"You've had a conversion, Reverend Martin" once told David. This was near the beginning. It was also around the time that David began to realize that by four o'clock on most Sunday afternoons. Reverend Gene Martin was no longer strictly sober. It would still be some months, however, before David realized just how much his new teacher drank. In fact, yours is the only genuine conversion I've ever seen, perhaps the only genuine one I'll ever see. These are not good times for the God of our fathers, David. Lot of people talking the talk, not many walking the walk.

David wasn't sure that "conversion" was the right word for what had happened to him, but he hadn't spent much time worrying about it. Something had happened, and just coping with it was enough. The something had brought him to Reverend Martin, and Reverend Martin-drunk or not-had told him things he needed to know and set him tasks that he needed to do. When David had asked him, at one of those Sunday-afternoon meetings (soundless basketball on the TV that day), what he should be doing, Reverend Martin had responded promptly. "The job of the new Christian is to meet God, to know God, to trust God, to love God. That's not like taking a list to the supermarket, either, where you can dump stuff into your basket in any order you like. It's a progression, like working your way up the math ladder from counting to calculus. You've met God, and rather spectacularly, too. Now you've got to get to know him."

"Well, I talk to you," David had said.

"Yes, and you talk to God. You do, don't you? Haven't given up on the praying?"

"Nope. Don't often hear back, though."

Reverend Martin had laughed and taken a sip from his teacup. "God's a lousy conversationalist, no question about that, but he left us a user's manual. I suggest you consult it."

"Huh?"

"The Bible," Reverend Martin had said, looking at him over the rim of his cup with bloodshot eyes.

So he had read the Bible, starting in March and fin-ishing Revelation ("The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen") just a week or so before they had left Ohio. He had done it like homework, twenty pages a night (weekends off), making notes, memorizing stuff that seemed important, skipping only the parts Reverend Martin told him he could skip, mostly the begats. And what he remembered most clearly now, as he stood shiv-ering at the sink in the jail cell, dousing himself with icy water, was the story of Daniel in the lions' den. King Darius hadn't really wanted to throw Danny in there, but his advisers had mousetrapped him somehow. David had been amazed at how much of the Bible was politics.

"You STOP THAT!" his father screamed, startling David out of his thoughts and making him look around. In the growing gloom Ralph Carver's face was long with terror, his eyes red with grief. In his agitation he sounded like an eleven-year-old himself, one having a hell of a tantrum. "Stop that RIGHT NOW, do you hear me?"

David turned back to the sink without answering and began to splash water on his face and in his hair. He remembered King Darius's parting advice to Daniel before Daniel was led away: "Thy God whom thou servest in your days and nights will deliver thee." And something else, something Daniel had said the next day about why God had shut the lions' mouths -

"David! DAVID!"

But he wouldn't look again. Couldn't. He hated it when his father cried, and he had never seen or heard him cry like this. It was awful, as if someone had cut open a vein in his heart.

"David, you answer me!"

"Put a sock in it, pal," Marinville said.

"You put a sock in it," Mary told him.

"But he's getting the coyote riled!"

She ignored him. "David, what are you doing?"

David didn't answer. This wasn't the kind of thing you could discuss rationally, even if there was time, because faith wasn't rational. This was something Reverend Martin had told him over and over again, drilling him with it like some important spelling rule, "I" before "E" except after "C": sane men and women don't believe in God That was all, that was flat. You can't say it from the pulpit, because the congregation'd run you out of town, but it's the truth. God isn't about reason; God is about faith and belief God says, "Sure, take away the safety net. And when that's gone, take away the tightrope, too

He filled his hands with water once more and splashed it over his face and into his hair. His head. That would be where he succeeded or failed, he knew that already. It was the biggest part of him, and he didn't think there was much give to a person's skull.

David grabbed the bar of Irish Spring and began to lather himself with it. He didn't bother with his legs, there would be no problem there, but worked from the groin on up, rubbing harder and generating more suds as he went His father was still yelling at him, but now there was no time to listen. The thing was, he had to be quick . . . and not just because he was apt to lose his nerve if he stopped too long to think about the coyote sitting out there. If he let the soap dry, it wouldn't serve to grease him; it would gum him up and hold him back instead.

He gave his neck a fast lube-job, then did his face and hair. Eyes slitted, soap still clutched in one hand, he padded to the cell door. A horizontal bar crossed the vertical ones about three feet off the floor. The gap between the vertical bars was at least four inches and maybe five The cells in the holding area had been built to hold men brawny miners, for the most part - not skinny eleven year-old boys, and he didn't expect much trouble slipping through.

At least until he got to his head.

Quick, hurry, don 't think, trust God.

He knelt, shivering and covered with green soapslime from the hips on up, and began rubbing the cake of soap up and down, first on the inside of one white-painted ver-tical bar, then on the other.

Out by the desk, the coyote got to its feet. Its growl rose to a snarl. Its yellow eyes were fixed intently on David Carver. Its muzzle wrinkled back in an unpleasantly toothy grin.

"David, no! Don 't do it, son! Don 't be crazy!"

"He's right, kid." Marinville was standing at the bars of his cell now, hands wrapped around them. So was Mary. That was embarrassing but probably natural enough, considering the way his father was carrying on. And it couldn't be helped. He had to go, and go now. He hadn't been able to draw any hot water from the tap, and he thought the cold would dry the soap on his skin even quicker.

