Page 90 of The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand

She stepped closer to put him in her shadow. She was only three years older, but he was short for his age and she was tall for hers. “Listen to me: We have to leave. You know it, too. There’s more of them every day. And they’re getting closer. We should go together.”

Edmund shrugged off his jacket. The concert T-shirt beneath was in rags. “I’m not scared of any stupid pirates.” He had adopted her word for the gang of marauders they heard looking for other survivors to menace, just like their namesake in storybooks.

“Edmund, they find each other and stick like glue. If we don’t do the same, we lose. They’re hunting people down. This is a small island. Not enough places to hide. No clean water. It’s time. Or it’ll be too late.”

He didn’t want to admit it, but he was curious about her plan. “What, then?”

“We take our boat, that’s what. Sail north.”

Edmund shielded his eyes from the sun with a grubby, unwashed hand as he stared at her. An earthy stink floated from him that must be making his mother do flips in her grave—if she had one. “It’s not ‘our’ boat,” he said, but he was curious. “North to where, anyway?”

“You know where.”

He frowned and stooped over to make wide stomping steps away from her, palms on his kneecaps. Practicing his choreography again. Some part of him was always trying to pretend the world away.

“Michael Jackson’s not in Colorado,” he said. “He’s not at some old Black lady’s house. He’s putting on concerts in Las Vegas. That’s where he went.”

“He’s dead, Edmund—”

“ Shut up! ” Edmund screamed at her. His face turned bright crimson. “He’s gonna put me on the stage right next to him as soon as he sees me—the best kid dancer in the whole world —and then he’s gonna take me to live with him in Neverland!”

His last word was a sob. Hearing his plan out loud must have hurt his own ears.

Marie felt bad about breaking her promise never to poke holes in Edmund’s fantasy.

She respected fantasies. Granpè Jean had called Marie by her mother’s name in his last hours, which hurt her feelings because she was the one washing and weeping over him—but at least saying the name Nadine made him smile.

His last wish had been to pretend that Manman and Daddy hadn’t died in that crash on the Seven Mile Bridge so long ago that Marie barely remembered them.

“We’re still here… so he probably is, too.

” She was crossing her fingers behind her back, her habit when she was telling half a truth.

Or no truth at all. If by some miracle Michael had survived, she would never allow Edmund to go live with him at Neverland—a superstar hanging out with young boys and zoo animals felt wrong in a hundred ways—but one battle with Edmund’s fantasies was enough for today.

Edmund was right: she could have chosen any of the other boats from the forest of masts at this harbor alone.

She didn’t need to buy a share of the Proud Mary and include Edmund in her plan.

But last night, when she’d quizzed herself on why she hadn’t left in one of the simpler motorboats already, she realized she didn’t want to leave the doofy shrimp behind.

And she needed him. He was smart. Edmund might have been one of the most intelligent ten-year-olds on the planet even back when the planet was full of ten-year-olds, but she didn’t trust him on a journey this ambitious no matter how good he was at making knots and yanking up his sails.

Someone needed to be stronger than them. Wiser.

They would need the Boat Man, too.

“I’ve been studying Granpè Jean’s maps,” Marie said, pulling one out of her back pocket.

Granpè Jean had grown up in a fishing family and never tired of imagining ways to travel by boat.

“We should be able to sail up the Mississippi River to St. Louis and go west from there. And even if we can’t, at least we’ll be closer. Away from here.”

“It’s worse out there!”

“Maybe,” she said. “But not on the water, I bet.”

Edmund needed another hour of convincing to at least think about it while they stowed the water bottles in his boat’s dark, crowded galley, everything narrow and in miniature.

The bottles took up his entire table. Everything needed cleaning.

His aluminum sink was crammed with plates stained with dried ketchup and white spots that turned out to be maggots.

But he didn’t refuse outright, a pleasant surprise.

He must have a lick of sense hidden somewhere in that scrambled head.

None of Granpè Jean’s brothers had wanted to risk the rickety fishing boat with him from Port-de-Paix after Baby Doc cursed his homeland, so he’d fled to Miami alone, where he had never gotten over his rage at being caged like a criminal.

