Desperation (36 page)

4

Ralph recounted the crash of
the Carver family as clearly as he could, eating sardines between bursts of talk. He was trying to clear his head, trying to come back—for David's sake more than his own—but it was hard. He kept seeing Kirstie lying motionless at the foot of the stairs, kept seeing Entragian pulling Ellie across the holding area by the arm.
Don't worry, David, I'
ll be back,
she had said, but to Ralph, who believed he had heard every turn and lift of Ellie's voice in their fourteen years of marriage, she had sounded already gone. Still, he owed it to David to try and be here. To come back himself, from wherever it was his shocked, over-stressed—and guilty, yes, there was that, too—mind wanted to take him.

But it was hard.

When he had finished, Audrey said: “Okay, no revolt from the animal kingdom, at least. But I'm very sorry about your wife and your little girl, Mr. Carver. You too, David.”

“Thanks,” Ralph said, and when David added, “My mom could still be okay,” he ruffled the boy's hair and told him yes, that was right.

Mary went next, telling about the Baggie under the spare tire, the way Entragian had mixed “I'm going to kill you” into the Miranda warning, and the way he had shot her husband on the steps, completely without warning or provocation.

“Still no wildlife,” Audrey said. This now seemed to be her central concern. She tilted her sardine-can up to her mouth and drank the last of the fish oil without so much as a flicker of embarrassment.

“You either didn't hear the part about the coyote he brought upstairs to guard us or you don't
want
to hear it,” Mary said.

Audrey dismissed this with a wave of her hand. She was sitting down now, providing Billingsley with at least another four inches of leg to look at. Ralph was looking, too, but he felt absolutely nothing about what he was seeing. He had an idea there was more juice in some old car batteries than there was in his emotional wiring right now.

“You
can
domesticate them, you know,” she said. “Feed them Gaines-burgers and train them like dogs, in fact.”

“Did you ever see Entragian walking around town with a coyote on a leash?” Marinville asked politely.

She gave him a look and set her jaw. “No. I knew him to speak to, like anyone else in town, but that was all. I spend most of my time in the pit or the lab or out riding. I'm not much for town life.”

“What about you, Steve?” Marinville asked. “What's your tale?”

Ralph saw the rangy fellow with the Texas accent exchange a glance with his girlfriend—if that was what she was—and then look back at the writer. “Well, first off, if you tell your agent I picked up a hitchhiker, I guess I'll lose my bonus.”

“I think you can consider him the least of your worries at this point. Go on. Tell it.”

They both told it, alternating segments, both clearly aware that the things they had seen and experienced upped the ante of belief considerably. They both expressed frustration at their inability to articulate how awful the stone fragment in the lab/storage area had been, how powerfully it had affected them, and neither seemed to want to come out and say what had happened when the wolf (they agreed that that was what it had been, not a coyote) brought the fragment out of the lab and laid it before them. Ralph had an idea it was something sexual, although what could be so bad about that he didn't know.

“Still a doubting Thomas?” Marinville asked Audrey when Steve and Cynthia had finished. He spoke mildly, as if he did not want her to feel threatened.
Of course he doesn't want her to feel threatened,
Ralph thought.
There's only seven of us, he wants us all on the same team. And he'
s really not too bad at it.

“I don't know what I am.” She sounded dazed. “I don't want to believe any of this shit—just
considering
it freaks me severely—but I can't imagine why you'd lie.” She paused, then said thoughtfully: “Unless seeing those people hung up in Hernando's Hideaway . . . I don't know, scared you so badly that . . .”

“That we started seeing things?” Steve asked.

She nodded. “The snakes you saw in the house—that at least makes sense of a sort. They feel this kind of weather coming as much as three days in advance sometimes, and go for any sheltered place. As for the rest . . . I don't know. I'm a scientist, and I can't see how—”

“Come on, lady, you're like a kid pretending her mouth is stitched shut so she won't have to eat the broccoli,” Cynthia said. “Everything we saw dovetails with what Mr. Marinville there saw before
us,
and Mary saw before
him,
and the Carvers saw before
them.
Right down to the knocked-over piece of picket fence where Entragian greased the barber, or whoever he was. So quit the I'm-a-scientist crap for awhile.
We're
all on the same page; you're the one that's on a different one.”

“But I didn't see any of these things!” Audrey almost wailed.

“What
did
you see?” Ralph asked. “Tell us.”

