Preamble

Here's how this story got going. I just read The Stand recently. Somewhere in the latter half of the book, when the tension between the Free Zone and the Bad Place began to wind itself up, around the place in the book when Mother Abagail vanished, I began to have a hint how the book might end. As the unread part of the book became shorter and shorter, I became more tense and excited to see how this ending might start up and play out. However, in the end, he closed the book in a very Stephen King way, and entirely differently than I expected.

By this time, my own thoughts on the ending had gotten so detailed as to make for a story of its own. I enjoyed picking through both the King story and my story, and I wondered what I might do with my own private ending.

I offer it here to other readers of The Stand.

One critique of Mr. King's book, The Stand – he had this epidemic influenza, and all these people who quickly dropped dead of this flu. That means that the population of the US started at 248,709,873, and rather quickly dropped to 1,492,259 folks, more or less.

That's a lot of dead people. Yet Mr. King kinda delicately stays away from the magnitude of the number of corpses & corpsettes strewn about the land of the free etc. That's about 4.97 million ex-folks per state, more or less. So some of my narrative is disgusting, since I have to pick up the pieces, just by writing about folks getting around and tripping over them, etc. Don't blame me. Blame Captain Trips.

Judy Blue

Judy rolled into the Free Zone unnoticed. It was around early summer, late June, shortly after the horror hit; before Boulder, Colorado became known as the Free Zone and shook off its first scene as Deadville, Colorado; a week after Captain Trips put out his Monster Hit Single that topped the charts and rolled across the country, dominated day after day, and blew out America; after the tanks had stopped rolling and the dying hand of Order & Authority stiffened up with rigor mortis; when Judy Blue rolled up in the rosy-fingered dawn, up out of the pitiful morgue that was Denver.

The hot dry wind, the Southeast wind blew dust and stench across high prairie from Oklahoma; over Denver, picking up the sweet charnel smell of a few thousand tons of sun-dried people slowly baking into jerky, and then over Boulder. Three or four days into the Big Dieoff, the bellies in Deadville started to pop like giant wet popcorn kernels. People put bandannas across their faces - sprinkled with peppermint oil, it dulls the smell. Otherwise, try witch hazel or spearmint schnapps.

Bellies swell up into stretchy, bruisy gas bags, and pop a wet report like distant gunfire - more of a boom than a crack, although sometimes it's a loud crack-and-splat if the remains lie nearby. Or else, if the belly wall rots first, up comes a fat black gas rope of intestine through the void, looking ever so much like a grotesque, formless dark balloon animal, big around as a fist. That usually lets go quietly, although sometimes there's a flatulent bubbly hiss, like a bike tire under water bubbling away when you check it for a flat. The blatting, burbling commotion lasts about a minute. Kids would pop them with BB guns here and there.

The wind came up from Denver one afternoon that first bad week, not too many folks had an appetite that day. By another week, the Death Farts subsided, and the smell went down to just Dead Raccoon nasty, not enough to vomit. She came up the east face of the Sangre de Cristo range, on the East Slope of the Rockies to the Raton Pass, and thence up by Colorado Springs.

She was ever stoic, ever silent. She was a fine young lady, with a nice-looking form and face; but an expression set with grim resolve that wouldn't lift even when she laughed. Something silent dogged her down. Real notable eyes, too - blue and deep, real windows into the soul, but sorrowful.

She started to make some friends with the college kids around town - the Free Zone and the survivors' dreams were awful new.

Judy Blue wasn't her real name. That's her nickname after... well, after. She told her new friends that she dreamed of Mother Abagail. She said that Mother Abagail and the Free Zone and the Walkin' Dude began to drift into her dreams some time before the plague hit. She didn't seem like a girl who would make that stuff up.

Mother Abagail was near enough to Boulder; Judy would wait for her in Boulder, not truck up to Nebraska. Her new friends would hesitantly tell of their dreams of the Black Cloud that had come to the desert looming over the farlands. The Walkin' Man, the Hard Case, the Evil One.

