Desperation

They passed a long, ramshackle building with rusty metal sides-a factory or some kind of mill, she thought-and then the road tilted up. They started to climb the embankment.

“Please,” she whispered. “Please, just tell me what you want.”

“Uck,” he said, grimacing, and reached into his mouth like a man who’s got a hair on his tongue. Instead of a hair he pulled out the tongue itself. He looked at it for a moment, lying limply in his fist like a piece of liver, and then tossed it aside.

They passed two pickup trucks, a dumptruck, and a yellow-ghost backhoe. all parked together inside the first Switchback the road made on its way to the top.

“If you’re going to kill me, make it quick,” she said in her trembly voice. “Please don’t hurt me. Do that much, at least, promise you won’t hurt me.”

But the slumped, bleeding figure behind the wheel of the cruiser promised her nothing. It simply drove through the flying dust, guiding the car to the crest of the bulwark. The cop didn’t hesitate at the top hut crossed the rim and started down, leaving the wind above them as he did. Ellen looked back, wanting to see some last light, but she was too late.

The walls of the pit had already hidden what remained of the sunset. The cruiser was descending into a vast lake of darkness, an abyss that made a joke of the headlights.

Down here, night had already fallen.

You’ve had a conversion, Reverend Martin once told David. This was near the beginning. It was also around the time that David began to realize that by four o’clock on most Sunday afternoons. Reverend Gene Martin was no longer strictly sober. It would still be some months, however, before David realized just how much his new teacher drank. In fact, yours is the only genuine conversion I’ve ever seen, perhaps the only genuine one I’ll ever see. These are not good times for the God of our fathers, David. Lot of people talking the talk, not many walking the walk.

David wasn’t sure that “conversion” was the right word for what had happened to him, but he hadn’t spent much time worrying about it. Something had happened, and just coping with it was enough. The something had brought him to Reverend Martin, and Reverend Martin-drunk or not-had told him things he needed to know and set him tasks that he needed to do. When David had asked him, at one of those Sunday-afternoon meetings (soundless basketball on the TV that day), what he should be doing, Reverend Martin had responded promptly. “The job of the new Christian is to meet God, to know God, to trust God, to love God. That’s not like taking a list to the supermarket, either, where you can dump stuff into your basket in any order you like. It’s a progression, like working your way up the math ladder from counting to calculus. You’ve met God, and rather spectacularly, too. Now you’ve got to get to know him.”

“Well, I talk to you,” David had said.

“Yes, and you talk to God. You do, don’t you. Haven’t given up on the praying.”

“Nope. Don’t often hear back, though.”

Reverend Martin had laughed and taken a sip from his teacup. “God’s a lousy conversationalist, no question about that, but he left us a user’s manual. I suggest you consult it.”

“Huh.”

“The Bible,” Reverend Martin had said, looking at him over the rim of his cup with bloodshot eyes.

So he had read the Bible, starting in March and fin-ishing Revelation (“The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen”) just a week or so before they had left Ohio. He had done it like homework, twenty pages a night (weekends off), making notes, memorizing stuff that seemed important, skipping only the parts Reverend Martin told him he could skip, mostly the begats. And what he remembered most clearly now, as he stood shiv-ering at the sink in the jail cell, dousing himself with icy water, was the story of Daniel in the lions’ den. King Darius hadn’t really wanted to throw Danny in there, but his advisers had mousetrapped him somehow. David had been amazed at how much of the Bible was politics.

“You STOP THAT!” his father screamed, startling David out of his thoughts and making him look around. In the growing gloom Ralph Carver’s face was long with terror, his eyes red with grief. In his agitation he sounded like an eleven-year-old himself, one having a hell of a tantrum. “Stop that RIGHT NOW, do you hear me.”

David turned back to the sink without answering and began to splash water on his face and in his hair. He remembered King Darius’s parting advice to Daniel before Daniel was led away: “Thy God whom thou ser-vest in your days and nights will deliver thee.” And some-thing else, something Daniel had said the next day about why God had shut the lions’ mouths—“David! DAVID!”

But he wouldn’t look again. Couldn ‘t. He hated it when his father cried, and he had never seen or heard him cry like this. It was awful, as if someone had cut open a vein in his heart.

“David, you answer me!”

“Put a sock in it, pal,” Marinville said.

“You put a sock in it,” Mary told him.

“But he’s getting the coyote riled!”

She ignored him. “David, what are you doing.”

David didn’t answer. This wasn’t the kind of thing you could discuss rationally, even if there was time, because faith wasn’t rational. This was something Rev erend Martin had told him over and over again, drilling him with it like some important spelling rule, i before e except after C: sane men and women don’t believe in God That was all, that was flat. You can’t say it from the pulpit, because the congregation ’d run you out of town, but it’s the truth. God isn’t about reason; God is about faith and belief God says, “Sure, take away the safety net. And when that’s gone, take away the tightrope, too He filled his hands with water once more and splashed it over his face and into his hair.

His head. That would be where he succeeded or failed, he knew that already. It was the biggest part of him, and he didn’t think there was much give to a person’s skull.

David grabbed the bar of Irish Spring and began to lather himself with it. He didn’t bother with his legs, there would be no problem there, but worked from the groin on up, rubbing harder and generating more suds as he went His father was still yelling at him, but now there was no time to listen. The thing was, he had to be quick… and not just because he was apt to lose his nerve if he stopped too long to think about the coyote sitting out there. If he let the soap dry, it wouldn’t serve to grease him; it would gum him up and hold him back instead.

He gave his neck a fast lube-job, then did his face and hair. Eyes slitted, soap still clutched in one hand, he padded to the cell door. A horizontal bar crossed the ver tical ones about three feet off the floor. The gap between the vertical bars was at least four inches and maybe five The cells in the holding area had been built to hold men brawny miners, for the most part-not skinny eleven year-old boys, and he didn’t expect much trouble slipping through.

At least until he got to his head.

Quick, hurry, don ‘t think, trust God.

He knelt, shivering and covered with green soapslime from the hips on up, and began rubbing the cake of soap up and down, first on the inside of one white-painted ver-tical bar, then on the other.

Out by the desk, the coyote got to its feet. Its growl rose to a snarl. Its yellow eyes were fixed intently on David Carver. Its muzzle wrinkled back in an unpleas-antly toothy grin.

“David, no! Don ‘t do it, son! Don ‘t be crazy!”

“He’s right, kid.” Marinville was standing at the bars of his cell now, hands wrapped around them. So was Mary. That was embarrassing but probably natural enough, con-sidering the way his father was carrying on. And it couldn’t be helped. He had to go, and go now. He hadn’t been able to draw any hot water from the tap, and he thought the cold would dry the soap on his skin even quicker.

He recalled the story of Daniel and the lions again as he dropped to one knee, gathering himself. Not very sur-prising, given the circumstances. When King Darius arrived the next day, Daniel had been fine. “My God hath sent his anger, and hath shut the lions’ mouths,” Daniel told him, “forasmuch as innocency was found in me.” That wasn’t exactly right, but David knew the word “innocency” was. It had fascinated him, chimed some-where deep inside him. Now he spoke it to the being whose voice he sometimes heard-the one he identified as the voice of the other: Find innocency in me, God. Find innocency in me and shut that fleabag ’s mouth. Jesus’ name I pray, amen.

He turned sideways, then propped his whole weight on one arm, like Jack Palance doing pushups at the Academy Awards. In this fashion he was able to stick both feet out through the bars at the same time. He wriggled backward, now out to his ankles, now his knees, now his thighs… which was where he first felt the painted bars press their soapslick coolness against him.

“No!” Mary screamed. “No, get away from him, you ugly fuck! GETAWAY FROM HIM!”

There was a clink. It was followed by a thin rolling—marble sound. David turned his head long enough to see Mary with her hands now outside the bars of her cell. The left was cupped. He saw her pick another coin out of it with her right hand and throw it at the coyote. This time it barely paid attention, although the quarter struck it on the flank. The animal started toward David’s bare feet and legs instead, head lowered, snarling.

Oh Christ almighty, Johnny thought. Goddam kid must have checked his brains at the door.

Then he yanked the belt out of the bottom of his motor-cycle jacket, stuck his arm as far out through the bars as he could, and brought the buckle end down on the 7 coyote’s scant flank just as it was about to help itself to the kid’s right foot.

The coyote yelped in pain as well as surprise this time. It whirled, snatching at the belt.

Johnny yanked it away—it was too thin, too apt to give out in the coyote’s jaws before the kid could get out… if the kid actually could get out, which Johnny doubted. He let the belt go flying over his shoulder and yanked off the heavy leather jacket itself, trying to hold the coyote’s yellow gaze as he did so willing it not to look away. The animal’s eyes reminded him of the cop’s eyes.

The kid shoved his butt through the bars with a gasp, and Johnny had time to wonder how that felt on the old family jewels. The coyote started to turn toward the sound and Johnny flung the leather jacket out at it, holding on by the collar. If the animal hadn’t taken two steps forward to snatch at the belt, the jacket wouldn’t have reached it… — but the coyote had and the jacket did. When it brushed the animal’s shoulder, it whirled and seized the jacket so fiercely that it was almost snapped out of Johnny’s hands. As it was he was dragged head-first into the bars. It hurt like a mother and a bright red rocket went off behind his eyes, but he still had time to be grateful that his nose had gone between the bars rather than into one.

“No, you don’t,” he grunted, winding his hands into the leather collar and pulling. “Come on, hon… come on. you nasty gopher-eating bugger… come on over… and any howdy.”

The coyote snarled bitterly at him, the sound muffled through its mouthful of jacket-twelve hundred bucks at Barneys in New York. Johnny had never quite pictured it like this when he had tried it on.

He bunched his arms-not as powerful as they’d been thirty years ago, but not puny, either-and dragged the coyote foward. Its claws slid on the hardwood floor. It got one front leg braced against the desk and shook the jacket from side to side, trying to yank it out of Johnny’s hands. His collection of Life Savers went flying, his maps, his spare set of keys, his pocket pharmacy (aspirin, codeine caps, Sucrets, a tube of Preparation-H), his sunglasses, and his goddam cellular phone. He let the coyote take a step or two backward, trying to keep it interested, to play it like a fish, then yanked it forward again.

It bonked its head on the corner of the desk this time, a sound that warmed Johnny’s heart. “A rriba!” he grunted. “How’d that feel, honey.”

“Hurry up!” Mary screamed. “Hurry up, David!”

Johnny glanced over at the kid’s cell. What he saw made his muscles relax with fear—when the coyote yanked on the jacket this time, the animal came very close to pulling it free.

“Hurry up!” the woman screamed again, but Johnny saw that the kid couldn’t hurry up.

Soaped up, naked as a peeled shrimp, he had gotten as far as his chin, and there he was stuck, with the whole length of his body out in the holding area and his head back inside the cell. Johnny had one overwhelming impression, mostly called to mind by the twist of the neck and the stressed line of the jaw.

The kid was hung.

He did okay until he got to his head, and there he stuck fast with his cheek on the boards and the shelf of his jaw pressed against one soapy bar and the back of his head against the other. A panic driven by claustrophobia—the smell of the wood floor, the iron touch of the bars, a nightmare memory of a picture he’d once seen of a Puritan in stocks-dimmed his vision like a dark curtain. He could hear his dad shouting, the woman screaming, and the coyote snarling, but those sounds were all far away. His head was stuck, he’d have to go back, only he wasn’t sure he could go back because now his arms were out and one was pinned under him and—God help me, he thought. It didn’t seem like a prayer; it was maybe too scared and up against it to be a prayer. Please help me, don’t let me be stuck, please help me.

Turn your head, the voice he sometimes heard now told him. As always, it spoke in an almost disinterested way, as if the things it was saying should have been self—evident, and as always David recognized it by the way it seemed to pass through him rather than to comefrom him.

An image came to him then: hands pressing the front and back of a book, squeezing the pages together a little in spite of the boards and the binding. Could his head do that.

David thought-or perhaps only hoped-that it could. But he would have to be in the right position.

Turn your head, the voice had said.

From somewhere behind him came a thick ripping sound, then Marinville’s voice, somehow amused, scared, and outraged all at the same time: “Do you know how much that thing cost.”

David twisted around so he lay on his back instead of his side. Just having the pressure of the bar off his jaw was an incredible relief. Then he reached up and placed his palms against the bars.

Is this right.

No answer. So often there was no answer. Why was that.

Because God is cruel, the Reverend Martin who kept school inside his head replied. God is cruel. I have pop-corn, David, why don ‘t I make some. Maybe we can find one of those old horror movies on TV, something Uni-versal, maybe even The Mummy.

He pushed with his hands. At first nothing happened, but then, slowly, slowly, his soapy head began sliding between the bars. There was one terrible moment when he stopped with his ears crushed against the sides of his head and the pressure beating on his temples, a sick throb that was maybe the worst physical hurt he had ever known. In that moment he was sure he was going to stick right where he was and die in agony, like a heretic caught in some Inquisitorial torture device.

He shoved harder with his palms, eyes looking up at the dusty ceiling with ago-nized concentration, and gave a small, relieved moan as he began to move again almost at once.

With the nar-rowest aspect of his skull presented to the bars, he was able to deliver himself into the holding area without too much more trouble. One of his ears was trickling blood, but he was out. He had made it. Naked, covered with foamy greenish curds of Irish Spring soap, David sat up. A monstrous bolt of pain shot through his head from back to. front, and for a moment he felt his eyes were literally bugging out, like those of a cartoon Romeo who has just spotted a dishy blonde.

The coyote was the least of his problems, at least for the time being. God had shut its mouth with a motorcycle jacket. Stuff from the pockets was scattered everywhere, and the jacket itself was torn straight down the middle. A limp rag of saliva-coated black leather hung from the side of the coyote’s muzzle like a well-chewed cheroot.

“Get out, David!” his father cried. His voice was hoarse with tears and anxiety. “Get out while you still can!”

The gray-haired man, Marinville, flicked his eyes up to David momentarily. “He’s right, kid. Get lost.” He looked back down at the snarling coyote. “Come on, Rover, you can do better than that! By Jesus, I’d like to be around when you start shitting zippers by the light of the moon!” He yanked the jacket hard. The coyote came skidding along the floor, head down, neck stretched, forelegs stiff, shaking its narrow head from side to side as it tried to pull the jacket away from Marinville.

David turned on his knees and pulled his clothes out through the bars. He squeezed his pants, feeling for the tube of the shotgun shell in the pocket. The shotgun shell was there.

He got to his feet, and for a few seconds the world turned into a merry-go-round. He had to reach out for the bars of his erstwhile cell to keep from falling over. Billingsley put a hand over his. It was surprisingly warm. “Go, son,” he said. “Time’s almost up.”

David turned and tottered toward the door. His head was still throbbing, and his balance was badly off; the door seemed to be on a rocker or a spindle or something.

He staggered, regained his footing, and opened the door. He turned to look at his father.

“I’ll be back.”

“Don’t you dare,” his father said at once. “Find a phone and call the cops, David. The State cops. And be careful. Don’t let-”

There was a harsh ripping sound as Johnny’s expensive leather jacket finally tore in two.

The coyote, not expect-ing such a sudden victory, went flying backward, rolled over on its side, and saw the naked boy in the doorway. It scrambled to its feet and flew at him with a snarl. Mary screamed.

“Go, kid, GET OUT!” Johnny yelled.

David ducked out and yanked the door shut behind him. A split second later, the coyote hit it with a thud. A howl-terrible because it was so close-rose from the holding area. It was as if it knew it had been fooled, David thought; as if it also knew that, when the man who had summoned it here returned, he would not be pleased.

There was another thud as the coyote threw itself at the door again, a pause, then a third.

The animal howled again. Gooseflesh rose on David’s soapy arms and chest. Just ahead of him were the stairs down which his kid sister had tumbled to her death; if the crazy cop hadn’t moved her, she would still be at the bottom, waiting for him in the gloom, eyes open and accusing, asking him why he hadn’t stopped Mr. Big Boogeyman, what good was a big brother if he couldn’t stop the boogeyman.

Ican ‘t go down there, he thought. I can’t, I absolutely can’t.

No… but all the same, he had to.

Outside, the wind gusted hard enough to make the brick building creak like a ship in a working sea. David could hear dust, too, hitting the side of the building and the street doors down there like fine snow. The coyote howled again, separated from him only by an inch or so of wood… and knowing it.

David closed his eyes and pressed his fingers together in front of his mouth and chin.

“God, this is David Carver again. I’m in such a mess, God, such a mess. Please pro-tect me and help me do what I have to do. Jesus’ name I pray, amen.”

He opened his eyes, took a deep breath, and groped for the stair railing. Then, naked, holding his clothes against his chest with his free hand, David Carver started down into the shadows.

Steve tried to speak and couldn’t. Tried again and still couldn’t, although this time he did manage a single dry squeak. You sound like a mouse farting behind a baseboard, he thought.

He was aware that Cynthia was squeezing his hand in a grip powerful enough to be painful, but the pain didn’t seem to matter. He didn’t know how long they would have stood there in the doorway of the big room at the end of the Quonset hut if the wind hadn’t blown something over outside and sent it clattering down the Street. Cynthia gasped like someone who has been punched and put the hand not holding Steve’s up to one side of her face. She turned to look at him that way, so he could see only one wide, horrified eye. Tears were trickling down from it.

“Why.” she whispered. “Why.”

He shook his head. He didn’t know why, didn’t have a clue. The only two things he was sure of were that the people who had done this were gone, or he and Cynthia would have been dead already, and that he, Steven Ames of Lubbock, Texas, did not want to be here if they decided to come back.

The large space at the end of the Quonset hut looked like a combination workroom, lab, and storage area. It was lit by hanging hi-intensity lamps with metal hoods, a little like the lights which hang over the tables in billiard emporiums. They cast a bright lemony glow. It looked to Steve as if two crews might have worked here at the same time, one doing assay work on the left side of the room, the other sorting and cataloguing on the right. There were Dandux laundry baskets lined up against the wall on the sorting side, each with chunks of rock in it. These had clearly been sorted; one basket was filled with rocks that were mostly black, another with smaller rocks, almost pebbles, that were shot through with glitters of quartz.

On the assay side (if that was what it was), there was a line of Macintosh computers set up on a long table lit-tered with tools and manuals. The Macs were running screen—saver programs. One featured pretty, multicolored helix shapes above the words GAS CHROMATOGRAPH READY. Another, surely not Disney-sanctioned, showed Goofy pulling down his pants every seven seconds or so, revealing a large boner with the words HYUCK HYUCK HYUCK written on it.

At the far end of the room, inside a closed overhead garage door with the words WELCOME TO HERNANDO’ S HIDEAWAY printed on it in blue paint, was an ATV

with an open carrier hooked up behind it. This was also full of rock samples. On the wall to its left was a sign reading YOU MUST WEAR A HARDHAT MSHA REGULATIONS NO EXCUSES. There was a row of hooks running below the sign, but there were no hardhats hung from them. The hardhats were scattered on the floor, below the dangling feet of the people who had been hung from the hooks, hung like roasts in a butcher’s walk-in freezer.

“Steve… Steve, are they like… dummies. Depart-ment store mannequins. Is it… you know… a joke.”

“No.” The word was small and felt as dusty as the air outside, but it was a start. “You know they’re not. Let up, Cynthia, you’re breaking my hand.”

“Don’t make me let go,” she said in a wavery voice. Her hand was still up to her face and she stared one-eyed at the dangling corpses across the room. On the radio, The Tractors had been replaced by David Lee Murphy, and David Lee Murphy had given way to an ad for a place called Whalen’s, which the announcer described as “Austin’s Anything Store!”

“You don’t have to let go, just let up a little,” Steve said. He raised an unsteady finger and began to count. One… two… three…

“I think I wet my pants a little,” she said.

“Don’t blame you.” Four… five… six…

“We have to get out of here, Steve, this makes the guy who broke my nose look like Santa Cl-”

“Be quiet and let me count!”

