Desperation Read online

  The boy was still on the phone. The three men were gathered around him. Mary could see how badly Marinville wanted to take the phone back again; she could also see he didn't quite dare. It'll do you good not to be able to have what you want, Johnny, she thought. Do you a world of good.

  "I might have," David said, smiling a little. He listened, gave his first name, then turned around so he was facing the Owl's Club. He ducked his head, and when he spoke again, Mary could hardly hear him. A kind of dark wonder passed over her like a dizzy spell.

  He doesn't want the coyotes across the street to hear what he's saying. I know how crazy that sounds, but it's what he's doing. And you know something even crazier? I think he's right.

  "There's an old movie theater," David said in a low voice. "It's called The American West." He glanced at Billingsley for confirmation.

  Billingsley nodded. "Tell him to go around to the back," he said, and Mary decided that if she was crazy, at least she wasn't the only one; Billingsley also spoke in a low voice, and glanced over his shoulder, once, quickly, as if to make sure the coyotes weren't creeping closer, trying to eavesdrop. After he had made sure they were still on the sidewalk in front of the Water and Utility Building, he turned back to David. "Tell him there's an alley."

  David did. As he finished, something apparently occurred to Marinville. He started to grab for the phone, then restrained himself. "Tell him to park the truck away from the theater," he said. The great American novelist also spoke in low tones, and he had one hand up to his mouth, as if he thought there might be a lipreader or two among the coyotes. "If he leaves it in front and Entragian comes back ..."

  David nodded and passed this on, as well. Listened as Steve said something else, nodding, the smile resurfacing. Mary's eyes drifted, to the coyotes. As she looked at them, she realized an exceedingly perverse thing: if they managed to hide from Entragian long enough to regroup and get out of town, part of her would be sorry. Because once this was over, she would have to confront the fact of Peter's death; she would have to grieve for him and for the destruction of the life they had made together. And that was maybe not the worst of it. She would also have to think about all this, try and make some sense of it, and she wasn't sure she could do it. She wasn't sure any of them would be able to do it. Except maybe for David.

  "Come as fast as you can," he said. There was a faint bleep as he pushed the END button. He collapsed the antenna and handed the phone back to Marinville, who immediately pulled the antenna out again, studied the LED readout, shook his head, and closed the phone up.

  "How'd you do it, David? Magic?"

  The kid looked at him as if Marinville were crazy. "God," he said.

  "God, you dope," Mary said, smiling in a way that did not feel familiar to her at all. This wasn't the time to be pulling Marinville's chain, but she simply couldn't resist.

  "Maybe you should have just told Mr. Marinville's friend to come and pick us up," Ralph said dubiously. "That probably would have been the simplest, David."

  "It's not simple," David replied. "Steve'll tell you that when they get here."

  "They?" Marinville asked.

  David ignored him. He was looking at his father. "Also, there's Mom," he said. "We're not leaving without her."

  "What are we going to do about them?" Mary asked, and pointed across the street at the coyotes. She could have sworn that they not only saw the gesture but understood it.

  Marinville stepped off the sidewalk and into the street, his long gray hair blowing out and making him look like an Old Testament prophet. The coyotes got to their feet, and the wind brought her the sound of their growls. Marinville had to be hearing them, too, but he went on another step or two nevertheless. He half-closed his eyes for a moment, not as if the sand was bothering them but as if he was trying to remember something. Then he clapped his hands together once, sharply. "Tak!" One of the coyotes lifted its snout and howled. The sound made Mary shudder. "Tak, ah lah! Tak!"

  The coyotes appeared to move a little closer together, but that was all.

  Marinville clapped his hands again. "Tak! . . . Ah lah ... Takl ... oh, shit on this, I was never any good at foreign languages, anyhow." He stood looking disgusted and uncertain. That they might attack him--him and his unloaded Mossberg .22--seemed the furthest thing from his mind.

  David stepped down from the sidewalk. His father grabbed at his collar. "It's okay, Dad," David said.

  Ralph let go, but followed as David went to Marinville. And then the boy said something Mary thought she might remember even if her mind succeeded in blocking the rest of this out--it was the sort of thing that came back to you in dreams, if nowhere else.

