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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Okay. But do it fast."

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

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

"Smokin."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So be quick. Right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Rats?" She. looked around, eyes darting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What's wrong?"

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

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

2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"How do you know?" Marinville asked.

David shrugged in the gloom. "Just do."

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

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

"Here we are."

He bent, and Mary saw him pick something up - a crate, it looked like. He put it on top of another one, then stepped up onto the makeshift platform with a wince. He was standing in front of a dirty frosted-glass window. He put his hands on this, the fingers spread like starfish, and pushed. The window slid up.

"It's the ladies'," he said. "Watch out. There's a little drop."

He turned around and slid through, looking like a large, wrinkled boy entering the Over-the-Hill Gang's club-house. David followed, then his father. Johnny Marinville went next, first almost falling off the crate platform as he turned around. He really was close to blind in the dark, she thought, and reminded herself never to ride in a car this man was driving. And a motorcycle? Had he really crossed the country on a motorcycle? If so, God must love him a lot more than she ever would.

She grabbed him by the back of the belt and steadied him. "Thanks," he said, and this time he did sound humble. Then he was wriggling through the window, puffing and grunting, his long hair hanging in his face.

Mary took one quick look around, and for a moment she heard ghost-voices in the wind.

Didn't you see it?

See what?

On that sign. That speed-limit sign.

What about it?

There was a dead cat on it.

Now, standing on the crate, she thought: The people who said those things really are ghosts, because they 're dead. Me as much as him - certainly the Mary Jackson who left on this trip is gone. The person back here behind this old movie house, she's someone new.

She passed her gun and flashlight through the window to the hands held up to take them, then turned around and slid easily over the sill and into the ladies'.

Ralph caught her around the hips and eased her down. David was shining his flashlight around, holding one hand over the top of the lens in a kind of hood. The place had a smell that made her wrinkle her nose - damp, mildew, booze. There was a carton filled with empty liquor bottles in one corner. In one of the toilet-stalls there were two large plastic bins filled with beer-cans. These had been placed over a hole where, once upon a time, she supposed, there had been an actual toilet. Around the time James Dean died, from the look of the place, she thought. She realized she could use a toilet herself, and that no matter how the place smelled, she was hungry, as well. Why not? She hadn't had anything to eat for almost eight hours. She felt guilty about being hungry when Peter would never eat again, but she supposed the feeling would pass. That was the hell of it, when you thought it over. That was the exact hell of it.

"Holy shit," Marinville said, pulling his own flashlight out of his shirt and shining it into the beer-can repository. "You and your friends must party hearty, Thomas."

"We clean the whole place out once a month," Billingsley said, sounding defensive. "Not like the kids that used to run wild upstairs until the old fire escape finally fell down last winter. We don't pee in the corners, and we don't use drugs, either."

Marinville considered the carton of liquor empties. "On top of all that J. W. Dant, a few drugs and you'd probably explode."

"Where do you pee, if you don't mind me asking?" Mary said. "Because I could use a little relief in that direction."

"There's a Port-A-Potty across the hail in the men's. The kind they have in sickrooms. We keep that clean, too." He gave Marinville a complex look, equal parts truculence and timidity. Mary supposed that Marinville was preparing to tee off on Billingsley. She had an idea Billingsley felt it coming, too. And why? Because guys like Marinville needed to establish a pecking order, and the veterinarian was clearly the most peckable person in attendance.

"Excuse me," she said. "Might I borrow your flashlight Johnny?"

She held out her hand. He looked at it dubiously, then handed it over. She thanked him and headed for the door

"Whoa-neat!" David said softly, and that stopped her The boy had focused his flashlight on one of the few sections of wall where the tiles were still mostly intact On it someone had drawn a gloriously rococo fish in various Magic Marker colors. It was the sort of flippy tailed, half-mythological beast that one sometimes found disporting atop the waviest of very old sea-maps. Yet there was nothing fearsome or sea-monsterish about the fellow swimming on the wall above the broken Towl Master dispenser; with its blue Betty Boop eyes and red gills and yellow dorsal fin, there was something sweet and exuberant about it - here in the fetid, booze-smelling dark, the fish was almost miraculous. Only one tile had fallen out of the drawing, eradicating the lower half of the tail.

"Mr. Billingsley. did you - "

"Yes, son, yes," he said, sounding both defiant and embarrassed. "I drew it." He looked at Marinville. "I was probably drunk at the time."

