Page 66 of The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand
He’d thought he was numb to the sight of corpses until September, when he entered the freezer of Bad Boy’s BBQ on the corner of West 56th and Train Avenue.
He was looking for food, same as anybody, and had the passing thought that maybe Ralph Wojesik’s propane generator had kept the freezer going for long enough that some of the meat inside hadn’t spoiled.
The generator was long silenced and whatever meat had been in the freezer was long gone—except for the human meat.
There were three bodies on stainless steel hooks that first day.
Looked like a bad horror movie, the corpses hung high, impaled with the hooks carefully driven through the back of the necks so that their sharp points came out of the mouths, barely visible, the way you’d tuck a hook through a night crawler before casting it into the water and hoping to tempt a walleye.
Kovach had seen so much death by then that even a sight as gruesome as this wasn’t likely to give him much pause, except for one detail: the corpses had been drained of blood.
Two men and one woman, one Black, two white, ages approximately twenty, forty, and fifty.
No similarities between the vics. In another age, this would’ve been noteworthy. Now it was a day that ended in Y .
Except for the way they’d been bled out.
Even in a moment when carnage was commonplace, that was unique.
They’d been hung carefully, and then the femoral arteries had been cut—neatly, probably with a razor or a scalpel, a precise, efficient incision, no rage to it.
Hang a body up so gravity is your friend and then open the femoral artery and it doesn’t take long to drain the blood.
So where was the blood?
The bare concrete floor was speckled with a few rust-colored flecks. Kovach put on his gloves and used his pocketknife to lift those from the stone. Proximity told him the blood had likely come from the vics, but there was so little of it.
Why?
The freezer wasn’t operational, but it was still cooler than most rooms in the city.
A smart space to work with a body when you didn’t have electricity, one that kept the smell from overwhelming you right away, and one that was discreet and out of sight, allowing time while you did your gruesome work.
He suspected those elements played into the selection of the location, but it was impossible to know for sure.
He lowered the bodies from the hooks, but didn’t remove them, because he tried not to burn corpses unless the wind was blowing out of the southwest, toward the lake, which carried the smell away from his house on Clark Avenue.
He liked to sit out on the porch in the evening.
Simple pleasures. It was hard to enjoy the porch when the wind carried the stench of the burning dead.
That day, though, the wind was pushing hard out of the north, cool and crisp and undercutting the humidity, a perfect night for baseball, if baseball had still existed.
The breeze off the lake would’ve limited the long power hitters to the warning track, turned it into a pitcher’s duel, and that was always Eddie Kovach’s favorite style of baseball.
Shame that the game, like presumably the rest of America, was dead.
He wondered idly, as he walked away from the corpses with the hooks through their skulls, whether baseball would ever come back.
It seemed unlikely, sure, but the human condition was an interesting one.
Resilient, maybe? Delusional, certainly.
Call it what you wanted, there was hope hiding in there.
One night, not long ago, he’d heard laughter while he sat on the porch.
Not the wild, mad laughter of hysteria that had become almost as common as the screams and the gunfire, but real laughter, the kind that followed a joke, the kind that was joyful and partnered with a smile, and he’d walked toward the sound, but then it was gone, and he’d never located the laughter.
He kept the memory, though. When he rolled the muzzle of the Smith the blood disappeared.
A serial killer. On Eddie Kovach’s block!
Somehow, this was the greatest indignity he could fathom in a world that had lost all dignity in June, when they’d called off baseball, and the president had given his last speech, and madness reigned.
He could burn the bodies, same as he did with all the others who died of the plague or random violence or suicide or simple, foolish accidents that could no longer be set right because there were no hospitals, no ambulances, no police patrols, no social order. Or…
He could solve the case.
Someone needed to speak for the dead. Eddie Kovach couldn’t do it for all of them, but for the five in the meat locker at Bad Boy’s BBQ in his very neighborhood? He could do that much.
That night, he began surveillance.
It was three days before anyone approached the building.
Three long hot days and nights of round-the-clock surveillance, dozing here and there, but mostly awake, trying to keep his mind off the relentless stink of death, off the memories of other long nights with partners at his side, good men and women who were likely all dead now, like Debbie.
Sometimes, he played the radio low, wondering which survivor was manning the equipment, and why they never spoke.
Maybe it was on some kind of autopilot… or maybe the survivor who played music knew better than to announce his or her existence.
The music was pop hits, modern stuff, Madonna and Larry Underwood.
Kovach could do without Madonna, but he liked Underwood’s song “Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?” The way the white boy sang it made Kovach think of the old solo album from Buddy Miles, who’d been Hendrix’s drummer, had an Afro damn near as wide as his drum kit.
Kovach had loved that album back in the days when Debbie and Kovach would go out and dance.
Hard to believe there’d ever been such days.
“But bay-yay-yaybe you can tell me if anyone can…”
He turned the radio louder when that Underwood song played.
Drummed his fingers off the steering wheel of the gutted van he’d set up as a surveillance post. When the song was over, he’d turn the radio back down low, or off entirely, and watch the barbecue joint in silence, the way a detective should.
Third day, finally, action. Just before sunset. A woman, small and brunette, weighing maybe a buck ten, dressed in a tank top over loose blue pants that looked like medical scrubs.
Pushing a body in a wheelbarrow.
The corpse was a man, pale and broad-shouldered and blond and big, too big for the woman to push easily even using the wheelbarrow.
Kovach was so struck by the scene he almost forgot about his camera.
He finally snapped a few photos while she fumbled the door to the barbecue restaurant open and wrestled the wheelbarrow inside.
When she was out of sight, he lowered the camera and let his hand trace the butt of his duty pistol. Go in? Murder suspect with a corpse, of course you went in.
Those had once been the rules, anyhow.
These were different times.
He waited. There was no need to rush, and he was curious about the blood.
She was inside for twenty minutes. Came back out with a plastic two-liter of Pepsi in each hand, walking fast. In the waning light, the contents of the Pepsi bottles could almost have passed for the real deal. There was just enough of the day left to show that the liquid inside wasn’t cola-colored.
It was a dark ruby.
Kovach took pictures. He left the van when the brunette was two blocks away, then followed, kept low and quiet, stopped when she stopped, ducked behind a dumpster the one time she looked back. Counted to twenty, checked the street again. She was back in motion, walking faster.