Mary Jackson was sitting on her bunk, looking - down at her folded hands and thinking arsenic thoughts about her sister-in-law. Deirdre Finney, with her pretty pale face and sweet, stoned smile and pre-Raphaehte curls. Deirdre who didn't eat meat ("It's like, cruel, you know?") but smoked the smoke, oh yes, Deirdre had been going steady with that rascal Panama Red for years now Deirdre with her Mr. Smiley-Smile stickers. Deirdre who had gotten her brother killed and her sister-in-law slammed into a hicksville jail cell that was really Death Row, and all because she was too fucking fried to remember that she'd left her extra pot under the spare tire

That's not fair, a more rational part of her mind replied It was the license plate, not the pot. That's why Entragian stopped you. In a way it was like the Angel of Death seeing a doorway without the right mark on it. If the dope hadn't been there, he would've found something else. Once you caught his eye, you were cooked, that's all. And you know it.

But she didn't want to know it; thinking of it that way, as some sort of weird natural disaster, was just too awful.

It was better to blame it on Peter's idiot sister, to imagine punishing Deirdre in a number of nonlethal but painful ways. Caning - the sort they administered to thieves in Hong Kong - was the most satisfying, but she also saw herself hiking the tip of a pointed high-heeled shoe into Deirdre's flat little fashionplate ass. Anything to get that room-for-rent look out of her eyes long enough for Mary to scream "you GOT YOUR BROTHER KILLED, you STUPID TWAT, ARE YOU READING ME?" into Deirdre's face and to see the understanding there.

"Violence breeds violence," she told her hands in a calm, teacherly tone. Talking to herself under these circumstances seemed perfectly normal. "I know it, everybody knows it, but thinking about it is so pleasant, sometimes."

"What?" Ralph Carver asked. He sounded dazed. In fact - gruesome idea - he sounded quite a bit like the walking short-circuit that was her sister-in-law.

"Nothing. Never mind."

She got up. Two steps took her to the front of the cell. She wrapped her hands around the bars and looked out. The coyote was sitting on the floor with the remains of Johnny Marinville's leather jacket in front of its fore-paws, looking up at the writer as if mesmerized.

"Do you think he got away?" Ralph asked her. "Do you think my boy got away, ma'am?"

"It's not ma'am, it's Mary, and I don't know. I want to believe it, I can tell you that. I think there's a pretty good chance that he did, actually." As long as he didn't run into the cop, she added to herself.

"Yeah, I guess so. I had no idea he was so serious about the praying stuff," Ralph said. He sounded almost apologetic, which Mary found weird, under the circumstances. "I thought it was probably . . . I don't know . . . a passing fad. Sure didn't look that way, did it?"

"No," Mary agreed. "It didn't."

"Why do you keep staring at me, Bosco?" Marinville asked the coyote. "You got my fucking jacket, what else do you want? As if I didn't have a pretty good idea." He looked up at Mary. "You know, if one of us could get out of here, I think that mangebasket might actually turn tail and - "

"Hush!" Billingsley said. "Someone coming up the stairs!"

The coyote heard it, too. It broke eye-contact with Marinville and turned around, growling. The footfalls neared, reached the landing, stopped. Mary snatched a glance at Ralph Carver, but couldn't look for long; the combination of hope and terror on his face was too awful. She had lost her husband, and that hurt worse than she had ever imagined anything could. What would it be like to see your whole family snatched away in the course of an afternoon?

The wind rose, howling along the eaves. The coyote looked nervously over its shoulder at the sound, then took three slow steps toward the door, ragged ears twitching.

"Son!" Ralph called desperately. "Son, if that's you, don't come in! That thing's standing right in front of the door!"

"How close?" It was him, the boy. It really was. Amazing. And the self-possession in his voice was even more amazing. Mary thought that perhaps she should re-evaluate the power of prayer.

Ralph looked bewildered, as if he didn't understand the question. The writer did, though. "Probably five feet, and looking right at it. Be careful."

"I've got a gun," the boy said. "I think you better all get under your bunks. Mary, get as far over to my dad's side as you can. Are you sure he's right in front of the door, Mr. Marinville?"

"Yes. Big as life and twice as ugly is my friend Bosco. Have you ever fired a gun before, David?"

"No."

"Oh, Moses." Marinville rolled his eyes.

"David, no!" Ralph called. Belated alarm was filling his face; he seemed to be just realizing what was happening here. "Run and get help! Open the door and that r bastard'll be on you in two jumps!"

"No," the kid said. "I thought about it, Dad, and I'd rather chance the coyote than the cop. Plus I have a key. 1 21 think it'll work. It looks just the same as the one the cop used."

"I'm convinced," Marinville said, as if that settled it. "Everybody get down. Count to five, David, then do it."

"You'll get him killed!" Ralph yelled furiously at Marinville. "You'll get my boy killed just to save your own ass!"

Mary said, "I understand your concern, Mr. Carver, but I think if we don't get out of here, we're all dead."

"Count to five, David!" Marinville repeated. He got down on his knees, then slid under his bunk.

Mary looked across at the door, realized that her cell would be directly in the kid's line of fire, and understood why David had told her to get way over to his father's side. He might only be eleven, but he was thinking better than she was.

"One," the boy on the other side of the door said. She could hear how scared he was, and she didn't blame him. Not a bit. "Two."

"Son!" Billingsley called. "Listen to me, son! Get on your knees! Hold the gun in both hands and be ready to shoot up-up, son! It won't come on the floor, it'll jump for you! Do you understand?"

"Yeah," the kid said. "Yeah, okay. You under your bunk, Dad?"

Ralph wasn't. He was still standing at the bars of his cell. There was a scared, set look on the swollen face hovering between the white-painted bars. "Don't do it, David! I forbid you to do it!"

"Get down, you asshole," Marinville said. He was staring out from under his bunk at David's father with furious eyes.

Mary approved of the sentiment but thought that Marinville's technique sucked - she would have expected better from a writer. Some other writer, anyway; she had this one placed. The guy who'd written Delight, perhaps the century's dirtiest book, was cooling his heels in the cell next to hers, surreal but true, and although his nose looked as if it might never recover from what the cop had done to it, Marinville still had the attitude of a guy who expects to get whatever he wants. Probably on a silver tray.

