Descendants
Page 1
DESCENDANTS
Five short stories from Stephen King’s mysterious and thriller packed story vaults. Open up your imagination and let the vivid writing and frightening tales awaken your mind. Scream late into the night with more great horror for all your senses.
Evil comes in many forms. Travel through the desert, speak with others from another world, and smell the roses in these incredible journeys and wild realities.
Copyright© 2016 by Stephen King
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or person, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Designed by Magic Pen Designs
Contents
Descendants
M.A.T.T.
Locked Inside
Brain Donors
White Rose
Descendants
All I wanted was to not be lonely.
Just a few people, just a few people who needed a roof over their heads for a few months. People fall on hard times, they need a break, a refuge where they can catch their breath and be among friends. There are a lot of people who don’t have friends. Or family. Or anyone who cares whether they live or die.
I wanted to be the man those people came to.
I wanted it because I’d been there, and I only had me to “pull myself up by bootstraps”, and that was bullshit. It was pushing a boulder up a cliff and either having it roll back on you, or pushing it over the lip.
I’m rambling.
Rambling… haven’t slept in three days. Because of it. Maybe it’s been longer?
I’m not lonely anymore. Now I’m just scared. I want to try and sleep because I’m scared and I don’t want to be anymore. I want to be lonely again.
********
I live in Casa Grande, AZ. Have you ever been here before? No, neither have most people. It’s a town you pass through going to or coming from Phoenix. Casa Grande is not a destination. It’s where you stop and pay $4.00 for a gallon of unleaded and curse it as you pump.
It’s unapologetically nowhere.
But even nowhere has people who’ve come from somewhere else. They’re the ones who charge you top dollar for gas, hotel rooms, deep fried crap, or at least they work for the people who charge top dollar, and make pennies for every buck you shell out. I’m one of these people. In fact, I’m considered one of the lucky ones. I make nine bucks an hour, plus my boss gives me a one bedroom apartment, basic cable and all utilities, and all I have to do is answer the phone when it rings, keep the parking lot swept, and make sure no one breaks into any of the occupied storage units.
I got the job when I was living in California, working as a cashier at a Wendy’s in La Jolla. It seemed like a great deal at the time, especially since I was paying $900 a month for an efficiency, and all for the pleasure of living 30 miles from the ocean. Besides, I wanted out of Cali. Forty years of group homes and minimum wage life had soured me and got me thinking I might be better off heading a little ways east. I called the number listed and the facility owner hired me right then and there: I was the new manager of EZ-Does-It Storage in Casa Grande, AZ. My last check from Wendy’s bought me a bus ticket and left me $175 dollars before my first pay day at the new job.
The Greyhound dropped me off in the town center at 3 AM, leaving me in a cloud of dust as it headed to Phoenix. It was 3 AM and the town was dead to the world. The only light I saw was a gas station a couple of miles from the locked depot I was dropped off at. I needed directions to my new home, job, or a taxi. I hoisted my duffel back and made the walk. By the time I made it to the gas station, I was panting and had sweated through my clothes. First lesson learned: even in the middle of the night, Southern Arizona rarely dropped below the triple digits and you needed to limit your movements and keep yourself bottled up in the air condition.
But on my first night in Arizona, I wouldn’t be feeling any cool air. The gas station was a little one person, bullet proof cubicle with an intercom if you wanted to buy a pack of cigarettes or soda from the cashier inside. That night he was a chain smoking blob of a human being who barely acknowledged me as I buzzed the intercom.
“What d’ya want?”
“Is there a phone around here?” I asked.
“What?”
“A phone?” I’ve always been soft spoken and mumbled a bit, especially around strangers.
“What?”
“A PHONE?”
“What do you need that for? Don’t you have a cell phone?”
“No.”
“What? Who the hell doesn’t have a cell phone?”
I didn’t. With fast food wages, I could never afford one, except for the occasional drop phone I’d pick up at the store when I was in-between jobs. But since my phone interview, I hadn’t bothered to buy a new one.
“I don’t. I…I just need to find out where my new job is located and get a taxi out to it.”
“Taxi?” The blob chuckled. “Where’s your car? Are you too drunk to drive or something?”
“No, I’m not drunk…I just don’t own a car.”
The blob chuckled and cleared his throat at the same time, and I pictured ramming my hand through the thick Plexiglas and grabbing him by one of his chins and dragging him through the jagged hole.
“Well, you’re going to need a car. We don’t have no buses and the only taxi around here is Raul, and he quits working at ten, just like everyone else.”
He paused and cleared his throat again and lit up a cigarette. I couldn’t imagine the smell inside that tiny little room: nicotine and flop sweat, maybe a trace of canned, stale ravioli
“You said you had a job, huh? Where you working?”
I told him and his chuckle turned into a jagged, phlegmy laugh that didn’t abate for two wheezing minutes.
“Shit, boy, that’s twenty miles clear out of town. Fucking Raul will charge you an arm and leg to get you out there and then bitch and complain about the distance the entire trip. You’re almost better off hitchhiking out there.”
