Page 99 of The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand

She couldn’t stand it, Palwasha said. The resounding emptiness, being alone with the alone.

She knew it would drive her insane—so when she heard Nasir’s motorbike in the distance, she thought, Sweet death…

or a friend? Were they even different now?

The stench of rotting flesh still in her nostrils, she came out from her hiding place and waited for the stranger, her eyes squeezed shut, rocking, rocking, pretending she was still in her father’s embrace.

The tall, bearded stranger didn’t hurt her.

His voice was kind, and he had a knack for calming her fears.

Also for finding and preserving food. Sun-drying, brining, pickling, or salting was the trick, Nasir told her, as he substituted the bike for an abandoned Toyota Corolla, its keys clutched in the driver’s rotted hands.

Palwasha looked away as Nasir dragged the family of three out of the car to the roadside and placed a rain-slick tarp over them.

“They won’t miss it,” he commented as they got into the vehicle. He wouldn’t look at her and she hoped he couldn’t hear the invisible fingers tap-tapping on the windows as they drove away, heading to Islamabad, thinking they would find life and some semblance of law and order in the capital city.

They didn’t. Just more dead at every chowk, traffic signal, hamlet, and bungalow.

Brown kites, eagles, and vultures soared over the city, while feral cats roamed in packs.

And wasn’t that odd, Nasir thought one night, as they sat outside a guesthouse under a fourteenth moon, him smoking an expensive cigar he’d found in a VIP suite, Palwasha biting into a miraculously edible apple from the kitchen’s cold storage that had long ago stopped working.

None of the feral animals wore collars. They were all strays.

Where were the expensive purebreds of the city’s rich and elite?

Of all those diplomats from foreign countries, one week of whose cat food cost more than their chowkidar’s monthly salary?

They stayed in Islamabad for three weeks, foraging, scavenging, waiting for someone to appear, something to happen, before Nasir finally decided to try Lahore.

He’d thought long and hard about it and it made sense to him to move south.

There would be more traffic of the living in the heart of Punjab.

Also, there were the dreams.

But he didn’t tell Maulvi Khizar about them yet.

Instead, he talked about the GT Road, that iconic highway built in the sixteenth century by the emperor Sher Shah Suri, now desolate and crammed to the brim with dented, rusting vehicles and corpses bloated in the summer heat.

They had to abandon the Corolla early on and switch to the rickshaw, which was able to navigate the obstacles on the highway far more easily and carry more than a motorbike could.

Palwasha wanted to name the rickshaw. Nasir thought that silly, but really what did it matter? They named it Parrot.

And it was on GT Road near Jhelum that they had their first encounter with the Wolves.

Palwasha shuddered as Nasir described to Maulvi Khizar how they ran into the fields and managed to hide behind a grove of banyan trees right before the contingent rolled into view.

Watching them move across the highway, laughing and herding boys and girls in ropes and chains, was the first time Nasir realized the world wasn’t merely empty, but that it had been emptied of good people.

Evil men, like cockroaches, had survived.

Khizar counted beads on a tasbih as Nasir told their story.

When he was finished, the old mullah sat in silence, his fingers telling the rosary reverently, gently, as if he were touching dewdrops, then said, “We’re strange creatures, aren’t we?

We hope in futility that the world will change, and when it does, we long for what once was. ”

Nasir watched fondly as Palwasha drank the last of her tea and got up.

They had plenty of opportunity along the way to pick up new clothes and she had changed into clean shalwar kurta, but despite Nasir’s persuasion she refused to throw her old green dupatta away.

It must have complemented her jade eyes once, but now, oil-stained, blackened with dirt, it clung to her neck like a net of vines.

She asked in accented Urdu, “Where is the bathroom?”

Khizar thought for a moment, then he gestured to a door that led to the pillared interior of the mosque.

“Into the courtyard and on your left. Baita,” he said to her as she shuffled to the door, “indulge an old man and recite the prayer hanging on the eastern pillar before you enter the bathroom, okay?”

The girl stared at him, nodded, then remembered he couldn’t see her. “Jee, Maulvi sahib.”

