Desperation (48 page)

“And they
were
only Chinese,” Steve said.

“That's right, little chink-chink China-boys. Mr. Billingsley was right about that. And while all this was going on, the two China-boys who
had
escaped were out in the desert near Rose Rock, going mad. It got to them in the end, you see. It caught up with them. It was almost two weeks before they came back to Desperation, not three days. It
was
the Lady Day they walked into—you see how he got the truth all mixed up with the lies?—but they didn't kill anyone there. Shih flashed the foreman's gun, which was empty, and that was all it took. They were brought down by a whole pack of miners and cowboys. They were naked except for loincloths. They were covered with blood. The men in the Lady Day felt like that blood must have been from all the folks they had murdered, but it wasn't. They'd been out in the desert, calling animals to them . . . just like Tak called the cougar that you shot, Mr. Marinville. Only the Lushan brothers didn't want them for anything like that. They only wanted to eat. They ate whatever came—bats, buzzards, spiders, rattlesnakes.”

David raised an unsteady hand to his face and wiped first his left eye and then his right.

“I feel very sorry for the Lushan brothers. And I feel like I know them a little. How they must have felt. How they must have been grateful, in a way, when the madness finally took them over completely and they didn't have to think anymore.

“They could have stayed out there in the Desatoya foothills practically forever, I guess, but they were all Tak had, and Tak is always hungry. It sent them into town, because there was nothing else it could do. One of them, Shih, was killed right there in the Lady Day. Ch'an was hung two days later, right about where those three bikes were turned upside down in the street . . . remember those? He raved in Tak's language, the language of the unformed, right up until the end. He tore the hood right off his head, so they hung him barefaced.”

“Boy, that God of yours, what a guy!” Marinville said cheerfully. “Really knows how to repay a favor, doesn't he, David?”

“God is cruel,” David said in a voice almost too low to hear.

“What?” Marinville asked. “What did you say?”

“You know. But life is more than just steering a course around pain. That's something you used to know, Mr. Marinville. Didn't you?”

Marinville looked off into the corner of the truck and said nothing.

4

The first thing Mary was
aware of was a smell—sweetish, rank, nauseating.
Oh Peter, dammit to hell,
she thought groggily.
It's the freezer, everything's spoiled!

Except that wasn't right; the freezer had gone off during their trip to Majorca, and that had been a long time ago, before the miscarriage. A lot had happened since then. A lot had happened just recently, in fact. Most of it bad. But what?

Central Nevada's full of intense people.

Who said that? Marielle? In her head it certainly sounded like Marielle.

Doesn't matter, if it's true. And it is, isn't it?

She didn't know. Didn't
want
to know. What she mostly wanted was to go back into the darkness part of her was trying to come out of. Because there were voices

(they're a dastardly bunch)

and sounds

(reek-reek-reek)

that she didn't want to consider. Better to just lie here and—

Something scuttered across her face. It felt both light and hairy. She sat up, pawing her cheeks with both hands. An enormous bolt of pain went through her head, bright dots flashed across her vision in sync with her suddenly elevated heartrate, and she had a similarly bright flash of recall, one even Johnny Marinville would have admired.

I bumped my bad arm putting up another crate to stand on.

Hold on, you'll be inside in a jiffy.

And then she had been grabbed. By Ellen. No; by the thing

(Tak)

that had been
wearing
Ellen. That thing had slugged her and then boom, boom, out go the lights.

And in a very literal sense, they were still out. She had to flutter her lids several times simply to assure herself that her eyes were open.

Oh, they're open, all right. Maybe it's just dark in this place . . . but maybe you're blind. How about that for a lovely thought. Mare? Maybe she hit you hard enough to blind y—

Something was on the back of her hand. It ran halfway across and then paused, seeming to throb on her skin. Mary made a sound of revulsion with her tongue pressed to the roof of her mouth and flapped her hand madly in the air, like a woman waving off some annoying person. The throbbing disappeared; the thing on the back of her hand was gone. Mary got to her feet, provoking another cymbal-crash of pain in her head which she barely noticed. There were
things
in here, and she had no time for a mere headache.

