Desperation (53 page)

3

The dark shape dive-bombed her
again, and Mary swatted it away. “Fuck
off
!” she panted at it.

The bat veered, cheeping, but didn't go far. It circled her like some sort of spotter-plane, and Mary had an unpleasant idea that that was just what it was. She looked up and saw the rim of the pit ahead and above her. Closer now—maybe only two hundred yards—but it still looked mockingly far off. It felt as if she were tearing each breath out of the air, and it hurt going down. Her heart was hammering, and there was a deep stitch in her left side. She had actually thought she was in pretty good shape for a woman who was thirtysomething, as if using the NordicTrack and the StairMaster three times a week at Gold's Gym could get you ready for something like this.

Suddenly the fine gravel surface of the road slid out from under her sneakers, and her trembling legs weren't able to correct her balance in time. She was able to avoid going flat on her face by dropping to one knee, but her jeans tore, she felt the sting of the gravel biting through her skin, and then warm blood was flowing down her lower leg.

The bat was on her at once, cheeping and battering its wings in her hair.

“Get out, you cocksucker!” she cried, and boxed a closed fist at it. It was a lucky punch. She felt the fine-grained surface of one wing give way under the blow and then the bat was fluttering on the road ahead of her, mouth opening and closing, staring at her—or seeming to—with its useless little eyes. Mary struggled to her feet and stamped on it, voicing a sharp, almost birdlike cry of satisfaction as it crunched beneath her sneaker.

She started to turn again, then glimpsed something down below. A shadow moving among shadows.

“Mary?” It was Ellen Carver's voice that came floating up, but at the same time it wasn't. It was gargly, full. If you hadn't been through the hell of the last six or eight hours, you might have thought it was Ellen with a bad cold. “Wait, Mare! I want to go with you! I want to see David! We'll go see him together!”

“Go to hell,” Mary whispered. She turned and began to walk again, tearing breath out of the air and rubbing at the pain in her side. She would have run if she could.

“Mary-Mary-quite-contrary!” Not quite laughing, but almost. “You can't get away, dear—don't you know that?”

The rim looked so far away that Mary forced herself to quit looking at it and lowered her head to her sneakers. The next time the voice behind her called her name, it sounded closer. Mary made herself walk a little faster. She fell twice more before she got to the rim, the second time hard enough to knock the wind out of her, and it took her precious, precious seconds of first kneeling and then standing with her head down and her hands on her thighs to get it back. She wished Ellen would call again, but she didn't. And now Mary didn't want to look back. She was too afraid of what she might see.

Five yards from the top, however, she finally did. Ellen was less than twenty yards below her, panting soundlessly through a mouth dropped so wide open that it looked like an airscoop. Blood misted out with each exhalation; her blouse was drenched with it. She saw Mary looking at her, grimaced, reached out with clawed hands, tried to sprint forward and grab her. She couldn't.

Mary, however, found that she
could
sprint. It was mostly the look in Ellen Carver's eyes. Nothing human in them. Nothing at all.

She reached the top of the pit, the air now screaming thinly in and out of her throat. The road ran flat across thirty yards of rim, then tilted down. She could see a tiny yellow spark in the blackness of the desert floor, winking on and off: the blinker in the center of town.

Mary set her eyes on this and ran a little faster.

4

“What are you doing, David?”
Ralph asked tightly. After a short period of concentration which was probably silent prayer, David had begun walking toward the back door of the Ryder truck. Ralph had moved instinctively, putting his body between his son and the handle that ran the door up. Steve saw this and sympathized with the feeling behind it, but didn't guess it would do much good. If David decided he was going to leave, David would leave.

The boy held up the wallet. “Taking this back.”

“No you don't,” Ralph said, shaking his head rapidly. “No way. For God's sake, David, you don't even know where that man is—out of town by now, is my guess. And good riddance to bad rubbish.”

“I know where he is,” David said calmly. “I can find him. He's close.” He hesitated, then added: “I'm
supposed
to find him.”

“David?” To his own ears, Steve's voice sounded tentative, oddly young. “You said the chain was broken.”

“That was before I saw the picture in his wallet. I have to go to him. I have to go now. It's the only chance we have.”

