Desperation

  "How'd he do that?" the dark-haired woman asked suspiciously, but when Steve started walking in that direction, she went along. Cynthia fell in next to her, walking on the outside. "How could he do that?"

  "Cellular phone," Steve said.

  "They don't work very well around here as a rule," the dark-haired woman said. "Too many mineral deposits."

  They walked under the theater's marquee (a tumbleweed caught in an angle between the glassed-in ticket-booth and the lefthand door rattled like a maraca) and stopped on the far side. "There's the alley," Cynthia said. She started forward but the woman stayed where she was, frowning from Steve to Cynthia and then back to Steve again.

  "What friend, what other people?" she asked. "How did they get here? How come that fuck Collie didn't kill them?"

  "Let's save all that for later." Steve took her arm.

  She resisted his tug, and when she spoke this time, there was a catch in her voice. "You're taking me to him, aren't you?"

  "Lady, we don't even know who you're talking about," Cynthia said. "Just for Christ's sake will you come on!"

  "I hear a motor," Steve said. His head was cocked to one side. "Coming from the south, I think. Coming in this direction for sure."

  The woman's eyes widened. "Him," she whispered. "Him." She looked over her shoulder, as if longing for the safety of the laundrymat, and then made her decision and bolted down the alley. By the time they got to the board fence running along the back of the theater, Cynthia and Steve were hurrying just to keep up.

  4

  "Are you sure . . . " the woman began, and then a flashlight flicked, once, from farther down the building. They were in single-file, Steve between the women, the one from the laundrymat ahead of him. He took her hand (very cold) in his right and reached back to Cynthia's (marginally warmer) with his left. The dark-haired woman led them slowly down the path. The flashlight blinked on again, this time pointed down at two stacked crates.

  "Climb up and get on in here," a voice whispered. It was one Steve was delighted to hear.

  "Boss?"

  "You bet." Marinville sounded as if he might be smiling. "Love the coverall look--it's so masculine. Get on in here, Steve."

  "There are three of us."

  "The more the merrier."

  The dark-haired- woman hiked her skirt in order to get up on the crates, and Steve could see the boss helping himself to an eyeful. Even the apocalypse couldn't change some things, apparently.

  Steve helped Cynthia up next, then followed. He turned around, slid partway in, then reached down and pushed the top crate off the one underneath. He didn't know if it would be enough to fool the guy the dark-haired woman was so afraid of if he came back here sniffing around, but it was better than nothing.

  He slid into the room, a wino-hideout if he had ever seen one, then grabbed the boss and hugged him. Marinville laughed, sounding both surprised and pleased. "Just no tongue, Steve, I insist."

  Steve held him by the shoulders, grinning. "I thought you were dead. We found your scoot buried in the sand."

  "You found it?" Now Marinville sounded delighted. "Son of a bitch!"

  "What happened to your face?"

  Marinville held the lens of the flashlight under his chin, turning his lumpy, discolored face into something out of a horror movie. His nose looked like roadkill. His grin, although cheerful, made matters even worse. "If I made a speech to PEN America looking like this, do you think the assholes would finally listen?"

  "Man," Cynthia said, awed, "someone put a real hurt on you."

  "Entragian," Marinville said gravely. "Have you met him?"

  "No," Steve said. "And judging from what I've heard and seen so far, I don't want to."

  The bathroom door swung open, squalling on its hinges, and a kid stood there--short hair, pale face, bloodsmeared Cleveland Indians tee-shirt. He had a flashlight in one hand, and he moved it quickly, picking out the newcomers' faces one at a time. Things came together in Steve's mind as neatly as jigsaw-puzzle pieces. He supposed the kid's shirt was the key connection.

  "Are you Steve?" the boy asked.

  Steve nodded. "That's me. Steve Ames. This is Cynthia Smith. And you're my phone-pal."

  The boy smiled wanly at that.

  "That was good timing, David. You'll probably never know how good. It's nice to meet you. David Carver, isn't it?"

  He stepped forward and shook the boy's free hand, enjoying the look of surprise on his face. God knew the kid had surprised him, coming through on the phone that way.