"Is my dad out of the way?" The kid sounded unsure as well as scared now, and Mary hated his father for what he was doing-plucking the boy's already overstrained nerves as if they were guitar strings.

"No!" Ralph bawled. "And I'm not going to get out of the way! Get out of here! Find a phone! Call the State Cops!"

'1 tried the one on Mr. Reed's desk," David called back. "It's dead."

"Then try another one! Goddammit, keep trying until you find one that-"

"Quit being dumb and get under your bunk," Mary said to him in a low voice. "What do you want him to remember about today? That he saw his sister killed and shot his father by mistake, all before suppertime? Help! Your son's trying; you try, too."

He looked at her, his cheeks shiny-pale, a vivid contrast to the blood clotted on the left side of his face. "He's all I got left," he said in a low voice. "Do you understand that?"

"Of course I do. Now get under your bunk, Mr. Carver."

Ralph stepped back from the bars of his cell, hesitated, then dropped to his knees and slid under his bunk.

Mary glanced over at the cell David had wriggled out of - God, that had taken guts - and saw that the old veterinarian was under his bunk. His eyes, the only young part of him, gleamed out of the shadows like luminous blue gems.

"David!" Marinville called. "We're clear!"

The voice that returned was tinged with doubt: "My dad, too?"

"I'm under the bunk," Ralph called. "Son, you be careful. If-" His voice trembled, then firmed. "If it gets on you, hold onto the gun and try to shoot up into its belly." He poked his head out from under the bunk, suddenly alarmed. "Is the gun even loaded? Are you sure?"

'Yeah, I'm sure." He paused. "Is it still in front of the door?"

"Yes!" Mary called.

The coyote had taken a step closer, in fact. Its head was down, its growl as steady as the idle of an outboard motor. Every time the boy spoke from his side of the door, its ears twitched attentively.

"Okay, I'm on my knees," the boy said. Mary could hear the nerves in his voice more clearly now. She had an idea he might be approaching the outer edges of his control. "I'm going to start counting again. Make sure you're as far back as you can be when I get to five. I . . . I don't want to hurt anyone by accident."

"Remember to shoot uphill," the vet said. "Not a lot, but a little. Okay?"

"Because it'll jump. Right. I'll remember. One. . . two. . ."

Outside, the wind dropped briefly. In the quiet, Mary could hear two things with great clarity: the rumbling growl of the coyote, and her own heartbeat in her ears.

Her life was in the hands of an eleven-year-old with a gun. If David shot and missed or froze up and didn't shoot at all, the coyote would likely kill him. And then, when the psycho cop came back, they would all die.

". . . three . . ." The quiver which had crept into the boy's voice made him sound eerily like his father.

. . . four . . . five."

The doorknob turned.

2

For Johnny Marinville it was like being tumbled back into Vietnam again, where mortal things happened at a zany speed that always surprised you. He hadn't held out much hope for the kid, thought he was apt to spray bullets wildly everywhere but into Bosco's hide, but the kid was all they had. Like Mary, he had decided that if they weren't out of here when the cop came back, they were through.

And the kid surprised him.

To begin with, he didn't throw the door open, so it would hit the wall and then bounce back, obscuring his line of fire; he seemed to toss it open. He was on his knees, and dressed again, but his cheeks were still green with Irish Spring soap and his eyes were very wide. The door was still swinging open when he clamped his right hand over his left on the butt of the gun, which looked to Johnny like a .45. A big gun for a kid. He held it at chest-level, the barrel tilted upward at a slight angle. His face was solemn, even studious.

The coyote, perhaps not expecting the door to open in spite of the voice which had been coming from behind it, took half a step backward, then tensed on its haunches and sprang at the boy with a snarl. It was, Johnny thought, the little backward flinch that sealed its doom; it gave the boy all the time he needed to settle himself. He fired g twice, allowing the gun to kick and then return to its original aiming point before pulling the trigger a second time. The reports were deafening in the enclosed space.

Then the coyote, which had gone airborne after the first shot and before the second, hit David and knocked him backward.

His father screamed and scrambled out from under his bunk. The kid appeared to be fighting with the animal on the landing beyond the doorway, but Johnny found it almost impossible to believe the coyote could have much fight left in it; he had heard the slugs go home, and both the hardwood floor and the desk were painted with the animal's blood.

"David! David! Shoot it in the guts!" his father screamed, dancing up and down in his anxiety.

Instead of shooting, the kid fought free of the coyote, as if it were a coat he had somehow gotten tangled in. He scooted away on his butt, looking bewildered. The front of his shirt was matted with blood and fur. He got the wall against his back and used it to posh his way onto his feet. He looked at the gun as he did it, seemingly amazed to see it was still there at the end of his arm.

"I'm okay, Dad, settle down. I got it, it never even nipped me." He ran his hand over his chest and then down the arm holding the gun, as if confirming this to himself, as well. Then he looked at the coyote. It was still alive, panting harshly and rapidly with its head hung over the first stair riser. Where its chest had been there was now a wide bloody dent.

David dropped to one knee beside it and put the barrel of the .45 against the dangling head. He then turned his own head away. Johnny saw the kid's eyes clenched shut, and his heart went out to the boy. He had never enjoyed his own kids much - they had a tiresome way of upsetting you for the first twenty years and trying to upstage you for the second twenty - but one like this wouldn't be so bad to have around, maybe. He had some game, as the basketball players said.

I'd even get down on my knees with him at bedtime, Johnny thought. Shit. anybody would. Look at the results.

Still wearing that stressful expression-the look of a child who knows he must eat his liver before he can go out and play-David pulled the trigger a third time. The report was just as loud but not quite as sharp, somehow. The coyote's body jumped. A fan of red droplets as fine as lace appeared below the stairwell's railing. That harsh panting sound quit. The kid opened his eyes and looked down at what he had done. "Thank you, God," he said in a small, dull voice. "It was awful, though. Really awful."

"You did a good job, boy," Billingsley said.

David got up and walked slowly into the holding area. He looked at his father. Ralph held his arms out. David went over to him, starting to cry again, and let his father hold him in a clumsy embrace that had bars running through the middle of it.

"I was afraid for you, guy," Ralph said. "That's why I told you to go away. You know that, don't you?"