She would say nothing of her dreams; but her eyes would glitter, and she would stare off at the mountains, her mouth grim. She'd imply that the Walkin' Dude didn't fit into her particular view of the world, and that he'd best be moving on. You could imagine her staring down a telescopic sight, aiming patiently. It gave the other folks the heebie-jeebies, sometimes.

Judy came into town remarkably well stocked up, like a mountaineer or woodsman. Came in a big Dooley pickup, with jump tanks for extra gas, hauling a covered trailer.

She always was particular about that trailer. What it contained was nobody's business. She did mention that she hauled 10,000 rounds of .22 for needs be, and later on, a big-game rifle and other wilderness and survival stuff. The Weatherby was a big-game caliber. Judy went hunting shortly after she moved in to her place. There was a fine elk roast that evening down at the campground that was the old park by the University. Her and Jesús and his brother would go up hunting – nobody else. Those two fellas could lug an elk carcass out of the woods to the trailer after it was field-dressed and butchered. She was good at that, as well. She had an air that she was good at most things she set her mind to.

Judy moved in to a house up north of the University off Iris. Like everyone else, getting nice housing wasn't a big challenge. You wanted to get one that you could heat in the winter, get well water nearby, and all the previous occupants had the courtesy to bloat up and go bang someplace else. Mr. Sandoval had settled in one street over, and a few other neighbors – live ones, that is – were sprinkled by here and there.

Jesús – "Chúy" he went by, and his brother Al lived up that way. They were up from Costilla County with his brother, and he was awful slow, brother not a whole lot better. Baca was their family name. They were metalworkers and carvers, producing some remarkably small and delicate pieces, being that they were such big men.

They'd winter in, down South in the San Luís Valley, and craft and mold and hammer jewelry for most of the fall and winter. Sometimes the snow came, and sealed everybody into the valley until Spring. Later, they'd come over the mountains in the late mountain Spring to sell in Colorado Springs and Denver. Some of their prettier stuff went for well into the thousands in Denver. They'd pick up jewels and materials after they sold their pieces –silver, some gold, and occasional rarer metals – and head back down home for a settle-in, around late Summer.

You probably haven't spent much time thinking on taphonomy - it's really a spectator science, it is. The archaeologists talk of it rather swift, as "the transition from remains to fossils." Here in the New New World, it was Taphonomy 101, and everyone was on an unending field trip.

The High Plains and Rockies are dry, and bodies tend more to mummify than rot, except for the bellies - no matter where you go, it's the Big Bang Theory for corpses, unless they're frozen or embalmed and such. In the less-congested towns in the flatlands and mountains, there were enough hungry wild animals to quickly get after the corpses. As the predator birds go for fat (and eyeballs), most cadavers got peeled quick, especially the face. The critters with teeth would get after the meat.

A place like Boulder, there were more corpses than the wild could handle, so they just lay around lazy, like a street bum - "Buddy, can ya spare a life?" bums. Down in a big place like Denver and the Springs, you had to rely on our friendly fellow-traveling species, the rats and pigeons, to get down with it, I suppose.

Judy moved into a nice bungalow north a bit, with a huge spread for a city - maybe two acres. Her the trailer sat tight up by the house on the North side. She'd let you walk on through her house anytime of day or night if she wasn't home - that's how country folk do it. But don't go nosing around the North side of the house. You'd get a scolding, and that from a girl who drops elk at 600 yards, it makes you think.

Except for one or two pals, she kept to herself, not much to speak of, a plain girl. Not "plain," like mean girls say, but plain like frontier - make it work, make it last, use it up, make do. Comfortable being by herself.

The Dooley, she lent free out to anyone needing it. It sure was handy for making a haul out of Denver. It damn well better come back fit, clean and everything stowed and shiny. Like everyone else who came, she settled in, got her place clean and her lot all ready The Free Zone continued to grow in dribs and drabs. That could have been the end of the story if all stayed quiet, but it didn't.