Desperation (54 page)

“Johnny,” David Carver said, “God can raise the dead.”

“Oh Jesus, don't tell me that,” he whispered. “I don't want to be raised.” But his voice seemed to reach him from far away, and curiously
doubled,
as if he were coming apart in some strange but fundamental way. Fracturing like hornfels.

“It's too late,” David said. “It's already happened.”

“Fuck you, little hero, I'm going to Austin. Do you hear me?
Fucking
AUSTIN
!
”

“Tak will be there ahead of you,” David said. He was still holding out the wallet, the one with the picture of Johnny and David Halberstam and Duffy Pinette standing outside that sleazy little bar, The Viet Cong Lookout. A dive, but it had the best jukebox in the 'Nam. A Wurlitzer. In his head Johnny could taste Kirin beer and hear the Rascals, the drive of the drums, the organ like a dagger, and how hot it had been, how green and how hot, the sun like thunder, the earth smelling like pussy every time it rained, and that song had seemed to come from everywhere, every club, every radio, every shithole juke; in a way, that song
was
Vietnam:
I was feelin' so bad, I asked my family doctor just what I had.

That's the song that was playing when you died, wasn'
t it, Johnny?

“Austin,” he whispered in a feeble, failing voice. And still there was that sense of twinning, that sense of
twoness.

“If you leave now, Tak will be waiting for you in a lot of places,” David said, his implacable would-be jailer, still holding out his wallet, the one in which that hateful picture was entombed. “Not just Austin. Hotel rooms. Speaking halls. Fancy lunches where people talk about books and things. When you're with a woman, it'll be you who undresses her and Tak who has sex with her. And the worst thing is that you may live like that for a long time.
Can de lach
is what you'll be, heart of the unformed.
Mi him can ini.
The empty well of the eye.”

I won't!
he tried to scream again, but this time no voice came out, and when he struck at the ore-cart again, the hammer dropped free of his fingers. The strength left his hand. His thighs turned watery and his knees began to unhinge. He slipped onto them with a choked and drowning cry. That sense of doubling, of
twinning,
was even stronger now, and he understood with both dismay and resignation that it was a true sensation. He was literally dividing himself in two. There was John Edward Marinville, who didn't believe in God and didn't want God to believe in him; that creature wanted to go, and understood that Austin would only be the first stop. And there was Johnny, who wanted to stay. More, who wanted to fight. Who had progressed far enough into this mad supernaturalism to want to die in David's God, to burn his brain in it and go out like a moth in the chimney of a kerosene lamp.

Suicide!
his heart cried out.
Suicide, suicide!

ARVN soldiers, war's deadeyed optimists, looking for diamonds in assholes. A drunk with a bottle of beer in his hand and his wet hair in his eyes, climbing out of a hotel swimming pool, laughing as the cameras flashed. Terry's nose bleeding below her hurt, incredulous eyes while a voice from the sky announced that United's flight 507 to Jacksonville was boarding at Gate B-7. The cop kicking him as he writhed on the centerline of a desert highway.
It makes me furious,
the cop had said.
It makes me sick with rage.

Johnny felt himself leave his own body, felt himself grasped by hands that were not his own and turned out of his flesh like change from a pocket. He stood ghostlike beside the kneeling man and saw the kneeling man holding his hands out.

“I'll take it,” the kneeling man said. He was weeping. “I'll take my wallet, what the fuck, give it back.”

He saw the boy come to the kneeling man and kneel beside him. He saw the kneeling man take the wallet and then put it in the front pocket of the jeans beneath the chaps so he could press his hands together finger-to-finger, as David had done.

“What do I say?” the kneeling man asked, weeping. “Oh David, how do I start, what do I say?”

“What's in your heart,” the kneeling boy said, and that was when the ghost gave up and rejoined the man. Clarity streaked into the world, lighting it up—lighting
him
up—like napalm, and he heard Felix Cavaliere singing
I said baby, it's for sure, I got the fever, you got the cure.

“Help me, God,” Johnny said, raising his hands to a place where they were even with his eyes and he could see them well. “Oh God, please help me. Help me do what I was sent here to do, help me to be whole, help me to live. God, help me to live again.”

2

I'm going to catch you,
bitch!
it thought triumphantly.

