Page 67 of The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand

He followed her for almost thirty blocks, thinking that once she would have been insane to walk in this neighborhood after dark, then reminding himself that she was the one who’d brought the dead in and hung them up on the hooks—her sanity was a question, yes, but her safety wasn’t the concern.

The advantage of so much death was that there was no such thing as a dangerous neighborhood.

They went north, all the way to Detroit Avenue, where she finally stopped at an apartment building, used a key on a padlock to loosen a chain that held the door shut, and slipped inside.

A few minutes after she entered, a light went on in the fifth-floor corner apartment, the faint, flickering glow of a candle or kerosene lamp.

Somewhere down the street, not far away, a man howled with madness, and gunshots cracked.

It was full dark now, and Kovach had decisions to make.

Arrest her? He almost laughed. He intended to stop her—but, really, what was the rush?

She’d chained and locked the door and he had no backup.

She’d hear him breaking into the building, and if that happened, Fast Eddie K was likely to take his leave from this world dangling from a meat hook himself. No thanks.

He went home. Slept until daybreak. Woke up and cleaned his gun and walked back to the brunette’s apartment building. Waited.

She came down two hours later, checked the window, then unchained the door and stepped outside.

She had a black leather bag slung over one shoulder, a clipboard in her left hand, and a street map in her right.

She checked the map, then the clipboard, then folded the map, removed a pen, made a notation on the clipboard, and tucked the pen behind her ear before setting off up the street.

Kovach fell in behind her.

They walked west, then north, toward the lake. The heat had finally broken, and the air was crisp. The day was quiet, no looters out—not much left to loot. Sometimes the mornings could almost pass for sane.

Almost.

Farther north, past Don’s Lighthouse Grille, where Kovach and Debbie had eaten dinner on the night he proposed, and straight across the intersection, moving toward Edgewater Park, where he’d finally gotten down on one knee, his hand trembling a little as he opened the ring box.

Left on Lake Avenue, then left again on West 145th.

Kovach wheezing a little now, thinking there was no wonder the brunette killer was so damn slim, with all this walking.

She stopped outside of a brick Tudor-style house, looked up the drive, then down at her clipboard.

All business. Satisfied with whatever she’d seen, she knelt behind a tree and unzipped the black leather bag.

Kovach removed the lens cap from his camera and zoomed in.

The clipboard was in the grass at her feet. She had a syringe in her right hand and a vial in her left.

Mysterious cause of death = solved. Kovach couldn’t help being pleased with his initial read of the scene in the meat locker, determining that the hooks hadn’t been used until after the fact.

She uncapped the syringe with her teeth.

Kovach snapped pictures while she pierced the vial with the needle and drew back the plunger, filling the big syringe with an unknown liquid.

She then withdrew what looked like an air pistol, flipped the bolt open, and loaded the syringe inside.

A dart gun. Kovach had never seen one in action.

She put the loaded gun in the bag and straightened up and eyed the Tudor again and he knew he had to stop her now. Even in this sorry excuse for a world, Detective Eddie Kovach wasn’t going to let a murderer proceed with business.

He’d come to speak for the dead, after all. A few of them, anyhow.

He approached her at a quick but steady walk, camera slung beneath his left arm, gun held in his right.

Her attention was on the house—she seemed to be considering the best approach across the wide lawn—and she didn’t hear him until he was almost on her.

When she whirled, his gun was already leveled at her face.

“Put the bag on the ground and then put your hands behind your head, fingers laced together,” Kovach said.

She stared at him, fierce-eyed, chest rising and falling. Didn’t move to surrender the bag.

“Cleveland Police Department,” Kovach said. “Put the fucking bag on the ground.”

Her eyes widened and then she laughed. Not a pleasant sound; an astonished one, a bark of disbelief.

“Police,” she said, blurting the word out as if it were the most implausible thing she’d ever heard.

“That’s right. Detective Kovach, Homicide. We’re going to talk about Bad Boy’s Barbecue.”

