Desperation (52 page)

Not that she would have to worry about it much; the cruiser's ignition slot was empty.

“Shit!” Mary whispered fiercely. “Shit on toast!” She turned and shone her light first on a cluster of mining equipment and then over to the base of the road leading up the pit's north slope. Packed dirt surfaced with gravel, at least four lanes wide to accommodate the heavy equipment she had just been looking at, probably smoother than the highway she and Peter had been on when the goddam cop stopped them . . . and she couldn't drive the police-cruiser up and out of here because she didn't have the fucking key.

If I can't, I have to make sure he can't either. Or she. Or whatever in hell it is.

She bent into the car again, wincing at the sour smell (and keeping an eye on the nasty statuette in the footwell, as if it might come to life and leap at her). She yanked the hood release, then walked around to the front of the car. She felt along the top of the grille for the catch, found it, and raised the Caprice's hood. The engine inside was huge, but she had no trouble spotting the air-cleaner. She leaned over it, grasped the butterfly nut in the center, and applied pressure. Nothing happened.

She hissed with frustration and blinked more sweat out of her eyes. It stung. A little over a year ago, she had read poems as part of a cultural event called “Women Poets Celebrate Their Sense and Sexuality.” She had worn a suit from Donna Karan, and a silk blouse underneath. Her hair had been freshly done, feathered in bangs across her brow. Her long poem, “My Vase,” had been quite the hit of the evening. Of course all that had been before her visit to the historic and beautiful China Pit, home of the unique and fascinating Rattlesnake Number Two mine. She doubted if any of the people who had heard her read “My Vase”—

smooth

sided

fragrance of stems

brimmed with shadows

curved like the

line of a shoulder

the line of a thigh

—at that event would recognize her now. She no longer recognized herself.

Her right hand, the one she was using on the air-cleaner, itched and throbbed. The fingers slipped. A nail tore painfully, and she gasped. “Please God, help me do this, I wouldn't know the distributor cap from the camshaft, so it has to be the carburetor. Please help me be strong enough to—”

This time when she applied pressure, the butterfly nut turned.

“Thanks,” she panted. “Oh yeah, thanks very much. You stay close. And take care of David and the others, will you? Don't let them leave this shithole without me.”

She spun the butterfly nut off and let it fall into the engine. She pulled the air-cleaner off its post and tossed it aside, revealing a carburetor almost as big as . . . well, almost as big as a vase. Laughing, Mary squatted, got a fistful of China Pit, pushed down a metal flap-thingie over one of the carb's chambers, and stuffed the sand and rock in. She added two more handfuls, filling the throat of the carburetor, strangling it, then stepped back.

“Let's see you drive
that,
you bitch,” she panted.

Hurry. Mary, you have to hurry.

She shone the flashlight over the parked equipment. There were two pickup trucks among the bigger, bulkier stuff. She walked across to them and shone the light into the cabs. No keys here, either. But there was a hatchet in with the litter of equipment in the back of the Ford F-150, and she used it to flatten two tires on both trucks. She started to throw the hatchet away, then reconsidered. She shone the light around once more, and this time she saw the gaping vaguely square hole twenty yards or so up from the bottom of the pit.

There. The source of all this trouble.

She didn't know how she knew that, if it was the voice or God or just some intuition of her own, and she didn't care. Right now she only cared about one thing: getting the bloody hell out of here.

She snapped off the flash—the moon would give her all the light she needed, at least for awhile—and began to trudge up the road which led out of China Pit.

Chapter 3

1

The literary lion stood by
the computers set up at one end of the long table, looking across the lab toward the far wall, where over a dozen people had been hung on hooks like experimental subjects in a Nazi deathcamp. All pretty much the way Steve and Cynthia had described it, except for one thing: the woman hanging just beneath the words
YOU
MUST
WEAR A HARDHAT
, the one whose head was cocked so far over to the right that her cheek lay on her shoulder, looked weirdly like Terry.

You know that's just your imagination, don't you?

Did he?
Well, maybe. But, God! . . . the same red-gold hair . . . the high forehead and slightly crooked nose . . .

“Never mind her nose,” he said. “You got a crooked nose of your own to worry about. So just get out of here, okay?”

