Page 51 of The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand

On the morning of July 3—two days after he was finally able to muster the nerve to wrap up his father’s decaying corpse in a bedsheet and drag it outside into the backyard garden and bury it—Tommy opened a can of peaches for breakfast. A treat he and his dad had once saved for special occasions.

Using his fingers, he ate the slices one by one until they were gone, and then he lifted the can to his mouth and gulped down what was left of the juice.

When he was finished, he shoved a granola bar and a pack of beef jerky into his backpack, along with a full jug of water, a tube of sunscreen, and a pocketknife.

After zipping it closed, he slung the pack over one shoulder and the rifle over the other, feeling a momentary sting when the strap rubbed against his blood-stained bandage (thanks to the damn fishing lure).

Closing the backyard gate behind him, he cut across his next-door neighbor’s lawn, the knee-high grass swishing against his jeans.

He was once again headed for the water tower, but he wanted to make a stop at the library first. He hadn’t been in the mood for reading lately, but with his father gone and his days now free, he’d decided it was time to start up again.

Something nice and thick, too. Maybe The Lord of the Rings or Dune .

Walking down the center of Cedar Drive, detouring around the occasional abandoned vehicle, he glanced at the houses on either side of the road.

Many of the windows were boarded-up with sheets of plywood.

Most of the curtains in the windows were drawn.

Almost all of the front doors were marked with a spray-painted red X —verification that the home had been searched and cleared by the soldiers.

It used to feel eerie to Tommy… all those empty houses.

His friends and neighbors long gone; the sound of his own footfalls deafening in his ears.

But after a while, he’d gotten used to it.

Just like he’d gotten used to the silence (there’d been a time when he would’ve done just about anything to hear the thrum of a lawn mower or a hot rod laying rubber on asphalt or the tinkling song of an ice cream truck cruising the block).

His father hadn’t said much in the days leading up to his death, but there had been some conversation.

So, who would I talk to now? If a person stopped speaking for an extended period of time, did they eventually forget how to?

Was that even possible? The idea bothered him very much, and without even realizing he was doing it, he began singing as he walked.

“I know I didn’t say I was comin down,

I know you didn’t know I was here in town,

But bay-yay-yaby you can tell me if anyone can…”

The song was called “Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?” by some guy named Larry Underwood, and in the days before the radio stations went dark, it was all the rage and climbing the charts.

It wasn’t exactly the Beatles or the Stones, but it did have a catchy hook.

For some reason, Tommy hadn’t been able to get it out of his head. He began to sing louder.

“Baby, can you dig your man?

He’s a righteous man,

Tell me baby, can you dig your man?”

In the beginning, news of the mysterious flu—or Captain Trips, as some members of the media had begun calling it with no real explanation—provided a constant source of fascination for a small-town kid like Tommy Harper.

It was like something out of one of the science fiction novels he liked to read.

Each time a new piece of information appeared in the newspaper or on one of the television newscasts, Tommy was eager to discuss it with someone.

The only problem was… who ? His handful of friends from school couldn’t have been less interested if their lives had depended on it.

All they wanted to talk about were the Red Sox and video games and what color bikini seventeen-year-old homecoming queen Tiffany Watson was wearing at the pool on any given day.

His mother wasn’t really an option, either.

She was a worrier, prone to cutting him off in midsentence and bowing her head in prayer every time Tommy brought up a depressing subject.

His sister, Jennifer, was the worst of the bunch.

Her boyfriend (“Pizza Face” to his pals on the football team) had recently broken up with her and started dating an older girl who was new to town.

Jenn was devastated. If she wasn’t lying in bed, wiping tears from her face as she scribbled in her journal, she was sitting outside in the backyard with a box of Kleenex on her lap, eating ice cream from the carton and listening to sad songs on the radio.

It had only been two weeks, and she’d already gained five pounds from eating away her sorrows.

In her current state, she probably didn’t even know that there was a communicable disease making its way through numerous cities.

That left Tommy’s father, and while he was much more practical than the others and a whole lot easier to talk to, as sheriff he was also super busy.

Tommy had listened in on a couple of his dad’s official phone calls and heard him talking about preliminary coordination plans with the hospital and where on Highway 9 they would set up roadblocks if such measures were to become necessary.

During another call, Tommy heard him addressing the person on the other line as “Colonel Perkins” and carefully repeating a phone number as he wrote it down.

One night, after his father had hung up the telephone, Tommy walked into the den and asked if he should be worried.

Sheriff Harper assured his son that there was nothing at all to be concerned about.

The government doctors and scientists were working around the clock on a cure, and before long everything would return to normal.

And that was good enough for Tommy. After all, if you couldn’t trust your own dad, who just happened to also be law enforcement, who could you trust?

Tommy sat at the edge of the tower platform, his legs dangling over the side, and felt the sun hammering down on his shoulders.

His knapsack was full of books from the library, but he was too damn hot to read.

He had peeled off his T-shirt about an hour ago, tearing the bandage on his shoulder in the process, and rolled up his jeans to his knees.

It hadn’t helped much; it felt like he was melting.

I could bring a tent up here , he thought, wiping the sweat out of his eyes. It would have to be a small one, but that’s all I’d need. And nothing too bright, so it blends in.

“Who the hell’s gonna notice it anyway?” he spoke aloud. “No one. That’s who.”

There was a time, not long after the soldiers had left, that a fairly constant parade of strangers had passed through town. A handful traveling alone, but most of them in groups. One solitary man arrived on horseback. A few others on motorcycles. But the majority were on foot.

On several occasions, Tommy had laid down on his stomach across the metal platform and peered over the edge, spying on the outsiders.

Using his father’s binoculars, he’d watched as they searched the stores and houses for food and supplies, all of it long plundered by then and either consumed or squirreled away.

One couple stopped and fished for a while in Hanson Creek, but then quickly moved on when they didn’t have any luck.

An older man with gray hair down to the crack of his ass strolled down Main Street, stark naked and singing church hymns.

Another time, Tommy saw two women emerge from the woods and make their way along the edge of town, stopping only to search a handful of cars that had been involved in a head-on collision.

A moment later, he noticed a bearded man following maybe forty yards behind them, scuttling from tree to tree, car to car, house to house.

Working that hard to hide his presence, the man was obviously up to no good.

And the two women appeared completely unaware.

Tommy scooted to the opposite side of the platform and watched this cat-and-mouse pursuit until all three of them disappeared.

And he never once uttered a word of warning to the unsuspecting women, something he still felt guilty about to this day.

But that wasn’t even the worst of it. On a cloudy afternoon in late May, a caravan of cars and trucks arrived in Bennington from the direction of Highway 9.

Tommy, awakened from his nap by the roar of their engines, counted sixteen vehicles from his perch atop the water tower.

The lead car, driving way too fast, made a wrong turn by the high school, and the whole group of them ended up bumper to bumper on the dead-end street where the tower was located.

It took them nearly ten minutes of cussing and horn blowing to get out of each other’s way and turn around, plenty of time for Tommy to get a good look. Something he quickly regretted.

Several of the trucks had been rigged with what looked like machine-gun turrets on the reinforced roofs of their cabs.

Others had makeshift cages in their flatbeds.

They were crammed full of both male and female prisoners—all of them Black.

A number of cars had swastikas spray-painted on their hoods.

Holding his breath, Tommy watched as they drove out of town, looking like a wiry, metallic snake.

Once they were gone and the road dust had settled, he’d climbed down as fast as he could and ran home to tell his father.