When she’d left, Khizar turned to Nasir. “You’re both welcome to stay as long as you wish. I have plenty of tinned food and spices, and there are herds of cattle and game roaming the fields around here. You’ll never run out of meat if you have any skill with a gun.”

“I brought a few guns with me from Abbottabad.” Nasir scratched his long and unkempt beard. He needed to trim it. “And I can shoot.”

“My room is small, as you can see, and can’t accommodate all of us. My advice,” Khizar said, “is for the girl to either sleep outside—I can put up a couple charpais behind the mosque—or in one of the houses across the road.”

“We certainly don’t want to inconvenience you, and we’ll sleep wherever you want.” Nasir studied the mullah’s face. “But I don’t think space is your real concern here, is it?”

Khizar fell silent. Outside the postern door, dusk extended its tentacles, covering the mullah’s charpai in shadow. Hero was nowhere to be seen. After a rabbit or stray cat perhaps.

“There really isn’t any other way to put it.” Khizar’s cataract-glazed eyes were upon the courtyard door. “The mosque is inhabited by jinn and the girl isn’t safe in here after dusk.”

“Jinn.”

“Jinn,” Khizar agreed, and lifted his teacup to his lips.

“My grandfather used to tell stories about them. Said they lived in this area for millennia—long before people came here. When you’re a child, you believe such stories.

As you grow older, you laugh at them. Eventually you forget them.

” He put away the cup and reached for his hookah.

“But they don’t forget us, you see, even if we ignore them.

The jinn move among us, building and migrating, majestic and silent, living their own lives that they mark in thousands of years.

And when the wabaa overwhelmed us humans, they returned. ”

Uneasily Nasir glanced at the door. It was possible that the old man was not all there , that loneliness had worked on him as it had on all of them, but jinn were mentioned in the Quran, and in his hometown of Balakot, stories of evil jinn in the shape of cattle roaming lonely mountain roads at night were legion.

“Certainly, Maulvi sahib, many thanks. We’ll sleep in one of the houses.

We don’t intend to impose on your hospitality for too long, anyway.

” He got up to fetch the girl, but suddenly she was there, adjusting the discolored dupatta around her neck, staring at him with those green eyes he had always thought discomfiting, as if she could see more than she let on. “There you are, child. All well?”

“Yes.” She moved her lips twice, glanced over her shoulder into the shadows pooling in the courtyard, then back at him. “Yes, I think so. Maulvi sahib,” she said quietly. “Who’s Burqan?”

“Wa La Hawla Wala Quwwata. There is no strength or power except in God the Eternal and Majestic.” Khizar’s eyes had widened, the cataracts shining like white marbles. “Never speak that name again lest you call the jinn king. Wherever did you hear it?”

“It’s on the painting of the black-haired man with the fiery eyes. Hanging on the pillar next to the prayer sheet.”

They went out into the courtyard, where the pillars of the mosque stood dusking like ancient trees. Khizar lit two oil lamps and hung them up, and Nasir turned on a flashlight.

They searched for nearly an hour, the old mullah squinting and patting at the walls and pillars, but they couldn’t find the painting with the jinn king’s name.

Nasir found he’d lied to Khizar. They ended up staying with the mullah for several months.

Nasir convinced himself it was partly because he was worried about the blind old man, partly because they’d traveled a long way to get here, this green land of the Ravi and Indus with its acres of crops and fruit trees, some of which had survived thanks to the arrival of monsoon rains, and while the electric tube wells were useless and the once-lush villages and towns now crumbling into dust and green decay, the hand pumps in the fields still fetched sweet water and the mullah still gave the azaan five times a day, his melodious call carrying across miles and miles of silence, like God’s own voice over a subdued earth.

But really, and it took him some time to figure it out, Nasir had stayed because of Khizar’s stories.

Khizar was full of them. From his childhood spent in Old Lahore, where he grew up the only son of a pit wrestler, who wanted his son to follow him into the akhara, to his youth as a truant kite flier on the rooftops of Lahore, singing ghazals and radio songs to giggling pretty girls on neighboring roofs and indulging in glorious paichay with other kite fliers.

Khizar smiled when he told this particular story, and Palwasha reddened and left the room on some pretext.

Nasir’s favorite stories were of those who’d passed through the area—both before and after the wabaa.