"Yes, Daddy." David was crying harder now, and Johnny realized even before the kid went on that these tears weren't about the fleabag, no, not these~ "Pie was on a huh-huh-hook downstairs. Other people, t-t-too. I took her down. I couldn't take the other ones down, they were grub-grownups, but I took Pie down. I s-sang . . . sang to h-h-"

He tried to say more, but the words were swallowed in hysterical, exhausted sobs. He pressed his face between the bars while his father stroked his back and told him to hush, just hush, he was sure David had done everything for Kirsten that he could, that he had done fine.

Johnny let them have a full minute of this by his watch - the kid deserved that much just for opening the goddam door when he knew there was a wild dog on the other side waiting for him to do it - and then spoke the kid's name. David didn't look around, so he said it a second time, louder. The boy did look around then. His eyes were red-rimmed and streaming.

"Listen, kiddo, I know you've been through a lot," Johnny said, "and if we get out of this thing alive, I'll be the first one to write you a commendation for the Silver Star. But right now we have to get gone. Entragian could be on his way back. If he was close by, he probably heard the gunshots. If you've got a key, now's the time to try it out."

David pulled a thick ring of keys out of his pocket and found the one which looked like the one Entragian had used. He put it in the lock of his father's cell. Nothing happened. Mary cried out in frustration and slammed the heel of her hand against the bars of her own cell.

"Other way," Johnny said. "Turn it around."

David turned the key over and slid it into the lock-slot again. This time there was a loud click - almost a thud - and the cell door popped open.

"Yes!" Mary cried. "Oh, yes!"

Ralph stepped out and swept his son into his arms, this time with no bars between them. And when David kissed the puffy place on the left side of his father's face, Ralph Carver cried out in pain and laughed at the same time. Johnny thought it one of the most extraordinary sounds he had ever heard in his life, and one you could never convey in a book; the quality of it, like the expression on Ralph Carver's face as he looked into his son's face, would always be just out of reach.

3

Ralph took the mag-key from his son and used it to unlock the other cells. They stepped out and stood in a little cluster in front of the guard's desk - Mary from New York, Ralph and David from Ohio, Johnny from Con-necticut, old Tom Billingsley from Nevada. They looked at each other with the eyes of train-wreck survivors.

"Let's get out of here," Johnny said. The boy had given the gun to his father, he saw. "Can you shoot that, Mr. Carver? Can you see to shoot that?"

"Yes to both," Ralph said. "Come on.

He led them through the door, holding David's hand as he went. Mary walked behind them, then Billingsley. Johnny brought up the rear. As he stepped over the coyote, he saw that the final shot had pretty much pulverized the animal's head. He wondered if the kid's father could have done that. He wondered if he could have done it.

At the foot of the stairs, David told them to hold on. The glass doors were black now; night had come. The wind screamed beyond them like something that was lost and pissed off about it. "You won't want to believe this but it's true," the boy said, and then told them what he had seen on the other side of the street.

"Behold, the buzzard shall lie down with the coyote,' Johnny said, peering out through the glass. "That's in the Bible. Jamaicans, chapter three."

"I don't think that's funny," Ralph said.

"Actually, neither do I," Johnny said. "It's too much like something the cop would say."

He could see the shapes of the buildings over there, and the occasional tumbleweed bouncing past, hut that was all. And did it matter? Would it matter even if there were a pack of werewolves standing outside the local poolhall, smoking crack and watching for escapees? They couldn't stay here in any case. Entragian would be hack, guys like him always came back.

There are no guys like him, his mind whispered. There were never in the history of the world that guys like him, and you know it.

Well, maybe he did, but it didn't change the principle of the thing a hit. They had to get out.

"1 believe you," Mary told David. She looked at Johnny. "Come on. Let's go into the Police Chief's office, or whatever they call it here."

"For'?"

"Lights and guns. Do you want to come, Mr. Billingsley?"

Billingsley shook his head.

"David, may I have the keys'?"

David handed them to her. Mary slipped them into the pocket of her jeans. "Keep your eyes open." she said. David nodded. Mary reached out, took Johnny's hand - her fingers were cold as ice - and pulled him through the door which led into the clerks' area.

He saw what was spray-painted on the wall and pointed to it. " 'In these silences something may rise.' What do you suppose that means'?"

"Don't know, don't care. I just want to get to someplace where there are lights and people and phones and we can -

She was turning to the right as she spoke, her eyes touching on the fold of green di'ape below the tall windows with no particular interest (the shape beneath it was too slight for her to recognize). Then she saw the bodies hung on the wall. She gasped and doubled over, as if someone had struck her in the belly, then turned to flee.

Johnny caught her, but for a moment he was sure she wasp going to get away from him-there was a lot of strength hidden in that slim body.

"No!" he said, shaking her in what was partly exasperation. He was ashamed of that but couldn't entirely suppress it. "No, you have to help me! Just don't look at them!"

"But one of them's Peter!"

"And he's dead. I'm sorry but he is. We're not. Don't look at him. Come on."

He led her swiftly toward the door marked TOWN SAFETY OFFICER, trying to think how they should proceed. And here was another disgusting little facet of this experience: he was becoming aroused by Mary Jackson. She was quivering in the circle of his arm, he could feel the softness of her breast just above his hand, and he wanted her. Her husband was hung up like a fucking over-coat right behind them, hut he was still getting a fairly respectable stiffy, especially for a man with possible prostate woes. Terry was right all along, he thought. 1 am an asshole.

"Come on," he said, squeezing her in what he hoped was a brotherly way. "If that kid could do what he did, then you can hang in there. I know you can. Get it together, Mary."

She pulled in a deep breath. "I'm trying."

"Good g . . . oh shit. We've got another mess here. I'd tell you not to look, but 1 think we're a little beyond the niceties."

Mary looked at the sprawled body of the Town Safety Officer and made a thick noise in her throat. "The boy . . . David. . . Jesus Christ. . . how did he do it?"

"1 don't know." Johnny said. "He's some kid, all right. I think he must have knocked Sheriff Jim there out of his chair trying to get his keys. Can you go next door to the Fire Chief's office'? It'll be quicker if we toss both of em at once."

"Yes."

