Page 72 of The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand

I LOVE THE DEAD

Josh Malerman

“How could they have named it after him? How? How can you take the kindest, warmest, wisest man on the planet… and name something so terrible after him? I don’t understand!

Someone tell me, please! Except there’s nobody to tell me.

Nobody left! How do you like that? Just when a man needs an answer.

This is ridiculous. This is insane! Captain Trips?

Do they not know it’s his nickname? The punk kids who started calling it that…

is it because they hate him? Oh, they all hate him, don’t they!

They hate his kindness, his intelligence…

they hate the way he plays the guitar! What a bunch of pigeon shit.

All they see are the Jerry Bears and dancing skeletons and they think, ‘This is not for me. This is the end of the world.’ And their heads are so far up their butts that when the end of the world actually comes…

they name it after him. Jerry Garcia! Captain Trips. How could they? How dare they?”

Lev had been thinking about Jerry Garcia when he found the finger in the meadow. But the odds of anything interesting happening while he was thinking of Jerry were high, as he thought of little else.

He’d seen body parts in recent days. Oh, boy.

The dead lined the streets of Boise like fish pumped up from the sewers.

Most had died from the superflu, but violence has a tendency of dancing when bad music plays.

And so, he’d seen arms, legs, heads, even an eye.

But a finger? All alone and outside of town?

And not just any finger: it was the top two-thirds, sliced off above the knuckle.

Just like Jerry Garcia’s finger had been when he was a boy.

“Holy shit ,” Lev said. And the enormity he felt was more powerful than the fear he’d had of the superflu. The desire to show someone, anyone, was crushed by the understanding that nobody remained.

Picking the hard thing up from the grass, he eyed it through a pair of small spectacles. The same sort Jerry had been wearing these days. And he thought, not for the first time:

Is Jerry Garcia still alive?

“Captain Trips,” he said. And he laughed. Because in the face of all things horrible, here was undoubtedly a sign. The missing finger of the world’s greatest guitar player. And a chance, for Lev, at purpose.

He would leave Boise.

He would go to San Francisco.

He would bring Jerry Garcia his finger.

Lev’s legs hurt. His legs always hurt. Exercise of any kind hurt. He preferred couches and record players. Joints and thick beers. But all this walking, this exertion, was killing him. His back hurt. His arms were tired from flailing as he ranted. His joints felt like marble.

But his heart hurt the most.

The disrespect shown to the greatest musician the world had ever known was a thing he could not reconcile. Could not accept. And whenever Lev Marks felt this way, he played his guitar.

“There’s a fallen tree,” he said, to himself, always talking to himself these days. “A good place for a song. You wanna hear how good he is? I’ll show you how good he is. You don’t need technology to play the acoustic guitar, suckers!”

The guitar had been strapped to his back since Boise.

He’d picked up both it and the shirt on the same downtown strip in that now dead city.

Bodies everywhere back there. Lev preferred to think of them as dancing skeletons.

He squinted when he saw dead bodies, wreckage, empty cars, and storefronts.

Made it all look more like a painting, an album cover, album art. And what killer album art it was.

He swung the guitar’s soft case from over his shoulder and sat on the fallen tree. The sun was up, big, hot, and the many colors of his tie-dyed shirt were bright. His belly hung out the bottom; they’d only had a medium and Lev Marks was certainly a large.

The Martin acoustic placed gently on his leg, he reached into his cargo shorts and pulled forth the finger. He ran his chord hand through his thinning curly hair. Sweat had pooled on the lenses of those little glasses.

He strummed the guitar, using the dead finger as a pick.

Just imagine the looks of astonishment on the faces of the punks who disliked Jerry and the Dead.

Imagine that now! How upset they’d be to discover the genius had outlived them all.

For Jerry Garcia could not have died from a disease called Captain Trips.

And those pigeon-shit punks were dead now, those pricks who couldn’t recognize a good song if Bob Dylan took it apart to show them.

He strummed. An ugly, ungainly sound. And not just because the Martin was out of tune.

And not just because of the finger. Lev had no touch.

Never had. No rhythm. He played a guitar like he was sawing a bone.

