Page 42 of The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand

She reaches the gas station pumps, where dark blue graffiti asks, Who’s afraid of the big bad bug?

and beneath that, ME! Unoccupied vehicles linger nearby.

Doesn’t look like anyone’s inside the station, either, and the shelves have been ransacked.

It should be safe so long as the storm is a one-night event.

Silvia takes another step as that crack-crack sound clatters among the trees. A chill runs through her—definitely footsteps.

She turns to the waving white limbs as a stocky man charges loose from the thicket. He’s in his fifties, wearing a blue button-down shirt, a farmer’s tan, and thin blond strands where he once grew a thicker head of hair. Wild eyes blaze above a gaping jaw.

His desperate face curls in confusion when he spots Silvia.

And her pistol, drawn from her blouse, aiming his way. “Stay back!”

The man skids to slowing, but he doesn’t stop. Trees jitter behind him like an audience caught in silent laughter.

“Get away!” Silvia tries again, begging him not to carry the captain any closer. Not when she only has four shots left.

“Make way,” the man says, picking up speed. “Somebody let her out—”

The pistol screams for the second time today, but Silvia’s aim isn’t as certain as before. Her shot dives into the man’s left shoulder, jerking him to one side. He stumbles undeterred, toward the gun, toward her.

She fires again, screaming with the shot. It bores a hole through the man’s breast pocket, and he falls in a twisted heap of bandy limbs.

“You bastard.” Silvia backsteps between the pumps. “Made me waste it.”

A dark flower blooms over the man’s chest. His fearful gaze aims frozen at the sky, and Silvia glances into the dimming emptiness, sensing predatory eyes upon her. It has watched her enough today. She needs to get inside.

And she needs to change. Both Dorothy and ordinary Silvia have already blown their cover before nightfall.

Helena’s decline started like a cold. That was fine—Helena had been sick with colds before, and Silvia knew how to handle her. Tea, soup, Tylenol, entertainment.

“You don’t have to do that,” Helena said.

Silvia was in the middle of a card trick, dressed in her top hat, white button-down, and long black coat. A two of hearts lay face up on the stool beside the couch where Helena lay, her curly hair bunched into a bob, a loose robe draping her body.

“I need practice,” Silvia said. She had another two of hearts hidden somewhere up her sleeve. “You’re helping me keep fresh for when everything goes back to normal.”

“How thoughtful of me,” Helena said, and then coughed into a fistful of tissues.

But unlike a cold, this sickness didn’t ease up after a couple of days. It was a mole of a virus, digging deeper into Helena’s lungs each night and filling them with cobwebs of mucus and madness.

Silvia kept up the entertainment bit. She even looted a new costume, tucked in the back of a department store with a bunch of goodies from Halloween ’89, and tended to Helena in a white skirt and red-crossed nurse’s cap. Part of her hoped for a laugh, even a smile.

And maybe part of her needed that smile. It would be a sign that, unlike those people on TV, Helena could recover, and then Silvia could quit thinking of Captain Trips as another disease with an I standing for Inevitable .

Inside the gas station, in her new costume, Silvia spreads her sleeping bag behind the counter with its empty cigarette pack display and pointless cash register. The shelves are foodless, the refrigerators without drink. Beach blankets, plastic souvenirs, postcards—these remain.

Rainfall patters lightly on the roof and dots the gloomy windows. True darkness will eventually swallow this place, but so long as the windows don’t shatter, Silvia imagines she’ll be safe.

Until the door swings open.

Maybe it’s the wind? Or some harmless animal has learned to open outward-swinging doors? Silvia rummages for her gun and aims over the checkout counter.

The glass-paneled door clacks shut behind the silhouette of a sopping-wet stranger. By the thinning light, she wears a forest-green tank top and camo pants. Sunburn tinges her skin, and toned muscle coats her arms. A Red Sox ball cap shadows her face.

She stands there dripping a moment, and then her head cocks sideways as she notices Silvia. “Why are you a clown?” the stranger asks.

Silvia now wears striped baggy pants and a dark shirt with oversized orange buttons.

A plastic canary-yellow flower juts over her heart.

Kids at birthday parties used to ask a version of that why question, and she’d say, Because life’s a circus , or Maybe clowns dress like me , or for mean kids, Thought there should be two of us here .

Along with the costume, the stranger must notice the gun. She ducks behind the shelves with her green duffel bag.

“Get lost,” Silvia says, gritting her teeth. “I was here first.”