He recalled the story of Daniel and the lions again as he dropped to one knee, gathering himself. Not very surprising, given the circumstances. When King Darius arrived the next day, Daniel had been fine. "My God hath sent his anger, and hath shut the lions' mouths," Daniel told him, "forasmuch as innocency was found in me." That wasn't exactly right, but David knew the word "innocency" was. It had fascinated him, chimed some-where deep inside him. Now he spoke it to the being whose voice he sometimes heard - the one he identified as the voice of the other: Find innocency in me, God. Find innocency in me and shut that fleabag 's mouth. Jesus' name I pray, amen.

He turned sideways, then propped his whole weight on one arm, like Jack Palance doing pushups at the Academy Awards. In this fashion he was able to stick both feet out through the bars at the same time. He wriggled backward, now out to his ankles, now his knees, now his thighs . . . which was where he first felt the painted bars press their soapslick coolness against him.

"No!" Mary screamed. "No, get away from him, you ugly fuck! GETAWAY FROM HIM!"

There was a clink. It was followed by a thin rolling-marble sound. David turned his head long enough to see Mary with her hands now outside the bars of her cell. The left was cupped. He saw her pick another coin out of it with her right hand and throw it at the coyote. This time it barely paid attention, although the quarter struck it on the flank. The animal started toward David's bare feet and legs instead, head lowered, snarling.

2

Oh Christ almighty, Johnny thought. Goddam kid must have checked his brains at the door.

Then he yanked the belt out of the bottom of his motor-cycle jacket, stuck his arm as far out through the bars as he could, and brought the buckle end down on the coyote's scant flank just as it was about to help itself to the kid's right foot.

The coyote yelped in pain as well as surprise this time. It whirled, snatching at the belt. Johnny yanked it away - it was too thin, too apt to give out in the coyote's jaws before the kid could get out . . . if the kid actually could get out, which Johnny doubted. He let the belt go flying over his shoulder and yanked off the heavy leather jacket itself, trying to hold the coyote's yellow gaze as he did so willing it not to look away. The animal's eyes reminded him of the cop's eyes.

The kid shoved his butt through the bars with a gasp, and Johnny had time to wonder how that felt on the old family jewels. The coyote started to turn toward the sound and Johnny flung the leather jacket out at it, holding on by the collar. If the animal hadn't taken two steps forward to snatch at the belt, the jacket wouldn't have reached it . . . - but the coyote had and the jacket did. When it brushed the animal's shoulder, it whirled and seized the jacket so fiercely that it was almost snapped out of Johnny's hands. As it was he was dragged head-first into the bars. It hurt like a mother and a bright red rocket went off behind his eyes, but he still had time to be grateful that his nose had gone between the bars rather than into one.

"No, you don't," he grunted, winding his hands into the leather collar and pulling. "Come on, hon . . . come on. you nasty gopher-eating bugger. . . come on over. . . and any howdy."

The coyote snarled bitterly at him, the sound muffled through its mouthful of jacket - twelve hundred bucks at Barneys in New York. Johnny had never quite pictured it like this when he had tried it on.

He bunched his arms - not as powerful as they'd been thirty years ago, but not puny, either - and dragged the coyote forward. Its claws slid on the hardwood floor. It got one front leg braced against the desk and shook the jacket from side to side, trying to yank it out of Johnny's hands. His collection of Life Savers went flying, his maps, his spare set of keys, his pocket pharmacy (aspirin, codeine caps, Sucrets, a tube of Preparation-H), his sunglasses, and his goddam cellular phone. He let the coyote take a step or two backward, trying to keep it interested, to play it like a fish, then yanked it forward again. It bonked its head on the corner of the desk this time, a sound that warmed Johnny's heart. "A rriba!" he grunted. "How'd that feel, honey?"

"Hurry up!" Mary screamed. "Hurry up, David!"

Johnny glanced over at the kid's cell. What he saw made his muscles relax with fear - when the coyote yanked on the jacket this time, the animal came very close to pulling it free.

"Hurry up!" the woman screamed again, but Johnny saw that the kid couldn't hurry up. Soaped up, naked as a peeled shrimp, he had gotten as far as his chin, and there he was stuck, with the whole length of his body out in the holding area and his head back inside the cell. Johnny had one overwhelming impression, mostly called to mind by the twist of the neck and the stressed line of the jaw.

The kid was hung.

3

He did okay until he got to his head, and there he stuck fast with his cheek on the boards and the shelf of his jaw pressed against one soapy bar and the back of his head against the other. A panic driven by claustrophobia - the smell of the wood floor, the iron touch of the bars, a nightmare memory of a picture he'd once seen of a Puritan in stocks - dimmed his vision like a dark curtain. He could hear his dad shouting, the woman screaming, and the coyote snarling, but those sounds were all far away. His head was stuck, he'd have to go back, only he wasn't sure he could go back because now his arms were out and one was pinned under him and -

God help me, he thought. It didn't seem like a prayer; it was maybe too scared and up against it to be a prayer. Please help me, don't let me be stuck, please help me.

Turn your head, the voice he sometimes heard now told him. As always, it spoke in an almost disinterested way, as if the things it was saying should have been self-evident, and as always David recognized it by the way it seemed to pass through him rather than to come from him.

An image came to him then: hands pressing the front and back of a book, squeezing the pages together a little in spite of the boards and the binding. Could his head do that? David thought - or perhaps only hoped - that it could. But he would have to be in the right position.

Turn your head, the voice had said.

From somewhere behind him came a thick ripping sound, then Marinville's voice, somehow amused, scared, and outraged all at the same time: "Do you know how much that thing cost?"

David twisted around so he lay on his back instead of his side. Just having the pressure of the bar off his jaw was an incredible relief. Then he reached up and placed his palms against the bars.

