Page 85 of The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand

For most of her life, darkness had trailed her. And when it wasn’t behind, it was ahead—something she’d either edged around or fallen into. Now, a seam of brightness opened inside Elise. It was smooth and true, and she rode it like this train rode its track.

“Sing,” she said to Ruby.

“Huh?” Ruby looked at her, confused.

“Sing,” Elise repeated, and pointed at the train, now only a mile away. “The song about the train.”

“What? I don’t… don’t…” Big tears rolled from Ruby’s eyes. She was so scared.

“The song the old lady sings in our dreams.”

The Corvid veered into them again, coming from the left.

It hit Elise’s door, nearly folding it in half.

The window shattered, spraying the interior with glass.

Both Elise and Ruby screamed. The Chevette swerved dangerously to the right, narrowly avoiding a sloped boulder that would have flipped them like a coin.

Elise pumped the brake and turned the wheel, swinging the back end around.

She passed behind the Corvid and raced away in another direction, now almost parallel to the railway track.

Her door swung open loosely. It trembled for a moment on its compromised hinges, then fell off.

Elise clutched the wheel, feeling even more vulnerable. She put her foot to the floor.

The Corvid followed. Elise watched it in the rearview, making adjustments to keep it behind her.

“Sing!” she said to Ruby.

Ruby nodded and started in a thin, wavering voice: “ This train is bound for glory, this train… ”

“Sing louder!” Elise said. “Like you believe it, Ruby. Sing with your soul!”

“ This train ”—a little louder—“ is bound for glory, this train… ”

“ This train is bound for glory ,” Elise joined in, pulling every word from that seam of light inside her. “ All who ride, you must be holy. Lord oh Lord, talking about this train… ”

The Corvid tried to pull up on their left, but Elise maneuvered that way and forced it to drop back.

It thumped into their rear bumper again and something else was ripped off—the trunk lid itself, Elise realized.

The Corvid drove over it without missing a beat.

It swung out the other way, trying to pull level on the right.

Again, Elise timed her movement, turning the wheel and keeping the Corvid in the rearview.

“ This train don’t carry no liars, this train ,” they both sang, their voices steadily growing stronger.

Elise’s focus switched from the train to the mirror and back again.

The track was no more than five hundred yards away.

They raced toward it on a diagonal. The Chevette’s needle was at sixty but dropping. The engine didn’t have much left.

The Corvid hit their rear end yet again. Elise was thrown against the wheel, but kept singing. She looked at the approaching locomotive, four hundred yards away now. Ruby tightened in her seat. She’d yanked one of the California Raisin figures from the dashboard and clutched it like a talisman.

“ This train don’t carry no liars. Don’t carry nothing but the holy fire. Lord oh lord, talking about this train …”

Elise held on to the light inside and kept her foot to the floor.

Three hundred yards. The needle had dropped to fifty. Elise urged more from the engine. She sang so loudly that her throat was raw. Ruby accompanied her word for word—a desperate, faithful harmony. They headed toward the track and the train kept rolling.

“ This train don’t carry no gamblers, this train… ”

Two hundred yards away… one hundred and fifty…

The Corvid smoked and snarled. It rode their back end, bumping and bullying. Through the dust and darkness, Elise glimpsed two hands clasping the wheel. They had hooked, black fingernails and prison tattoos.

“This train don’t carry no gamblers, this train … ”

Eighty yards… seventy… sixty…

Above their singing and the frantic engine noise, Elise heard the train rocking on its track.

It blew its whistle, coming on fast. She looked away from the rearview mirror and concentrated on the locomotive.

It had a swooping, plow-like frame fixed to the front (a cowcatcher, Elise remembered it was called, although in her mind she thought of it as a crow catcher) that looked for all the world like a big silver smile.

She made a slight adjustment to her line and aimed for the section of track just ahead of it.

“This train don’t carry no gamblers. No loose sinners, no midnight ramblers. Lord oh Lord, talking about this train.”

Ruby covered her eyes. Elise gripped the wheel and the last line she sang turned into a determined cry.

She crossed the track one sweet second ahead of the train.

The track was laid on a shallow embankment.

Elise hit the incline at close to fifty miles per hour and took off—all four wheels off the ground.

The train bore down on them, larger and brighter than everything, even the sun.

It missed them by a heartbeat. The Chevette soared thirty feet and landed on the other side of the track with a monstrous crunch that blew out the rear windshield and flattened two tires.

They had made it, though.

The Corvid was not so fortunate. The locomotive—the crow catcher—hit it with the force of a meteorite.

A tremendous thunderclap-like boom shook the air as the muscle car was savagely T-boned.

It was knocked along the track like a toy, rolling and flipping, breaking apart in ugly black pieces.

Sparking metal caught the ruptured fuel line and the gas tank went up with an intense thud, throwing more pieces across the desert.

Black smoke ballooned into the sky. It was thick and oily, textured like feathers.

The train did not derail, and it did not stop. It shook righteously on its track, sounding its whistle, as sweet and uplifting as gospel. Elise and Ruby watched through the dusty windshield as it continued north and eventually blended with the horizon.