But at first he couldn't move. He knew what he had to do—cross the room and start going through their pockets, pulling the car-keys—but knowing wasn't the same as doing. To reach in, to feel the stiff dead skin of their legs under his hand with only the thin pocket-material between him and it . . . to handle their stuff . . . not just car-keys but pocket-knives and nail-clippers and maybe aspirin-tins—

Everything people keep in their pockets is hyphenated
, he thought.
How fascinating.

—ticket-stubs, money-clips, change-purses—

“Stop,” he whispered. “Just go on and do it.”

The radio blurted static like gunfire. He jumped. No music. It was past midnight, and the local shitkickers had signed off. They would be back with another load of Travis Tritt and Tanya Tucker come sunrise, but with any luck, John Edward Marinville, the man
Harper'
s
had once called the only white male writer in America who
matters,
would be gone.

If you go, it's over.

Brushing at his face as though the thought were an annoying fly he could shoo away, Johnny started across the room. He supposed he
was
deserting them, in a manner of speaking, but be real—they had the means to leave themselves if they wanted to, didn't they? As for him, he was heading back to a life where folks didn't spout nonsense languages and rot before your eyes. A life where you could count on people's last growth-spurts to have taken place by the time they were eighteen. His leather chaps brushed against each other as he approached the corpses. Yes, all right, so for the moment he felt less like a literary lion than one of the ARVN looters he had seen in Quang Tri, looking for gold religious medallions on the corpses, sometimes even separating the buttocks of the dead in hopes of finding a diamond or pearl, but that was a specious comparison . . . and would turn out to be a transitory feeling, he was quite sure. Looting corpses wasn't what he was here for at all.
Keys
—a set that matched one of the cars in the parking lot—was what he was here for and
all
he was here for. Furthermore—

Furthermore the dead girl under
YOU
MUST
WEAR A HARDHAT
really
did
look like Terry. A strawberry-blonde with a bullet-hole in her lab coat. Of course, Terry's strawberry-blond days were long gone, she was mostly gray now, but—

You'll wish you stayed when you start smelling Tak on your skin.

“Oh, please,” he said. “Let's not be puerile.”

He looked to the left, wanting to get his eyes off the dead blonde who looked so much like Terry—Terry back in the days when she had been able to drive him wild just by crossing her legs or flipping her hip at him—and what he saw made him grin hopefully. There was an ATV over there. Parked inside the garage door like it was, he thought there was a better than even chance that the keys would be in the ignition. If they were, he would at least be spared the indignity of going through the pockets of Entragian's victims—or maybe he had been Josephson when he'd done this, not that it mattered. All he'd have to do would be unhook the ore-carrier, run up the garage door, and ride away.

. . . when you start smelling Tak on your skin.

Maybe he
would
smell it to start with, but he wouldn't smell it for long. David Carver might be a prophet, but he was a
young
prophet, and there were a few things he didn't seem to realize, direct line to God or no. One was the simple fact that stink washed off. Yes indeed it did. That was one of the few things in life Johnny was entirely sure of.

And the key to the ATV was, praise God, in the ignition.

He leaned in, turned the key to Accessory, and observed there was also more than three-quarters of a tank of gas. “All sevens, baby,” he said, and laughed. “Rolling all sevens now.”

He went to the back of the little Jeep-like vehicle and examined the ore-cart coupling. No problem there, either. Just a glorified cotter pin was all it was. He'd find a hammer . . . knock it out . . .

Not even Houdini could have done it, Marinville.
It was the old rumdum's voice this time.
Because of the head. And what about the phone? What about the sardines?

“What about them? There were just a few more cans in the bag than we thought, that's all.”

He was sweating, though. Sweating the way he had in 'Nam, sometimes. It wasn't the heat, although it
had
been hot, and it hadn't been the fear, although you
were
afraid, even when you were sleeping. Mostly it had been the sick sweat that came with knowing you were in the wrong place at the wrong time with fundamentally good people who were spoiling themselves, maybe forever, by doing the wrong thing.

Unobtrusive miracles,
he thought, only once again he heard the words in the old rumdum's voice. He was, by God, chattier dead than alive.
Why, if it wasn't for the boy, you'd still be in a jail cell now, wouldn't you? Or dead. Or worse. And you deserted him.

“If I hadn't distracted that coyote with my jacket,
David'd
be dead now,” Johnny said. “Leave me alone, you old fool.”

