Desperation Read online

  The steps paused. Cynthia murmured. Steve said something in return. Then they got back into the truck, the doors slammed, the engine revved, and they started off again. David kept his face pressed against her a moment or two longer, then raised his head. "Thanks."

  She smiled, but the truck's rear door was still up and she supposed enough light was getting in for David to see that she had also wept. "Any time," she said. She kissed his cheek. "Really."

  She clasped her arms around her knees and looked out the back of the truck, watching the dust spume up. She could still see the blinker-light, a yellow spark in the wide sweep of the dark, but now it was going in the wrong direction, drawing away from them. The worlds--the one she had always thought to be the only world--also seemed to be drawing away from her now. Malls, restaurants, MTV, Gold's Gym workouts, and occasional hot sex in the afternoon, all drawing away.

  And it's all so easy, she thought. As easy as a penny slipping through a hole in your pocket.

  "David?" Johnny asked. "Do you know how Tak got into Ripton in the first place?"

  David shook his head.

  Johnny nodded as if that was what he had expected and sat back, resting his head against the side of the truck. Mary realized that, as exasperating as Marinville could be, she sort of liked him. And not just because he had come back with David; she had sort of liked him ever since... well, since they were looking for guns, she guessed. She'd scared him, but he had bounced back. She guessed he was the kind of guy who had made a second career out of bouncing back from stuff. And when he wasn't concentrating on being an asshole, he could be amusing.

  The .30-.06 was lying beside him. Johnny felt around for it without raising his head, picked it up, and laid it across his knees. "I suspect I may miss a lecture tomorrow evening," he said to the ceiling. "It was to be on the subject 'Punks and Post-literates: American Writing in the Twenty-first Century.' I shall have to return the advance. 'Sad, sad, sad, George and Martha.' That's from--"

  "Who's Afraid of .Virginia Woolf?," Mary said. "Edward Albee. We're not all bozos on this bus."

  "Sorry," Johnny said, sounding startled.

  "Just be sure to put the apology in your journal," she said, without the slightest idea of what she was talking about. He lowered his head to look at her, frowned for a moment, then started laughing. After a moment, Mary joined him. Then David was also laughing, and Ralph joined in. His was surprisingly high-pitched for a big man, a kind of cartoon tee-hee, and thinking that made Mary laugh even harder. It hurt her scraped stomach, but the hurt didn't stop her.

  Steve pounded on the back of the cab. It was impossible to tell if his muffled voice was amused or alarmed. "What's going on?"

  In his best lion's voice, Johnny Marinville roared back: "Be quiet, you Texas longhorn! We're discussing literature back here!"

  Mary screamed with laughter, one hand pressed to the base of her throat, the other curled against her throbbing belly. She wasn't able to stop until the truck reached the crest of the embankment, crossed the rim, and started down the far side. Then all the humor went out of her at once. The others stopped at about the same time.

  "Do you feel it?" David asked his father.

  "I feel something."

  Mary started shivering. She tried to remember if she had been shivering before, while she was laughing, and couldn't. They felt something, yes, she had no doubt that they did. They might have felt even more if they had been out here earlier, if they'd had to get up this same road before the bleeding thing just behind could--

  Push it out of , jur head, Mare. Push it out and lock the door.

  "Mary?" David asked.

  She looked at him.

  "It won't be much longer."

  "Good."

  Five minutes later--very long minutes--the truck stopped and the cab doors opened. Steve and Cynthia came around to the back. "Hop out, you guys," Steve said. "Last stop."

  Mary worked herself out of the truck, wincing at every move. She hurt all over, but her legs were the worst. If she had sat in the back of the truck much longer, she reckoned she probably wouldn't have been able to walk at all.

  "Johnny, do you still have those aspirin?"

  He handed them over. She took three, washing them down with the last of her Jolt. Then she walked around to the front of the truck.

  They were at the bottom of the China Pit, first time for the others, second for her. The field office was near; looking at it, thinking of what was inside and of how close she had probably come to ending her existence in there, made her feel like screaming. Then her eyes fixed on the cruiser, the driver's door still open, the hood still raised, the air-cleaner still lying by the left front tire.