Elise turned to look back out the driver’s side window. The wreckage from the Corvid was scattered all over. Some of it burned. Elise was reminded of newspaper photographs of crashed airplanes. There was no sign of the driver, although she didn’t look too hard.

She and Ruby spilled from the Chevette and stood hugging each other for a long time.

Afterward, they took a few moments to gather the provisions that had been ejected from the open trunk.

Not everything was salvageable. Most of the cans were, though, and the bottled water.

They took the good stuff and left the rest for the coyotes.

The Chevette still ran, but only just. It limped across the desert, wheezing and dripping fluids.

The speedometer needle swayed brokenly from side to side.

Elise guessed they were going ten miles per hour.

Maybe. After fifteen minutes of hobbling along on two flats, the Chevette finally gave up the ghost. Something went bang beneath the hood, then it lurched once and died.

“What now?” Ruby asked.

Elise got out of the car. She looked around and pointed at something way off to the east. A barn. A windmill.

“There,” she said.

“Is that a farm?”

“Yeah. Let’s go.”

They left most of their belongings in the car. They took a bottle of water each and wore their hats and sunglasses. It was hot and they were exhausted. They stopped often. It took almost an hour to reach the farm.

Cattle ripped hay from near-empty feeders and plodded happily enough.

There was no other sign of life, but Elise and Ruby proceeded with caution.

They entered the farmhouse and found five dead: the farmer, his wife, and three adult men, probably sons.

One of the younger men had died recently, maybe only hours before.

The farmer and his wife were in bed, curled into each other’s arms. Someone had placed a red rose on the comforter.

It would have been beautiful if not for the smell and the flies.

The refrigerator was dark and warm. Most of the food had spoiled.

The pantry was in better shape. Elise and Ruby didn’t take much, just enough for their journey: canned fruits and soups, a box of Ho Hos, three packets of Lay’s Crunch Tators, and a six-pack of Dr Pepper.

Elise found a Smith & Wesson revolver in a kitchen drawer, along with a box of .

38-caliber ammunition. She threw the ammo in with their food and tucked the wheel gun into her jeans.

Truck keys hung from a hook by the front door.

The truck—a clean white Silverado—was in the barn.

Its tank was one-eighth full. There was a diamondback in the bed.

Elise hooked it out with a stick, then they loaded up their farmhouse haul and got moving.

They returned to the Chevette, siphoned its tank dry, and grabbed their belongings.

Ruby peeled the three remaining California Raisins from the dash and adopted them as her own.

They drove back to the farm, past the cattle and the barn, and followed a long, dusty driveway to Ocotillo Road. Elise referenced the map she’d marked up back in El Centro and they headed out.

Ruby fell asleep after an hour, clutching the California Raisins figures to her chest. She snored sweetly.

Elise kept checking the rearview mirror, but saw nothing back there.

The Silverado ran smoothly. She followed U.S.

89 for forty miles, then took another rural road—the delightfully named Hoppy Toad Pass—that cut east toward the Tonto National Forest. She saw no people, no cars.

At one point, a herd of white tail deer ran alongside her, as beautiful as they were purposeful.

Elise matched their speed for half a mile, wiping tears from her eyes.

She almost woke Ruby to show her, but decided to take this moment to herself. She’d earned it.

The sun inched west and the sky purpled. Ruby woke up and stretched, extending her legs into the footwell, arching her back. She wiped her eyes and looked around.

“We still in Arizona?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Feels like I’ve been asleep forever.” She either yawned or sighed—Elise couldn’t tell which. It was a sweet sound, in any case. “How much farther?”

“A long way. Into Colorado, through the Rockies.” Elise looked at Ruby and smiled. “Then straight on till Nebraska.”

Ruby pondered this, scrunching the bridge of her nose. “Like… a hundred miles?”

“More like eight hundred.”

“Jeez.” A moment passed as Ruby processed this unthinkable distance. At length, she settled back in her seat, looked fondly at her California Raisins, and said, “I dreamed about her again. The old lady.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. She told me that we’re not the only people traveling to see her. There’ll be others. People like us.”

Elise frowned, the bridge of her nose scrunching similarly to Ruby’s. People like us … what did that mean? Then Ruby placed one hand over her heart, and Elise understood: There’d be no Morey Sorensens or Hector Drogans in Nebraska. There’d be nobody like Jason.

“People like us,” she said.

“She was smiling in the dream,” Ruby continued, nodding. “She has a real pretty smile.”

A warm sensation spread through Elise’s chest. For the first time in a long time, everything felt right. It was probably foolish to feel this way, but she couldn’t help it—and nor did she want to.

They moved on, the road unfolding between tall green pines and rugged passes. Elise checked the mirrors, but not as often.

They refueled courtesy of an abandoned Dodge Raider and stopped for the night northeast of Flagstaff, parked behind a ramshackle post office on Hopi land.

They ate chicken noodle soup straight from the can and had Ho Hos for dessert, then reclined their seats and slept.

Elise had loaded the .38 and kept it close.

It took her a long time to drift off. She woke before dawn, started the truck, and got rolling.

The sun rose high and golden. They crossed the Colorado state line two hours later.