Is this right?

No answer. So often there was no answer. Why was that?

Because God is cruel, the Reverend Martin who kept school inside his head replied. God is cruel. I have pop-corn, David, why don 't I make some? Maybe we can find one of those old horror movies on TV, something Universal, maybe even The Mummy.

He pushed with his hands. At first nothing happened, but then, slowly, slowly, his soapy head began sliding between the bars. There was one terrible moment when he stopped with his ears crushed against the sides of his head and the pressure beating on his temples, a sick throb that was maybe the worst physical hurt he had ever known. In that moment he was sure he was going to stick right where he was and die in agony, like a heretic caught in some Inquisitorial torture device. He shoved harder with his palms, eyes looking up at the dusty ceiling with agonized concentration, and gave a small, relieved moan as he began to move again almost at once. With the narrowest aspect of his skull presented to the bars, he was able to deliver himself into the holding area without too much more trouble. One of his ears was trickling blood, but he was out. He had made it. Naked, covered with foamy greenish curds of Irish Spring soap, David sat up. A monstrous bolt of pain shot through his head from back to. front, and for a moment he felt his eyes were literally bugging out, like those of a cartoon Romeo who has just spotted a dishy blonde.

The coyote was the least of his problems, at least for the time being. God had shut its mouth with a motorcycle jacket. Stuff from the pockets was scattered everywhere, and the jacket itself was torn straight down the middle. A limp rag of saliva-coated black leather hung from the side of the coyote's muzzle like a well-chewed cheroot.

"Get out, David!" his father cried. His voice was hoarse with tears and anxiety. "Get out while you still can!"

The gray-haired man, Marinville, flicked his eyes up to David momentarily. "He's right, kid. Get lost." He looked back down at the snarling coyote. "Come on, Rover, you can do better than that! By Jesus, I'd like to be around when you start shitting zippers by the light of the moon!" He yanked the jacket hard. The coyote came skidding along the floor, head down, neck stretched, forelegs stiff, shaking its narrow head from side to side as it tried to pull the jacket away from Marinville.

David turned on his knees and pulled his clothes out through the bars. He squeezed his pants, feeling for the tube of the shotgun shell in the pocket. The shotgun shell was there. He got to his feet, and for a few seconds the world turned into a merry-go-round. He had to reach out for the bars of his erstwhile cell to keep from falling over. Billingsley put a hand over his. It was surprisingly warm. "Go, son," he said. "Time's almost up."

David turned and tottered toward the door. His head was still throbbing, and his balance was badly off; the door seemed to be on a rocker or a spindle or something.

He staggered, regained his footing, and opened the door. He turned to look at his father. "I'll be back."

"Don't you dare," his father said at once. "Find a phone and call the cops, David. The State cops. And be careful. Don't let - "

There was a harsh ripping sound as Johnny's expensive leather jacket finally tore in two. The coyote, not expecting such a sudden victory, went flying backward, rolled over on its side, and saw the naked boy in the doorway. It scrambled to its feet and flew at him with a snarl. Mary screamed.

"Go, kid, GET OUT!" Johnny yelled.

David ducked out and yanked the door shut behind him. A split second later, the coyote hit it with a thud. A howl - terrible because it was so close - rose from the holding area. It was as if it knew it had been fooled, David thought; as if it also knew that, when the man who had summoned it here returned, he would not be pleased.

There was another thud as the coyote threw itself at the door again, a pause, then a third. The animal howled again. Gooseflesh rose on David's soapy arms and chest. Just ahead of him were the stairs down which his kid sister had tumbled to her death; if the crazy cop hadn't moved her, she would still be at the bottom, waiting for him in the gloom, eyes open and accusing, asking him why he hadn't stopped Mr. Big Boogeyman, what good was a big brother if he couldn't stop the boogeyman?

I can't go down there, he thought. I can't, I absolutely can't.

No, but all the same, he had to.

Outside, the wind gusted hard enough to make the brick building creak like a ship in a working sea. David could hear dust, too, hitting the side of the building and the street doors down there like fine snow. The coyote howled again, separated from him only by an inch or so of wood . ., and knowing it.

David closed his eyes and pressed his fingers together in front of his mouth and chin. "God, this is David Carver again. I'm in such a mess, God, such a mess. Please protect me and help me do what I have to do. Jesus' name I pray, amen."

He opened his eyes, took a deep breath, and groped for the stair railing. Then, naked, holding his clothes against his chest with his free hand, David Carver started down into the shadows.

4

Steve tried to speak and couldn't. Tried again and still couldn't, although this time he did manage a single dry squeak. You sound like a mouse farting behind a baseboard, he thought.

He was aware that Cynthia was squeezing his hand in a grip powerful enough to be painful, but the pain didn't seem to matter. He didn't know how long they would have stood there in the doorway of the big room at the end of the Quonset hut if the wind hadn't blown something over outside and sent it clattering down the Street. Cynthia gasped like someone who has been punched and put the hand not holding Steve's up to one side of her face. She turned to look at him that way, so he could see only one wide, horrified eye. Tears were trickling down from it.

"Why?" she whispered. "Why?"

He shook his head. He didn't know why, didn't have a clue. The only two things he was sure of were that the people who had done this were gone, or he and Cynthia would have been dead already, and that he, Steven Ames of Lubbock, Texas, did not want to be here if they decided to come back.

