Desperation (38 page)

4

Mary Jackson said: “What do
we do now? How do we get out of this mess? Do we even try, or do we wait to be rescued?”

For a long time no one replied. Then Steve shifted in the chair he was sharing with Cynthia and said, “We
can't
wait. Not for long, anyway.”

“Why do you say that?” Johnny asked. His voice was curiously gentle, as if he already knew the answer to this question.

“Because
somebody
should've gotten away, gotten to a phone outside of town and pulled the plug on the murder-machine. No one did, though. Even before the storm started, no one did. Something very powerful's happening here, and I think that counting on help from the outside may only get us killed. We have to count on each other, and we have to get out as soon as possible. That's what I believe.”

“I'm not going without finding out what happened to my mom,” David said.

“You can't think that way, son,” Johnny said.

“Yes I can. I
am.
”

“No,” Billingsley said. Something in his voice made David raise his head. “Not with other lives at stake. Not when you're . . . special, the way you are. We need you, son.”

“That's not fair,” David almost whispered.

“No,” Billingsley agreed. His lined face was stony. “It ain't.”

Cynthia said, “It won't do your mother any good if you—and the rest of us—die trying to find her, kiddo. On the other hand, if we can get out of town, we could come back with help.”

“Right,” Ralph said, but he said it in a hollow, sick way.

“No, it's
not
right,” David said. “It's a crock of
shit,
that's what it is.”

“David!”

The boy surveyed them, his face fierce with anger and sick with fright. “None of you care about my mother, not one of you. Even you don't, Dad.”

“That's untrue,” Ralph said. “And it's a cruel thing to say.”

“Yeah,” David said, “but I think it's true, just the same. I know you love her, but I think you'd leave her because you believe she's already dead.” He fixed his father with his gaze, and when Ralph looked down at his hands, tears oozing out of his swollen eye, David switched to the veterinarian. “And I'll tell
you
something, Mr. Billingsley. Just because I pray doesn't mean I'm a comic-book wizard or something. Praying's not magic. The only magic I know is a couple of card tricks that I usually mess up on anyway.”

“David—” Steve began.

“If we go away and come back, it'll be too late to save her! I know it will be! I
know
that!” His words rang from the stage like an actor's speech, then died away. Outside, the indifferent wind gusted.

“David, it's probably already too late,” Johnny said. His voice was steady enough, but he couldn't quite look at the kid as he said it.

Ralph sighed harshly. His son went to him, sat beside him, took his hand. Ralph's face was drawn with weariness and confusion. He looked older now.

Steve turned to Audrey. “You said you knew another way out.”

“Yes. The big earthwork you see as you come into town is the north face of the pit we've reopened. There's a road that goes up the side of it, over the top, and into the pit. There's another one that goes back to Highway 50 west of here. It runs along Desperation Creek, which is just a dry-wash now. You know where I mean, Tom?”

He nodded.

“That road—Desperation Creek Road—starts at the motor-pool. There are more ATVs there. The biggest only seats four safely, but we could hook up an empty gondola and the other three could ride in it.”

Steve, a ten-year veteran of load-ins, load-outs, snap decisions, and rapid getaways (often necessitated by the combination of four-star hotels and rock-band assholes), had been following her carefully. “Okay, what I suggest is this. We wait until morning. Get some rest, maybe even a little sleep. The storm might blow itself out by then—”

“I think the wind
has
let up a little,” Mary said. “Maybe that's wishful thinking, but I really think it has.”

“Even if it's still going, we can get up to the motorpool, can't we, Audrey?”

“I'm sure we can.”

“How far is it?”

“Two miles from the mining office, probably a mile and a half from here.”

He nodded. “And in daylight, we'll be able to see Entragian. If we try to go at night, in the storm, we can't count on that.”

“We can't count on being able to see the . . . the wildlife, either,” Cynthia said.

“I'm talking about moving fast and armed,” Steve said. “If the storm plays out, we can head up to the embankment in my truck—three up front in the cab with me, four back in the box. If the weather is still bad—and I actually hope it will be—I think we should go on foot. We'll attract less attention that way. He might never even know we're gone.”

“I imagine the Escolla boy and his friends were thinking about the same way when Collie ran em down,” Billingsley said.

“They were headed north on Main Street,” Johnny said. “Exactly what Entragian would have been looking for. We'll be going
south,
toward the mine, at least initially, and leaving the area on a feeder road.”

“Yeah,” Steve said. “And then bang, we're gone.” He went over to David—the boy had left his father and was sitting on the edge of the stage, staring out over the tacky old theater seats—and squatted beside him. “But we'll come back. You hear me, David? We'll come back for your mom, and for anyone else he's left alive. That's a rock-solid promise, from me to you.”

David went on staring out over the seats. “I don't know what to do,” he said. “I know I need to ask God to help me straighten out my head, but right now I'm so mad at him that I can't. Every time I try to compose my mind, that gets in the way. He let the cop take my mother! Why? Jesus,
why
?”

