Page 91 of The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand
But not her. Anyone she’d known would still recognize Marie, and she was proud of that.
When her parents died, she’d dreamed that she was staring at her eyes in the mirror and said, You are still you, Marie.
Your life is not ruined . Then she realized it was Manman’s face in the dream mirror, not hers.
But Manman didn’t come to her dreams anymore.
Marie thought she might never forgive that old lady in Colorado for crowding Manman, Papa, and Granpè Jean out of her dreams when they must be trying so desperately to comfort her.
Maybe she wanted to go to Colorado mostly so she could free up her dreams again.
The day before, she’d followed the Boat Man to observe his behavior. He stayed clear of other people just like her, pulling back if he thought he heard noises. He seemed afraid, although he spent much of the day shuffling on the beach. Or sitting on the pier by the marker, staring out at the sea.
The designated Southernmost Point of Key West had a concrete marker painted like a giant buoy in red, black, and yellow. Granpè Jean had taken Marie there when his cousins from New York came to visit, posing for photos. It was one of the nicer areas in Key West, so it was in pirate country.
“He’s probably way down south,” Marie told Edmund. “We’ll have to go closer to them.”
Edmund halted his stooped stomping and turned over his shoulder to look at her, holding his pose. Just like in the video. His face glowed with glee.
“I’m bringing two guns, then.”
Marie struggled to keep the machete balanced across her Schwinn’s handlebars without slicing her fingers as she pedaled.
The pirates probably had scouts, so she was careful to lead Edmund through alleys and over bumpy soil and sand rather than riding in the road.
Edmund had refused to take off his red jacket as he pedaled his BMX racing bike behind her, so his hair was dripping with sweat and pasted to his forehead by the time they rode to Southernmost Point.
She saw the buoy from a distance on the pier—and a shadow she was sure was the Boat Man—but she held out her arm to keep Edmund from charging ahead. She climbed off her bike and left it behind to walk the last stretch, motioning for Edmund to do the same.
Look right, look left. Look behind. Look everywhere. Vigilance was exhausting.
Ahead, the vastness of the unbroken sea whispered courage in her ear.
“Walk slow,” she said. “We don’t want to scare him.”
“Why not? We can make him do what we want.”
Lord help her, maybe this boy was a pirate already. Marie glared at him to shut him up.
“Let me do the talking,” she said. She never understood why Edmund obeyed her, but he usually did. She’d only needed to kick his ass once for his fealty, despite his guns.
Together, she and Edmund walked toward the man at the border of the sea.
From the start, the Boat Man didn’t look right.
He sat on the platform, leaning against the concrete buoy towering over him while he smoked a cigarette that appeared hand-rolled and smelled like the absent partiers on Duval Street.
He nestled a crumpled paper bag in his lap like a pet.
His jeans and Van Halen T-shirt looked fresh, so he was grooming himself much better than Edmund despite a salt-and-pepper beard growing wild, but his forehead’s grooves made him look full of rage already.
The bigger problem was his shadow.
From a distance, that was all Marie had seen of him—and now that they were closer, she wondered how his shadow had been large enough to see from so far away.
It didn’t look right, that shadow—his giant twin lolling against the buoy, but at an angle that didn’t match the shadows from the railing right behind him, above the inscription in red and blue paint: AMERICA BEGINS HERE.
(Someone had crossed out BEGINS and spray-painted Ends instead.)
As if the Boat Man’s shadow didn’t need the sun. When Marie blinked, his shadow snapped into alignment, so sudden it made her dizzy.
Or maybe she was swooning from the smell floating from him.
The sea air couldn’t wash away the familiar rot she knew too well from houses, cars, and shops, which had driven most survivors to the marinas.
Marie had thought about leaving her house too, but she’d been forced to haul away only three neighbors’ bodies to improve the general state of her street—thankfully, the Pettigrews had been away when the bridge shut down.
The chore had passed in a blur like the days after Granpè Jean died, and she had washed her skin and her sore muscles in the ocean afterward, hair and all, to be free from the Smell. That Smell.
And the Smell was here with the Boat Man, at the point that felt like the tip of the world.
Marie tried to think of what to say to him when the Boat Man grinned brown teeth that looked worse than his scowl. He yelled at Edmund, “Who the fuck are you supposed to be?!”
