M-O-O-N, that spells a great book, laws yes! Everybody knows that!
Today I wrapped up reading what might be one of the best books I’ve ever read. It all started with ABC’s new show Lost, which I absolutely love, but that post’s for later this week. As I was browsing the message boards over at TV Without Pity, I found that Lost had finally received enough acclaim to warrant it’s own section. While slowly crawling through all the pages of posts, I stumbled across a discussion over an interview one of the show’s creators had given, where he divulged that the basis for the whole show was loosely pulled from a Stephen King novel titled The Stand. I read a few pages of the interview and of the discussion on the message board and twenty minutes later I had ordered a copy off E-Bay.
It finally arrived about a week later, all 1136 pages of, with its coverless front and its dog-eared corners. I tore into it that very night and it seems like I’ve yet to put it down. Until today, that is. The first chapter fires off like a rocket and you quickly learn what the book is about. A military germ warfare facility has a little mishap, the computer safety system has a little lapse, and a sentry is caught a little off guard. Before you know it, a nasty strain of the flu is released into the world that has a mortality rate hovering around 99.6%. Whoops.
The survivors soon find themselves scattered across the country and searching for each other, among other things. As they slowly begin to migrate together, a weird and unexplainable force begins to show them their paths. On the one hand, they could draw towards Her, in Nebraska, where the smell of corn is sickly sweet and where God has given Her the strength to live on. Or, they could go to Him, the Walkin’ Man, the Dude, the Dark Imp. With his red, cold eye and his dark, astounding powers. With his control over nature and his warm, bountiful, electrified Las Vegas. With his promises and his electricity and his stability and his…
The rest of the novel plays out the scenario. Good versus Evil, Light versus Darkness. Her versus Him. But honestly, the book wouldn’t be considered spectacular without something else, like say some memorable characters. And by the end of the novel, you find yourself calling everybody your friend. I’m not joking. I punched and dented the wall when one of the characters died in an assassination. I launched the book across the room when another character was sent out on a suicide mission. When another character passed on, I simply laid the book across my chest, grabbed the pillow lying beside me, and screamed into it. And when I finished the book, I realized that I wanted another one. I didn’t care anymore about the surrounding situations in the book, I cared about the characters. I cared about my friends. I wanted reassurance that they would survive, that they wouldn’t meet the same fate that some of my other friends had met. I wanted to see how the rest of their lives turned out, after the apocalyptic battle had finally resolved itself. I wanted to make sure they were alright, that they were happy. I just wanted to see them again.
I wanted to see the ever silent Nick Andros, who always seemed to hear what needed to be heard.
Good ‘ole East Texas himself, Stu Redmond, who was there from the start at the TEXACO.
Larry Underwood, who ain’t no nice guy, right?
Baldy Glen Bateman, who proved Sociology had its uses.
Sweet mother Abigail Freemantle, who still made her own bread to this day.
Amazing wild Joe, or whatever his name might actually be, and his “gift.”
Giggly Fran Goldsmith and her undying love for…well, I won’t spoil that.
Pimply, misunderstood Harold Lauder and his knack for never quite understanding them back.
Quiet Nadine Cross and her stark white hair, who knew what she had to do, but not how to do it.
Country boy Ralph Brentner, who reminded Larry to Fear No Evil.
The Judge. Dayna. Lucy. Doc. Lloyd. Trashcan Man.
Even burley Kojax himself, who always knew deep down he was a good dog.
And then there was Tom. Tom Cullen, who loved his matchbox car garage and who loved Nicky even more. Tom Cullen, who knew how to spell illegal, and Boulder, and DeeDee Packalotte. Tom Cullen, who just wanted to go back home where people loved him, laws yes. I honestly don’t think there has ever been a more likeable character in the history of novels. He may have been playing with a few cards short of a deck, but he more then made up for it in other ways.
The copy I ended up buying was the 1990 version, the Uncut and Unabridged version. King had originally released the book back in the late 70s and had been forced to cut out quite a bit. In his later version, he added some 300 pages and after I finished reading the book, I wanted to see if I could find a site that listed all the changes he had made. I never did find such a list anywhere on the Internet, but I did stumble upon a message board where somebody commented that chapter 38 hadn’t been in the original. As my eyes flickered across the computer screen and onto the chapter number, my heart instantly froze over and my chest suddenly felt as if somebody had knocked the wind out of me. It might seem silly that out of a book with 70 some odd chapters, I would remember chapter 38, but I did. Out of all the chapters, 38 was the only one I knew by its number. 38 was the only one where I found tears streaming down my face, where I found myself ripped from the story and sent spiraling into my mind only to fall right back into the tale. 38 told the story of Sam Tauber.