  "Put your arm around me," she told Johnny.

  He did, looking down at her with a raised eyebrow.

  "Now walk me over to that car."

  "Why?"

  "There's something I have to do."

  "Mary, the sooner we start, the sooner we finish," David said.

  "This'll only take a second. Come on, Shakespeare. Let's go."

  He walked her over to the car, his arm around her waist, the .30-.06 in his free hand. She supposed he could feel her trembling, but that was all right. She nerved herself, gnawing at her lower lip,. remembering the ride into town in the back of this car. Sitting with Peter behind the mesh. Smelling Old Spice and the metallic scent of her own fear. No doorhandles. No window-cranks. And nothing to look at but the back of Entragian's sunburned neck and that stupid blank-eyed bear stuck to the dashboard.

  She leaned into Entragian's stink--except it was really Tak's stink, she knew that now--and ripped the bear off the dashboard. Now its blank can toi eyes stared directly up at hers, as if asking her what all this foolishness could possibly be about, what good it could possibly accomplish, what evil it could possibly' change.

  "Well," she told it, "you're gone, motherfucker, and that's step one." She dropped it to the rough surface of the pit and then stamped down on it. Hard. She felt it crunch under her sneaker. It was, in some fundamental way, the most satisfying moment of the whole miserable nightmare.

  "Don't tell me," Johnny said. "It's some new variation of est therapy. A symbolic affirmation expressly designed for stressful life-passages, sort of an 'I'm okay, you're stomped to shit' kind of thing. Or--"

  "Shut up," she said, not unkindly. "And you can let loose of me now."

  "Do I have to?" His hand moved on her waist. "I was just getting familiar with the topography."

  "Too bad I'm not a map."

  Johnny dropped his hand and they walked back to the others.

  "David?" Steve asked. "Is that the place?"

  He pointed past the cluster of heavy machinery and to the left of the rusty Quonset with the stove-stack. About twenty yards up the slope was the squarish hole she had seen earlier. Then she hadn't given it much consideration, as she'd had other fish to fry--staying alive, chiefly--but now looking at it gave her a bad feeling. A weak-in-the-knees feeling. Well, she thought, I did the bear, anyway. It'll never stare at anyone else cooped up in the back of that police-cruiser. There's that much.

  "That's it," David said. "China Shaft."

  "Can tak in can tah." his father said, as if in a dream.

  "Yes."

  "And we have to blow it up?" Steve asked. "Just how do we go about that?"

  David pointed to the concrete cube near the field office. "First we have to get inside there."

  They walked over to the powder magazine. Ralph yanked at the padlock on the door, as if to get the feel of it, then racked the Ruger. The metallic clack-clack sound it made was very loud in the stillness of the pit. "The rest of you stand back," he said. "This always works great in the movies, but in real life, who knows."

  "Wait a sec, wait a sec," Johnny said, and ran back to the Ryder truck. They heard him rummaging through the cartons of stuff just behind the cab, then: "Oh! There you are, you ugly thing."

  He came back carrying a black Bell motorcycle
helmet with a full face-shield. He handed it to Ralph. "Brain-bucket deluxe. I hardly ever wear this one, because there's too much of it. I get it over my head and my claustrophobia kicks in. Put it on."

  Ralph did. The helmet made him look like a futuristic welder. Johnny stepped back from him as he turned to the lock again. So did the others. Mary had her hands on David's shoulders.

  "Why don't you guys turn around?" Ralph said. His voice was muffled by the helmet.

  Mary kept expecting David to protest--concern for his father, perhaps even exaggerated concern, wouldn't be unusual, given the fact that he had lost the other two members of his family in the last twelve hours--but David said nothing. His face was only a pale blur in the dark, impossible to read, but she sensed no agitation in him. Certainly the shoulders under her hands were calm enough, at least for now.

  Maybe he saw it was going to be all right, she thought. In that vision he had ... or whatever it was. Or maybe--

  She didn't want to finish that thought, but was slow closing it off.

  --maybe he just knows there's no other choice.