She turned slowly around, breathing that sickish-sweet aroma that was so similar to the stench that had greeted her and Pete when they had returned home from their mini-vacation in the Balearic Islands. Pete's parents had given them the trip as a Christmas present the year after they had been married, and how great it had been . . . until they'd walked back in, bags in hand, and the stench had hit them like a fist. They had lost everything: two chickens, the chops and roasts she'd gotten at the good discount meat-cutter's she'd found in Brooklyn, the venison-steaks Peter's friend Don had given them, the pints of strawberries they'd picked at the Mohonk Mountain House the previous summer. This smell . . . so similar . . .

Something that felt the size of a walnut dropped into her hair.

She screamed, at first beating at it with the flat of her hand. That did no good, so she slid her fingers into her hair and got hold of whatever it was. It squirmed, then burst between her fingers. Thick fluid squirted into her palm. She raked the bristly, deflating body out of her hair and shook it off her palm. She heard it hit something . . .
splat.
Her palm felt hot and itchy, as if she had reached into poison ivy. She rubbed it against her jeans.

Please God don't let me be next,
she thought.
Whatever happens don't let me end up like the cop. Like Ellen.

She fought the urge to simply bolt into the black surrounding her. If she did that she might brain herself, disembowel herself, or impale herself, like an expendable character in a horror movie, on some grotesque piece of mining equipment. But even that wasn't the worst. The worst was that there might be something besides the scuttering things in here with her. Something that was just waiting for her to panic and run.

Waiting with its arms held out.

Now she had a sense—perhaps it was only her imagination, but she didn't think so—of stealthy movement all around her. A rustling sound from the left. A slithering from the right. There was a sudden low squalling from behind her, there and gone before she could scream.

That last one wasn't anything alive,
she told herself.
At least I don't think so. I think it was a tumbleweed hitting metal and scraping along it. I think I'm in a little building somewhere. She put me in a little building for safekeeping and the fridge is out, just like the lights, and the stuff inside has spoiled.

But if Ellen was Entragian in a new body, why hadn't he/she just put her back in the cell where he'd put her to start with? Because he/she was afraid the others would find her there and let her out again? It was as plausible a reason as any other she could think up, and there was a thread of hope in it, as well. Holding onto it, Mary began to shuffle slowly forward with her hands held out.

It seemed she walked that way for a very long time—years. She kept expecting something else to touch her, and at last something did. It ran across her shoe. Mary froze. Finally it went about its business. But what followed it was even worse: a low, dry rattle coming out of the darkness at roughly ten o'clock. So far as she knew, there was only one thing that rattled like that. The sound didn't really stop but seemed to die away, like the whine of a cicada on a hot August afternoon. The low squalling returned. This time she was positive it was a tumbleweed sliding along metal. She was in a mining building, maybe the Quonset where Steve and the girl with the wild hair, Cynthia, had seen the little stone statue that had frightened them so badly.

Get moving.

I can't. There's a rattlesnake in here. Maybe more than one.
Probably
more than one.

That's not all that
's in here, though. Better get moving, Mary.

Her palm throbbed angrily where the thing in her hair had burst open. Her heart thudded in her ears. As slowly as she could, she began inching forward again, hands out. Terrible ideas and images went with her. She saw a snake as thick as a powerline dangling from a rafter just ahead of her, fanged jaws hinged wide, forked tongue dancing. She would walk right into it and wouldn't know until it battened on her face, injecting its poison straight into her eyes. She saw the closet-demon of her childhood, a bogey she had for some reason called Apple Jack, slumped in the corner with his brown fruit-face all pulled in on itself, grinning, waiting for her to wander into his deadly embrace; the last thing she'd smell would be his cidery aroma, which was for the time being masked by the stench of spoilage, as he hugged her to death, all the time covering her face with wet avid uncle-kisses. She saw a cougar, like the one that had killed poor old Tom Billingsley, crouched in a corner with its tail switching. She saw Ellen, holding a baling hook in one hand and smiling a thin waiting smile which was like a hook itself, simply marking time until Mary got close enough to skewer.

But mostly what she saw was snakes.

Rattlers.

Her fingers touched something. She gasped and almost recoiled, but that was just nerves; the thing was hard, unliving. A straight-edge at the height of her torso. A table? Covered with an oilcloth? She thought so. She walked her fingers across it, and forced herself to freeze when one of the scuttery things touched her. It crawled over the back of her hand and down to her wrist, almost surely a spider of some sort, and then was gone. She walked her hand on, and here was something else investigating her, more of what Audrey had called “wildlife.” Not a spider. This thing, whatever it was, had claws and a hard surface.

