David said, "The man who showed me these things- the man who guided me-told me to tell you that none of this is destiny." His-arms were clasped around his knees and his head was bent; he seemed to be speaking to his sneakers. "In a way, that's the scariest part. Pie's dead, and Mr. Billingsley, and everyone else in Desperation, because one man hated the Mining Safety and Health Administration and another was too curious and hated being tied to his desk. That's all."

"And God told you all this?" Johnny asked.

The boy nodded, still without looking up.

"So we're really talking miniseries here," Johnny said. "Night One is the Lushan Brothers, Night Two is Josephson, the Footloose Receptionist. They'll love it at ABC."

"Why don't you shut up?" Cynthia said softly.

"Another county heard from!" Johnny exclaimed. "This young woman, this roadbabe with attitude, this flashing female flame of commitment, will now explain, complete with pictures and taped accompaniment by the noted rock ensemble Pearl Jam - "

"Just shut the fuck up," Steve said.

Johnny looked at him, shocked to silence.

Steve shrugged, embarrassed but not backing down. "The time for whistling past the graveyard's over. You need to cut the crap." He looked back at David.

"I know more about this part," David said. "More than I want to, actually. I got inside this one. I got inside his head." Hepaused. "Ripton. That was his name. He was the first."

And still looking down between his cocked knees at his sneakers, David began to talk.

2

The man who hates MSHA is Cary Ripton, pit-foreman of the new Rattlesnake operation. He is forty-eight, balding, sunken-eyed, cynical, in pain more often than not these days, a man who desperately wanted to be a mining engineer but wasn't up to the math and wound up here instead, running an open-pit. Stuffing blast-holes full of ANFO and trying not to choke the prancing little faggot from MSHA when he comes out on Tuesday afternoons.

When Kirk Turner runs into the field office this afternoon, face blazing with excitement, to tell him that the last blast-pattern has uncovered an old drift-mine and that there are bones inside, they can see them, Ripton's first impulse is to tell him to organize a party of volunteers, they're going in. All sorts of possibilities dance in his head. He is too old a hand for childish fantasies about lost goldmines and troves of Indian artifacts, much too old, but as he and Turner rush out, part of him is thinking about those things just the same, oh yes.

The cluster of men standing at the foot of the newly turned blast-field, eyeing the hole their latest explosions have uncovered, is a small one: seven guys in all, counting Turner, the crew boss. There are right now fewer than ninety men working for the Desperation Mining Corporation. Next year, if they're lucky - if the copper-yield and the prices both stay up - there may be four times that number.

Ripton and Turner walk up to the edge of the hole. There is a dank, strange smell coming out of it, one Cary Ripton associates with coalgas in the mines of Kentucky and West Virginia. And yes, there are bones. He can see them scattering back into the canted, downsloping darkness of an old-fashioned square-drift mine, and while it's impossible to tell for sure about all of them, he sees a ribcage which is almost certainly human. Farther back, tantalizingly close but still just a little too far for even a powerful flashlight to show clearly, is something that could be a skull.

"What is this?" Turner asks him. "Any idea?"

Of course he does; it's Rattlesnake Number One, the old China Shaft. He opens his mouth to say so, then closes it again. This is not a matter for a blast-monkey like Kirk Turner, and is certainly not one for his crew, nitro-boys who spend their weekends in Ely gambling, whoring, drinking . . . and talking, of course. Talking about any thing and everything. Nor can he take them inside. He thinks they would go, that their curiosity would drive them in spite of the obvious risks involved (a drift-mine this old, running through earth this uneasy, shit, a loud yell might be enough to bring the roof down), but the talk would get back to the prancing little MSHA faggot in no time flat, and when it did, losing his job would be the least of Ripton 's worries. The MSHA fag (all hat and no cattle is how Frank Geller, the chief mining engineer, sums him up) likes Ripton no more than Ripton likes him, and the foreman who leads an expedition into the long-buried China Shaft today might find himself in federal court facing a fifty-thousand-dollar fine and a possible five years in jail, the week after next. There are at least nine red-letter regulations expressly forbidding entry into "unsafe and unimproved structures." Which this of course is.

Yet those bones and old dreams call to him like troubled voices from his childhood, like the ghost of every unfulfilled ambition he has ever held, and he knows even z then that he isn't going to turn the China Shaft meekly over to the company and the federal pricks without at least one look inside for himself

He instructs Turner, who is bitterly disappointed but not really argumentative (he understands about MSHA as well as Ripton. . . maybe, as a blast-monkey, even better), to have yellow RESTRICTED AREA tapes placed across the opening. He then turns to the rest of the crew and reminds them that the newly uncovered drift, which might turn out to be a historical and archaeological treasure trove, is on DMC property. "I don't expect you to keep this quiet forever," he tells them, "but as a favor to me I'd like you to keep your mouths shut for the next Jew days. Even with your wives. Let me notify the brass. That part should be easy, at least - Symes, the comptroller, is coming in from Phoenix next week. Will you do that for me?"

They say they will. Not all will be able to keep their promise even for twenty-four hours, of course - some men are just no good at keeping secrets - but he thinks he commands enough respect among them to buy twelve hours and four would probably be enough. Four hours after quitting time. Four hours in there by himself with a flash-light, a camera, and an electric follow-me for any souvenirs he may decide to collect. Four hours with all those childhood fantasies he is too old a hand to think about. And if the roof should pick that moment, after almost a hundred and forty years and untold blasts shaking the ground all around it, to let go? Let it. He's a man with no wife, no kids, no parents, and two brothers who have forgotten he's alive. He has a sneaking suspicion that he wouldn't be losing that many years, in any case. He's been feeling punk for almost six months now, and just lately he had taken to pissing blood. Not a lot, but even a little seems like a lot when it's yours you see in the toilet bowl.

