Page 89 of The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand

THE BOAT MAN

Tananarive Due and Steven Barnes

Key West was now the Island of Chickens.

Although chickens had roamed free on streets and in yards for all of Marie’s life, and apparently since the first Cuban settlers a million years ago, they walked with more arrogance now.

When Marie slipped outside into the shadows between the old wooden row houses, chickens were the largest living creatures she saw except for the birds lucky enough to be able to touch the sky.

Chickens strutted in a sea of brown and white, with bright red combs flapping, filling the streets as they darted between abandoned cars.

They roamed the houses with impunity, through perpetually open doorways, across sofas and kitchen counters.

Or they roosted on white fences wrapped in cheerful bougainvillea blossoms, sometimes as far as she could see.

Cats were prowling, of course. But not as many cats as chickens. Not by a mile.

Marie thought she might catch a chicken for dinner. But later. If she could keep her head on straight and didn’t think of them as pets so she wouldn’t chicken out —she chuckled to herself at the pun—dinner was everywhere she looked. For life.

But Marie didn’t want to be in Key West for life. Hell, no.

Marie La Guerre had big plans.

Although she preferred to move in darkness, Marie set out to see Edmund in daylight. Edmund didn’t know it yet, but he and his boat were a part of her plan. A big part.

The wheels of her old Radio Flyer wagon whined as she pulled it over the jutting mango tree roots at her back gate, its load of treasure hidden under a deceptively grimy tarp.

Look left, look right. Her belly only unclenched when she didn’t see anyone else on the car-littered street or the porches within ten paces on both sides of her, yards overgrown as if Senora Sanchez and the Pettigrews had been gone for years instead of only since June.

In the days after the Tripz raced through Key West like a hurricane, she’d been senseless with grateful tears on the rare occasions when she saw anyone else standing upright.

Someone to tell her horribly ordinary ordeal of trying to nurse Granpè Jean when he died cursing in Kreyòl and coughing blood.

Someone’s kind eyes offering a hidden piece of her parents or Granpè Jean in soft blue, green, or brown. Any eyes that weren’t runny with blood.

Not anymore. She’d learned better about people.

She could hear them even now—the pirates.

They were still a few blocks away, sound carrying farther than it should on the ocean breeze, but she heard their whoops signaling that they had breached a barricade: somebody’s wood panels breaking.

No gunshots yet today, but she had heard guns the day before like distant fireworks. Gunshots in an open-air tomb.

Pirates weren’t content to take their pick of the yachts and million-dollar homes that had been left behind: pirates needed prey.

The Tripz had given birth to monsters wearing human skin who fed from the living like the loups-garoux in Granpè Jean’s scary stories from Ayiti.

And although Granpè Jean still stubbornly refused to visit her dreams to give her guidance—had been crowded out of her dreams, more like it—Marie knew better than to leave herself at the mercy of monsters, wondering each night if one was trying to peek past her blinds or smash her windows for the pure joy of hearing her cry and beg and scream.

She was only thirteen, but pirates would not treat her like a child.

Zwazo pose sou tout branch , Granpè Jean said when he got sick, his favorite encouragement made cryptic after the Tripz: Birds land on all branches.

Your turn will come .

Pulling her wagon behind her, Marie waded past the chickens to cross the road.

The spot where she had buried Granpè Jean called out to her as she walked past: his favorite place to sit and drink white rum—his beach chair on the sand in the shade of scrawny coconut palms. She’d pulled him in this same wagon, struggling although he’d lost so much weight.

Not a hole six feet deep, more like three feet, but it was a hole at least, which made him one of the privileged.

Deep enough to keep the crows away when there was so much other meat aplenty.

The silence from him screamed to her when she passed his burial place.

Still, she spoke to him in a whisper, “I’m being sensible today, Granpè Jean.

Just like Manman. Just like you always said.

” It was a teeny lie, because she was going to Edmund, who was not sensible at all.

But she hoped she could be sensible enough for both of them.

As Marie had warned Edmund many times, she could hear his music from a quarter mile away; a faint beat and vocal flourishes that were unmistakable. And always the same song—one she had loved, too, but hearing it in a loop every time she visited Edmund had twisted her affection closer to loathing.