The large space at the end of the Quonset hut looked like a combination workroom, lab, and storage area. It was lit by hanging hi-intensity lamps with metal hoods, a little like the lights which hang over the tables in billiard emporiums. They cast a bright lemony glow. It looked to Steve as if two crews might have worked here at the same time, one doing assay work on the left side of the room, the other sorting and cataloguing on the right. There were Dandux laundry baskets lined up against the wall on the sorting side, each with chunks of rock in it. These had clearly been sorted; one basket was filled with rocks that were mostly black, another with smaller rocks, almost pebbles, that were shot through with glitters of quartz.

On the assay side (if that was what it was), there was a line of Macintosh computers set up on a long table littered with tools and manuals. The Macs were running screen-saver programs. One featured pretty, multicolored helix shapes above the words GAS CHROMATOGRAPH READY. Another, surely not Disney-sanctioned, showed Goofy pulling down his pants every seven seconds or so, revealing a large boner with the words HYUCK HYUCK HYUCK written on it.

At the far end of the room, inside a closed overhead garage door with the words WELCOME TO HERNANDO'S HIDEAWAY printed on it in blue paint, was an ATV with an open carrier hooked up behind it. This was also full of rock samples. On the wall to its left was a sign reading

YOU MUST WEAR A HARDHAT MSHA REGULATIONS NO EXCUSES. There was a row of hooks running below the sign, but there were no hardhats hung from them. The hardhats were scattered on the floor, below the dangling feet of the people who had been hung from the hooks, hung like roasts in a butcher's walk-in freezer.

"Steve . . . Steve, are they like . . . dummies? Department store mannequins? Is it. . . you know. ., a joke?"

"No." The word was small and felt as dusty as the air outside, but it was a start. "You know they're not. Let up, Cynthia, you're breaking my hand."

"Don't make me let go," she said in a wavery voice. Her hand was still up to her face and she stared one-eyed at the dangling corpses across the room. On the radio, The Tractors had been replaced by David Lee Murphy, and David Lee Murphy had given way to an ad for a place called Whalen's, which the announcer described as "Austin's Anything Store!"

"You don't have to let go, just let up a little," Steve said. He raised an unsteady finger and began to count. One. ., two. . . three. . .

"I think I wet my pants a little," she said.

"Don't blame you." Four. . . five. ., six. . .

"We have to get out of here, Steve, this makes the guy who broke my nose look like Santa Cl - "

"Be quiet and let me count!"

She fell silent, her mouth trembling and her chest hitching as she tried to contain her sobs. Steve was sorry he'd shouted - this one had been through a lot even before today - but he wasn't thinking very well. Christ, he wasn't entirely sure he was thinking at all.

"Thirteen," he said.

"Fourteen," she corrected in a shaky, humble voice. "Do you see? In the corner? One of them fell off. One of them fell off the h-h-h-"

"Hook" was what she was trying to say, but the stutter turned into miserable little cries and she began to weep. Steve took her in his arms and held her, feeling her hot, wet face throb against his chest. Low on his chest. She was so goddam small.

Over the fuzz of her extravagantly colored hair he could see the other side of the room, and she was right- there was another body crumpled in the corner. Fourteen dead in all, at least three of them women. With their heads hanging and their chins on their chests, it was hard to tell for sure about some of the others. Nine were wearing lab coats - no, ten, counting the one in the corner - and two were in jeans and open-necked shirts. Two others were wearing suits, string ties, dress boots. One of these appeared to have no left hand, and Steve had a pretty good idea of where that hand might be, oh yes indeed he did. Most had been shot, and they must have been facing their killers, because Steve could see gaping exit wounds in the backs of most of the dropped heads. At least three, however, had been opened like fish. They hung with their white coats stained maroon and pools of blood beneath them and their guts dangling.

"Now here's Mary Chapin Carpenter to tell us why she feels lucky today," the radio announcer said, emerging gamely from another blast of static. "Maybe she's been to Whalen's in Austin. Let's find out."

Mary Chapin Carpenter began to tell the hanging dead men and women in the lab of the Desperation Mining Corporation about her lucky day, how she'd won the lot-tery and all, and Steve let go of Cynthia. He took a step into the lab and sniffed the air. No gunsmoke that he could smell, and maybe that didn't mean much - the air conditioners probably turned over the air in here pretty fast - but the blood was dry on the corpses which had been eviscerated, and that probably meant whoever had done this was long gone.

"Let's go!" Cynthia hissed, tugging his arm.

"Okay," he said. "Just-"

He broke off as something caught his eye. It was sitting on the end of the computer table, to the right of the screen with the Goofy-flasher on it. Not a rock, or not just a rock, anyway. Some kind of stone artifact. He walked over and looked down at it.

The girl scurried after him and yanked his arm again. "What's the matter with you? This isn't a guided tour! What if - " Then she saw what he was looking at - really saw it - and broke off. She reached out a tentative finger and touched it. She gasped and drew her finger back. At the same moment her hips jerked forward as if she'd gotten an electric shock and her pelvis banged into the edge of the table. "Holy shit," she breathed. "I think I just - " And there she stopped.

"Just what?"

"Nothing." But she looked as if she was blushing, so Steve guessed maybe it was something, at that. "There ought to be a picture of that thing next to ugly in the dictionary."

It was a rendering of what might have been a wolf or a coyote, and although it was crude, it had enough power to make them both forget, at least for a few seconds, that they were standing sixty feet from the leftovers of a mass murder. The beast's head was twisted at a strange angle (a somehow hungry angle), and its eyeballs appeared to be starting out of their sockets in utter fury. Its snout was wildly out of proportion to its body - almost the snout of an alligator - and it was split open to show a jagged array of teeth. The statue, if that was what it was, had been broken off just below the chest. There were stumps of forelegs, but that was all. The stone was pitted and eroded with age. It was glittery in places, too, like the rocks collected in one of the Dandux baskets. Beside it, anchored by a plastic box of pushpins, was a note: Jim-What the hell is this? Any idea? Barbie.