If I get out of this, maybe I'll go to the doctor, he thinks. Take it as a sign and go to the damned doctor. How about that?

Turner wants to take some pictures of the exposed drift after he clocks out. Ripton lets him. It seems the quickest way to get rid of him.

"How far in do you think we punched it?" Turner asks, standing about two feet beyond the yellow tape and snapping pictures with his Nikon-pictures that, with no flash, will show nothing but a black hole and a few scattered bones that might belong to a deer.

"No way to tell," Ripton says. In his mind he's inventorying the equipment he'll take in with him.

"You ain't gonna do nothin dumb after I'm gone, are you?" Turner asks.

"Nope," Ripton says. "I have too much damned respect for Mining Safety to even think of such a thing."

"Yeah, right," Turner says, laughing, and early the next morning, around two o'clock, a much larger version of Gary Ripton will enter the bedroom Turner shares with his wife and shoot the man as he sleeps. His wife, too. Tak!

It's a busy night for Gary Ripton. A night of killing (not one of Turner's blast-crew lives to see the morning sun) and a night of placing can tahs; he has taken a gunnysack filled with them when he leaves the pit, over a hundred in all. Some have broken into pieces, but he knows even the fragments retain some of their queer, unpredictable power. He spends most of the night placing these relics, leaving them in odd corners, mailboxes, glove compartments. Even in pants pockets! Yes! Hardly anyone locks their houses out here, hardly anyone stays up late out here, and the homes belonging to Turner's blast-crew are not the only ones Gary Ripton visits.

He returns to the pit, feeling as trashed-out as Santa Claus returning to the North Pole after the big night. . . only Santa's work ends once the presents have been distributed. Ripton's is only beginning. it's quarter to five; he has over two hours before the first members of Pascal Martinez's small Saturday day-crew show up. It should be enough, but there is certainly no time to waste. Gary Ripton's body is bleeding so badly he's had to stuff his underwear full of toilet paper to absorb it, and twice on his way out to the mine he has had to stop and yark a gutful of blood out the window of Gary's pickup truck, it's splashed all down the side. in the first tentative and somehow sinister light of the coming day, the drying blood looks like tobacco-juice.

In spite of his need to hurry, he's stopped dead for a moment by what the headlights show when he arrives at the bottom of the pit. He sits behind the wheel of the old truck with his eyes wide.

There are enough desert animals on the north slope of the China Pit to fill an ark: wolves, coyotes, hopping baldheaded buzzards, flapping owls with eyes like great gold wedding-rings; cougars and wildcats and even a few scruffy barncats. There are wild dogs with their ribs arcing against their scant hides in cruel detail - many are escapees from the raggedy-ass commune in the hills, he knows - and running around their feet unmolested are hordes of spiders and platoons of rats with black eyes.

Each of the animals coming out of the China Shaft carries a can tah in its mouth. They lope, flap, and scurry iq the pit-road like a flood of weird refugees escaping some underground world. Below them, sitting patiently like customers in a Green Stamp redemption center two days before Christmas - take a number and wait - are more animals. What they're waiting for is their turn to go into the dark.

Tak begins to laugh with Gary Ripton's vocal cords. "What a hoot!" he exclaims.

Then he drives on to the field office, unlocks the door with Ripton's key, and kills Joe Prudum, the night watchman. Old Joe isn't much of a night watchman; comes on at dark, doesn't have the slightest idea anything's going on in the pit, and doesn't think there's anything strange about Gary Ripton showing up first thing in the morning. He's using the washer in the corner to do some laundry, he's sitting down to have his topsy-turvy version of dinner, and everything's cozy right up to the moment when Ripton puts a bullet in his throat.

That done, Ripton calls the Owl's Club in town. The Owl's is open twenty-four hours a day (although, like a vampire, it's never really alive), it's where Brad Josephson, he of the gorgeous chocolate skin and long, sloping gut, eats breakfast six days a week. . . and always at this brutally early hour. That will come in handy now. Ripton wants Brad on hand, and quickly, before the black man can be polluted by the can tahs. The can tahs are useful in many ways, but they spoil a man or woman for Tak's greater work. Ripton knows he can take someone from Martinez's crew if he needs to, perhaps even Pascal himself, but he wants (well, Tak wants, actually) Brad. Brad will be useful in other ways.

How long do the bodies last if they're healthy? he asks himself as he approaches the phone. How long if the one you push into overdrive hasn't been incubating a juicy case of cancer to start with?

He doesn't know, but thinks he will probably soon have a chance to find out.

"Owl's," says a woman's voice in his ear - the sun's not even up and she sounds tired already.

"Howdy, Denise," he says. "How they hangin?"

"Who 's this?" Deeply suspicious.

"Cary Ripton, hon. You don't recognize my voice?"

"You must have a bad case of morning mouth, darlin. Or are you coming down with a cold?"

"Gold, I guess," he says, grinning and wiping blood off his lower lip. It is oozing out from between his teeth. Down below it feels like all of his innards have come loose and are floating in a sea of blood. "Listen, hon. is Brad in?"

"Right over in the corner where he always is, livin large and eatin nasty-four eggs, home fries, 'bout half a pound of limpfried bacon. I hope when he finally vapor-locks, he does it somewhere else. What you want Brad for at this hour of a Sat'd'y mornin?"

