Page 70 of The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand

Everything went along well between them until the day they went into town together to get supplies.

It was fall and a sudden nip had come on, so he was wearing her brother Mark’s parka.

She supposed later that might have been the reason for the trouble.

Too, he seemed a bit too comfortable behind the wheel when she let him drive her father’s pickup truck.

They were pulling up in front of the hardware store when she saw them.

Two men and two women. They were young and old, mixed, but they didn’t seem to be a family.

From their clothes, she guessed that they had come from a city and she couldn’t imagine what they were doing out there, so far from anything.

After a few wary minutes staring at each other, the older woman asked if they were from around here.

They didn’t look dangerous to Maryellen.

There was no gun or rifle, as far as she could see, and they had a flighty, nervous look about them, like rabbits.

Eventually, Maryellen and Wayne stepped out of the truck and the six of them stood in a circle, talking.

It turned out that the four of them had come from Morristown.

They hadn’t known each other before the plague but, as they stumbled across each other, alone and scavenging, had decided to join up.

“There’s safety in numbers,” the younger woman said, and Wayne nodded sagely at Maryellen.

It made her think Wayne wanted to go with them.

They were headed west. “It’s because of the dreams,” the younger woman said in a way that made Maryellen think she should know what she was talking about.

Listening to each of them, she came to understand that they each had dreamt about the same person, an elderly Black woman who lived in a cabin out west. In their dreams, the old woman told them to join her.

Maryellen didn’t understand what they were getting at. “It’s the power of suggestion,” she said. “One of you had a dream with this woman and gave the idea to the rest of you.”

But the others denied this was the case. “That’s what she does. She comes to you ,” the younger man insisted. “She’s trying to gather the survivors together, don’t you see? Giving humanity a way forward.” The others nodded at his words, but Maryellen wasn’t sure.

It wasn’t until that evening, after Maryellen and Wayne had made love, that Wayne admitted he had heard of the old woman. “As things were getting bad, people started talking about the dreams.”

“Oh? Why didn’t you say something earlier?”

He shrugged, and it made him seem younger than he was, like she was shaming him into confessing.

“It’s more than the old woman… People dreamt about someone else, too.

A man. Those dreams weren’t so pleasant.

” He drew a strand of her hair through his fingers dreamily.

He’d told her that he loved her hair because it was so silky.

“They call him the Walkin Dude. It was like he was calling people to mayhem. To chaos.”

She knew she had to ask the next question even though she wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answer. “And—did you ever have one of these dreams?”

He paused a moment before he shook his head. “No. Never.”

Not long after this, Wayne began bringing up moving on.

“Maybe we should’ve joined them,” he’d say casually.

“We can’t stay here by ourselves forever.

Eventually we’ll start running out of food or medicine.

” Or, “One of us could get seriously hurt.” He was afraid of all these things more than she was.

They could grow food. Working on a farm, she was used to all kinds of scrapes.

As for injury, well, she’d seen horses and cattle break legs; her own uncle had broken his back falling out of the hay loft, but he was gone by the time they got him to the hospital.

Sometimes there was nothing you could do. Sometimes people died.

Several times a day, Maryellen would find herself looking at Wayne and wondering if they would’ve gotten together if it wasn’t for the plague.

Aside from the fact that he had been a college student and she had still been a high school senior, or the happenstance of where they lived.

Her question was more fundamental: Would she have been even attracted to someone like Wayne?

He was so unlike the boys out here that it was hard for her to know.

He seemed easygoing—as much as anyone could be given the circumstances—and considerate of her wishes.

But she was also acutely aware that she honestly didn’t know him very well, and she was afraid that she might wake up one day far from home and realize that she didn’t know him at all.

It was at these times that she wished her mother were still with her. She missed her mother’s advice.

It had only been a couple of months, the middle of October, but Maryellen could see that they were starting to fall in together.

She felt his assumptions weigh heavily on her, namely that they would inevitably leave this farm before long and head west. He was already starting to assert himself, expecting her to follow his lead.

