Desperation Read online

  "Steve?" Sharper than ever. "What are you thinking?"

  "Nothing," he said. His voice was thick, the voice of a man struggling out of a deep sleep. "Nothing, never mind."

  "Does it start with C and end with E?"

  Actually, my dear, "cunt" ends with a T, but you're in the ballpark.

  What was wrong with him? What in God's name? It was as if that funny piece of rock had turned on another radio, this one in his head, and it was broadcasting a voice that was almost his own.

  "What are you talking about?" he asked her.

  "Coyote, coyote," she said, lilting the words like a child. No, she wasn't accusing him of anything, although he supposed that briefly thinking so had been a natural enough mistake; she was just falling all over herself with excitement. "The thing we saw back in the lab! If we had it, we could get out of here! I know we could, Steve! And don't waste my time--our time--by telling me I'm crazy!"

  Considering the stuff they had seen and the stuff that had happened to them in the last ninety minutes or so, he had no intention of doing that. If she was crazy, they both were. But--

  "You told me not to touch it." He was still struggling to talk; it was as if there were mud packed into his thinking equipment. "You said it felt. Felt what? What had she said?

  Nice. That was it. "Touch it, Steve. It feels nice. "

  No. Wrong.

  "You said it felt nasty."

  She smiled at him. In the green glow of the dashlights, the smile looked cruel. "You want to feel something nasty? Feel this."

  She took his hand, put it between her legs, and twitched her hips upward twice. Steve closed his hand on her down there--hard enough to hurt, maybe--but her smile stayed on. Widened, even.

  What are we doing? And why in God's name are we doing it now?

  He heard the voice, but it was almost lost--like a voice screaming fire in a ballroom full of yelling people and jagged music. The cleft between her legs was closer, more urgent. He could feel it right through her jeans, and it was burning. Burning.

  She said her name was Emergency and asked to see my gun, Steve thought. You're going to see it, all right, honey, thirty-eight pistol on a forty-five frame, shoots tombstone bullets with a ball and chain.

  He made a tremendous effort to catch hold of himself, grabbing for anything that would shut the pile down before the containment rods melted. What he got hold of was an image--the curious, wary expression on her face as she looked at him through the truck's open passenger door, not getting in right away, wide blue eyes checking him out first, trying to decide if he was the kind of guy who might bite or maybe try to yank something off her. An ear, for instance. Are you a nice person? she'd asked him, and he had said Yeah, I guess so, and then, nice person that he was, he had brought her to this town of the dead, and his hand was in her crotch, and he was thinking he'd like to fuck her and hurt her at the same time, kind of an experiment, you could say, one having to do with pleasure and pain, the sweet and the salty. Because that was the way it was done in the place of the wolf, that was how it was done in the house of the scorpion, it was what passed for love in Desperation.

  Are you a nice person? Not a crazy serial killer or anything? Are you nice, are you nice, are you a nice person?

  He pulled his hand away from her, shuddering. He turned to the window and looked out into the blowing blackness where sand danced like snow. He could feel sweat on his chest and arms and in his armpits, and although it was a little better now, he still felt like a sick man between fits of delirium. Now that he had thought of the stone wolf, he couldn't unthink it, it seemed; he kept seeing its crazy corkscrewed head and bulging eyes. It hung in his head like an unsatisfied habit.

  "What's wrong?" she moaned from beside him. "Oh, Jesus, Steve, I didn't mean to do that, what's wrong with us?"

  "I don't know," he said hoarsely, "but I'll tell you something I do know--we just got us a little taste of what happened in this town, and I don't like it much. I can't get that fucking stone thing out of my mind."

  He finally found enough courage to look at her. She was all the way over against the passenger door, like a scared teenager on a first date that had gone too far, and although she looked calm enough, her cheeks were fiery red and she was wiping away tears with the side of her hand.

  "Me, either," she said. "I remember once I got a little piece of glass in my eye. That's what this feels like. I keep thinking I'd like to take that stone and rub it against my ... you know. Except it's not much like thinking. It's not like thinking at all."