He spotted a hammer lying on a worktable against the wall. He headed in that direction.

“Tell me something, Johnny,” Terry said, and he froze in his tracks. “When exactly was it that you decided to deal with your fear of dying by giving up real life completely?”

That
voice wasn't in his head, he was all but sure of it. Hell, he
was
sure of it. It was Terry, hanging on the wall. Not a lookalike, not a mirage or a hallucination, but Terry. If he turned around now he would see her with her head raised, her cheek no longer on her shoulder, looking at him as she had always looked at him when he fucked up—patient because Johnny Marinville fucking up was the usual course of things, disillusioned because she was the only one who kept expecting him to do better. Which was dumb, like betting on the Tampa Bay Bucs to win the Super Bowl. Except sometimes, with her—
for
her—he
had
done better, had risen above what he had come to think of as his nature. But when he did, when he excelled, when he fucking
flew over the landscape
, did she ever say anything then? Well, maybe “Change the channel, let's see what's on PBS,” but that was about the extent of it.

“You didn't even give up living for writing,” she said. “That would at least have been understandable, if contemptible. You gave up living for
talking
about writing. I mean
Jesus,
Johnny!”

He stalked to the table on trembling legs, meaning to throw the hammer at the bitch, see if that would shut her up. And that was when he heard the low growling from his left.

He turned his head in that direction and saw a timberwolf—very likely the same one that had approached Steve and Cynthia with the
can tah
in its mouth—standing in the doorway leading back to the offices. Its eyes glowed at him. For a moment it hesitated, and Johnny allowed himself to hope—maybe it was afraid, maybe it would back off. Then it was running at him full-tilt, its muzzle wrinkling back to expose its teeth.

2

The thing which had been
Ellen had been concentrating on the wolf—using the wolf to finish with the writer—so deeply that it was in a state akin to hypnosis. Now something, some disruption in the expected flow of things, interrupted Tak's concentration. It pulled back for a moment, holding the wolf where it was, but turning toward the Ryder truck with the rest of its terrible curiosity and dark regard. Something had happened at the truck, but Tak was unable to tell what it was. There was a feeling of disorientation, a sense of waking in a room where the positions of all the furniture had been subtly altered.

Perhaps, if it wasn't trying to be in two places at the same time—

“Mi him, en tow!”
it growled, and sent the wolf at the writer. So much for the man who would be Steinbeck; the thing on four legs was fast and strong, the thing on two, slow and weak. Tak pulled its mind out of the wolf, its vision of Johnny Marinville first dimming, then fading out as the writer turned, groping for something on the worktable with one hand while his eyes went wide with fright.

It turned its full mind toward the truck and the others—although the only one of the others who mattered, who had
ever
mattered (would that it had understood earlier), was the shitting prayboy.

The bright yellow rental truck was still parked on the street—through the overlapping eyes of the spiders and with the low-to-the-ground heat-vision of the snakes Tak saw it clearly—but when it tried to go inside, it was unable. No eyes in there? Not even one tiny scuttering spider? No? Or was it Prayboy again, blocking its vision?

No matter. It didn't have time to
let
it matter. They
were
in there, all of them, they had to be, and Tak would have to leave it at that, because something else was wrong, as well. Something even closer to home.

Something wrong with Mary.

Feeling strangely and uncomfortably harried, feeling
driven,
it let the Ryder truck fade and now centered on the field office, looking through the uneasily shifting eyes of the creatures which filled it. It registered the out-of-place dryer first, then the fact that Mary was gone. She'd gotten out somehow.

“You
bitch
!” it screamed, and blood flew out of Ellen's mouth in a fine spray. The word wasn't good enough to express its feelings, and so it lapsed into the old language, spitting invective as it got to its feet . . . and staggered for balance on the edge of the
ini.
The weakness of this body had advanced in a way that was appalling. What made it worse was that it didn't have a body to which it could immediately go, if necessary; for the time being, it was stuck with this one. It thought briefly of the animals, but there were none here capable of serving Tak in that way. Tak's presence drubbed even the strongest of its human vessels to death in a matter of days. A snake, coyote, rat, or buzzard would simply explode immediately upon or moments after Tak's entry, like a tin can into which someone drops a lit stick of dynamite. The timberwolf might serve for an hour or two, but the wolf was the only one of its kind left in these parts, and currently three miles away, dealing with (and by now probably dining on) the writer.