"Company business."

"Well shut my mouth n go to heaven," she says. "You want to take care of that cold, Rip - you sound really congested."

"Just with love for you," he tells her.

"Huh," she says, and the phone goes down with a clunk. "Brad!" he hears her yell. "Phone! For you! Mr. Wonderful!" A pause while Brad is probably asking her what she's talking about. "Find out for yourself" she says, and a moment later Brad Josephson is on the line. He says hello like a man who knows perfectly well that Publishers Clearinghouse doesn't call at five in the morning to tell you won the big one.

"Brad, it's Gary Ripton," he says. He knows just how to get Brad out here; he got the idea from the late great Kirk Turner. "Have you got your camera gear in your car?" Of course he does. Brad is, among other things, an ardent birdwatcher. Fancies himself an amateur ornithologist, in fact. But Gary Ripton can do better than birds this morning. A lot better.

"Yes, sure, what's the deal?"

Ripton leans back against the poster taped up in the corner, the one showing a dirty miner pointing like Uncle Sam and saying GO AHEAD, BAN MINING, LET THE BASTARDS FREEZE IN THE DARK! "If you hop in your car and drive out here right now, I'll show you," Ripton says. "And if you get here before Pascal Martinez and his boys, I'll give you a chance at the most amazing pictures you'll ever take in your life."

"What are you talking about?" Josephson sounds excited now.

"The bones of forty or fifty dead Chinese, to start with, how's that sound?"

"What - "

"We punched into the old China Shaft yesterday afternoon. Less than twenty feet in you'll get the most amazing - "

"I'm on my way. Don't you move. Don't you goddam move.

The phone clicks in his ear and Ripton grins with red lips. "I won't," he says. "Don't worry about that. Can de lach! Ah ten! Tak!"

Ten minutes later, Ripton - now bleeding from the navel as well as the rectum and penis - walks across the crumbled bottom of the pit to the China Slope. Here he spreads his arms like an evangelist and speaks to the ani-mals in the language of the unformed. All of them either fly away or withdraw into the mine. It will not do for Brad Josephson to see them. No, that would not do at all.

Five minutes after that Josephson comes down the steep grade of the pit-road, sitting bolt-upright behind the wheel of an old Buick. The sticker on the front reads MINERS GO DEEPER AND STAY LONGER. Ripton watches him from the door of the field office. It wouldn't do for Brad to get a good look at him, either, not until he gets a little closer.

No problem there. Brad parks with a scrunch of tires, gets out, grabs three different cameras, and trots toward the field office, pausing only to gape at the open hole twenty feet or so up the slope.

"Holy shit, it's the China, all right," he says. "Got to be. Come on, Gary! For Christ's sake, Martinez will be here any time!"

"Nah, they start a little later on Saturday," he says, grinning. "Cool your jets."

"Yeah, but what about old Joe? He could be a prob - "

"Cool your jets, i said! Joe's in Reno. Granddaughter popped a kid."

"Good! Great! Have a cigar, huh?" Brad laughs a little wildly.

"Come in here," Ripton says. "Got something to show you.

"Something you brought out?"

"That's right," Ripton says, and in a way it's true, in a way he does want to show Brad something he brought out. Josephson is still frowning down at his swinging cameras, trying to sort out the straps, when Ripton grabs him and throws him to the back of the room. Josephson squawks indignantly. Later he will be scared, and still later he'll be terrified, but right now he hasn't noticed Joe Prudum 's body and is only indignant.

"For the last time, cool your jets!" Ripton says as he steps outside and locks the door. "Gosh! Relax!"

Laughing, he goes to the truck and gets in. Like many Westerners, Gary Ripton believes passionately in the right of Americans to bear arms; there's a shotgun in the rack behind the seat and a nasty little hideout gun - a Ruger Speed-Six - in the glovebox. He loads the shotgun and lays it across his lap. The Ruger, which is already loaded, he simply puts on the seat beside him. His first impulse is to tuck it into his belt, but now he's all but swimming in blood down there (Ripton, you idiot, he thinks, don't you know men your age are supposed to get the old prostate tickled every year or so), and soaking Ripton 's pistol in it might not be a good idea.

When Josephson's ceaseless hammering at the field-office door begins to annoy him, he turns on the radio, juices the volume, and sings along with Johnny Paycheck, who is telling whoever wants to listen that he was the only hell his mama ever raised.

Pretty soon Pascal Martinez shows up for some of that good old Saturday-morning time and a half He's got Miguel Rivera, his amigo, with him. Ripton waves. Pascal waves back. He parks on the other side of the field office, and then he and Mig walk around to see what Ripton 's doing here on Saturday morning, and at this ungodly hour. Ripton sticks the shotgun out the window, still smiling, and shoots both of them. it's easy. Neither tries to run. They die with puzzled looks on their faces. Ripton looks at them, thinking of his granddaddy telling about the passenger pigeons, birds so dumb you could club them on the ground. The men out here all have guns but few of them think, way down deep, that they will ever have to use one. They are all show and no go. Or all hat and no cattle, if you like that better.