"Look at its tongue," Cynthia said in a strange, dreaming voice.

"What about it?"

"It's a snake."

Yes, he saw, it was. A rattler, maybe. Something with fangs, anyway.

Cynthia's head snapped up. Her eyes were wide and alarmed. She grabbed his shirt again and pulled it. "What are we doing?" she asked, "This isn't art - appreciation class, for Christ's sake - we've got to get out of here!"

Yeah, we do, Steve thought. The question is, where do we go?

They'd worry about it when they got to the truck. Not in here. He had an idea it would be impossible to do any productive thinking in here.

"Hey, what happened to the radio?" she asked.

"Huh?" He listened, but the music was gone. "I don't know."

With a strange, set expression on her face, Cynthia reached out to the crumbling fragment on the table again. This time she touched it between the ears. She gasped. The hanging lights flickered - Steve saw them flicker - and the radio came back on. "Hey Dwight, hey Lyle, boys, you don 't need to fight," Mary Chapin Carpenter sang through the static, "hot dog, I feel lucky tonight!"

"Christ," Steve said. "Why'd you do that?"

Cynthia looked at Steve. Her eyes looked oddly hazy. She shrugged, touched her tongue to the middle of her upper lip. "I don't know." Suddenly she put her hand to her forehead and squeezed her temples, hard. When she took it away, her eyes were clear again, but frightened. "What the hell?" she said, more to herself than to him.

Steve reached out to touch the thing himself. She grabbed his wrist before he could. "Don't. It feels nasty."

He shook her off and put his finger on the wolf's back (all at once he was sure that was what it was, not a coyote but a wolf). The radio went dead again. At the same time there was a cough of broken glass from somewhere be-hind them. Cynthia yelped.

Steve had already taken his finger off the rock; he would have done that even if nothing at all had happened, because she was right: it felt nasty. But for a moment, something did happen. It felt as if one of the more vital circuits in his head had shorted out, for one thing. Except . . . hadn't he been thinking about the girl? Doing some-thing to the girl, with the girl? The kind of thing both of you might like to try but would never talk about to your friends? A kind of experiment?

Even as he was mulling this over, trying to remember what the experiment might have been, he was reaching out for the stone again with his finger. He didn't make a conscious decision to do this, but now that he was, it seemed like a good idea. Just let that old finger go where it wants, he thought, bemused. Let it touch whatever it. She grabbed his hand and twisted it away from the piece of stone Just as he was about to put his finger on the wolf's back. "Hey, sport, read my lips: I want to get out of here! Right now!"

He took a deep breath, let it out. Repeated the process. His head began to feel like familiar territory again, but he was suddenly more frightened than ever. Of exactly what he didn't know. Wasn't sure he wanted to know. "Okay. Let's go."

Holding her hand, he led her back into the hallway. He glanced over his shoulder once, at the crumbled gray bit of carving. Twisted, predatory head. Bulging eyes. Too-long snout. Snake tongue. And beyond it, something else. Both the helix and the exhibitionist Goofy were gone. Those screens were dark, as if some power - surge had shorted them out.

Water was pouring through the open door of the office with the aquarium in it. There was a molly stranded on the edge of the hallway carpet, flopping its last. Well, Steve thought, now we know what broke, no need to wonder about that.

"Don't look when we go by," he said. "Just - "

"Did you hear something just then?" she asked. "Bangs or booms or something like that?"

He listened, heard only the wind . . . then thought he heard a stealthy shuffling from behind him.

He wheeled around quickly. Nothing there. Of course there wasn't, what had he been thinking? That one of the corpses had wriggled down off its hook and was coming after them? Dumb. Even under these stressful circumstances, that was plumb loco, Wild Bill. But there was something else, something he couldn't dismiss, dumb or not: that statue. It was like a physical presence in his head, a thumb poking rudely into the actual tissue of his brain. He wished he hadn't looked at it. Even more, he wished he hadn't touched it.

"Steve? Did you hear anything? It could have been gun-shots. There! There's another one!"

The wind screamed along the side of the building and something else fell over out there, making them cry out and grab for each other like kids in the dark. The thing that had fallen over went scraping along the ground outside.

"I don't hear anything but the wind. Probably what you heard was a door banging shut somewhere. If you heard anything."

"There were at least three of them," she said. "Maybe they weren't gunshots, more like thuds, but - "

"Could have been something flying in the wind, too. Come on, cookie, let's shake some tailfeathers."

"Don't call me cookie and I won't call you cake," she said faintly, not looking when they passed the office with the water still draining out of it.

Steve did. The aquarium was now nothing but a rectangle of wet sand surrounded by jags of glass. The hand lay on the soaked carpet beside the desk. It had landed on its back. There was a dead guppy stranded on its palm. The fingers seemed almost to beckon him - come on in, stranger, pull up a chair, take a load off, mi casa es su casa.

No thanks, Steve thought.

He had no more than started to open the door between the littery reception area and the outside when it was snatched prankishly out of his hands. Dust was blowing past in ribbons. The mountains to the west had been completely obliterated by moving membranes of darkening gold - sand and alkali grit flying in the day's last ten minutes or so of light - but he could see the first stars glowing clearly overhead. The wind was at near gale force now. A rusty old barrel with the words ZOOM

CHEMTRONICS DISPOSE OF PROPERLY stencilled on it rolled across the parking lot, past the Ryder truck, and across the road. Into the desert it went. The tink-tink-tink of the lanyard-clip against the flagpole was feverish now, and something to their left thumped twice, hard, a sound like silencer-muffled pistol shots. Cynthia jerked against him. Steve turned toward the sound and saw a big blue Dumpster. As he looked, the wind half-lifted its lid, then dropped it. There was another muffled thump.