  "How do you know my last name?"

  Cynthia took David's hand when Steve let it go. She shook it once, firmly. "We found your Humvee or Winnebago or whatever it is. Steve there checked out your baseball cards."

  "Be honest," Steve said to David. "Do you think Cleveland's ever gonna win the World Series?"

  "I don't care, just as long as I'm around to see them play another game," David said with a trace of a smile.

  Cynthia turned toward the woman from the laundrymat, the one they might have shot if they'd had guns. "And this is--"

  "Audrey Wyler," the dark-haired woman said. "I'm a consulting geologist for Diablo Mining. At least, I was." She scanned the ladies' room with large dazed eyes, taking in the carton of liquor bottles, the bins of beer-cans, the fabulous fish swimming on one dirty tiled wall. "Right now I don't know what I am. What I feel like is meatioaf three days left over."

  She turned, little by little, toward Marinville as she spoke, much as she had turned toward Steve outside the laundrymat, and took up her original scripture.

  "We have to get out of town. Your pal here says the road out is blocked, but I know another one. It's goes from the staging area down at the bottom of the embankment out to Highway 50. It's a mess, but there are ATVs in the motor-pool, half a dozen of them--"

  "I'm sure your knowledge will come in very handy, but I think we ought to pass that part by, for the time being," Marinville said. He spoke in a professionally soothing voice, one Steve recognized right away. It was how the boss talked to the women (it was invariably women, usually in their fifties or early sixties) who set up his literary lectures--what he called his cultural bombing runs. "We had better talk things over a little, first. Come on into the theater. There's quite a setup there. I think you'll be amazed."

  "What are you, stupid?" she asked. "We don't need to talk things over, we need to get out of here." She looked around at them. "You don't seem to grasp what has happened here. This man, Collie Entragian--"

  Marinville raised his flashlight and shone it full into his face for a moment, letting her get a good look. "I've met the man, as you can see, and I grasp plenty. Come on out front, Ms. Wyler, and we'll talk. I see you're impatient with that idea, but it's for the best. The carpenters have a saying--measure twice, cut once. It's a good saying. All right?"

  She gave him a reluctant look, but when he started toward the door, she followed. So did Steve and Cynthia. Outside, the wind screamed around the theater, making it groan in its deepest joints.

  5

  The dark shape of a car, one with lightbars on the roof, rolled slowly north through the windscreaming dark, away from the rampart that marked China Pit at the south end of Desperation. It rolled with its lights off; the thing behind the wheel saw quite well in the dark, even when that darkness was stuffed with flying grit.

  The car passed the bodega at the town's south end. The fallen sign reading MEXICAN FOOD'S was now mostly covered by blowing sand; all that still showed in the weak glow of the porch bulb was CAN FOO. The cruiser drove slowly on up the street to the Municipal Building, turned into the lot, and parked where it had before. Behind the wheel, the large, slumped figure wearing the Sam Browne belt with the badge on the cross-strap was singing an old song in a tuneless, droning voice: "And we'll go dancin, baby, then you'll see... How the magic's in the music and the music's in me . . ."

  The creature in the driver's seat killed the Caprice's engine and then just sat there, h
ead down, fingers tapping at the wheel. A buzzard flapped out of the flying dirt, made a last-minute course adjustment as the wind gusted, then landed on the hood of the cruiser. A second followed, and a third. This latest arrival squalled at his mates, then squirted a thick stream of guano onto the car's hood.

  They lined up, looking in through the dirty windshield.

  "Jews," the driver said, "must die. And Catholics. Mormons, too. Tak."

  The door opened. One foot swung out, then another. The figure in the Sam Browne belt stood up, slammed the door shut. It held its new hat under its arm for the time being. In its other hand it held the shotgun the woman, Mary, had grabbed off the desk. It walked around to the front door. Here, flanking the steps, were two coyotes. They whined uneasily and shrank down on their haunches, grinning sycophantic doggy grins at the approaching figure, which passed them with no acknowledgement at all.

  It reached for the door, and then its hand froze. The door was ajar. A vagary of the wind had sucked it most of the way shut . . . but not completely.