At first, chances of that had seemed slim. It had gotten within twenty yards of the
os pa
near the top of the pit—sixty short feet—but the bitch had been able to find a little extra and beat it to the top. Once she started down the other side, Mary had been able to extend her lead in a hurry, from twenty yards to sixty to a hundred and fifty. Because
she
could breathe deeply,
she
could cope with her body's oxygen debt. Ellen Carver's body, on the other hand, was rapidly losing the ability to do either. The vaginal bleeding had become a flood, something that would kill the Ellen-body in the next twenty minutes or so anyway . . . but if Tak was able to catch Mary, it wouldn't matter how much the remains of Ellen Carver bled; it would have a place to go. But as it came over the rim of the pit, something had ruptured in Ellen's left lung, as well. Now with every exhale it was not just spraying a fine mist of red but shooting out liquid jets of blood and tissue from both Ellen's mouth and nose. And it couldn't get enough fresh oxygen to keep up the chase. Not with just one working lung.

Then, a miracle. Running too fast for the grade and trying to look back over her shoulder at the same time, the bitch's feet tangled together and she took a spectacular tumble, hitting the gravel surface of the road in a kind of swandive and ploughing downhill for almost ten feet before she came to a stop, leaving a dark drag-mark behind her. She lay face-down with her arms extended, trembling all over. In the starlight her splayed hands looked like pale creatures fished out of a tidepool. Tak saw her try to get a knee under her. It came partway up, then relaxed and slid back again.

Now! Now!
Tak ah wan!

Tak forced the Ellen-body into a semblance of a run, gambling on the last of that body's energy, gambling on its own agility to keep from tripping and falling as the bitch had done. The back-and-forth of its respiration had become a kind of wet chugging in Ellen's throat, like a piston running in thick grease. Ellen's sensory equipment was graying out at the edges, getting ready to shut down. But she would last a little longer. Just a little. And a little was all it would take.

A hundred and forty yards.

A hundred and twenty.

Tak ran at the woman lying in the road, screaming in soundless, hungry triumph as it closed the gap.

3

Mary could hear
something coming,
something that was yelling nonsense words in a thick, gargly voice. Could hear the thud of shoes on the gravel. Closing in. But it all seemed unimportant. Like things heard in a dream. And surely this
had
to be a dream . . . didn't it?

Get up, Mary! You have to get up!

She looked around and saw something awful but not in the least dreamlike bearing down on her. Its hair flew out behind it. One of its eyes had ruptured. Blood exploded from its mouth with each breath. And on its face was the look of a starving animal abandoning the stalk and staking everything on one last charge.

GET UP, MARY! GET UP
!

I can't, I'm scraped all over and it's too late anyway,
she moaned to the voice, but even as she was moaning she was struggling with her knee again, trying to cock it under her. This time she managed the trick and struggled upward with the knee as her center, trying to pull herself out of gravity's well this one last time.

The Ellen-thing was in full sprint now. It seemed to be exploding out of its clothes as it came. And it was screaming: a drawn-out howl of rage and hunger packed in blood.

Mary got on her feet, screaming herself now as the thing swooped down, reaching out, grasping for her with its fingers. She threw herself into a full downhill run, eyes bulging, mouth sprung open in a full-jawed but silent scream.

A hand, sickeningly hot, slapped down between her shoulderblades and tried to twist itself into her shirt. Mary hunched forward and almost fell as her upper body swayed out beyond the point of balance, but the hand slipped away.

“Bitch!”
An inhuman, guttural growl—from
right behind her
—and this time the hand closed in her hair. It might have held if the hair had been dry, but it was slick—almost slimy—with sweat. For a moment she felt the thing's fingers on the back of her neck and then they were gone. She ran down the slope in lengthening leaps, her fear now mingling with a kind of crazy exhilaration.

There was a thud from behind her. She risked a look back and saw that the Ellen-thing had gone down. It lay curled in on itself like a crushed snail. Its hands opened and closed on thin air, as if still searching for the woman who had barely managed to elude it.

Mary turned and focused on the blinker-light. It was closer now . . . and there were other lights, as well, she was sure of it. Headlights, and coming this way. She focused on them, ran toward them.

She never even registered the large shape which passed silently above her.

4

All over.