She fell silent, her mouth trembling and her chest hitching as she tried to contain her sobs. Steve was sorry he’d shouted-this one had been through a lot even before today-but he wasn’t thinking very well. Christ, he wasn’t entirely sure he was thinking at all.

“Thirteen,” he said.

“Fourteen,” she corrected in a shaky, humble voice. “Do you see. In the corner. One of them fell off. One of them fell off the h-h-h-”

“Hook” was what she was trying to say, but the stutter turned into miserable little cries and she began to weep. Steve took her in his arms and held her, feeling her hot, wet face throb against his chest. Low on his chest. She was so goddam small.

Over the fuzz of her extravagantly colored hair he could see the other side of the room, and she was right—there was another body crumpled in the corner. Fourteen dead in all, at least three of them women. With their heads hanging and their chins on their chests, it was hard to tell for sure about some of the others. Nine were wearing lab coats-no, ten, counting the one in the corner-and two were in jeans and open-necked shirts. Two others were wearing suits, string ties, dress boots. One of these appeared to have no left hand, and Steve had a pretty good idea of where that hand might be, oh yes indeed he did. Most had been shot, and they must have been facing their killers, because Steve could see gaping exit wounds in the backs of most of the dropped heads. At least three, however, had been opened like fish. They hung with their white coats stained maroon and pools of blood beneath them and their guts dangling.

“Now here’s Mary Chapin Carpenter to tell us why she feels lucky today,” the radio announcer said, emerging gamely from another blast of static. “Maybe she’s been to Whalen’s in Austin. Let’s find out.”

Mary Chapin Carpenter began to tell the hanging dead men and women in the lab of the Desperation Mining Corporation about her lucky day, how she’d won the lot-tery and all, and Steve let go of Cynthia. He took a step into the lab and sniffed the air. No gunsmoke that he could smell, and maybe that didn’t mean much-the air conditioners probably turned over the air in here pretty fast-but the blood was dry on the corpses which had been eviscerated, and that probably meant whoever had done this was long gone.

“Let’s go!” Cynthia hissed, tugging his arm.

“Okay,” he said. “Just-”

He broke off as something caught his eye. It was sitting on the end of the computer table, to the right of the screen with the Goofy-flasher on it. Not a rock, or not just a rock, anyway. Some kind of stone artifact. He walked over and looked down at it.

The girl scurried after him and yanked his arm again. “What’s the matter with you. This isn’t a guided tour! What if-” Then she saw what he was looking at-really saw it-and broke off. She reached out a tentative finger and touched it. She gasped and drew her finger back. At the same moment her hips jerked forward as if she’d gotten an electric shock and her pelvis banged into the edge of the table. “Holy shit,” she breathed. “I think I just-” And there she stopped.

“Just what.”

“Nothing.” But she looked as if she was blushing, so Steve guessed maybe it was something, at that. “There ought to be a picture of that thing next to ugly in the dictionary.”

It was a rendering of what might have been a wolf or a coyote, and although it was crude, it had enough power to make them both forget, at least for a few seconds, that they were standing sixty feet from the leftovers of a mass murder. The beast’s head was twisted at a strange angle (a somehow hungry angle), and its eyeballs appeared to be starting out of their sockets in utter fury. Its snout was wildly out of proportion to its body-almost the snout of an alligator-and it was split open to show a jagged array of teeth. The statue, if that was what it was, had been broken off just below the chest. There were stumps of forelegs, but that was all. The stone was pitted and eroded with age. It was glittery in places, too, like the rocks col-lected in one of the Dandux baskets. Beside it, anchored by a plastic box of pushpins, was a note: Jim-What the hell is this. Any idea. Barbie.

“Look at its tongue,” Cynthia said in a strange, dreaming voice.

“What about it.”

“It’s a snake.”

Yes, he saw, it was. A rattler, maybe. Something with fangs, anyway.

Cynthia’s head snapped up. Her eyes were wide and alarmed. She grabbed his shirt again and pulled it. “What are we doing.” she asked, “This isn’t art-appreciation class, for Christ’s sake-we’ve got to get out of here!”

Yeah, we do, Steve thought. The question is, where do we go.

They’d worry about it when they got to the truck. Not in here. He had an idea it would be impossible to do any productive thinking in here.

“Hey, what happened to the radio.” she asked.

“Huh.” He listened, but the music was gone. “I don’t know.”

With a strange, set expression on her face, Cynthia reached out to the crumbling fragment on the table again. This time she touched it between the ears. She gasped. The hanging lights flickered-Steve saw them flicker—and the radio came back on. “Hey Dwight, hey Lyle, boys, you don ‘t need to fight,” Mary Chapin Carpenter sang through the static, “hot dog, I feel lucky tonight!”

“Christ,” Steve said. “Why’d you do that.”

Cynthia looked at Steve. Her eyes looked oddly hazy. She shrugged, touched her tongue to the middle of her upper lip. “I don’t know.” Suddenly she put her hand to her forehead and squeezed her temples, hard. When she took it away, her eyes were clear again, but frightened. “What the hell.” she said, more to herself than to him.

Steve reached out to touch the thing himself. She grabbed his wrist before he could.

“Don’t. It feels nasty.”

He shook her off and put his finger on the wolf’s back (all at once he was sure that was what it was, not a coyote but a wolf). The radio went dead again. At the same time there was a cough of broken glass from somewhere be-hind them. Cynthia yelped.

Steve had already taken his finger off the rock; he would have done that even if nothing at all had happened, because she was right: it felt nasty. But for a moment, something did happen. It felt as if one of the more vital circuits in his head had shorted out, for one thing. Except… hadn’t he been thinking about the girl. Doing some-thing to the girl, with the girl. The kind of thing both of you might like to try but would never talk about to your friends. A kind of experiment.

Even as he was mulling this over, trying to remember what the experiment might have been, he was reaching out for the stone again with his finger. He didn’t make a conscious decision to do this, but now that he was, it seemed like a good idea. Just let that old finger go where it wants, he thought, bemused. Let it touch whatever it—She grabbed his hand and twisted it away from the piece of stone Just as he was about to put his finger on the wolf’s back. “Hey, sport, read my lips: I want to get out of here! Right now!”

He took a deep breath, let it out. Repeated the process. His head began to feel like familiar territory again, but he was suddenly more frightened than ever. Of exactly what he didn’t know. Wasn’t sure he wanted to know. “Okay. Let’s go.”

Holding her hand, he led her back into the hallway. He glanced over his shoulder once, at the crumbled gray bit of carving. Twisted, predatory head. Bulging eyes. Too—long snout. Snake tongue. And beyond it, something else. Both the helix and the exhibitionist Goofy were gone. Those screens were dark, as if some power-surge had shorted them out.

Water was pouring through the open door of the office with the aquarium in it. There was a molly stranded on the edge of the hallway carpet, flopping its last. Well, Steve thought, now we know what broke, no need to wonder about that.

“Don’t look when we go by,” he said. “Just-”

“Did you hear something just then.” she asked. “Bangs or booms or something like that.”

He listened, heard only the wind… then thought he heard a stealthy shuffling from behind him.

He wheeled around quickly. Nothing there. Of course there wasn’t, what had he been thinking. That one of the corpses had wriggled down off its hook and was coming after them. Dumb. Even under these stressful circum-stances, that was plumb loco, Wild Bill.

But there was something else, something he couldn’t dismiss, dumb or not: that statue. It was like a physical presence in his head, a thumb poking rudely into the actual tissue of his brain. He wished he hadn’t looked at it. Even more, he wished he hadn’t touched it.

“Steve. Did you hear anything. It could have been gun-shots. There! There’s another one!”

The wind screamed along the side of the building and something else fell over out there, making them cry out and grab for each other like kids in the dark. The thing that had fallen over went scraping along the ground outside.

“I don’t hear anything but the wind. Probably what you heard was a door banging shut somewhere. If you heard anything.”

“There were at least three of them,” she said. “Maybe they weren’t gunshots, more like thuds, but-”

“Could have been something flying in the wind, too. Come on, cookie, let’s shake some tailfeathers.”

“Don’t call me cookie and I won’t call you cake,” she said faintly, not looking when they passed the office with the water still draining out of it.

Steve did. The aquarium was now nothing but a rect-angle of wet sand surrounded by jags of glass. The hand lay on the soaked carpet beside the desk. It had landed on its back. There was a dead guppy stranded on its palm. The fingers seemed almost to beckon him-come on in, stranger, pull up a chair, take a load off, mi casa es su casa.

No thanks, Steve thought.

He had no more than started to open the door between the littery reception area and the outside when it was snatched prankishly out of his hands. Dust was blowing past in ribbons. The mountains to the west had been com-pletely obliterated by moving membranes of darkening gold-sand and alkali grit flying in the day’s last ten min-utes or so of light-but he could see the first stars glowing clearly overhead. The wind was at near gale force now. A rusty old barrel with the words ZOOM CHEMTRONICS DISPOSE OF PROPERLY stencilled on it rolled across the parking lot, past the Ryder truck, and across the road. Into the desert it went. The tink-tink-tink of the lanyard-clip against the flagpole was feverish now, and something to their left thumped twice, hard, a sound like silencer-muffled pistol shots. Cynthia jerked against him. Steve turned toward the sound and saw a big blue Dumpster. As he looked, the wind half-lifted its lid, then dropped it. There was another muffled thump.

“There’s your gunshots,” he said, raising his voice to be heard over the wind.

“Well… it didn’t sound just like that.”

Aconcatenation of coyote-howls rose in the night, some from the west, flying to them on the wind and grit, some from the north. The sound reminded Steve of old newsclips he’d seen of Beatlemania, girls screaming their heads off for the moptops from Liverpool. He and Cynthia looked at each other. “Come on,” he said. “The truck. Right now.”

They hurried to it, arms around each other and the wind at their backs. When they were in the cab again, Cynthia locked her door, bopping the button down decisively with the heel of her hand, Steve did the same, then started the engine. Its steady rumble and the glow from the dash board when he pulled the headlight knob comforted him He turned to Cynthia.

“All right, where do we go to report this. Austin’s out It’s too far west and in the direction this shit is coming from. Wc’d end up by the side of the road, hoping we could start the damn engine again once the storm passed That leaves Ely, which is a two-hour drive-longer, if the storm overtakes us-or downtown Desperation, which is maybe less than a mile.”

“Ely,” she said at once. “The people who did this could be up there in town, and I doubt if a couple of local cops or even county mounties could match up to guys who could do what we saw in there.”

“The people who did it could also be back on Route 50,” he said. “Remember the RV, and the boss’s bike.”

“But we did see traffic,” she said, then jumped as some—thing else fell over nearby. It sounded big and metallic. “Christ, Steve, can’t we please just get the fuck out of here.”

He wanted to as badly as she did, but he shook his head. “Not until we figure this out. It’s important. Fourteen dead people, and that doesn’t count the boss or the people from the RV.”

“The Carver family.”

“This is gonna be big when it comes out-nationwide. If we go back to Ely and if it turns out there were two cops with phones and radios less than a mile up the road, 21 and if the people who did this get away because we took too long blowing the whistle… well, our decision is go—mg to be questioned. Harshly.”

The dashlights made her face look green and sick. “Are you saying they’d think we had something to do with it.”

“I don’t know, but I’ll tell you this: You’re not the Duchess of Windsor and I’m not the Duke of Earl. We’re a couple of roadbums, is what we are. How much ID do you have.

A driver’s license.”

“I never took the test. Moved around too much.”

“Social Security.”

“Well, I lost the card someplace, I think I left it behind when I split from the guy who fucked up my ear, but I remember the number.”

“What have you got for actual paperwork.”

“My discount card from Tower Records and Video,” she snapped. “Two punches left and I get a free CD. I’m shooting for Out Come the Wolves. Seems fitting, given the soundtrack in these parts. Satisfied.”

“Yeah,” he said, and began to laugh. She stared at him for a moment, cheeks green, shadows rippling across her brow, eyes dark, and he felt sure she was going to launch herself at him and see how much of his skin she could pull off. Then she began to laugh, too, a helpless screamy sound he didn’t care for much. “Come here a second,” he said, and held out his hand.

“Don’t you get funny with me, I’m warning you,” she said, but she scooted across the seat and into the circle of his arm with no hesitation. He could feel her shoulder trembling against his. She was going to be cold in that tank-top if they had to get out of the truck. The tempera-ture fell off the table in this part of the world once the sun went down.

“You really want to go into town, Lubbock.”

“What I want is to be in Disneyland eating a Sno-Kone, but I think we ought to go up there and take a look. If things are normal… if they feel normal… okay, we’ll try reporting it there. But if we see anything that looks the slightest bit wrong, we head for Ely on the double.”

She looked up at him solemnly. “I’m going to hold you to that.”

“You can.” He put the truck in gear and began to roll slowly toward the road. To the west, the gold glow which had been filtering through the sand was down to an ember.

Overhead, more stars were poking through, but they were beginning to shimmy as the flying sand thickened.

“Steve. You don’t happen to have a gun, do you.”

He shook his head, thought about going back into the Quonset to look for one, and then put the idea out of his head. He wasn’t going back in there, that was all; he just wasn’t.

“No gun, hut I’ve got a really big Swiss Army knife, one with all the bells and whistles.

It’s even got a magnifying glass.”

“That makes me feel a lot better.”

He thought of asking her about the statue, or if she’d had any funny ideas-experimental ideas-and then didn’t. Like the thought of going back into the Quonset building again, it was just too creepy. He turned onto the road, one arm still about her shoulders, and started toward town. The sand blew thickly across the wedge of light thrown by his high beams, twisting into lank shadows that persistently reminded him of hanged men dangling from hooks.

The body of his sister was gone from the foot of the stairs, and that was something. David stood looking out through the double doors for a moment. Daylight was fading, and although the sky overhead was still clear-a darkening indigo-the light was dying down here at ground-level in a choke of dust. Across the street, an overhead sign reading DESPERATION COFFEE SHOP AND VIDEO STOP swung back and forth in the wind.

Sitting beneath it, and looking attentively across at him, were two more coyotes. Sitting between them, tatty feathers flap ping in the wind like the feathers on some old woman s church-and-Bingo hat, was a large bald-looking bird David recognized as a buzzard.

Sitting right between the coyotes.

“That’s impossible,” he whispered. and maybe it was but he was seeing it, just the same.

He dressed quickly, looking at a door to his left as he did. Printed on the frosted-glass pane were the words DES-PERATION TOWN OFFICE, along with the hours-nine to four. He tied his sneakers and then opened the door, ready to turn and run if he sensed anything dangerous… if he sensed anything moving, really.

But where would I run. Where is there to run.

The room beyond the door was gloomy and silent. He groped to his left, expecting something or someone to reach out of the darkness and grab his hand, but nothing did. He found a switchplate, then the switch itself. He flipped it, blinked as his eyes adjusted to the old—fashioned hanging globes, then stepped forward. Straight ahead was a long counter with several barred windows like tellers’ stations in an old-fashioned bank. One was marked TAX CLERK, another HUNTING PERMITS, another MINES AND ASSAY. The last one, smaller, bore a sign read-ing MSHA and FEDERAL LAND-USE REGS. Spray-painted on the wall behind the clerks’ area in big red letters was this: IN THESE SILENCES SOMETHING MAY RISE.

Iguess something did, too, David thought, turning his head to check the other side of the room. Something not very—He never finished the thought. His eyes widened, and his hands went to his mouth to stifle a shriek. For a moment the world went gray, and he believed he might faint. To stop it happening he took his hands away from his mouth and squeezed them against his temples instead, renewing the pain there. Then he let them drop to his sides, looking with wide eyes and a hurt, quivering mouth at what was on the wall to the right of the door. There were coathooks. A Stetson with a snakeskin band hung on the one nearest the windows. Two women hung on the next two, one shot, the other gutted. This second woman had long red hair and a mouth that was open in a silent frozen scream. To her left was a man in khaki, his head down, his holster empty. Pearson, maybe, the other deputy. Next to him was a man in jeans and a blood—spattered workshirt. Last in line was Pie. She had been hung up by the back of her MotoKops shirt.

Cassie Styles was on it, standing in front of her Dream Floater van with her arms folded and a big grin on her face. Cassie had always been Pie’s favorite MotoKop. Pie’s head Iolled over her broken neck and her sneakers dangled limply down.

Her hands. He kept looking at her hands. Small and pink, the fingers slightly open.

Ican’t touch her, I can’t go near her!

But he could. He had to, unless he planned to leave her there with Entragian’s other victims. And after all, what else was a big brother for, especially one who wasn’t quite big enough to stop the boogeyman from doing such an unspeakable thing in the first place.

Chest hitching, greenish-white curds of soap drying to scales on his skin, he put his hands together again and raised them in front of his face. He closed his eyes. His voice, when it came out, was trembling so badly he hardly recognized it as his own. “God, I know that my sister is with you, and that this is just what she left behind. Please help me do what I have to for her.” He opened his eyes again and looked at her. “I love you, Pie. I’m sorry for all the times I yelled at you or pulled your braids too hard.”

That last was too much. He knelt on the floor and put his hands on top of his bowed head and held them there, gasping and trying not to pass out. His tears cut trails in the green goo on his face. What hurt most was the knowledge that the door which had swung shut between them would never be opened, at least not in this world. He would never see Pie go out on a date or shoot a basket from downtown two seconds before the buzzer. She would never again ask him to spot her while she stood on her head or want to know if the light in the refrigerator stayed on even when the door was closed. He understood now why people in the Bible rent their clothes.

When he had control of himself, he dragged one of the chairs which stood against the wall over to where she was. He looked at her hands, her pink palms, and his mind wavered again. He forced it steady-just finding he could do that, if he had to, was a welcome surprise. That wavering toward grief returned more insistently as he stood on the chair and observed the waxy, unnatural pallor of her face and the purplish cast of her lips. Cau-tiously, he let some of the grief in. He sensed it would be better for him if he did. This was his first dead person, but it was also Pie, and he did not want to be scared of her or grossed out by her. So it was better to feel sorry, and he—did. He did.

Hurry, David.

He wasn’t sure if that was his voice or the other’s, but this time it didn’t matter. The voice was right. Pie was dead, but his father and the others upstairs weren’t. And then there was his mother. That was the worst thing, in a way even worse than what had happened to Pie, because he didn’t know. The crazy cop had taken his mother some-where, and he might be doing anything to her. Anything.

Iwon’t think about that. I won’t let myself He thought instead of all the hours Pie had spent in front of the TV with Melissa Sweetheart in her lap, watching KrayZee Toons. Professor KrayZee had yielded his place of honor in her heart to the MotoKops (espe-cially Cassie Styles and the handsome Colonel Henry) over the last year or so, but the old Prof still seemed like the right answer to David. He only remembered one of Prof. KrayZee’s little songs, and he sang it now as he slipped his arms around the dead girl and lifted her free of the hook: “This old man… he played one…

Her head fell against his shoulder. It was amazingly heavy-how had she ever held it up all day long, as little as she was.

“He played knick-knack on my thumb…”

He turned, stepped clumsily down from the chair, stag-gered but did not fall, and took Pie over to the windows. He smoothed her shirt down in the back as he went. It had torn, but only a little. He laid her down, one hand under her neck to keep from bumping her head on the floor. It was the way Mom had showed him when Pie had been just a baby and he had asked to hold her. Had he sung to her then. He couldn’t remember. He supposed he might have.

“With a knick—knack paddy whack, give a dog a bone…”

Ugly dark-green drapes hung at the sides of the win-dows, which were narrow nine-foot floor-to-ceiling jobs. David tugged one down.

“Krazy Prof goes rolling home…

He laid the drape out beside his sister’s body, singing the stupid little song over again. He wished he could give her Melissa Sweetheart to keep her company, but ‘Lissa was back by the Wayfarer. He lifted Pie onto the drape and folded the bottom half over her. It came all the way up to her neck and she looked better to him now, a lot. As if she were at home, sleeping in bed.