"Be prepared; if Fireman Bob was at home when Entragian went nuclear, he's probably just as dead as the rest of them."

"I'll be okay. Take these."

She handed him the keys, then went to the door marked

FIRE CHIEF. Johnny saw her start to glance toward her husband, then look away again. He nodded and tried to send her some mental encouragement-good girl, good idea. She turned the knob of the Fire Chiefs door, then pushed it open with tented fingers, as if it might be booby-trapped. She looked in, let out a breath, and gave Johnny a thumbs-up.

"Three things, Mary: lights, guns, any car-keys you spot. Okay?"

"Okay."

He went into the cop's office, running quickly through the keys on the ring David had gotten as he did. There was a set of GM car-keys which Johnny guessed probably belonged to the cruiser Entragian had brought him back in. If it was out there in the parking lot it would help them, but Johnny didn't think it was. He had heard an engine start up shortly after the madman had taken Carver's wife away.

The desk drawers were locked, but the right key in the lock of the wide drawer above the kneehole opened all of them. He found a flashlight in one and a locked box marked RUGER in another. He tried several different little keys on the box. None worked.

Take it anyway? Maybe. If neither of them found other guns somewhere else.

He crossed the room, pausing to look out a window. Flying dust was all he could see. Probably all there was to see. God, why hadn't he taken the interstate?

That struck him funny; he giggled under his breath as he looked at the closed door behind Reed's desk. Sound like a crazyman, he thought. Never mind Travels with Harley; if you get out of this alive, you should think about calling the book Travels with Loony.

That made him laugh even harder. He put one hand over his mouth to stifle it and opened the door. The laughter stopped in a hurry. Sitting amid the boots and shoes, partly obscured by hanging coats and spare uniforms, was a dead woman. She was propped against the closet's side wall and dressed in clothes Johnny thought of as Boot Scootin Secretarial-tapered slacks, not denim, and a silk shirt with entwined roses embroidered over the left breast. The woman appeared to be staring at him with round-eyed wonder, but that was only an illusion.

Because you expect to see eyes, he thought, and not just big red sockets where they used to be.

He restrained an urge to slam the closet shut and pushed the hanging garments to either side along the pole instead, so he could see the rear wall. A good idea. There was a gun-rack with half a dozen rifles and a shotgun in it back there. One of the grooves was empty, third from the right, and Johnny guessed that was where another shot-gun, the one Entragian had pointed at him, usually went.

"Hot damn, paydirt!" he exclaimed, and stepped into the closet. He planted one foot on either side of the sitting corpse's body, but that made him acutely uncomfortable; he had once gotten head from a woman who had been sitting against a bedroom wall in almost that exact same position. At a party in East Hampton, that had been. Spielberg had been there. Joyce Carol Oates, too.

He stepped back, put one foot on the corpse's shoulder, and pushed. The woman's body slid slowly and stiffly to the right. Her huge red eyesockets seemed to stare at him with an expression of surprise as she went, as if she were wondering how a cultured fellow such as himself, a National Book Award winner, for goodness' sake, could possibly stoop to pushing over a lady in a closet. Tendrils of her hair slid along the wall, trailing after her.

"Sony, ma'am," he said, "but it's better for both of us this way, believe me."

The guns were held in place by a length of cable threaded through the trigger-guards. The cable was pad-locked to an eyebolt on the side of the case. Johnny hoped he would have better luck finding the key to this lock than he'd have finding the one that opened the box with the Ruger in it.

The third key he tried popped the padlock. He stripped the cable back through the trigger-guards with a jerk so hard that one of them - a Remington .30-.06 - came tumbling out. He caught it, turned . . . and the woman, Mary, was standing right there. Johnny gave a strangled little whoop that probably would have been a scream if he hadn't been so scared. His heart stopped beating, and for one very long moment he was positive it wasn't going to restart; he'd be dead of fright even before he fell backward onto the corpse in the silk shirt. Then, thank God, it got going again. He slammed a fist into his chest just above the left nipple (an area which had once been hard and now wasn't very) just to show the pump underneath who was the boss.

"Don't ever do that," he told Mary, trying not to wheeze. "What's wrong with you?"

"I thought you heard me." She didn't look terribly sympathetic. There was a golfbag, of all things, slung over her shoulder. A tartan golfbag. She looked at the corpse in the closet. "There's a body in the Fire Chiefs closet, too. A man."

"What was his handicap, any idea?" His heart was still galloping, but maybe not so fast now.

"You never quit, do you?"

"Fuck you, Mary, I'm trying to kid myself out of dying, here. Every martini I ever drank just jumped on my heart. Christ, you scared me."

"I'm sorry, but we've got to hurry up. He could come back any time."

"A concept that never crossed my poor excuse for a mind. Here, take this. And be careful." He handed her the .30-.06, thinking of an old Tom Waits song. Black crow shells from a .30-. 06, Waits sang in his stripped and somehow ghoulish voice. Whittle you into kindlin.

"How careful? Is it loaded?"

"I don't even remember how to check. I did a tour of Vietnam, but as a journalist. That was a long time ago, in any case. The only guns I've seen fired since then have been on movie screens. We'll figure the guns out later, okay?"

She put it gingerly into the golfbag. "I found two flash-lights. They both work. One's a long-barrel job. Very bright."

"Good." He handed her the flashlight he had found.

"The bag was hung on the back of the door," Mary said, dropping the flashlight in. "The Fire Chief . . . if it was him. . . well, one of the clubs was stuck down through the top of his head. Way down. He was sort of. . . skewered on it."

Johnny took two more rifles and the shotgun from the rack and turned with them in his arms. If the walnut doodad on the floor below the rack contained ammo, as he assumed it did, all would be well; a rifle or shotgun for each of the grownups. The kid could have Sheriff Jim's .45 back. Shit, the kid could have any gun he wanted, as far as Johnny was concerned. So far, at least, David Carver was the only one of them who had demonstrated he could use one if he had to.

"I'm sorry you had to see that," he said, helping Mary ease the guns into the golfbag.

She shook her head impatiently, as if that wasn't the point. "How much strength would it take to do something like that? To push the handle of a golf-club down through a man's head and neck and right into his chest? To push it down until there was nothing but the head sticking up like a. . . a little hat, or something?"

