Desperation (24 page)

2

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 motorcycle jacket, stuck his arm as far out through the bars as he could, and brought the buckle end down on the 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 say
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.
“Arriba!”
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.

3

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 come
from
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 popcorn, David, why don't I make some? Maybe we can find one of those old horror movies on TV, something Universal, 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 agonized concentration, and gave a small, relieved moan as he began to move again almost at once. With the narrowest 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 expecting 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?

I can'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 protect 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.

4

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 littered 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? Department 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 lottery 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 collected 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 behind 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
something 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 circumstances, 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 gunshots. 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 rectangle 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.