Audrey crossed her legs, tugged at the hem of her dress. “I was camping. I had four days off, so I packed up Sally and headed north, into the Copper Range. It's my favorite place in Nevada.” Ralph thought she looked defensive, as if she had taken a ribbing for this sort of behavior in the past.

Billingsley looked as if he had just wakened from a dream . . . one of having Audrey's long legs wrapped around his scrawny old butt, perhaps. “Sally,” he said. “How
is
Sally?”

Audrey gave him an uncomprehending look for a moment, then grinned like a girl. “She's fine.”

“Strain all better?”

“Yes, thanks. It was good liniment.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“What're you talking about?” Marinville asked.

“I doctored her horse a year or so back,” Billingsley said. “That's all.”

Ralph wasn't sure he would let Billingsley work on
his
horse, if he had one; he wasn't sure he would let Billingsley work on a stray cat. But he supposed the vet might have been different a year ago. When you made drinking a career, twelve months could make a lot of changes. Few of them for the better.

“Getting Rattlesnake back on its feet has been pretty stressful,” she said. “Lately it's been the switchover from rainbirds to emitters. A few eagles died—”

“A
few
?” Billingsley said. “Come now. I'm no tree-hugger, but you can do better than that.”

“All right, about forty, in all. No big deal in terms of the species; there's no shortage of eagles in Nevada. As you know, Doc. The greens know it, too, but they treat each dead eagle as if it were a boiled baby, just the same. What it's really about—and
all
it's about—is trying to stop us from mining the copper. God, they make me so
tired
sometimes. They come out here in their perky little foreign cars, fifty pounds of American copper in each one, and tell us we're earth-raping monsters. They—”

“Ma'am?” Steve said softly. “Pardon, but ain't a one of us folks from Greenpeace.”

“Of course not. What I'm saying is that we
all
felt bad about the eagles—the hawks and the ravens too, for that matter—in spite of what the treehuggers say.” She looked around at them, as if to evaluate their impression of her honesty, then went on. “We leach copper out of the ground with sulfuric acid. The easiest way to apply it is with rainbirds—they look like big lawn-sprinklers. But rainbirds can leave pools. The birds see them, come down to bathe and drink, then die. It's not a nice death, either.”

“No,” Billingsley agreed, blinking at her with his watery eyes. “When it was gold they were taking out of China Pit and Desatoya Pit—back in the fifties—it was cyanide in the pools. Just as nasty. No greenie-treehuggers back then, though. Must have been nice for the company, eh, Miss Wyler?” He got up, went to the bar, poured himself a finger of whiskey, and swallowed it like medicine.

“Could I have one about the same?” Ralph asked.

“Yessir, I b'lieve you could,” Billingsley said. He handed Ralph his drink, then set out more glasses. He offered warm soft drinks, but the others opted for spring-water, which he poured out of a plastic jug.

“We pulled the rainbirds and replaced them with distribution heads and emitters,” Audrey said. “It's a drip-system, more expensive than rainbirds—a
lot
—but the birds don't get into the chemicals.”

“No,” Billingsley agreed. He poured himself another tot. This he drank more slowly, looking at Audrey's legs again over the rim of his glass.

5

A problem?

Maybe not yet . . . but there
could
be, if steps weren't taken.

The thing that looked like Ellen Carver sat behind the desk in the now-empty holding area, head up, eyes gleaming lustrously. Outside, the wind rose and fell, rose and fell. From closer by came the pad-click of paws ascending the stairs. They stopped outside the door. There came a coughing growl. Then the door swung open, pushed by the snout of a cougar. She was big for a female—perhaps six feet from snout to haunches, with a thick, switching tail that added another three feet to her overall length.

As the cougar came through the door and into the holding area, slinking low to the board floor, her ears laid back against her wedgeshaped skull, the thing cored into her head a little further, wanting to experience a bit of what the cougar was feeling as well as to draw her. The animal was frightened, sorting through the smells of the place and finding no comfort in any of them. It was a human den-place; but that was only part of her problem.

The cougar smelled a lot of trouble here. Gunpowder, for one thing; to the cougar, the smell of the fired guns was still sharp and acrid. Then there was the smell of fear, like a mixture of sweat and burned grass. There was the smell of blood, too—coyote blood and human blood, mixed together. And there was the thing in the chair, looking down at her as she slunk toward it, not wanting to go but not able to stop. It looked like a human being but didn't smell like one. It didn't smell like anything the cougar had ever scented before. She crouched by its feet and voiced a low whining, mewing sound.

