Page 5 of The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand

THE TRIPPS

Wrath James White

“Ay, yo! Don’t touch that nigga! He got the Tripps!

” Freddy called out before taking a long pull on a huge blunt and suppressing a cough.

He exhaled slowly. A miasma of marijuana vapors surrounded him.

His hardened visage emerged from the narcotic cloud like a magician appearing in a puff of dry-ice smoke.

Talik looked up at Freddy, squinting at the taller man, whose back was to the sun, creating a glow around him that added to the magician image.

He looked back down at Fat Steve. The big kid’s dark earthy-brown complexion was now a sickly gray.

A sheen of perspiration gave his skin a moist unctuousness, like something that had crawled up from the bottom of a lake.

His eyes were sallow and rheumy, weeping a yellow pus from the corners.

A steady flow of mucus leaked from his nose over his chapped lips, yet he seemed oblivious to it.

His eyes were cloudy and distant, half-lidded, as if he were about to either fall asleep or die right there on the spot.

Even when he coughed—a harsh, wet, phlegm-choked bark—his eyes remained inanimate.

“Fuck that! He snatched my mom’s purse yesterday! I want her money back!” Talik protested, battling between the desire to dig through Fat Steve’s pockets for his wallet and the urge to flee the cloud of pestilence engulfing the bigger kid.

Talik was only ten years old and shockingly skinny, even for this neighborhood, where so many kids went hungry.

He didn’t know a single kid who ate three meals a day.

Most were lucky if they got one. For many families, the money that didn’t go to necessities like keeping the rent paid and the utilities on often went to alcohol and drugs, with food and clothing a distant second.

Fat Steve was almost fourteen, half a foot taller, and at least fifty pounds heavier than Talik.

If the big kid hadn’t been near death, there was no way Talik would have dared approach him about his mom’s purse.

He was brave, but not stupid. Fat Steve would have beaten him to a pulp and might have even killed him just to increase his rep on the streets.

This was Talik’s only chance. Besides, his mom was sick, too, and so was his older brother.

It was probably just a matter of time before he and his little sister caught whatever was going around.

“Your mom probably ain’t have no money in that purse anyway,” Freddy replied. “It ain’t worth getting sick for.”

Freddy was an OG. Tall, light-skinned, long, matted, reddish-brown dreadlocks, and lean, wiry muscles.

He wore a Bob Marley T-shirt, but had more of a Super Cat attitude—more dancehall reggae than roots.

Freddy was a crack dealer and hard-core killer, but Talik wasn’t in that game, and he knew Freddy respected Talik’s mom too much to cause him any problems. He was only a few years younger than Talik’s momma and had gone to high school with her back in the day.

Talik knelt down and studied Fat Steve. He looked bad. It wasn’t just all the phlegm and mucus leaking out of him or that wet tubercular cough. He was shaking and shivering, and his breathing sounded all gurgly, like when Talik blew bubbles in his soda with a straw.

“What’s Tripps, yo?” Talik asked as he stood and turned back toward Freddy.

“Captain Trips? You ain’t been watching the news, little homie?

” Freddy replied. “That shit is spreading all across the country. Half the neighborhood done caught it. It’s some kind of superflu or some shit.

Folks is saying the government made that shit to clean out the ghettos.

I guess all the drugs they pumpin’ in here ain’t killin’ niggas fast enough. ”

Talik found Freddy’s conspiracy theories ironic considering he was the main drug dealer in their neighborhood, but perhaps that meant he knew what he was talking about more than most. For all Talik knew, Freddy might have been getting his crack directly from the CIA.

A single gunshot rang out, followed by a volley of curses and threats and the booming staccato of a semi automatic rifle.

Then more gunshots and the piercing scream of someone witnessing the death of a loved one.

It was an all too familiar melody of anguish and loss, normal for G-town, but not at this time of day.

Gunfights and drive-bys typically took place after sunset.

The sounds of gun violence were as much a symphony of the night as the mating calls of crickets and cicadas.

“You’d better get yo ass home, little homie. Sounds like shit is poppin’ off out here,” Freddy said, looking quickly up and down the street while reaching into his waistband for the chrome-plated 9-millimeter he kept on him at all times.

Talik didn’t have to be told twice. When the shooting started, no one was safe, not even kids his age, who were sometimes even the shooters.