The rest of the crew arrives by ones and twos - no one worries much about the timeclock on Saturdays. Ripton shoots them as they come and drags their bodies around to the back of the field office, where, they soon begin to stack up beneath the clothes dryer's exhaust-pipe like cordwood. When he runs out of shotgun shells (there's plenty of ammo for the Ruger, but the pistol is useless as a primary weapon, not accurate at a distance greater than a dozen feet), he finds Martinez's keys, opens the back of his Cherokee, and discovers a beautiful (and completely illegal) Jver Johnson auto under a blanket. Next to it are two dozen thirty-round clips in a Nike shoebox. The arriving miners hear the shots as they ascend the north side of the pit, but they think it's target-shooting, which is how a good many Saturdays start in the China Pit. It's a beautiful thing.

By seven forty-five, Ripton has killed everyone on Pascal Martinez's A-crew. As a bonus, he gets the one- legged guy from Bud's Suds who has come out to service the coffee-machine. Twenty-five bodies behind the field office.

The animals start moving in and out of the China Shaft again, streaming toward town with can tahs in their mouths. Soon they will quit for the day, waiting for the cover of night to start again.

In the meantime, the pit is his. . . and it is time to make the jump. He wants out of this unpleasantly decaying body, and if he doesn't make the switch soon, he never will.

When he opens the door, Brad Josephson rushes him. He has heard the gunfire, he has heard the screams when Ripton 's first shot hasn't put his victim down cleanly, and he knows that rushing is the only option he has. He expects to be shot, but of course Gary can 't do that. Instead he grabs Josephson 's arms, calling on the last of this body's strength to do it, and shoves the black man against the wall so hard that the entire prefab building shakes. And it's not just Ripton now, of course; it's Tak's strength. As if to confirm this, Josephson asks how in God's name he got so tall.

"Wheaties!" it exclaims. "Talc!"

"What are you doing?" Josephson asks, trying to squirm away as Ripton 's face bears down on his and Ripton 's mouth comes open. "What are you d - "

"Kiss me, beautiful!" Ripton exclaims, and slams his mouth down on Josephson 's. He makes a blood-seal through which he exhales. Josephson goes rigid in Ripton 's arms and begins to tremble wildly. Ripton exhales and exhales, going out and out and out, feeling it happen, feeling the transfer. For one terrible moment the essence of Tak is naked, caught between Ripton, who is collapsing, and Josephson, who has begun to swell like a float on the morning of the Thanksgiving Day Parade. And then, instead of looking out of Ripton's eyes, it is looking out of Josephson's eyes.

It feels a wonderful, intoxicating sense of rebirth. It is filled not only with the strength and purpose of Tak, but with the greasefired energy of a man who eats four eggs and half a pound of limp bacon for breakfast. It feels. . . feels.

"I feel GRRRREA T!" Brad Josephson exclaims in a boisterous Tony the Tiger voice. It can hear a tenebrous creaking that is Brad's backbone growing, the taut silk- across-satin sound that is his muscles stretching, the thawing-ice sound of his skull expanding. He breaks wind repeatedly, the sound like the reports of a track-starter s gun.

It drops Ripton 's body-the body feels as light as a burst seedpod - and strides toward the door, listening to the seams of Josephson 's khaki shirt tear open as his shoulders widen and his arms lengthen. His feet don't grow as much, but enough to burst the laces of his tennis shoes.

Tak stands outside, grinning hugely. It has never felt better. Everything is in its eye. The world roars like a waterfall. A recordsetting erection, a pantsbuster if ever there was one, has turned the front of his jeans into a tent.

Tak is here, liberated from the well of the worlds. Tak is great, Tak will feed, and Tak will rule as it has always ruled, in the desert of wastes, where the plants are migrants and the ground is magnetic.

It gets into the Buick, splitting the seam running up the back of Brad Josephson 's pants all the way to the belt-loops. Then, grinning at the thought of the bumper-sticker on the front of the car - MINERS GO DEEPER AND STAY LONGER - it swings around the field office and heads back toward Desperation, stretching out a rooster-tail of dust behind the fastmoving car.

3

David stopped. He still sat with his back against the wall of the Ryder truck, looking down at his sneakers. His voice had grown husky with talking. The others stood around him in a semicircle, pretty much as Johnny supposed the wise old wallahs had once stood around the boy Jesus while he gave them the scoop, the lowdown, the latest buzz, the true gen. Johnny's clearest view was of the little punk-chick, Steve Ames's catch of the day, and she looked pretty much the way he himself felt: mesmerized, amazed, but not disbelieving. And that, of course, was the root of his disquiet. He was going to get out of this town, nothing was going to stop him from doing that, but it would be a lot easier on the old ego if he could simply believe the boy was deluded, rapping tall tales straight out of his own imagination. But he didn't think that was the case.

You know it's not, Terry said from her cozy little place in Der Bitchen Bunker.

Johnny squatted to get a fresh bottle of Jolt, not feeling his wallet (genuine crocodile, Barneys, three hundred and ninety-five dollars), which had worked most of the way out of his back pocket, slip all the way out and drop to the floor. He tapped David's hand with the neck of the bottle. The boy looked up, smiling, and Johnny was shocked at how tired he looked. He thought about David's explanation of Talc - trapped in the earth like an ogre in a fairy-tale, using human beings like paper cups because it wore their bodies out so rapidly - and wondered if David's God was much different.

"Anyway, that's how he does it," David said in his husky voice. "He goes across on their breath, like a seed on a gust of wind."

"The kiss of death instead of the kiss of life," Ralph said.

David nodded.

"But what kissed Ripton?" Cynthia asked. "When he went into the mine the night before, what kissed him?"

"I don't know," David said. "Either I wasn't shown or I don't understand. All I know is that it happened at the well I told you about. He went into the room . . . the chamber. . . the can tahs drew him, but he wasn't allowed to actually touch any of them."

