Page 43 of The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand

Angel breaks into laughter. It’s a full, hearty outburst, the first laugh Silvia’s heard in a long time, and she hates that she kind of likes it.

“Been a while since you chatted with anyone, huh?” Angel asks. “Always chasing them off, I bet. So, clown—do you believe in God?”

Silvia lets her eyes close and soaks in the presence she knows to be there, but not by the name Angel has given.

The truth behind it, having given up the notion of a loving Almighty.

Silvia used to instead imagine a vengeful thumb squishing friends, family, that boy who mopped the deli floor, the bodies plummeting into the Atlantic Ocean.

Helena. All of them seemingly pilfered by some great crook in the sky.

Nowadays she’s given up the notion of God altogether and accepted the captain.

His ships are legion, crawling across the planet Earth like enormous prodding spiders, devouring love and connection while society writhes dying in his web.

Captain Trips has more vessels than God could have saints.

He is everything, everywhere. That roaring storm. That hungry virus.

Sun, time, death—the universe forms in carnivores.

Shadows deepen throughout the gas station. When Silvia glances from behind the counter again, only the nearest two aisles of shelving stand out from the black depths. No sign of Angel.

Except her voice in Silvia’s ears.

“Who’d you lose?” Angel asks, another likely carnivore.

“I mean, everyone lost people, but who was your big one? Mine was my mother. Agony, but also a blessing. When the bug stole her mind, it also stole her out of time. She thought she was at my confirmation, then my wedding. Time eats us, but she snatched crumbs from its teeth, like those birds that clean gator mouths. My mother, a time traveler. Only the bug can do that.”

Silvia’s reply comes haltingly. “He’s a. Deadly captain. Not a blessing. There was somebody I loved. Who I took care of. Who died for me. Let me cheat death, for a little while.”

She’s choosy about her words without meaning to be. It’s been second nature for her to hide that Helena was another woman. Old habits die harder than the human race, and Silvia’s language hasn’t caught up yet with a decimated world too sparsely populated to give a damn.

Cloth slides against the floor somewhere beyond the counter. Angel might only be shifting in place, getting comfortable, but Silvia has to check.

There’s little to see. Darkness has eaten most of the gas station, now leaving only one aisle of shelving visible. Something shuffles again, as if Angel has shed her tank top and camo pants to dress herself in relentless night, an approaching fiend pretending to be nothing but the absence of light.

“The sickness is a liberator, like me,” Angel says. Is her voice louder? Closer? “Freeing the dead of this world. Freeing the living of doubt.”

Lightning forks beyond the glass-paneled door, illuminating the shelves and casting their shadows across the floor in stretches of black teeth. An uncertain form moves between them, almost a pacing animal.

And then it disappears along with the lightning.

“You got it wrong,” Silvia snaps. “He’s hunting me.”

“Who is?” Angel asks. “Somebody from your past? I swear, this bug has the sickest sense of humor in who to spare.”

“Him.” Silvia takes a harsh breath. “Captain Trips.”

“That’s just a name.” Angel pauses, then scoffs. “Is that the problem? You think I’ll get you sick? Do I look like the superflu?”

No, she looks like an engulfing shadow. Silvia watches the darkness seep nearer, black silk coating a tile floor.

“A captain has his crew,” Silvia says. “I’ve seen him coming. Out here, and in my dreams.”

“In your dreams?” Angel laughs again, sharper now, and Silvia likes the sound less this time. “Honey, that’s not Captain Trips. That’s just—well, he’s the Man. And he’s not just anything. Those dreams are a beacon.”

Silvia could scream in aggravation. She knows what she’s seen and felt. Captain Trips, taking human form. Taking any form.

“Guess that’s why you’re skittish,” Angel says, gentler now. “Let me put your mind at ease. Anyone still alive right now is immune to the bug, dear clown. Captain Trips is yesterday’s news. The Man? In your dreams? He’s tomorrow.”

“Maybe for you, and everybody else left, but not me,” Silvia says. “I know better. Like how a gazelle knows something isn’t right that day on the savanna, before the cats close in. Prey instinct.”

She wonders if gazelles are among the captain’s victims, or if they still roam African grasslands, hunted by cheetahs. Were they spared, too? He’s likely given the carnivores a pardon, respect passing from predator to predator. Lions and tigers and bears, oh—

—Captain, my Captain, our fearful trip is done .

