Desperation Read online

  "Other way," Johnny said. "Turn it around."

  David turned the key over and slid it into the lock-slot again. This time there was a loud click--almost a thud--and the cell door popped open.

  "Yes!" Mary cried. "Oh, yes!"

  Ralph stepped out and swept his son into his arms, this time with no bars between them. And when David kissed the puffy place on the left side of his father's face, Ralph Carver cried out in pain and laughed at the same time. Johnny thought it one of the most extraordinary sounds he had ever heard in his life, and one you could never convey in a book; the quality of it, like the expression on Ralph Carver's face as he looked into his son's face, would always be just out of reach.

  3

  Ralph took the mag-key from his son and used it to unlock the other cells. They stepped out and stood in a little cluster in front of the guard's desk--Mary from New York, Ralph and David from Ohio, Johnny from Connecticut, old Tom Billingsley from Nevada. They looked at each other with the eyes of train-wreck survivors.

  "Let's get out of here," Johnny said. The boy had given the gun to his father, he saw. "Can you shoot that, Mr. Carver? Can you see to shoot that?"

  "Yes to both," Ralph said. "Come on."

  He led them through the door, holding David's hand as he went. Mary walked behind them, then Billingsley. Johnny brought up the rear. As he stepped over the coyote, he saw that the final shot had pretty much pulverized the animal's head. He wondered if the kid's father could have done that. He wondered if he could have done it.

  At the foot of the stairs, David told them to hold on. The glass doors were black now; night had come. The wind screamed beyond them like something that was lost and pissed off about it. "You won't want to believe this, but it's true," the boy said, and then told them what he had seen on the other side of the street.

  "Behold, the buzzard shall lie down with the coyote," Johnny said, peering out through the glass. "That's in the Bible. Jamaicans, chapter three."

  "I don't think that's funny," Ralph said.

  "Actually, neither do I," Johnny said. "It's too much like something the cop would say." He could see the shapes of the buildings over there, and the occasional tumbleweed bouncing past, but that was all. And did it matter? Would it matter even if there were a pack of werewolves standing outside the local poolhall, smoking crack and watching for escapees? They couldn't stay here in any case. Entragian would be back, guys like him always came back.

  There are no guys like him, his mind whispered. There were never in the history of the world any guys like him, and you know it.

  Well, maybe he did, but it didn't change the principle of the thing a bit. They had to get out.

  "I believe you," Mary told David. She looked at Johnny. "Come on. Let's go into the Police Chief's office, or whatever they call it here."

  "For?"

  "Lights and guns. Do you want to come, Mr. Billingsley?"

  Billingsley shook his head.

  "David, may I have the keys?"

  David handed them to her. Mary slipped them into the pocket of her jeans. "Keep your eyes open," she said. David nodded. Mary reached out, took Johnny's hand--her fingers were cold as ice--and pulled him through the door which led into the clerks' area.

  He saw what was spray-painted on the wall and pointed to it. "'In these silences something may rise.' What do you suppose that means?"

  "Don't know, don't care. I just want to get to someplace where there are lights and people and phones and we can--"

  She was turning to the right as she spoke, her eyes touching on the fold of green drape below the tall windows with no particular interest (the shape beneath it was too slight for her to recognize). Then she saw the bodies hung on the wall. She gasped and doubled over, as if someone had struck her in the belly, then turned to flee. Johnny caught her, but for a moment he was sure she was going to get away from him--there was a lot of strength hidden in that slim body.

  "No!" he said, shaking her in what was partly exasperation. He was ashamed of that but couldn't entirely suppress it. "No, you have to help me! Just don't look at them!"

  "But one of them's Peter!"

  "And he's dead. I'm sorry, but he is. We're not. Yet, anyhow. Don't look at him. Come on."

  He led her swiftly toward the door marked TOWN SAFETY OFFICER, trying to think how they should proceed. And here was another disgusting little facet of this experience: he was becoming aroused by Mary Jackson. She was quivering in the circle of his arm, he could feel the softness of her breast just above his hand, and he wanted her. Her husband was hung up like a fucking overcoat right behind them, but he was still getting a fairly respectable stiffy, especially for a man with possible prostate woes. Terry was right all along, he thought. I am an asshole.