"I don't know. A lot, I guess. But Entragian's a moose. A moose indeed, but now that she'd put it in this light, it did seem strange.

"It's the level of violence that scares me the most," she said. "The ferocity. That woman in the closet . ., her eyes are gone, aren't they?"

"Yes."

"The Carvers' little girl. . . what he did to Peter, shooting him point-blank in the stomach over and over the people out there hung up like deer in hunting season . . do you see what I mean?"

"Of course." And you're not even touching the rest of it,

Mary, he thought. He's not just a serial killer; he's the Brain Stoker version of Dr. Dolittle.

She looked around nervously as a particularly strong gust of wind hit the building. "It doesn't matter where we go next, as long as we're out of here. Come on. For God's sake!"

"Right, just thirty seconds, okay?"

He knelt by the woman's legs, smelling blood and perfume. He went through the keys again, and this time had almost reached the end of his choices before one popped the lock on what did indeed turn out to be a small but exceedingly well stocked ammo chest. He took eight or nine boxes of shells, ones he hoped would fit the weapons he had already taken, and dumped them into the golfbag.

"I'll never in this life be able to carry all that, Mary said.

"That's okay, I will."

Except he couldn't. He was ashamed to find he couldn't even get the golfbag off the floor, let alone sling it over his shoulder. If the bitch hadn't scared me so bad-he thought, and then had to laugh at himself. He really did.

"What are you grinning about?" she asked him sharply. "Nothing." He made the grin disappear. "Here, grab the strap. Help me pull it."

Together they dragged the bag across the floor, Mary keeping her head down and her eyes fixed firmly on the steel bouquet of protruding gunbarrels as they came around the counter and backed toward the door. Johnny took a single look up at the hanging corpses and thought:

The storm, the coyotes sitting along the road like an honor guard, the one in the holding area, the buzzards, the dead. How comforting it would be to believe this was all an adventure in dreamland. But it wasn't; he had only to sniff the sour aroma of his own sweat through the clogged and painful channels of his nose to be sure of that. Something beyond anything he had ever believed - anything he had ever considered believing - was happening here, and it wasn't a dream.

"That's it, don't look," he panted.

"I'm not, don't worry," she replied. Johnny was pleased to hear her panting a little, too.

Out in the hall, the wind was louder than ever. Ralph was standing at the doors with his arm curled around his son's shoulders, looking out. The old guy was behind them. They all turned to Johnny and Mary.

"We heard a motor," David said at once.

"We think we did," Ralph amended.

"Was it the cruiser?" Mary asked. She pulled one of the rifles out of the golfbag, and when the barrel drifted toward Billingsley, he pushed it away again with the flat of his hand, grimacing.

"I'm not even sure it was a motor," Ralph said. "The wind - "

"It wasn't the wind," David said.

"See any headlights?" Johnny asked.

David shook his head. "No, but the sand is flying so thick."

Johnny looked from the gun Mary was holding (the barrel was now pointed at the floor, which seemed like a step in the right direction) to the others protruding from the goltbag to Ralph. Ralph shrugged and looked at the old man.

Billingsley caught the look and sighed. "Go on, dump em out," he said. "Let's see what you got."

"Can't this wait?" Mary asked. "If that psycho comes back - "

"My boy says he saw more coyotes out there," Ralph Carver said. "We shouldn't take a chance on getting sayaged, ma'am."

"For the last time, it's Mary, not ma'am," she said crossly. "Okay, all right. But hurry!"

Johnny and Ralph held the golfbag while Billingsley pulled the rifles out and handed them to David. "Put em a-row," he said, and David did, lining them up neatly at the foot of the stairs, where the light from the clerks' area would fall on them.

Ralph picked the bag up and tipped it. Johnny and Mary caught the flashlights and shells as they slid Out. The old man handed the ammunition to David a box at a time, telling him which guns to put them by. They finished with three boxes stacked by the .30-.06 and none by the gun on the end. "You didn't get nothing that'll fit that Mossberg," he said. "It's a damned fine gun, but it's chambered for .22s. You want to go back n see if you can find some .22s?"

"No," Mary said immediately.

Johnny looked at her, irritated - he didn't like women answering questions that had been aimed at him - and then let it go. She was right. "There's no time," he told Billingsley. "We'll carry it anyway, though. Somebody in town'll have .22s. You take it, Mary."

"No thanks," she said coolly, and selected the shotgun, which the veterinarian had identified as a Rossi twelve-gauge. "If it's to be used as a club instead of a firearm, it ought to be a man who swings it. Don't you agree?"

Johnny realized he had been mousetrapped. Quite neatly, too. You bitch, he thought, and might have said it aloud, husband hung on a coathook or not, except that David Carver cried out "Truck!" at that moment, and tore open one of the municipal building's glass doors.

They had been hearing the wind for some time now, and had felt it shake the brick building they were in, but none of them was quite prepared for the ferocity of the gust that ripped the door out of David's hand and slammed it against the wall hard enough to crack the glass. The posters thumbtacked to the hallway bulletin board rattled. Some tore free and went swirling up the stairwell. Sand sheeted in, stinging Johnny's face. He put a hand up to shield his eyes and accidentally bumped his nose instead. He yelled with pain.

"David!" Ralph cried, and grabbed for his son's shirt. Too late. The boy darted out into the howling dark, unmindful of anything that might be waiting. And now Johnny understood what had galvanized David: head-lights. Turning headlights that swept across the street from right to left, as if mounted on a gimbal. Sand danced wildly in the moving beams.

"Hey!" David screamed waving his arms. "Hey, you! You in the truck!"

The headlights began to ebb. Johnny snatched up one of the flashlights from the floor and ran out after the Carvers. The wind assaulted him, making him stagger on his feet and grab at the doorjamb so he wouldn't go tumbling off the steps. David had run into the middle of the street, dropping one shoulder to dodge a dark, speeding object which Johnny at first thought was a buzzard. He clicked on the flashlight and saw a tumbleweed instead.

He turned the flashlight toward the departing taillights and swung it back and forth in an arc, slitting his eyes against the sand. The light appeared puny in the sand-thickened dark.

"HEY!" David screamed. His father was behind him, the revolver in his hand. He was trying to look in all direc-tions at once, like a presidential bodyguard who senses danger. "HEY, COME BACK!"