The thing in the coverall got out of the chair, dropped to Ellen Carver's knees, lifted the cougar's snout, and looked into the cougar's eyes. It began to speak rapidly in that other language, the tongue of the unformed, telling the cougar where she must go, how she must wait, and what she must do when the time came. They were armed and would likely kill the animal, but she would do her job first.

As it spoke, Ellen's nose began to trickle blood. It felt the blood, wiped it away. Blisters had begun to rise on Ellen's cheeks and neck. Fucking yeast infection! Nothing more than that, at least to start with! Why was it some women simply could not take care of themselves?

“All right,” it told the cougar. “Go on, now. Wait until it's time. I'll listen with you.”

The cougar made its whining, mewing sound again, licked with its rough tongue at the hand of the thing wearing Ellen Carver's body, then turned and padded out of the room.

It resumed the chair and leaned back in it. It closed Ellen's eyes and listened to the ceaseless rattle of sand against the windows, and let part of itself go with the animal.

Chapter 2

1

“You had some downtime coming,
you saddled up, and you went camping,” Steve said. “What then?”

“I spent four days in the Coppers. Fishing, taking pictures—photography's what I do for fun. Great days. Then, three nights ago, I came back. Went right to my house, which is north of town.”

“What brought you back?” Steve asked. “It wasn't bad weather on the way, was it?”

“No. I had my little radio with me, and all I heard was fair and hot.”

“All I heard, too,” Steve said. “This shit's a total mystery.”

“I had a meeting scheduled with Allen Symes, the company comptroller, to summarize the switchover from rainbirds to heads and emitters. He was flying in from Arizona. I was supposed to meet him at Hernando's Hideaway at nine o'clock, the morning before last. That's what we'd taken to calling the lab and the offices out there on the edge of town. Anyway, that's why I'm wearing this damned dress, because of the meeting and because Frank Geller told me that Symes doesn't—didn't—like women in jeans. I know everything was okay when I got back from my camping trip, because that's when Frank called me and told me to wear a dress to the meeting. That night, around seven.”

“Who's Frank Geller?” Steve asked.

“Chief mining engineer,” Billingsley said. “In charge of reopening the China Pit. At least he was.” He gave Audrey a questioning look.

She nodded. “Yes. He's dead.”

“Three nights ago,” Marinville mused. “Everything in Desperation was peachy three nights ago, at least as far as you know.”

“That's right. But the next time I saw Frank, he was hung up on a hook. And one of his hands was gone.”

“We saw him,” Cynthia said, and shivered. “We saw his hand, too. At the bottom of an aquarium.”

“Before all that, during the night, I woke up at least twice. The first time I thought it was thunder, but the second time it sounded like gunshots. I decided I'd been dreaming and went back to sleep, but that must be around the time he . . . got started. Then, when I got to the mining office . . .”

At first, she said, she hadn't sensed anything wrong—certainly not from the fact that Brad Josephson wasn't at his desk. Brad never was, if he could help it. So she had gone out back to Hernando's Hideaway, and there she had seen what Steve and Cynthia would come along and see themselves not long after—bodies on hooks. Apparently everyone who had come in that morning. One of them, dressed in a string tie and dress boots that would have tickled a country-and-western singer, had been Allen Symes. He had come all the way from Phoenix to die in Desperation.

“If what you say is right,” she said to Steve, “Entragian must've gotten more of the mining people later on. I didn't count—I was too scared to even
think
of counting them—but there couldn't have been more than seven when I was there. I froze. I might even have blacked out for a little while, I can't say for sure. Then I heard gunshots. No question what they were that time. And someone screaming. Then there were more gunshots and the screaming stopped.”

She went back to her car, not running—she said she was afraid that panic would take her over if she started running—and then drove into town. She intended to report what she'd found to Jim Reed. Or, if Jim was out on county business, as he often was, to one of his deputies, Entragian or Pearson.

“I didn't run to the car and I didn't go speeding into town, but I was in shock, just the same. I remember feeling around in the glove compartment for my cigarettes, even though I haven't smoked in five years. Then I saw two people go running through the intersection. You know, under the blinker-light?”

They nodded.