  "Come on," he said, squeezing her in what he hoped was a brotherly way. "If that kid could do what he did, then you can hang in there. I know you can. Get it together, Mary."

  She pulled in a deep breath. "I'm trying."

  "Good g ... oh shit. We've got another mess here. I'd tell you not to look, but I think we're a little beyond the niceties."

  Mary looked at the sprawled body of the Town Safety Officer and made a thick noise in her throat. "The boy ... David... Jesus Christ ... how did he do it?"

  "I don't know," Johnny said. "He's some kid, all right. I think he must have knocked Sheriff Jim there out of his chair trying to get his keys. Can you go next door to the Fire Chiefs office? It'll be quicker if we toss both of em at once."

  "Yes."

  "Be prepared; if Fireman Bob was at home when Entragian went nuclear, he's probably just as dead as the rest of them."

  "I'll be okay. Take these."

  She handed him the keys, then went to the door marked FIRE CHIEF. Johnny saw her start to glance toward her husband, then look away again. He nodded and tried to send her some mental encouragement--good girl, good idea. She turned the knob of the Fire Chief's door, then pushed it open with tented fingers, as if it might be booby-trapped. She looked in, let out a breath, and gave Johnny a thumbs-up.

  "Three things, Mary: lights, guns, any car-keys you spot. Okay?"

  "Okay."

  He went into the cop's office, running quickly through the keys on the ring David had gotten as he did. There was a set of GM car-keys which Johnny guessed probably belonged to the cruiser Entragian had brought him back in. If it was out there in the parking lot it would help them, but Johnny didn't think it was. He had heard an engine start up shortly after the madman had taken Carver's wife away.

  The desk drawers were locked, but the right key in the lock of the wide drawer above the kneehole opened all of them. He found a flashlight in one and a locked box marked RUGER in another. He tried several different little keys on the box. None worked.

  Take it anyway? Maybe. If neither of them found other guns somewhere else.

  He crossed the room, pausing to look out a window. Flying dust was all he could see. Probably all there was to see. God, why hadn't he taken the interstate?

  That struck him funny; he giggled under his breath as he looked at the closed door behind Reed's desk. Sound like a crazyman, he thought. Never mind Travels with Harley; if you get out of this alive, you should think about calling the book Travels with Loony.

  That made him laugh even harder. He put one hand over his mouth to stifle it and opened the door. The laughter stopped in a hurry. Sitting amid the boots and shoes, partly obscured by hanging coats and spare uniforms, was a dead woman. She was propped against the closet's side wall and dressed in clothes Johnny thought of as Boot Scootin Secretariat--tapered slacks, not denim, and a silk shirt with entwined roses embroidered over the left breast. The woman appeared to be staring at him with round-eyed wonder, but that was only an illusion.

  Because you expect to see eyes, he thought, and not just big red sockets where they used to be.

  He restrained an urge to slam the closet shut and pushed the hanging garments to either side along the pole instead, so he could se
e the rear wall. A good idea. There was a gun-rack with half a dozen rifles and a shotgun in it back there. One of the grooves was empty, third from the right, and Johnny guessed that was where another shotgun, the one Entragian had pointed at him, usually went.

  "Hot damn, paydirt!" he exclaimed, and stepped into the closet. He planted one foot on either side of the sitting corpse's body, but that made him acutely uncomfortable; he had once gotten head from a woman who had been sitting against a bedroom wall in almost that exact same position. At a party in East Hampton, that had been. Spielberg had been there. Joyce Carol Oates, too.

  He stepped back, put one foot on the corpse's shoulder, and pushed. The woman's body slid slowly and stiffly to the right. Her huge red eyesockets seemed to stare at him with an expression of surprise as she went, as if she were wondering how a cultured fellow such as himself, a National Book Award winner, for goodness' sake, could possibly stoop to pushing over a lady in a closet. Tendrils of her hair slid along the wall, trailing after her.

  "Sorry, ma'am," he said, "but it's better for both of us this way, believe me."