  There was a long moment of silence--very long, it seemed to Mary--and then a high whipcrack rifle report that should have echoed and didn't. It was just there and then gone, absorbed by the walls and benches and valleys of the open pit. In its aftermath she heard one startled 'bird-cry--Quowwwk!--and then nothing more. She wondered why Tak hadn't sent the animals against them as it had sent them against so many of the people in town. Because the six of them together were something special? Maybe. If so, it was David who had made them special, the way a single great player can elevate a whole team.

  They turned and saw Ralph bent over the padlock (to Mary he looked like the Pieman bent over Simple Simon on the Howard Johnson's signs), peering at it through the helmet's faceplate. The lock was now warped and twisted, with a large black bullet-hole through the center of it, but when he yanked on it, it continued to hold fast.

  "One more time," he said, and twirled his finger at them, telling them to turn around.

  They did and there was another whipcrack. No bird-cry followed his one. Mary supposed whatever had called was far away by now, although she had heard no flapping wings. Not that she would have, probably, with two gunshots ringing in her ears.

  This time when Ralph yanked, the lock's arm popped free of its ruined innards. Ralph pulled it off the hasp and threw it aside. When he took Johnny's helmet off, he was grinning.

  David ran to him and gave him a high-five. "Good going, Dad!"

  Steve pulled the door open and peered in. "Man! Darker than a carload of assholes."

  "Is there a light-switch?" Cynthia asked. "No windows, there must be."

  He felt around, first on the right, then the left. "Watch for spiders," Mary said nervously. "There could be spiders."

  "Here it is, I got it," Steve said. There was a click-click, click-click, but no light.

  "Who's still got a flashlight?" Cynthia asked. "I must've left mine back in the damned movie theater. I don't have it, anyway."

  There was no answer. Mary had also had a flashtight--the one she'd found in the field office--and she thought she had tucked it into the waistband of her jeans after disabling the pickup trucks. If so, it was gone now. The hatchet, too. She must have lost both items in her flight from the pit.

  "Crap," Johnny said. "Boy Scouts we ain't."

  "There's one in the truck, behind the seat," Steve said. "Under the maps."

  "Why don't you go get it?" Johnny said, but for a moment or two, Steve didn't move. He was looking at Johnny with a strange expression, one Mary couldn't quite read, on his face. Johnny saw it, too. "What? Something wrong?"

  "Nope," Steve said. "Nothing wrong, boss."

  "Then step on it."

  3

  Steve Ames marked the exact moment when control over their little expeditionary force passed from David to Johnny; the moment when the boss became the boss again. Why don't you go get it, he'd said, a question that wasn't a question at all but the first real order Marinville had given him since they'd started out in Connecticut, Johnny on his motorcycle, Steve rolling leisurely along behind in the truck, puffing the occasional cheap cigar. He had called him boss (until Johnny told him to stop) because it was a tradition in the entertainment business: in the theater, sceneshifters called the stage manager boss; on a movie set, key grips called the director boss; out on tour, roadies called the tour-manager or the guys in the band boss. He had simply carried that part of his old life over into this job, but he hadn't thought of Johnny as the boss, in spite of his booming stage-voice and his chin-thrust-forward, I-know-exactly-what-I'm-doing manner, until now. And this time, when Steve had called him boss, Johnny hadn't objected.

  Why don't you go get it?

  A nominal question, just six words, and everything had changed.

  What's changed? What, exactly?

  "I don't know," he muttered, opening the driver's-side door of the Ryder truck and starting to rummage through the crap behind the seat. "That's the hell of it, I don't really know."

  The flashlight--a long-barrelled, six-battery job--was under a crushed litter of maps, along with the first-aid kit and a cardboard box with a few road-flares in it. He tried the light, saw that it worked, and jogged back to the others.

  "Look for spiders first," Cynthia said. Her voice was just a little too high for normal conversation. "Spiders and snakes, just like in that old song. God, I hate em."

  Steve stepped into the powder magazine and shone his light around, first running it over the floor, then the cinderblock walls, then the ceiling. "No spiders," he reported. "No snakes."

  "David, stand right outside the door," Johnny said. "We shouldn't all cram in there together, I think. And if you see anyone or anything--"

  "Give a yell," David finished. "Don't worry."