It had to be the woman.

It had to be Mary.

The thing that looked like Ellen slipped out through the rift in the wall of the
an tak
and limped toward the faint purple square that marked the place where the old shaft now opened into the outside world. Rats squeaked eagerly around Ellen's feet as it went, smelling the blood flowing out of Ellen's stupid, sickly cunt. Tak kicked them aside, cursing them in the old language.

At the entrance to the China Shaft it paused, looking down. The moon had passed behind the far side of the pit, but it still shed some light, and the domelight inside the police-cruiser shed a little more. Enough for Ellen's eyes to see that the cruiser's hood was up and for the creature now inhabiting Ellen's brain to understand that the sly
os pa
had fucked the motor up somehow. How had she gotten out of the field office? And how had she dared do this? How had she
dared?

For the first time, Tak was afraid.

It looked left and saw that both pickups were standing on flats. It was like the Carvers' RV all over again, only this time
it
was on the receiving end, and it didn't like the feeling one bit. That left the heavy equipment, and although it knew where the keys were—sets for everything in one of the field office file cabinets—they would do it no good; there was nothing down there it could drive. Cary Ripton had known how to run the heavy stuff, but Tak had lost Ripton's physical skills the moment it left him for Josephson. As Ellen Carver, it had some of Ripton's, Josephson's, and Entragian's memories (although even these were now fading like overexposed photographs) but none of their abilities.

Oh, the bitch!
Os pa! Can fin!

Clenching and unclenching Ellen's fists nervously, aware of her sodden panties and the soaked shirt inside them, aware that Ellen's thighs were painted with blood, Tak closed Ellen's eyes and looked for Mary.

“Mi him, en tow! En tow! En
tow
!”

At first there was nothing, just blackness and the slow flux of cramps deep down in Ellen's stomach. And terror. Terror that the
os pa
bitch was gone already. Then it saw what it was looking for, not with Ellen's eyes but with ears inside of Ellen's ears: a sudden alien echo of sound that made the shape of a woman.

It was a circling bat that had seen Mary as she struggled up the road toward the northern rim of the pit, and Mary was a long way from fresh, gasping for breath and turning around every dozen steps or so. Checking for pursuit. The bat “saw” the smells coming off her quite clearly, and what Tak picked up was encouraging. It was the smell of fear, mostly. The sort which might tilt into panic with one hard push.

Still, Mary was only four hundred yards or so from the top, and after that the going would be downhill. And while Mary was tired and breathing hard, the bat did not sense the bitter metallic aroma of exhaustion in the sweat which surrounded her. Not yet, at least. There was also the fact that Mary was not bleeding like a stuck pig. This next-to-useless Ellen Carver body
was.
The bleeding wasn't out of control—not yet—but would be before much longer. Perhaps taking time to collect itself, to rest in the comforting glow of the
ini
, had been a mistake, but who would have believed this could happen?

What about sending the
can toi
to stop her? Those that were not on the perimeter as part of the
mi him
?

It
could
, but what fucking
good
would it do? It could surround Mary with snakes and spiders, with hissing wildcats and laughing coyotes, and the bitch would very likely walk right through them, parting them the way Moses had supposedly parted the Red Sea. She must know that “Ellen” couldn't damage her body, not with the
can toi
, not with any other weapon. If she
didn't
know it, she'd still be in the field office, probably crouched in the corner, all but catatonic with fear, unable to make a sound after screaming herself hoarse.

How
had she known? Had it been the prayboy? Or had it been a message from the prayboy's God, David Carver's
can tak
? No matter. The fact that Ellen's body was starting to come apart and Mary had a half-mile head start, those things didn't matter, either.

“I'm coming just the same, sweetheart,” it whispered, and began making its way along one of the benches, moving away from the mineshaft and toward the road.

Yes. Coming just the same. It might have to beat this body to flinders in order to catch up with the
os pa,
but it
would
catch up.

Ellen turned her head, spat blood, grinned. She no longer looked much like the woman who had been considering a run for the school board, the woman who had enjoyed lunch with her friends at China Happiness, the woman whose deepest, darkest sexual fantasies involved making love to the hunk in the Diet Coke commercials.

“It doesn't matter how fast you hurry,
os pa.
You're not getting away.”