Page 54 of The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand

LA MALA HORA

Alex Segura

I felt his tiny hand tighten in mine.

His small, thin fingers tensing up—the chipped, almost flimsy nails digging into my skin.

I looked down at my son, Danny. He’d just turned eight—just had a birthday. I say it that way because we don’t celebrate birthdays anymore. There’s nothing to be happy about. There’s no hope. There’s just darkness.

But I can’t tell him this, no matter how badly I want to. No matter how much I’ll wish I had.

Two months ago, things were different. We were making plans—like people foolishly do before fate slams a wrench into their midsection.

I can picture it, too—that last calm feeling, right before it all went to hell.

Looking out the large bay windows of our house, tucked in the suburbs of southwest Miami.

I could see Danny playing in the front yard as I talked to my mom.

I was asking her about how many cupcakes to make, what kind of goody bags we should have.

The mundane stuff that feels so much more powerful in the rearview.

These things that fade with every thought—become less tangible, like a puff of smoke being swept away by the wind.

My name is Desi Calderon, and I’m not sure how much time I have left.

How much time we have left.

This thought sits with me for hours. Perhaps days.

As we make our way, slowly, north from Miami.

First in my mom’s banged-up Mazda 626. Then in anything else we find that works and, by some miracle, has gas.

I hesitated at first—taking keys from the dead.

Fumbling through their pockets and purses, like some panicked thief, their bodies spread out and around the street, like something out of a Romero movie—detritus, but not always. They were people once.

We were, too.

The irony—if there is such a thing—is that Danny and I left before, well, everything.

Before “Captain Trips.” Before the darkness.

Before everything collapsed. Dead bodies everywhere, no light, no air-conditioning, nothing.

In what felt like an instant, the world went dark—but we were already making our way out of town.

Even before the virus, I feared for my life. For my son’s life.

I feel the soft thud of my worn-out sneakers on the asphalt.

I feel a soft, tropical breeze slap my face and I almost smile—the gust slicing through the heat like those paper airplanes I’d toss in class when I was a kid.

It felt so good. Nothing felt good anymore.

I want to feel this breeze forever , I thought.

We’d gotten as far as the Fort Lauderdale airport in my mom’s car.

It crapped out a mile or so away from the ramp to 595.

But it wasn’t like we were moving much by then, anyway.

Cars were stopped across I-95, a sprawling array of metal tombstones, clogging one of the biggest pathways across the country.

It was too much to process. But somehow, we were alive—Danny and me.

My little man—his face so placid and caring, those deep, dark, knowing eyes.

That perpetually thoughtful expression. I wanted to hold him close and make him feel safe—whisper that this was just a bad dream, that we were going somewhere good and calm and cool—but he was smart enough to know that wasn’t happening.

I’m coming for him .

The words popped out in front of my mind—like a ghoul stepping into the light of a hallway, eyes aflame, mouth open and pleading.

Erik’s voice hadn’t been pleading, or desperate—it’d been focused.

That’s what had initially scared me, before any of this other shit happened.

The idea that this man I’d left behind, this man I’d gone to every length possible to get away from, knew where to find me and our son.

“Where are we sleeping, Mami?”

Danny’s question pulls me out of my own mind.

I tighten my fingers around his hand and look around.

We were near Pompano Beach now. After the car died on 95, we tried to get off the highway—stepping over the bodies, around the car wrecks, through ravines and down ramps.

The side streets are going to be our best bet , I thought.

We could find a car and bob and weave through the back alleys and roads and just keep going.

Away from all this, away from Erik—toward something else. Toward my dreams.

Of that woman.

Mother Abagail.

Something about the dreams feels different.

They’re not just fevered visions, products of discomfort, desperate meals, and anxiety like nothing I’ve ever experienced.

No, the dreams are almost real—like I’m tapping into something new, something primal.

I see her. I feel her calling to us. Telling us to keep going.

But where?

I long for anything else—for the mundane tasks of my project manager job: the phone calls, the spreadsheets, the tedious meetings, and awkward lunches with my boss, who I knew wanted to sleep with me.