"There's your gunshots," he said, raising his voice to be heard over the wind.

"Well . . . it didn't sound just like that."

Aconcatenation of coyote-howls rose in the night, some from the west, flying to them on the wind and grit, some from the north. The sound reminded Steve of old newsclips he'd seen of Beatlemania, girls screaming their heads off for the moptops from Liverpool. He and Cynthia looked at each other. "Come on," he said. "The truck. Right now."

They hurried to it, arms around each other and the wind at their backs. When they were in the cab again, Cynthia locked her door, bopping the button down decisively with the heel of her hand, Steve did the same, then started the engine. Its steady rumble and the glow from the dash board when he pulled the headlight knob comforted him He turned to Cynthia.

"All right, where do we go to report this? Austin's out It's too far west and in the direction this shit is coming from. We'd end up by the side of the road, hoping we could start the damn engine again once the storm passed That leaves Ely, which is a two-hour drive - longer, if the storm overtakes us - or downtown Desperation, which is maybe less than a mile."

"Ely," she said at once. "The people who did this could be up there in town, and I doubt if a couple of local cops or even county mounties could match up to guys who could do what we saw in there."

"The people who did it could also be back on Route 50," he said. "Remember the RV, and the boss's bike."

"But we did see traffic," she said, then jumped as some- thing else fell over nearby. It sounded big and metallic. "Christ, Steve, can't we please just get the fuck out of here?"

He wanted to as badly as she did, but he shook his head. "Not until we figure this out. It's important. Fourteen dead people, and that doesn't count the boss or the people from the RV."

"The Carver family."

"This is gonna be big when it comes out - nationwide. If we go back to Ely and if it turns out there were two cops with phones and radios less than a mile up the road, 21 and if the people who did this get away because we took too long blowing the whistle. . . well, our decision is going to be questioned. Harshly."

The dashlights made her face look green and sick. "Are you saying they'd think we had something to do with it?"

"I don't know, but I'll tell you this: You're not the Duchess of Windsor and I'm not the Duke of Earl. We're a couple of roadbums, is what we are. How much ID do you have? A driver's license?"

"I never took the test. Moved around too much."

"Social Security?"

"Well, I lost the card someplace, I think I left it behind when I split from the guy who fucked up my ear, but I remember the number."

"What have you got for actual paperwork?"

"My discount card from Tower Records and Video," she snapped. "Two punches left and I get a free CD. I'm shooting for Out Come the Wolves. Seems fitting, given the soundtrack in these parts. Satisfied?"

"Yeah," he said, and began to laugh. She stared at him for a moment, cheeks green, shadows rippling across her brow, eyes dark, and he felt sure she was going to launch herself at him and see how much of his skin she could pull off. Then she began to laugh, too, a helpless screamy sound he didn't care for much. "Come here a second," he said, and held out his hand.

"Don't you get funny with me, I'm warning you," she said, but she scooted across the seat and into the circle of his arm with no hesitation. He could feel her shoulder trembling against his. She was going to be cold in that tank-top if they had to get out of the truck. The temperature fell off the table in this part of the world once the sun went down.

"You really want to go into town, Lubbock?"

"What I want is to be in Disneyland eating a Sno-Kone, but I think we ought to go up there and take a look. If things are normal . . . if they feel normal . . . okay, we'll try reporting it there. But if we see anything that looks the slightest bit wrong, we head for Ely on the double."

She looked up at him solemnly. "I'm going to hold you to that."

"You can." He put the truck in gear and began to roll slowly toward the road. To the west, the gold glow which had been filtering through the sand was down to an ember. Overhead, more stars were poking through, but they were beginning to shimmy as the flying sand thickened.

"Steve? You don't happen to have a gun, do you?"

He shook his head, thought about going back into the Quonset to look for one, and then put the idea out of his head. He wasn't going back in there, that was all; he just wasn't. "No gun, hut I've got a really big Swiss Army knife, one with all the bells and whistles. It's even got a magnifying glass."

"That makes me feel a lot better."

He thought of asking her about the statue, or if she'd had any funny ideas - experimental ideas - and then didn't. Like the thought of going back into the Quonset building again, it was just too creepy. He turned onto the road, one arm still about her shoulders, and started toward town. The sand blew thickly across the wedge of light thrown by his high beams, twisting into lank shadows that persistently reminded him of hanged men dangling from hooks.

5

The body of his sister was gone from the foot of the stairs, and that was something. David stood looking out through the double doors for a moment. Daylight was fading, and although the sky overhead was still clear - a darkening indigo - the light was dying down here at ground-level in a choke of dust. Across the street, an overhead sign reading DESPERATION COFFEE SHOP AND VIDEO STOP swung back and forth in the wind. Sitting beneath it, and looking attentively across at him, were two more coyotes. Sitting between them, tatty feathers flap ping in the wind like the feathers on some old woman's church-and-Bingo hat, was a large bald-looking bird David recognized as a buzzard. Sitting right between the coyotes.

'That's impossible," he whispered. and maybe it was but he was seeing it, just the same.

He dressed quickly, looking at a door to his left as he did. Printed on the frosted-glass pane were the words DESPERATION TOWN OFFICE, along with the hours - nine to four. He tied his sneakers and then opened the door, ready to turn and run if he sensed anything dangerous . . . if he sensed anything moving, really.