Mary paused in the doorway, bracing for Marinville's reply. He surprised her. "I've been known to draw a few drunkfish myself," he said. "With words rather than coloring pens, but I imagine the principle is the same. Not bad, Billingsley. But why here? Of all places, why here?

"Because I like this place," he said with considerable dignity. "Especially since the kids cleared out. Not that they ever bothered us much back here; they liked the balcony, mostly. I suppose that sounds crazy to you, but I don't much care. It's where I come to be with my friends since I retired and quit the Town Committee. I look forward to the nights I spend with them. It's just an old movie theater, there's rats and the seats are full of mildew, but so what? It's our business, ain't it? Our own business. Only now I suppose they're all dead. Dick Onslo, Tom Kincaid, Cash Lancaster. My old pals." He uttered a harsh, startling cry, like the caw of a raven. It made her jump.

"Mr. Billingsley?" It was David. The old man looked at him. "Do you think he killed everyone in town?"

"That's crazy!" Marinville said.

Ralph yanked his arm as if it were the stop-cord on a bus. "Quiet."

Billingsley was still looking at David and rubbing at the flesh beneath his eyes with his long, crooked fingers. "I think he may have," he said, and glanced at Marinville again for a moment. "I think he may have at least tried."

"How many people are we talking about?" Ralph asked. "In Desperation? Hundred and ninety, maybe two hundred. With the new mine people starting to trickle in, maybe fifty or sixty more. Although it's hard to tell how many of em would've been here and how many up to the pit."

"The pit?" Mary asked.

"China Pit. The one they're reopening. For the copper."

"Don't tell me one man, even a moose like that, went around town and killed two hundred people," Marinville said, "because, excuse me very much, I don't believe it. I mean, I believe in American enterprise as much as anyone, but that's just nuts."

"Well, he might have missed a few on the first pass," Mary said. "Didn't you say he ran over a guy when he was bringing you in? Ran him over and killed him?"

Marinville turned and favored her with a weighty frown. "I thought you had to take a leak."

"I've got good kidneys. He did, didn't he? He ran someone down in the st~'iet. You said so."

"All right, yeah. Rancourt, he called him. Billy Rancourt."

"Oh Jesus." Billingsley closed his eyes.

"You knew him?" Ralph asked.

"Mister, in a town the size of this one, everybody knows everybody. Billy worked at the feed store, cut some hair in his spare time."

"All right, yeah, Entragian ran this Rancourt down in the street-ran him down like a dog." Marinville sounded upset, querulous. "I'm willing to accept the idea that Entragian may have killed a lot of people. I know what he's capable of."

"Do you?" David asked softly, and they all looked at him. David looked away, at the colorful fish floating on the wall.

"For one guy to kill hundreds of people. . ." Marinville said, and then quit for a moment, as if he'd temporarily lost his train of thought. "Even if he did it at night . . . I mean, guys..

"Maybe it wasn't just him," Mary said. "Maybe the buzzards and the coyotes helped."

Marinville tried to push this away - even in the gloom she could see him trying - and then gave up. He sighed and rubbed at one temple, as if it hurt. "Okay, maybe they did. The ugliest bird in the universe tried to scalp me when he told it to, that I know happened. But still-"

"It's like the story of the Angel of Death in Exodus," David said. "The Israelites were supposed to put blood on their door-tops to show they were the good guys, you know? Only here, he's the Angel of Death. So why did he pass over us? He could have killed us all just as easy as he killed Pie, or your husband, Mary." He turned to the old man. "Why didn't he kill you, Mr. Billingsley? If he killed everyone else in town, why didn't he kill you?"

Billingsley shrugged. "Dunno. I was laying home drunk. He came in the new cruiser-same one I helped pick out, by God - and got me. Stuck me in the back and hauled me off to the calabozo. I asked him why, what I'd done, but he wouldn't tell me. I begged him. I cried. I didn't know he was crazy, not then, how could I? He was quiet, but he didn't give any signs that he was crazy. I started to get that idea later, but at first I was just convinced I'd done something bad in a blackout. That I'd been out driving, maybe, and hurt someone. I . . . I did something like that once before."

"When did he come for you?" Mary asked.