  "Don't speak to them in the language of the dead, Mr. Marinville."

  David took another step forward. Now he was alone in the middle of the street, with Ralph and Marinville standing behind him. Mary and Billingsley were behind them, up on the sidewalk. The wind had reached a single high shriek. Mary could feel the dust stinging her cheeks and forehead, but for the time being, that seemed far away, unimportant.

  David put his hands together in front of his mouth, finger to finger, in that child's gesture of prayer. Then he held them out again, palms up, in the direction of the coyotes. "May the Lord bless you and keep you, may the Lord make his face to shine upon you, and lift you up, and give you peace," he said. "Now get out of here. Take a hike."

  It was as if a swarm of bees had settled on them. They whirled in a clumsy, jostling mass of snouts and ears and teeth and tails, nipping at one another's flanks and at their own. Then they raced off, yapping and yowling in what sounded like some painful argument. She could hear them, even with the contending shriek of the wind, for a long time.

  David turned back, surveyed their dumbfounded faces --expressions too large to miss, even in the gloom--and smiled a little. He shrugged, as if to say Well, what are you gonna do? Mary observed that his face was still tinted Irish Spring green. He looked like the victim of an inept Halloween makeup job.

  "Come on," David said. "Let's go."

  They clustered in the street. "And a little child shall lead them," Marinville said. "So come on, child--lead."

  The five of them began trudging north along Main Street toward The American West.

  CHAPTER 5

  1

  "I think that's it." Cynthia pointed out her window. "See it?"

  Steve, hunched over the wheel and squinting through the bloodsmeared windshield (although it was the sand sticking in the blood that was the real problem), nodded. Yes, he could see the old-fashioned marquee, held by rusty chains to the side of a weathered brick building. There was only one letter left on the marquee, a crooked R.

  He turned left, onto the tarmac of the Conoco station. A sign reading BEST CIG PRICES IN TOWN had fallen over. Sand had piled against the concrete base of the single pump-island like a snowdrift.

  "Where you going? I thought the kid told you the movie theater!"

  "He also told me not to park the truck near it. He's right, too. That wouldn't ... hey, there's a guy in there!"

  Steve brought the truck to a hard stop. There was indeed a guy in the Conoco station's office, rocked back in his chair with his feet on his desk. Except for something in his posture--mostly the awkward way his head was lying over on his neck--he could have been sleeping.

  "Dead," Cynthia said, and put a hand on Steve's shoulder as he opened his door. "Don't bother. I can tell from here."

  "We still need a place to hide the truck. If there's room in the garage, I'll open the door. You drive in." There was no need to ask if she could do it; he hadn't forgotten the spiffy way she'd handled the truck out on Highway 50.

  "Okay. But do it fast."

  "Believe me," he said. He started to get out, then hesitated. "You are all right, aren't you?"

  She smiled. It clearly took some effort, but it was a working smile, all the same. "For the time being. You?"

  "Smokin."

  He got out, slammed the do
or behind him, and hurried across the tarmac to the gas station's office door. He was amazed at how much sand had accumulated already. It was as if the west wind were intent on burying the town. Judging from what he had seen of it so far, that wasn't such a bad idea.

  There was a tumbleweed caught in the recessed doorway, its skeletal branches rattling. Steve booted it and it flew away into the night. He turned, saw that Cynthia was now behind the wheel of the truck, and gave her a little salute. She held her fists up in front of her, her face serious and intent, then popped the thumbs. Mission Control, we are A-OK. Steve grinned, nodded, and went inside. God, she could be funny. He didn't know if she knew it or not, but she could be.

  The guy in the office chair needed a spot of burying. Inside the shadow thrown by the bill of his cap, his face was purple, the skin stretched and shiny. It had been stencilled with maybe two dozen black marks. Not snakebites, and too small even to be scorpion stings--

  There was a skin magazine on the desk. Steve could read the title--Lesbo Sweethearts--upside down. Now something crawled over the edge of the desk and across the naked women on the cover. It was followed by two friends. The three of them reached the edge of the desk and stopped there in a neat line, like soldiers at parade rest.