  Steve centered the beam of the flashlight on a sign in the middle of the floor--it was on a stand, like the one in restaurants that said PLEASE WAIT FOR HOSTESS TO SEAT YOU. Only what this one said--in big red letters--was: WARNING WARNING WARNING

  BLASTING AGENTS AND BOOSTERS MUST BE KEPT

  SEPARATE!

  THIS IS A FEDERAL REGULATION

  CARELESSNESS WITH EXPLOSIVES WILL NOT BE TOLERATED!

  The rear wall was studded with spikes driven into the cinderblock. Hung on these were coils of wire and fat white cord. Det-cord, Steve assumed. Against the right and left walls, facing each other like bookends with no books between them, were two heavy wooden chests. The one marked DYNAMITE and BLASTING CAPS and USE EXTREME CAUTION was open, the lid up like the lid of a child's toybox. The other, marked simply BLASTING AGENT in black letters against an orange background, was padlocked shut.

  "That's the ANFO," Johnny said, pointing at the padlocked cabinet. "Acronym stands for ammonium nitrate and fuel oil."

  "How do you know that?" Mary asked.

  "Picked it up somewhere," he said absently. "Just picked it up somewhere."

  "Well, if you think I'm gonna blow the padlock off that one, you're nuts," Ralph said. "You guys have any ideas that don't involve shooting?"

  "Not just this second," Johnny said, but he didn't sound very concerned.

  Steve walked toward the dynamite chest.

  "No dyno in there," Johnny said, still sounding weirdly serene.

  He was right about the dynamite, but the chest was far from empty. The body of a man in jeans and a George-town Hoyas tee-shirt was crammed into it. He had been shot in the head. His glazed eyes stared up at Steve from below what might once have been blond hair. It was hard to tell.

  Steeling himself against the smell, Steve leaned over and worked at the keyring hanging on the man's belt.

  "What is it?" Cynthia asked, starting toward him.

  A beetle came out of the corpse's open mouth and trundled down his chin. Now Steve could hear a faint rustling. More insects under the dead guy. Or maybe one of his nice new friend's beloved rattlers.

  "Nothing,"
he said. "Stay where you are."

  The keyring was stubborn. After several fruitless efforts to depress the clef-shaped clip holding it to the belt-loop, Steve simply tore the whole thing off, loop and all. He closed the lid and crossed the room with the keyring. Johnny, he noticed, was standing about three paces inside the door, gazing raptly down at his motorcycle helmet. "Alas, poor Urine," he said. "I knew him well."

  "Johnny? You okay?"

  "Fine." Johnny tucked the motorcycle helmet under his arm and smiled winningly at Steve ... but his eyes looked haunted.

  Steve gave the keys to Ralph. "One of these, maybe?"

  It didn't take long. The third key Ralph tried slid into the padlock on the chest marked BLASTING AGENT. A moment later the five of them were looking inside. The chest had been partitioned into three bins. Those on the ends were empty. The one in the middle was half full of what looked like long cheesecloth bags. Littered among them were a few escapees: round pellets that looked to Steve like whitewashed birdshot. The bags had drawstring tops. He lifted one out. It looked like a bratwurst and he guessed it weighed about ten pounds. Written on the side in black were the letters ANFO. Below them, in red: CAUTION: FLAMMABLE, EXPLOSIVE.

  "Okay," Steve said, "but how are we going to set it off with no booster? You were right, boss--no dynamite, no blasting caps. Just a guy with a .30-.30 haircut. The demolitions foreman, I assume."

  Johnny looked at Steve, then at the others. "I wonder if the rest of you would step out with David for a moment. I'd like to speak to Steve alone."

  "Why?" Cynthia asked instantly.

  "Because I need to," Johnny said in an oddly gentle voice. "It's a little unfinished business, that's all. An apology. I don't apologize well under any circumstances, but I'm not sure I could do it at all with an audience."

  Mary said, "I hardly think this is the time--"

  The boss had been signalling him--signalling urgently--with his eyes. "It's okay," Steve said. "It'll be quick."

  "And don't go empty-handed," Johnny said. "Each of you take a bag of this instant Fourth of July."

  "My understanding is that without something explosive to boost it, it's more like Instant Campfire," Ralph said.