“With a knick-knack paddy whack, give a dog a bone,” he sang again, “Krazy Prof went rolling home.” He kissed—her forehead. “I love you, Pie,” he said, and he drew the top of the drape over her.

He remained beside her for a moment with his hands clasped tightly between his thighs, trying to get control of his emotions again. When he felt steadier, he got to his feet. The wind was howling, daylight was almost gone, and the sound of the dust against the windowpanes was like the light tapping of many fingers. He could hear a harsh, monotonous squeaking sound-reek—reek-reek-as something turned in the wind, and he jumped when some—thing else out there in the growing darkness fell over with a bang.

He turned from the window and went hesitantly around the counter. There were no more bodies, but papers had been spilled behind the window marked TAX CLERK, and there were spots of dried blood on some of them. The Tax Clerk’s high-backed, long-legged chair had been knocked over.

Behind the counter area was an open safe (David saw more stacks of paper but no money, and nothing that looked disturbed). To the right was a small cluster of desks. To the left were two closed doors, both with gold lettering on them. The one marked FIRE CHIEF didn’t interest him, but the other one, the office of the Town Safety Officer, did. Jim Reed, that was his name.

“Town Safety Officer. What you’d call Chief of Police in a bigger burg,” David murmured, and went over to the door. It was unlocked. He felt along the wall again, located the light-switch—and flicked it. The first thing he saw when the lights came on was the huge caribou’s head on the wall to the left of the desk. The second was the man behind the desk. He was tilted back in his office chair. Except for the ballpoint pens sticking out of his eyes and the desk-plaque protruding from his mouth, he might have been sleeping there, that was how relaxed his posture was. His hands had been laced together across his ample belly. He was wearing a khaki shirt and an across—the-chest belt like Entragian’s.

Outside, something else fell over and coyotes howled in unison like a doowop group from hell. David jumped, then glanced over his shoulder to make sure Entragian wasn’t sneaking up on him. He wasn’t. David looked back at the Town Safety Officer. He knew what he had to do, and he thought if he could touch Pie, he could probably touch this stranger.

First, however, he picked up the p—Ione. He expected it to be dead and it was. He hit the cut-off buttons a time or two anyway, saying “Hello. Hello.”

Room service, send me up a room, he thought, and shiv-ered as he put the handset back in the cradle. He went around the desk and stood next to the cop with the pens in his eyes. The dead man’s name-plaque-JAMES REED, TOWN SAFETY OFFICER-was still on his desk, so the one in his mouth was something else. OPS HERE was printed on the part sticking out between his teeth.

David could smell something familiar-not aftershave or cologne. He looked at the dead man’s folded hands, saw the deep cracks in the skin, and understood. It was hand lotion he smelled, either the same stuff his mother used or something similar. Jim Reed must have finished rubbing some into his hands not long before he was killed.

David tried to look into Reed’s lap and couldn’t. The man was too fat and pulled in too close to his desk for David to be able to see what he needed to see. There was a small black hole in the center of the chairback-that he could see just fine. Reed had been shot; the thing with the pens had been done (David hoped) after he was already dead.

Get going. Hurry.

He started to pull the chair back, then shouted with surpiise and jumped out of the way when it over-balanced almost at his touch and spilled Jim Reed’s dead weight onto the floor. The corpse uttered a great dead belch when it hit. The plaque in its mouth flew out like a—missile leaving its silo. It landed upside down, but David could read it with no trouble just the same: THE BUCK—STOPS HERE.

Heart pounding harder than ever, he dropped to one knee beside the body. Reed’s uniform pants were unbut-toned and unzipped, exposing some decidedly non-reg underdrawers (vast, silk, peach-colored), but David barely noticed these. He was looking for something else, and he sighed with relief when he saw it. On one well-padded hip was Reed’s service revolver. On the other was a keychain clipped to a belt-loop. Biting his lower lip, somehow sure that the dead cop was going to reach out (oh shit the mummy’s after us) and grab him, David struggled to free the keys from the belt-loop. At first the clip wouldn’t open for him, but he was finally able to get it loose. He picked through the keys quickly, praying to find what he needed… and did. A square one that almost didn’t rook like a key at all. A black magnetic strip ran down its length. The key to the holding cells upstairs.

He hoped. — David put the keyring in his pocket, glanced curiously 21 at Reed’s open pants again, then unsnapped the strap over the cop’s gun. He pulled it out, holding it in both hands, feeling its extraordinary weight and sense of inheld vio-lence. A revolver, not an automatic with the bullets buried away in the handle. David turned the muzzle toward him-self, careful to keep his fingers outside the trigger-guard, so he could look at the cylinder. There were bullet-heads in every hole he could see, so that was probably all right. The first chamber might be empty-in the movies cops sometimes did that to keep from shooting themselves by accident-but he reckoned that wouldn’t matter if he pulled the trigger at least twice, and fast.

He turned the gun around again and inspected it from the butt forward, looking for a safety-catch. He didn’t see one, and very gingerly pulled back on the trigger a little.

When he saw the hammer start to rise out of its hood, he let off the pressure in a hurry.

He didn’t want to fire the gun down here. He didn’t know how smart coyotes were, but he guessed that if they were smart about anything, it would probably be about guns.

He went back out into the main office. The wind howled, throwing sand against the window. The panes were bruise-purple now. Soon they’d be black. He looked over at the ugly green curtain, and the shape which lay beneath it. Love you, Pie, he thought, then went back out into the hall. He stood there a moment, taking deep breaths, eyes closed, gun held at his side with. the muzzle pointed at the floor.

“God, I never shot a gun in my life,” he said. “Please help me be able to shoot this one. Jesus’ sake, amen.”

That taken care of, David started up the stairs.

Mary Jackson was sitting on her bunk, looking—down at her folded hands and thinking arsenic thoughts about her sister-in-law. Deirdre Finney, with her pretty—pale face and sweet, stoned smile and pre-Raphaehte curls. Deirdre who didn’t eat meat (“It’s like, cruel, you know.”) but smoked the smoke, oh yes, Deirdre had been going steady with that rascal Panama Red for years now Deirdre with her Mr. Smiley-Smile stickers. Deirdre who had gotten her brother killed and her sister-in-law slammed into a hicksville jail cell that was really Death Row, and all because she was too fucking fried to remember that she’d left her extra pot under the spare tire That’s not fair, a more rational part of her mind replied It was the license plate, not the pot. That’s why Entragian stopped you. In a way it was like the Angel of Death seeing a doorway without the right mark on it. If the dope hadn’t been there, he would’ve found something else. Once you caught his eye, you were cooked, that’s all. And you know it.

But she didn’t want to know it; thinking of it that way, as some sort of weird natural disaster, was just too awful. 21 It was better to blame it on Peter’s idiot sister, to imagine punishing Deirdre in a number of nonlethal but painful ways. Caning-the sort they administered to thieves in Hong Kong-was the most satisfying, but she also saw herself hiking the tip of a pointed high-heeled shoe into Deirdre’s flat little fashionplate ass.

Anything to get that room-for-rent look out of her eyes long enough for Mary to scream “you GOT YouR BROTHER KILLED, you STUPID TWAT, ARE YOU READING ME.” into Deirdre’s face and to see the understanding there.

“Violence breeds violence,” she told her hands in a calm, teacherly tone. Talking to herself under these cir-cumstances seemed perfectly normal. “I know it, every-body knows it, but thinking about it is so pleasant, sometimes.”

“What.” Ralph Carver asked. He sounded dazed. In fact-gruesome idea-he sounded quite a bit like the walking short-circuit that was her sister-in-law.

“Nothing. Never mind.”

She got up. Two steps took her to the front of the cell. She wrapped her hands around the bars and looked out. The coyote was sitting on the floor with the remains of Johnny Marinville’s leather jacket in front of its fore-paws, looking up at the writer as if mesmerized.

“Do you think he got away.” Ralph asked her. “Do you think my boy got away, ma’am.”

“It’s not ma’am, it’s Mary, and I don’t know. I want to believe it, I can tell you that. I think there’s a pretty good chance that he did, actually.” As long as he didn’t run into the cop, she added to herself.

“Yeah, I guess so. I had no idea he was so serious about the praying stuff,” Ralph said.

He sounded almost apolo-getic, which Mary found weird, under the circumstances. “I thought it was probably… I don’t know… a passing fad. Sure didn’t look that way, did it.”

“No,” Mary agreed. “It didn’t.”

“Why do you keep staring at me, Bosco.” Marinville asked the coyote. “You got my fucking jacket, what else do you want. As if I didn’t have a pretty good idea.” He looked up at Mary. “You know, if one of us could get out of here, I think that mangebasket might actually turn tail and-”

“Hush!” Billingsley said. “Someone coming up the stairs!”

The coyote heard it, too. It broke eye-contact with Mar-inville and turned around, growling. The footfalls neared, reached the landing, stopped. Mary snatched a glance at Ralph Carver, but couldn’t look for long; the combina-tion of hope and terror on his face was too awful. She had lost her husband, and that hurt worse than she had ever imagined anything could. What would it be like to see your whole family snatched away in the course of an afternoon.

The wind rose, howling along the eaves. The coyote looked nervously over its shoulder at the sound, then took three slow steps toward the door, ragged ears twitching.

“Son!” Ralph called desperately. “Son, if that’s you, don’t come in! That thing’s standing right in front of the door!”

“How close.” It was him, the boy. It really was. Amazing. And the self-possession in his voice was even more amazing. Mary thought that perhaps she should re-evaluate the power of prayer.

Ralph looked bewildered, as if he didn’t understand the—r. question. The writer did, though. “Probably five feet, and looking right at it. Be careful.”—“I’ve got a gun,” the boy said. “I think you better all get under your bunks. Mary, get as far over to my dad’s side as you can. Are you sure he’s right in front of the door, Mr.

Marinville.”

“Yes. Big as life and twice as ugly is my friend Bosco. Have you ever fired a gun before, David.”

“‘No.” “Oh, Moses.” Marinville rolled his eyes.

“David, no!” Ralph called. Belated alarm was filling his face; he seemed to be just realizing what was hap-pening here. “Run and get help! Open the door and that r bastard’ll be on you in two jumps!”

“No,” the kid said. “I thought about it, Dad, and I’d rather chance the coyote than the cop. Plus I have a key. 1 21 think it’ll work. It looks just the same as the one the cop used.”

“I’m convinced,” Marinville said, as if that settled it. “Everybody get down. Count to five, David, then do it.”

“You’ll get him killed!” Ralph yelled furiously at Mar-inville. “You’ll get my boy killed just to save your own ass!”

Mary said, “I understand your concern, Mr. Carver, but I think if we don’t get out of here, we’re all dead.”

“Count to five, David!” Marinville repeated. He got down on his knees, then slid under his bunk.

Mary looked across at the door, realized that her cell would be directly in the kid’s line of fire, and understood why David had told her to get way over to his father’s side. He might only be eleven, but he was thinking better than she was.

“One,” the boy on the other side of the door said. She could hear how scared he was, and she didn’t blame him. Not a bit. “Two.”

“Son!” Billingsley called. “Listen to me, son! Get on your knees! Hold the gun in both hands and be ready to shoot up-up, son! It won’t come on the floor, it’ll jump for you! Do you understand.”

“Yeah,” the kid said. “Yeah, okay. You under your bunk, Dad.”

Ralph wasn’t. He was still standing at the bars of his cell. There was a scared, set look on the—wollen face hovering between the white-painted bars. “Don’t do it, David! I forbid you to do it!”

“Get down, you asshole,” Marinville said. He was staring out from under his bunk at David’s father with furious eyes.

Mary approved of the sentiment but thought that Mar-inville’s technique sucked-she would have expected better from a writer. Some other writer, anyway; she had this one placed. The guy who’d written Delight, perhaps the century’s dirtiest book, was cooling his heels in the cell next to hers, surreal but true, and although his nose looked as if it might never recover from what the cop had done to it, Marinville still had the attitude of a guy who expects to get whatever he wants. Probably on a silver tray.

“Is my dad out of the way.” The kid sounded unsure as well as scared now, and Mary hated his father for what he was doing-plucking the boy’s already overstrained nerves as if they were guitar strings.

“No!” Ralph bawled. “And I’m not going to get out of the way! Get out of here! Find a phone! Call the State Cops!”

“1 tried the one on Mr. Reed’s desk,” David called back. “It’s dead.”

“Then try another one! Goddammit, keep trying until you find one that-”

“Quit being dumb and get under your bunk,” Mary said to him in a low voice. “What do you want him to remember about today. That he saw his sister killed and shot his father by mistake, all before suppertime. Help! Your son’s trying; you try, too.”

He looked at her, his cheeks shiny-pale, a vivid contrast to the blood clotted on the left side of his face. “He’s all I got left,” he said in a low voice. “Do you understand that.”

“Of course I do. Now get under your bunk, Mr. Carver.”

Ralph stepped back from the bars of his cell, hesitated, then dropped to his knees and slid under his bunk.

Mary glanced over at the cell David had wriggled out of-God, that had taken guts-and saw that the old vet-erinarian was under his bunk. His eyes, the only young part of him, gleamed out of the shadows like luminous blue gems.

“David!” Marinville called. “We’re clear!”

The voice that returned was tinged with doubt: “My dad, too.”

“I’m under the bunk,” Ralph called. “Son, you be careful. If-” His voice trembled, then firmed. “If it gets on you, hold onto the gun and try to shoot up into its belly.” He poked his head out from under the bunk, sud-denly alarmed. “Is the gun even loaded. Are you sure.”

“Yeah, I’m sure.” He paused. “Is it still in front of the door.”

“Yes!” Mary called.

The coyote had taken a step closer, in fact. Its head was down, its growl as steady as the idle of an outboard motor. Every time the boy spoke from his side of the door, its ears twitched attentively.

“Okay, I’m on my knees,” the boy said. Mary could hear the nerves in his voice more clearly now. She had an idea he might be approaching the outer edges of his con-trol.

“I’m going to start counting again. Make sure you’re as far back as you can be when I get to five. I… I don’t want to hurt anyone by accident.”

“Remember to shoot uphill,” the vet said. “Not a lot, but a little. Okay.”

“Because it’ll jump. Right. I’ll remember. One… two…”

Outside, the wind dropped briefly. In the quiet, Mary could hear two things with great clarity: the rumbling growl of the coyote, and her own heartbeat in her ears.

Her life was in the hands of an eleven-year-old with a gun. If David shot and missed or froze up and didn’t shoot at all, the coyote would likely kill him. And then, when the psycho cop came back, they would all die.

“… three…” The quiver which had crept into the boy’s voice made him sound eerily like his father.

… four… five.”

The doorknob turned.

For Johnny Marinville it was like being tumbled back into Vietnam again, where mortal things happened at a zany speed that always surprised you. He hadn’t held out much hope for the kid, thought he was apt to spray bullets wildly everywhere but into Bosco’s hide, but the kid was all they had. Like Mary, he had decided that if they weren’t out of here when the cop came back, they were through.

And the kid surprised him.

To begin with, he didn’t throw the door open, so it would hit the wall and then bounce back, obscuring his line of fire; he seemed to toss it open. He was on his knees, and dressed again, but his cheeks were still green with Irish Spring soap and his eyes were very wide. The door was still swinging open when he clamped his right hand over his left on the butt of the gun, which looked to Johnny like a.45. A big gun for a kid. He held it at chest—level, the barrel tilted upward at a slight angle. His face was solemn, even studious.

The coyote, perhaps not expecting the door to open in spite of the voice which had been coming from behind it, took half a step backward, then tensed on its haunches and sprang at the boy with a snarl. It was, Johnny thought, the little backward flinch that sealed its doom; it gave the boy all the time he needed to settle himself. He fired g twice, allowing the gun to kick and then return to its original aiming point before pulling the trigger a second time. The reports were deafening in the enclosed space.

Then the coyote, which had gone airborne after the first shot and before the second, hit David and knocked him backward.

His father screamed and scrambled out from under his bunk. The kid appeared to be fighting with the animal on the landing beyond the doorway, but Johnny found it almost impossible to believe the coyote could have much fight left in it; he had heard the slugs go home, and both the hardwood floor and the desk were painted with the animal’s blood.

“David! David! Shoot it in the guts!” his father screamed, dancing up and down in his anxiety.

Instead of shooting, the kid fought free of the coyote, as if it were a coat he had somehow gotten tangled in. He scooted away on his butt, looking bewildered. The front of his shirt was matted with blood and fur. He got the wall against his back and used it to posh his way onto his feet. He looked at the gun as he did it, seemingly amazed to see it was still there at the end of his arm.

“I’m okay, Dad, settle down. I got it, it never even nipped me.” He ran his hand over his chest and then down the arm holding the gun, as if confirming this to himself, as well.

Then he looked at the coyote. It was still alive, panting harshly and rapidly with its head hung over the first stair riser. Where its chest had been there was now a wide bloody dent.

David dropped to one knee beside it and put the barrel of the.45 against the dangling head. He then turned his own head away. Johnny saw the kid’s eyes clenched shut, and his heart went out to the boy. He had never enjoyed his own kids much-they had a tiresome way of upsetting you for the first twenty years and trying to upstage you for the second twenty-but one like this wouldn’t be so bad to have around, maybe. He had some game, as the basketball players said.

i’d even get down on my knees with him at bedtime, Johnny thought. Shit. anybody would. Look at the results.

Still wearing that stressful expression-the look of a child who knows he must eat his liver before he can go out and play-David pulled the trigger a third time. The report was just as loud but not quite as sharp, somehow. The coyote’s body jumped. A fan of red droplets as fine as lace appeared below the stairwell’s railing. That harsh panting sound quit. The kid opened his eyes and looked down at what he had done.

“Thank you, God,” he said in a small, dull voice. “It was awful, though. Really awful.”

“You did a good job, boy,” Billingsley said.

David got up and walked slowly into the holding area. He looked at his father. Ralph held his arms out. David went over to him, starting to cry again, and let his father hold him in a clumsy embrace that had bars running through the middle of it.

“I was afraid for you, guy,” Ralph said. “That’s why I told you to go away. You know that, don’t you.”

“Yes, Daddy.” David was crying harder now, and Johnny realized even before the kid went on that these tears weren’t about the fleabag, no, not these—“Pie was on a huh-huh—hook downstairs. Other people, t-t-too. I took her down. I couldn’t take the other ones down, they were grub-grownups, but I took Pie down. I s-sang… sang to h-h-”

He tried to say more, but the words were swallowed in hysterical, exhausted sobs. He pressed his face between the bars while his father stroked his back and told him to hush, just hush, he was sure David had done everything for Kirsten that he could, that he had done fine.

Johnny let them have a full minute of this by his watch-the kid deserved that much just for opening the goddam door when he knew there was a wild dog on the other side waiting for him to do it-and then spoke the kid’s name. David didn’t look around, so he said it a second time, louder. The boy did look around then. His eyes were red-rimmed and streaming.

“Listen, kiddo, I know you’ve been through a lot,” Johnny said, “and if we get out of this thing alive, I’ll be the first one to write you a commendation for the Silver Star. But right now we have to get gone. Entragian could be on his way back. If he was close by, he probably heard the gunshots. If you’ve got a key, now’s the time to try it out.”

David pulled a thick ring of keys out of his pocket and found the one which looked like the one Entragian had used. He put it in the lock of his father’s cell. Nothing happened.

Mary cried out in frustration and slammed the heel of her hand against the bars of her own cell.

“Other way,” Johnny said. “Turn it around.”

David turned the key over and slid it into the lock-slot again. This time there was a loud click-almost a thud—and the cell door popped open.

“Yes!” Mary cried. “Oh, yes!”

Ralph stepped out and swept his son into his arms, this time with no bars between them.

And when David kissed the puffy place on the left side of his father’s face, Ralph Carver cried out in pain and laughed at the same time. Johnny thought it one of the most extraordinary sounds he had ever heard in his life, and one you could never convey in a book; the quality of it, like the expression on Ralph Carver’s face as he looked into his son’s face, would always be just out of reach.