Do you know you did a miracle just a little while ago?
Steve thought. He didn't say it; it might only make David's confusion and misery worse. After a moment Steve got up and stood looking down at the boy, hands shoved deep into his pockets, eyes troubled.

5

The cougar walked slowly down
the alley, head lowered, ears flattened. She avoided the garbage cans and the pile of scrap lumber much more easily than the humans had done; she saw far better in the dark. Still, she paused at the end of the alley, a low, squalling growl rising from her throat. She didn't like this. One of them was strong—very strong. She could sense that one's force even through the brick flank of the building, pulsing like a glow. Still, there was no question of disobedience. The outsider, the one from the earth, was in the cougar's head, its will caught in her mind like a fishhook. That one spoke in the language of the unformed, from the time before, when all animals except for men and the outsider were one.

But she didn't like that sense of force. That glow.

She growled again, a rasp that rose and fell, coming more from her nostrils than her closed mouth. She slipped her head around the corner, wincing at a blast of wind that ruffled her fur and charged her nose with smells of brome grass and Indian paintbrush and old booze and older brick. Even from here she could smell the bitterness from the pit south of town, the smell that had been there since they had charged the last half-dozen blast-holes and reopened the bad place, the one the animals knew about and the men had tried to forget.

The wind died, and the cougar padded slowly down the path between the board fence and the rear of the theater. She stopped to sniff at the crates, spending more time on the one which had been overturned than on the one which still stood against the wall. There were many intermingled scents here. The last person who had stood on the overturned crate had then pushed it off the one still against the wall. The cougar could smell his hands, a different, sharper smell than the others. A skin smell,
undressed
somehow, tangy with sweat and oils. It belonged to a male in the prime of his life.

She could also smell guns. Under other circumstances that smell would have sent her running, but now it didn't matter. She would go where the old one sent her; she had no choice. The cougar sniffed the wall, then looked up at the window. It was unlocked; she could see it moving back and forth in the wind. Not much, because it was recessed, but enough for her to be sure it was open. She could get inside. It would be easy. The window would push in before her, giving way as man-things sometimes did.

No,
the voice of the unformed said.
You can't.

An image flickered briefly in her mind: shiny things. Man-drinkers, sometimes smashed to bright fragments on the rocks when the men were done with them. She understood (in the way that a layperson may vaguely understand a complicated geometry proof, if it is carefully explained) that she would knock a number of these man-drinkers onto the floor if she tried to jump through the window. She didn't know how that could be, but the voice in her head said it was, and that the others would hear them break.

The cougar passed beneath the unlatched window like a dark eddy, paused to sniff at the firedoor, which had been boarded shut, then came to a second window. This one was at the same height as the one with the man-drinkers inside of it, and made of the same white glass, but it wasn't unlatched.

It's the one you'll use, though,
the voice in the cougar's head whispered.
When I tell you it's time, that's the one you'll use.

Yes. She might cut herself on the glass in the window, as she had once cut the pads of her feet on the pieces of man-drinkers up in the hills, but when the voice in her head told her that the time had come, she would jump at the window. Once inside, she would continue to do what the voice told her. It wasn't the way things were supposed to be . . . but for now, it was the way things were.

The cougar lay below the bolted men's-room window, curled her tail around her, and waited for the voice of the thing from the pit. The voice of the outsider. The voice of Tak. When it came, she would move. Until it did, she would lie here and listen to the voice of the wind, and smell the bitterness it brought with it, like bad news from another world.

Chapter 3

1

Mary watched the old veterinarian
take a bottle of whiskey out of the liquor cabinet, almost drop it, then pour himself a drink. She took a step toward Johnny and spoke to him in a low voice. “Make him stop. That's the one with the drunk in it.”

He looked at her with raised eyebrows. “Who elected
you
Temperance Queen?”

“You shithead,” she hissed. “Don't you think I know who got him started? Don't you think I
saw
?”

She started toward Tom, but Johnny pulled her back and went himself. He heard her little gasp of pain and supposed he might have squeezed her wrist a little harder than was exactly gentlemanly. Well, he wasn't used to being called a shithead. He had won a National Book Award, after all. He had been on the cover of
Time.
He had also fucked America's sweetheart (well, maybe that was sort of retroactive, or something, she hadn't really been America's sweetheart since 1965 or so, but he
had
still fucked her), and he wasn't used to being called a shithead. Yet, Mary had a point. He, a man not unacquainted with the highways and byways of Alcoholics Anonymous, had nevertheless given that kiddy favorite, Mr. Drunken Doggy Doctor, his first shot of the evening. He'd thought it would pull Billingsley together, get him focused (and they had
needed
him focused, it was his town, after all) . . . but hadn't he also been a teeny-tiny bit pissed off at the tosspot vet awarding himself a loaded gun while The National Book Award Kid had to be contented with an unloaded .22?

No. No, dammit, the gun wasn't the issue. Keeping the old man wired together enough to be of some help, that was the issue.

Well, maybe. Maybe. It felt a little bogus, but you had to give yourself the benefit of the doubt in some situations—especially the crazy ones, which this certainly was. Either way, it maybe hadn't been such a good idea. He had had a large number of not-such-good-ideas in his life, and if anyone was qualified to recognize one when he saw it, John Edward Marinville was probably that fellow.