"Because the can tahs spoil people as a vessel for Tak," Steve half-said, half-asked.

"Yes."

"But Talc has a physical body? I mean, he-it-we're not just talking about an idea, are we? Or a spirit?"

David was shaking his head. "No, Tak's real, it has a being. It had to get Ripton into the mine because it can't get through the mi - the well. It has a physical body, and the well is too small for it. All it can do is catch people, inhabit them, make them into can tak. And trade them in when they wear out."

"What happened to Josephson, David?" Ralph asked. He sounded quiet, almost drained. Johnny found it increasingly difficult to look at Carver looking at his son.

"He had a leaky heart valve," David said. "It wasn't a big deal. He could have gone on without any problem for years, maybe, but Talc got hold of him, and just ..

David shrugged. "Just wore him out. It took two and a half days. Then he switched to Entragian. Entragian was strong, he lasted most of a whole week . . . but he had very fair skin. People used to kid him about all the sun-bum creams he had."

"Your guide told you all this," Johnny said.

"Yes. I guess that's what he was."

"But you don't know who he was."

"I almost know. I feel like I should know."

"Are you sure he didn't come from this Talc? Because there's an old saying: 'The devil can wear a pleasing aspect.'

"He wasn't from Talc, Johnny."

"Let him talk," Steve said. "All right?"

Johnny shrugged and sat down. One of his hands almost touched his fallen wallet as he did so. Almost, but not quite.

"The back part of the hardware store here in town is a clothes store," David resumed. "Work clothes, mostly. Levi's, khakis, Red Wing boots, stuff like that. They order special for this one guy, Curt Yeoman, who works- worked - for the telephone company. Six-foot-seven, the tallest man in Desperation. That's why Entragian's clothes weren't ripped when he took us, Dad. Saturday night, Josephson broke into the True Value and grabbed a set of khakis in Curt Yeoman's size. Shoes, too. He took them to the Municipal Building and actually put them in Collie Entragian's locker. Even then he knew who he was going to use next, you see."

"Was that when he killed the Police Chief?" Ralph asked.

"Mr. Reed? No. Not then. He did that Sunday night. By then Mr. Reed didn't matter much, anyway. Ripton left him one of the can tahs, you see, and it messed Mr. Reed up. Bad. The can tahs do different things to different people. When Mr. Josephson killed him, Mr. Reed was sitting at his desk and - "

Looking away, clearly embarrassed, David made his right hand into a tube and moved it rapidly up and down in the air.

"Okay," Steve said. "We get the picture. What about Entragian? Where was he all weekend?"

"Out of town, like Audrey. The Desperation cops have-had-a law-enforcement contract with the county. It means a lot of travelling. Friday night, the night Ripton killed the blast-crew, Entragian was in Austin. Saturday night he slept at the Davis Ranch. Sunday night - the last night he was really Collie Entragian - he spent on Shoshone tribal land. He had a friend up there. A woman, I think."

Johnny walked toward the back of the Ryder truck, then wheeled around. "What did he do, David? What did it do? How did we get to where we are now? How did it happen without anyone finding out? How could it happen?" He paused. "And another question. What does Tak want? To get out of its hole in the ground and stretch its legs? Eat pork rinds? Snort cocaine and drink Tequila Sunrises? Sorew some NFL cheerleaders? Ask Bob Dylan what the lyrics to 'Gates of Eden' really mean? Rule the earth? What?"

"It doesn't matter," David said quietly.

"Huh?"

"All that matters is what God wants. And what he wants is for us to go up to the China Pit. All the rest is just . . . story-hour."

Johnny smiled. It felt tight and a little painful, too small for his mouth. "Tell you what, sport: what your God wants doesn't matter in the least to me." He turned back to the Ryder truck's rear door and ran it up. Outside, the air seemed almost breathlessly still and strangely warm in the wake of the storm. The blinker pulsed rhythmically at the intersection. Crossing the street at regular intervals were rippled sand dunes. Seen in the nebulous light of the westering moon and the yellow pulse of the blinker-light, Desperation looked like an outpost in a science fiction movie.

"I can't stop you if you mean to go," David said.

"Maybe Steve and my dad could, but it wouldn't do any r good. Because of the free-will covenant."

"That's right," Johnny said. "Good old free will." He jumped down from the back of the truck, wincing at another twinge of pain in his back. His nose was hurting again, too. Big time. He looked around, checking for coyotes or buzzards or snakes, and saw nothing. Not so much as a bug. "Frankly, David, I trust God about as far as I can sling a piano." He looked back in at the boy, smiling.

"You trust him all you want. I guess it's a luxury you can still afford. Your sister's dead and your mother's turned into Christ-knows-what, but there's still your father to get through before Talc goes to work on you personally."

David jerked. His mouth trembled. His face crumpled and he began to cry.

"You bitch!" Cynthia shouted at Johnny. "You cunt - "

She rushed to the back of the truck and kicked at him Johnny dodged back, the toe of her small foot missing his chin by only an inch or two. He felt the wind of it. Cynthia stood on the edge of the truck, waving her arms for balance. She probably would have fallen into the street if Steve hadn't caught her by the shoulders and steadied her.

"Lady, I never pretended to be a saint," Johnny said, and it came out the way he wanted - easy and ironic and amused - but inside he was horrified. The wince on the kid's face . . . as if he'd been slugged by someone he'd counted on as a friend. And he'd never been called a bitch in his life. A cunt, either, for that matter.