As the superflu epidemic wound down, there was a second epidemic that lasted roughly two weeks. This epidemic was most common in technological societies such as the United States, least common in underdeveloped countries such as Peru or Senegal. In the United States the second epidemic took about 16 percent of the superflu survivors. In places like Peru and Senegal, no more than 3 percent. The second epidemic had no name because the symptoms differed wildly from case to case. A sociologist like Glen Bateman might have called this second epidemic “natural death” or “those ole emergency room blues.” In a strictly Darwinian sense, it was the final cut – the unkindest cut of all, some might have said.
Sam Tauber was five and a half years old. His mother had died on June the twenty-fourth in the Murfreesboro, Georgia, General Hospital. On the twenty-fifth, his father and younger sister, two-year-old April, had died. On June the twenty-seventh, his older brother Mike had died, leaving Sam to shift for himself.
Sam had been in shock ever since the death of his mother. He wandered carelessly up and down the streets of Murfreesboro, eating when he was hungry, sometimes crying. After a while he stopped crying, because crying did no good. It didn’t bring the people back. At night his sleep was broken by horrible nightmares in which Papa and April and Mike died over and over, their faces swollen black, a terrible rattling sound in their chests as they strangled on their own snot.
At quarter of ten on the morning of July 2, Sam wandered into a field of wild blackberries behind Hattie Reynolds’s house. Bemused and vacant-eyed, he zigzagged among blackberry bushes that were almost twice as tall as he was, picking the berries and eating them until his lips and chin were smeared black. The thorns ripped at his clothes and sometimes at his bare flesh, but he barely noticed. Bees hummed drowsily around him. He never saw the old and rotted well-cover half buried in tall grass and blackberry creepers. It gave under his weight with a grinding, splintering crash and Sam plunged twenty feet down the rock-lined shaft to the dry bottom, where he broke both his legs. He died twenty hours later, as much from fear and misery as from shock and hunger and dehydration.
I must have read that intro to chapter 38 ten, probably twenty times. Each and every time I finished, my mind would race to Colton. Each and every time, I thought to myself, “if something like this really happened, that could happen to Colty. He could be all alone, looking for Pikachu, simply wanting to see a familiar face.” I then would try and shift my focus away from those thoughts and I would always find myself wondering had I been in the book, would I have maybe saved Sam? Would I have somehow been in Georgia and stumbled across him before he tumbled down to his grisly death? Probably not. It’s a fair bet that if something like that ever happened, I would instinctively head north. Away from Georgia. Leaving Sam…
I finally jumped on the computer and punched in mapquest. I asked it to locate for me Murfreesboro, Georgia. I wanted to see how far away it was from here, because I wanted to know how far I’d be traveling on my first day if such a plague were to strike this planet during my lifetime. But to my surprise, it told me no such place existed. As I sat staring at the screen where mapquest patiently waited for me to choose between Murfreesboro, TN, AK, or NC, I realized that Sam wasn’t real. It was the first time I finally let such a thought seep into my mind and take root, but it didn’t seem to warm me over much. I suddenly wanted to hold Colty in my arms, see for myself that he was alive, and promise that I would never let such a thing happen to him. As I finally began to regain my composure, I clicked the option for Murfreesboro, North Carolina. Mapquest immediately pulled up a nice map of a small, rural town and it took me a few zoom-outs to see where it rested. North-east of Raleigh, on some random, secondary highway that was far off the path of any destination I’ve ever embarked upon. But seeing the map was still comforting in a sort of queer way and I wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t until later that I finally understood. It was because if there ever is a large scale tragedy and I ever do decide to head north, it will be to Virginia to pick up my siblings. To pick up Colty. And Clay. And Jules…
But not before making a short pit stop on the way. Just north-east of Raleigh. Just down a little secondary highway. Just in case.
Only a good book can do this to a man. Laws yes.