  The guns were held in place by a length of cable threaded through the trigger-guards. The cable was padlocked to an eyebolt on the side of the case. Johnny hoped he would have better luck finding the key to this lock than he'd have finding the one that opened the box with the Ruger in it.

  The third key he tried popped the padlock. He stripped the cable back through the trigger-guards with a jerk so hard that one of them--a Remington .30-.06--came tumbling out. He caught it, turned ... and the woman, Mary, was standing right there. Johnny gave a strangled little whoop that probably would have been a scream if he hadn't been so scared. His heart stopped beating, and for one very long moment he was positive it wasn't going to restart; he'd be dead of fright even before he fell backward onto the corpse in the silk shirt. Then, thank God, it got going again. He slammed a fist into his chest just above the left nipple (an area which had once been hard and now wasn't very) just to show the pump underneath who was the boss.

  "Don't ever do that," he told Mary, trying not to wheeze. "What's wrong with you?"

  "I thought you heard me." She didn't look terribly sympathetic. There was a golfbag, of all things, slung over her shoulder. A tartan golfbag. She looked at the corpse in the closet. "There's a body in the Fire Chief's closet, too. A man."

  "What was his handicap, any idea?" His heart was still galloping, but maybe not so fast now.

  "You never quit, do you?"

  "Fuck you, Mary, I'm trying to kid myself out of dying, here. Every martini I ever drank just jumped on my heart. Christ, you scared me."

  "I'm sorry, but we've got to hurry up. He could come back any time."

  "A concept that never crossed my poor excuse for a mind. Here, take this. And be careful." He handed her the .30-.06, thinking of an old Tom Waits song. Black crow shells from a .30-.06, Waits sang in his stripped and somehow ghoulish voice. Whittle you into kindlin.

  "How careful? Is it loaded?"

  "I don't even remember how to check. I did a tour of Vietnam, but as a journalist. That was a long time ago, in any case. The only guns I've seen fired since then have been on movie screens. We'll figure the guns out later, okay?"

  She put it gingerly into the golfbag. "I found two flashlights. They both work. One's a long-barrel job. Very bright."

  "Good." He handed her the flashlight he had found.

  "The bag was hung on the back of the door," Mary said, dropping the flashlight in. "The Fire Chief ... if it was him ... well, one of the clubs was stuck down through the top of his head. Way down. He was sort of ... skewered on it."

  Johnny took two more rifles and the shotgun from the rack and turned with them in his arms. If the walnut doodad on the floor below the rack contained ammo, as he assumed it did, all would be well; a rifle or shotgun for each of the grownups. The kid could have Sheriff Jim's .45 back. Shit, the kid could have any gun he wanted, as far as Johnny was concerned. So far, at least, David Carver was the only one of them who had demonstrated he could use one if he had to.

  "I'm sorry you had to see that," he said, helping Mary ease the guns into the golfbag.

  She shook her head impatiently, as if that wasn't the point. "How much strength would it take to do something like that? To push the handle of a golf-club down through a man's head and neck and right into his chest? To push it down until there was nothing but the head sticking up like a ... a little hat, or something?"

  "I don't know. A lot, I guess. But Entragian's a moose." A moose indeed, but now that she'd put it in this light, it did seem strange.

  "It's the level of violence that scares me the most," she said. "The ferocity. That woman in the closet... her eyes are gone, aren't they?"

  "Yes."

  "The Carvers' little girl ... what he did to Peter, shooting him point-blank in the stomach over and over ... the people out there hung up like deer in hunting season ... do you see what I mean?"

  "Of course." And you're not even touching the rest of it, Mary, he thought. He's not just, a serial killer; he's the Bram Stoker version of Dr. Dolittle.

  She looked around nervously as a particularly strong gust of wind hit the building. "It doesn't matter where we go next, as long as we're out of here. Come on. For God's sake!"

  "Right, just thirty seconds, okay?"

  He knelt by the woman's legs, smelling blood and perfume. He went through the keys again, and this time had almost reached the end of his choices before one popped the lock on what did indeed turn out to be a small but exceedingly well stocked ammo chest. He took eight or nine boxes of shells, ones he hoped would fit the weapons he had already taken, and dumped them into the golfbag.

  "I'll never in this life be able to carry all that," Mary said.