I felt my stomach drop, the sting of tears. The blob noticed.
“Look, guy, if you want to stick around for a couple of hours, I’ll give you a lift out there. It’s a little out of my way, so if you wanted to pitch in a little gas money, that would be okay with me.”
********
There ain’t been any screams for awhile now.
I’ve gotta piss real bad, but I don’t want to move, so I just piss my jeans and let it puddle around my ass.
It won’t be long now, they’re coming.
********
I squatted outside the cubicle for two hours, sweating, and watching the sun turn the sky purple, then pink with slivers of gold. I’ve always been a late sleeper, so this was the first sunrise I’d ever seen.
The blob’s name was Ollie.
He smelled just as bad as I imagined him. But instead of canned ravioli, his stink was more like chicken soup left on the counter to grow a thick green skin. And cigarettes, Ollie liked his Pall Malls. He drove a 20 year-old rust colored Datsun truck. He told me to jump in the bed, not so much because he didn’t want me riding up front with him, but because of the piles of trash that occupied the passenger seat. The truck bed was only a little better, and I only had to shift around some dusty bottles and cans.
The second thing you learned about the desert is that there are a lot of people who can’t ever let anything go, even the things that are meant to go in the trash.
I had to admit it was a downright pretty drive out to EZ-Does-It Storage. Like the sunrise, I’d never seen so much nothing, so much yellow waste shimmering under the sun like there were a million invisible lakes out in it that all disappeared the moment you stooped down to scoop a handful of it into your mouth.
The facility looked like just as much of a mirage as the nonexistent lakes. It was the same color as the drifting sand. Ollie dropped me off in the cracked grey asphalt of the parking lot with barely a wave. The last manager had been gone for over a month and the two acres of boxy structures looked like they’d been left abandoned for years. The owner had told me the keys and necessary security access codes were under the welcome mat of my on property apartment in the back of the facility. With the overall state of the buildings, I had my doubts whether they would be there or not.
The welcome mat was covered underneath an inch of sand, but a thick ring of color coded keys and a single sheet of paper was hidden underneath it. The paper was single spaced and in 6 point type; I had to squint while practically holding it up to my nose in order to read it. It was a list of all the keys and what lock they fit, and at the very bottom, the security code for the apartment and front office.
The pink key was the key to the apartment.
I opened the door, punched in the four digit security code into the alarm system and took a look at my new home.
You guessed it, more dust, cobwebs, and boiling, uncirculated air. It was small and disgusting, but it was home.
********
We had it so good.
All of us, out here in the middle of nowhere, working together to make sure no one went without.
We came so close.
And then…oh, God…oh God…those were the Wilcox children…I hear them.
********
Clean up took me three weeks. My predecessor wasn’t exactly what you would call a “clean” person, so my new apartment took up almost half of that time. True enough I had the month of accumulated dust that had seeped in through the cracks of the doors and windows, but I also had the heaps of trash which occupied every corner of the space.
I totally get hoarders, or as my mom like to describe herself, a “collector”. Sometimes a brain can’t bear to throwaway matchbooks, plastic cups, newspapers and magazines. There’s purpose to all of those things; they’re memories, something that can be used later. But the garbage people, the folks who never take out their trash or clean out their refrigerators? My predecessor was one of those.
The living room was fairly clean, but when I walked into the small closed off kitchen/dining area, the stink of rot practically knocked me on my ass.
And the flies.
They were a black, moving wall of sound and motion, they clung to my face, their legs skimming the drying pools, tasting and moving back to their feast. I ran outside, my knees hitting the pavement and I retched, trying to get the taste of the room out of my stomach, my lungs. I sat against the outside wall of the apartment catching my breath, cursing a bit over what I’d gotten myself into.
After a half an hour I built up the nerve to step back into the kitchen, but this time with a frayed bandana covering my nose and mouth. The former manager had apparently been fond of hamburgers and bacon. The top two shelves of the hot refrigerator were packed to overflowing with cellophane wrapped packages. As I dry heaved and blindly swatted at the living clouds, I made a mental inventory of what I would need to get the kitchen in order. I was thinking a blow torch might do the trick.
********
I barely ate in the time it took me to finish the clean-up, which was fine. One of the benefits of working food service is you’re typically entitled to one meal per shift and all the sticky, sweet soda you can drink. I’d been working fast food for five years and it had turned me into a doughy lump of wheezing florescent colored meat. I wasn’t as rotund as Ollie, but I imagine if I kept moving along my same “career path” I’d be moving through the world with my huge ass spilling over the sides of a rascal electric scooter. The work of hauling countless bags of garbage out of the apartment in the hundred degree heat caused my deep fried weight to slough off me, and any time I felt in the least bit hungry, all I needed to do was recall how all that rotting hamburger felt against my arms as I swept it all into the grey rubber industrial trash can that had become my best friend.