  "I know," he said, wishing savagely that she hadn't said that. Because now the idea was in his mind, too. He saw himself rubbing that ugly damned thing--ugly but powerful--against his erect penis. And from there he saw the two of them fucking on the floor beneath that row of hooks, beneath those dangling corpses, with that crumbling gray piece of stone held between them, in their teeth.

  Steve swept the images away ... although how long he would be able to keep them away he didn't know. He looked at her again and managed a smile. "Don't call me cookie," he said. "Don't call me cookie and I won't call you cake."

  She let out a long, trembling, half-vocalized breath that fell just a little short of laughter. "Yeah. Somethin like that, anyway. I think it might be getting a little better."

  He nodded cautiously. Yes. He still had a world-class hardon, and he could badly use a reprieve from that, but now his thoughts seemed a little more his own. If he could keep them diverted from that piece of stone a little while longer, he thought he'd be okay. But for a few seconds there it had been bad, maybe the worst thing that had ever happened to him. In those seconds he had known how guys like Ted Bundy must feel. He could have killed her. Maybe would have killed her, if he hadn't broken his physical contact with her when he had. Or, he supposed, she might have killed him. It was as if sex and murder had somehow changed places in this horrible little town. Except even sex wasn't what it was about, not really. He remembered how, when she had touched the wolf, the lights had flickered and the radio had come back on.

  "Not sex," he said. "Not murder, either. Power."

  "Huh?"

  "Nothing. I'm going to drive us right back through the middle of town. Out toward the mine."

  "That big wall off to the south?"

  He nodded. "It's an open-pit. There'll have to be at least one equipment road out there that cuts back to 50. We're going to find it and take it. I'm actually glad this one is blocked off. I don't want to go anywhere near that Quonset, or that--"

  She reached out and grabbed his arm. Steve followed her gaze and saw something come slinking into the arc of the truck's headlights. The dust was now so thick that at first the animal looked like a ghost, some Indian-conjured spirit from a hundred years ago. It was a timberwolf, easily the length and height of a German Shepherd, but leaner. Its eyes were sockets of crimson in the headlights. Following it like attendants in some malign fairy-tale were two files of desert scorpions with their stingers furled over their backs. Flanking the scorpions were coyotes, two on each side. They appeared to be grinning nervously.

  The wind gusted. The truck rocked on its springs. To their left, the fallen piece of awning flapped like a torn sail.

  "The wolf's carrying something," she said hoarsely.

  "You're nuts," he said, but as it drew closer, he saw that she wasn't nuts. The wolf stopped about twenty feet from the truck, as bald and real as something in a high-resolution crime-scene photograph. Then it lowered its head and dropped the thing it had been holding in its mouth. It looked at it attentively for a moment, then backed off three steps. It sat down and began to pant.

  It was the statue-fragment, lying there on its side at the entrance to the cafe parking lot, lying there in the blowing dust, mouth snarling, head twisted, eyes starting from their sockets. Fury, rage, sex, power--it seemed to broadcast these things at the truck in a tight cone, like some sort of magnetic field.

  The image of fucking Cynthia recurred, of being buried
in her like a sword jammed hilt-deep in hot, packed mud, the two of them face-to-face, lips drawn back in identical snarls as they gripped the snarling stone coyote between them like a thong.

  "Should I get it?" she asked, and now she was the one who sounded as if she were sleeping.

  "Are you kidding?" he asked. His voice, his Texas accent, but not his words, not now. These words were coming from the radio in his head, the one the piece of stone statue had turned on.

  Its eyes, glaring at him from where it lay in the dust.

  "What, then?"

  He looked at her and grinned. The expression felt ghastly on his face. It also felt wonderful. "We'll get it together, of course. Okay by you?"

  His mind was the storm now, filled with roaring wind from side to side and top to bottom, driving before it the images of what he would do to her, what she would do to him, and what they would do to anyone who got in their way.

  She grinned back, her thin cheeks stretching upward until it was like looking at a skull grin. Greenish-white light from the dashboard painted her brow and lips, filled in her eyesockets. She stuck her tongue out through that grin and flicked it at him, like the snake-tongue of the statue. He stuck his own tongue out and wriggled it back at her. Then he groped for the doorhandle. He would race her to the fragment, and they would make love among the scorpions with it held in their mouths between them, and whatever happened after that wouldn't matter.