Ralph took the mag-key from his son and used it to unlock the other cells. They stepped out and stood in a little cluster in front of the guard’s desk-Mary from New York, Ralph and David from Ohio, Johnny from Con-necticut, old Tom Billingsley from Nevada.

They looked at each other with the eyes of train-wreck survivors.

“Let’s get out of here,” Johnny said. The boy had given the gun to his father, he saw.

“Can you shoot that, Mr. Carver. Can you see to shoot that.”

“Yes to both,” Ralph said. “Come on.

He led them through the door, holding David’s hand as he went. Mary walked behind them, then Billingsley. Johnny brought up the rear. As he stepped over the coyote, he saw that the final shot had pretty much pulver-ized the animal’s head. He wondered if the kid’s father could have done that. He wondered if he could have done it.

At the foot of the stairs, David told them to hold on. The glass doors were black now; night had come. The wind screamed beyond them like something that was lost and pissed off about it. “You won’t want to believe this but it’s true,” the boy said, and then told them what he had seen on the other side of the street.

“Behold, the buzzard shall lie down with the coyote,’ Johnny said, peering out through the glass. “That’s in the Bible. Jamaicans, chapter three.”

“I don’t think that’s funny,” Ralph said.

“Actually, neither do I,” Johnny said. ‘—It’s too much like something the cop would—ay.”

I-fe could see the shapes of the buildings over there, and the occasional tumbleweed bouncing past, hut that was all. And did it matter. Would it matter even if there were a pack of werewolves standing outside the local poolhall, smoking crack and watching for escapees. They couldnt stay here in any case. Entragian would be hack, guys like him always came back.

There are no guys like him, his mind whispered. There were never in the histoiy of the world an)’ guys like him, and you know it.

Well, maybe he did, but it didn’t change the principle of the thing a hit. They had to get out.

“1 believe you,” Mary told David. She looked at Johnny. “Come on. Let’s go into the Police Chief’s office, or whatever they call it here.”

“For”.”

“Lights and guns. Do you want to come, Mr. Bill ingsley.”

Billingsley shook his head.

“David, may I have the keys”.”

David handed them to her. Mary slipped them into the pocket of her jeans. “Keep your eyes open.” she said. David nodded. Mary reached out, took Johnny’s hand—her fingers were cold as ice-and pulled him through the door which led into the clerks’ area.

He saw what was spray-painted on the wall and pointed to it. “‘In these silences something may rise.’ What do you suppose that means”.”

“Don’t know, don’t care. I just want to get to some-place where there are lights and people and phones and we can—She was turning to the right as she spoke, her eyes touching on the fold of green di’ape below the tall win-dows with no particular interest (the shape beneath it was too slight for her to recognize). Then she saw the bodies hung Ofl the wall. She gasped and doubled over, as if someone had struck her in the belly, then turned to flee.

Johnny caught her, but for a moment he was sure she wasp going to get away from him—there was a lot of strength_ hidden in that slim body.

“No!” he said, shaking her in what was partly—exasperation. He was ashamed of that but couldn’t entirely suppress it. “No, you have to help me! Just don’t-—look at them!”

“But one of them’s Peter!”

“And he’s dead. I’m sony. hut he is. We’re not. Yet>—anyhow. Don’t look at him. Come on.”

He led her swiftly toward the door marked TOWN — SAFETY OFF]CER, trying to think how they should proceed. _ And here was another disgusting little facet of this experi-ence: he was becoming aroused by Mary Jackson. She was quivering in the circle of his arm, he could feel the softness of her breast just above his hand, and he wanted her.

Her husband was hung up like a fucking over-coat right behind them, hut he was still getting a fairly respectable stiffy, especially for a man with possible prostate woes. Terry was right all along, he thought. 1 am an asshole.

“Come on,” he said, squeezing her in what he hoped was a brotherly way. “If that kid could do what he did, _ then you can hang in there. I know you can. Get it together, Mary.”

She pulled in a deep breath. “I’m trying.”

“Good g… oh shit. We’ve got another mess here. I’d—tell you not to look, but 1 think we’re a little beyond the niceties.”

Mary looked at the sprawled body of the Town Safety Officer and made a thick noise in her throat. “The boy… David… Jesus Christ… how did he do it.”

“1 don’t know.” Johnny said. “He’s some kid, all right. I think he must have knocked Sheriff Jim there out of his chair trying to get his keys. Can you go next door to the Fire Chief’s office”. It’ll be quicker if we toss both of em at Once.”

“Yes.”

“Be prepared; if Fireman Bob was at home when Entra-gian went nuclear, he’s probably just as dead as the rest of them.”

“I’ll be okay. Take these.”

She handed him the keys, then went to the door marked FIRE CHIEF. Johnny saw her start to glance toward her husband, then look away again.

He nodded and tried to send her some mental encouragement-good girl, good idea. She turned the knob of the Fire Chiefs door, then pushed it open with tented fingers, as if it might be booby-trapped. She looked in, let out a breath, and gave Johnny a thumbs-up.

“Three things, Mary: lights, guns, any car-keys you spot. Okay.”

“Okay.”

He went into the cop’s office, running quickly through the keys on the ring David had gotten as he did. There was a set of GM car-keys which Johnny guessed probably belonged to the cruiser Entragian had brought him back in. If it was out there in the parking lot it would help them, but Johnny didn’t think it was. He had heard an engine start up shortly after the madman had taken Carver’s wife away.

The desk drawers were locked, but the right key in the lock of the wide drawer above the kneehole opened all of them. He found a flashlight in one and a locked box marked RUGER in another. He tried several different little keys on the box. None worked.

Take it anyway. Maybe. If neither of them found other guns somewhere else.

He crossed the room, pausing to look out a window. Flying dust was all he could see.

Probably all there was to see. God, why hadn’t he taken the interstate.

That struck him funny; he giggled under his breath as he looked at the closed door behind Reed’s desk. Sound like a crazyman, he thought. Never mind Travels with Harley; if you get out of this alive, you should think about calling the book Travels with Loony.

That made him laugh even harder. He put one hand over his mouth to stifle it and opened the door. The laughter stopped in a hurry. Sitting amid the boots and shoes, partly obscured by hanging coats and spare uni-forms, was a dead woman. She was propped against the closet’s side wall and dressed in clothes Johnny thought of as Boot Scootin Secretarial-tapered slacks, not denim, and a silk shirt with entwined roses embroidered over the left breast. The woman appeared to be staring at him with round-eyed wonder, but that was only an illusion.

Because you expect to see eyes, he thought, and not just big red sockets where they used to be.

He restrained an urge to slam the closet shut and pushed the hanging garments to either side along the pole instead, so he could see the rear wall. A good idea. There was a gun—rack with half a dozen rifles and a shotgun in it back there. One of the grooves was empty, third from the right, and Johnny guessed that was where another shot-gun, the one Entragian had pointed at him, usually went.

“Hot damn, paydirt!” he exclaimed, and stepped into the closet. He planted one foot on either side of the sitting corpse’s body, but that made him acutely uncomfortable; he had once gotten head from a woman who had been sit-ting against a bedroom wall in almost that exact same position. At a party in East Hampton, that had been. Spielberg had been there. Joyce Carol Oates, too.

He stepped back, put one foot onthe corpse’s shoulder, and pushed. The woman’s body slid slowly and stiffly to the right. Her huge red eyesockets seemed to stare at him with an expression of surprise as she went, as if she were wondering how a cultured fellow such as himself, a National Book Award winner, for goodness’ sake, could possibly stoop to pushing over a lady in a closet. Tendrils of her hair slid along the wall, trailing after her.

“Sony, ma’am,” he said, “but it’s better for both of us this way, believe me.”

The guns were held in place by a length of cable threaded through the trigger-guards. The cable was pad-locked to an eyebolt on the side of the case. Johnny hoped he would have better luck finding the key to this lock than he’d have finding the one that opened the box with the Ruger in it.

The third key he tried popped the padlock. He stripped the cable back through the trigger—guards with a jerk so hard that one of them-a Remington.30-.06-came tum-bling out. He caught it, turned… and the woman, Mary, was standing right there. Johnny gave a strangled little whoop that probably would have been a scream if he hadn’t been so scared. His heart stopped beating, and for one very long moment he was positive it wasn’t going to restart; he’d be dead of fright even before he fell back-ward onto the corpse in the silk shirt. Then, thank God, it got going again. He slammed a fist into his chest just above the left nipple (an area which had once been hard and now wasn’t very) just to show the pump underneath who was the boss.

“Don’t ever do that,” he told Mary, trying not to wheeze. “What’s wrong with you.”

“I thought you heard me.” She didn’t look terribly sym-pathetic. There was a golfbag, of all things, slung over her shoulder. A tartan golfbag. She looked at the corpse in the closet. “There’s a body in the Fire Chiefs closet, too. A man.”

“What was his handicap, any idea.” His heart was still galloping, but maybe not so fast now.

“You never quit, do you.”

“Fuck you, Mary, I’m trying to kid myself out of dying, here. Every martini I ever drank just jumped on my heart. Christ, you scared me.”

“I’m sorry, but we’ve got to hurry up. He could come back any time.”

“A concept that never crossed my poor excuse for a mind. Here, take this. And be careful.” He handed her the.30-.06, thinking of an old Tom Waits song. Black crow shells from a.30-. 06, Waits sang in his stripped and somehow ghoulish voice. Whittle you into kindlin.

“How careful. Is it loaded.”

“I don’t even remember how to check. I did a tour of Vietnam, but as a journalist. That was a long time ago, in any case. The only guns I’ve seen fired since then have been on movie screens. We’ll figure the guns out later, okay.”

She put it gingerly into the golfbag. “I found two flash-lights. They both work. One’s a long-barrel job. Very bright.”

“Good.” He handed her the flashlight he had found.

“The bag was hung on the back of the door,” Mary said, dropping the flashlight in. “The Fire Chief… if it was him… well, one of the clubs was stuck down through the top of his head. Way down. He was sort of… skewered on it.”

Johnny took two more rifles and the shotgun from the rack and turned with them in his arms. If the walnut doodad on the floor below the rack contained ammo, as he assumed it did, all would be well; a rifle or shotgun for each of the grownups. The kid could have Sheriff Jim’s.45 back. Shit, the kid could have any gun he wanted, as far as Johnny was concerned. So far, at least, David Carver was the only one of them who had demonstrated he could use one if he had to.

“I’m sorry you had to see that,” he said, helping Mary ease the guns into the golfbag.

She shook her head impatiently, as if that wasn’t the point. “How much strength would it take to do something like that. To push the handle of a golf-club down through a man’s head and neck and right into his chest. To push it down until there was nothing but the head sticking up like a… a little hat, or something.”

“I don’t know. A lot, I guess. But Entragian’s a moose. A moose indeed, but now that she’d put it in this light, it did seem strange.

“It’s the level of violence that scares me the most,” she said. “The ferocity. That woman in the closet… her eyes are gone, aren’t they.”

“Yes.”

“The Carvers’ little girl… what he did to Peter, shooting him point-blank in the stomach over and over the people out there hung up like deer in hunting season… do you see what I mean.”

“Of course.” And you’re not even touching the rest of it, Mary, he thought. He’s not just a serial killer; he’s the—Brain Stoker version of Dr.

Dolittle.

She looked around nervously as a particularly strong gust of wind hit the building. “It doesn’t matter where we go next, as long as we’re out of here. Come on. For God’s—sake!”

“Right, just thirty seconds, okay.”

He knelt by the woman’s legs, smelling blood and per-fume. He went through the keys again, and this time had almost reached the end of his choices before one popped the lock on what did indeed turn out to be a small but exceedingly well stocked ammo chest. He took eight or nine boxes of shells, ones he hoped would fit the weapons he had already taken, and dumped them into the golfbag.

“I’ll never in this life be able to carry all that, Mary said.

“That’s okay, I will.”

Except he couldn’t. He was ashamed to find he couldn’t even get the golfbag off the floor, let alone sling it over his shoulder. If the bitch hadn’t scared me so bad-he thought, and then had to laugh at himself. He really did.

“What are you grinning about.” she asked him sharply. “Nothing.” He made the grin disappear. “Here, grab the strap. Help me pull it.”

Together they dragged the bag across the floor, Mary keeping her head down and her eyes fixed firmly on the steel bouquet of protruding gunbarrels as they came around the counter and backed toward the door. Johnny took a single look up at the hanging corpses and thought: The storm, the coyotes sitting along the road like an honor guard, the one in the holding area, the buzzards, the dead. How comforting it would be to believe this was all an adventure in dreamland. But it wasn’t; he had only to sniff the sour aroma of his own sweat through the clogged and painful channels of his nose to be sure of that. Something beyond anything he had ever believed—anything he had ever considered believing-was hap-pening here, and it wasn’t a dream.

“That’s it, don’t look,” he panted.

“I’m not, don’t worry,” she replied. Johnny was pleased to hear her panting a little, too.

Out in the hall, the wind was louder than ever. Ralph was standing at tl—ie doors with his arm curled around his son’s shoulders, looking out. The old guy was behind them. They all turned to Johnny and Mary.

“We heard a motor,” David said at once.

“We think we did,” Ralph amended.

“Was it the cruiser.” Mary asked. She pulled one of the rifles out of the golfbag, and when the barrel drifted toward Billingsley, he pushed it away again with the flat of his hand, grimacing.

“I’m not even sure it was a motor,” Ralph said. “The wind-”

“It wasn’t the wind,” David said.

“See any headlights.” Johnny asked.

David shook his head. “No, but the sand is flying so thick.”

Johnny looked from the gun Mary was holding (the barrel was now pointed at the floor, which seemed like a step in the right direction) to the others protruding from the goltbag to Ralph. Ralph shrugged and looked at the old man.

Billingsley caught the look and sighed. “Go on, dump em out,” he said. “Let’s see what you got.”

“Can’t this wait.” Mary asked. “If that psycho comes back-”

“My boy says he saw more coyotes out there,” Ralph Carver said. “We shouldn’t take a chance on getting say-aged, ma am.

“For the last time, it’s Mary, not ma’am,” she said crossly. “Okay, all right. But hurry!”

Johnny and Ralph held the golfbag while Billingsley pulled the rifles out and handed them to David. “Put em a-row,” he said, and David did, lining them up neatly at the foot of the stairs, where the light from the clerks’ area would fall on them.

Ralph picked the bag up and tipped it. Johnny and Mary caught the flashlights and shells as they slid Out. The old man handed the ammunition to David a box at a time, telling him which guns to put them by. They finished with three boxes stacked by the.30-.06 and none by the gun on the end. “You didn’t get nothing that’ll fit that Moss—berg,” he said. “It’s a damned fine gun, but it’s cham-bered for.22s. You want to go back n see if you can find some.22s.”

“No,” Mary said immediately.

Johnny looked at her, irritated-he didn’t like women answering questions that had been aimed at him-and then let it go. She was right. “There’s no time,” he told Billingsley.

“We’ll carry it anyway, though. Somebody in town’ll have.22s. You take it, Mary.”

“No thanks,” she said coolly, and selected the shotgun, which the veterinarian had identified as a Rossi twelve—gauge. “If it’s to be used as a club instead of a firearm, it ought to be a man who swings it. Don’t you agree.”

Johnny realized he had been mousetrapped. Quite neatly, too. You bitch, he thought, and might have said it aloud, husband hung on a coathook or not, except that David Carver cried out “Truck!” at that moment, and tore open one of the municipal building’s glass doors.

They had been hearing the wind for some time now, and had felt it shake the brick building they were in, but none of them was quite prepared for the ferocity of the gust that ripped the door out of David’s hand and slammed it against the wall hard enough to crack the glass. The posters thumbtacked to the hallway bulletin board rattled. Some tore free and went swirling up the stairwell. Sand sheeted in, stinging Johnny’s face. He put a hand up to shield his eyes and accidentally bumped his nose instead. He yelled with pain.

“David!” Ralph cried, and grabbed for his son’s shirt. Too late. The boy darted out into the howling dark, unmindful of anything that might be waiting. And now Johnny understood what had galvanized David: head-lights. Turning headlights that swept across the street from right to left, as if mounted on a gimbal. Sand danced wildly in the moving beams.

“Hey!” David screamed waving his arms. “Hey, you! You in the truck!”

The headlights began to ebb. Johnny snatched up one of the flashlights from the floor and ran out after the Carvers. The wind assaulted him, making him stagger on his feet and grab at the doorjamb so he wouldn’t go tum-bling off the steps. David had run into the middle of the street, dropping one shoulder to dodge a dark, speeding object which Johnny at first thought was a buzzard. He clicked on the flashlight and saw a tumbleweed instead.

He turned the flashlight toward the departing taillights and swung it back and forth in an arc, slitting his eyes against the sand. The light appeared puny in the sand—thickened dark.

“HEY!” David screamed. His father was behind him, the revolver in his hand. He was trying to look in all direc-tions at once, like a presidential bodyguard who senses danger.

“HEY, COME BACK!”

The taillights were receding, heading north along the road which led back to Highway 50.

The blinker was dancing in the wind, and Johnny caught just a glimpse of the departing truck in its stuttery glow. A panel-job with something printed on the back. He couldn’t read it-there was too much flying sand.

“Get back inside, you guys!” he shouted. “It’s gone!”

The boy stood in the Street a moment longer, looking toward where the taillights had disappeared. His shoul-ders were slumped. His father touched one of his hands.

“Come on, David. We don’t need that truck. We’re in town. We’ll just find someone who can help us, and…

He trailed off, looking around and seeing what Johnny had seen already. The town was dark. That might only mean that people were hunkered down, that they knew what had been happening and were hiding from the crazyman until the cavalry arrived. That made a certain degree of sense, but it wasn’t how it felt to Johnny’s heart.

To his heart, the town felt like a graveyard.

David and his father started back toward the steps, the boy head-down dejected, the man still looking every-where for trouble. Mary stood in the doorway, watching them come, and Johnny thought she looked extraordi-narily beautiful, with her hair flying around her head.

The truck, Johnny. Was there something about the truck. There was, wasn’t there.

Terry’s voice.

Howls rose in the windy dark. They sounded mocking, like laughter, and seemed to come from everywhere. Johnny hardly heard them. Yes, something about the truck. Definitely.

About the size of it, and the lettering, and just the look of it, even in the dark and the blowing sand. Something—“Oh, shit!” he cried, and clutched his chest again. Not at his heart, not this time, but for a pocket that was no longer there. In his mind’s eye he saw the coyote shaking his expensive motorcycle jacket back and forth, ripping the lining, spilling shit to the four points of the compass. Including—“What.” Mary asked, alarmed at the look on his face.

“What.”

“You-all better get back in here till these guns’re loaded,” Billingsley told them, “‘less you want some varmint down on you.”

Johnny barely heard that, either. The letters on the back of the truck receding into the windy dark could have spelled Ryder. It made sense, didn’t it. Steve Ames was looking for him. He had poked his head into Desperation, seen nothing, and was now driving out of town again to look somewhere else.

Johnny leaped past the astonished Billingsley, down on one knee loading guns, and pelted upstairs toward the holding area, praying to David Carver’s God that his cel-lular telephone was still intact.

If things are normal, feel normal, Steve Ames had said, we’ll try reporting it there. But if we see any-thing that looks the slightest bit wrong, we head for Ely on the double.

And, as the Ryder truck sat idling beneath the dancing blinker-light which marked Desperation’s only inter-section, Cynthia reached out and twitched Steve’s shirt. “Time to head for Ely,” she said, and pointed out her window, west along the cross-street.

“Bikes in the street down there, see them. My old grammy used to say bikes in the street are one of those bigtime whammies, like breaking a mirror or leaving a hat on the bed.

Time to boogie.”

“Your grammy said that, huh.”

“Actually, I never had a grammy, not one that I knew, anyway, but get real-what are they doing there. Why hasn’t anybody taken them out of the storm. Don’t you see how wrong all this is.”

