Page 6 of The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand

The second floor had two bedrooms, each not much larger than the average prison cell, with one big room on the third floor that had once been an attic but was now their mother’s bedroom.

At the end of the hallway on the second floor, a small bathroom with a tub, toilet, and sink—but no shower—served the entire home.

The second-floor hallway was dark. The sole light fixture, a brass dome with clear glass and three bulbs that hugged the ceiling, had not worked for several months.

The bathroom door was shut, as was the room he shared with his brother and the room his younger sister occupied, so no sunlight could get in anywhere.

Talik and his sister were the only ones in the house who weren’t sick.

His sister, Lawanda, was eighteen months younger than Talik, and his brother, Malcolm, was two years older.

They were all extremely close. When one of them was sick, they all pitched in to care for them.

For the last twenty-four hours, he’d heard the juicy wet coughs of his brother whenever he walked up the stairs.

His mother said he had the flu, but that was before the news spread about the Tripps.

Before Talik had begun dreaming about Mother Abagail.

The silence that greeted him as he walked down the hallway toward his brother’s room made Talik feel like he was tiptoeing through a crypt on his way to the burial chamber.

He heard his sister’s singsong voice coming from her room, imitating the voices of her dolls as she guided them through conversations.

Talik was grateful for the sound. It made the house feel less funereal.

Even the sound of his mother’s loud coughs coming from the kitchen was better than the void he faced beyond his brother’s door.

Talik had seen many people die in his ten years on earth.

Kids his age, some younger. Teenagers, adults, his friends’ fathers and mothers.

Lives abbreviated by gun violence or drug overdoses.

He was well acquainted with the deathly emptiness that followed the end of a life, an echo of silence where sound should have been.

That’s what it felt like outside his brother’s room now, like a body waiting to drop.

His soft knock on the old warped wooden door with the cracked paint and rusted brass doorknob was loud as a gunshot in the emptiness of the hallway.

“Malcolm?” Talik could smell his brother’s sickness wafting from the room, an acrid, darkly humid musk of funky sweat, vomit, and Vicks VapoRub. He opened the door and peeked his head in. That sick stench became nearly overpowering. “Malcolm? You awake?”

His brother’s head was turned toward the closed window, staring blankly at the trees beyond.

One of their favorite pastimes had been watching the squirrels chase each other through the branches.

They’d even given them all names. Malcolm’s breathing was shallow, a wheezing rattling sound like an old lawn mower engine had joined the bubbling sound coming from his chest as he labored to draw air in through the mucus clogging his lungs.

Talik crept closer. He didn’t want to get sick, but he didn’t like the idea of his brother suffering all alone.

People were dying from the Tripps. As much as he wanted to believe this was just a regular flu, he couldn’t escape the image of Fat Steve drowning in his own fluids.

“You doing okay, bruh? Can I get you something?” Talik asked.

Malcolm continued to stare out the window. He hadn’t blinked in several seconds.

“You still seeing Mother Abagail?” Malcolm finally asked.

“Yeah. I still see her.”

“I see her, too, now. I can see her right now. She told me not to be scared.” Malcolm turned his head to look at Talik. “And she told me to tell you to watch out for the Walkin Dude. She—” Malcolm began to cough. Snot and phlegm sprayed from his nose and mouth and dotted the window.

Talik stepped closer, then stopped, wary of catching the Tripps.

He didn’t know the exact process by which disease spread, but he didn’t think getting Malcolm’s snot all over him would be a good idea.

There was nothing he could do for his brother anyway.

Whether it was the flu or the Tripps, it had to work its course.

The coughing stopped and Malcolm returned to staring out the window.

“She says the Walkin Dude is here—in this house. She says you should get out of here. You should go to her. Go to her…” Malcolm let out a long, rattling wheeze that bubbled up through his snotty nose and his phlegm-choked throat.

Then his breathing stopped. His head lolled to the side; eyes still fixed on the window.

“Malcolm? Malcolm!” Talik fell to his knees at the foot of Malcolm’s bed.