  Because in a very real sense, they would be gone.

  3

  Johnny came back out onto the sidewalk and handed the bottle of Jim Beam to Billingsley, who looked at it with the unbelieving eyes of a man who has just been told he's won the Powerball lottery. "There you go, Tom," he said. "Have yourself a tonk--just the one, mind you--and then pass it on. None for me, I've taken the pledge." He looked across the street, expecting to see more coyotes, but there were still just the five of them. I'll take the fifth, Johnny thought, watching as the veterinarian spun the cap off the bottle of whiskey. You'd go along with that, wouldn't you, Tom? Of course you would.

  "What is wrong with you?" Mary asked him. "Just what in the hell is wrong with you?"

  "Nothing," Johnny said. "Well, a broken nose, but I guess that isn't what you meant, is it?"

  Billingsley tilted the bottle back with a short, sharp flick of the wrist that looked as practiced as a nurse's injection technique, and then coughed. Tears welled in his eyes. He put the mouth of the bottle to his lips again, and Johnny snatched it away. "Nope, I don't think so, oldtimer."

  He offered the bottle to Ralph, who took it, looked at it, then bit off a quick swallow. Ralph then offered it to Mary.

  "No."

  "Go on," Ralph said. His voice was quiet, almost humble. "Better if you do."

  She looked at Johnny with hateful, perplexed eyes, then took a nip from the bottle. She coughed, holding it away from her and looking at it as if it were toxic. Ralph took it back, plucked the cap from Billingsley's left hand, and put it back on. During this, Johnny opened the bottle of aspirin, shook out half a dozen, bounced them in his hand for a moment, then tossed them into his mouth.

  "Come on, Doc," he said to Billingsley. "Lead the way."

  They started down the street, Johnny telling them as they went why he had all but broken his neck to get his cellular phone back. The coyotes on the other side of the street got up and paced them. Johnny didn't care for that much, but what were they supposed to do about it? Try shooting at them? Pretty noisy. At least there was no sign of the cop. And if they saw him before they made it down to the movie theater, they could always duck into one of these other places. Any old port in a storm.

  He swallowed, grimacing at the burn as the half-liquefied aspirin slid down his throat, and tried to put the bottle into his breast pocket. It bumped the top of the phone. He took it out, put the bottle of pills in its place, started to shove the cellular into his pants pocket, then decided it couldn't hurt to try again. He pulled the antenna and flipped the phone open. Still no transmission-bars. Zilch.

  "You really think that was your friend?" David asked.

  "I think so, yes."

  David held out his hand. "Could I try it?"

  Something in his voice. His father heard it, too. Johnny could see it in the way the man was looking at him.

  "David? Son? Is something wr--"

  "Could I try it please?"

  "Sure, if you want." He held the useless phone out to the boy, and as David took it, Johnny saw three transmission-bars appear beside the S. Not one or two but three.

  "Son of a bitch!" he breathed, and grabbed the phone back. David, who had been studying the keypad functions, saw him reaching a moment too late to stop him.

  The moment the cellular phone was back in Johnny's hand, the transmission-bars disappeared again, leaving only the S.

  They were never there in the first place, you know that, don't you? You hallucinated them. You--

  "Give it back!" David shouted. Johnny was stunned by the anger in his voice. The phone was snatched away again, but not too fast for him to see the transmission-bars reappear, glowing gold in the dark.

  "This is so damned dumb," Mary said, looking first back over her shoulder, then at the coyotes across the street. They had stopped when the people had. "But if it's the way you want to play it, why don't we just drag a table out and get drunk in the middle of the fucking street?"

  No one paid any attention. Billingsley was still looking at the bottle of Beam. Johnny and Ralph were staring at the kid, who was stuttering his finger on the NAME/MENU button with the speed of a veteran video-game player, hurrying past Johnny's agent and ex-wife and editor, finally getting to STEVE.

  "David, what is it?" Ralph asked.

