Post-Apocalyptic Memories

Night Surf, the apocalypse, and non-love at the end of the world

Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

If you’re new here, welcome to The Barrens, a Stephen King book club, the section of Kindling where we read stories and discuss them. Currently we are reading through his first short story collection, Night Shift. Next week we read I Am the Doorway. As always please feel free to chime in, comment, meet other readers. Happy Reading!

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After the guy was dead and the smell of his burning flesh was off the air, we all went back down to the beach.

I was lying on a blanket in a park when I opened my copy of Night Shift and read this line. I was tired, watching my kids play, a little out of body and un-showered on a Saturday. The sun was shining, poking holes in the trees that will soon shed their green leaves. I remember it a week later, can play it in my mind like a recording.

Maybe I would have remembered that moment anyway. Perhaps it was the light, or the time of day. But I don’t think so. The moment I read that first line is emblazoned there, in memory. Words can do that, freeze a place in time, cut it out and save it for you. Maybe for a year, maybe forever. That’s one of the magical things about reading.

It’s one hell of an opening line. I wonder, now, if by the time I finish this collection, this story will stand out to me most. I thought we had a pack of serial killers on our hands, sociopaths who had murdered a man in cold blood, then went off for a bonfire and a night swim, a group of kids out of the pages of Lord of the Flies. Then I read on.

There were only two radio stations left on the air that we could get.

Meaning something has happened, something big and disastrous.

The Massachusetts station was better, but we could only get it at night. It was a bunch of kids. I guess they took over the transmitting facilities of WRKO or WBZ after everybody left or died.

We follow Bernie and his girlfriend Susie as they make their way down to an empty beach in the night. Bernie remembers when it was filled with people, before A6 came and wiped everyone out. We learn that the man they burned was infected with the virus, Captain Trips. His head and neck were bloated, his mind gone.

But the burning wasn’t done out of necessity, to stop the spread of infection. It was done for novelty, something new to do, egged on by Corey’s superstitious belief that a sacrifice like that might keep them safe from the virus.

It was Corey’s idea to burn him up, but it started off as a joke. He had read all those books about witchcraft and black magic at college, and he kept leering at us in the dark beside Alvin Sackheim’s Lincoln and telling us that if we made a sacrifice to the dark gods, maybe the spirits would keep protecting us against A6.

Each character spends the night haunted in some way by what they’ve done. Susie cries and acts out, desperate for Bernie’s attention. Needles confesses that he has A6, he knows it. Headache, stomachache, painful urination. Corey listens to the radio. And Bernie plays it cool, pretends he doesn’t even think about A6, laughs off Needles’ symptoms even when he shows him the triangular smudges on his jaw, the swelling in his neck.

We smoked and I watched the surf come in and go out. Needles had Captain Trips. That made everything real all over again. It was late August already, and in a couple of weeks the first chill of fall would be creeping in. Time to move inside someplace. Winter. Dead by Christmas, maybe, all of us.

Bernie and Susie head to an empty apartment to sleep. He wakes in early morning, sweating from nightmares about the man they burned. Susie wakes up too, and he tells her about Needles. She’s afraid, grasping for some semblance of security. They all had a virus called A2, before A6 spread throughout the globe. Their theory is that the first variant made them immune. If Needles has it, that means they aren’t safe.

In the first act of kindness from him, he reassures her, tells her that Needles might have lied about his immunity so that he wouldn’t have to be alone. He remembers better days, a few years earlier, when he was in college. He thinks about a day at the beach with Maureen, his college girlfriend, their carefree day spent in the sun, spreading oil on her back, his whole life ahead of him, and he desperately wants to live.

There’s a real sadness in this story. The finality of death in a group of young people, shallow, unprepared for the end despite a plague that has wiped out most of the humans on the planet. They are petty, almost vile in their lack of depth and treatment of one another. And yet, I felt sorry for them. Sorry that they didn’t have more time, more beach days like the one he remembered, more silly fights and failed relationships. More time to learn and grow and love each other.

I put my face in my hands and clutched it, feeling the skin, its grain and texture. It was all narrowing so swiftly, and it was all so mean—there was no dignity in it.

The surf coming in, coming in, coming in. Limitless. Clean and deep.

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And now to you dear reader. This was a short one, but it hit me hard. I’ve been thinking about various scenes for days, particularly the burning of Alvin Sackheim. Why did they do it? Had they just given up on life? Become immune to death?

What is with Susie and Bernie’s relationship? Why are they together and why do they treat each other so badly?

Did you like it? I really did, and I have a sneaking suspicion that this story was a precursor to the thoughts that later bloomed into The Stand. What do you think?