  Three more came out from under the desk and scurried across the dirty linoleum floor toward him. Steve took a step backward, set himself, then brought a workboot down, hard. He got two of the three. The other zigged to the right and raced off toward what was probably the bathroom. When Steve looked back at the desk, he saw there were now eight fellows lined up along the edge, like movie Indians on a ridge.

  They were brown recluse spiders, also known as fiddleback spiders, because the shape on their backs looked vaguely like a country fiddle. Steve had seen plenty in Texas, had even been stung by one while rooting in his Aunt Betty's woodpile as a boy. Over in Arnette, that had been, and it had hurt like a bastard. Like an ant-bite, only hot. Now he understood why the dead man smelled so spoiled in spite of the dry climate. Aunt Betty had insisted on disinfecting the bite with alcohol immediately, telling him that if you ignored a fiddleback's bite, the flesh around it was apt to start rotting away. It was something in their spit. And if enough of them were to attack a person all at once ...

  Another pair of fiddlebacks appeared, these two crawling out of the dark crease at the center of the gas-jockey's strokebook. They joined their pals. Ten, now. Looking at him. He knew they were. Another one crawled out of the pump-jockey's hair, journeyed down his forehead and nose, over his puffed lips, across his cheek. It was probably on its way to the convention at the edge of the desk, but Steve didn't wait to see. He headed for the garage, turning up his collar as he went. For all he knew, the goddam garage could be full of them. Recluse spiders liked dark places.

  So be quick. Right?

  There was a light-switch to the left of the door. He turned it. Half a dozen dirty fluorescents buzzed to life above the garage area. There were actually two bays, he saw. In one was a pickup which had been raised on oversized tires and customized into an all-terrain vehicle--silky blue metal-flake paint, THE DESERT ROVER written in red on the driver's side of the cab. The other bay would do for the Ryder truck, though, if he moved a pile of tires and the recapping machine.

  He waved to Cynthia, not knowing if she could actually see him or not, and crossed to the tires. He was bending over them when a rat leaped out of the dark hole in the center of the stack and sank its teeth into his shirt. Steve cried out in surprise and revulsion and hit himself in the chest with his right fist, breaking its back. The rat began to wriggle and pedal its back legs in the air, squealing through its clenched teeth, trying to bite him.

  "Ah, fuck!" Steve scream. "Ah, fuck, you fuck, let go, you little fuck!"

  Not so little, though--it was almost the size of a full-grown cat. Steve leaned forward, bowing so his shirt would bell out (he did this without thinking, any more than he was aware he was screaming and cursing), then grabbed the rat's hairless tail and yanked. There was a harsh ripping sound as his shirt tore open, and then the rat was doubling over on the lumpy knuckles of its broken spine, trying to bite his hand.

  Steve swung it by its tail like a lunatic Tom Sawyer, then let it fly. It zoomed across the garage, a ratsteroid, and smacked into the wall beyond THE DESERT ROVER. It lay still with its clawed feet sticking up. Steve stood watching it, making sure it wasn't going to get up and come at him again. He was shuddering all over, and the noise that came out of his mouth made him sound cold--Brr-rrrr-ruhhh.

  There was a long, tool-littered table to the right of the door. He snatched up a tire iron, holding it by the pry-bar end, and kicked over the stack of tires. They rolled like tiddlywinks. Two more rats, smaller ones, ran out, but they wanted no part of him; they sprinted, squeaking, toward the shadowy nether regions of the garage.

  He couldn't stand the sick ratblood heat against his skin another second. He tore his shirt the rest of the way open and then pulled it off. He did it one-handed. There was no way he was going to drop the tire iron. You'll take my tire iron when you pry it from my cold dead fingers, he thought, and laughed. He was still shuddering. He examined his chest carefully, obsessively, for any break in the skin. There was none. "Lucky," he muttered to himself as he pulled the recapper over to the wall and then hurried to the garage door. "Lucky, goddam lucky, fucking goddam rat-in-the-box."