"Get out!" Cynthia screamed. Behind her, Ralph was down on one knee, clumsily holding his son and staring out at Johnny in a kind of stunned disbelief. "We don't need you, we'll do it without you!"

"Why do it at all?" Johnny asked, taking care to stay out of range of her foot. "That's my point. For God? What did he ever do for you, Cynthia. that you should spend your life waiting for him to buzz you on the old intercom or send you a fax? Did God protect you from the guy who jobbed your ear and broke your nose?"

"I'm here, ain't I?" she asked truculently.

"Sorry, that's not enough for me. I'm not going to be the punchline of a joke in God's little comedy club. Not if I can help it. I can't believe any of you are seriously contemplating going up there. The idea is insane."

"What about Mary?" Steve asked. "Do you want to leave her? Can you leave her?"

"Why not?" Johnny asked, and actually laughed. It was just a short bark of sound. . . but it was not without amusement, and he saw Steve shy away from it, disgusted. Johnny glanced around for animals, but the coast was still clear. So maybe the kid was right - Tak wanted them to go, had opened the door for them. "I don't know her any more than I know the sandhogs he - it, if you like that better - killed in this town. Most of whom were probably so brain-dead they didn't even know they were gone. I mean, don't you see how pointless all this is? If you should succeed, Steve, what's your reward going to be? A lifetime membership at the Owl's Club?"

"What happened to you?" Steve asked. "You walked up to that cougar big as life and blew her head off. You were like the fucking Wolverine. So I know you've got guts. Had em, anyway. Who stole em?"

"You don't understand. That was hot blood. You know what my trouble is? If you give me a chance to think, I'll take it." He took another step backward. No God stopped him. "Good luck, you guys. David, for whatever it's worth, you're an extraordinary young man."

"If you go, it's over," David said. His face was still against his father's chest. His words were muffled but audible. "The chain breaks. Tak wins."

"Yeah, but when playoff-time comes, he's ours," Johnny said, and laughed again. The sound reminded him of cocktail parties where you laughed that same meaningless laugh at meaningless witticisms while, in the background, a meaningless little jazz combo played meaningless renditions of meaningless old standards like "Do You Know the Way to San Jose" and "Papa Loves Mambo." It was the way he had been laughing when he climbed out of the pool at the Bel-Air, still holding his beer in one hand. But so what. He could laugh any fucking way he wanted to. He bad once won the National Book Award, after all.

"I'm going to take a car from the mining-office lot. I'm going to drive like hell until I get to Austin, and then I'm going to make an anonymous call to the State Police, tell them some bad shit's happened in Desperation. Then I'll take some rooms in the local Best Western and hope you guys show up to use them. If you do, drinks are on me. One way or another, I'm stepping off the wagon tonight. I think Desperation's cured me of sobriety for ever." He smiled at Steve and Cynthia, standing side by side in the back of the truck with their arms around each other. "You two are crazy not to come with me now, you know. Somewhere else you could be good together. I can see that. All you can do here is be can tahs for David s cannibal God."

He turned and began to walk away, head down, heart pounding. He expected to be followed by anger, invective, maybe pleas. He was ready for any of them, and perhaps the only thing that could have stopped him was the thing Steve Ames did say, in the low, almost toneless voice of a man who is only conveying a fact.

"I don't respect you for this."

Johnny turned around, more hurt by this simple declaration than he would have believed possible. "Dear me, be said. "I've lost the respect of a man once in charge of throwing out Steven Tyler's barf-bags. Ratfuck."

"I never read any of your books, but I read that story you gave me, and I read the book about you," Steve said "The one by the professor in Oklahoma. I guess you were a hellraiser, and a shit to your women, but you went to Vietnam without a rifle, for God's sake . . . and tonight the cougar. ., what happened to all that?"

"Ran out like piss down a drunk's leg," Johnny said. "I suppose you don't think that happens, but it does. The last of mine ran out in a swimming pool. How's that for absurd?"

David joined Steve and Cynthia at the back of the truck.

He still looked pale and worn, but he was calm. "Its mark is on you," he said. "It will let you go, but you'll wish you stayed when you start smelling Tak on your skin."

Johnny looked at the boy for a long time, fighting an urge to walk back to the truck-fighting it with all the considerable force of will at his disposal. "So I'll wear lots of aftershave," he said. "Bye, boys and girls. Live right."

He walked away, and as fast as he could. Any faster and he would have been running.

4

There was silence in the truck; they watched until Johnny was out of sight, and still no one said anything. David stood with his father's arm around him, thinking he had never felt so hollow, so empty, so utterly done in. It was over. They had lost. He kicked one of the empty Jolt bottles, his eye following its skitter to the wall of the truck, where it bounced.

David stepped forward. "Look, Johnny's wallet. It must have fallen out of his pocket."

"Poor baby," Cynthia said.

"Surprised he didn't lose it sooner," Steve said. He spoke in the dull, preoccupied tone of a man whose real thoughts are somewhere else entirely. "I kept telling him a guy on a motorcycle trip ought to have a wallet with a chain on it." A ghost of a grin touched his lips. "Getting those motel rooms in Austin may not be as easy as he thinks."

"I hope he sleeps in the damn parking lot," Ralph said. "Or beside the road."

David barely heard them. He felt the way he had that day in the Bear Street Woods - not when God was speaking to him, but when he had become aware that God was going to. He bent forward and picked up Johnny's wallet. When he touched it, something that felt like a wallop of electricity exploded in his head. A small, plosive grunt escaped him. He fell against the wall of the truck, clutching the wallet.

