Desperation (20 page)

But the cop only bent, offloaded his burden, then backed out onto the porch's little stoop again. He closed the door and then wiped his hands above it, leaving smears of blood on the lintel. He was so tall he didn't even have to reach to do this. The gesture gave Johnny a deep chill—it was like something out of the Book of Exodus, instructions for the Angel of Death to pass on by . . . except this man
was
the Angel of Death. The destroyer.

The cop walked back to the cruiser, got in, and drove sedately back toward the intersection.

“Why'd you take him into there?” Johnny asked.

“What did you
want
me to do?” the cop asked. His voice was thicker than ever; now he seemed almost to be gargling his words. “Leave him for the buzzards? I'm ashamed of you,
mon capitaine.
You've been living so long with so-called civilized folk that you're starting to think like them.”

“The dog—”

“A man is not a dog,” the cop said in a prim, lecturely voice. He turned right at the intersection, then almost immediately hung a left, turning into a parking lot next to the town's Municipal Building. He killed the engine, got out, and opened the right-hand rear door. That at least spared Johnny the pain and effort of sliding his banged-up body out past the sagging driver's seat. “A chicken is not a chicken dinner and a man is not a dog, Johnny. Not even a man like you. Come on. Get out. Alley-zoop.”

Johnny got out. He was very aware of the silence; the sounds he could hear—wind, the spick-spack of alkali hitting the brick side of the Municipal Building, a monotonous squeaking sound from somewhere nearby—only emphasized that silence, turned it into something like a dome. He stretched, wincing at the pain in his back and leg but needing to do something for the rest of his muscles, which were badly cramped. Then he forced himself to look up into the ruin of the cop's face. The man's height was intimidating, somehow disorienting. It wasn't just that at six-three Johnny was used to looking down into people's faces instead of up; it was the
amount
of the height differential, not an inch or two but at least four. Then there was the breadth of the man. The sheer breadth. He didn't just stand; he
loomed.

“Why didn't you kill me like you did that guy back there? Billy? Or does it even make any sense to ask? Are you beyond why?”

“Oh shit, we're all beyond why,
you
know that,” the cop said, exposing bloody teeth in a smile Johnny could have done without. “The
important
thing is . . . listen closely . . .
I could let you go.
Would you like that? You must have at least two more stupid, pointless books left in your head, maybe as many as half a dozen. You could write a few before that thunderclap coronary that's waiting for you up the road finally takes you off. And I'm sure that, given time, you could put this interlude behind you and once more convince yourself that what you are doing somehow justifies your existence. Would you like that, Johnny? Would you like me to let you go free?”

Erin go bragh,
Johnny thought for no reason at all, and for one nightmarish moment felt he would laugh. Then the urge was gone and he nodded. “Yes, I'd like that very much.”

“Free! Like a bird out of a cage.” The cop flapped his arms to demonstrate, and Johnny saw that the bloody patches under his arms had spread. His uniform shirt was now stained crimson along the torn side-seams almost all the way down to his beltline.

“Yes.” Not that he believed his new playmate had the slightest intention in the world of letting him free; oh no. But said playmate was shortly going to be nothing but blood-sausage held together by the casing of his uniform, and if he could just remain whole and functional himself until that happened . . .

“All right. Here's the deal, bigshot: suck my cock. Do that and I'll let you go. Straight trade.”

He unzipped his fly and pulled down the elastic front of his shorts. Something that looked like a dead whitesnake fell out. Johnny observed the thin stream of blood drizzling from it without surprise. The cop was bleeding from every other orifice, wasn't he?

“Speaking in the lit'ry sense,” the cop said, grinning, “this particular blowjob is going to be a little more Anne Rice than Armistead Maupin. I suggest you follow Queen Victoria's advice—close your eyes and think of strawberry shortcake.”

Johnny Marinville looked at the maniac's prick, then up at the maniac's grinning face, then back at his prick again. He didn't know what the cop expected—screams, revulsion, tears, melodramatic pleading—but he had a clear sense that he wasn't feeling what the cop wanted him to feel, what the cop probably thought he
was
feeling.