But where would I run? Where is there to run?

The room beyond the door was gloomy and silent. He groped to his left, expecting something or someone to reach out of the darkness and grab his hand, but nothing did. He found a switchplate, then the switch itself. He flipped it, blinked as his eyes adjusted to the old-fashioned hanging globes, then stepped forward. Straight ahead was a long counter with several barred windows like tellers' stations in an old-fashioned bank. One was marked TAX CLERK, another HUNTING PERMITS, another MINES AND ASSAY. The last one, smaller, bore a sign read-ing MSHA and FEDERAL LAND-USE REGS. Spray-painted on the wall behind the clerks' area in big red letters was this:

IN THESE SILENCES SOMETHING MAY RISE.

I guess something did, too, David thought, turning his head to check the other side of the room. Something not very -

He never finished the thought. His eyes widened, and his hands went to his mouth to stifle a shriek. For a moment the world went gray, and he believed he might faint. To stop it happening he took his hands away from his mouth and squeezed them against his temples instead, renewing the pain there. Then he let them drop to his sides, looking with wide eyes and a hurt, quivering mouth at what was on the wall to the right of the door. There were coathooks. A Stetson with a snakeskin band hung on the one nearest the windows. Two women hung on the next two, one shot, the other gutted. This second woman had long red hair and a mouth that was open in a silent frozen scream. To her left was a man in khaki, his head down, his holster empty. Pearson, maybe, the other deputy. Next to him was a man in jeans and a blood-spattered workshirt. Last in line was Pie. She had been hung up by the back of her MotoKops shirt. Cassie Styles was on it, standing in front of her Dream Floater van with her arms folded and a big grin on her face. Cassie had always been Pie's favorite MotoKop. Pie's head lolled over her broken neck and her sneakers dangled limply down.

Her hands. He kept looking at her hands. Small and pink, the fingers slightly open.

I can't touch her, I can't go near her!

But he could. He had to, unless he planned to leave her there with Entragian's other victims. And after all, what else was a big brother for, especially one who wasn't quite big enough to stop the boogeyman from doing such an unspeakable thing in the first place?

Chest hitching, greenish-white curds of soap drying to scales on his skin, he put his hands together again and raised them in front of his face. He closed his eyes. His voice, when it came out, was trembling so badly he hardly recognized it as his own. "God, I know that my sister is with you, and that this is just what she left behind. Please help me do what I have to for her." He opened his eyes again and looked at her. "I love you, Pie. I'm sorry for all the times I yelled at you or pulled your braids too hard."

That last was too much. He knelt on the floor and put his hands on top of his bowed head and held them there, gasping and trying not to pass out. His tears cut trails in the green goo on his face. What hurt most was the knowledge that the door which had swung shut between them would never be opened, at least not in this world. He would never see Pie go out on a date or shoot a basket from downtown two seconds before the buzzer. She would never again ask him to spot her while she stood on her head or want to know if the light in the refrigerator stayed on even when the door was closed. He understood now why people in the Bible rent their clothes.

When he had control of himself, he dragged one of the chairs which stood against the wall over to where she was. He looked at her hands, her pink palms, and his mind wavered again. He forced it steady - just finding he could do that, if he had to, was a welcome surprise. That wavering toward grief returned more insistently as he stood on the chair and observed the waxy, unnatural pallor of her face and the purplish cast of her lips. Cautiously, he let some of the grief in. He sensed it would be better for him if he did. This was his first dead person, but it was also Pie, and he did not want to be scared of her or grossed out by her. So it was better to feel sorry, and he did. He did.

Hurry, David.

He wasn't sure if that was his voice or the other's, but this time it didn't matter. The voice was right. Pie was dead, but his father and the others upstairs weren't. And then there was his mother. That was the worst thing, in a way even worse than what had happened to Pie, because he didn't know. The crazy cop had taken his mother somewhere, and he might be doing anything to her. Anything.

I won't think about that. I won't let myself.

He thought instead of all the hours Pie had spent in front of the TV with Melissa Sweetheart in her lap, watching KrayZee Toons. Professor KrayZee had yielded his place of honor in her heart to the MotoKops (especially Cassie Styles and the handsome Colonel Henry) over the last year or so, but the old Prof still seemed like the right answer to David. He only remembered one of Prof. KrayZee's little songs, and he sang it now as he slipped his arms around the dead girl and lifted her free of the hook: "This old man. ., he played one. . ."

Her head fell against his shoulder. It was amazingly heavy-how had she ever held it up all day long, as little as she was?

"He played knick-knack on my thumb. . ."

He turned, stepped clumsily down from the chair, staggered but did not fall, and took Pie over to the windows. He smoothed her shirt down in the back as he went. It had torn, but only a little. He laid her down, one hand under her neck to keep from bumping her head on the floor. It was the way Mom had showed him when Pie had been just a baby and he had asked to hold her. Had he sung to her then? He couldn't remember. He supposed he might have.

"With a knick-knack paddy whack, give a dog a bone. . ."

Ugly dark-green drapes hung at the sides of the win-dows, which were narrow nine-foot floor-to-ceiling jobs. David tugged one down.

"Krazy Prof goes rolling home..

He laid the drape out beside his sister's body, singing the stupid little song over again. He wished he could give her Melissa Sweetheart to keep her company, but Lissa was back by the Wayfarer. He lifted Pie onto the drape and folded the bottom half over her. It came all the way up to her neck and she looked better to him now, a lot. As if she were at home, sleeping in bed.