He tried to do so around the farm, although there was still a lot he didn’t know.

Maybe that was why he wanted to leave, so he could be somewhere that felt more familiar.

Where he wasn’t dependent on her—indeed, where their roles would be reversed.

She would not feel as uncertain if she thought that, if it hadn’t been for the plague, he would have been drawn to her, but she was pretty sure she was too young and simple.

But here he was, making himself a fixture in her life.

There was the real chance that she might get pregnant and that would change everything.

She was getting used to having him around, and one day, she’d be so used to him that the thought of losing him would terrify her.

Maryellen was coming in from the kitchen garden with the last of the potatoes when she noticed the paddock gate had been left open to the meadow and the forest beyond, a temptation set for the three cows and Ruby.

The cows were gone, but Ruby stood by the water trough.

Maryellen saddled Ruby and rode out after the cows. They had not gotten far and she easily herded them home. She found Wayne in the house, sitting in front of the hearth, his eyes trained on the dancing flames like they were telling him a story.

“Did you leave the gate open?” she asked as she hung up her jacket. “Because the cattle were loose in the woods.”

“Oh geez, maybe I did,” he said, his eyes widening. “I’m sorry.”

She wanted to believe him. Because not believing him meant he thought he could lie to her and get away with it.

He was changing. She could not deny it. He was like a plant slowly, slowly turning as it followed the sun. He was changing in ways that were disquieting—leaving things undone, pretending not to hear her, disappearing for hours with her daddy’s shotgun.

A week later, Maryellen was stacking the hay in the loft that she’d found in the Tanners’ barn when she saw Wayne pointing the firearm at Ruby.

She thought at first that she was hallucinating: Wayne generally avoided her horse.

But no, her eyes weren’t playing tricks.

Wayne stood with the gun leveled at Ruby’s head.

He was taking deep breaths. His arms looked to be trembling.

“Hey!” she shouted so he could hear her, though he was far away. “What are you doing?!”

He snapped to attention at the sound of her voice, swiveling to find her. His face had gone pale and he let the rifle droop to the ground. “When did you get back? I thought you’d gone down to your neighbors’ place…”

But she was already down the ladder and running toward him, her heart pounding the entire time. She could not imagine why he was doing this, what had gotten into him. Was he going to kill her, too, girl and horse linked in his mind? “What were you planning? Were you fixing to shoot Ruby?”

At Maryellen’s words, Wayne suddenly came to, no longer embarrassed at being caught. He lifted the weapon again in Ruby’s direction, though he didn’t hold it as high this time. Maryellen stopped dead in her tracks twenty feet away from Ruby, who nickered at the sight of her.

Wayne’s eyes smoldered. “It’s her or me, Maryellen. You’re letting this horse stand in our way. We got to leave here—you know it—and you won’t do it as long as she’s alive. I don’t have a choice.”

Maryellen’s mind reeled. Had she really been sharing a bed with this man for the past two months? She didn’t think the man she knew was capable of doing this, but now she saw that was because, as she feared, she didn’t really know him.

The man—boy—she knew was a mirage. An act he’d put on to gain her trust.

A small voice inside tried to argue: Don’t we all do that when we meet a stranger, pretend to be someone we’re not? Until we know we can trust them?

But not like this. He had crossed a line. He had pretended to be gentle, but in truth he was violent. Anyone could become violent if pushed, yes, but this was different.

He was showing her: I am dangerous .

She took a cautious step toward him. “Hold on. You’re right, Wayne. I see that now. We gotta leave. But… let me just say goodbye to her first, okay? We’ve been together my whole life. I—I can’t just let her go without saying goodbye.”

She made her voice soft, taking all the anger out of it so it would seem like she had surrendered.

He watched her for a long minute, trying to decide.

Finally, when Maryellen had just about given up hope, he lowered the gun.

“Okay. Now you’re being reasonable. Go on—say goodbye. Then we pack our bags and go.”