Night Shift

by Stephen King

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. In somebody's front room with Corey's expensive radio/tape-player on top of a bookcase full of Reader's Digest Condensed Books and the weak winter sun lying on the rug in meaningless windowpane patterns. The vision was clear enough to make me shudder. Nobody should think about winter in August. It's like a goose walking over your grave. Needles laughed. “See? You do think about it.” What could I say? I stood up. “Going to look for Susie.” “Maybe we're the last people on earth, Bernie. Did you ever think of that?” In the faint moonlight he already looked half dead, with circles under his eyes and pallid, unmoving fingers like pencils. I walked down to the water and looked out across it. There was nothing to see but the restless, moving humps of the waves, topped by delicate curls of foam. The thunder of the breakers was tremendous down here, bigger than the world. Like standing inside a thunderstorm. I closed my eyes and rocked on my bare feet. The sand was cold and damp and packed. And if we were the last people on earth, so what? This would go on as long as there was a moon to pull the water.