The click came as quick as a heartbeat, and Marie knew before she turned around that Edmund had his unwieldy .45 in his hand, pointed at the Boat Man. And cocked, no less. Edmund’s hand was shaking. “It’s Michael’s jacket from ‘Beat It’! Anybody knows that!”
“Fuck Michael Jackson!”
Marie gasped, bracing for Edmund’s crazed gunfire to rip into her, gone wild. He was barely big enough to grip such a big gun, much less aim.
“No, fuck you ! Eddie Van Halen played the guitar solo on ‘Beat It,’ stupid!”
It was so surreal, the two of them carrying on, that Marie wondered if she were only dreaming.
But another click turned Marie’s head the other way, and this time her blood thickened, clogging her throat: the Boat Man’s own shiny gun was now visible from its hiding place in the paper bag, pointed straight at her.
“No guns!” Marie blurted.
The Boat Man’s eyes were hidden in his shadow, but she thought she saw a flicker of amusement. “Says the bitch with a machete.”
Marie dropped her machete with a clatter at her feet. “No guns—we only want to make you a partner!” She turned back to Edmund. “No guns, Edmund.”
“He called you a bitch!”
The first and last time Edmund called her a bitch, she had wrestled him to the ground and twisted his arm until he cried. “It’s okay this one time,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady.
“Only if he puts his down first!” Edmund said.
“ You first, you scared little shit,” the Boat Man said. “You’ll shoot me on accident.”
By accident, Marie couldn’t help thinking, a silent correction. Or maybe she said it aloud.
“I’m not scared!” Edmund said, and Marie knew he wasn’t lying. His hand was no doubt shaking from excitement, not fear. He only slid his gun back into his shorts because of the pleading look on Marie’s face, not because of anything the Boat Man said.
Marie sucked in three breaths before she could stop imagining gunfire.
A turn of the breeze sharpened the Smell so much that Marie looked down toward the water and saw someone who looked like she was three hundred pounds bursting against the seams of a flower-patterned dress, like the Incredible Hulk.
Her blond hair splayed out in the water like jellyfish tentacles framing her head as she bobbed face down, arms spread as if she were hugging the salt water.
The body looked fairly fresh despite its decomposition bloat and missing chunks from sea life.
She probably had jumped in. Maybe that was why people came here.
Of course, the Smell wasn’t coming from him .
But why was he sitting so close to its stink?
The Boat Man ignored her eyes on the body. “I’m not gonna be nobody’s daddy.”
Edmund snorted, or maybe both of them did. Damn right .
“You two brats have ten seconds to tell me what you want.”
So, Marie told him. And watched light spill into his shadowed eyes.
Marie couldn’t remember the last time she’d been so excited in the hours before she went to bed, stuffing her belongings into her father’s old army duffel bag: photos, her birth certificate, Manman’s good winter houndstooth coat, her bathing suit.
She felt like she was going on vacation.
She packed in such a frenzy that she didn’t remember to be heartbroken about leaving the house she had grown up in. Or the island that had been her home.
Night was when the worries came. And the dreams.
She expected to see the old lady—perhaps to congratulate Marie on such a bold and sensible plan—but this time she dreamed of being on the deck of the Proud Mary , lightning flashing in the sky like floodlights to reveal a roiling night sea.
The waves were so high that the Proud Mary pitched and heeled, sometimes close to turning over on its side. Water flooded the deck.
Marie clung to the mast, hugging it like a loved one as water drenched her. But no: it wasn’t the mast! She was clinging to the swollen blob of the dead woman she’d seen floating.
She called for Edmund and the Boat Man, but her mouth made no sound when she screamed. Or, if it did, she could not hear her voice against the ocean battering the hull.
This is how I’m going to die , she thought.
With that thought, she saw the man standing at the bow. (When she was awake, she had trouble remembering nautical terms, but she thought bow in sleep.) He stood legs akimbo, hands on his hips, a statue defying the boat’s swaying.
The sail whipped in the wind, tearing to tatters.
One of the ropes lashed above her, snakelike, and she barely ducked in time before it might have coiled itself around her neck.
After the rope missed, it snapped back toward her with a mind of its own, ensnaring her upper arm.
The rope yanked her upward, to her toes.
“ Help me! ” she screamed.