Chuck has us working on an X & Y kinda stories. We pick something from table X and one from table why and smoosh them together and - hey! - we get a cracker of a story! I chose Stephen King's The Stand and Indiana Jones (And the Lost Arc)... well... it was okay I guess.
enjoy.
“No... no, please...run, Stu, run!” her eyes
snapped open to find him staring at her in the darkness of their bedroom. Tears
brimmed and poured down her cheeks as she held him close, sobbing, “Oh, I
dreamt you were ...”
“Franny, was it the same dream?” he turned
on the bedside lamp on his side before looking back at her. She nodded and he lay
against the pillows sighing, wondering what it all meant, “I haven’t had any
dreams like that – not since Mother Abigail.”
Sniffing, she snuggled against him, wanting
to be near him, “I don’t know what it means – I wish to god I did – but I don’t.”
Stu kissed the top of her head, knowing she
was scared about what these dreams might mean. Could there be another Randall
Flagg out there? Could there be another plague – much like the one they just
survived – doing the rounds to kill off the rest of them? He just didn’t know;
and he didn’t like seeing his wife in this much pain about not wanting to sleep,
“We will find out what this is about, Fran, I’ll ask around and see if anyone
else is having similar dreams.”
“I don’t like losing sleep, Stu, it’s
starting to affect my health.” She said.
“Yours and mine alike.” He reached over and
turned off the lamp, but didn’t let her go; instead pulling up the covers and
holding her as close as he could to protect her as much as he could from what
was going on inside her head.
Teddy sat on the front porch with Stu
sinking a nice hot cup of coffee. It wasn’t quite as good as they used to be,
but he was getting used to the taste.
“I’m sorry about the quality, but drying out
the beans is something of an art form.” Stu smiled, “I’ll get it soon enough.”
“Nah, it’s okay, not everything is going to
be perfect in the first few years. Remember Glen Bateman told us that.” He peered
into the bottom of the cup for a moment before setting onto the table in
between Stu and himself, “So you didn’t invite me here to discuss the quality
of your beans, Stu. What’s going on?”
He ran a hand over his head of short curly
hair, “I’m not sure. Franny’s been having nightmares about me; tellin’ me to
run. It’s woken her up in the middle of the night for the past week.”
Teddy sighed, “Geez Louis man, I dunno what
to say. I’m no doc.”
“I don’t want to talk to no doctor, they’ll
just fill her fulla pills.” He leaned back in the porch chair, “I want to know
if your wife has had any bad dreams like my Franny?”
The long-hair man adjusted his glasses, then
pushed his hair back, “Nope, not that I can think of, or remember.”
“Shit. It looks like I’m taking her to the
hospital then.” He shook his head, “I hate hospitals.”
She stood at the door, just out of sight
knowing what was happening to her in her sleep was probably going to be
something bad... it probably meant it they had to go away from Boulder for
something important. Looking over at her lovely little baby girl, Abigail,
Franny realised she’d probably had to leave her behind.
The doctor at the hospital sat in his chair
with a worried expression on his face as they sat down across from him.
“Tell us what’s going on.” Stu said taking
her hand.
“Franny, you’re fine. There’s nothing wrong
with you. I don’t know why you’re going through these dreams; and if they’re
like the ones we all experienced last year, I’d say you’re both in for an adventure.”
He put his pen on the open file, “But you have to know something. You’re
pregnant; and being pregnant can cause all kinds of weird things to happen...
like nightmares.”
“I’m pregnant?” she smiled, “You could have
opened with that, you know.”
“But this running dream, and you being in
danger, Stu, it’s probably something I wouldn’t worry about too much.” The doctor
smiled, “Besides, it may well be your hormones.”
Once inside the door, Stu watched his Franny
opened up the rest of the house. He was going to be a Daddy... wow! Smiling, he
saw her grab the kettle off the stove, fill it with water, return it to the
stove and turn it on for a pot of tea.
“Do you think we should pick up Abbie
from... what are you looking at?” she asked standing in the middle of the
kitchen.
He walked over to her, took her hand, “You.”
“Stu! Franny! Are you both home?” Teddy’s
voice called down the hall, “Where are you?”
Stu turned off the stove and walked out to
where he saw Teddy was standing there with his rifle at the ready, “What’s
going on, man?”
“Pack your shit, we have to bug out.”
“Aaw crap!”
“What’s bug out?” Franny asked.
Teddy looked at her, “Evacuate. Somebody has
shown up from out west near Vegas, some stragglers who were the last to get hit
by radiation... we gotta leave before they spread it to us.”
As they packed the last of their things into
the back of the SUV, Franny tied their little sweetheart into her car seat, “Where
are we going to go?”
“Rapid City.” Stu said.
“That’s a long way, and the petrol might not
work in the cars anymore.” She said.
“That’s a risk worth taking. Get in and we’ll
take turns driving.”
Rapid City looked pretty nice after the long
hours on the road; but it was far from empty. Stu slowed the SUV to first gear
and could feel they were being watched.
“We’re not alone, Fran.” He said, “They saw
us coming from miles away and they think we’re nasty.” As the words passed his
lips, a man stood out in front of their vehicle, levelling a twelve-gauge at
the windscreen and Stu stopped without panic.
“Out!” the man shouted, “We’re not happy for
new people to show up out of the blue sky here.”
Unbuckling his seat belt, Stu got out of the
vehicle and Franny moved over to his seat. He looked over at her as he smiled
and put his hands up, “I’m friendly, we all are, friend.” He said, “We were
evacuated from Boulder.”
He lowered his firearm slowly, “Are you Stu
Redman?”
“Are you going to fill me fulla holes if I
say yes?”
