Desperation (28 page)

“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 happening 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 the 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 golfbag 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 savaged, 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 Mossberg,” he said. “It's a damned fine gun, but it's chambered 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: headlights.
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 tumbling 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 directions 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 shoulders 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 everywhere for trouble. Mary stood in the doorway, watching them come, and Johnny thought she looked extraordinarily 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 cellular telephone was still intact.

4

If things are normal,
feel
normal,
Steve Ames had said,
we'll try reporting it there. But if we see anything 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 intersection, 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 intersection; 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 diagonal 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.

A hot 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 hall 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 hall.

“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 bandanna, 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.