Tears flooded from his eyes as his body jerked and hitched with sobs.

He looked up through blurry eyes at his brother’s face, then followed his gaze to the window.

For a brief moment, he thought he saw the outline of the old woman from his dreams, then it was gone, and he was just staring at the squirrels, watching them leap from branch to branch only a few feet away from the window.

“What is it? What happened?” His sister, Lawanda, rushed in behind him, and Talik grabbed her and pulled her into his arms.

“Malcolm’s gone.”

“Noooo! Noooo! Malcoooolm! No-ho-ho!” Lawanda cried.

When Talik looked up, his mother was standing in the doorway. There was not a single tear in her eyes.

“I just got a call from your grandma. Your daddy’s dead.

He died about thirty minutes ago. The Tripps got ’im.

Your grandma’s sick, too,” she said with no more emotion than if she’d been announcing the death of a mosquito.

She began to cough again. Her eyes were yellow where they should have been white, with livid red capillaries forming a road map all over them.

She still hadn’t uttered a word about her dead son.

Talik’s mouth dropped. The tears he’d shed for his brother were now joined by a fresh volley of tears for his deceased father. “Dad’s dead?”

“Yeah, he wasn’t worth shit nohow,” his momma said.

“Momma! Momma, Malcolm’s dead!” Lawanda cried.

“Yeah, I can see that. Y’all come on out of there before y’all get sick, too.”

That was all she said. No words of comfort or sympathy. When Talik walked past her out of the room, he could have sworn he saw a smirk on her face. She shut the door behind them, then started back down the stairs.

“Dad’s dead?” Lawanda asked her momma.

“That’s what I said, ain’t it?”

“Ain’t you gonna call the ambalance?” Talik asked.

“For your daddy? Ain’t nobody worried about his ass.”

“For Malcolm!”

His mother paused on the stairs and turned her yellow eyes on Talik. She still wore a slight smirk that was half scowl, but her eyes were far away, the way they sometimes looked when she smoked too much weed. “You hear what’s going on outside?”

Talik listened. Screams and gunshots, breaking glass, and angry shouts drifted in through the thin walls. It sounded like a full-scale riot. Either that or a war.

“Folks is goin’ crazy out there. They’s lootin’ and killin’, prolly rapin’ folks, too.

Ain’t no ambalance comin’ in here. Just leave ’im where he at till all this blows over.

And don’t go in there. Y’all stay in your sister’s room.

” She began coughing again, then staggered a bit as she turned around and started back down the stairs.

Talik turned to his sister and saw the worry in her eyes.

“Is Momma sick?” Lawanda asked.

Talik nodded. “I think she might be. She’ll be all right, though.”

“Is she gonna die like Malcolm?”

“I said she’ll be okay.”

“She actin’ strange, though.”

Talik nodded again. He looked down the stairs, where his mother had reached the bottom. She turned and looked up at him, smiled and winked. Talik couldn’t think of a single thing anyone should be smiling about right now.

“Come on, Lawanda. Let’s go in your room.”

Talik didn’t know what was going on, but something was definitely off with his momma. He locked the door behind them. He couldn’t stop thinking about what Malcolm said about Mother Abagail’s warning.

The Walkin Dude is here—in this house.

A shrill, agonized scream sang out, chasing chills up Talik’s spine and raising goose bumps. He looked at his sister, whose eyes were wide.

“That’s Tonya!” she cried out as she raced to the window.

Talik followed quickly behind her. They opened the window and peered down into the street.

There were so many people out it looked like a block party.

They were breaking windows, kicking in doors, dragging people out onto the sidewalk, running out of homes with TVs, game consoles, whatever cash they could find, and whatever women they could grab.

The attacks seemed random. Some homes were left untouched, while the house just two doors down was ransacked.

A few were now on fire. On the pavement just below them, their neighbor Tonya was being stripped naked and beaten.

Moose and Diesel, two known killers who were members of the Junior Black Mafia, seemed to be leading the horde of looters and vandals, directing the carnage and mayhem.

They were attacking Tonya like two hungry jackals.