Billingsley had to think about it in order to be sure. "Day before yesterday. Just before sundown. I was in bed, my head hurting, thinking about getting something for my hangover. An aspirin, and a little hair of the dog that bit me. He came and got me right out of bed. I didn't have anything on but my underwear shorts. He let me dress. Helped me. But he wouldn't let me take a drink even though I was shaking all over, and he wouldn't tell me why he was taking me in." He paused, still rubbing the flesh beneath his eyes. Mary wished he would stop doing that, it was making her nervous. "Later on, after he had me in a cell, he brought me a hot dinner. He sat at the desk for a little while and said some stuff. That's when I started to think he must be crazy, because none of it made sense."

"'I see holes like eyes,' "Mary said.

Billingsley nodded. "Yeah, like that. 'My head is full of blackbirds,' that's another one I remember. And a lot more I don't. They were like Thoughts for the Day out of a book written by a crazy person."

"Except for being in town to start with, you're just like us," David said. "And you don't know why he let you live any more than we do."

"I guess that's right."

"What happened to you, Mr. Marinville?"

Marinville told them about how the cop had pulled up behind his bike while he had been whizzing and contemplating the scenery north of the road, and how he had seemed nice at first. "We talked about my books," he said. "I thought he was a fan. I was going to give him a fuckin autograph. Pardon my French, David."

"Sure. Did cars go by while you were talking? I bet they did."

"A few, I guess, and a couple of semis. I didn't really notice."

"But he didn't bother any of them."

"Just you."

Marinville looked at the boy thoughtfully.

"He picked you out," David persisted.

"Well . . . maybe. I can't say for sure. Everything seemed jake until he found the dope."

Mary held her hands up. "Whoa, whoa, time out."

Marinville looked at her.

"This dope you had-"

"It wasn't mine, don't go getting that idea. You think I'd try driving cross-country on a Harley with half a pound of grass in my saddlebag? My brains may be fried, but not that fried."

Mary began to giggle. It made her need to pee worse, but she couldn't help it. It was all just too perfect, too wonderfully round. "Did it have a smile-sticker on it?" she asked, giggling harder than ever. She didn't really need an answer to this question, but she wanted it, just the same. "Mr. Smiley-Smile?"

"How did you know that?" Marinville looked as-tounded. He also looked remarkably like Arlo Guthrie, at least in the glow of the flashlights, and Mary's giggles became little screams of laughter. She realized that if she didn't get to the bathroom soon, she was going to wet her pants.

"B-Because it came from our t-t-trunk," she said, holding her stomach. "It b-belonged to my sih-sih-sister-in-law. She's a total ding dong. Entragian may be c-c- crazy, but at least he r-r-recycles. . . excuse me, I'm about to h-have an accident."

She hurried across the hail. What she saw when she opened the men's-room door made her laugh even harder. Set up like some comic-opera throne in the center of the floor was a portable toilet with a canvas bag suspended below the seat in a steel frame. On the wall across from it was another Magic Marker drawing, obviously from the same hand which had created the fish. This one was a horse at full gallop. There was orange smoke jetting from its nostrils and a baleful rose-madder glint in its eyes. It appeared to be headed out into an expanse of prairie somewhere east of the sun and west of the washbasins. None of the tiles had fallen out of this wall, but most had buckled, giving the stallion a warped and dreamish look.

Outside, the wind howled. As Mary unsnapped her pants and sat down on the cold toilet seat, she suddenly thought of how Peter sometimes put his hand up to his mouth when he laughed-his thumb touching one corner, his first finger touching the other, as if laughter somehow made him vulnerable - and all at once, with no break at all, at least none she could detect, she was crying. How stupid all this was, to be a widow at thirty-five, to be a fugitive in a town full of dead people, to be sitting in the men's room of an abandoned movie theater on a canvas Port-A-Potty, peeing and crying at the same time, pissing and moaning, you might say, and looking at a dim beast on a wall so warped that it seemed to be running underwater, how stupid to be so frightened, and to have grief all but stolen away by her mind's brute determination to survive at any cost . . . as if Peter had never meant anything anyway, as if he had just been a footnote.

How stupid to still feel so hungry. . . but she was.

"Why is this happening? Why does it have to be me?" she whispered, and put her face into her hands.

3

If either Steve or Cynthia had had a gun, they probably would have shot her.