“The town's new police-car came roaring through right after them. Entragian was driving it, but I didn't know that then. There were three or four gunshots, and the people he was chasing were thrown onto the sidewalk, one right by the grocery store, the other just past it. There was blood. A lot. He never slowed, just went on through the intersection, heading west, and pretty soon I heard more shots. I'm pretty sure I heard him yelling ‘Yee-haw,' too.

“I wanted to help the people he'd shot if I could. I drove up a little way, parked, and got out of my car. That's probably what saved my life, getting out of my car. Because everything that moved, Entragian killed it. Anyone. Anything. Everything. There were cars and trucks sitting dead in the street like toys, all zigzagged here and there, at least a dozen of them. There was an El Camino truck turned on its side up by the hardware store. Tommy Ortega's, I think. That truck was almost his girlfriend.”

“I didn't see
anything
like that,” Johnny said. “The street was clear when he brought me in.”

“Yeah—the son of a bitch keeps his room picked up, you have to give him that. He didn't want anyone wandering into town and wondering what had happened, that's what I think. He hasn't done much more than sweep the mess under the rug, but it'll hold for awhile. Especially with this goddam storm.”

“Which wasn't forecast,” Steve said thoughtfully.

“Right, which wasn't forecast.”

“What happened then?” David asked.

“I ran up to the people he shot. One of them was Evelyn Shoenstack, the lady who runs the Cut n Curl and works part-time in the library. She was dead with her brains all over the sidewalk.”

Mary winced. Audrey saw it and turned toward her.

“That's something else you need to remember. If he can see you and he decides to shoot you, you're gone.” She passed her eyes over the rest of them, apparently wanting to be sure they didn't think she was joking. Or exaggerating. “He's a dead shot. Accent on the
dead.
”

“We'll keep it in mind,” Steve said.

“The other one was a delivery guy. He was wearing a Tastykake uniform. Entragian got him in the head, too, but he was still alive.” She spoke with a calm Johnny recognized. He had seen it in Vietnam, in the aftermath of half a dozen firefights. He'd seen it as a noncombatant, of course, notebook in one hand, pen in the other, Uher tape-recorder slung over his shoulder on a strap with a peace sign pinned to it. Watching and listening and taking notes and feeling like an outsider. Feeling
jealous.
The bitter thoughts which had crossed his mind then—eunuch in the harem, piano-player in the whorehouse—now struck him as insane.

“The year I was twelve, my old man gave me a .22,” Audrey Wyler said. “The first thing I did was to go outside our house in Sedalia and shoot a jay. When I went over to it, it was still alive, too. It was trembling all over, staring straight ahead, and its beak was opening and closing, very slowly. I've never in my whole life wanted so badly to take something back. I got down on my knees beside it and waited for it to be finished. It seemed that I owed it that much. It just went on trembling all over until it died. The Tastykake man was trembling like that. He was looking down the street past me, although there wasn't anybody there, and his forehead was covered with tiny beads of sweat. His head was all pushed out of shape, and there was white stuff on his shoulder. I had this crazy idea at first that it was Styrofoam poppers—you know, the packing stuff people put in the box when they mail something fragile?—and then I saw it was bone chips. From his, you know, his skull.”

“I don't want to hear any more of this,” Ralph said abruptly.

“I don't blame you,” Johnny said, “but I think we need to know. Why don't you and your boy take a little walk around backstage? See what you can find.”

Ralph nodded, stood up, and took a step toward David.

“No,” David said. “We have to stay.”

Ralph looked at him uncertainly.

David nodded. “I'm sorry, but we do,” he said.

Ralph stood where he was a moment longer, then sat down again.

During this exchange, Johnny happened to look over at Audrey. She was staring at the boy with an expression that could have been fear or awe or both. As if she had never seen a creature quite like him. Then he thought of the crackers coming out of that bag like clowns out of the little car at the circus, and he wondered if
any
of them had ever seen a creature quite like David Carver. He thought of the transmission-bars, and Billingsley saying not even Houdini could have done it. Because of the head. They were concentrating on the buzzards and the spiders and the coyotes, on rats that jumped out of stacks of tires and houses that might be full of rattlesnakes; most of all they were concentrating on Entragian, who spoke in tongues and shot like Buffalo Bill. But what about David? Just what, exactly, was he?

“Go on, Audrey,” Cynthia said. “Only maybe you could, you know, drop back from R to PG-13.” She lifted her chin in David's direction.

Audrey looked at her vaguely for a moment, not seeming to understand. Then she gathered herself and continued.