“Why don't we save that for later, Tom?” he said, and smoothly plucked the glass of whiskey out of the vet's hand just as he was bringing it to his lips.

“Hey!” Billingsley cawed, making a swipe at it. His eyes were more watery than ever, and now threaded with bright red stitches that looked like tiny cuts. “Gimme that!”

Johnny held it away from him, up by his own mouth, and felt a sudden, appallingly strong urge to take care of the problem in the quickest, simplest way. Instead, he put the glass on top of the bar, where ole Tommy wouldn't be able to reach it unless he jumped around to one side or the other. Not that he didn't think Tommy was capable of jumping for a drink; ole Tommy had gotten to a point where he would probably try to fart “The Marine Hymn” if someone promised him a double. Meantime, the others were watching, Mary rubbing her wrist (which
was
red, he observed—but just a little, really no big deal).

“Gimme!”
Billingsley bawled, and stretched out one hand toward the glass on top of the bar, opening and closing his fingers like an angry baby that wants its sucker back. Johnny suddenly remembered how the actress—the one with the emeralds, the one who had been America's number one honeybunny in days of yore, so sweet sugar wouldn't melt in her snatch—had once pushed him into the pool at the Bel-Air, how everyone had laughed, how he himself had laughed as he came out dripping, with his bottle of beer still in his hand, too drunk to know what was happening, that the flushing sound he heard was the remainder of his reputation going down the shitter. Yes sir and yes ma'am, there he had been on that hot day in Los Angeles, laughing like mad in his wet Pierre Cardin suit, bottle of Bud upraised in one hand like a trophy, everyone else laughing right along with him; they were all having a great old time, he had been pushed into the pool just like in a movie and they were having a great old time, hardy-har and hidey-ho, welcome to the wonderful world of too drunk to know better, let's see you write your way out of this one, Marinville.

He felt a burst of shame that was more for himself than for Tom, although he knew it was Tom they were looking at (except for Mary, who was still making a big deal of her wrist), Tom who was still saying “Gimme that
baack
!” while he clenched and unclenched his hand like Baby Fucking Huey, Tom who was already shot on only three drinks. Johnny had seen this before, too; after a certain number of years spent swimming around in the bottle, drinking everything in sight and yet seeming to remain almost stone-sober, your booze-gills had this weird tendency to suddenly seal themselves shut at almost the first taste. Crazy but true. See the amazing Late-Stage Alcoholic, folks, step right up, you won't believe your eyes.

He put an arm around Tom, leaned into the brown aroma of Dant that hung around the man's head like a fumey halo, and murmured, “Be a good boy now and you can have that shot later.”

Tom looked at him with his red-laced eyes. His chapped, cracked lips were wet with spit. “Do you promise?” he whispered back, a conspirator's whisper, breathing out more fumes and running it all together, so it became
Deryapromiz
?

“Yes,” Johnny said. “I may have been wrong to get you started, but now that I have, I'm going to maintain you. That's
all
I'll do, though. So have a little dignity, all right?”

Billingsley looked at him. Wide eyes full of water. Red lids. Lips shining. “I can't,” he whispered.

Johnny sighed and closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again, Billingsley was staring across the stage at Audrey Wyler.

“Why does she have to wear her damned skirt so
short
?” he muttered. The smell of his breath was strong enough for Johnny to decide that maybe this wasn't just a case of three drinks and you're out; Old Snoop Doggy Doc had chipped himself an extra two or three somewhere along the line.

“I don't know,” he said, smiling what felt like a big false gameshow host's smile and leading Billingsley back toward the others, getting him turned away from the bar and the drink sitting on top of it. “Are you complaining?”

“No,” Billingsley said. “No, I . . . I just . . .” He looked nakedly up at Johnny with his wet drunk's eyes. “What was I talking about?”

“It doesn't matter.” A gameshow host's voice was now coming out of the gameshow host's grin: big, hearty, as sincere as a producer's promise to call you next week. “Tell me something—why do they call that hole in the ground China Pit? I've been wondering about that.”

“I imagine Miss Wyler knows more about it than I do,” Billingsley said, but Audrey was no longer on the stage; as David and his father joined them, looking concerned, Audrey had exited stage-right, perhaps looking for something else to eat.

“Oh, come on,” Ralph said, unexpectedly conversational. Johnny looked at him and saw that, despite all his own problems, Ralph Carver understood exactly how the land lay with old Tommy. “I bet you've forgotten more local history than that young lady over there ever learned. And it
is
local history, isn't it?”

“Well . . . yes. History and geology.”

“Come on, Tom,” Mary said. “Tell us a story. Help pass the time.”

“All right,” he said. “But it ain't purty, as we say around here.”

Steve and Cynthia wandered over. Steve had his arm around the girl's waist; she had hers around his, with her fingers curled in one of his belt-loops.

“Tell it, oldtimer,” Cynthia said softly. “Go on.”

So he did.