  He pushed the button by the door and it began trundling up. He stepped to one side, giving Cynthia room, looking everywhere for rats and spiders and God knew what other nasty surprises. Next to the worktable was a gray mechanic's coverall hanging from a nail, and as Cynthia drove the Ryder truck into the garage, engine roaring and lights glaring, Steve began to beat this coverall with the tire iron, working from the legs up like a woman beating a rug, watching to see what might run out of the legs or armholes.

  Cynthia killed the truck's engine and slid down from the driver's seat. "Whatcha doin? Why'd you take your shirt off? You'll catch your death of cold, the temperature's already started to--"

  "Rats." He had reached the top of the coverall without spooking any wildlife; now he started working his way back down again. Better safe than sorry. He kept hearing the sound the rat's spine had made when it broke, kept feeling the rat's tail in his fist. Hot, it had been. Hot.

  "Rats?" She looked around, eyes darting.

  "And spiders. The spiders are what got the guy in th--"

  He was suddenly alone, Cynthia out the open garage door and on the tarmac, standing in the wind and blowing sand with her arms wrapped around her thin shoulders. "Spiders, ouug, I hate spiders! Worse'n snakes!" She sounded pissed, as if the spiders were his fault. "Get out of there!"

  He decided the coverall was safe. He pulled it off the hook, started to toss the tire iron away, then changed his mind. Holding the coverall draped over one arm, he pushed the button beside the door and then went over to Cynthia. She was right, it was getting cold. The alkali dust stung his bare shoulders and stomach. He began to wriggle his way into the coverall. It was going to be a little baggy in the gut, but better too big than too small, he supposed.

  "I'm sorry," she said, wincing and holding a hand to the side of her face as the wind gusted, driving a sheet of sand at them. "It's just, spiders, ouug, so bad, I can't ... what kind?"

  "You don't want to know." He zipped the coverall up the front, then put an arm around her. "Did you leave anything in the truck?"

  "My backpack, but I guess I can do without a change of underwear tonight," she said, and smiled wanly. "What about your phone?"

  He patted his left front jeans pocket through the coverall. "Don't leave home without it," he said. Something tickled across the back of his neck and he slapped at it madly, thinking of the brown recluses lined up so neatly along the edge of the desk, soldiers in some unknown cause out here in nowhere.

  "What's wrong?"

  "I'm just a little freaked. Come on. Let's go to the movies."

  "Oh," she
said in that prim little no-nonsense voice that just cracked him up. "A date. Yes, thanks."

  2

  As Tom Billingsley led Mary, the Carvers, and America's greatest living novelist (at least in the novelist's opinion) down the alley between The American West and the Desperation Feed and Grain, the wind hooted above them like air blown across the mouth of a pop bottle.

  "Don't use the flashlights," Ralph said.

  "Right," Billingsley said. "And watch out here. Garbage cans, and a pile of old crap. Lumber, tin cans."

  They skirted around the huddle of cans and the pile of scrap lumber. Mary gasped as Marinville took her arm, at first not sure who it was. When she saw the long, somehow theatrical hair, she attempted to pull free. "Spare me the chivalry. I'm doing fine."

  "I'm not," he said, holding on. "I don't see for shit at night anymore. It's like being blind." He sounded different. Not humble, exactly--she had an idea that John Marinville could no more be humble than some people could sing middle C off a pitch-pipe--but at least human. She let him hold on.

  "Do you see any coyotes?" Ralph asked her in a low voice.

  She restrained an urge to make a smart come-back--at least he hadn't called her "ma'am." "No. But I can barely see my own hand in front of my face."

  "They're gone," David said. He sounded completely sure of himself. "At least for now."

  "How do you know?" Marinville asked.

  David shrugged in the gloom. "Just do."

  And Mary thought they could probably trust him on it. That was how crazy things had gotten.

  Billingsley led them around the corner. A rickety board fence ran along the backside of the movie theater, leaving a gap of about four feet. The old man walked slowly along this path with his hands held out. The others followed in single file; there was no room to double up. Mary was just starting to think Billingsley had gotten them down here on some sort of wild-goose chase when he stopped.

  "Here we are."