His wrists still hurt from not having made it through the bar-chord phase of learning and he never practiced.

Half the chords were muted, dead, as the few pure notes made it out alive.

He didn’t know the intricacies of the chords for the songs he played, but who did?

G worked just fine even if Bob Weir had been playing G7 onstage.

He played a meek D now.

“Morning Dew,” he said. He paused playing. It was a revelation of sorts. Yes, the Grateful Dead had a song about an apocalypse. “Morning Dew” was the story of a man emerging after nuclear fallout. He lifted the dead finger and eyed the pale nail.

“Morning Dew…”

Is this why the punks named the end after Jerry? It was easy (thrilling) to imagine himself, Lev, as the narrator of that song. As if he’d listened to so much Dead he’d finally stepped into their music.

“Holy shit ,” he said. It was too much to take in all at once. It made him too giddy. He got up again, clumsily put the guitar back into its case, the finger back in his pocket.

And he continued southwest. Toward San Francisco.

A man with a guitar and a tie-dyed shirt.

And a missing finger, found.

Lev Marks. Deadhead extraordinaire.

“I’ll ask him myself,” Lev said. “I’ll ask him what he thinks of the stupid nickname.”

He plugged one nostril with a finger from his chord hand and snotted out the other.

He’d seen people get sick, the discoloration around the neck.

If he squinted, it looked like dark tie-dye.

“He’s alive. I can feel it. No way a guy like him dies from the same thing everybody else does. No way, suckers!”

Still, he worried, yes, as he stumbled along, a bit hunchbacked, taking quick anxious steps in his tennis shoes.

He’d seen a lot on his walk from Boise. Endless traffic made up of driverless cars, bodies on hillsides.

He stopped dozens of times to play guitar, strumming with Jerry’s finger, just like he’d played guitar as his friend Denny died from the flu.

He’d seen life, too, out here. Deer and sheep.

Coyotes and birds. Crows. His sister had warned him long ago not to do too much acid, that it could all come screaming back one day.

She told him acid gets stored in the back of the head and could one day drip down the spine.

Unannounced. Lev could be seventy years old and suddenly find himself on the same trip he’d taken at twenty. But what did Fran know?

Still…

This whole thing felt like a bad trip. Maybe that’s what the punks meant when they nicknamed it so.

And maybe it was the acid he’d taken (and maybe it wasn’t) that caused him to think the same crow had been following him from Idaho through Oregon.

He’d seen it in trees in northern Nevada.

Seen it in the desert. Lev had felt a sort of pull then.

An idea to go to Las Vegas. One night, he thought the crow spoke to him.

Told him Jerry Garcia was indeed alive, playing shows in Las Vegas.

“No way,” Lev said then and he said it again now. “That’s beneath him. Jerry Garcia is the smartest, warmest, most brilliant guitar player of all time.”

He once loved talking about Jerry’s missing finger at parties. You think this song is good now? Wait till I tell you he only had four good fingers!

“Ha! Genius!”

His voice carried across a grassy plain as he exited what felt like the thousandth stretch of forest. Whatever was going on in Las Vegas could wait. Lev Marks was going to find Jerry Garcia in Haight-Ashbury because that’s where a genius like him would go.

“Home,” Lev said. “He’d go home. Because he’s smart. And because that place was good to him. And pretty damn good to the rest of the world, too.”

How close was he to San Francisco? He didn’t know.

He’d been walking along highways and dirt roads, through woods and over hills.

Felt like a month now, maybe more. He’d slept in empty hotels and abandoned homes.

Restaurant booths and the back benches of cars.

Eating sardines and other canned goods. There was so much death out here.

So much emptiness. And the silence of a world turned off.

Like when a record ends, that sorrowful moment of scratchiness, then…

nothing. That’s what had happened to the world.

Everybody was singing along to “Franklin’s Tower” and then…

the scratchiness… the needle with no song to play… the superflu.

The end.

“Ah, Denny,” he said. “Wish you could be with me right now. You’d finally get to meet the man and then you’d finally get his music.

All those times you made fun of me. All those times you didn’t get it.

I bet you got it at the end, though. The last thing you heard was ‘Ripple.’ I bet you got it then. ”