He looked at the bikes, which were lying on their sides as if they had fallen over in the wind, then farther down the east-west cross-street. “Yeah, but people’re home. There are lights.” He pointed.

Yes, she saw there were lights in some of the houses, but she thought the pattern they made looked random, somehow. And—‘There were lights on at that mining place, too,”

she said. “Besides, take a good look-most of the houses are dark. Now why is that, do you think.” She heard the little sarcastic edge rising in her voice, didn’t like it, couldn’t stop it. “Do you think maybe most of the local yokels chartered a bus to go watch the Desperation Dorks play a doubleheader with the Austin Assholes. Big desert rivalry.

Something they look forward to all y… hey, what are you doing.”

Not that she needed to ask. He was turning west along the cross-street. A tumbleweed flew at the truck like something jumping out of the screen at you in a 3-D movie. Cynthia cried out and raised an arm over her face. The tumbleweed hit the windshield, bounced, scraped briefly on the roof of the cab, and was gone.

“This is stupid,” she said. “And dangerous.”

He glanced over at her briefly, smiled, and nodded. She should have been pissed at him, smiling at a time like this, but she wasn’t. It was hard to be pissed at a man who could light up that way, and she knew that was half her damned problem. As Gert Kinshaw back at D & S had been fond of saying, those who do not learn from the past are condemned to get beat up by it. She didn’t think Steve Ames was the sort of man who would use his fists on a woman, but that wasn’t the only way that men hurt women. They also hurt them by smiling pretty, so pretty, and getting them to follow along into the lion’s jaws. Usually with a covered-dish casserole in their hands.

“If you know it’s dangerous, why’re you doing it Lubbock.”

“Because we need to find a phone that works, and because I don’t trust the way I feel. It’s almost dark and I’ve got the worst case of the jimjams in history. I don’t want to let them control me. Look, just let me check a couple of places. You can stay in the truck.”

“The fuck I… hey, check it out. Over there.” She pointed at a length of picket fence that had been knocked over and was lying on the lawn of a small frame house. In the glare of the headlights it was all but impossible to tell what color the house was, but she had no trouble seeing the tire-tracks printed on the length of downed fence; they were too clear to miss.

• “A drunk driver could have done that,” he said. “I saw two bars already, and I haven’t even been looking.” A stupid idea, in her opinion, but she was getting to like his Texas accent more and more. Another bad sign.

“Come on, Steve, get real.” Coyote-howls rose in the night, counterpointing the wind.

She slid next to him again. “Jesus, I hate that. What’s with them.”

“I don’t know.”

He was creeping along at no more than ten miles an hour, wanting to be able to stop before he was on top of anything the headlights might reveal. Probably smart. What would have been even smarter, in her humble opinion, was a quick turnaround and an even quicker get—the-hell—out-of-Dodge.

“Steve, I can’t wait to get somewhere with billboards and bank signs and sleazy used-car lots that stay open all night.”

“I hear you,” he said, and she thought: You don ‘t, though. When people say “I hear you,” they almost never do.

“Just let me check here-this one house-and then this burg is history,” he said, and turned into the driveway of a small ranch-style home on the left side of the street. They had come perhaps a quarter of a mile west from the inter-section; Cynthia could still see the blinker through the flying sand.

There were lights on in the house Steve had picked, bright ones that fell through the sheers across the living—room window, dimmer, yellowy ones shining through the trio of oblongs set into the front door in a rising diago-nal line.

He pulled his bandanna up over his mouth and nose and then opened the truck door, holding on as the wind tried to rip it out of his hand. “Stay here.”

“Yeah, right, eat me.” She opened her own door and the wind did pull it away from her.

She slid out before he could say anything else.

Ahot gust pushed her backward, making her stagger and grab the edge of the door for balance. The sand stung her lips and cheeks, making her wince as she pulled her own bandanna up. And the worst thing of all was that this storm might just be warming up.

She looked around for coyotes-they sounded close—and saw none. Yet, anyway. Steve was already climbing the steps to the porch, so much for the protective male. She went after him, wincing as another strong gust rocked her back on her heels.

We’re behaving like characters in a cheap horror movie, she thought dismally, staying when we know we should go, poking where we have no business poking.

True enough, she supposed… except wasn’t that what people did. Wasn’t that why, when Richie Judkins had come home in a really badass ear-ripping mood, Little Miss Cynthia had still been there. Wasn’t that what most of the bad stuff in the world was about, staying when you knew damned well you should go, pushing on when you knew you should cut and run. Wasn’t that, in the last analysis, why so many people liked cheap horror movies. Because they recognized the scared kids who refused to leave the haunted house even after the murders started as themselves.

Steve was standing on the top step in the howling wind and dust, head hunched down, bandanna flapping… and ringing the doorbell. Actually ringing the bell, like he was going to ask the lady of the house if he could come in and explain the advantages of Sprint over AT&T. It was too much for Cynthia. She pushed rudely past, almost knocking him into the bushes beside the stoop, grabbed the doorknob, and turned it. The door opened. She couldn’t see the bottom half of Steve’s face because of the bandanna, but the look of amazement in his eyes as she followed the opening door into the house was very satisfactory.

“Hey!” she shouted. “Hey, anybody home. Fucking Avon calling, you guys!”

No answer-but there was a strange noise coming from an open doorway ahead to the right. A kind of hissing. She turned to Steve. “Nobody home, see. Now let’s go.”

Instead, he started up the hail toward the sound.

“No!” she whispered fiercely, and grabbed his arm. “No, en-oh, that spells no, enough is enough!”

He shook free without even looking at her-men, goddam men, such parfit knightly assholes they were—and went on up the hall. “Hello.” he asked as he went.

just so that anyone intent on killing him would know exactly where to look. Cynthia had every intention of going back outside and getting into the truck. She would wait three minutes by her watch, and if he wasn’t out by then she’d put the truck in gear and drive away, damned if she wouldn’t.

Instead, she followed him up the hail.

“Hello.” He stopped just short of the open doorway—maybe he had some sense left, a little, anyway-and then cautiously poked one eye around the jamb. “Hell-” He stopped. That funny hissing was louder than ever now, a shaky sort of sound, loose, almost like—She looked over his shoulder, not wanting to but not able to help herself. Steven had gone white above his ban-danna, and that wasn’t a good sign.

No, not a hissing, not really. A rattling.

It was the dining room. The family had been about to eat what looked like the evening meal-although not this evening’s meal, she saw that right away. There were flies buzzing over the pot roast, and some of the slices were already supporting colonies of maggots.

The creamed corn had congealed in its bowl. The gravy was a greasy clot in its boat.

Three people were seated at the table: a woman, a man, and a baby in a high chair. The woman was still wearing the full-length apron in which she had cooked the meal. The baby wore a bib which read I’M A BIG Boy NOW. He was slumped sideways behind his tray, on which were several stiff-looking orange slices. He regarded Cynthia with a frozen grin. His face was purple. His eyes bulged from puffy sockets like glass marbles.

His parents were equally puffed. She could see several pairs of holes on the man’s face, small ones, almost hypodermic-sized, one set in the side of his nose.

Several large rattlesnakes were on the table, crawling restlessly among the dishes, shaking their tails. As she looked, the bodice of the woman’s apron bulged. For one moment Cynthia thought the woman was still alive in spite of her purple face and glazed eyes, that she was breathing, and then a triangular snake’s head pushed up through the ruffles, and tiny black buckshot eyes looked across at her.

The snake opened its mouth and hissed. Its tongue danced.

And more of them. Snakes on the floor under the table, crawling over the dead man’s shoes. Snakes beyond them, in the kitchen-she could see a huge one, a diamond-back, slithering along the Formica counter beneath the microwave.

The ones on the floor were coming for them, and coming fast.

Run! she shrieked at herself, and found she couldn’t move-it was as if her shoes had been glued to the floor. She hated snakes above all creatures; they revolted her in some fundamental sense far below her ability to articulate or understand. And this house was full of them, there could be more behind them, between them and the door—Steve grabbed her and yanked her backward. When he saw she was unable to run, he picked her up and ran with her in his arms, pelting down the hallway and out into the night, carrying her over the threshold and into the dark like a bridegroom in reverse.

“Steve, did you see-”

The door on her side of the truck was still open. He threw her inside, slammed her door, then ran around to his side and got in. He looked through the windshield at the rectangle of light falling through the open door of the ranch-house, then at her. His eyes were huge above the bandanna.

“Sure I saw,” he said. “Every snake in the mother-fucking universe, and all of them coming at us.”

“I couldn’t run… snakes, they scare me so bad m sorry.”

“My fault for getting us in there in the first place.” He put the truck in reverse and backed jerkily out of the 21 driveway, swinging around so the truck—s nose was pointed east, toward the fallen bikes, the flattened piece of fence, and the dancing blinker-light. “We’re getting the fuck back to Highway 50 so fast it’ll make your head spin.” He stared at her with horrified perplexity. “They were there, weren’t they. I mean, I didn’t just hallucinate em-they were there.”

“Yes. Now just go, Steve, drive.”

He did, going faster now but still not fast enough to be dangerous. She admired his control, especially since he was so obviously rocked back on his heels. At the 21 blinker he turned left and headed north, back the way they had come.

“Try the radio,” he said as the hideous little town at last began to fall behind them. “Find some tunes. Just no achy-breaky heart. I draw the line at that.”

“Okay.”

She bent forward toward the dash, glancing into the rearview mirror mounted outside her window as she did. For just a moment she thought she saw a wink of light back there, swinging in an arc. It could have been a flash-light, it could have been some peculiar reflection kicked across the glass by the dancing blinker, or it could have been just her imagination. She preferred to believe that last one. In any case it was gone now, smothered in flying dust. She thought briefly about mentioning it to Steve and decided not to. She didn’t think he’d want to go back and investigate, she thought he was every bit as freaked out as she was at this point, but it was wise never to underesti-mate a man’s capacity to play John Wayne.

But if there are people back there—She gave her head a small, decisive shake. No. She wasn’t falling for that. Maybe there were people alive back there, doctors and lawyers and Indian chiefs, but there was also something very bad back there. The best thing they could do for any survivors who might remain in Desperation was to get help.

Besides, I didn’t really see anything. I’m almost sure I didn’t.

She turned on the radio, got a barrage of static all the way across the dial when she pushed the SEEK button, turned it off again.

“Forget it, Steve. Even the local shitkicking station is-”

“What the fuck.” he asked in a high, screamy voice that was completely unlike his usual one. “What the blue fuck.”

“I don’t see-” she began, and then she did. Something ahead of them, some huge shape looming in the flying dust. It had big yellow eyes. She put her hands to her mouth, but they weren’t quite in time to catch her scream. Steve hit the brakes with both feet.

Cynthia, who hadn’t fastened her seatbelt, was thrown against the dashboard, just managing to get her forearms up in time to spare her head a bump.

“Christ almighty,” Steve said. His voice sounded a little more normal. “How the hell did that get in the road.”

“What is it.” she asked, and knew even before the question was out of her mouth. No Jurassic Park mon-strosity (her first thought, God help her), and no oversized piece of mining equipment. No big yellow eyes, either. What she’d mistaken for eyes had been the reflection of their own headlights in a sheet of window-glass. A pic-ture-window, to be exact. It was a trailer. In the road. Blocking the road.

Cynthia looked to her left and saw that the stake fence between the road and the trailer park had been knocked over. Three of the trailers-the biggest ones-were gone; she could tell where they had been by the cement-block foundations upon which they had sat.

Those trailers were now drawn across the road, the biggest in front, the others behind it like a secondary wall put up in case the main line of defense is breached. One of these latter two was the rusty Airstream on which the Rattlesnake Trailer Park’s satellite dish had been mounted. The dish itself now lay upended at the edge of the park like a vast black hubcap. It had taken down some lady’s clothesline when it fell. Pants and shirts flapped from it.

“Go around,” she said.

“I can’t on this side of the road-the dropoff’s too steep. The trailer park side’s pretty steep, too, but-”

“You can do it,” she said, fighting back the quiver in her voice. “And you owe me. I went in that house with you-”

“Okay, okay.” He reached for the transmission lever, probably meaning to drop it into the lowest gear, and then his hand froze in midair. He cocked his head. She heard it a second later and her first panicky thought was (they ’re here oh Jesus they got in the truck somehow) of snakes. But this wasn’t the same. This was a harsh whining sound, almost like a piece of paper caught in a fan, or—Something came falling out of the dancing air above them, something that looked like a big black stone. It hit the windshield hard enough to make a bullet-snarl of opacity at the point of impact and send long, silvery cracks shooting out in either direction. Blood-it looked black in this light-splatted across the glass like an inkblot. There was a nasty crack-crunch as the kamikaze accordioned in on itself, and for a moment she saw one of its merciless, dying eyes peering in at her. She screamed again, this time making no attempt to muffle it with her hands.

There was another hard thud, this one from over their heads. She looked up and saw the roof of the cab was dented down. “Steve, get us out of here!” she cried.

He turned on the wipers, and one of them pushed the squashed buzzard down onto the outside air vents. It lay there in a lump like some bizarre tumor with a beak. The other wiper smeared blood and feathers across the glass in a fan. Sand immediately started to stick in this mess. Steve goosed the washer-fluid switch. The windshield cleared a little near the top, but the bottom part was hope-less; the hulk of the dead bird made it impossible for the wiper-blades to do their job.

“Steve,” she said. She heard his name coming out of her mouth but couldn’t feel it; her lips were numb. And her midsection felt entirely gone. No liver, no lights, just an empty place filled with its own whistling windstorm. “Under the trailer. Coming out from under that trailer. See them.”

She pointed. He saw. The sand had drifted crosswise along the tar in east-west lines that looked like clutching fingers. Later, if the wind kept up at this pitch, those dunelets would fatten to arms, but now they were just fin-gers. Emerging from beneath the trailer, strutting like the vanguard of an advancing army, was a battalion of scorpions. She couldn’t tell how many-how could she, when she was still finding it difficult to believe she was seeing them at all. Less than a hundred, probably, but still dozens of them.

Dozens.

There were snakes crawling among and behind them, wriggling along in rapid s-shapes, sliding over the ridges of sand with the ease of water moccasins speeding across a pond.

They can’t get in here, she told herself, take it easy, they can’t get in!

No, and maybe they didn’t want to. Maybe they weren’t supposed to. Maybe they were supposed to—Came another of those harsh whickering sounds, this time on her side of the truck, and she leaned toward Steve, cringed toward Steve with her right arm held up to protect the side of her face. The buzzard hit the passenger window of the truck like a bomb filled with blood instead of explosive. The glass turned milky and sagged in toward her, holding for the time being. One of the buzzard’s wings flapped weakly at the windshield. The wiper on her side tore a chunk of it off.

“it’s all right!” he cried, almost laughing and putting an arm around her as he echoed her thought. “It’s okay, they can ‘t get in!”

“Yes, they can!” she shouted back. “The birds can, if we stay here! If we give them time!

And the snakes the scorpions.

“What. What are you saying.”

“Could they make holes in the tires.” It was the RV she was seeing in her mind’s eye, all its tires flat… the RV, and the purplefaced man back there in the ranch—house, his face tattooed with holes in pairs, holes so small they looked almost like flecks of red pepper.

“They could, couldn’t they. Enough of them, all stinging and biting at once, they could.”

“No,” he said, and gave a strange little yawp of laughter. “Little bitty desert scorpions, four inches long, stingers no bigger than thorns, are you kidding.” But then the wind dropped momentarily, and from beneath them—already from beneath them-they heard scurrying, jos-tling sounds, and she saw something she could have skipped: he didn’t believe what he was saying. He wanted to,but he didn’t.

The cellular phone was lying all the way across the holding area, at the foot of a file—cabinet with a PAT BUCHANAN FOR PRESIDENT sticker on it. The gadget didn’t look broken, but—Johnny pulled up the antenna and flipped it open. The phone beeped and the S appeared, good, but there were no transmission-bars, bad. Very bad. Still, he had to try. He pushed the NAME/MENU button until STEVE appeared, then squeezed the SEND button.

“Mr. Marinville.” It was Mary, standing in the door-way. “We have to go. The cop-”

“I know, I know, just a second.”

Nothing. No ring, no robot, no reception. Just a very faint hollow roaring sound, the sort of thing you heard in a conch shell.

“Fucked,” he said, and closed the phone’s speaker-pad. “But that was Steve, I know it was. If we’d only gotten outside thirty seconds sooner… thirty cocksucking little seconds…

“Johnny, please.”

“Coming.” He followed her back downstairs.

Mary had the Rossi shotgun in her hand, and when they were back outside, Johnny saw that David Carver had taken back the pistol and was holding it beside his leg. Ralph now held one of the rifles. He had it in the crook of his arm, like he thought he was Dan’l Boone. Oh, Johnny, a mocking voice spoke up from inside his head-it was Terry, the never-say-die bitch who had gotten him into this fuckarow in the first place. Don’t tell me you’re jealous of Mr. Suburban Ohio-you.

Well, maybe. Just a little. Mostly because Mr. Sub-urban Ohio’s rifle was loaded, unlike the Mossberg shot-gun which Johnny now picked up.

“That’s a Ruger.44,” the old man was telling Ralph. “Four rounds. I left the chamber empty. If you have to shoot, remember that.”

“I will,” Ralph said.

“She’ll kick you hard. Remember that, too.”

Billingsley lifted the last gun, the.30.-.06. For a moment Johnny thought the old fart was going to offer to trade him, but he didn’t. “All right,” he said, “I guess we’re ready. Don’t shoot at any varmints unless they come at us. You’d just miss, use up ammunition, and probably draw more. Do you understand that, Carver.”

“Yes,” Ralph said.

“Son.”

“Yes.”

“Ma’ am.”

“Yes,” Mary said. She sounded resigned to being a ma’am, at least until she got back to civilization.

“And I won’t swing unless they get close, I promise,” Johnny said. It was supposed to be a joke, a little mood—brightener, but all it earned him from Billingsley was a look of cool contempt. It wasn’t a look Johnny thought he deserved.

“Do you have a problem with me, Mr. Billingsley.” he asked.

“I don’t care for your looks much,” Billingsley shot back. “We don’t have much respect out in these parts for older folks who wear their hair long. As to whether or not I have a problem with you, that I couldn’t say just yet.”

“So far as I can see, what you do to folks out in these parts is gutshoot them and then hang them on hooks like deer, so maybe you’ll pardon me if I don’t take your opin-ions too deeply to heart.”

“Now listen here-”

“And if that hair’s laying across your ass because you missed your daily quart of sour mash, don’t take it out on me.” He was ashamed at the way the old man’s eyes flick-ered when he said that, and at the same time he was bit-terly gratified. You knew your own, by God. There were a lot of know-it-all buttheads in Alcoholics Anonymous, but they were right about that. You knew your own even when you couldn’t smell the booze on their breath or wafting out of their pores. You could almost hear them pinging in your head like sonar.

“Stop it!” Mary snapped at him. “If you want to be an asshole, do it on your own time!”

Johnny looked at her, wounded by her tone of voice, wanting to say something childish like Hey, he started itf “Where should we go.” David asked. He shone his light across the street, at the Desperation Coffee Shop and Video Stop. “Over there. The coyotes and the buzzard I saw are gone.

“Too close, I think,” Ralph said. “What about we get out of here completely. Did you find any car-keys.”

Johnny rummaged and came up with the keyring David had taken from the dead cop.

“Only one set on here. I imagine they go to the cruiser Entragian was driving.”

—‘Is driving,” David said. “It’s gone. It’s what he took my mom away in.” His face as he said this was unread able. His father put a hand on the back of the boy’s neck “It might be safer not to be driving just now, anyway, Ralph said. “A car’s pretty conspicuous when it’s the only one on the road.”

“Anyplace will do, at least to start with,” Mary said.

“Anyplace, yeah, but the farther from the cop’s home base, the better,” Johnny said.

“That’s the asshole’s opin-ion, anyhow.”

Mary gave him an angry look. Johnny bore it, not looking away. After a moment she did, flustered.