  "What the fuck?" it muttered, and opened the door. It went upstairs fast, first putting the hat on (jamming it down hard; it didn't fit so well now) and then shifting the shotgun to both hands.

  A coyote lay dead at the top of the stairs. The door which led into the holding area was also standing open. The thing with the shotgun in its hands stepped in, knowing already what it would see, but the knowing did not stop the angry roar which came out of its chest. Outside, at the foot of the steps, the coyotes whined and cringed and squirted urine. On the police-cruiser, the buzzards also heard the cry of the thing upstairs and fluttered their wings uneasily, almost lifting off and then settling back, darting their heads restlessly at each other, as if to peck.

  In the holding area, all the cells which had been occupied were now standing open and empty.

  "That boy," the figure in the doorway whispered. Its hands were white on the stock of the shotgun. "That nasty little drug user."

  It stood there a moment longer, then stepped slowly into the room. Its eyes shifted back and forth in its expressionless face. Its hat--a Smokey-style with a flat brim--was slowly rising again as the thing's hair pushed it up. It had a great deal more hair than the hat's previous owner. The woman Collie Entragian had taken from the detention area and down the stairs had been five-six, a hundred and thirty pounds. This thing looked like that woman's very big sister: six-three, broad-shouldered, probably two hundred pounds. It was wearing a coverall it had taken from the supply shed before driving back out of what the mining company called Rattlesnake Number Two and the townspeople had for over a hundred years called the China Pit. The coverall was a bit tight in the breast and the hip, but still better than this body's old clothes; they were as useless to it now as Ellen Carver's old concerns and desires. As for Entragian, it had his belt, badge, and hat; it wore his pistol on her hip.

  Of course it did. After all, Ellen Carver was the only law west of the Pecos now. It was her job, and God help anyone who tried to keep her from doing a good one.

  Her former son, for instance.

  From the breast pocket of the coverall it took a small piece of sculpture. A spider carved from gray stone. It canted drunkenly to the left on Ellen's palm (one of its legs on that side was broken off), but that in no way dissipated its ugliness or its malevolence. Pitted stone eyes, purple with iron that had been volcano-cooked millennia ago, bulged from above its mandible, which gaped to show a tongue that was not a tongue but the grinning head of a tiny coyote. On the spider's back was a shape which vaguely resembled a country fiddle.

  "Tak!" the creature standing by the desk said. Its face was slack and doughy, a cruel parody of the face of the woman who, ten hours before, had been reading her daughter a Curious George book and sharing a cup of cocoa with her. Yet the eyes in that face were alive and aware and venomous, hideously like the eyes of the thing resting on her palm. Now she took it in her other hand and raised it over her head, into the light of the hanging glass globe over the desk. "Tak ah wan! Tak ah lah! Mi him, en tow! En tow!"

  Recluse spiders came hurrying toward it from the darkness of the stairwell, from cracks in the baseboard, from the dark comers of the empty cells. They gathered around it in a circle. Slowly, it lowered the stone spider to the desk.

  "Tak!" it cried softly. "Mi him, en tow. "

  A ripple went through the attentive circle of spiders. There were maybe fifty in all, most no bigger than plump raisins. Then the circle broke up, streaming toward the door in two lines. The thing that had been Ellen Carver before Collie Entragian took her down into the China Pit stood watching them go. Then it put the carving back into its pocket.

  "Jews must die," it told the empty room. "Catholics must die. Mormons must die. Grateful Dead fans must die." It paused. "Little prayboys must also die."

  It raised Ellen Carver's hands and began tapping Ellen Carver's fingers meditatively against Ellen Carver's collarbones.

  PART III

  THE AMERICAN WEST: LEGENDARY SHADOWS

  CHAPTER 1

  1

  "Holy shit!" Steve said. "This is amazing."

  "Fucking weird is what it is," Cynthia replied, then looked around to see if she had offended the old man. Billingsley was nowhere in sight.

  "Young lady," Johnny said. "Weird is the mosh pit, the only invention for which your generation can so far take credit. This is not weird. This is rather nice, in fact."