  David ignored him and turned urgently to Johnny. "Is this him, Mr. Marinville? Is the guy with the truck Steve?"

  "Yes."

  David pushed SEND.

  4

  Steve had heard of being saved by the bell, but this was ridiculous.

  Just as his fingers found the doorhandle--and he could hear Cynthia grabbing for hers on the other end of the seat--the cellular telephone gave out its nasal, demanding cry: Hmeep! Hmeep!

  Steve froze. Looked at the phone. Looked across the seat at Cynthia, whose door was actually open a little. She was staring back at him, the grin on her lips fading.

  Hmeep! Hmeep!

  "Well?" she asked. "Aren't you going to answer that?" And there was something in her tone, something so wifely, that he laughed.

  Outside, the wolf pointed its nose into the darkness and howled, as if it had heard Steve's laughter and disapproved. The coyotes seemed to take that howl as a signal. They got up and disappeared back the way they had come, walking into the blowing dust with their heads lowered. The scorpions were already gone. If, that was, they had been there at all. They might not have been; his head felt like a haunted house, one filled with hallucinations and false memories instead of ghosts.

  Hmeep! Hmeep!

  He grabbed the phone off the dashboard, pushed the SEND button, and put it to his ear. He stared out at the wolf as he did it. And the wolf stared back. "Boss? Boss, that you?"

  Of course it was, who else would be calling him? Only it wasn't. It was a kid.

  "Is your name Steve?" the kid asked.

  "Yes. How'd you get the boss's phone? Where--"

  "Never mind that," the kid said. "Are you in trouble? You are, aren't you?"

  Steve opened his mouth. "I don't--" Closed it again. Outside, the wind screamed around the cab of the Ryder truck. He held the little phone to the side of his face and looked over an oozing lump of buzzard at the wolf. He saw the chunk of statue lying in front of it as well. The crude images of intermingled sex and violence which had filled his mind were fading, but he could remember the power they had exercised over him the way he could remember certain vivid nightmares.

  "Yeah," he said. "I guess you could say that."

  "Are you in the truck we saw?"

  "
If you saw a truck, likely that was us, yeah. Is my boss with you?"

  "Mr. Marinville's here. He's okay. Are you all right?"

  "I don't know," Steve said. "There's a wolf, and he brought this thing ... it's like a statue, only--"

  Cynthia's hand darted into the lower part of his vision and honked the horn. Steve jumped. At the entrance to the cafe parking lot, the wolf jumped, too. Steve could see its muzzle draw back in a snarl. Its ears flattened against its skull.

  Doesn't like the horn, he thought. Then another thought came, one of those simple ones that made you want to slam your hand against your own forehead, as if to punish your laggard brains. If it won't get out of the way, I can run the fucker over, can't I?

  Yes. Yes, he could. After all, he was the one with the truck.

  "What was that?" the kid asked sharply. Then, as if realizing that was the wrong question: "Why are you doing that?"

  "We've got company. We're trying to get rid of it."

  Cynthia honked the horn again. The wolf got to its feet. Its ears were still laid back. It looked pissed, but it also looked confused. When Cynthia honked the horn a third time, Steve put both of his hands over hers and helped. The wolf looked at them a moment longer, its head cocked and its eyes a nasty yellow-green in the glare of the headlights. Then it bent, seized the piece of statuary in its teeth, and disappeared back the way it had come.

  Steve looked at Cynthia, and she looked back at him. She still looked scared, but she was smiling a little just the same.

  "Steve?" The voice was faint, dodging in and out of static-bursts. "Steve, are you there?"

  "Yes."

  "Your company?"

  "Gone. For the time being, at least. The question is, what do we do next? Any suggestions?"

  "I might have." Damned if it didn't sound as if maybe he was smiling, too.

  "What's your name, kid?" Steve asked.

  5

  Behind them, back in the direction of the Municipal Building, something gave in to the wind and fell over with a huge loose crash. The sound made Mary wheel around in that direction, but she saw nothing. She was grateful for the mouthful of whiskey Carver had talked her into taking. Without it, that sound--she guessed it might have been some building's false front tumbling into the street--would have had her halfway out of her skin.