I slept in the showroom of the facility on a soft, relatively new beige sofa. Each night I would collapse on top of it, my muscles burning from the day’s work, my skin ripe with sweat, and I would tumble into sleep to be awoken what felt like five minutes later by the heat of day pushing through the blinds.
Ollie ended up not being such an asshole as he’d started out. He would stop by on his way to his four over night shifts at the gas station, offering me rides into town so I could buy dry foods I could munch on when my body absolutely demanded fuel. But most importantly, he allowed me to use the station’s phone so I could contact the facility owner and let him know I’d made it. He had to make the calls necessary to have the electricity and phones turned back on. God knows why the cheap bastard turned them off in the first place. On the nights Ollie picked me up after I did my shopping and cleaned my clothes at the Dollar laundromat, I’d spend the night outside of the cubicle playing electronic chess with me shouting my moves through the intercom, or listening to his weird conspiracy theories and half digested take on current events.
I “reopened” EZ-Does-It Storage on Saturday, August 27th, even though storage facilities never really close, even if the front office doesn’t look occupied. The security system and gate motors all run off of remote battery systems. I was fifteen pounds lighter and still shrinking and I wore my company logo emblazoned polo shirt tucked into my jeans and with a swell of pride. I spent my first “official” work day playing computer solitaire and occasionally staring at the office phone mentally willing it to ring.
********
You think you’ll be a father forever.
On this plain, I knew I would always have the joy of being responsible for a set of lives not my own, and those lives would be forever grateful.
No.
No, it is not true.
Life does not care about mothers, or fathers, or brothers and sisters, or the human myth of blood ties.
All life cares for is blood to drink. To feast on it until its stomach is bloated and ready to burst from its stained lips.
My joy had made me forget.
Life is only darkness. Life is a predator.
********
The day Marty Wilcox drove his ancient RV into the parking lot was one of the hottest days in September on record.
117 degrees.
If you’ve never experienced what a 117 degrees feels like, let me describe it.
Imagine being under a magnifying class held by a sadistic 10-year-old. Watching as your skin slowly starts to sizzle under the intensified sunlight.
That.
I heard the vehicle coming from inside the office. It wheezed and rattled, its engine grinding metal-on-metal. I stepped out of the office and watched it come to a halt, a cloud of white and black smoke erupting from the hood. I almost expected it to catch fire and explode, its occupants rushing out of it and covered in flames.
The only person to come out of it was a short, rail thin man toting a huge red fire extinguisher that looked like it weighed more than he did. He wore a thick snarled beard and his mud-colored hair was a tangle of lopsided dreadlocks, but they weren’t the kind of neat tubes of hair dresser designed hair that topped the heads of good college kids who discovered pot and Bob Marley their freshmen year. Marty’s head was entirely the product of not showering on a regular basis.
He stood in front of the RV, teeth barred, spraying d
own the vented engine hood with thick white foam until all that seeped out was a thin trickle of gray smoke. He sat down heavy on the asphalt still holding the dribbling hose of the extinguisher gripped in his hand as he wiped the sweat from his eyes.
I half jogged to him, stopping a couple of feet in front of him so as to not make him feel threatened.
“Are you okay?” These were the first words I had spoken in nearly three days.
He stared up at me, a smile blooming that lit up his entire face.
“I could be worse. I could be burning to death instead of just sweating and talking to you.”
The word is beatific. I’d read it dozens of times, but never really grasped what it meant until that moment. He was serene, without a care in the world except the moment he was living in.
“What’s your name?” He asked. It was the first time someone had asked me since moving to Arizona, not even Ollie had bothered.
“Salias.”
“Salias, you were a friend to the disciple, Paul.” I knew this had something to do with the Bible, but in the beginning with Marty, I’ll be the first to admit I had only tried reading a bible once when I was working graveyard at a 24 hour convenience store. I was bored and sleepy and the bible didn’t help with my sleepiness. In fact, it indirectly cost me the job, although I didn’t shed any tears over it. I’ve had a gun pointed at me twice in my life and both times happened at that job.
“Uh, yeah.”
“Well, friend of Paul, is there any chance you have a phone in your store you might let me use?”
He stretched out his hand to me. Despite the grime and soot, it was soft and warm; his touch sent something—a chill, electricity, I’m not sure—through me and I felt full. I helped him to his feet, our eyes meeting.
“My name’s Marty. Marty Wilcox.”
********
Thinking back, I don’t know if Marty made any real phone calls that day. I know I watched him dial the phone, I know I watched him speak into the receiver and act like he was listening to someone on the other end, but for the life of me, I can’t remember a word he said unless it was directly spoken to me. Marty was a liar and a pretender, I know these things now, but then, I was enamored. Back then he could’ve held up one of his battered work boots up to his ear and screamed a conversation to Big Bird and I would’ve believed he was making the most important call in the world; a call to avoid nuclear annihilation; to the leaders of the world teaching them how to end world hunger; a call to God asking him to come back to Earth so he could re-teach us how to love.