They were passing Bud's Suds (the neon sign in the window read ENJOY OUR LOTSPITALITY) when the door of the next business up - the laundrymat - opened and a woman sprang out. Steve, seeing only a dark shape, drew back the tire iron to hit her.

"No!" Cynthia said, grabbing at his wrist and holding it. "Don't do that!"

The woman - she had a lot of dark hair and very white skin, but that was all Cynthia could tell at first - grabbed Steve by the shoulders and shoved her face up into his. Cynthia didn't think the laundrymat woman ever saw the upraised tire iron at all. She's gonna ask him if he's found Jeeeesus, Cynthia thought. It's never Jesus when they grab you like that, it's always Jeeeesus.

But of course that was not what she said.

"We have to get out." Her voice was low, hoarse. "Right now." She snatched a glance over her shoulder, flicked a look at Cynthia, then seemed to dismiss her entirely as she focused on Steve again. Cynthia had seen this before and wasn't offended by it. When it got to be crunch-time, a certain kind of woman could only see the guy. Sometimes it was the way they had been raised; more often it seemed actually hard-wired into their cunning little Barbie Doll circuits.

Cynthia was getting a better look at her now, in spite of the dark and the blowing dust. An older woman (thirty, at least), intelligent-looking, not unsexy. Long legs poking out of a short dress that looked somehow gawky, as if the chick inside it wasn't accustomed to wearing dresses Yet she was far from clumsy, judging from the way she moved with Steve when he moved, as if they were dancing. "Do you have a car?" she rapped.

"That's no good," Steve said. "The road out of town is blocked."

"Blocked? Blocked how?"

"A couple of house trailers," he said.

"Where?"

"Near the mining company," Cynthia said, "but that s not the only problem. There are a lot of dead people - "

"Tell me about it," she said, and laughed shrilly "Collie's gone nuts. I saw him kill half a dozen myself He drove after them in his cruiser and shot them down in the street. Like they were cattle and Main Street was the killing-floor." She was still holding onto Steve, shaking him as she spoke, as if scolding him, but her eyes were everywhere. "We have to get off the street. If he catches us . . . come in here. It's safe. I've been in here since yesterday forenoon. He came in once. I hid under the desk in the office. I thought he'd follow the smell of my per fume and find me . . . come around the desk and find me but he didn't. Maybe he had a stuffy nose!"

She began to laugh hysterically, then abruptly slapped her own face to make herself stop. It was funny, in a shocking way; the sort of thing the characters in old Warner Brothers cartoons sometimes did.

Cynthia shook her head. "Not the laundrymat. The movie theater. There are other people there."

"I saw his shadow," the woman said. She was still holding Steve by the shoulders and her face was still turned confidentially up to his, as if she thought he was Humphrey Bogart and she was Ingrid Bergman and there was a soft filter on the camera. "I saw his shadow, it fell across the desk and I was sure. . . but he didn't, and I think we'll be safe in the office while we think about what to do next - "

Cynthia reached out, took the woman's chin in her hand, and turned it toward her.

"What are you doing?" the dark-haired woman asked angrily. "Just what in the hell do you think you're doing?

"Getting your attention, I hope."

Cynthia let go of the woman's face, and be damned if she didn't immediately turn back to Steve, every bit as brainless as a flower turning on its stalk to follow the sun, and resume her speed-rap.

"I was under the desk. . . and . . . and . . . we have to listen, we have to . . ."

Cynthia reached out again, grasped the woman's lower face again, turned it back in her direction again.

"Hon, read my lips. The theater. There are other people there."

The woman looked at her, frowning as if she were trying to get the sense of this. Then she looked past Cynthia's shoulder at the chain-hung marquee of The American West.

"The old movieshow?"

"Yes."

"Are you sure? I tried the door last night, after it got dark. It's locked."

"We're supposed to go around to the back," Steve said. "I have a friend, that's where he told me to go."

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

"Cellular phone," Steve said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The woman's eyes widened. "Him," she whispered.

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

4

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

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

"Boss?"

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

"There are three of us."

"The more the merrier.

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

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

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

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

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

"What happened to your face?"

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

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

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

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

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

"Are you Steve?" the boy asked.

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

The boy smiled wanly at that.

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

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

"How do you know my last name?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5

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

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

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

They lined up, looking in through the dirty windshield. "Jews," the driver said, "must die. And Catholics. Mormons, too. Tak."

The door opened. One foot swung out, then another.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her former son, for instance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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