Page 9 of The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand

brIGHT LIGHT CITY

Meg Gardiner

Startled, Danielle Cooper scrambled alongside another flight attendant to pull the door shut. She swung the handle and locked it as a horde of people charged down the jetway toward the plane.

“Oh my God.” Dani backed into the galley, beside the wild-eyed gate agent. Outside, faces crowded the window and hands pounded on the door.

The captain came over the PA. “ Cabin crew, be seated for departure .”

The hell? Back in economy, passengers still packed the aisle, struggling toward their seats. The cockpit door was open, the captain coughing heavily, the first officer shaky and slick with sweat. Dani gaped at the gate agent.

The woman violently shook her head. “I’m not getting off this plane.”

Dani raised her hands. They were already pushing back from the gate. On the jetway, the throng undulated forward like a python. Shoved, people at the front plummeted to the tarmac.

Sweet mother . She hurried to close the cockpit door and saw a man in a suit leap from the jetway onto the nose of the plane.

The captain barked, “ Judas shitting Priest! ”

Suit Guy landed with a metallic thud and salamandered up the windshield to grab the wipers.

The pushback tractor swung the jet around. Suit Guy shouted, lost his grip, and slid off. Dani shut the cockpit door and strapped into a jump seat.

Why did I take this flight assignment?

Yeah. Scheduling had begged. Bonus. Big one. We can’t fill rosters. Everyone’s out sick. Plus, whiny boyfriend in Seattle. Time for buh-bye .

The engines spooled up. Their howl couldn’t drown out the coughing that filled the cabin, the moans, the feverish craziness. The gate agent strapped into the seat beside Dani. Uniform torn, a slap mark reddening her cheek.

She muttered, “C’mon, let’s go let’s go let’s go.”

Dani was adept at soothing nervous passengers, but the agent’s jitters leached into her. She peered out the window as they taxied to the runway, saw bronzed mountains, heat shimmer, a cobalt sky boiling with thunderheads.

And the pushback tractor, racing after them. Suit Guy at the wheel.

Holy God . The jet turned onto the runway and immediately accelerated.

Dani stretched to scan outside, thinking, We’re clear, we’re good , hearing the gate agent chant, “Go go go,” and saw the tractor cut across the taxiway, across the dirt, aiming to intercept them.

Her mouth dropped. Suit Guy thought he could wrangle a 160,000-pound airliner, jump onto the wing or grab the landing gear like a cowboy wrestling a steer…

Come on, come on, take off. She urged the wheels to lift, but heard a shout from the cockpit and a monstrous bang as the tractor clipped the fuselage. It caromed into the left engine. The explosion shook the jet. Shrapnel shredded the cabin wall.

The airliner raked over the tractor at 150 mph, skidding, people screaming. Dani yelled, “Brace! Brace!” They slid off the runway, dust flying. We’re all dead.

That was when she saw the little girl.

Chocolate-syrup pigtails, a pink backpack. Unaccompanied minor. Dani had handed her stick-on wings when she boarded. Mollie—eleven years old, going to see her dad in San Francisco.

Mollie with the huge brown eyes pinned on her.

“Brace!”

Mollie ducked.

Bam , they jolted to a stop. Silence. Then crackling. The left wing was burning. Dani unbuckled, adrenalized, heard a weak order from the cockpit: “ Evacuate .”

Right main door open. Slide deployed. Yelling, “ Leave your carry-ons behind! ” Passengers staggered, shoving, some skittering over the seats like spiders, but many stayed seated, disbelieving. As though the plane could still take off, someone shouted, “Get back on the runway!”

The gate agent sat paralyzed. “No, no, no.” A screaming man flailed up the aisle toward the cockpit, with— Whoa, crap —a machete raised overhead.

Behind him, Mollie fought to stay on her feet against stampeding adults.

Dani elbowed her way to the little girl, hauled her to the exit, and practically tossed her onto the slide. Then a man slammed into Dani like Mike Singletary sacking a passer and she flew out the door, plunged face-first down the slide, and hit the sandy dirt.

Flames towered and roared. Heat, smoke, insanity. The little girl climbed to her feet.

Mollie Tajima. That was her name. Dani grabbed her hand and ran.

Fifty yards clear, sixty, seven Mississippi . A fireball consumed the jet, booming across the desert afternoon, and knocked them flat.

She turned to the little girl. “You okay?”

“Yeah.” Flames shivered in Mollie’s eyes. “Are they all like this?”

“Honey?”

“Plane crashes. This is my first one.”

No fire trucks were coming.

The terminal was anarchy. Podiums overturned; boarding doors locked. Superflu casualties. A Cinnabon cashier was stuffed in a trash can. Mid-concourse a grandmotherly woman on a mobility scooter sat at a slot machine, cigarette to her lips, shoving quarters in as if feeding a ravenous god.