The taillights were receding, heading north along the road which led back to Highway 50. The blinker was dancing in the wind, and Johnny caught just a glimpse of the departing truck in its stuttery glow. A panel-job with something printed on the back. He couldn't read it - there was too much flying sand.

"Get back inside, you guys!" he shouted. "It's gone!"

The boy stood in the Street a moment longer, looking toward where the taillights had disappeared. His shoulders were slumped. His father touched one of his hands.

"Come on, David. We don't need that truck. We're in town. We'll just find someone who can help us, and..

He trailed off, looking around and seeing what Johnny had seen already. The town was dark. That might only mean that people were hunkered down, that they knew what had been happening and were hiding from the crazyman until the cavalry arrived. That made a certain degree of sense, but it wasn't how it felt to Johnny's heart.

To his heart, the town felt like a graveyard.

David and his father started back toward the steps, the boy head-down dejected, the man still looking everywhere for trouble. Mary stood in the doorway, watching them come, and Johnny thought she looked extraordi-narily beautiful, with her hair flying around her head.

The truck, Johnny. Was there something about the truck? There was, wasn't there? Terry's voice.

Howls rose in the windy dark. They sounded mocking, like laughter, and seemed to come from everywhere. Johnny hardly heard them. Yes, something about the truck. Definitely. About the size of it, and the lettering, and just the look of it, even in the dark and the blowing sand. Something -

"Oh, shit!" he cried, and clutched his chest again. Not at his heart, not this time, but for a pocket that was no longer there. In his mind's eye he saw the coyote shaking his expensive motorcycle jacket back and forth, ripping the lining, spilling shit to the four points of the compass. Including -

"What?" Mary asked, alarmed at the look on his face.

"What?"

"You-all better get back in here till these guns're loaded," Billingsley told them, "'less you want some varmint down on you."

Johnny barely heard that, either. The letters on the back of the truck receding into the windy dark could have spelled Ryder. It made sense, didn't it? Steve Ames was looking for him. He had poked his head into Desperation, seen nothing, and was now driving out of town again to look somewhere else.

Johnny leaped past the astonished Billingsley, down on one knee loading guns, and pelted upstairs toward the holding area, praying to David Carver's God that his cellular telephone was still intact.

4

If things are normal, feel normal, Steve Ames had said, we'll try reporting it there. But if we see anything that looks the slightest bit wrong, we head for Ely on the double.

And, as the Ryder truck sat idling beneath the dancing blinker-light which marked Desperation's only inter-section, Cynthia reached out and twitched Steve's shirt. "Time to head for Ely," she said, and pointed out her window, west along the cross-street. "Bikes in the street down there, see them? My old grammy used to say bikes in the street are one of those bigtime whammies, like breaking a mirror or leaving a hat on the bed. Time to boogie."

"Your grammy said that, huh?"

"Actually, I never had a grammy, not one that I knew, anyway, but get real - what are they doing there? Why hasn't anybody taken them out of the storm? Don't you see how wrong all this is?"

He looked at the bikes, which were lying on their sides as if they had fallen over in the wind, then farther down the east-west cross-street. "Yeah, but people're home. There are lights." He pointed.

Yes, she saw there were lights in some of the houses, but she thought the pattern they made looked random, somehow. And -

'There were lights on at that mining place, too," she said. "Besides, take a good look - most of the houses are dark. Now why is that, do you think?" She heard the little sarcastic edge rising in her voice, didn't like it, couldn't stop it. "Do you think maybe most of the local yokels chartered a bus to go watch the Desperation Dorks play a doubleheader with the Austin Assholes? Big desert rivalry? Something they look forward to all y . . . hey, what are you doing?"

Not that she needed to ask. He was turning west along the cross-street. A tumbleweed flew at the truck like something jumping out of the screen at you in a 3-D movie. Cynthia cried out and raised an arm over her face. The tumbleweed hit the windshield, bounced, scraped briefly on the roof of the cab, and was gone.

"This is stupid," she said. "And dangerous."

He glanced over at her briefly, smiled, and nodded. She should have been pissed at him, smiling at a time like this, but she wasn't. It was hard to be pissed at a man who could light up that way, and she knew that was half her damned problem. As Gert Kinshaw back at D & S had been fond of saying, those who do not learn from the past are condemned to get beat up by it. She didn't think Steve Ames was the sort of man who would use his fists on a woman, but that wasn't the only way that men hurt women. They also hurt them by smiling pretty, so pretty, and getting them to follow along into the lion's jaws. Usually with a covered-dish casserole in their hands.

"If you know it's dangerous, why're you doing it Lubbock?"

"Because we need to find a phone that works, and because I don't trust the way I feel. It's almost dark and I've got the worst case of the jimjams in history. I don't want to let them control me. Look, just let me check a couple of places. You can stay in the truck."

"The fuck I. . . hey, check it out. Over there." She pointed at a length of picket fence that had been knocked over and was lying on the lawn of a small frame house. In the glare of the headlights it was all but impossible to tell what color the house was, but she had no trouble seeing the tire-tracks printed on the length of downed fence; they were too clear to miss.

"A drunk driver could have done that," he said. "I saw two bars already, and I haven't even been looking." A stupid idea, in her opinion, but she was getting to like his Texas accent more and more. Another bad sign.

"Come on, Steve, get real." Coyote-howls rose in the night, counterpointing the wind. She slid next to him again. "Jesus, I hate that. What's with them?"

"I don't know."

He was creeping along at no more than ten miles an hour, wanting to be able to stop before he was on top of anything the headlights might reveal. Probably smart. What would have been even smarter, in her humble opinion, was a quick turnaround and an even quicker get-the-hell-out-of-Dodge.

"Steve, I can't wait to get somewhere with billboards and bank signs and sleazy used-car lots that stay open all night."

"I hear you," he said, and she thought: You don 't, though. When people say "I hear you," they almost never do.

"Just let me check here - this one house-and then this burg is history," he said, and turned into the driveway of a small ranch-style home on the left side of the street. They had come perhaps a quarter of a mile west from the intersection; Cynthia could still see the blinker through the flying sand.

