New year, same old apocalypse. As we get 2026 underway, I’m returning to my reading of Christopher Golden and Brian Keene’s collection The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand (2025). 

As 2025 wound down, we wrapped up the opening section of stories, “Down with the Sickness,” with this set of stories dropping readers in media res, with the superflu underway and the world falling apart. Sometimes they staked their claim where they were and other times, they took to the roads, looking for other survivors or following the path their dreams led them down, whether that was to Mother Abagail in Nebraska or Flagg in Las Vegas. The second section, “The Long Walk” seems to be situated more in the aftermath, after survivors have had a bit of time to adjust to this new reality. Several stories in the first half of this section depict characters hitting the road—a narrative theme that feels appropriate to a section titled “The Long Walk”—but not all. This week, I read the first five stories of this section: Josh Malerman’s “I Love the Dead,” Cynthia Pelayo’s “Milagros,” S.A. Cosby’s “The Legion of Swine,” Rio Youers’ “Keep the Devil Down,” and V. Castro’s “Across the Pond.”

In this first set of stories from “The Long Walk” section, one interesting theme that resonates between several of the stories are people’s perceptions of themselves versus who they really are when push comes to shove, including the (often disastrous) impact their actions have on others. Lev, the protagonist of Malerman’s “I Love the Dead,” sees himself as a basically good guy on a righteous journey, but he’s also carrying a decomposing severed finger in the hopes of presenting it to Jerry Garcia, who he believes he’ll find in San Francisco, and he’s willing to fight and hurt anyone he comes across who doesn’t agree with his taste in music, which seems a fanatical place to draw one’s line in the sand at the end of the world. Lev’s musical affinity is a bit slippery, though: while he worships The Grateful Dead, it’s Alice Cooper’s “I Love the Dead” that keeps creeping its way into his mind and ultimately draws him on toward Vegas and Flagg. V. Castro’s Elizabeth in “Across the Pond” sees herself as a regular, everyday kind of person, though she has no problem drugging, raping, and abusing another survivor when she meets one, particularly if it gets her closer to Flagg. 

The Dark Man looms especially large in this section: he calls to Lev and Elizabeth, the band of travelers in Cosby’s “The Legion of Swine” are Vegas-bound to join him, and he hovers like a threatening presence in Youers’ “Keep the Devil Down,” a constant reminder of the choices that Elise could make, if she just gives in to others’ engrained perceptions of her inherent “badness.” In addition to calling to those willing to serve him, Flagg is also busy working to destroy those who would resist him, including the young girl at the heart of Pelayo’s “Milagro.” 

“Milagro” is fatalistic in tone, the story in this section most closely aligned with King’s Bachman bookThe Long Walk (1979), from which this section draws its title. But there are also glimmers of hope and heroism, particularly in Youers’ “Keep the Devil Down,” in which characters choose optimism and care—and fight to defend it—in the face of violence and hopelessness.