"David?" Ralph asked. His voice was distant, his concern echoing over a thousand miles.

Ignoring him, David opened the wallet. There was currency in one compartment and a squash of papers - memoranda, business cards, and such - in another. He ignored both and thumbed a snap on the wallet's left interior side, releasing an accordion of sleeved photographs. He was faintly aware of the others moving in around him as he looked through the pictures, using one finger to spool back through the years: here was a bearded Johnny and a beautiful dark-haired woman with high cheekbones and thrusting breasts, here a gray-mustached Johnny at the railing of a yacht, here a ponytailed Johnny in a tie- dyed jabbho, standing beside an actor who looked like Paul Newman before Newman ever thought of selling red-sauce and salad dressing. Each Johnny was a little younger, the head-hair and facial hair darker, the lines in the face less carven.

"Here," David whispered. "Oh God, here." He tried to take the photo out of its transparent pocket and couldn't; his hands were shaking too badly. Steve took the wallet, removed the picture, and handed it to the boy. David held it in front of his eyes with the awe of an astronomer who has discovered a brand-new planet.

"What?" Cynthia asked, leaning closer.

"It's the boss," Steve said. "He was over tbere - 'in country,' he usually calls it - almost a year, researching a book. He wrote a few magazine pieces about the war, too, I think." He looked at David. "Did you know that picture was there?"

"I knew something was there," David said, almost too faintly for the others to hear. "As soon as I saw his wallet on the floor. But. ., it was him." He paused, then re-peated it, wonderingly. "It was him."

"Who was who?" Ralph asked.

David didn't answer, only stared at the picture. It showed three men standing in front of a ramshackle cinderblock building - a bar, judging from the Budweiser sign in the window. The sidewalks were crowded with Asians. Passing in the street at camera left, frozen forever into a half-blur by this old snapshot, was a girl on a motorscooter.

The men on the left and right of the trio were wearing polo shirts and slacks. One was very tall and held a notebook. The other was festooned with cameras. The man in the middle was wearing jeans and a gray tee-shirt. A Yankees baseball cap was pushed far back on his head. A strap crossed his chest; something cased and bulky hung against his hip.

"His radio," David whispered, touching the cased object.

"Nope," Steve said after taking a closer look. "That's a tape-recorder, 1968-style."

"When I met him in the Land of the Dead, it was a radio." David could not take his eyes from the picture. His mouth was dry; his tongue felt large and unwieldy. The man in the middle was grinning, he was holding his reflector sunglasses in one hand, and there was no question about who be was.

Over his head, over the door of the bar from which they had apparently just emerged, was a handpainted sign. The name of the place was The Viet Cong Lookout.

5

She didn't actually faint, but Mary screamed until something in her head gave way and the strength deserted her muscles. She staggered forward, grabbing the table with one hand, not wanting to, there were black widows and scorpions crawling all over it, not to mention a corpse with a nice tasty bowl of blood in front of him, but she wanted to go tumbling face - first onto the floor even less.

The floor was the domain of the snakes.

She settled for dropping to her knees, holding onto the edge of the table with the hand that wasn't holding the flashlight. There was something strangely comforting about this posture. Calming. After a moment's thought she knew what it was: David, of course. Being on her knees reminded her of the simple, trusting way the boy had knelt in the cell he'd shared with Billingsley. In her mind she heard him saying in a slightly apologetic tone, I wonder if you 'd mind turning around. . . I have to take off my pants. She smiled, and the idea that she was smiling in this nightmare place - that she could smile in this nightmare place - calmed her even more. And without thinking about it, she slipped into prayer herself for the first time since she was eleven years old. She'd been at summer camp, lying in a stupid little bunk in a stupid mosquito-infested cabin with a bunch of stupid girls who would probably turn out to be mean and of a pinchy nature. She had been overwhelmed with homesickness, and had prayed for God to send her mother to take her home. God had declined, and from then until now, Mary bad consid-ered herself to be pretty much on her own.

"God," she said, "I need help. I'm in a room filled with creepy-crawlies, mostly poisonous, and I'm scared to death. If you're there, anything you can do would be appreciated. A - "

Amen, it was supposed to be, but she broke off before she could finish saying it, her eyes wide. A clear voice spoke in her head-and not her own voice, either, she was sure of it. It was as if someone had just been waiting, and not very patiently, for her to speak first.

There's nothing here that can hurt you, it said.

On the other side of the room, the beam of her flash-light illuminated an old Maytag washer-dryer set. A sign over them read: NO PERSONAL LAUNDRY! THIS MEANS U!

Spiders moved back and forth across the sign on long, strutting legs. There were more on top of the washing machine. Closer by, on the table, a small scorpion appeared to be investigating the crushed remains of the spider she had torn out of her hair. Her hand still throbbed from that encounter; the thing must have been full of poison, maybe enough to kill her if it had injected her instead of just splashing her. No, she didn't know who that voice belonged to, but if that was the way God answered prayers, she supposed it was no wonder the world was in such deep shit. Because there was plenty here that could hurt her, plenty.

No, the voice said patiently, even as she turned the flashlight past the decomposing bodies lined up on the floor and discovered another writhing tangle of snakes. No, they can't. And you know why.

"I don't know anything," she moaned, and focused the flashlight's beam on her hand. Red and throbby, but not swelling. Because it hadn't bitten her.

Hmmmm. That was sort of interesting.

Mary put the light back on the bodies, running it from the first one to Josephson to Entragian. The virus which had haunted these bodies was now in Ellen. And if she, Mary Jackson, was supposed to be its next home, then the things in here really couldn't hurt her. Couldn't damage the goods.