There were lights on in the house Steve had picked, bright ones that fell through the sheers across the living-room window, dimmer, yellowy ones shining through the trio of oblongs set into the front door in a rising diagonal line.

He pulled his bandanna up over his mouth and nose and then opened the truck door, holding on as the wind tried to rip it out of his hand. "Stay here."

"Yeah, right, eat me." She opened her own door and the wind did pull it away from her. She slid out before he could say anything else.

A hot gust pushed her backward, making her stagger and grab the edge of the door for balance. The sand stung her lips and cheeks, making her wince as she pulled her own bandanna up. And the worst thing of all was that this storm might just be warming up.

She looked around for coyotes - they sounded close - and saw none. Yet, anyway. Steve was already climbing the steps to the porch, so much for the protective male. She went after him, wincing as another strong gust rocked her back on her heels.

We're behaving like characters in a cheap horror movie, she thought dismally, staying when we know we should go, poking where we have no business poking.

True enough, she supposed . . . except wasn't that what people did? Wasn't that why, when Richie Judkins had come home in a really badass ear ripping mood, Little

Miss Cynthia had still been there? Wasn't that what most of the bad stuff in the world was about, staying when you knew damned well you should go, pushing on when you knew you should cut and run? Wasn't that, in the last analysis, why so many people liked cheap horror movies? Because they recognized the scared kids who refused to leave the haunted house even after the murders started as themselves?

Steve was standing on the top step in the howling wind and dust, head hunched down, bandanna flapping. . . and ringing the doorbell. Actually ringing the bell, like he was going to ask the lady of the house if he could come in and explain the advantages of Sprint over AT&T. It was too much for Cynthia. She pushed rudely past, almost knocking him into the bushes beside the stoop, grabbed the doorknob, and turned it. The door opened. She couldn't see the bottom half of Steve's face because of the bandanna, but the look of amazement in his eyes as she followed the opening door into the house was very satisfactory.

"Hey!" she shouted. "Hey, anybody home? Fucking Avon calling, you guys!"

No answer-but there was a strange noise coming from an open doorway ahead to the right. A kind of hissing. She turned to Steve. "Nobody home, see? Now let's go."

Instead, he started up the hail toward the sound.

"No!" she whispered fiercely, and grabbed his arm. "No, en-oh, that spells no, enough is enough!"

He shook free without even looking at her - men, goddam men, such parfit knightly assholes they were - and went on up the hall. "Hello?" he asked as he went.

Just so that anyone intent on killing him would know exactly where to look. Cynthia had every intention of going back outside and getting into the truck. She would wait three minutes by her watch, and if he wasn't out by then she'd put the truck in gear and drive away, damned if she wouldn't.

Instead, she followed him up the hail.

"Hello?" He stopped just short of the open doorway - maybe he had some sense left, a little, anyway - and then cautiously poked one eye around the jamb.

"Hell - " He stopped. That funny hissing was louder than ever now, a shaky sort of sound, loose, almost like -

She looked over his shoulder, not wanting to but not able to help herself. Steven had gone white above his bandanna, and that wasn't a good sign.

No, not a hissing, not really. A rattling.

It was the dining room. The family had been about to eat what looked like the evening meal - although not this evening's meal, she saw that right away. There were flies buzzing over the pot roast, and some of the slices were already supporting colonies of maggots. The creamed corn had congealed in its bowl. The gravy was a greasy clot in its boat.

Three people were seated at the table: a woman, a man, and a baby in a high chair. The woman was still wearing the full-length apron in which she had cooked the meal. The baby wore a bib which read I'M A BIG Boy NOW. He was slumped sideways behind his tray, on which were several stiff-looking orange slices. He regarded Cynthia with a frozen grin. His face was purple. His eyes bulged from puffy sockets like glass marbles. His parents were equally puffed. She could see several pairs of holes on the man's face, small ones, almost hypodermic-sized, one set in the side of his nose.

Several large rattlesnakes were on the table, crawling restlessly among the dishes, shaking their tails. As she looked, the bodice of the woman's apron bulged. For one moment Cynthia thought the woman was still alive in spite of her purple face and glazed eyes, that she was breathing, and then a triangular snake's head pushed up through the ruffles, and tiny black buckshot eyes looked across at her.

The snake opened its mouth and hissed. Its tongue danced.

And more of them. Snakes on the floor under the table, crawling over the dead man's shoes. Snakes beyond them, in the kitchen - she could see a huge one, a diamond-back, slithering along the Formica counter beneath the microwave.

The ones on the floor were coming for them, and coming fast.

Run! she shrieked at herself, and found she couldn't move - it was as if her shoes had been glued to the floor. She hated snakes above all creatures; they revolted her in some fundamental sense far below her ability to articulate or understand. And this house was full of them, there could be more behind them, between them and the door. Steve grabbed her and yanked her backward. When he saw she was unable to run, he picked her up and ran with her in his arms, pelting down the hallway and out into the night, carrying her over the threshold and into the dark like a bridegroom in reverse.

5

"Steve, did you see - "

The door on her side of the truck was still open. He threw her inside, slammed her door, then ran around to his side and got in. He looked through the windshield at the rectangle of light falling through the open door of the ranch-house, then at her. His eyes were huge above the bandanna.

"Sure I saw," he said. "Every snake in the mother-fucking universe, and all of them coming at us."

"I couldn't run. . . snakes, they scare me so bad m sorry."

"My fault for getting us in there in the first place." He put the truck in reverse and backed jerkily out of the 21 driveway, swinging around so the truck's nose was pointed east, toward the fallen bikes, the flattened piece of fence, and the dancing blinker-light. "We're getting the fuck back to Highway 50 so fast it'll make your head spin." He stared at her with horrified perplexity. "They were there, weren't they? I mean, I didn't just hallucinate em - they were there."

"Yes. Now just go, Steve, drive."

He did, going faster now but still not fast enough to be dangerous. She admired his control, especially since he was so obviously rocked back on his heels. At the 21 blinker he turned left and headed north, back the way they had come.

"Try the radio," he said as the hideous little town at last began to fall behind them. "Find some tunes. Just no achy-breaky heart. I draw the line at that."

"Okay."

