Page 60 of The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand

“Dead,” she says. “It’s just us now.” She strokes the leg of the dead VISITOR beside her.

Then she takes a shining thing from her pocket and suddenly there is blood on the other living VISITOR’s face.

He stares at her, tastes it, and then puts his fingers into the red slick and strokes it down her face in a gleaming line.

He does it again. They start to laugh, covered in blood.

“To the end of everything,” the female says.

“I’ll get the GIANT,” the male says. “Let’s watch some fun before our time comes.”

The door into the cage opens again and something comes through—a big black dog, twice my height. It is the weight of a bear. It is very sick. Strings of bloody snot and drool fall from its muzzle. It has forgotten everything it ever knew.

The two VISITORS get on their hind legs and roar.

The big black dog roars, too, and comes at me with parted jaws.

I leap high in the air. It is big and strong, but confused.

I dance and twist out of its way. Its hot breath follows me.

It is almost fun. I am laughing at the dog.

The dog cries and roars and leaps at me. The VISITORS scream with delight.

I dance and leap and run until I am tired, and still the big black dog follows. I leap a little less high each time, and its jaws come closer and closer, snapping the air behind me.

The jaws crunch onto the scruff of my neck and the dog picks me up like Ee Ee Eee used to.

But the dog is not carrying me with a mother’s kindness.

It shakes me like a rat. I twist once more with the last of my energy and fasten my teeth in its vulnerable throat.

Blood runs everywhere. The VISITORS are frenzied, shrieking with joy.

The black dog is MEAT and I tear chunks from it even as it lives.

It’s bad MEAT because of the sickness, but I will eat anything at this point.

I am so hungry. The light is so bright and the roaring so loud and I am alone, which my kind should never be, and the lights and the screaming and the bloody faces of the VISITORS get into my brain, and I realize, yes, this is what it feels like to be insane.

It happened to Tak Tak Tak, and if I stay here much longer, it will happen to me.

The loop goes around my neck, and they pull me away from the MEAT. I am yanked through the dark. Clang goes the cage. Tak Tak Tak lies sad and crazy in the corner. I nose him. “I understand,” I tell him. “That is a place with no brothers and sisters.”

“They like to watch the pets fight,” the golden dog says from the next-door cage. She is nearly dead. “He especially likes to watch the dogs who played with kids and fetched the newspaper to kill each other.”

“I thought they loved their pets,” I say.

“These days everyone kills what they love,” she says. “To prove they’re not afraid.”

The golden dog dies soon after saying this and it’s quiet for a time.

I nose Tak Tak Tak and try to talk to him. But there’s no sign he hears me. He cowers in a pile and makes no reply. “Like the RABBIT,” I keep saying. “Remember the RABBIT?”

I tense as footsteps come down the hall.

It is the male VISITOR who comes again. He’s not interested in Tak Tak Tak anymore; Tak Tak Tak is quiet like a dead thing.

I bite and snarl and dart, avoiding the loop and the stick.

He’s so busy with me he doesn’t notice Tak Tak Tak creeping along the side of the cage, not until Tak Tak Tak is upon him.

Only an idiot would have not seen that coming.

But the VISITOR is beginning to be sick.

He doesn’t know it yet, but I can smell it.

Also, he is an idiot. Even though we have not eaten for some time we are stronger than him because we are not sick.

The blood of his throat makes a spray in the air.

Tak Tak Tak and I leap over the VISITOR.

He is twitching and clutching his neck. We race through the dark, following our noses toward the fresh air.

Our claws slip on viscera. It is leaking from some dead VISITORS sitting in a neat row against the wall.

I wonder if they were made to fight one another, too.

We quickly run past them. We come out of the door, and we run and run through the city.

They forgot that we are not dogs. We are Lycaon pictus and we were eating the VISITORS thousands of years ago, long before they learned to put us in cages.

The sickness does not get us because we are not dog or human, and we will live a long time, while their lungs turn to liquid and their eyes lose their light.

Since we have been underground, the city has started to rot.

The streets are filled with the dead. But there is something else, too.

Tak Tak Tak and I follow the call of the something, something that lies beyond the sickness and the concrete.

It grows stronger as the buildings thin out, as we come near it.

We don’t stop at dark, we don’t even stop as hunger eats us, as the sweet stench of the bodies calls to us. Everything here is MEAT now. But we are done with this place.

We reach it at the beginning of the second day, as the light rises over the world and the city ends. We are at the edge of a great golden place. This is what has been pulling at us, all this time.

“Tak Tak Tak,” I say, awed. “It is the place of the ancestors.” Waving grass stretches in all directions. Small trees rustle in the prairie wind. The land rolls on and on, vast and made for running and jumping.

Tak Tak Tak looks at me and touches me with his nose. For the first time since the dark place, he kisses me. “It’s not that place,” he says, “but it’s very much like it, yes.”

“Let’s go and find the WIVES,” I say. “The Dholes. They must be out there somewhere. We shouldn’t keep them waiting.”

Together we go into the burning sunrise.