  "Weird," Cynthia repeated, but she was smiling.

  Johnny guessed that The American West had been built in the decade following World War II, when movie theaters were no longer the overblown Xanadus they had been in the twenties and thirties, but long before malling and multiplexing turned them into Dolby-equipped shoe-boxes. Billingsley had turned on the pinspots above the screen and those in what once would have been called the orchestra-pit, and Johnny had no trouble seeing the place. The auditorium was big but bland. There were vaguely art-deco electric wall-sconces, but no other grace-notes. Most of the seats were still in place, but the red plush was faded and threadbare and smelled powerfully of mildew. The screen was a huge white rectangle upon which Rock Hudson had once clinched with Doris Day, across which Charlton Heston had once matched chariots with Stephen Boyd. It had to be at least forty feet long and twenty feet high; from where Johnny stood, it looked the size of a drive-in screen.

  There was a stage area in front of the screen--a kind of architectural holdover, Johnny assumed, since vaudeville must have been dead by the time this place was built. Had it ever been used? He supposed so; for political speeches, or high school graduations, maybe for the final round of the Cowshit County Spelling Bee. Whatever purposes it had served in the past, surely none of the people who had attended those quaint country ceremonies could have predicted this stage's final function.

  He glanced around, a little worried about Billingsley now, and saw the old man coming down the short, narrow corridor which led from the bathrooms to the backstage area, where the rest of them were clustered. Old fella's got a bottle stashed, he went back for a quick snort, that's all, Johnny thought, but he couldn't smell fresh booze on the old guy when he brushed past, and that was a smell he never missed now that he had quit drinking himself.

  They followed Billingsley out onto the stage, the group of people Johnny was coming to think of (and not entirely without affection) as The Collie Entragian Survival Society, their feet clumping and echoing, their shadows long and pallid in the orchestra sidelights. Billingsley had turned these on from a box in the electrical closet by the stage-left entrance. Above the tatty red plush seats, the weak light petered out in a hurry and there was only darkness ascending to some unseen height. Above that--and on all sides as well--the desert wind howled. It was a sound that cooled Johnny's blood ... but he could not deny the fact that there was also something strangely attractive about it ... although what that attraction might be, he didn't know.

  Oh, don't lie. You know. Billingsley and his friends k
new as well, that's why they came here. God made you to hear that sound, and a room like this is a natural amplifier for it. You can hear it even better when you sit in the front of the screen with your old pals, throwing legendary shadows and drinking to the past. That sound says quitting is okay, that quitting is in fact the only choice that makes any sense. That sound is about the lure of emptiness and the pleasures of zero.

  In the middle of the dusty stage and in front of the curtainless screen was a living room--easy chairs, sofas, standing lamps, a coffee-table, even a TV. The furniture stood on a big piece of carpet. It was a little like a display in the Home Living section of a department store, but what Johnny kept coming back to was the idea that if Eugene lonesco had ever written an episode of The Twilight Zone, the set would probably have looked a lot like this. Dominating the decor was a fumed-oak bar. Johnny ran a hand over it as Billingsley snapped on the standing lamps, one after the other. The electrical cords, Johnny saw, ran through small slits in the lower part of the screen. The edges of these rips had then been mended with electrical tape to keep them from widening.

  Billingsley nodded at the bar. "That come from the old Circle Ranch. Part of the Clayton Loving auction, it was. Buzz Hansen n me teamed together and knocked it down for seventeen bucks. Can you b'lieve it?"

  "Frankly, no," Johnny said, trying to imagine what an item like this might go for in one of those precious little shops down in SQHO. He opened the double doors and saw the bar was fully stocked. Good stuff, too. Not primo, but good. He closed the doors again in a hurry. The bottles inside called to him in a way the bottle of Beam he'd taken out of the Owl's had not.

  Ralph Carver sat down in a wing-chair and looked out over the empty seats with the dazed hopefulness of a man who dares to think he may be dreaming after all. David went over to the television. "Do you get anything on this--oh, I see." He had spotted the VCR underneath. He squatted down to look at the cassettes stacked on top of it.

  "Son--" Billingsley began, then gave up.