It had come so close—had actually touched the bitch's hair—but at the last second Mary had eluded it. And even as she began to draw away again, Ellen's feet had crossed and Tak went down, listening to the rupturing sounds from inside the Ellen-body as it rolled onto its side, grasping at the air as if it might find handholds in it.

It rolled over onto Ellen's back, staring up at the star-filled sky, moaning with pain and hate. To have come so close!

That was when it saw the dark shape up there, blotting out the stars in a kind of gliding crucifix, and felt a sudden fresh burst of hope.

It had thought of the wolf and then dismissed the idea because the wolf was too far away, but it had been wrong to believe the wolf was the only
can toi
vessel which might hold Tak for a little while.

There was this.

“Mi him,
”
it whispered in its dying, blood-thick voice.
“Can de lach, mi him, min en tow. Tak!”

Come to me. Come to Tak, come to the old one, come to the heart of the unformed.

Come to me, vessel.

It held up Ellen's dying arms, and the golden eagle fluttered down into them, staring into Tak's dying face with rapt eyes.

5

“Don
't look at the bodies,”
Johnny said. He was rolling the ore-cart away from the ATV. David was helping.

“I'm not, believe me,” David said. “I've seen enough bodies to last me a lifetime.”

“I think that's good enough.” Johnny started toward the driver's side of the ATV and tripped over something. David grabbed his arm, although he, Johnny, hadn't come especially close to falling. “Watch it, Gramps.”

“You got a mouth on you, kid.”

It was the hammer he'd tripped on. He picked it up, turned to toss it back onto the worktable, then reconsidered and stuck the rubber-sleeved handle into the belt of his chaps. The chaps now had enough blood and dirt grimed into them to look almost like the real thing, and the hammer felt right there, somehow.

There was a control-box set to the right of the metal door. Johnny pushed the blue button marked
UP
, mentally prepared for more problems, but the door rattled smoothly along its track. The air that came in, smelling faintly of Indian paintbrush and sage, was fresh and sweet—like heaven. David filled his chest with it, turned to Johnny, and smiled. “Nice.”

“Yeah. Come on, hop in this beauty. Take you for a spin.”

David climbed into the front passenger seat of the vehicle, which looked like a high-slung, oversized golf-cart. Johnny turned the key and the engine caught at once. As he ran it out through the open door, it occurred to him that none of this was happening. It was all just part of an idea he'd had for a new novel. A fantasy tale, perhaps even an outright horror novel. Something of a departure for John Edward Marinville, either way. Not the sort of stuff of which serious literature was made, but so what? He was getting on, and if he wanted to take himself a little less seriously, surely he had that right. There was no need to shoulder each book like a backpack filled with rocks and then sprint uphill with it. That might be okay for the kids, the bootcamp recruits, but those days were behind him now. And it was sort of a relief that they were.

Not real, none of this, nah, no way. In reality he was just out for a ride in the old convertible, out for a ride with his son, the child of his middle years. They were going to Milly's on the Square. They'd park around the side of the ice-cream stand, eat their cones, and maybe he'd tell the kid a few war stories about his own boyhood, not enough to bore him, kids had a low tolerance for tales that started “When
I
was a boy,” he knew that, he guessed every dad who didn't have his head too far up his own ass did, so maybe just one or two about how he'd tried out for baseball more or less as a lark, and goddamned if the coach hadn't—

“Johnny? Are you all right?”

He realized he had backed all the way to the edge of the street and was now just sitting here with the clutch in and the engine idling.

“Huh? Yeah. Fine.”

“What were you thinking about?”

“Kids. You're the first one I've been around in . . . Christ, since my youngest went off to Duke. You're okay, David. A little God-obsessed, but otherwise quite severely cool.”

David smiled. “Thanks.”

Johnny backed out a little farther, then swung around and shifted into first. As the ATV's high-set headlights swept Main Street, he saw two things: the leprechaun weathervane which had topped Bud's Suds was now lying in the street, and Steve's truck was gone.

“If they did what you wanted, I guess they're on their way up there,” Johnny said.

“When they find Mary they'll wait for us.”

“
Will
they find her, do you think?”

“I'm almost positive they will. And I think she's okay. It was close, though.” He glanced over at Johnny and this time he smiled more fully. Johnny thought it was a beautiful smile. “You're going to come out of this all right, too, I think. Maybe you'll write about it.”