Ralph said, “We might do well to hide up, at least for a little while.”

“Where.” Mary asked.

“Where do you think, Mr. Billingsley.” David asked.

“The American West,” he said after a moment’s thought. “Reckon that’d do to start with.”

“What is it.” Johnny asked. “A bar.”

“Movie theater,” Mary said. “I saw it when he drove us into town. It looked closed up.”

Billingsley nodded. Is. Would have been torn down ten year ago, if there was anything to put up in its place. It’s locked, but I know a way in. Come on. And remember what I said about the varmints. Don’t shoot unless you have to.”

“And stay close together,” Ralph added. “Lead the way, Mr. Billingsley.”

Once again Johnny brought up the rear as they set off north along Main Street, their shoulders hunched against the scouring drive of the west wind. Johnny looked ahead at Billingsley, who just happened to know a way into the town’s old deserted movie theater.

Billingsley, who turned out to have all sorts of opinions on all sorts of issues, once you got him wound up a little. You’re a late—stage alcoholic, aren’t you, my friend. Johnny thought. You’ve got all the bells and whistles.

If so, the man was operating well for one who hadn’t had a shot in awhile. Johnny wanted something to reduce the throb in his nose, and he suspected that getting a drink into old Tommy at the same time might be an investment in their future.

They were passing beneath the battered awning of Des-peration’s Owl’s Club. “Hold it,”

Johnny said. “Going in here for a minute.”

“Are you nuts.” Mary asked. “We have to get off the street!”

“There’s nobody on the street but us,” Johnny said, “didn’t you notice.” He moderated his voice, tried to sound reasonable. “Look, I just want to get some aspirin. My nose is killing me. Thirty seconds-a minute, max.”

He tried the door before she could answer. It was locked. He hit the glass with the rifle butt, actually looking forward to the bray of the burglar alarm, but the only sound was the tinkle of glass falling onto the floor inside and the relentless howl of the wind. Johnny knocked out the few jagged bits of glass sticking up from the side of the doorframe, then reached through and felt for the lock.

“Look,” Ralph murmured. He pointed across the street. Four coyotes stood on the sidewalk in front of a squat brick building with the word UTILITY printed on one window and WATER on the other. They didn’t move, but their eyes were trained on the little cluster of people across the street. A fifth came trotting down the sidewalk from the south and joined them.

Mary raised the Rossi and pointed it toward the coy-otes. David Carver pushed it down again. His face was distant, abstracted. “No, it’s all right,” he said. “They’re just watching.”

Johnny found the lock, turned it, and opened the door The light-switches were to the left.

They turned on a bank of old-fashioned fluoreseents, the kind that look like inverted ice—cube trays. These illuminated a little restau rant area (deserted), a cluster of slot machines (dark), and a pair of blackjack tables. Hanging from one of the light fixtures was a parrot.

Johnny at first thought it must be stuffed, but when he got a little closer, he observed the bulging eyes and the splatter of mixed blood and guano on the wood below it. It was real enough. Someone had strung it up.

Entragian must not have liked the way it said “Polly want a cracker,” Johnny thought.

The Owl’s smelled of old hamburgers and beer. At the far end of the room was a little shopping area. Johnny took a large bottle of generic aspirin, then went behind the bar.

“Hurry up!” Mary cried at him. “Hurry up, can’t you7 “Right there,” he said. A man in dark pants and a shirt that had once been white was lying on the dirty linoleum floor, staring up at Johnny with eyes as glassy as those of the hanged parrot. The bartender, from the look of his clothes. His throat had been cut.

Johnny pulled a quart of Jim Beam off the shelf.

He held it up to the light for a moment, checking the level, then hurried out. A thought—not a nice one-tried to surface and he shoved it back down. Hard. He wanted to lubricate the old horse-doctor, that was all, keep him loose. When you got right down to it, it was an act of Christian charity.

You ’re nwre than a sweetheart, Terry said inside his head. You’re really a saint, aren’t you. St. John the Lubricator. And then her cynical laughter.

Shut up, bitch, he thought… but as always, Terry was reluctant to go.

Be coot, Steven, he told himself. It’s the only way you’ll get out of this. If you panic, I think there’s a good chance both of you are going to die in this goddam rented truck.

He put the transmission in reverse, and, steering by the outside mirror (he didn’t dare open his door and lean out; it would be too easy for a dive-bombing buzzard to break his neck), began to move backward. The wind had picked up again, but he could still hear the crunching from under the truck as they rolled over the scorpions. It reminded him of how cereal sounded when you were chewing it.

Don’t drive off the side, for Christ’s sake don’t do that.

“They’re not following,” Cynthia said. The relief in her voice was unmistakable.

He took a look, saw that she was right, and stopped. He had backed up about fifty feet, far enough so that the lead trailer across the road was just a vague shape in the blowing sand again. He could see brown blotches against the whitish-gray sand in the road.

Squashed scorpions. From here they looked like pats of cowdung. And the others were retreating. In another moment he would find it hard to believe they had been there at all.

Oh, they were, he thought. If you start doubting that, old buddy, all you have to do is take a look at the dead bird currently blocking the air-vents at the bottom of the windshield.

“What do we do now.” she asked.

“I don’t know.” He looked out his window and saw the Desert Rose Cafe. Half of its pink awning had come down in the wind. He looked out the other window, past Cyn-thia, and saw a vacant lot with three boards nailed across the entrance. KEEP OUT OF HERE had been painted across the center board in sloppy white capitals, presumably by someone who didn’t believe in Western hospitality.

“Something wants to keep us in town,” she said. “You know that, don’t you.”

He backed the Ryder truck into the parking lot of the Desert Rose, trying to think of a plan. What came instead was a series of disjointed images and words. The doll lying face-down at the bottom of the RV’s steps. The Tractors, saying her name was Emergency and her tele-phone number was 911. Johnny Cash, saying he built it one piece at a time. Bodies on hooks, a tigerfish swim-ming between the fingers of the hand at the bottom of the aquarium, the baby’s bib, the snake on the kitchen counter under the microwave.

He realized he was on the edge of panic, maybe on the edge of doing something really stupid, and groped for anything that would pull him back from the edge, get him thinking straight again. What came to his mind, unbidden, was something he never would have expected. It was an image-clearer than any of the preceding ones-of the piece of stone sculpture they had seen on the computer table in the mining corporation’s Quonset. The coyote with the strange, twisted head and the starting eyeballs, the coyote whose tongue had been a snake.

There ought to be a picture of that thing next to ugly in the dictionary, Cynthia had said, and she was right about that, oh yes, no question, but Steve was suddenly over-whelmed by the idea that anything that ugly also had to be powerful.

Are you kidding. he thought distractedly. The radio turned on and off when you touched it, the lights flick-ered, the aquarium fucking exploded. Of course it’s powerful.

“What was that little piece of statuary we found back there.” he asked. “What was up with that.”

“I don’t know. I only know that when I touched it…

“What. When you touched it, what.”

“It seemed like I remembered every rotten thing that ever happened to me in my life,” she said. “Sylvia Mar-cucci spitting on me in the eighth grade, out in the play-ground-she said I stole her boyfriend, and I didn’t even know who the hell she was talking about. The time my dad got drunk at my Aunt Wanda’s second wedding and felt my ass while we were dancing and pretended it was a mistake. Like his hardon was a mistake, too.” Her hand crept to the side of her head. “Gettin yelled at. Gettin dumped on. Richie Judkins, almost ripping my fuckin ear off. I thought of all those things.”

“Yeah, but what did you really think of.”

She looked for a moment as if she were going to tell him not to be a wise-ass, then didn’t.

“Sex,” she said, and let out a shaky sigh. “Not just fucking, either. All of it. The dirtier the better.”

Yes, he thought, the dirtier the better. Things you might like to try but would never talk about. Experimental stuff “What are you thinking about.” Her voice was oddly sharp, at the same time oddly pungent, like a smell. Steve looked over at her and suddenly wondered if her pussy was tight. An insane thought to be having at a time like this, but it was what came into his head.

“Steve.” Sharper than ever. “What are you thinking.”

“Nothing,” he said. His voice was thick, the voice of a man struggling out of a deep sleep. “Nothing, never mind.”

“Does it start with C and end with E.”

Actually, my dear, “cunt” ends with a T, but you’re in the ballpark.

What was wrong with him. What in God’s name. It was as if that funny piece of rock had turned on another radio, this one in his head, and it was broadcasting a voice that was almost his own.

“What are you talking about.” he asked her.

“Coyote, coyote,” she said, lilting the words like a child. No, she wasn’t accusing him of anything, although he supposed that briefly thinking so had been a natural enough mistake; she was just falling all over herself with excitement. “The thing we saw back in the lab! If we had it, we could get out of here! I know we could, Steve! And don’t waste my time-our time-by telling me I’m crazy!”

Considering the stuff they had seen and the stuff that had happened to them in the last ninety minutes or so, he had no intention of doing that. If she was crazy, they both were.

But—“You told me not to touch it.” He was still struggling to talk; it was as if there were mud packed into his think-ing equipment. “You said it felt Felt what. What had she said.

Nice. That was it. “Touch it, Steve. It feels nice.”

No. Wrong.

“You said it felt nasty.”

She smiled at him. In the green glow of the dashlights, the smile looked cruel. “You want to feel something nasty. Feel this.”

She took his hand, put it between her legs, and twitched her hips upward twice. Steve closed his hand on her down there-hard enough to hurt, maybe-but her smile stayed on.

Widened, even.

What are we doing. And why in God’s name are we doing it now.

He heard the voice, but it was almost lost-like a voice screaming fire in a ballroom full of yelling people and jagged music. The cleft between her legs was closer, more urgent. He could feel it right through her jeans, and it was burning. Burning.

She said her name was Emergency and asked to see my gun, Steve thought. You’re going to see it, all right, honey, thirty-eight pistol on a forty-five frame, shoots tombstone bullets with a ball and chain.

He made a tremendous effort to catch hold of himself, grabbing for anything that would shut the pile down before the containment rods melted. What he got hold of was an image-the curious, wary expression on her face as she looked at him through the truck’s open passenger door, not getting in right away, wide blue eyes checking him out first, trying to decide if he was the kind of guy who might bite or maybe try to yank something off her. An ear, for instance. Are you a nice person. she’d asked him, and he had said Yeah, I guess so, and then, nice person that he was, he had brought her to this town of the dead, and his hand was in her crotch, and he was thinking he’d like to fuck her and hurt her at the same time, kind of an expenment, you could say, one having to do with plea-sure and pain, the sweet and the salty. Because that was the way it was done in the place of the wolf, that was how it was done in the house of the scorpion, it was what passed for love in Desperation.

Are you a nice person. Not a crazy serial killer or any-thing. Are you nice, are you nice, are you a nice person.

He pulled his hand away from her, shuddering. He turned to the window and looked out into the blowing blackness where sand danced like snow. He could feel sweat on his chest and arms and in his armpits, and although it was a little better now, he still felt like a sick man between fits of delirium. Now that he had thought of the stone wolf, he couldn’t unthink it, it seemed; he kept seeing its crazy corkscrewed head and bulging eyes. It hung in his head like an unsatisfied habit.

“What’s wrong.” she moaned from beside him. “Oh, Jesus, Steve, I didn’t mean to do that, what’s wrong with us.”

“I don’t know,” he said hoarsely, “but I’ll tell you something I do know-we just got us a little taste of what happened in this town, and I don’t like it much. I can’t get that fucking stone thing out of my mind.”

He finally found enough courage to look at her. She was all the way over against the passenger door, like a scared teenager on a first date that had gone too far, and although she looked calm enough, her cheeks were fiery red and she was wiping away tears with the side of her hand.

“Me, either,” she said. “I remember once I got a little piece of glass in my eye. That’s what this feels like. I keep thinking I’d like to take that stone and rub it against my… you know. Except it’s not much like thinking. It’s not like thinking at all.”

“I know,” he said, wishing savagely that she hadn’t said that. Because now the idea was in his mind, too. He saw himself rubbing that ugly damned thing-ugly but pow-erful—against his erect penis. And from there he saw the two of them fucking on the floor beneath that row of hooks, beneath those dangling corpses, with that crum-bling gray piece of stone held between them, in their teeth.

Steve swept the images away… although how long he would be able to keep them away he didn’t know. He looked at her again and managed a smile. “Don’t call me cookie,” he said. “Don’t call me cookie and I won’t call you cake.”

She let out a long, trembling, half-vocalized breath that fell just a little short of laughter.

“Yeah. Somethin like that, anyway. I think it might be getting a little better.”

He nodded cautiously. Yes. He still had a world-class hardon, and he could badly use a reprieve from that, but now his thoughts seemed a little more his own. If he could keep them diverted from that piece of stone a little while longer, he thought he’d be okay. But for a few seconds there it had been bad, maybe the worst thing that had ever happened to him. In those seconds he had known how guys like Ted Bundy must feel. He could have killed her. Maybe would have killed her, if he hadn’t broken his physical contact with her when he had. Or, he supposed, she might have killed him. It was as if sex and murder had somehow changed places in this horrible little town. Except even sex wasn’t what it was about, not really. He remembered how, when she had touched the wolf, the lights had flickered and the radio had come back on.

“Not sex,” he said. “Not murder, either. Power.”

“Huh.”

“Nothing. I’m going to drive us right back through the middle of town. Out toward the mine.”

“That big wall off to the south.”

He nodded. “It’s an open-pit. There’ll have to be at least one equipment road out there that cuts back to 50. We’re going to find it and take it. I’m actually glad this one is blocked off. I don’t want to go anywhere near that Quonset, or that-”

She reached out and grabbed his arm. Steve followed her gaze and saw something come slinking into the arc of the truck’s headlights. The dust was now so thick that at first the animal looked like a ghost, some Indian-conjured spirit from a hundred years ago. It was a timberwolf, easily the length and height of a German Shepherd, but leaner. Its eyes were sockets of crimson in the headlights. Following it like attendants in some malign fairy-tale were two files of desert scorpions with their stingers furled over their backs.

Flanking the scorpions were coyotes, two on each side. They appeared to be grinning nervously.

The wind gusted. The truck rocked on its springs. To their left, the fallen piece of awning flapped like a torn sail.

“The wolf’s carrying something,” she said hoarsely.

“You’re nuts,” he said, but as it drew closer, he saw that she wasn’t nuts. The wolf stopped about twenty feet from the truck, as bald and real as something in a high—resolution crime-scene photograph. Then it lowered its head and dropped the thing it had been holding in its mouth. It looked at it attentively for a moment, then backed off three steps. It sat down and began to pant.

It was the statue-fragment, lying there on its side at the entrance to the cafe parking lot, lying there in the blowing dust, mouth snarling, head twisted, eyes starting from their sockets. Fury, rage, sex, power-it seemed to broad-cast these things at the truck in a tight cone, like some sort of magnetic field.

The image of fucking Cynthia recurred, of being buried in her like a sword jammed hilt—deep in hot, packed mud, the two of them face-to-face, lips drawn back in identical snarls as they gripped the snarling stone coyote between them like a thong.

“Should I get it.” she asked, and now she was the one who sounded as if she were sleeping.

“Are you kidding.” he asked. His voice, his Texas accent, but not his words, not now.

These words were coming from the radio in his head, the one the piece of stone statue had turned on.

Its eyes, glaring at him from where it lay in the dust.

“What, then.”

He looked at her and grinned. The expression felt ghastly on his face. It also felt wonderful. “We’ll get it together, of course. Okay by you.”

His mind was the storm now, filled with roaring wind from side to side and top to bottom, driving before it the images of what he would do to her, what she would do to him, and what they would do to anyone who got in their way.

She grinned back, her thin cheeks stretching upward until it was like looking at a skull grin. Greenish-white light from the dashboard painted her brow and lips, filled in her eyesockets. She stuck her tongue out through that grin and flicked it at him, like the snake-tongue of the statue. He stuck his own tongue out and wriggled it back at her. Then he groped for the doorhandle. He would race her to the fragment, and they would make love among the scorpions with it held in their mouths between them, and whatever happened after that wouldn’t matter.

Because in a very real sense, they would be gone.

Johnny came back out onto the sidewalk and handed the bottle of Jim Beam to Billingsley, who looked at it with the unbelieving eyes of a man who has just been told he’s won the Powerball lottery. “There you go, Tom,” he said. “Have yourself a tonk-just the one, mind you-and then pass it on. None for me, I’ve taken the pledge.” He looked across the street, expecting to see more coyotes, but there were still just the five of them.

I’ll take the fifth, Johnny thought, watching as the veteri-narian spun the cap off the bottle of whiskey. You’d go along with that, wouldn’t you, Tom. Of course you would.

“What is wrong with you.” Mary asked him. “Just what in the hell is wrong with you.”

“Nothing,” Johnny said. “Well, a broken nose, but I guess that isn’t what you meant, is it.”

Billingsley tilted the bottle back with a short, sharp flick of the wrist that looked as practiced as a nurse’s injection technique, and then coughed. Tears welled in his eyes. He put the mouth of the bottle to his lips again, and Johnny snatched it away. “Nope, I don’t think so, oldtimer.”

He offered the bottle to Ralph, who took it, looked at it, then bit off a quick swallow.

Ralph then offered it to Mary.

“Go on,” Ralph said. His voice was quiet, almost humble. “Better if you do.”

She looked at Johnny with hateful, perplexed eyes, then took a nip from the bottle. She coughed, holding it away from her and looking at it as if it were toxic. Ralph took it back, plucked the cap from Billingsley’s left hand, and put it back on. During this, Johnny opened the bottle of aspirin, shook out half a dozen, bounced them in his hand for a moment, then tossed them into his mouth.

“Come on, Doe,” he said to Billingsley. “Lead the way. — They started down the street, Johnny telling them as they went why he had all but broken his neck to get his cellular phone back. The coyotes on the other side of the street got up and paced them. Johnny didn’t care for that much, but what were they supposed to do about it. Try shooting at them. Pretty noisy. At least there was no sign of the cop. And if they saw him before they made it down to the movie theater, they could always duck into one of these other places. Any old port in a storm.

He swallowed, grimacing at the burn as the half—liquefied aspirin slid down his throat, and tried to put the bottle into his breast pocket. It bumped the top of the phone. He took it out, put the bottle of pills in its place, started to shove the cellular into his pants pocket, then decided it couldn’t hurt to try again. He pulled the antenna and flipped the phone open. Still no transmission—bars. Zilch “You really think that was your friend.” David asked.

“I think so, yes.”

David held out his hand. “Could I try it.”

Something in his voice. His father heard it, too. Johnny could see it in the way the man was looking at him.

“David. Son. Is something wr-”

“Could I try it please.”

“Sure, if you want.” He held the useless phone out to the boy, and as David took it, Johnny saw three transmis-sion-bars appear beside the S. Not one or two but three.

“Son of a bitch!” he breathed, and grabbed the phone back. David, who had been studying the keypad func-tions, saw him reaching a moment too late to stop him.

The moment the cellular phone was back in Johnny’s hand, the transmission-bars disappeared again, leaving only the S.

They were never there in the first place, you know that, don’t you. You hallucinated them. You—“Give it back!” David shouted. Johnny was stunned by the anger in his voice.

The phone was snatched away again, but not too fast for him to see the transmission-bars reappear, glowing gold in the dark.

“This is so damned dumb,” Mary said, looking first back over her shoulder, then at the coyotes across the street. They had stopped when the people had. “But if it’s the way you want to play it, why don’t we just drag a table out and get drunk in the middle of the fucking street.”

No one paid any attention. Billingsley was still looking at the bottle of Beam. Johnny and Ralph were staring at the kid, who was stuttering his finger on the NAME/MENU button with the speed of a veteran video-game player, hurrying past Johnny’s agent and ex-wife and editor, finally getting to STEVE.

“David, what is it.” Ralph asked.

David ignored him and turned urgently to Johnny. “Is this him, Mr. Marinville. Is the guy with the truck Steve.”

“Yes.”

David pushed SEND.