Mary forced herself to hold still, but couldn't keep entirely quiet; a low, desperate moan escaped her. Sweat ran down her forehead and cheeks like warm motor-oil, stung in her eyes. Then the thing on her hand gave her an obscene little squeeze and was gone. She could hear it click-dragging its way across the table. She moved her hand again, resisting the clamor of her mind to pull back. If she did, what then? Stand here trembling in the dark until the stealthy sounds around her drove her crazy, sent her running in panicked circles until she bashed herself unconscious again?

Here was a plate—no, a bowl—with something in it. Congealed soup? Her fingers fumbled beside it and felt a spoon. Yes, soup. She felt beyond it, touched what could have been a salt- or pepper-shaker, then something soft and flabby. She suddenly remembered a game they had played at slumber-parties when she was a girl in Mamaroneck. A game made to be played in the dark. You'd pass around spaghetti and intone
These are the dead man's guts,
pass around cold Jell-O and intone
These are the dead man's brains.

Her hand struck something hard and cylindrical. It fell over with a rattle she recognized at once . . . or hoped she did: batteries in the tube of a flashlight.

Please, God,
she thought, groping for it.
Please God let it be what it feels like.

The squalling from outside came again, but she barely heard it. Her hand touched a cold piece of meat

(this is the dead man's face)

but she barely felt it. Her heart was hammering in her chest, her throat, even in her sinuses.

There! There!

Cold, smooth metal, it tried to squitter out of her grip, but she squeezed it tight. Yes, a flashlight; she could feel the switch lying against the web of skin between her thumb and forefinger.

Now let it work, God. Please, okay?

She pressed the switch. Light sprang out in a widening cone, and her yammering heartbeat stopped dead in her ears for a moment.
Everything
stopped dead.

The table was long, covered with lab equipment and rock samples at one end, covered with a checked piece of tablecloth at the other. This end had been set, as for dinner, with a soup-bowl, a plate, silverware, and a water-glass. A large black spider had fallen into the waterglass and couldn't get out; it writhed and scratched fruitlessly. The red hourglass on its belly showed in occasional flickers. Other spiders, most also black widows, preened and strutted on the table. Among them were rock-scorpions, stalking back and forth like parliamentarians, their stingers furled on their backs. Sitting at the end of the table was a large bald man in a Diablo Mining Corporation tee-shirt. He had been shot in the throat at close range. The stuff in the soup-bowl, the stuff she had touched with her fingers, wasn't soup but this man's clotted blood.

Mary's heart re-started itself, sending her own blood crashing up into her head like a piston, and all at once the flashlight's yellow fan of light began to look red and shimmery. She heard a high, sweet singing in her ears.

Don't you faint, don'
t you
dare—

The flashlight beam swung to the left. In the corner, under a poster which read
GO AHEAD, BAN MINING, LET THE BASTARDS FREEZE IN THE DARK
!, was a roiling nest of rattlesnakes. She slid the beam along the metal wall, past congregations of spiders (some of the black widows she saw were as big as her hand), and in the other corner were more snakes. Their daytime torpor was gone, and they writhed together, flowing through sheetbends and clove hitches and double diamonds, occasionally shaking their tails.

Don't faint, don't faint, don't faint—

She turned around with the light, and when it happened upon the other three bodies that were in here with her, she understood several things at once. The fact that she had discovered the source of the bad smell was only the least of them.

The bodies at the foot of the wall were in an advanced state of decay, delirious with maggots, but they hadn't been simply dumped. They were lined up . . . perhaps even laid out. Their puffy, blackening hands had been laced together on their chests. The man in the middle really
was
black, she thought, although it was impossible to tell for sure. She didn't know him or the one on his right, but the one on the black guy's left she
did
know, in spite of the toiling maggots and the decomposition. In her mind she heard him mixing
I'm going to kill you
into the Miranda warning.

As she watched, a spider ran out of Collie Entragian's mouth.

The beam of the light shook as she ran it along the line of corpses again. Three men. Three
big
men, not a one of the three under six-feet-five.

I know why I'm here instead of in jail,
she thought.
And I know why I wasn't killed. I'm next. When it's through with Ellen . . . I'm next.

Mary began to scream.