  "That's okay, I will."

  Except he couldn't. He was ashamed to find he couldn't even get the golfbag off the floor, let alone sling it over his shoulder. If the bitch hadn't scared me so bad-- he thought, and then had to taugh at himself. He really did.

  "What are you grinning about?" she asked him sharply.

  "Nothing." He made the grin disappear. "Here, grab the strap. Help me pull it."

  Together they dragged the bag across the floor, Mary keeping her head down and her eyes fixed firmly on the steel bouquet of protruding gunbarrels as they came around the counter and backed toward the door. Johnny took a single look up at the hanging corpses and thought: The storm, the coyotes sitting along the road like an honor guard, the one in the holding area, the buzzards, the dead. How comforting it would be to believe this was all an adventure in dreamland. But it wasn't; he had only to sniff the sour aroma of his own sweat through the clogged and painful channels of his nose to be sure of that. Something beyond anything he had ever believed--anything he had ever considered believing--was happening here, and it wasn't a dream.

  "That's it, don't look," he panted.

  "I'm not, don't worry," she replied. Johnny was pleased to hear her panting a little, too.

  Out in the hall, the wind was louder than ever. Ralph was standing at the doors with his arm curled around his son's shoulders, looking out. The old guy was behind them. They all turned to Johnny and Mary.

  "We heard a motor," David said at once.

  "We think we did," Ralph amended.

  "Was it the cruiser?" Mary asked. She pulled one of the rifles out of the golfbag, and when the barrel drifted toward Billingsley, he pushed it away again with the flat of his hand, grimacing.

  "I'm not even sure it was a motor," Ralph said. "The wind--"

  "It wasn't the wind," David said.

  "See any headlights?" Johnny asked.

  David shook his head. "No, but the sand is flying so thick."

  Johnny looked from the gun Mary was holding (the barrel was now pointed at the floor, which seemed like a step in the right direction) to the others protruding from the golfbag to Ralph. Ralph shrugged and looked at the old man.

  Billingsley caugh
t the look and sighed. "Go on, dump em out," he said. "Let's see what you got."

  "Can't this wait?" Mary asked. "If that psycho comes back--"

  "My boy says he saw more coyotes out there," Ralph Carver said. "We shouldn't take a chance on getting savaged, ma'am."

  "For the last time, it's Mary, not ma'am," she said crossly. "Okay, all right. But hurry!"

  Johnny and Ralph held the golfbag while Billingsley pulled the rifles out and handed them to David. "Put em a-row," he said, and David did, lining them up neatly at the foot of the stairs, where the light from the clerks' area would fall on them.

  Ralph picked the bag up and tipped it. Johnny and Mary caught the flashlights and shells as they slid out. The old man handed the ammunition to David a box at a time, telling him which guns to put them by. They finished with three boxes stacked by the .30-.06 and none by the gun on the end. "You didn't get nothing that'll fit that Mossberg," he said. "It's a damned fine gun, but it's chambered for .22s. You want to go back n see if you can find some .22s?"

  "No," Mary said immediately.

  Johnny looked at her, irritated--he didn't like women answering questions that had been aimed at him--and then let it go. She was right. "There's no time," he told Billingsley. "We'll carry it anyway, though. Somebody in town'll have .22s. You take it, Mary."

  "No thanks," she said coolly, and selected the shotgun, which the veterinarian had identified as a Rossi twelve-gauge. "If it's to be used as a club instead of a firearm, it ought to be a man who swings it. Don't you agree?"

  Johnny realized he had been mousetrapped. Quite neatly, too. You bitch, he thought, and might have said it aloud, husband hung on a coathook or not, except that David Carver cried out "Truck!" at that moment, and tore open one of the municipal building's glass doors.

  They had been hearing the wind for some time now, and had felt it shake the brick building they were in, but none of them was quite prepared for the ferocity of the gust that ripped the door out of David's hand and slammed it against the wall hard enough to crack the glass. The posters thumbtacked to the hallway bulletin board rattled. Some tore free and went swirling up the stairwell. Sand sheeted in, stinging Johnny's face. He put a hand up to shield his eyes and accidentally bumped his nose instead. He yelled with pain.