“Hell dang it man. We ran out of vehicles to
get to Boulder. You and your woman, you’re famous. Everyone knows you!” the man
slung the rifle over his shoulder and put forward his hand, “Welcome to Rapid
City. Sorry about the rude welcome, but we’ve had our fair share of Flagg’s
people show up here.”
“Well, I’m glad to say we’re not in any way
related to him.” He shook hands with the man, “Well, you know me, what’s your
name?”
“Bill – everyone calls me Billster; it’s a
mix of my first and last names.” He smiled, “Bring your people through, there’s
plenty of houses and the power’s on too!”
“Great!”
Their new house was fully furnished and the
garden needed work done to it – but Stu loved getting in and getting his hands
dirty in that sense. Franny was quickly making the house a home as she started
looking around the stores which were selling new and old items from the other
houses not currently being used.
But she still suffered the nightmares; which
bothered Stu to no end. This time, though she started writing them down, and
seeing more in them the longer they stayed in Rapid City.
Stu soon found himself a job with a
landscaping crew to help around the city to make it look like it did before
Captain Trips came to kill off the population. The committee running this place
was hoping to have this city up and running like it did before, to make it feel
as though nothing had happened.
He came home one day to find Franny had
gotten a map of the city and pinned it to one of the bedroom walls upstairs.
She was looking through her dream journal and pushing pins into the map, making
notes, pinning them off to one side, then taking string and playing connect the
dots with it all.
It gave him the creeps to see her doing
this.
“Honey, what are you doing?”
She turned, “I’ve been seeing more in my
dreams, Stu; and it’s this city I’ve been dreaming of.” Closing her journal,
she took a step back and looked up at the map on the wall, “It looks messy, but
it really is what my brain is showing me.”
“And that is?”
“I have to ... we have to... go into the
hills and find this.” She showed him a brass idol, “It’s there, and we must get
it to protect the city.”
“Or you’re needing to work.”
“You don’t believe me.”
He put the book down and took her hands, “Honey,
I love you and really hope your dreams stop, but really you need help.”
“We got help, and the doctor didn’t find
anything wrong.” She said, “Can you please trust me?”
Taking a deep breath, he smiled, “Okay, what
do we do?”
“We leave tonight.”
“What about Abigail?”
“She will be okay, we will be gone for only
a little while.” She grinned, “I got a babysitter!”
In the dark, the hills looked like mountains
looming over them with haunting, deep holes for caves. Stu had flashbacks to
the nightmares he had last year in the cornfields for a moment and those dead,
red eyes of...
“Come on, let’s go.” She took his hand and
turned on her flashlight as they started climbing the well-worn tourist path up
the hillside.
“Franny, it’s a tourist spot.”
“Yeah, for the first few miles, but there’s
an area where we’ll go off on our own.” She smiled. It didn’t take long for her
to prove to him how well she knew this hillside.
Soon, they came to a fork in the path, and
the trees lined it upwards towards the top of the hills to a lookout; but where
they were going was the other, unwalked, path. This was something Stu wasn’t
too happy about, but Franny asked him to trust her.
She turned on her flashlight and he followed
suit and they climbed up and into a huge, blackened hole of a cave which seemed
to swallow them up whole. He turned back to take one last look at the city
lights twinkling below and was surprised at how high up they really were; and
wondered if they were going to come back from this or was going to be a big
joke?
“Stu, come on.” Her voice echoed from the
darkness within the cave. He turned and shone his flashlight into it and felt
as though the light was taken up by the ink blackness for a moment; but it wasn’t,
“Franny, this is creepy, honey.”
“I know. I need you near.”
They walked along a narrow pathway inside
the hillside and came to a huge cavern inside the place. Looking down, they
found they no longer needed their flashlights and so, turning them off, looked
around from their vantage point.
She pointed down at a dais in the middle of
the place, “Do you see it?” she whispered, “That’s what we need. We have to
take it off the dais without altering the weight on it.”
“Or else?”
“Something bad happens.”
He regarded her, “Hon, that’s just something
for the house isn’t it?”
“No. It’s to help us all.”
“Okay. I’ll see what I can do.”
The two of them found their way down to the
staging area where the dais was and the idol sat in a pool of glimmering light.
Stu pulled out of his pocket a plastic bag he normally had on him in case he found
a tree in full fruit, and he started filling it with sand from around the area.
He found a few rocks and pushed them into the bag, wrapped it up, felt the
weight and thought it was about right.
He walked up to it, the bag of rocks and
sand in one hand, the other hand ready to take the idol. In one swift movement,
he swapped them over.
Franny grinned when it was the right weight
and walked to him, “Oh you did it! Thank you, sweetheart!” As they looked it
over, the bag on the dais moved and two stones fell out onto the floor, A
grumbling started up and they stood, looking up towards the back of the cavern
where a massive rolling sound thundered around the cavern, “Oh no! The weight
shifted!”
“What the ...” Stu looked up to find a huge
white ball catapulting towards them, “Holy crap! Franny! Run!”
“No... no, please...run, Stu, run!” she
screamed as they turned and ran away from the huge ball, along the only way out
– a huge tunnel – with the ball coming after them, destroying anything in its
path.
Side by side they ran with the idol in their
possession; and when Stu spotted a clearing to their left, he grabbed her arm
and pulled on it, she knew exactly what he was saying. They both jumped the
side wall and made it into the nature reserve alive just as the moon rose over
Rapid City and that massive ball rushed past them leaving a cloud of dust in
its wake.
The next morning, Stu and Franny sat at the
breakfast table with the idol between them. She still didn’t understand what it
was or what it meant; but when she went to bed the night before, she didn’t
have any nightmares.
“So, Fran, what does this thing mean?”
She smiled, “It’s a bigger mystery than I
thought... I’m not sure. But wasn’t that fun?”