Steve had heard of being saved by the bell, but this was ridiculous.

Just as his fingers found the doorhandle-and he could hear Cynthia grabbing for hers on the other end of the seat-the cellular telephone gave out its nasal, demanding cry: Hmeep!

Hmeep!

Steve froze. Looked at the phone. Looked across the seat at Cynthia, whose door was actually open a little. She was staring back at him, the grin on her lips fading.

Hmeep! Hmeep!

“Well.” she asked. “Aren’t you going to answer that.” And there was something in her tone, something so wifely, that he laughed.

Outside, the wolf pointed its nose into the darkness and howled, as if it had heard Steve’s laughter and dis-approved. The coyotes seemed to take that howl as a signal. They got up and disappeared back the way they bad come, walking into the blowing dust with their heads lowered. The, scorpions were already gone. If, that was, they had been there at all.

They might not have been; his bead felt like a haunted house, one filled with hallucjna-tions and false memories instead of ghosts.

Hmeep! Hmeep!

He grabbed the phone off the dashboard, pushed the SEND button, and put it to his ear.

He stared out at the wolf as he did it. And the wolf stared back. “Boss. Boss, that you.”

Of course it was, who else would be calling him. Only it wasn’t. It was a kid.

“Is your name Steve.” the kid asked.

“Yes. How’d you get the boss’s phone. Where-”

“Never mind that,” the kid said. “Are you in trouble. You are, aren’t you.”

Steve opened his mouth. “I don’t-” Closed it again. Outside, the wind screamed around the cab of the Ryder truck. He held the little phone to the side of his face and looked over an oozing lump of buzzard at the wolf. He saw the chunk of statue lying in front of it as well. The crude images of intermingled sex and violence which had filled his mind were fading, but he could remember the power they had exercised over him the way he could remember certain vivid nightmares.

“Yeah,” he said. “I guess you could say that.”

“Are you in the truck we saw.”

“If you saw a truck, likely that was us, yeah. Is my boss with you.”

“Mr. Marinville’s here. He’s okay. Are you all right.”

“I don’t know,” Steve said. “There’s a wolf, and he brought this thing… it’s like a statue, only-”

Cynthia’s hand darted into the lower part of his vision and honked the horn. Steve jumped. At the entrance to the cafe parking lot, the wolf jumped, too. Steve could see its muzzle draw back in a snarl. Its ears flattened against its skull.

Doesn’t like the horn, he thought. Then another thought came, one of those simple ones that made you want to slam your hand against your own forehead, as if to punish your laggard brains. If it won’t get out of the way, I can run the fucker over, can’t I.

Yes. Yes, he could. After all, he was the one with the truck.

“What was that.” the kid asked sharply. Then, as if realizing that was the wrong question: “Why are you doing that.”

“We’ve got company. We’re trying to get rid of it.”

Cynthia honked the horn again. The wolf got to its feet. Its ears were still laid back. It looked pissed, but it also looked confused. When Cynthia honked the horn a third time, Steve put both of his hands over hers and helped. The wolf looked at them a moment longer, its head cocked and its eyes a nasty yellow-green in the glare of the headlights.

Then it bent, seized the piece of statuary in its teeth, and disappeared back the way it had come.

Steve looked at Cynthia, and she looked back at him. She still looked scared, but she was smiling a little just the same.

“Steve.” The voice was faint, dodging in and out of static-bursts. “Steve, are you there.”

“Yes.”

“Your company.”

“Gone. For the time being, at least. The question is, what do we do next. Any suggestions.”

“I might have.” Damned if it didn’t sound as if maybe he was smiling, too.

“What’s your name, kid.” Steve asked.

Behind them, back in the direction of the Mu-nicipal Building, something gave in to the wind and fell over with a huge loose crash. The sound made Mary wheel around in that direction, but she saw nothing. She was grateful for the mouthful of whiskey Carver had talked her into taking. Without it, that sound-she guessed it might have been some building’s false front tumbling into the street-would have had her halfway out of her skin.

The boy was still on the phone. The three men were gathered around him. Mary could see how badly Mar-inville wanted to take the phone back again; she could also see he didn’t quite dare. It’ll do you good not to be able to have what you want, Johnny, she thought.

Do you a world of good.

“I might have,” David said, smiling a 4ittle. He listened, gave his first name, then turned around so he was facing the Owl’s Club. He ducked his head, and when he spoke again, Mary could hardly hear him. A kind of dark wonder passed over her like a dizzy spell.

He doesn ‘t want the coyotes across the street to hear what he’s saying. I know how crazy that sounds, but it’s what he’s doing. And you know something even cra-zier. I think he’s right.

“There’s an old movie theater,” David said in a low voice. “It’s called The American West.” He glanced at Billingsley for confirmation.

Billingsley nodded. “Tell him to go around to the back,” he said, and Mary decided that if she was crazy, at least she wasn’t the only one; Billingsley also spoke in a low voice, and glanced over his shoulder, once, quickly, as if to make sure the coyotes weren’t creeping closer, trying to eavesdrop. After he had made sure they were still on the sidewalk in front of the Water and Utility Building, he turned back to David. “Tell him there’s an alley.”

David did. As he finished, something apparently occurred to Marinville. He started to grab for the phone, then restrained himself. “Tell him to park the truck away from the theater,” he said. The great American novelist also spoke in low tones, and he had one hand up to his mouth, as if he thought there might be a lipreader or two among the coyotes. “If he leaves it in front and Entragian comes back…

David nodded and passed this on, as well. Listened as Steve said something else, nodding, the smile resurfacing. Mary’s eyes drifted, to the coyotes. As she looked at them, she realized an exceedingly perverse thing: if they managed to hide from Entragian long enough to regroup and get out of town, part of her would be sorry. Because once this was over, she would have to confront the fact of Peter’s death; she would have to grieve for him and for the destruction of the life they had made together. And that was maybe not the worst of it. She would also have to think about all this, try and make some sense of it, and she wasn’t sure she could do it. She wasn’t sure any of them would be able to do it. Except maybe for David.

“Come as fast as you can,” he said. There was a faint bleep as he pushed the END button. He collapsed the antenna and handed the phone back to Marinville, who immediately pulled the antenna out again, studied the LED readout, shook his head, and closed the phone up.

“How’d you do it, David. Magic.”

The kid looked at him as if Marinville were crazy. “God,” he said.

“God, you dope,” Mary said, smiling in a way that did not feel familiar to her at all. This wasn’t the time to be pulling Marinville’s chain, but she simply couldn’t resist.

“Maybe you should have just told Mr. Marinville’s friend to come and pick us up,” Ralph said dubiously. “That probably would have been the simplest, David.”

“It’s not simple,” David replied. “Steve’ll tell you that when they get here.”

“They.” Marmnville asked.

David ignored him. He was looking at his father. “Also, there’s Mom,” he said. “We’re not leaving without her.”

“What are we going to do about them.” Mary asked, and pointed across the Street at the coyotes. She could have sworn that they not only saw the gesture but under-stood it.

Marinville stepped off the sidewalk and into the street, his long gray hair blowing out and making him look like an Old Testament prophet. The coyotes got to their feet, and the wind brought her the sound of their growls. Mar-inville had to be hearing them, too, but he went on another step or two nevertheless. He half-closed his eyes for a moment, not as if the sand was bothering them but as if he was trying to remember something. Then he clapped his hands together once, sharply. “Tak!” One of the coy-otes lifted its snout and howled. The sound made Mary shudder. “Tak, ah lah! Tak!”

The coyotes appeared to move a little closer together, but that was all.

Marinville clapped his hands again. “Tak!… Ah lah… Tak!… oh, shit on this, I was never any good at foreign languages, anyhow.” He stood looking disgusted and uncertain. That they might attack him-him and his unloaded Mossberg.22-seemed the furthest thing from his mind.

David stepped down from the sidewalk. His father grabbed at his collar. “It’s okay, Dad,”

David said.

Ralph let go, but followed as David went to Marinville. And then the boy said something Mary thought she might remember even if her mind succeeded in blocking the rest of this out-it was the sort of thing that came back to you in dreams, if nowhere else.

“Don’t speak to them in the language of the dead, Mr. Marinville.”

David took another step forward. Now he was alone in the middle of the street, with Ralph and Marmnville stand-ing behind him. Mary and Billingsley were behind them, up on the sidewalk. The wind had reached a single high shriek. Mary could feel the dust stinging her cheeks and forehead, but for the time being, that seemed far away, unimportant.

David put his hands together in front of his mouth, finger to finger, in that child’s gesture of prayer. Then he held them out again, palms up, in the direction of the coy-otes. “May the Lord bless you and keep you, may the Lord make his face to shine upon you, and lift you up, and give you peace,” he said. “Now get out of here. Take a hike.”

It was as if a swarm of bees had settled on them. They whirled in a clumsy, jostling mass of snouts and ears and teeth and tails, nipping at one another’s flanks and at their own.

Then they raced off, yapping and yowling in what sounded like some painful argument.

She could hear them, even with the contending shriek of the wind, for a long time.

David turned back, surveyed their dumbfounded faces — expressions too large to miss, even in the gloom-and smiled a little. He shrugged, as if to say Well, what are you gonna do. Mary observed that his face was still tinted Irish Spring green. He looked like the victim of an inept Halloween makeup job.

“Come on,” David said. “Let’s go.”

They clustered in the street. “And a little child shall lead them,” Marinville said. “So come on, child-lead.”

The five of them began trudging north along Main Street toward The American West.

“I think that’s it.” Cynthia pointed out her window. “See it.”

Steve, hunched over the wheel and squinting through the bloodsmeared windshield (although it was the sand sticking in the blood that was the real problem), nodded. Yes, he could see the old-fashioned marquee, held by rusty chains to the side of a weathered brick building. There was only one letter left on the marquee, a crooked R.

He turned left, onto the tarmac of the Conoco station. A sign reading BEST CIG PRICES IN TOWN had fallen over. Sand had piled against the concrete base of the single pump—island like a snowdrift.

“Where you going. I thought the kid told you the movie theater!”

“He also told me not to park the truck near it. He’s right, too. That wouldn’t… hey, there’s a guy in there!”

Steve brought the truck to a hard stop. There was indeed a guy in the Conoco station’s office, rocked back in his chair with his feet on his desk. Except for some-thing in his posture-mostly the awkward way his head was lying over on his neck-he could have been sleeping.

“Dead,” Cynthia said, and put a hand on Steve’s shoulder as he opened his door. “Don’t bother. I can tell from here.”

“We still need a place to hide the truck. If there’s room in the garage, I’ll open the door.

You drive in.” There was no need to ask if she could do it; he hadn’t forgotten the spiffy way she’d handled the truck out on Highway 50.

“Okay. But do it fast.”

“Believe me,” he said. He started to get out, then hesi-tated. “You are all right, aren’t you.”

She smiled. It clearly took some effort, but it was a working smile, all the same. “For the time being. You.”

“Smokin.”

He got out, slammed the door behind him, and hurried across the tarmac to the gas station’s office door. He was amazed at how much sand had accumulated already. It was as if the west wind were intent on burying the town. Judging from what he had seen of it so far, that wasn’t such a bad idea.

There was a tumbleweed caught in the recessed doorway, its skeletal branches rattling.

Steve booted it and it flew away into the night. He turned, saw that Cyn-thia was now behind the wheel of the truck, and gave her a little salute. She held her fists up in front of her, her face serious and intent, then popped the thumbs. Mission Con-trol, we are A-OK.

Steve grinned, nodded, and went inside. God, she could be funny. He didn’t know if she knew it or not, but she could be.

The guy in the office chair needed a spot of burying. Inside the shadow thrown by the bill of his cap, his face was purple, the skin stretched and shiny. It had been sten-cilled with maybe two dozen black marks. Not snakebites, and too small even to be scorpion stings—There was a skin magazine on the desk. Steve could read the title-Lesbo Sweethearts-upside down. Now something crawled over the edge of the desk and across the naked women on the cover. It was followed by two friends. The three of them reached the edge of the desk and stopped there in a neat line, like soldiers at parade rest.

Three more came out from under the desk and scurried across the dirty linoleum floor toward him. Steve took a step backward, set himself, then brought a workboot down, hard. He got two of the three. The other zigged to the right and raced off toward what was probably the bathroom. When Steve looked back at the desk, he saw there were now eight fellows lined up along the edge, like movie Indians on a ridge.

They were brown recluse spiders, also known as fiddle—back spiders, because the shape on their backs looked vaguely like a country fiddle. Steve had seen plenty in Texas, had even been stung by one while rooting in his Aunt Betty’s woodpile as a boy. Over in Arnette, that had been, and it had hurt like a bastard. Like an ant-bite, only hot. Now he understood why the dead man smelled so spoiled in spite of the dry climate. Aunt Betty had insisted on disinfecting the bite with alcohol immediately, telling him that if you ignored a fiddleback’s bite, the flesh 2 around it was apt to start rotting away. It was something in their spit. And if enough of them were to attack a person all at once…

Another pair of fiddlebacks appeared, these two crawling out of the dark crease at the center of the gas—jockey’s strokebook. They joined their pals. Ten, now. Looking at him.

He knew they were. Another one crawled out of the pump-jockey’s hair, journeyed down his fore-head and nose, over his puffed lips, across his cheek It was probably on its way to the convention at the edge of the desk, but Steve didn’t wait to see. He headed for the garage, turning up his collar as he went. For all he knew the goddam garage could be full of them. Recluse spiders liked dark places.

So be quick. Right.

There was a light-switch to the left of the door. He turned it. Half a dozen dirty fluorescents buzzed to life above the garage area. There were actually two bays, he saw.

In one was a pickup which had been raised on over—sized tires and customized into an all-terrain vehicle—silky blue metal-flake paint, THE DESERT ROVER written in red on the driver’s side of the cab. The other bay would do for the Ryder truck, though, if he moved a pile of tires and the recapping machine.

He waved to Cynthia, not knowing if she could actually see him or not, and crossed to the tires. He was bending over them when a rat leaped out of the dark hole in the 2 center of the stack and sank its teeth into his shirt. Steve cried out in surprise and revulsion and hit himself in the chest with his right fist, breaking its back. The rat began to wriggle and pedal its back legs in the air, squealing through its clenched teeth, trying to bite him.

“Ah, fuck!” Steve scream. “Ah, fuck, you fuck, let go, you little fuck!”

Not so little, though-it was almost the size of a full—grown cat. Steve leaned forward, bowing so his shirt would bell out (he did this without thinking, any more than he was aware he was screaming and cursing), then grabbed the rat’s hairless tail and yanked.

There was a harsh ripping sound as his shirt tore open, and then the rat was doubling over on the lumpy knuckles of its broken spine, trying to bite his hand.

Steve swung it by its tail like a lunatic Tom Sawyer, then let it fly. It zoomed across the garage, a ratsteroid, and smacked into the wall beyond THE DESERT ROVER. It lay still with its clawed feet sticking up. Steve stood watching it, making sure it wasn’t going to get up and come at him again. He was shuddering all over, and the noise that came out of his mouth made him sound cold—Brr—rrrr—ruhhh.

There was a long, tool-littered table to the right of the door. He snatched up a tire iron, holding it by the pry-bar end, and kicked over the stack of tires. They rolled like tiddlywinks. Two more rats, smaller ones, ran out, but they wanted no part of him; they sprinted, squeaking, toward the shadowy nether regions of the garage.

He couldn’t stand the sick ratblood heat against his skin another second. He tore his shirt the rest of the way open and then pulled it off. He did it one-handed. There was no way he was going to drop the tire iron. You’ll take my tire iron when you pry it from my cold dead fingers, he thought, and laughed. He was still shuddering. He exam-ined his chest carefully, obsessively, for any break in the skin. There was none. “Lucky,” he muttered to himself as he pulled the recapper over to the wall and then hurried to the garage door.

“Lucky, goddam lucky, fucking goddam rat-in-the-box.”

He pushed the button by the door and it began trundling up. He stepped to one side, giving Cynthia room, looking everywhere for rats and spiders and God knew what other nasty surprises. Next to the worktable was a gray me-chanic’s coverall hanging from a nail, and as Cynthia drove the Ryder truck into the garage, engine roaring and lights glaring, Steve began to beat this coverall with the tire iron, working from the legs up like a woman beating a rug, watching to see what might run out of the legs or armholes.

Cynthia killed the truck’s engine and slid down from the driver’s seat. “Whatcha doin.

Why’d you take your shirt off. You’ll catch your death of cold, the tempera ture’s already started to-”

“Rats.” He had reached the top of the coverall without spooking any wildlife; now he started working his way back down again. Better safe than sorry. He kept hearing the sound the rat’s spine had made when it broke, kept feeling the rat’s tail in his fist. Hot, it had been. Hot.

“Rats.” She. looked around, eyes darting.

“And spiders. The spiders are what got the guy in th He was suddenly alone, Cynthia out the open garage door and on the tarmac, standing in the wind and blowing sand with her arms wrapped around her thin shoulders “Spiders, ouug, I hate spiders! Worse’n snakes!” She sounded pissed, as if the spiders were his fault. “Get out of there!”

He decided the coverall was safe. He pulled it off the hook, started to toss the tire iron away, then changed his mind. Holding the coverall draped over one arm, he pushed the button beside the door and then went over to Cynthia. She was right, it was getting cold.

The alkali dust stung his bare shoulders and stomach. He began to wriggle his way into the coverall. It was going to be a little baggy in the gut, but better too big than too small, he supposed.

“I’m sorry,” she said, wincing and holding a hand to the side of her face as the wind gusted, driving a sheet of sand at them. “It’s just, spiders, ouug, so bad, I can’t… what kind.”

“You don’t want to know.” He zipped the coverall up the front, then put an arm around her. “Did you leave any thing in the truck.”

“My backpack, but I guess I can do without a change of underwear tonight,” she said, and smiled wanly. “What about your phone.”

He patted his left front jeans pocket through the cover-all. “Don’t leave home without it,”

he said. Something tickled across the back of his neck and be slapped at it madly, thinking of the brown recluses lined up so neatly along the edge of the desk, soldiers in some unknown cause out here in nowhere.

“What’s wrong.”

“I’m just a little freaked. Come on. Let’s go to the movies.”

“Oh,” she said in that prim little no-nonsense voice that just cracked him up. “A date.

Yes, thanks.”

As Tom Bittingsley led Mary, the Carvers, and America’s greatest living novelist (at least in the nov-elist’s opinion) down the alley between The American West and the Desperation Feed and Grain, the wind hooted above them like air blown across the mouth of a pop bottle.

“Don’t use the flashlights,” Ralph said.

“Right,” Billingsley said. “And watch out here. Gar-bage cans, and a pile of old crap.

Lumber, tin cans.”

They skirted around the huddle of cans and the pile of scrap lumber. Mary gasped as Marinville took her arm, at first not sure who it was. When she saw the long, somehow theatrical hair, she attempted to pull free. “Spare me the chivalry. I’m doing fine.”

“I’m not,” he said, holding on. “I don’t see for shit at night anymore. It’s like being blind.” He sounded dif-ferent. Not humble, exactly-she had an idea that John Marinville could no more be humble than some people could sing middle C off a pitch-pipe-but at least human. She let him hold on.

“Do you see any coyotes.” Ralph asked her in a low voice.

She restrained an urge to make a smart come-back-at least he hadn’t called her “ma’am.”

“No. But I can barely see my own hand in front of my face.”

“They’re gone,” David said. He sounded completely sure of himself. “At least for now.”

“How do you know.” Marinville asked.

David shrugged in the gloom. “Just do.”

And Mary thought they could probably trust him on it. That was how crazy things had gotten.

Billingsley led them around the corner. A rickety board fence ran along the backside of the movie theater, leaving a gap of about four feet. The old man walked slowly along this path with his hands held out. The others fol-lowed in single file; there was no room to double up. Mary was just starting to think Billingsley had gotten them down here on some sort of wild-goose chase when he stopped.

“Here we are.”