“I usually write about the stuff that happens to me. Dress it up a little and it does fine. But this . . . I don't know.”

They were passing The American West. Johnny thought of Audrey Wyler, lying in there under the ruins of the balcony. What was left of her.

“David, how much of Audrey's story was true? Do you know?”

“Most of it.” David was looking at the theater, too, craning his neck to keep it in view a moment or two longer as they passed. Then he turned back to Johnny. His face was thoughtful . . . and, Johnny thought, sad. “She wasn't a bad person, you know. What happened to her was like being caught in a landslide or a flood, something like that.”

“An act of God.”

“Right.”

“
Our
God. Yours and mine.”

“Right.”

“And God is cruel.”

“Right again.”

“You've got some damned tough ideas for a kid, you know it?”

Passing the Municipal Building now. The place where the boy's sister had been killed and his mother snatched away into some final darkness. David looked at it with eyes Johnny couldn't read, then raised his hands and scrubbed at his face with them. The gesture made him look his age again, and Johnny was shocked to see how young that was.

“More of them than I ever wanted to have,” David said. “You know what God finally told Job when he got tired of listening to all Job's complaints?”

“Pretty much told him to fuck off, didn't he?”

“Yeah. You want to hear something really bad?”

“Can't wait.”

The ATV was riding over ridges of sand in a series of toothrattling jounces. Johnny could see the edge of town up ahead. He wanted to go faster, but anything beyond second gear seemed imprudent, given the short reach of the headlights. It might be true that they were in God's hands, but God reputedly helped those who helped themselves. Maybe that was why he had kept the hammer.

“I have a friend. Brian Ross, his name is. He's my
best
friend. Once we made a Parthenon entirely out of bottlecaps.”

“Did you?”

“Uh-huh. Brian's dad helped us a little, but mostly we did it ourselves. We'd stay up Saturday nights and watch old horror movies. The black-and-white ones? Boris Karloff was our favorite monster.
Frankenstein
was good, but we liked
The Mummy
even better. We were always going to each other, ‘Oh shit, the mummy's after us, we better walk a little faster.' Goofy stuff like that, but fun. You know?”

Johnny smiled and nodded.

“Anyway, Brian was in an accident. A drunk hit him while he was riding to school. I mean, quarter of eight in the morning, and this guy is drunk on his ass. Do you believe that?”

“Sure,” Johnny said, “you bet.”

David gave him a considering look, nodded, then went on. “Brian hit his head.
Bad.
Fractured his skull and hurt his brain. He was in a coma, and he wasn't supposed to live. But—”

“Let me guess the rest. You prayed to God that your friend would be all right, and two days later, bingo, that boy be walkin n talkin, praise Jesus my lord n savior.”

“You don't believe it?”

Johnny laughed. “Actually, I do. After what's happened to me since this afternoon, a little thing like that seems perfectly sane and reasonable.”

“I went to a place that was special to me and Brian to pray. A platform we built in a tree. We called it the Viet Cong Lookout.”

Johnny looked at him gravely. “You're not kidding about that?”

David shook his head. “I can't remember which one of us named it that now, not for sure, but that's what we called it. We thought it was from some old movie, but if it was, I can't remember which one. We had a sign and everything. That was our place, that's where I went, and what I said was—” He closed his eyes, thinking. “What I said was, ‘God, make him better. If you do, I'll do something for you. I promise.' ” David opened his eyes again. “He got better almost right away.”

“And now it's payback time. That's the bad part, right?”

“No! I don't mind paying back. Last year I bet my dad five bucks that the Pacers would win the NBA championship, and when they didn't, he tried to let me off because he said I was just a kid, I bet my heart instead of my head. Maybe he was right—”

“
Probably
he was right.”

“—but I paid up just the same. Because it's bush not to pay what you owe, and it's bush not to do what you promise.” David leaned toward him and lowered his voice . . . as if he was afraid God might overhear. “The really bad part is that God knew I'd be coming out here, and he already knew what he wanted me to do. And he knew what I'd have to
know
to do it. My folks aren't religious—Christmas and Easter, mostly—and until Brian's accident, I wasn't, either. All the Bible I knew was John three-sixteen, on account of it's always on the signs the zellies hold up at the ballpark. For God so loved the world.”