“Have a heart, huh?” The stranger’s voice is a fine blade laid on velvet. “Can’t send me into that . Look, it’s just until the worst settles. Me over here, you over there. You’d have to come closer to shoot me anyway. How thirsty is that little popgun, my clown?”

Silvia’s quiet is almost acknowledgment that she’s near empty. Two bullets left, a don’t-shoot-until-you-see-the-whites-of-their-eyes situation.

She slinks behind the counter, steadying her breath while lightning stripes the sky. There’s nothing she can do but wait out this storm as it wraps its thundering mouth around the gas station.

Around Silvia and the stranger.

“They’re all going to die,” Helena whispered one day.

They had moved her from the couch to the bed, where she spent most of her time coughing or shivering no matter the blankets. But sometimes, at her most feverish moments, she rambled out the worst things Silvia had ever heard.

“He looks for us,” Helena went on. “Wants us. I’ve seen him.

He walks the hospitals, and he opens the doors, and he watches the patients sleep, waiting for his chance to taste them.

And sometimes he opens my office door. Especially at night.

He opens it, and he stares at me, those cold eyes. Waiting to taste me, too.”

“Who?” Silvia asked.

Helena coughed again, the force of it raking blood from her throat. “He’s watching me now. Right by the door.”

It took every ounce of Silvia’s control not to glance at the bedroom’s open doorway. Not to give credit to Helena’s delirium. Not to see a figure standing there.

She wondered if this was a panicky phase of the virus. Or did Captain Trips command a ship of premonition, with Helena’s soul keeping one foot on the pier and another on the gangplank? Except that assumed she had a choice between life and death.

Her fingers tore at the sheets. “He’s hunting,” she rasped. “Does he have territory? A psychic frontier at death? Or is it a trick? I’ve seen it in my patients, like they’re going to pull through, and then he pulls them away.”

Silvia couldn’t make sense of this. She licked her lips and adjusted her nurse’s cap, and then she tried for distraction with a hissing impish voice.

“Oh, what’s that vision of the future over there, everybody’s okay—nope, fooled you, time to die!”

Helena’s eyes caught Silvia’s, and then she wheezed through a cracked smile.

It was enough.

The rain’s drizzly pitter-patter swells to crashing drums as light shrinks from the gas station, the storm blotting out the sky. A woman could sneak across a linoleum floor under this racket.

Silvia glances around the counter’s corner, but she only sees three aisles of shelving clearly. The far wall beyond is a vague black curtain, hiding the stranger.

She speaks again, maybe summoned by Silvia’s gaze. “I wonder about those gas pumps.”

She pauses like she’s pointing at something and expects Silvia’s gaze to follow. Can she see Silvia looking across the floor? Silvia ducks behind the counter again, just in case.

“How long until the gas seeps out?” the stranger asks. “It’s funny how we’ve made parts of our world depend on us. Farmland. Oil rigs. Zoos. Without our attention, it all goes to shit. Maybe our species has killed itself, but we’re not going down alone, that’s for damn sure.”

Silvia keeps her mouth shut. The stranger can’t hold a one-sided conversation.

But she tries. “Know what really annoys me? I got a little cut on the webbing between my left hand’s middle and pointer fingers. Hard to bandage. And the world’s end makes it near impossible for anyone to invent an easy solution someday.”

“We don’t have to talk,” Silvia says.

The stranger chuckles. “What are you so afraid of? You’ve already outlived the worst.”

Silvia quakes, half-angry, half-bewildered. The stranger can’t understand the truth, has never met Helena. Never watched her slip away.

The rain bangs little fists on the roof and windows, and the sky flashes and growls, a wild animal desperate to get in.

Somebody let her out .

That was the last thing the man outside said before Silvia gunned him down. And what came next? The stranger’s arrival.

Silvia licks her lips. “Ever been in prison?”

The stranger gives another chuckle. “Is it that obvious?”

Silvia bites her tongue to stop from licking her lips again. She imagines there must be ChapStick on the outer portion of the counter, but no way will she reach for it. That man outside, his wild eyes—he’d been terrified enough to run at a gun.

Somebody let her out .

“They never liked freedom,” the stranger goes on. “Real freedom. This country was a mean joke, made up by the true clowns. But me? I’m an Angel of Liberty. I believe in freedom.”

“They locked you up for that?” Silvia asks. “Nothing worse?”

“Less the belief, more the action.” The Angel of Liberty turns reverent. “You can do plenty of nasty business sticking to your guns. But what the hell’s a belief in God-given freedom without action? That’s why I’m headed away from here. Out west. What’s out there won’t be a joke. It’ll be real.”