He bent, and Mary saw him pick something up-a crate, it looked like. He put it on top of another one, then stepped up onto the makeshift platform with a wince. He was standing in front of a dirty frosted-glass window. He put his hands on this, the fingers spread like starfish, and pushed. The window slid up.

“It’s the ladies’,” he said. “Watch out. There’s a little drop.”

He turned around and slid through, looking like a large, wrinkled boy entering the Over—the-Hill Gang’s club-house. David followed, then his father. Johnny Marinville went next, first almost falling off the crate platform as he turned around. He really was close to blind in the dark, she thought, and reminded herself never to ride in a car this man was driving. And a motorcycle. Had he really crossed the country on a motorcycle. If so, God must love him a lot more than she ever would.

She grabbed him by the back of the belt and steadied him. “Thanks,” he said, and this time he did sound humble. Then he was wriggling through the window, puffing and grunting, his long hair hanging in his face.

Mary took one quick look around, and for a moment she heard ghost-voices in the wind.

Didn’t you see it.

See what.

On that sign. That speed-limit sign.

What about it.

There was a dead cat on it.

Now, standing on the crate, she thought: The people who said those things really are ghosts, because they ’re dead. Me as much as him-certainly the Mary Jackson who left on this trip is gone. The person back here behind this old movie house, she’s someone new.

She passed her gun and flashlight through the window to the hands held up to take them, then turned around and slid easily over the sill and into the ladies”.

Ralph caught her around the hips and eased her down. David was shining his flashlight around, holding one hand over the top of the lens in a kind of hood. The place had a smell that made her wrinkle her nose-damp, mildew, booze. There was a carton filled with empty liquor bottles in one corner. In one of the toilet-stalls there were two large plastic bins filled with beer-cans. These had been placed over a hole where, once upon a time, she supposed, there had been an actual toilet. Around the time James Dean died, from the look of the place, she thought. She realized she could use a toilet herself, and that no matter how the place smelled, she was hungry, as well. Why not. She hadn’t had anything to eat for almost eight hours. She felt guilty about being hungry when Peter would never eat again, but she supposed the feeling would pass. That was the hell of it, when you thought it over. That was the exact hell of it.

“Holy shit,” Marinville said, pulling his own flashlight out of his shirt and shining it into the beer-can repository. “You and your friends must party hearty, Thomas.”

“We clean the whole place out once a month,” Bill-ingsley said, sounding defensive.

“Not like the kids that used to run wild upstairs until the old fire escape finally fell down last winter. We don’t pee in the corners, and we don’t use drugs, either.”

Marinville considered the carton of liquor empties. “On top of all that J. W. Dant, a few drugs and you’d probably explode.”

“Where do you pee, if you don’t mind me asking.” Mary said. “Because I could use a little relief in that direction.”

“There’s a Port-A-Potty across the hail in the men’s. The kind they have in sickrooms.

We keep that clean, too.” He gave Marinville a complex look, equal parts truculence and timidity. Mary supposed that Marinville was preparing to tee off on Billingsley. She had an idea Billingsley felt it coming, too. And why. Because guys like Marinville needed to establish a pecking order, and the veterinarian was clearly the most peckable person in attendance.

“Excuse me,” she said. “Might I borrow your flashlight Johnny.”

She held out her hand. He looked at it dubiously, then handed it over. She thanked him and headed for the door “Whoa-neat!” David said softly, and that stopped her The boy had focused his flashlight on one of the few sections of wall where the tiles were still mostly intact On it someone had drawn a gloriously rococo fish in various Magic Marker colors. It was the sort of flippy tailed, half-mythological beast that one sometimes found disporting atop the waveiets of very old sea-maps. Yet there was nothing fearsome or sea-monsterish about the fellow swimming on the wall above the broken Towl Master dispenser; with its blue Betty Boop eyes and red gills and yellow dorsal fin, there was something sweet and exuberant about it-here in the fetid, booze-smelling dark, the fish was almost miraculous.

Only one tile had fallen out of the drawing, eradicating the lower half of the tail.

“Mr. Billingsley. did you-”

“Yes, son, yes,” he said, sounding both defiant and embarrassed. “I drew it.” He looked at Marinville. “I was probably drunk at the time.”

Mary paused in the doorway, bracing for Marinville’s reply. He surprised her. “I’ve been known to draw a few drunkfish myself,” he said. “With words rather than col oring pens, but I imagine the principle is the same. Not bad, Billingsley. But why here. Of all places, why here9 “Because I like this place,” he said with considerable dignity. “Especially since the kids cleared out. Not that they ever bothered us much back here; they liked the bai cony, mostly. I suppose that sounds crazy to you, but I don’t much care. It’s where I come to be with my friends since I retired and quit the Town Committee. I look for-ward to the nights I spend with them. It’s just an old movie theater, there’s rats and the seats are full of mildew, but so what. It’s our business, ain’t it. Our own business. Only now I suppose they’re all dead. Dick Onslo, Tom Kincaid, Cash Lancaster. My old pals.” He uttered a harsh, startling cry, like the caw of a raven. It made her jump.

“Mr. Billingsley.” It was David. The old man looked at him. “Do you think he killed everyone in town.”

“That’s crazy!” Marinville said.

Ralph yanked his arm as if it were the stop-cord on a bus. “Quiet.”

Billingsley was still looking at David and rubbing at the flesh beneath his eyes with his long, crooked fingers. “I think he may have,” he said, and glanced at Marinville again for a moment. “I think he may have at least tried.”

“How many people are we talking about.” Ralph asked. “In Desperation. Hundred and ninety, maybe two hun-dred. With the new mine people starting to trickle in, maybe fifty or sixty more. Although it’s hard to tell how many of em would’ve been here and how many up to the pit.”

“The pit.” Mary asked.

“China Pit. The one they’re reopening. For the copper.”

“Don’t tell me one man, even a moose like that, went around town and killed two hundred people,” Marinville said, “because, excuse me very much, I don’t believe it. I mean, I believe in American enterprise as much as any-one, but that’s just nuts.”

“Well, he might have missed a few on the first pass,” Mary said. “Didn’t you say he ran over a guy when he was bringing you in. Ran him over and killed him.”

Marinville turned and favored her with a weighty frown. “I thought you had to take a leak.”

“I’ve got good kidneys. He did, didn’t he. He ran someone down in the st—’iet. You said so.”

“All right, yeah. t—ancourt, he called him. Billy Rancourt.”

“Oh Jesus.” Billingsley closed his eyes.

“You knew him.” Ralph asked.

“Mister, in a town the size of this one, everybody knows everybody. Billy worked at the feed store, cut some hair in his spare time.”

“All right, yeah, Entragian ran this Rancourt down in the street-ran him down like a dog.”

Marinville sounded upset, querulous. “I’m willing to accept the idea that Entragian may have killed a lot of people. I know what he’s capable of.”

“Do you.” David asked softly, and they all looked at him. David looked away, at the colorful fish floating on the wall.

“For one guy to kill hundreds of people…” Marinville said, and then quit for a moment, as if he’d temporarily lost his train of thought. “Even if he did it at night… I mean, guys…

“Maybe it wasn’t just him,” Mary said. “Maybe the buzzards and the coyotes helped.”

Marinville tried to push this away-even in the gloom she could see him trying-and then gave up. He sighed and rubbed at one temple, as if it hurt. “Okay, maybe they did. The ugliest bird in the universe tried to scalp me when he told it to, that I know happened. But still-”

“It’s like the story of the Angel of Death in Exodus,” David said. “The Israelites were supposed to put blood on their door-tops to show they were the good guys, you know.

Only here, he’s the Angel of Death. So why did he pass over us. He could have killed us all just as easy as he killed Pie, or your husband, Mary.” He turned to the old man. “Why didn’t he kill you, Mr. Billingsley. If he killed everyone else in town, why didn’t he kill you.”

Billingsley shrugged. “Dunno. I was laying home drunk. He came in the new cruiser—same one I helped pick out, by God-and got me. Stuck me in the back and hauled me off to the calabozo. I asked him why, what I’d done, but he wouldn’t tell me. I begged him. I cried. I didn’t know he was crazy, not then, how could I. He was quiet, but he didn’t give any signs that he was crazy. I started to get that idea later, but at first I was just con-vinced I’d done something bad in a blackout. That I’d been out driving, maybe, and hurt someone. I… I did something like that once before.”

“When did he come for you.” Mary asked.

Billingsley had to think about it in order to be sure. “Day before yesterday. Just before sundown. I was in bed, my head hurting, thinking about getting something for my hangover. An aspirin, and a little hair of the dog that bit me. He came and got me right out of bed. I didn’t have anything on but my underwear shorts. He let me dress. Helped me. But he wouldn’t let me take a drink even though I was shaking all over, and he wouldn’t tell me why he was taking me in.” He paused, still rubbing the flesh beneath his eyes. Mary wished he would stop doing that, it was making her nervous. “Later on, after he had me in a cell, he brought me a hot dinner. He sat at the desk for a little while and said some stuff. That’s when I started to think he must be crazy, because none of it made sense.”

“‘I see holes like eyes,’ “Mary said.

Billingsley nodded. “Yeah, like that. ‘My head is full of blackbirds,’ that’s another one I remember. And a lot more I don’t. They were like Thoughts for the Day out of a book written by a crazy person.”

“Except for being in town to start with, you’re just like us,” David said. “And you don’t know why he let you live any more than we do.”

“I guess that’s right.”

“What happened to you, Mr. Marinville.”

Marinville told them about how the cop had pulled up behind his bike while he had been whizzing and contem-plating the scenery north of the road, and how he had seemed nice at first. “We talked about my books,” he said. “I thought he was a fan. I was going to give him a fuckin autograph. Pardon my French, David.”

“Sure. Did cars go by while you were talking. I bet they did.”

“A few, I guess, and a couple of semis. I didn’t really notice.”

“But he didn’t bother any of them.”

“Just you. — Marinville looked at the boy thoughtfully.

“He picked you out,” David persisted.

“Well… maybe. I can’t say for sure. Everything seemed jake until he found the dope.”

Mary held her hands up. “Whoa, whoa, time out.”

Marinville looked at her.

“This dope you had-”

“It wasn’t mine, don’t go getting that idea. You think I’d try driving cross-country on a Harley with half a pound of grass in my saddlebag. My brains may be fried, but not that fried.”

Mary began to giggle. It made her need to pee worse, but she couldn’t help it. It was all just too perfect, too I.

wonderfully round. “Did it have a smile-sticker on it.” she asked, giggling harder than ever. She didn’t really need an answer to this question, but she wanted it, just the same.

“Mr. Smiley-Smile.”

“How did you know that.” Marinville looked as-tounded. He also looked remarkably like Arlo Guthrie, at least in the glow of the flashlights, and Mary’s giggles became little screams of laughter. She realized that if she didn’t get to the bathroom soon, she was going to wet her pants.

“B-Because it came from our t-t-trunk,” she said, holding her stomach. “It b-belonged to my sih-sih-sister-in-law. She’s a total ding dong. Entragian may be c-c—crazy, but at least he r-r-recycles… excuse me, I’m about to h-have an accident.”

She hurried across the hail. What she saw when she opened the men’s-room door made her laugh even harder. Set up like some comic-opera throne in the center of the floor was a portable toilet with a canvas bag suspended below the seat in a steel frame. On the wall across from it was another Magic Marker drawing, obviously from the same hand which had created the fish. This one was a horse at full gallop. There was orange smoke jetting from its nostrils and a baleful rose-madder glint in its eyes. It appeared to be headed out into an expanse of prairie somewhere east of the sun and west of the washbasins. None Gf the tiles had fallen out of this wall, but most had buckled, giving the stallion a warped and dreamish look.

Outside, the wind howled. As Mary unsnapped her pants and sat down on the cold toilet seat, she suddenly thought of how Peter sometimes put his hand up to his mouth when he laughed-his thumb touching one corner, his first finger touching the other, as if laughter somehow made him vulnerable-and all at once, with no break at all, at least none she could detect, she was crying. How stupid all this was, to be a widow at thirty-five, to be a fugitive in a town full of dead people, to be sitting in the men’s room of an abandoned movie theater on a canvas Port-A-Potty, peeing and crying at the same time, pissing and moaning, you might say, and looking at a dim beast on a wall so warped that it seemed to be running under-water, how stupid to be so frightened, and to have grief all but stolen away by her mind’s brute determination to sur-vive at any cost… as if Peter had never meant anything anyway, as if he had just been a footnote.

How stupid to still feel so hungry… but she was.

“Why is this happening. Why does it have to be me.” she whispered, and put her face into her hands.

If either Steve or Cynthia had had a gun, they probably would have shot her.

They were passing Bud’s Suds (the neon sign in the window read ENJOY OUR sLOTSPITALITY) when the door of the next business up-the laundrymat-opened and a woman sprang out. Steve, seeing only a dark shape, drew back the tire iron to hit her.

“No!” Cynthia said, grabbing at his wrist and holding it. “Don’t do that!”

The woman-she had a lot of dark hair and very white skin, but that was all Cynthia could tell at first-grabbed Steve by the shoulders and shoved her face up into his. Cynthia didn’t think the laundrymat woman ever saw the upraised tire iron at all. She’s gonna ask him if he’s found Jeeeesus, Cynthia thought. It’s never Jesus when they grab you like that, it’s always Jeeeesus.

But of course that was not what she said.

“We have to get out.” Her voice was low, hoarse. “Right now.” She snatched a glance over her shoulder, flicked a look at Cynthia, then seemed to dismiss her entirely as she focussed on Steve again. Cynthia had seen this before and wasn’t offended by it. When it got to be crunch-time, a certain kind of woman could only see the guy. Sometimes it was the way they had been raised; more often it seemed actually hard-wired into their cun-ning little Barbie Doll circuits.

Cynthia was getting a better look at her now, in spite of the dark and the blowing dust.

An older woman (thirty, at least), intelligent-looking, not unsexy. Long legs poking out of a short dress that looked somehow gawky, as if the chick inside it wasn’t accustomed to wearing dresses Yet she was far from clumsy, judging from the way she moved with Steve when he moved, as if they were danc ing. “Do you have a car.” she rapped.

“That’s no good,” Steve said. “The road out of town is blocked.”

“Blocked. Blocked how.”

“A couple of house trailers,” he said.

“Where.”

“Near the mining company,” Cynthia said, “but that s not the only problem. There are a lot of dead people-”

“Tell me about it,” she said, and laughed shrilly “Collie’s gone nuts. I saw him kill half a dozen myself He drove after them in his cruiser and shot them down in the street. Like they were cattle and Main Street was the killing-floor.” She was still holding onto Steve, shaking him as she spoke, as if scolding him, but her eyes were everywhere. “We have to get off the street. If he catches us… come in here. It’s safe. I’ve been in here since yesterday forenoon. He came in once. I hid under the desk in the office. I thought he’d follow the smell of my per fume and find me… come around the desk and find me but he didn’t. Maybe he had a stuffy nose!”

She began to laugh hysterically, then abruptly slapped her own face to make herself stop.

It was funny, in a shocking way; the sort of thing the characters in old Warner Brothers cartoons sometimes did.

Cynthia shook her head. “Not the laundrymat. The movie theater. There are other people there.”

“I saw his shadow,” the woman said. She was still hold ing Steve by the shoulders and her face was still turned confidentially up to his, as if she thought he was Hum phrey Bogart and she was Ingrid Bergman and there was a soft filter on the camera. “I saw his shadow, it fell across the desk and I was sure… but he didn’t, and I think we 11 be safe in the office while we think about what to do next-”

Cynthia reached out, took the woman’s chin in her hand, and turned it toward her.

“What are you doing.” the dark-haired woman asked angrily. “Just what in the hell do you think you’re doing.

“Getting your attention, I hope.”

Cynthia let go of the woman’s face, and be damned if she didn’t immediately turn back to Steve, every bit as brainless as a flower turning on its stalk to follow the sun, and resume her speed-rap.

“I was under the desk… and… and… we have to listen, we have to…

Cynthia reached out again, grasped the woman’s lower face again, turned it back in her direction again.

“Hon, read my lips. The theater. There are other people there.”

The woman looked at her, frowning as if she were trying to get the sense of this. Then she looked past Cyn-thia’s shoulder at the chain-hung marquee of The Ameri-can West.

“The old movieshow.”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure. I tried the door last night, after it got dark. It’s locked.”

“We’re supposed to go around to the back,” Steve said. “I have a friend, that’s where he told me to go.”

“How’d he do that.” the dark-haired woman asked sus-piciously, but when Steve started walking in that direc-tion, she went along. Cynthia fell in next to her, walking on the outside. “How could he do that.”

“Cellular phone,” Steve said.

“They don’t work very well around here as a rule,” the dark-haired woman said. “Too many mineral deposits.”

They walked under the theater’s marquee (a tumble-weed caught in an angle between the glassed-in ticket—booth and the lefthand door rattled like a maraca) and stopped on the far side. “There’s the alley,” Cynthia said. She started forward but the woman stayed where she was, frowning from Steve to Cynthia and then back to Steve again.

“What friend, what other people.” she asked. “How did they get here. How come that fuck Collie didn’t kill them.”

“Let’s save all that for later.” Steve took her ann.

She resisted his tug, and when she spoke this time, there was a catch in her voice.

“You’re taking me to him, aren’t you.”

“Lady, we don’t even know who you’re talking about Cynthia said. “Just for Christ’s sake will you come on!

“I hear a motor,” Steve said. His head was cocked to one side. “Coming from the south, I think. Coming in this direction for sure.”

The woman’s eyes widened. “Him,” she whispered.

“Him.” She looked over her shoulder, as if longing for the safety of the laundrymat, and then made her decision and bolted down the alley. By the time they got to the board fence running along the back of the theater, Cynthia and Steve were hurrying just to keep up.

“Are you sure… ” the woman began, and then a flashlight flicked, once, from farther down the building They were in single-file, Steve between the women, the one from the laundrymat ahead of him. He took her hand (very cold) in his right and reached back to Cynthia s (marginally warmer) with his left. The dark-haired woman led them slowly down the path. The flashlight blinked on again, this time pointed down at two stacked crates.

“Climb up and get on in here,” a voice whispered. It was one Steve was delighted to hear.

“Boss.”

“You bet.” Marinville sounded as if he might be smiling. “Love the coverall look-it’s so masculine. Get on in here, Steve.”

“There are three of us.”

“The more the merrier.

The dark-haired woman hiked her skirt in order to get up on the crates, and Steve could see the boss helping himself to an eyeful. Even the apocalypse couldn’t change some things, apparently.

Steve helped Cynthia up next, then followed. He turned around, slid partway in, then reached down and pushed the top crate off the one underneath. He didn’t know if it would be enough to fool the guy the dark-haired woman was so afraid of if he came back here snirfing around, but it was better than nothing.

He slid into the room, a wino-hideout if he had ever seen one, then grabbed the boss and hugged him. Mar-inville laughed, sounding both surprised and pleased. “Just no tongue, Steve, I insist.”

Steve held him by the shoulders, grinning. “I thought you were dead. We found your scoot buried in the sand.”

“You found it.” Now Marinville sounded delighted. “Son of a bitch!”

“What happened to your face.”

Marinville held the lens of the flashlight under his chin, turning his lumpy, discolored face into something out of a horror movie. His nose looked like roadkill. His grin, although cheerful, made matters even worse. “If I made a speech to PEN America looking like this, do you think the assholes would finally listen.”

“Man,” Cynthia said, awed, “someone put a real hurt on you.”

“Entragian,” Marinville said gravely. “Have you met him.”

“No,” Steve said. “And judging from what I’ve heard and seen so far, I don’t want to.”

The bathroom door swung open, squalling on its hinges, and a kid stood there-short hair, pale face, blood—smeared Cleveland Indians tee-shirt. He had a flashlight in one hand, and he moved it quickly, picking out the newcomers’ faces one at a time. Things came together in Steve’s mind as neatly as jigsaw-puzzle pieces. He sup-posed the kid’s shirt was the key connection.