Silvia jolts at the memory of Helena’s voice. She’s been puzzling again, not paying attention to whatever Angel’s in the middle of saying.

“—underestimating the power of the human mind. But you can’t see the forest for the trees.”

Silvia can’t even see her hand in front of her face, let alone the trees outside. Certainly not Angel if she’s moving in the dark. A black hole has swallowed their world.

Silvia slides against her sleeping bag like it can hide her from this waking nightmare. “I don’t have to see death to know it’s real. And I didn’t imagine Captain Trips.”

Garbage and branches swat the windows as the storm chews on the gas station, drowning out whatever Angel says next. Shadows haunt the lightning. The debris hopefully won’t smash through the windows or blow up the pumps and set fire to the place in the night.

Lost in another puzzle?

Silvia starts again. Drifting into her head used to make enduring children’s birthday parties easier, but it’s less helpful for surviving the night, let alone the apocalypse. Reminiscing about Helena might be disastrous.

Is that what Captain Trips really wants? Not enough for him to drag Helena into a vicious, shaking, drowning death, but he has to use her to catch Silvia, too.

Even the part locked in Silvia’s head.

“I know real Death,” Helena said, and the way she wheezed that last word gave it the authority of a person’s name.

“What everyone’s forgotten. Way back, Death was just another animal.

Everyone lived forever unless Death caught you.

And they’d chant and light fires and bang drums to scare away that beast. But then Death got smart.

He started scavenging from the old, and then he learned how to make everyone sick.

We developed medicines and vaccines, but it’s been a mortality arms race. Eventually, we had to lose.”

Silvia sat on the bed’s edge, holding Helena’s hand, wiping mucus from around her lips. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten. She’d only kept bringing tea and soup to Helena, who could barely manage a spoonful before coughing her lungs out.

She laid her head back with a rough swallow. “?‘O Captain, my Captain, our fearful trip is done.’ Walt Whitman.”

“Is that where it comes from?” Silvia asked. “Captain Trips?”

“Walt Whitman didn’t kill the world,” Helena said, patronizing, as if speaking to a kindergartner.

“Oh, the name? I don’t know. I never really knew anything.

But it felt good to pretend I did.” Her voice cracked then.

“And I’m never going to learn anything else.

I’ll never see them find a cure for AIDS.

Or cancer. I’ll never learn German. I’m never going to find out who fucking killed Laura Palmer. ”

Silvia forced a tearful smile. She didn’t know what else to do.

Helena’s fingers tensed, but they couldn’t squeeze anymore. “And I won’t find out how you’re going to look when you get old.”

Her words turned to mumbling, then fragmented syllables against coughing, and then she dropped into a ragged sleep. Silvia stayed holding her hand another moment, in case she woke up. Sometimes she came and went in fits and starts.

But Helena slept, and Silvia let go, easing off the bed to keep it from creaking. Would Helena remember this conversation when she woke up? Or would her mind drift to another time, another world? Silvia couldn’t know, but she wanted to do one last thing for Helena.

For that smile.

She headed into the bathroom and plucked up her costume makeup.

Cakey foundation paled her skin. Some blue for veins, gray to deepen the bags beneath her eyes.

A finger dabbed at contouring powder and drew thick lines along her forehead, cheeks, jaw, and neck.

She then patted the makeup into a mimicry of crevices and canyons for wrinkles, and she puffed powder across her hair, tracing gray strands through her auburn locks.

This was too much effort for an ordinary gag, but to get one last smile? She would be the world’s finest clown. Even its final clown.

“Helena?” Silvia called in a cartoonish old lady voice. “You whippersnapper, lollygagging in bed all day. Young lady, you’d better pop those peepers and look at me, or I’ll give you the business, you’ll see!”

She paced the bed using the lavender umbrella for a cane, back and forth, spitting out any elderly-isms she could summon from the weekends she used to spend with her grandparents. Anything so that Helena would wake up in the middle of this little show.

It took six minutes of playing the clown before Silvia leaned over the bed and noticed the stillness in Helena’s chest. The smell sliding off of her, beneath the odor of sickness.

And Silvia realized there would be no smile ever again. Death had finished his hunt.

She only realizes she’s dreaming when memories of Helena fade into a grim silhouette. That figure, the one Angel calls the Man, reaches for her.

Captain Trips is hungry again. If only he would devour Silvia’s recollection of Helena, then everything could become that much sadder, yet that much easier. Silvia would never know her life used to be better than this.