“I don't understand,” Ralph said, but he stepped away from the door. “What does that picture
mean
?”

“There's no time, Dad. I'm not sure I could explain even if there was.”

“Are we coming with you?” Cynthia asked. “We're not, are we?”

David shook his head. “I'll come back if I can. With Johnny, if I can.”

“This's nuts,” his father said, but he spoke hollowly, with no strength. “If you go wandering around out there, you'll be eaten alive.”

“No more than the coyote ate me alive when I got out of the cell,” David said. “The danger isn't if I go out there; it's if we all stay in here.”

He looked at Steve, then at the rear door of the Ryder truck. Steve nodded and ran the door up on its tracks. The desert night slipped in, pressed against his face like a cold kiss.

David went to his father and began to hug him. As Ralph's arms went around the boy in response, David felt that enormous force grab at him again. It ran through him like hard rain. He jerked convulsively in his father's arms, gasping, then took a blind step backward. His hands, shaking wildly, were held out before him.

“David!” Ralph cried. “David, what—”

And it was over. As quickly as that. The force left. But he could still see the China Pit as he had seen it for a moment in the circle of his father's arms; it had been like looking down from a low-flying plane. It glimmered in the last of the moonlight, a wretched alabaster sinkhole. He could hear the ruffle of the wind in his ears and a voice

(mi him, en tow! mi him, en tow!)

calling. A voice that wasn't human.

He made an effort to clear his mind and look around at them—so few left now, so few of The Collie Entragian Survival Society. Steve and Cynthia standing together, his father bending down toward him; behind them, the moondrenched night.

“What is it?” Ralph asked unsteadily. “Christ Almighty, what now?”

He saw he had dropped the wallet, and bent to pick it up. Wouldn't do to leave it here, gosh no. He thought of putting it into his own back pocket, then thought of how it had fallen out of Johnny's and dumped it down the front of his shirt instead.

“You have to go to the pit,” he told his father. “Daddy, you and Steve and Cynthia have to go out to the China Pit right now. Mary needs help. Do you understand?
Mary needs help!
”

“What are you talk—”

“She got out, she's running down the road toward town, and Tak is chasing her. You have to go now.
Right now!
”

Ralph reached for him again, but this time in a tentative, strengthless way. David ducked easily beneath his arm and jumped from the Ryder truck's tailgate into the street.

“David!” Cynthia cried. “Splitting up like this . . . are you sure it's right?”

“No!”
he shouted back. He felt desperate and confused and more than a little stunned. “I know how wrong it feels, it feels wrong to me, too, but there's nothing else! I swear to you! There's just nothing else!”

“You get back in here!”
Ralph bawled.

David turned, dark eyes meeting his father's frantic gaze. “Go, Dad. All three of you. Now. You have to. Help her! For God's sake,
help Mary
!”

And before anyone could ask another question, David Carver turned on his heel and went pelting off into the dark. With one hand he pumped the air; the other he held against the front of his shirt, cupping John Edward Marinville's genuine crocodile wallet, three hundred and ninety-five dollars, Barneys of New York.

5

Ralph tried to jump out
after his son. Steve grabbed him by the shoulders, and Cynthia grabbed him around the waist.

“Let me go!”
Ralph shouted, struggling . . . but not struggling too hard, at that. Steve felt marginally encouraged. “
Let me go after my son!”

“No,” Cynthia said. “We have to believe he knows what he's doing, Ralph.”

“I can't lose him, too,” Ralph whispered, but he relaxed, quit trying to pull away from them. “I
can't.
”

“Maybe the best way to make sure that doesn't happen is to go along with what he wants,” Cynthia said.

Ralph drew a deep breath, then exhaled it. “My son went after that asshole,” he said. He sounded as if he were talking to himself.
Explaining
to himself. “He went after that conceited asshole
to give him back his wallet,
and if we asked him why, he'd say because it's God's will. Am I right?”

“Yeah, probably,” Cynthia said. She reached out and touched Ralph's shoulder. He opened his eyes and she smiled at him. “And you know the bitch of it? It's probably the truth.”

Ralph looked at Steve. “You wouldn't leave him, would you? Pick up Mary, take that equipment-road back to the highway, and leave my boy behind?”

