Page 49 of The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand
MOVING DAY
Richard Chizmar
Shortly before dawn on the first day of July, Tommy Harper buried his father in the vegetable garden behind their house.
The narrow rectangle of fertilized soil, where Tommy’s mother once spent summer afternoons weeding and pruning, occupied the far corner of the backyard between the shed and the split-rail fence.
Before the flu, she’d grown her own tomatoes and carrots, peppers and cucumbers.
A small section of the garden was reserved for a variety of herbs she’d often referred to as her “secret ingredients.” She’d refused to reveal precisely what they were, but she used them in everything from her homemade spaghetti sauce to her award-winning red bean chili and even her Thanksgiving mashed potatoes.
She also made one hell of a pot of herbal tea.
Several nights earlier, after cooking a celebratory dinner of fresh rainbow trout on the grill, and beating Tommy at several hands of gin rummy at the coffee table in the den, Mr. Harper—a twenty-two year veteran of the Bennington Sheriff’s Department—bid good night to his son, shuffled down the carpeted hallway to the bedroom he’d once shared with his wife, stretched out on the unmade bed that was centered between the two windows looking out over the front yard, and placed the barrel of his service revolver into his mouth.
Tommy was sneaking a cigarette on the back porch when he heard the gunshot.
By the time he finished smoking the unfiltered Camel and went inside—not in any particular hurry, already knowing what he was going to find—his father’s heart had ceased beating.
The pillow beneath his misshapen head was a sea of blood and bone fragments.
The stench of his evacuated bowels permeated the dim bedroom.
A red spray mixed with tangles of dark hair stained the gold crucifix hanging above the headboard and dribbled down the wall onto the floor.
Tommy stood in the doorway, at once sickened and transfixed by the gory display—it brought to mind one of the Rorschach patterns he’d seen in his psychology textbook—and then he turned and closed the bedroom door and went back outside.
Later, after smoking what was left of the pack of Camels he’d swiped from a neighbor’s car, he returned to the bedroom to search for a goodbye note.
But there was nothing there for him to find.
By then, the flies had already found their way inside the house.
They crawled over his father’s face like an undulating second skin.
I’m all alone now , Tommy thought, listening to the insistent buzzing of the flies.
And then for no sane reason at all other than he couldn’t get the damn song out of his mind: Baby, can you dig your man? He’s a righteous man…
He backed out of the room and made it halfway down the hall before dropping to his knees and vomiting his dinner onto the carpet.
When he finished heaving, he wiped his mouth on his T-shirt and took a seat at the kitchen table.
A single wax candle, melted down to a nub, rested beside a scattering of cookie crumbs on the paper plate in front of him.
Not even an hour ago, his father had stood at the counter and sung to him—and now he was gone.
It had been Tommy Harper’s fifteenth birthday.
Once upon a time, the Harpers were a model family.
Their home in Bennington, Vermont, a neatly kept three-bedroom ranch, was located on a half-acre lot in a pleasant subdivision.
The schools were close by and highly rated.
They had friendly neighbors, a fenced-in backyard, and a well-behaved six-year-old cocker spaniel named Otis.
There was a twenty-gallon aquarium in the den housing a variety of tropical fish and a thirty-two-inch color television console.
Bookshelves lined the walls. A white Chevy pickup truck and a recent model Toyota Celica were parked outside in the driveway.
A pair of matching, hand-painted flower boxes hung from the railing of a covered front porch.
Mom, Joanne (her husband and a handful of close friends called her “Joey,” an affectionate college nickname that had stuck), was an on-call substitute teacher at the nearby elementary and middle schools.
She usually worked two or three days a week and spent the majority of her remaining time taking care of the house, her husband, and two children.
An avid jogger and amateur photographer, she enjoyed doing crossword puzzles and watching old black-and-white movies on television.
She was obsessed with arts and crafts and made her own Christmas cards every year.
Joanne Harper was also a devout Christian.
Dad, Russell, wasn’t much for attending Sunday church services—it was the one morning his work schedule allowed him to sleep in—but he was a faithful husband and devoted father.
He coached his daughter’s softball team and taught Tommy how to field grounders and hit a curveball at an age when most kids were still batting off a tee.
When he had time off from the sheriff’s office, he loaded up the bed of his truck and took the family on fishing and camping trips, as well as their annual weeklong vacation at the beach each August. Russell was a simple man.
He didn’t drink. Didn’t smoke. Didn’t gamble.
He was perfectly content to spend his evenings eating dinner with the family and making his own fishing lures at the workbench in his shed while listening to the Red Sox game on the radio.
Every other Thursday night, he bowled in a league with friends from the neighborhood.
He wasn’t very good, his average hovering around the 107 mark, but that did little to diminish his enjoyment.
Daughter, Jennifer, was two years older than Tommy.
An honor roll student in school, she was a cheerleader in the fall and ran cross-country in the spring.
Summers were spent at the pool and playing softball.
She had a steady boyfriend (a nice enough fellow named Herb Cavanaugh, whose teammates on the junior varsity football team called “Pizza Face” on account of his struggle with acne) and a part-time job at the Scoop and Serve ice cream shop on Main Street.
Jennifer was a pretty girl with strawberry blonde hair cut short into a bob and eager blue eyes that made her appear younger than her age.
She was a voracious reader and enjoyed writing poetry.
She was interested in astrology, and there was a stack of library books on her nightstand devoted to the subject.
More than anything, she wanted to go to college to become a veterinarian.
Ever since she was a little girl, she’d had a habit of bringing home stray or injured animals and nursing them back to health.
Even now, her favorite book was The Story of Doctor Dolittle .
Tommy, who was tall for his age, and Jenn were often mistaken for twins when they were first introduced to strangers.
Thick blond curls spilled over the boy’s forehead, framing a lean face highlighted by inquisitive blue eyes, full lips, and a prominent chin.
His mother often embarrassed him in front of her friends by claiming that he looked like a matinee idol.
He hated being the center of attention and usually made a quick escape from the room.
Despite the rising popularity afforded him by his natural good looks and superior skills on the baseball diamond, Tommy was a loner by choice.
He preferred long solo hikes in the woods to overcrowded weekend parties; reading science-fiction paperbacks in the backyard hammock to rowdy bonfires and school dances; and sitting alone atop the one-hundred-and-forty-foot water tower in the heart of Bennington to pretty much any other public activity.
Tommy couldn’t remember the title of the novel—it had been a loaner from the library, its tattered dust jacket a spiderweb of Scotch tape, that he’d read the summer he turned twelve—but he often found himself thinking about his favorite scene.
In the midst of a worldwide alien invasion, the teenage protagonist of the book climbed atop a water tower located on a hillside in his small midwestern hometown and watched in terror as the arachnoid-looking space creatures made their approach from a nearby forest. Trees splintered and crumpled in the aliens’ wake, flocks of panicked birds darkening the sky.
The earth beneath the tower trembled as the invaders drew closer.
Power lines were ripped free from their poles and lay writhing and sparking on lawns and roadways like a legion of angry serpents.
A gas station caught fire, the trio of pumps out front exploding one after the other.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! Fingers of flames reached fifty and sixty feet into the sky—and still the aliens marched on.
Even after all this time, Tommy could still picture every last detail inside his head.
It was almost as though it had been a scene in a movie he had watched at the drive-in instead of a handful of pages he’d read at bedtime.