You don'
t seem to understand that I've seen a few worse things in my time than a cock dripping blood. Not just in Vietnam, either.

He realized that the anger was creeping up on him again, threatening to take him over. Oh shit, of course it was. Anger had always been his primary addiction, not whiskey or coke or 'ludes. Plain old rage. It didn't have anything to do with what the cop had taken out of his pants, and that might be what the guy didn't understand. It wasn't a sex issue. The thing was, Johnny Marinville had never liked
anything
stuck in his face.

“I'll get down on my knees in front of you if you want,” he said, and although his voice was mild, something in the cop's face changed—really changed for the first time. It
blanked out
somehow, except for the good eye, which narrowed suspiciously.

“Why are you looking at me that way? What in the hell gives you the
right
to look at me that way?
Tak!
”

“Never mind how I'm looking at you. Just hear me out, motherfucker: three seconds after I put that trouser-rat of yours into my mouth, it's going to be lying on the pavement. You got that?
Tak!
”

He
spat
this last word up into the cop's face, standing on tiptoe to do it, and for a moment the big man looked more than surprised—he looked shocked. Then the expression tightened into a cramp of rage, and he shoved Johnny away from him so hard that for a moment he felt as if he were flying. He hit the side of the building, saw stars as the back of his head connected with rough brick, bounced back, then went sprawling when his feet tangled together. New places hurt and old places howled, but the expression he had seen on the cop's face made it all worthwhile. He looked up to see if it was still there, wanting to sample it again like a bee sampling the sweet heart of a flower, and his heart staggered in his chest.

The cop's face had tautened. The skin on it now looked like makeup, or a thin coat of paint—unreal. Even the blood-filled eye looked unreal. It was as if there was another face beneath the one Johnny could see, pushing at the overlying flesh, trying to get out.

The cop's good eye fixed on him for a moment, and then his head lifted. He pointed at the sky with all five fingers of his left hand. “
Tak ah lah,
” he said in his guttural, gargling voice.
“Timoh. Can de lach! On! On!”

There was a flapping sound, like clothes on a line, and a shadow fell over Johnny's face. There was a harsh cry, not quite a caw, and then something with scabrous, flapping wings dropped on him, its crooked claws gripping his shoulders and folding themselves into the fabric of his shirt, its beak digging into his scalp as it uttered its inhuman cry again.

It was the smell that told Johnny what it was—a smell like meat gone feverish with rot. Its huge, unkempt wings flapped against the sides of his face as it solidified its position, driving that stench into his mouth and nose,
jamming
it in, making him gag. He saw the Shepherd on its rope, swinging as the peeled-looking bald things pulled at its tail and feet with their beaks. Now one of them was roosting on
him
—one which had apparently never heard that buzzards were fundamental cowards that only attacked dead things—and its beak was plowing his scalp in furrows, bringing blood.

“Get it off!”
he screamed, completely unnerved. He tried to grab the wide, beating wings, but got only two fistfuls of feathers. Nor could he see; he was afraid that if he opened his eyes, the buzzard would shift its position and peck them out.
“Jesus, please, please get it off me!”

“Are you going to look at me properly if I do?” the cop asked. “No more insolence? No more disrespect?”

“No! No more!”
He would have promised anything. Whatever had leaped out of him and spoken against the cop was gone now; the bird had plucked it out like a worm from an ear of corn.

“You promise?”

The bird, flapping and squalling and pulling. Smelling like green meat and exploded guts. On him. Eating him. Eating him
alive.

“Yes! Yes! I promise!”

“Fuck you,” the cop said calmly. “Fuck you,
os pa,
and fuck your promise. Take care of it yourself. Or die.”