Her face changed. Still shocked, but with that tinge of uh-oh understanding that a suspect gave you the instant they realized you were a step ahead. Kovach had missed that look.

“I kill only the bad ones,” she said.

“Sure.”

“It’s true.”

“Sure.”

“They’re the ones who dream of the dark man,” she said. “But they still dream. That matters.” A pause, then: “You must dream, too. We all do. If we’re still alive, I think we’re all dreamers.”

He tried not to look rattled.

“What do you see?” she asked.

“I’m not the one who needs to answer questions.”

“Because you were a police officer.”

“I still am.”

Her smile was so sad it made his throat tighten.

“All right,” she said. “In that case, I’m still a doctor.”

“What kind of doctor?”

“Neuroscience.”

“Harvesting brains,” Kovach said. “Cool. Must’ve been inspiring work, based on what I’ve seen you do with a meat hook.”

“I’m not harvesting brains,” she said with real contempt, as if the notion disgusted her. “I’m harvesting blood. I think that’s the only real hope. The dreamers matter, and their blood might be valuable beyond what we can even imagine. The data is compelling.”

Though he was facing a murderer who was not in handcuffs, Eddie Kovach still lowered his gun.

“May we talk?” the murderer asked him.

He didn’t answer. He was trying to process the situation.

“Look,” she said, “you’re either going to kill me or—”

“I’m not going to kill you.”

“Well, you’re not going to arrest me, right?! There’s no jail left.”

He tried to project false confidence, as if he might know of a holding cell that she didn’t. She sighed again. Ran a hand through her hair.

“I would urge you to hear me out,” she said, and then gestured at the brick Tudor.

“Because there is a man inside that house who dreams of the dark man and is recruiting a team to follow him west, and I think his blood will be far more useful in service to research than it will be if it’s spilled for the dark man and his wolves. ”

And his wolves . Kovach felt his stomach clench. He hadn’t dreamed of the dark man, wasn’t sure what she meant by that, but he knew of the wolves. They lurked in the high windswept wheat in his own dreams, howling and snarling. Waiting on their master’s call.

“Hear me out,” she repeated, softer but more urgent now.

“Okay,” Kovach heard himself say. “But I’ll take your bag—and keep the gun in my hand.”

“That’s fine.”

They walked to Edgewater Park and sat on a picnic table looking out at Lake Erie.

There was a sniper on the pier, but he didn’t take a shot.

The snipers usually didn’t. They wanted to be seen and feared, that was all.

The man might even have been a colleague of Kovach’s at some point, another badge-toting fool who stuck to his mission as Kovach had.

They watched the gulls circle and swoop as the woman told Kovach her name was Ruth Pritchard and that she’d been employed as a research scientist at the Cleveland Clinic in the days before the end.

“I ran a sleep research program,” she said. “The focus was on lucid dreaming. We were nearing the end of our grant funding. Not enough people saw the practical value.”

The practical value, she’d decided in the lonely days holed up in her apartment during the summer, watching the city and country collapse, might just exceed any hope she’d ever had for her own study.

“While the phones stayed up, I kept calling my patients,” she told him.

“Pointless, right? I mean, we all knew how bad it was by then. Nothing would ever be the same, and still I kept pretending, kept going through the motions. It filled my days. It was better to pretend that there might be a return to normal than to accept that it was gone forever.”

Kovach thought of himself, walking the neighborhood streets, wearing his badge and carrying his radio, long after they’d told everyone in the department good luck, and God bless.

“A surprising number of them answered my calls,” Ruth Pritchard went on. “That was astonishing, because… well, statistically speaking—”

“They should have been dead.”

She nodded. “More of them, anyhow. Many more. I was working with a group of a hundred and fifty. They were intensely lucid dreamers with unusually high recall. And because I didn’t know what else to do, I kept calling them, and I kept asking questions, and it became obvious that they were still dreaming.