She walked past still, silent boats at their slips on their docks, most of them thankfully empty and free of ghastly odors.

Boats were the preferred homes among the few people left scattered on the island.

Edmund’s harbor was mostly deserted, since this side of the island was farther from supplies that might be scavenged from the demolished stores downtown.

These were the more modest boats of weekend sailors and fishermen, not the grand yachts left behind to plunder.

But there was a smell. At least a dozen dead chickens were piled in an almost perfect pyramid in her path, feathers bloodied and mangled by gunshot wounds, rotting in the sun.

Another pile sat only a few feet from the first, this one shrunken and charred black, no doubt from the bottle of lighting fluid that lay emptied beside it.

Not a barbecue—just burning for the sake of it.

Edmund’s work. Not for the first time, she wondered if he was a complete psycho.

Her irritation flared. If he was going to kill chickens, at least he could have shared them before they spoiled. Chickens were harder to chase down than she would have believed. For one thing, they could fly higher than people thought even if they couldn’t soar like seagulls.

Edmund’s boat was at the far end of the marina.

From several paces, it was impossible to miss his bright red leather jacket, which he always wore even in the wet summer heat.

He was on his sailboat’s deck, arms outstretched as he thrust his tiny pelvis and bobbed his head, following Michael Jackson’s choreography.

His face was a river of sweat. He bit his lip when he raised his arms into the famous Thriller zombie pose, swinging right and left with so much force that his glasses slipped to the edge of his dripping nose as he panted.

“It’s a sin to waste food!” Marie called to him. “And it’s stupid to shoot a bunch of chickens. You’ll wish you had saved those bullets.”

He didn’t miss a beat, as if she hadn’t spoken. This little white boy’s dancing might be the death of him, but although she would hate to admit it, with all of his practice he almost looked like Michael—especially after Michael made his skin lighter.

Once again, Marie checked behind her to make sure none of the pirates had followed her during the ten-minute walk from her street to the harbor. Satisfied, she lifted a flap of the tarp covering her wagon’s load just enough so he could peek.

“I bet you’re thirsty, eh?” Marie called to him, sweet and singsong.

That got Edmund’s attention. His eyes mooned as he stared down at her.

“Where’d you get that?” His arms fell flat at his sides. Once he stopped moving, he remembered how exhausted he was.

“Are you thirsty or not?”

Edmund hopped down to the pier. On the deck above, his portable VCR and its tiny screen kept showing the ghost tribe of zombies and their death dance.

Edmund was sunburned bright red, his nose and forehead peeling. If he still had parents, they would have warned him to wear sunblock and stay clear of the sun during its meanest hours. But sunburn was the least of their worries.

Edmund wrenched off the plastic bottle’s cap and took two long gulps, ready to hand it back to her. But she shook her head. “Whole thing’s yours.”

Edmund drained the rest with barely time to swallow.

Some of the precious water dribbled down his chin.

He stared at her wagon’s load as she revealed more: three cases of water, more than seventy bottles.

She had scavenged some herself as soon as she realized it would be a good idea, but many of the cases stacked in her coat closet were from Granpè Jean’s hurricane stash.

As a young man, he had been adrift in a fishing boat in the Atlantic on his way to Miami, and his biggest fear ever since had been dying from lack of fresh water.

Water, water, as far as the eye could see , he’d told her. And not a drop to drink!

Key West’s water supply had been unreliable even during the good times, with frequent Boil Water notices.

Marie would not drink the filthy gray liquid dribbling from her faucets now even if her life depended on it.

Bathing in it made her feel dirtied, not clean.

The water in her wagon was treasure no matter how much remained in his boat’s tanks.

“This is all yours,” she said. “It’s a trade.”

“I don’t got nothin’ to trade.”

“You don’t have anything,” she corrected him. “But actually, you do.”

She stared toward his forty-six-foot sailboat and its name painted in blue script: Proud Mary . It took a few seconds before he realized why she was staring.

“You’re crazy,” he said. “This is my uncle’s. Get your own!”

“I like this one,” she said. “It’s named for me. Sort of. That’s what you call a good omen. I don’t want the whole boat—just a share of it. Half.”

Edmund tossed his empty bottle into the water. “Hell no!”