Eyes squeezed to slits, kneeling, head lowered, Johnny gripped blindly for the bird, caught its wings where they joined its body, and tore it off his head. It spasmed wildly in the air above him, shitting white streams that the wind pulled away in banners, uttering its rough cry (only there was pain in it now), its head whipping from side to side. Sobbing—mostly what he felt was revulsion—Johnny ripped one of its wings off and threw the buzzard against the wall. It stared at him with eyes as black as tar, its bloodstained beak popping open and then snapping closed with liquid little clicks.

That's
my
blood, you bastard,
Johnny thought. He dropped the wing he'd torn off the bird and got to his feet. The buzzard tried to lurch away from him, flapping its one good wing like an oar, stirring up dust and feathers. It went in the direction of the Desperation police-cruiser, but before it managed more than five feet, Johnny brought one motorcycle boot down on it, snapping its back. The bird's scaly legs splayed out to either side, as if it were trying to do the split. Johnny put his hands over his eyes, convinced for one moment that his mind was going to snap just as the bird's back had snapped.

“Not bad,” the cop said. “You got him, pard. Now turn around.”

“No.” He stood, trembling all over, hands to his face.

“Turn around.”

There was no denying the voice. He turned and saw the cop pointing up, once again with all five splayed fingers. Johnny raised his head and saw more buzzards—two dozen at least—sitting in a line along the north side of the parking lot, looking down at them.

“Want me to call them?” the cop asked in a deceptively gentle tone of voice. “I can, you know. Birds are a hobby of mine. They'll eat you alive, if that's what I want.”

“N-N-No.” He looked back at the cop and was relieved to see his fly was zipped again. There was a bloodstain spreading across the front of his pants, though. “No, d-don't.”

“What's the magic word, Johnny?”

For a moment—a
horrible
moment—he had no idea what the cop wanted him to say. Then it came to him.
“Please.”

“Are you ready to be reasonable?”

“Y-Yes.”

“I wonder about that,” the cop said. He seemed to be speaking to himself. “I just wonder.”

Johnny stood looking at him, saying nothing. The anger was gone.
Everything
felt gone, replaced by a kind of deep numbness.

“That boy,” the cop said, looking up toward the second floor of the Municipal Building, where there were a number of opaque windows with bars outside them. “That boy troubles my mind. I wonder if I shouldn't talk to you about him. Perhaps you could counsel me.”

The cop folded his arms against his body, raised his hands, and began to tap his fingers lightly against his collarbones, much as he'd tapped them against the steering wheel earlier. He stared at Johnny as he did this.

“Or maybe I should just kill you, Johnny. Maybe it would be the best thing—once you're dead they might award you that Nobel you've always lusted after. What do you think?”

The cop raised his head to the buzzard-lined roofline of the Municipal Building and began to laugh. They cried harsh cawing sounds back down at him, and Johnny was not able to stifle the thought which came to him then. It was horrible because it was so convincing.

They are laughing with him. Because it's not
his
joke; it's
their
joke.

A gust of air snapped across the parking lot, making Johnny stagger on his feet, blowing the torn-off buzzard wing across the pavement like a featherduster. The light was fading out of the day—fading too fast. He looked to the west and saw that rising dust had blurred the mountains in that direction and might soon erase them completely. The sun was still above the dust, but wouldn't be for long. It was a windstorm, and headed their way.

5

The five people in the
holding cells—the Carvers, Mary Jackson, and old Mr. White Hair—listened to the man screaming and to the sounds that accompanied the screams—harsh bird-cries and flapping wings. At last they stopped. David hoped no one else was dead down there, but when you got right to it, what were the chances?

“What did you say his name was?” Mary asked.

“Collie Entragian,” the old man said. He sounded as if listening to the screams had pretty much tired him out. “Collie's short for Collier. He come here from one of those mining towns in Wyoming, oh, fifteen-sixteen years ago. Little more than a teenager then, he was. Wanted police work, couldn't get it, went to work for the Diablo Company up to the pit instead. That was around the time Diablo was gettin ready to pack up and go home. Collie was part of the close-down crew, as I remember.”

“He told Peter and me the mine was open,” Mary said.