She bent forward toward the dash, glancing into the rearview mirror mounted outside her window as she did. For just a moment she thought she saw a wink of light back there, swinging in an arc. It could have been a flash-light, it could have been some peculiar reflection kicked across the glass by the dancing blinker, or it could have been just her imagination. She preferred to believe that last one. In any case it was gone now, smothered in flying dust. She thought briefly about mentioning it to Steve and decided not to. She didn't think he'd want to go back and investigate, she thought he was every bit as freaked out as she was at this point, but it was wise never to underestimate a man's capacity to play John Wayne.

But if there are people back there -

She gave her head a small, decisive shake. No. She wasn't falling for that. Maybe there were people alive back there, doctors and lawyers and Indian chiefs, but there was also something very bad back there. The best thing they could do for any survivors who might remain in Desperation was to get help.

Besides, I didn't really see anything. I'm almost sure I didn't.

She turned on the radio, got a barrage of static all the way across the dial when she pushed the SEEK button, turned it off again.

"Forget it, Steve. Even the local shitkicking station is - "

"What the fuck?" he asked in a high, screamy voice that was completely unlike his usual one. "What the blue fuck?"

"I don't see - " she began, and then she did. Something ahead of them, some huge shape looming in the flying dust. It had big yellow eyes. She put her hands to her mouth, but they weren't quite in time to catch her scream. Steve hit the brakes with both feet. Cynthia, who hadn't fastened her seatbelt, was thrown against the dashboard, just managing to get her forearms up in time to spare her head a bump.

"Christ almighty," Steve said. His voice sounded a little more normal. "How the hell did that get in the road?"

"What is it?" she asked, and knew even before the question was out of her mouth. No Jurassic Park monstrosity (her first thought, God help her), and no oversized piece of mining equipment. No big yellow eyes, either. What she'd mistaken for eyes had been the reflection of their own headlights in a sheet of window-glass. A picture-window, to be exact. It was a trailer. In the road. Blocking the road.

Cynthia looked to her left and saw that the stake fence between the road and the trailer park had been knocked over. Three of the trailers - the biggest ones - were gone; she could tell where they had been by the cement-block foundations upon which they had sat. Those trailers were now drawn across the road, the biggest in front, the others behind it like a secondary wall put up in case the main line of defense is breached. One of these latter two was the rusty Airstream on which the Rattlesnake Trailer Park's satellite dish had been mounted. The dish itself now lay upended at the edge of the park like a vast black hubcap. It had taken down some lady's clothesline when it fell. Pants and shirts flapped from it.

"Go around," she said.

"I can't on this side of the road - the dropoff's too steep. The trailer park side's pretty steep, too, but-"

"You can do it," she said, fighting back the quiver in her voice. "And you owe me. I went in that house with you-"

"Okay, okay." He reached for the transmission lever, probably meaning to drop it into the lowest gear, and then his hand froze in midair. He cocked his head. She heard it a second later and her first panicky thought was

(they 're here oh Jesus they got in the truck somehow)

of snakes. But this wasn't the same. This was a harsh whining sound, almost like a piece of paper caught in a fan, or - Something came falling out of the dancing air above them, something that looked like a big black stone. It hit the windshield hard enough to make a bullet-snarl of opacity at the point of impact and send long, silvery cracks shooting out in either direction. Blood - it looked black in this light - splatted across the glass like an inkblot. There was a nasty crack-crunch as the kamikaze accordioned in on itself, and for a moment she saw one of its merciless, dying eyes peering in at her. She screamed again, this time making no attempt to muffle it with her hands.

There was another hard thud, this one from over their heads. She looked up and saw the roof of the cab was dented down. "Steve, get us out of here!" she cried.

He turned on the wipers, and one of them pushed the squashed buzzard down onto the outside air vents. It lay there in a lump like some bizarre tumor with a beak. The other wiper smeared blood and feathers across the glass in a fan. Sand immediately started to stick in this mess. Steve goosed the washer-fluid switch. The windshield cleared a little near the top, but the bottom part was hopeless; the hulk of the dead bird made it impossible for the wiper-blades to do their job.

"Steve," she said. She heard his name coming out of her mouth but couldn't feel it; her lips were numb. And her midsection felt entirely gone. No liver, no lights, just an empty place filled with its own whistling windstorm. "Under the trailer. Coming out from under that trailer. See them?"

She pointed. He saw. The sand had drifted crosswise along the tar in east-west lines that looked like clutching fingers. Later, if the wind kept up at this pitch, those dunelets would fatten to arms, but now they were just fingers. Emerging from beneath the trailer, strutting like the vanguard of an advancing army, was a battalion of scorpions. She couldn't tell how many - how could she, when she was still finding it difficult to believe she was seeing them at all? Less than a hundred, probably, but still dozens of them. Dozens.

There were snakes crawling among and behind them, wriggling along in rapid s-shapes, sliding over the ridges of sand with the ease of water moccasins speeding across a pond.

They can't get in here, she told herself, take it easy, they can't get in!

No, and maybe they didn't want to. Maybe they weren't supposed to. Maybe they were supposed to -

Came another of those harsh whickering sounds, this time on her side of the truck, and she leaned toward Steve, cringed toward Steve with her right arm held up to protect the side of her face. The buzzard hit the passenger window of the truck like a bomb filled with blood instead of explosive. The glass turned milky and sagged in toward her, holding for the time being. One of the buzzard's wings flapped weakly at the windshield. The wiper on her side tore a chunk of it off.

"It's all right!" he cried, almost laughing and putting an arm around her as he echoed her thought. "It's okay, they can 't get in!"

"Yes, they can!" she shouted back. "The birds can, if we stay here! If we give them time! And the snakes the scorpions.

"What? What are you saying?"

"Could they make holes in the tires?" It was the RV she was seeing in her mind's eye, all its tires flat . . . the RV, and the purplefaced man back there in the ranch-house, his face tattooed with holes in pairs, holes so small they looked almost like flecks of red pepper. "They could, couldn't they? Enough of them, all stinging and biting at once, they could."

"No," he said, and gave a strange little yawp of laughter. "Little bitty desert scorpions, four inches long, stingers no bigger than thorns, are you kidding?" But then the wind dropped momentarily, and from beneath them - already from beneath them - they heard scurrying, jostling sounds, and she saw something she could have skipped: he didn't believe what he was saying. He wanted to, but he didn't.