Steve shook his head.

Ralph put his hands to his face, seemed to gather himself, dropped his hands, and stared at them. There was a stony cast to his features now, a look of resolves taken and bridges burned. A queer thought came to Steve: for the first time since he'd met the Carvers, he could see the son in the father.

“All right,” Ralph said. “We'll leave God to protect my kid until we get back.” He jumped off the back of the truck and looked grimly down the street. “It'll
have
to be God. That bastard Marinville sure won't do it.”

Chapter 4

1

The thought which flashed across
Johnny's mind as the wolf charged him was the kid saying that the creature running this show wanted them to leave town, would be happy to let them go. Maybe it was a little glitch in the kid's second sight . . . or maybe Tak had just seen a chance to pick one of them off and was taking it. Never look a gift-horse in the mouth, and all that.

In either case
, he thought,
I am royally fucked.

You deserve to be, sweetheart,
Terry said from behind him—yeah, that was Terry, all right, helpful to the end.

He brandished the hammer at the oncoming wolf and yelled
“Get outta here!”
in a shrill voice he barely recognized as his own.

The wolf broke left and turned in a tight circle, growling as it went, hindquarters low to the ground, tail tucked. One of its powerful shoulders struck a cabinet as it completed its turn, and a teacup balanced on top of it fell off and shattered on the floor. The radio coughed out a long, loud bray of static.

Johnny took one step toward the door, visualizing how he would pelt down the hall and out into the parking lot—fuck the ATV, he'd find wheels elsewhere—and then the wolf was in the aisle again, head down and hackles up, eyes (horribly intelligent, horribly
aware
eyes) glowing. Johnny retreated, holding the hammer up in front of him like a knight saluting the king with his sword, waggling it slightly. He could feel his palm sweating against the hammer's perforated rubber sleeve. The wolf looked huge, the size of a full-grown German Shepherd at least. By comparison, the hammer looked ridiculously small, the kind of pantry-cabinet accessory one kept around for repairing shelves or installing picture-hooks.

“God help me,” Johnny said . . . but he felt no presence here; God was just something you said, a word you used when you could see the shit once more getting ready to obey the law of gravity and fall into the fan. No God, no God, he wasn't a suburban kid from Ohio still three years away from his first encounter with a razor, prayer was just a manifestation of what psychologists called “magical thinking,” and there was no God.

If there was, why would he come see about me, anyhow? Why would he come see about me after I left the others back in that truck?

The wolf suddenly barked at him. It was an absurd sound, high-pitched, the kind of bark Johnny would have expected from a poodle or a cocker spaniel. There was nothing absurd about its teeth, though. Thick curds of spit flew out from between them with each high-pitched bark.

“Get out!” Johnny yelled at it in his shrill, wavering voice. “Get out right now!”

Instead of getting out, the wolf screwed its hindquarters down toward the floor. For a moment Johnny thought it was going to take a crap, that it was every damn bit as scared as he was, and it was going to take a crap on the laboratory floor. Then, a split second before it happened, he realized the wolf was preparing not to crap but to leap. At him.

“No, God no, please!”
he screamed, and turned to run—back toward the ATV and the bodies hanging stiffly on their hooks.

In his head he did this; his body moved in the opposite direction,
forward,
as if directed by hands he could not see. There was no sense of being possessed, but a clear and unmistakable feeling of being
no longer alone.
His terror fell away. His first powerful instinct—to turn and run—also fell away. He took a step forward instead, pushing off from the table with his free hand. He cocked the hammer back to beyond his right shoulder and hurled it just as the wolf launched itself at him.

He expected the hammer to spin and was sure it would sail over the animal's head—he had pitched at Lincoln Park High School about a thousand years ago and still knew the feeling of one that was going to be wild-high—but it didn't. It was no Excalibur, just a plain old Craftsman hammer with a perforated rubber sleeve on it to improve the grip, but it didn't turn over and it didn't go high.

What it did was strike the wolf dead center between the eyes.