The old man shook his head in what might have been weariness or exasperation. “There's some thinks old China ain't played out, but they're wrong. It's true they been bustling around up there again, but they won't take doodley-squat out of it—just lose their investors' money and then shut her down. Won't be nobody any happier about it than Jim Reed, either. He's tired of barroom fights. All of us'll be glad when they leave old China alone again. It's haunted, that's what the ignorant folks round these parts think.” He paused. “I'm one of em.”

“Who's Jim Reed?” Ralph asked.

“Town Safety Officer. What you'd call Chief of Police in a bigger burg, but there's only two hundred or so people in Desperation these days. Jim had two full-time deputies—Dave Pearson and Collie. Nobody expected Collie to stay around after Diablo folded, but he did. He wasn't married, and he had workman's comp. He floated along for awhile, odd-jobbin, and eventually Jim started to throw work his way. He was good enough so that the town officers took Jim's recommendation and hired him on full-time in '91.”

“Three guys seems like a lot of law for a town this small,” Ralph said.

“I reckon. But we got some money from Washin'un, Rural Law Enforcement Act, plus we landed a contract with Sedalia County to keep school on the unincorporated lands round here—pop the speeders, jug the drunks, all such as that.”

More coyote wails from outside; they sounded shimmery in the rising wind.

Mary asked, “What did he get workman's comp for? Some kind of mental problem?”

“No'm. Pickup he was ridin in turned turtle on its way down into the pit yonder—the China. Just before the Diablo people gave it up as a bad job, this was. Blew out his knee. Boy was fit enough after, but he had a limp, no question about that.”

“Then it's not him,” Mary said flatly.

The old man looked at her, shaggy eyebrows raised.

“The man who killed my husband does not limp.”

“No,” the old man agreed. He spoke with a weird kind of serenity. “No, he don't. But it's Collie, all right. I been seein him most every day for fifteen years, have bought him drinks in The Broken Drum and had him buy me a few in return over at Bud's Suds. He was the one came to the clinic, took pictures, and dusted for prints the time those fellows broke in. Probably looking for drugs, they were, but I don't know. They never caught em.”

“Are you a doctor, mister?” David asked.

“Vet,” the old man said. “Tom Billingsley is my name.” He held out a big, worn hand that shook a little. David took it gingerly.

Downstairs, a door smashed open. “Here we are, Big John!” the cop said. His voice rolled jovially up the stairs. “Your room awaits! Room? Hell, a regular efficiency apartment! Up you go! We forgot the word processor, but we left you some
great
walls and a few little Hallmark sentiments like
SUCK MY COCK
and
I FUCKED YOUR SISTER
to get you started!”

Tom Billingsley glanced toward the door which gave upon the stairs, then looked back at David. He spoke loud enough for the others to hear but it
was
David he looked at, David he seemed to want to tell. “Tell you something else,” he said. “He's bigger.”

“What do you mean?” But David thought he knew.

“What I said. Collie was never a midget—stood about six-four, I'd judge, and probably weighed about two hundred and thirty. But now . . .”

He glanced toward the doorway to the stairs again—toward the sound of approaching, clumping footsteps. Two sets. Then he looked back at David.

“Now I'd say he's at least three inches more'n that, wouldn't you? And maybe sixty pounds heavier.”

“That's crazy!” Ellen cried. “Absolutely nuts!”

“Yessum,” the white-haired vet agreed. “But it's true.”

The door to the stairs flew all the way open and a man with a bloody face and shoulder-length gray hair—it was also streaked and clumped with blood—flew into the room. He didn't cross it with Mary Jackson's balletic grace but stumbled at the halfway point and fell to his knees, holding his hands out in front of him to keep from crashing into the desk. The man who followed him through the door was the man who had brought them all to this place, and yet he wasn't—he was a kind of blood-gorgon, a creature who appeared to be disintegrating before their very eyes.

He surveyed them from the melting ramparts of his face, and his mouth spread in a wide, lip-splitting grin. “Look at us,” he said in a thick, sentimental voice. “Look at us, would you? Gosh! Just one big happy family!”