He took one last look down at Fat Steve.

The big kid wasn’t breathing anymore. His eyes had fixed in place, and the snot dripping from his nose was now tinged with blood.

“Yo, I think Steve is dea—” Talik never got to finish his sentence.

If he had, Freddy wouldn’t have heard him.

The wannabe Rastafarian’s head exploded like a blood-filled water balloon.

A thick hail of gore, shattered skull fragments, and chunks of brain matter rained down onto Talik.

Freddy’s body collapsed at his feet, landing beside Fat Steve’s corpse like they had mutually decided it was nap time.

The top of Freddy’s head was gone from the bridge of the nose up.

Talik’s feet began to move, running in the opposite direction of the gunfire.

When he made it back to his home, he was winded more from screaming than running.

He slammed the door shut and locked it behind him.

His entire body was trembling while he sucked in huge gulps of air, trying to catch his breath.

“Boy, don’t you be slamming my damn door!” his mother yelled before succumbing to a fit of coughing.

“Sorry, Mom! They shootin’ out there! Freddy’s dead! He got shot in the head!” Talik was wild-eyed and had still not caught his breath. Just the effort of speaking nearly caused him to black out. He bent over with his hands on his knees, inhaling deeply.

“Freddy? Oh, Lord no! Freddy was such a good man.”

Talik didn’t want to tell his mom all the rumors about Freddy on the streets. It wasn’t right to speak ill of the dead. “Fat Steve is dead, too. The guy who stole your purse. The Tripps killed him.”

His momma nodded solemnly. “Yeah, I been watching the news. Lots of folks dyin’ all over the place from that Captain Trips. My job is shut down because everybody at the office got it. They dyin’ left and right.”

Talik stared at his mother intently. “But you okay, right? You ain’t gonna die, right Momma?”

His mother reached out and rubbed Talik’s head before gathering him into a hug. His tiny head nestled between his mother’s mammoth breasts. He could hear that same wheezing and bubbling sound in her lungs he’d heard Fat Steve making. “You know your momma’s too damn stubborn to die.”

Talik nodded, but remained worried. Another fit of coughing racked her body. She covered her mouth and nose in the crook of her arm, soaking it with mucus and phlegm. She looked at the gooey mess, scowled, then wiped it off onto her pajama pants.

“I saw her again, Momma. I saw Mother Abagail,” Talik said.

His mother scrunched up her face in a sneer of disgust. She coughed once more, dragging the sleeve of her blue and pink polka-dot house robe across her lips to wipe away the phlegm before smiling at Talik. “You mean the old Black woman you said looks like Nana?”

“Well, she doesn’t really look like Nana. She just sort of feels like Nana. You know? When I dream about her, it feels the same as I used to feel when I was with Nana; you know I’m sayin’?” Talik said.

“Okay, well, I ain’t seen her. But you can have your imaginary friend.”

“She ain’t imaginary. My friend Martin says he dreams about her sometimes.

And his neighbor Monique dreams about her all the time.

She said Mother Abagail is the one who warned her that her brother was going crazy and was gonna try an’ kill all of ’em.

She hid all the bullets or else he would have got ’em.

He tried to kill their momma with a hammer. ”

His mother sneered again. “Well, enough with all that foolishness. I ain’t seen no old Black woman in my dreams.”

Talik frowned and huffed. “What do you dream about, then?”

She shuddered and pulled her robe tight to her neck to ward off a chill, despite the August heat and lack of air-conditioning. “Never you mind. Go upstairs and check on your brother. He’s been sick all day. Ain’t been out the bed since yesterday mornin’.”

“Yes, Momma.” Talik knew better than to argue with his mother. Even sick, he was sure she wouldn’t have hesitated to take off her slipper and apply it to his backside.

The stairs leading up to the second floor had been constructed sometime during the Civil War, and Talik doubted they’d been maintained much since.

The treads were warped and splitting. The landing had two holes in it just big enough for a small foot to slip into and twist an ankle.

The handrail was loose, held in place at the top by two long screws his daddy had drilled into it.

He doubted it would hold up to even his waifish adolescent weight if he needed it to prevent a fall.

Whenever he walked up or down the stairs, Talik liked to imagine he was Indiana Jones on an adventure through a booby-trapped temple.