No surprise. I was, too. The unique thing was… ”

She paused as the sounds of cawing became higher and harsher. Kovach followed her eyes. The gulls had discovered a human foot and most of an ankle wedged in the rocks. The rest of the body was missing.

“The unique thing was, we were all dreaming of the same things,” Ruth said, turning from the gulls to Kovach, her dark-rimmed eyes intense with a quality he hadn’t seen in so long. A quality like hope.

“Do you see the farm?” he asked softly.

He could see her exhale. Her entire body loosened.

“With the old woman,” she whispered. “Yes. You too?”

“I don’t see a woman,” he said, and she tensed a little again. “I see a farm, surrounded by high wheat, and I think that if I head that way…”

His words trailed off and he shook his head.

“What?” she said. “If you head that way, what?”

“I don’t know. I think it may be good? May be… necessary? But then there are the wolves.”

He stopped, embarrassed, because she surely had heard his fear.

“Yes,” she said. “There are the wolves. And the one who commands them.”

Silence. He cleared his throat, said, “What’s the deal with the blood?”

“Vaccine research,” she said. “There are three doctors from the Cleveland Clinic’s vaccine program who are still alive. I won’t tell you who they are, or where. But they’re out there. And they’re working. And that is the closest thing to hope that I can offer.”

“You do the killing, and you bring them the blood?”

“That’s right.” Her fine-boned jaw was set hard. “But I kill only the ones who talked to me of joining the dark man.”

“And you’d study that blood, ultimately use it somehow in creating a vaccine?” Off her nod, he said, “Well… what if instead of a vaccine you succeed in making more just like him?”

For the first time, he saw she had fears of her own. “I don’t think that will happen.”

“That’s exactly what the president said about mass death.”

She swallowed. “We have to try.”

“But what if you’re wrong?” Kovach asked.

She didn’t answer for a long time. Then she pointed at the pier, where the sniper watched the shoreline through his scope, and then down to the rocks, where gulls fought over what little was left of the human foot.

“I have to try.”

They sat in silence for a bit. Kovach reached out and tapped the clipboard, which held a printed list of names and addresses in neat columns, with handwritten notations in tiny script jotted here and there.

“This is your kill list,” he said.

Her eyes answered yes.

“You let yourself do that,” he said wonderingly. “Murder people. Hang them up and drain their blood into Pepsi bottles. A doctor .”

“I’m not a doctor anymore. I want to be one again. That can only happen if we rebuild this city, this world. Some kind of civilization. Don’t you see that?”

Kovach, once a cop, thought that his eyes also probably answered yes, although he didn’t let himself speak.

“You asked me what if I’m wrong,” she said, “and that’s the right question. But it’s not so different from the old woman on the farm and the dark man with the wolves, is it? Two sides of the same coin. So… what if I’m right?”

Kovach stayed silent. His hand was on his gun and his eyes were on the gulls, which were busily pecking the last strips of flesh from the stark white bone.

“You could help me,” Ruth Pritchard said tentatively.

He shook his head. “I’m a cop,” he said. “A homicide detective. I stop people like you.”

When she touched his hand, his entire body thrilled. There was something in that touch that reminded him of the sound of laughter he’d heard up the avenue before it was lost to the dark. Something that made him think of the beautiful word mother . He couldn’t bring himself to look her in the eyes.

“There are no police anymore,” she whispered. “And there are no doctors. There are only survivors and dreamers, and there are two kinds of dreamers. Only one of them is going to write the story from here. Which one will it be, Detective Kovach?”

“Don’t call me that.”

“What do you want me to call you?” Still with her hand lightly on his. He forced himself to look away from the gulls just as one of them took flight with a piece of tendon in its jaws.

“Fast Eddie,” he said. “Now, let me have a look at the kill list, would you?”

He didn’t see that she was crying until she passed him the clipboard.

Neither of them spoke for a long time after that. They sat with their heads bowed over the list of names and the map of the city that had once been theirs, and Kovach thought that if she was wrong, she’d surely been his last case, and if she was right…

Maybe not.

God willing, maybe not.