The security checkpoint was unstaffed. That explained the machete. Check-in desks were abandoned. Dani tried a phone. United didn’t answer.

She squeezed Mollie’s shoulder. “We’ll call your mom.”

“She’s on her way to Mexico. With her boyfriend. Until this is over?”

This. Over. Damn. “Then let’s get hold of your dad.”

“Please.”

Dani phoned the girl’s father. Nothing. “Who else is here? Who can we call?”

Mollie’s voice quavered. “There’s just me.”

Outside the terminal, Dani hailed a cab.

It was waiting there in the blistering sunshine because who the hell wanted to go into Vegas now?

The driver had black stripes beneath his watery eyes, but could steer.

At the corner of Las Vegas Boulevard, he squeezed past an overturned school bus.

SANTA BARBARA SCHOOL DISTRICT inside the windshield, a Volkswagen Beetle smashed beneath it.

He dropped them at Mollie’s apartment building.

It was on fire.

“Like the plane,” Mollie said. She jerked a breath. “My books.”

Dani put an arm around the girl’s shouders. Calming-Dani was in charge, but Freaked-as-shit-Dani pulsed just beneath her skin. Airline, gone. Dad, MIA. Mom, fleeing to an unidentified beach in Baja.

Yeah, she herself had fled Seattle. But that was to ghost wheedling, needling Scott, an adult man, forty-eight hours ago when bonus pay for a SeaTac–Chicago–Las Vegas–San Francisco trip sounded infinitely easier than telling him, Dude, we’re over .

She wouldn’t forsake this kid, with her heat-pink cheeks and coltish limbs and rock-solid misunderstanding that grown-ups were in charge.

No. She’d take her to a friend’s house.

Bad idea.

Then: a teacher’s house. Then Child Protective Services. The police. A church.

Snake eyes.

Near sunset, Dani found a motel three blocks off the Strip, its office unattended, room keys hanging on a pegboard. She scooped them up.

“Wait here,” she told Mollie.

She unlocked Room 1 and froze. A couple lay entwined on the bed surrounded by empty bottles of Stoli and Jim Beam. They’d died with their boots on and nothing else.

Dani had once seen a billboard: ENSLAVED TO LUST? JESUS HAS THE ANSWER . It seemed this couple had gone to ask him for it, mid-thrust. Guns in their hands, blood on the walls.

Mollie walked up behind her. Dani slammed the door.

She took a room across the parking lot, empty and clean. They showered, got vending machine Cokes and snacks.

The TV lasted through six Green Acres reruns before collapsing into a test pattern. The phone system died an hour later. Mollie’s dad had never answered.

Dani sat down beside the girl on the lumpy bed. This might sound brutal, but she had to ask. “Your mom—you think she’ll come back? If she can?”

“She’ll come. If. She’ll…” Tears shimmered in Mollie’s eyes. Then they spilled. Her shoulders heaved. She buried her face in her hands.

Dumbass. Dani pulled Mollie close and rocked her until the tears ebbed, then tucked her in. “Sleep, kid. We’ve had a day.”

But at midnight Dani lay awake, listening to Mollie’s exhausted breathing. The city outside was unnaturally silent. No laughter. No cars. No planes. No helicopters.

Somebody had to come, right? The National Guard. Wayne Newton. Siegfried and Roy. The Rat Pack would save her.

She pressed a hand over her mouth to stifle a sob.

What was she going to do with a sixth-grader at the end of the world?

Elvis Presley, pray for us.

The motel had no café. Restaurants were toast, the nearest grocery store a wasteland. Finally, the next evening, Mollie was the one who said, “We’ll go to the kitchen at the Desert Inn.”

Her mom worked there as a waitress. “Sometimes she brings dinner home. Leftover lasagna. Pie. Lobster once.”

The walk was eerie in the evening sunshine.

Cars were wrecked along the Strip, beneath lights that glittered and danced, harlequin bright, enticing an empty city to come play.

Distantly Dani saw one other person—a stooped man shuffling along the gutter, stabbing litter with a steel-tipped stick.

She waved, but he carried on, engrossed, as if performing a ritual.

The Desert Inn hotel kitchen was derelict, but the walk-in fridge fully stocked. Dani fried up fat burgers, and nearly cried with joy at the taste. She suppressed thoughts of the rooms stacked overhead, ripe with dead gamblers.

“Ice cream sundae?” she said.

Mollie beamed—and the lights went out.

The refrigerator hum, the air-conditioning, every mechanical background noise, died. Mollie squeaked.

“Emergency generator will kick on in a minute,” said Calming-Dani.

The kitchen stayed dark. Dark dark.

“Sorry, kid. We’ll have to skip the sundaes.”

Hand out in front of her, Dani led Mollie through the kitchen’s swinging doors into the hotel restaurant. Like any reputable casino, it had no windows. She gingered her way forward in the blue twilight filtering through the hotel’s main doors.