Desperation (30 page)

2

Be cool, 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 Cynthia, 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 telephone number was 911. Johnny Cash, saying he built it one piece at a time. Bodies on hooks, a tigerfish swimming 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 overwhelmed 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 flickered, 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 Marcucci spitting on me in the eighth grade, out in the playground—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 thinking 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 experiment, you could say, one having to do with pleasure 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 anything? 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 powerful—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 crumbling 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 broadcast 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.