He had nearly drowned, both in the Atlantic and, later, in U.S.

bureaucracy—but one by one, his brothers left behind had died at the hands of the dreaded Tonton Macoutes.

Later, losing his only daughter had made Granpè Jean determined to tell Marie everything about his life, knowing she was the only one left to remember his siblings.

The pirates in Key West felt like the Macoute, too—except these days, wanton killing was a worse sin after so much dying.

“How long will it take?” Edmund said.

“I’m not sure. We can’t go alone,” she said. “I’m gonna ask the Boat Man.”

A week before, Marie and Edmund had been startled by the burr of a motorcycle with a shirtless rider and ducked out of sight in time to see him race down the pier with a Molotov cocktail.

With an expert throw, he’d set a sailboat on fire so fast that it lit up in orange like in Die Hard .

A man with a beard had dived into the water from the back of the boat.

The motorcyclist had fired a gun at the water five times.

Six. That unholy sound. Then, satisfied, he had driven off.

The weirdest part— one of the weird parts—was that they’d had no idea anyone else was living so close to Edmund’s boat until it became a spectacle. Through the entire episode, Edmund had been grinning his face off while Marie trembled, praying no one had seen them to disturb their hideaway.

Marie and Edmund had waited until all they heard were seagulls, and then crept to the pier.

They’d found the Boat Man spraying his burning vessel with a fire extinguisher, sobbing.

“Don’t just stand there, you little fucks—help me put it out!

” he’d shouted. But they hadn’t moved or spoken to him.

His boat was a lost cause. Marie didn’t know why he didn’t just choose another boat, or if he’d earned the attack, which felt more personal than random.

Now the Boat Man spent most of his time wandering in the open, cursing at the sky.

Edmund’s face wrenched into a toddler’s pout behind the black horn-rimmed glasses he said had belonged to his father. “ That freak?” But he was intrigued by the adventure of visiting him. “Okay, but I’m taking my guns.”

“Just one gun,” she said. “And keep it hidden under your shirt.” Edmund moaned with disappointment. Half the fun of a gun, for him, was waving it. Edmund’s uncle had collected guns and bullets the way Granpè Jean collected water. “And no firing unless we’re attacked.”

“I could fire a few rounds just to keep ’em away.”

“It’s stupid to bring them right to us.”

“They’ll just come tell me to join ’em.” He said it like it was a badge of honor.

Marie’s stomach cramped the way it had when she stepped away from the safety of her house.

The pirates would probably want Edmund to join.

And that might seem just fine to Edmund.

That was part of her hurry. They both had dreams about Las Vegas, too, but Marie’s made her wake up sweating and Edmund only told her stories about the thrill of his life on a concert stage.

“Maybe,” she said. “But they won’t ask me a damn thing. My skin’s too dark.”

“So?”

Marie didn’t have enough time left in the day to explain. She barely understood herself.

“So… that matters to some people. A lot of people.”

The only times Marie had ridden her bicycle far enough to glimpse the pirates near the yachts they had taken over at the fancier marina, every man, woman, and child among them had been white.

Maybe Edmund hadn’t noticed, but it might come in handy to travel in the company of a white boy and a man whose olive skin was hard to place, probably just a suntan.

Other Black people must have survived on the island, but she hadn’t seen any.

That could be a coincidence, or maybe her black skin would be target practice for pirates like the chickens were to Edmund.

She didn’t know if she could trust the Boat Man, either. But only one way to find out.

Marie reached into her wagon to grab the weapon she had chosen for this mission: Granpè Jean’s machete, which he’d kept sharp in the hurricane supply closet. Granpè Jean had warned her that people would swarm over the weak and timid like locusts, given half an excuse.

“Hey—no fair!” Edmund said, his eyes mesmerized by the machete’s gleaming blade while she tested its weight. “How come you get to carry that ?”

“I need it more,” she said. “Plus, how do you hide a machete?”

Edmund bent over to stomp in a regimented circle, lost in his daydream again. Even her machete couldn’t distract him from Michael. She wondered how much of Edmund was still intact after the Tripz and how much of the real Edmund was dead. Maybe he was a zombie.