Just looking for any kind of opening or signal to make his move.

I must have seemed like easy prey to him.

Single mom, recently divorced, new on the job.

I let him think what he wanted. I’d needed the job.

Now it all just seems like a blurry vision.

“We’ll find a room, Danny,” I said, pulling him in closer.

I could feel his frame, the bones of his body jutting out more than they ever had before.

We hadn’t been eating well—the flurry of opportunity that came right after the virus struck was gone.

The stores had been picked dry, if not by people then by animals.

We were lucky if we found cans—the can opener I’d yanked from a gas station in Hollywood felt like my prize possession now. A key to survival.

It was getting late. On days like this, when we couldn’t find a car—couldn’t pilfer keys or find something with gas in it, we just hoofed it.

Just tried to make our way up the state.

I loved walking—which was rare down here, where everyone stayed indoors, and if they had to go anywhere they hopped into their little air-conditioned cars and zipped around.

Pedestrians were unicorns. We’d found a few crappy umbrellas from an Eckerd drugstore we passed along the way—a flimsy shield from the Florida sun that we’d packed in a crappy rolling suitcase dragged behind us, on the rare moments a cloud would block the blazing light.

Sweltering heat aside, I loved the activity, no matter how hot it got.

Not my Danny, though.

He wanted to be on the couch, the temperature set to seventy-two, with a book in his lap—already reading fantasy novels and horror comics and Archie digests.

I could leave him there for hours if I wanted to.

He wasn’t made for what the world was now.

Haunted. Streaked with blood and bile. A smear over the map of what was once alive, vibrant—beautiful.

This god-awful state. It just felt fucking endless.

Florida was miserable that way. Getting out of South Florida felt like such a victory—but it was a mirage.

The area was endless—and once you got past Palm Beach, there was nothing…

a shimmering void until at least Orlando, maybe farther if you were trying to get to Gainesville or, God forbid, Pensacola or Tallahassee.

It felt like a series of challenges—a gauntlet of tests that I was never meant to face.

For me, a Cuban girl who grew up in Kendall listening to Célia and visiting my abuela ’s house in Little Havana, the state north of Miami Shores felt almost alien. There’d never been a need to go anywhere else. I had everything at home. My job, my car, my Danny—

And Erik. At least for a while.

I saw a tiny hotel—motel, really. Beachfront deal.

Small, faded pink paint, cramped, but hopeful.

Surely there was an empty room—a bed that wasn’t festering with giant palmetto bugs and, if we were lucky, some sputtering water in the pipes.

I imagined a shower. I didn’t dare think of hot water.

But a shower would be nice. Perhaps a place to make a fire and warm up one of the six cans of Goya frijoles negros in my backpack.

I’m coming for him .

I felt a shiver run up my arm. I chalked it up to hunger.

I stepped over a body—a man bundled in a large coat for some reason and who’d probably died here.

I couldn’t make out his face, but I took that as a grace, not a missed opportunity.

For a second, I thought I saw him fidget.

But I pressed on, pulling Danny next to me, away from yet another fallen shape.

Another life cut short—an incomplete chord, a few notes left silent.

I turned the knob on the front door and almost let out a sob as it opened.

Danny handed me the small flashlight we’d picked up in Lauderhill and I flicked it on.

We were in a tiny lobby area—I’d learned, over the last few weeks, to not linger over things.

Not in places we were only passing through.

Usually the smell said enough—whether there were bodies or food or animals festering.

But you never knew. Sometimes you’d catch a glimpse of someone hunched back, their face melting off—flesh torn away by a desperate cat or animal, or worse.

I shuddered to think about what Danny had seen in those moments.

How each image had gnawed away at what little innocence was left in him.

I let the flashlight’s glare dance across the opposite wall.

I pulled back once I saw it—the words smeared across what was once a bare, pale stucco.

The long L almost reaching from ceiling to just above a tattered couch positioned next to the front desk.

I didn’t need to bring the light back to read the words—I didn’t need to think about what the dark, red paint it was written in truly was.

AHORA EMPIEZA LA MALA HORA