There was a sound like a brick dropped on an oak plank. The green glare whiffed out of the wolf's eyes; they turned into old marbles even as the blood began to pour out of the animal's center-split skull. Then it hit him in the chest, driving him back against the table again, setting off a brilliant burst of pain in the small of his back. For a moment Johnny could smell the wolf—a dry smell, almost cinnamony, like the spices the Egyptians had used to preserve the dead. For that moment the animal's bloody face was turned up to his, the teeth which should by all rights have torn out his throat leering impotently. Johnny could see its tongue, and an old crescent-shaped scar on its muzzle. Then it dropped on his feet, like something loose and heavy wrapped in a ratty old steamer blanket.

Gasping, Johnny staggered away from it. He bent to pick up the hammer, then whirled around so clumsily he almost fell, sure that the wolf would be on its feet and coming for him again; there was no way he could have gotten it with the hammer like that, absolutely no
way,
that baby had been going
high,
your muscles remembered what it felt like when you'd uncorked one that was going all the way to the backstop, they remembered it very well.

But the wolf lay where it had fallen.

Is it time to reconsider David Carver's God?
Terry asked quietly. Stereo Terry now; she had a place in his head, and she also had a place on the wall under
YOU
MUST
WEAR A HARDHAT
.

“No,” he said. “It was a lucky shot, that's all. Like the one-in-a-thousand at the carny when you actually
do
win your girlfriend the big stuffed panda-bear.”

Thought you said it was going high.

“Well, I was wrong, wasn't I? Just like you used to tell me six or a dozen times every fucking day, you great bitch.” He was shocked by the hoarse, almost teary quality of his voice. “Wasn't that pretty much your refrain throughout the course of our charming union? You're wrong, Johnny, you're wrong, Johnny, you're totally fucking wrong, Johnny?”

You left them,
Terry's voice said, and what stopped him was not the contempt he heard in that voice (which was, after all, only his own voice, his own mind up to its old bicameral tricks) but the despair.
You left them to die. Worse, you continue to deny God even after you called on him . . . and he answered. What kind of man are you?

“A man who knows the difference between God and a free-throw,” he told the woman with the strawberry-blond hair and the bullet-hole in her lab coat. “A man who also knows enough to get while the getting's good.”

He waited for Terry to respond. Terry didn't. He considered what had just happened a final time, scanning it with his nearly perfect recall, and found nothing but his own arm, which apparently hadn't forgotten everything it had learned about throwing a fastball, and an ordinary Craftsman hammer. No blue light. No Cecil B. DeMille special effects. No London Philharmonic swelling with a hundred violins' worth of phony awe in the background. The terror and emptiness and despair he felt were transitory emotions; they would pass. What he was going to do right now was divorce the ATV from the ore-cart behind it, using the hammer to knock loose the cotter-pin coupling. What he was going to do next was get the ATV running and get the hell out of this creepy little—

“Not bad, ace,” said a voice from the doorway.

Johnny wheeled around. The boy was standing there. David. Looking at the wolf. Then he raised his unsmiling face to Johnny.

“A lucky shot,” Johnny said.

“Think that was it?”

“Does your father know you're out, David?”

“He knows.”

“If you came here to try and persuade me to stay, you're shit out of luck,” Johnny said. He bent over the coupling between the ore-cart and the ATV and took a swing at the cotter pin. He missed it completely and smashed his hand painfully against an angle of metal. He cried out and stuck his scraped knuckles into his mouth. Yet he had hit the leaping wolf dead between the eyes with the hammer, he—

Johnny blocked the rest. He pulled his hand out of his mouth, tightened his grip on the hammer's rubber sleeve, and bent over the coupling again. This time he hit it pretty well—not dead center, but close enough to pop the cotter pin free and send it rolling across the floor. It stopped beneath the dangling feet of the woman who looked like Terry.

And I'm not going to read anything into
that,
either.

“If you came to talk theology, you're similarly out of luck,” Johnny said. “If, however, you'd like to accompany me west to Austin—”

He broke off. The boy now had something in his hand, was holding it out to him. Between them, the dead wolf lay on the lab floor.

“What's that?” Johnny asked, but he knew. His eyes weren't that bad yet. Suddenly his mouth felt very dry.
Why are you chasing me?
he thought suddenly—to what he did not precisely know, only that it wasn't the kid.
Why can't you lose my scent? Just leave me alone?

