disclaimer: none of stephen king's works are mine.

Nick Andros had always had an uncanny way of knowing what might happen next. This particular knack had long since faded away as his life had become far too complex to predict.

Maybe that was one of the great truths of life. That as life gets more complicated, the kids who were considered specially talented in middle and high school were suddenly idiots like everyone else. Because everybody thinks they're a genius if they're told they are.

But right now, Nicholas Andros knows that he's going to die.

Death had never seemed too alien to him. It was sort of like living, at least in his silent movie world. There was a lack of real stimuli in being dead, no sound and no speaking and no touching and no smelling. Except for the latter two, Nick was already missing all of those.

It can't be too different, can it, after all? Being dead.

Harold Lauder is out there somewhere, with a bomb ready to detonate, and here Nick is in the center of it all. Frannie is screaming and crying, or at least that's what the way her mouth is moving and her face is contorted denotes, and suddenly Nick is aware of how terrified he is of true lack of stimuli.

Being mute didn't mean that you couldn't feel.

Being deaf didn't mean that you couldn't feel.

Hell, being blind in one eye still didn't mean that he wouldn't be able to feel anything ever again.

He grabs onto the terror suddenly rising in his throat and relishes it, hopes that it fills his entire body and blocks out this impending, dark thing that's suddenly ever so close and Nick can almost touch it. He somehow finds it in him to think about his childhood. School had never been hard, but the people had been. People were so different than education, school never taught you anything about them. You had to learn that for yourself.

hey, nicky, why don't you just say something to me? don't you know that ignorance is rude, you poor little retard

And the voice of the memories in his head becomes Randall Flagg and there's a lump in his throat rising, like he's ready to go into an asthmatic spasm. And Nick squeezes his eyes shut, as though that will block out the dark man from occupying his last thoughts.

Dammit, why doesn't he just do it? Why do the last seconds seem so much longer than the ones that don't even matter.

Flagg is still there, grinning because of the mute boy who no longer has any sort of control. It was fine, it was manageable, back when people were allowed to here a written out plea for help. He can somehow feel Frannie screaming, begging Stu to run back in and save his life.

but life doesn't work like that, poor little frannie.

It'd be nice to have someone sacrifice themselves for him. To have someone put him in front of everyone else in life, care enough to lose their own emotions and have their very existence blip out.

you're just a fucking mutie

And then it detonates. The walls go up in flames and burst, and Nick thinks for a moment he swears that he can hear the chaos exploding around him.

Then the silence sets in.

The irony of Nick Andros's existence flickering out was that he was never so much as able to scream.