They were passing the bodega with its fallen sign now. The LP tanks had torn off the side of the building and lay in the desert sixty or seventy yards away. China Pit loomed ahead. In the starlight it looked like a whited sepulchre.

“What are zellies?”

“Zealots. That's my friend Reverend Martin's word. I think he's . . . I think something may have happened to him.” David fell silent for a moment, staring at the road. Its edges had been blurred by the sandstorm, and out here there were drifts as well as ridges spilled across their path. The ATV took them easily. “Anyway, I didn't know anything about Jacob and Esau or Joseph's coat of many colors or Potiphar's wife until Brian's accident. Mostly what I was interested in back in those days”—he spoke, Johnny thought, like a nonagenarian war veteran describing ancient battles and forgotten campaigns—“was whether or not Albert Belle would ever win the American League MVP.”

He turned toward Johnny, his face grave.

“The bad thing isn't that God would put me in a position where I'd owe him a favor, but that he'd hurt Brian to do it.”

“God is cruel.”

David nodded, and Johnny saw the boy was on the verge of tears. “He sure is. Better than Tak, maybe, but pretty mean, just the same.”

“But God's cruelty is refining . . . that's the rumor, anyway. Yeah?”

“Well . . . maybe.”

“In any case, he's alive, your friend.”

“Yes—”

“And maybe it wasn't all about you, anyway. Maybe someday your pal is going to cure AIDS or cancer. Maybe he'll hit in sixty straight games.”

“Maybe.”

“David, this thing that's out there—Tak—what is it? Do you have any idea? An Indian spirit? Something like a manitou, or a wendigo?”

“I don't think so. I think it's more like a disease than a spirit, or even a demon. The Indians may not have even known it was here, and it was here before they were.
Long
before. Tak is the ancient one, the unformed heart. And the place where it really is, on the other side of the throat at the bottom of the well . . . I'm not sure that place is on earth at all, or even in normal space. Tak is a complete outsider, so different from us that we can't even get our minds around him.”

The boy was shivering a little, and his face looked even paler. Maybe that was just the starlight, but Johnny didn't like it. “We don't need to talk about it anymore, if you don't want to. All right?”

David nodded, then pointed up ahead. “Look, there's the Ryder van. It's stopped. They must have found Mary. Isn't that great?”

“It sure is,” Johnny said. The truck's headlights were half a mile or so farther on, shining out in a fan toward the base of the embankment. They drove on toward it mostly in silence, each lost in his own thoughts. For Johnny, those questions were mostly concerned with identity; he wasn't entirely sure who he was any longer. He turned to David, meaning to ask if David knew where there might be a few more sardines hiding—hungry as he was, he wouldn't even turn his nose up at a plate of cold lima beans—when his head suddenly turned into a soundless, brilliant airburst. He jerked backward in the driver's seat, shoulders twisting. A strangled cry escaped him. His mouth was drawn down so radically at the corners that it looked like a clown's mask. The ATV swerved toward the left side of the road.

David leaned over, grabbed the wheel, and corrected their course just before the vehicle could nose over the edge and tumble into the desert. By then Johnny's eyes were open again. He braked instinctively, throwing the boy forward. Then they were stopped, the ATV idling in the middle of the road not two hundred feet from the Ryder van's taillights. They could see people standing back there, red-stained silhouettes, watching them.

“Holy shit,” David breathed. “For a second or two there—”

Johnny looked at him, dazed and amazed, as if seeing him for the first time in his life. Then his eyes cleared and he laughed shakily.

“Holy shit is right,” he said. His voice was low, almost strengthless—the voice of a man who has just received a walloping shock. “Thanks, David.”

“Was it a God-bomb?”

“What?”

“A big one. Like Saul in Damascus, when the cataracts or whatever they were fell out of his eyes and he could see again. Reverend Martin calls those God-bombs. You just had one, didn't you?”

All at once he didn't want to look at David, was afraid of what David might see in his eyes. He looked at the Ryder's taillights instead.

Steve hadn't used the extraordinary width of the road to turn around, Johnny noticed; the rental truck was still pointed south, toward the embankment. Of course. Steve Ames was a clever old Texas boy, and he must have suspected this wasn't finished yet. He was right. David was right, too—they had to go up to the China Pit—but the kid had some other ideas that were maybe not so right.