"With a knick-knack paddy whack, give a dog a bone," he sang again, "Krazy Prof went rolling home." He kissed her forehead. "I love you, Pie," he said, and he drew the top of the drape over her.

He remained beside her for a moment with his hands clasped tightly between his thighs, trying to get control of his emotions again. When he felt steadier, he got to his feet. The wind was howling, daylight was almost gone, and the sound of the dust against the windowpanes was like the light tapping of many fingers. He could hear a harsh, monotonous squeaking sound - reek-reek-reek - as something turned in the wind, and he jumped when some thing else out there in the growing darkness fell over with a bang.

He turned from the window and went hesitantly around the counter. There were no more bodies, but papers had been spilled behind the window marked TAX CLERK, and there were spots of dried blood on some of them. The Tax Clerk's high-backed, long-legged chair had been knocked over.

Behind the counter area was an open safe (David saw more stacks of paper but no money, and nothing that looked disturbed). To the right was a small cluster of desks. To the left were two closed doors, both with gold lettering on them. The one marked FIRE CHIEF didn't interest him, but the other one, the office of the Town Safety Officer, did. Jim Reed, that was his name.

"Town Safety Officer. What you'd call Chief of Police in a bigger burg," David murmured, and went over to the door. It was unlocked. He felt along the wall again, located the light-switch and flicked it. The first thing he saw when the lights came on was the huge caribou's head on the wall to the left of the desk. The second was the man behind the desk. He was tilted back in his office chair. Except for the ballpoint pens sticking out of his eyes and the desk-plaque protruding from his mouth, he might have been sleeping there, that was how relaxed his posture was. His hands had been laced together across his ample belly. He was wearing a khaki shirt and an across-the-chest belt like Entragian's.

Outside, something else fell over and coyotes howled in unison like a doowop group from hell. David jumped, then glanced over his shoulder to make sure Entragian wasn't sneaking up on him. He wasn't. David looked back at the Town Safety Officer. He knew what he had to do, and he thought if he could touch Pie, he could probably touch this stranger.

First, however, he picked up the phone. He expected it to be dead and it was. He hit the cut-off buttons a time or two anyway, saying "Hello? Hello?"

Room service, send me up a room, he thought, and shivered as he put the handset back in the cradle. He went around the desk and stood next to the cop with the pens in his eyes. The dead man's name-plaque - JAMES REED, TOWN SAFETY OFFICER - was still on his desk, so the one in his mouth was something else. OPS HERE was printed on the part sticking out between his teeth.

David could smell something familiar - not aftershave or cologne. He looked at the dead man's folded hands, saw the deep cracks in the skin, and understood. It was hand lotion he smelled, either the same stuff his mother used or something similar. Jim Reed must have finished rubbing some into his hands not long before he was killed.

David tried to look into Reed's lap and couldn't. The man was too fat and pulled in too close to his desk for David to be able to see what he needed to see. There was a small black hole in the center of the chairback - that he could see just fine. Reed had been shot; the thing with the pens had been done (David hoped) after he was already dead.

Get going. Hurry.

He started to pull the chair back, then shouted with surprise and jumped out of the way when it over-balanced almost at his touch and spilled Jim Reed's dead weight onto the floor. The corpse uttered a great dead belch when it hit. The plaque in its mouth flew out like a missile leaving its silo. It landed upside down, but David could read it with no trouble just the same:

THE BUCK - STOPS HERE.

Heart pounding harder than ever, he dropped to one knee beside the body. Reed's uniform pants were unbuttoned and unzipped, exposing some decidedly non-reg underdrawers (vast, silk, peach-colored), but David barely noticed these. He was looking for something else, and he sighed with relief when he saw it. On one well-padded hip was Reed's service revolver. On the other was a keychain clipped to a belt-loop. Biting his lower lip, somehow sure that the dead cop was going to reach out

(oh shit the mummy's after us)

and grab him, David struggled to free the keys from the belt-loop. At first the clip wouldn't open for him, but he was finally able to get it loose. He picked through the keys quickly, praying to find what he needed. . . and did. A square one that almost didn't rook like a key at all. A black magnetic strip ran down its length. The key to the holding cells upstairs.

He hoped -

David put the keyring in his pocket, glanced curiously 21 at Reed's open pants again, then unsnapped the strap over the cop's gun. He pulled it out, holding it in both hands, feeling its extraordinary weight and sense of inheld violence. A revolver, not an automatic with the bullets buried away in the handle. David turned the muzzle toward himself, careful to keep his fingers outside the trigger-guard, so he could look at the cylinder. There were bullet-heads in every hole he could see, so that was probably all right. The first chamber might be empty - in the movies cops sometimes did that to keep from shooting themselves by accident - but he reckoned that wouldn't matter if he pulled the trigger at least twice, and fast.

He turned the gun around again and inspected it from the butt forward, looking for a safety-catch. He didn't see one, and very gingerly pulled back on the trigger a little. When he saw the hammer start to rise out of its hood, he let off the pressure in a hurry. He didn't want to fire the gun down here. He didn't know how smart coyotes were, but he guessed that if they were smart about anything, it would probably be about guns.

He went back out into the main office. The wind howled, throwing sand against the window. The panes were bruise-purple now. Soon they'd be black. He looked over at the ugly green curtain, and the shape which lay beneath it. Love you, Pie, he thought, then went back out into the hall. He stood there a moment, taking deep breaths, eyes closed, gun held at his side with. the muzzle pointed at the floor.

"God, I never shot a gun in my life," he said. "Please help me be able to shoot this one. Jesus' sake, amen."

That taken care of, David started up the stairs.