“Your wallet,” David said. His eyes on him, so steady. “It fell out of your pocket, in the truck. I brought it to you. It's got all your ID in it, in case you forget who you are.”

“Very funny.”

“I wasn't joking.”

“So what do you want?” Johnny asked harshly. “A reward? Okay. Write down your address, I'll send you either twenty bucks or an autographed book. Want a baseball signed by Albert Belle? I can do that. Whatever you want. Whatever strikes your fancy.”

David looked down at the wolf for a moment. “Pretty good shot for a man who can't even hit a coupling dead on from four inches away.”

“Shut up, wiseguy,” Johnny said. “Bring me the wallet if you're coming. Toss it over if you're not. Or just keep the goddam thing.”

“There's a picture in it. You and two other guys standing in front of a place called The Viet Cong Lookout. A bar, I think.”

“Yeah, a bar,” Johnny agreed. He flexed his hand uneasily on the shaft of the hammer, barely feeling the sting run across his scraped knuckles. “The tall guy in that picture's David Halberstam. Very famous writer. Historian. Baseball fan.”

“I was more interested in the ordinary-sized guy in the middle,” David said, and all at once a part of Johnny—a deep, deep part—knew what the child was driving at, what the child was going to say, and that part moaned in protest. “The guy in the gray shirt and the Yankees hat. The guy that showed me the China Pit from
my
Viet Cong Lookout. That guy was you.”

“What crap,” Johnny said. “The same kind of crazed crap you've been spouting ever since—”

Softly, perfectly on key, and still holding the wallet out to him on one hand, David Carver sang:
“
Well I said doctor . . . Mr. M.D. . . .”

It was like being slugged square in the middle of the chest. The hammer spilled out of Johnny's hand. “Stop it,” he whispered.

“. . . can you tell me . . . what's ailin' me . . . And he said yeah-yeah-yeah—”

“
Stop it!”
Johnny screamed, and the radio burped up another burst of static. He could feel stuff starting to move inside him. Terrible stuff. Sliding. Like an avalanche beginning under a surface that only looks solid. Why did the boy have to come? Because he was sent, of course. It wasn't David's fault. The real question was why couldn't the boy's terrible master let either of them go?

“The Rascals,” David said. “Only back then they were still the Young Rascals. Felix Cavaliere on vocals. Very cool. That's the song that was playing when you died, wasn't it, Johnny?”

Images beginning to slide downhill through his mind while Felix Cavaliere sang,
I was feelin' so bad:
ARVN soldiers, many no bigger than American sixth-graders, pulling dead buttocks apart, looking for hidden treasure, a nasty scavenger hunt in a nasty war,
can tah
in
can tak;
coming back to Terry with a dose in his crotch and a monkey on his back, wanting to score so bad he was half out of his mind, slapping her in an airport concourse when she said something smart about the war (his war, she had called it, as if he had invented the fucking thing), slapping her so hard that her mouth and nose bled, and although the marriage had limped along for another year or so, it had really ended right there in Concourse B of the United terminal at LaGuardia, with the sound of that slap; Entragian kicking him as he lay writhing on Highway 50, not kicking a literary lion or a National Book Award winner or the only white male writer in America who
mattered,
but just some potbellied geezer in an overpriced motorcycle jacket, one who owed God a death like anyone else; Entragian saying that the proposed title of Johnny's book made him furious, made him sick with rage.

“I won't go back there,” Johnny said hoarsely. “Not for you, not for Steve Ames or your father, not for Mary, not for the world. I won't.” He picked up the hammer again and slammed it against the ore-cart, punctuating his refusal. “Do you hear me, David? You're wasting your time. I
won't
go back.
Won'
t! Won't! Won't!
”

“At first I didn't understand how it
could
have been you,” David said, as if he hadn't heard. “It was the Land of the Dead—you even said so, Johnny. But you were alive. That's what I thought, at least. Even when I saw the scar.” He pointed at Johnny's wrist. “You died . . . when? 1966? 1968? I guess it doesn't matter. When a person stops changing, stops
feeling,
they die. The times you've tried to kill yourself since, you were just playing catch-up. Weren't you?” And the child smiled at him with a sympathy that was unspeakable in its innocence and kindness and lack of judgement.