"Spider should have bitten me," she murmured, "but it didn't. It let me kill it instead. Nothing in here has hurt me." She giggled, a high-pitched, hysterical sound. "We're pals!"

You have to get out of here, the voice told her. Before it comes back. And it will. Soon, now.

"Protect me!" Mary said, getting to her feet. "You will, won't you? If you're God, or from God, you will!"

No answer from the voice. Maybe its owner didn't want to protect her. Maybe it couldn't.

Shivering, Mary reached out toward the table. The black widows and the smaller spiders - brown recluses - scuttered away from her in all directions. The scorpions did the same. One actually fell off the side of the table. Panic in the streets.

Good. Very good. But not enough. She bad to get out of here.

Mary stabbed the black with the flashlight until she found the door. She crossed it on legs that felt numb and distant, trying not to tread on the spiders that were scurrying everywhere. The doorknob turned, but the door would only go back and forth an inch or so. When she yanked it hard, she could hear what sounded like a pad-lock rattling outside. She wasn't very surprised, actually.

She shone the light around again, running it over the poster - LET THE BASTARDS FREEZE IN THE DARK - and the rusty sink, the counter with the coffeemaker and the little microwave, the washer-dryer set. Then the office area with a desk and a few old file cabinets and a time-clock on the wall, a rack of timecards, the potbellied stove, a toolchest, a few picks and shovels in a rusty tangle, a calendar showing a blonde in a bikini. Then she was back to the door again. No windows; not a single one. She shone the light down at the floor, thinking briefly of the shovels, but the boards were flush with the corrugated metal walls, and she doubted very much if the thing in Ellen Carver's body would give her time enough to dig her way out.

Try the dryer, Mare.

That was she herself, had to be, but she was damned if it sounded like her. . . and it didn't feel exactly like a thought, either.

Not that this was the time to worry about such things. She hurried over to the dryer, taking less care about where she put her feet this time and stepping on several of the spiders. The smell of decay seemed stronger over here, riper, which was strange, since the bodies were on the other side of the room, but -

A diamondback rattler poked up the dryer's lid and began slithering out. It was like coming face to face with the world's ugliest jack-in-the-box. Its head swayed back and forth. Its black preacher's eyes were fixed solemnly on her. Mary took a step backward, then forced herself forward again, reaching out to it. She could be wrong about the spiders and snakes, she knew that. But what if this big fellow did bite her? Would dying of snakebite be worse than ending up like Entragian, killing everything that crossed her path until her body exploded like a bomb?

The snake's jaws yawned, revealing curved fangs like whalebone needles. It hissed at her.

"Fuck you, bro," Mary said. She seized it, pulled it out of the dryer - it was easily four feet long-and flung it across the room. Then she banged down the lid with the base of the flashlight, not wanting to see what else might be inside, and pulled the dryer away from the wall. There was a pop as the pleated plastic exhaust-hose pulled out of the hole in the wall. Spiders, dozens of them, scattered from beneath the dryer in all directions.

Mary bent down to look at the hole. It was about two feet across, too small to crawl through, but the edges were badly corroded, and she thought. . .

She went back across the room, stepping on one of the scorpions-crrunch-and kicking impatiently at a rat which had been hiding behind the bodies . . . and, most likely, gorging on them. She seized one of the picks, went back to the exhaust-hole, and pushed the dryer a little farther aside to give herself room. The smell of putrefaction was stronger now, but she hardly noticed. She worked the short end of the pick through the hole, pulled upward, and gave a little crow of delight when the tool yanked a furrow nearly eighteen inches long through the rotted, rusted metal.

Hurry, Mary - hurry!

She wiped sweat off her forehead, inserted the pick at the end of the furrow, and yanked upward again. The pick lengthened the slit at the top of the hole even more, then came loose so suddenly that she fell over backward, the pick jarring loose from her hand. She could feel more spiders bursting under her back, and the rat she'd kicked earlier - or maybe one of his relatives-crawled over her neck, squeaking. Its whiskers tickled the underside of her jaw.

"Fuck off!" she cried, and batted it away. She got to her feet, took the flashlight off the top of the dryer, clasped it between her upper left arm and her left breast. Then she leaned forward and folded back the two sides of the slit she'd made like wings.

She thought it was big enough. Just.

"God, thank you," she said. "Stay with me a little more, please. And if you get me through this, I promise I'll stay in touch."

She got on her knees and peered out through the hole. The stench was now so strong it made her feel like gagging. She shone the light out and down.

"God!" she screamed in a high, strengthless voice. "Oh Jesus, NO!"

Her first shocked impression was that there were hundreds of bodies stacked behind the building she was in the whole world seemed to be white, slack faces, glazed eyes, and torn flesh. As she watched, a buzzard that had been roosting on the chest of one man and pulling meat from the face of another took to the air, its wings flapping like sheets on a clothesline.

Not that many, she told herself. Not that many, Mary old kid, and even if there were a thousand, it wouldn 't change your situation.

Still, she couldn't go forward for a moment. The hole was big enough to crawl out of, she was sure it was, but she would. . . .

"I'll land on them," she whispered. The light in her hand was jittering uncontrollably, picking out cheeks and brows and tufted ears, making her think of that scene at the end of Psycho where the cobwebby bulb in the base-ment starts swinging back and forth, sliding across the wrinkled mummy-face of Norman's dead mother.

You have to go, Mary, the voice told her patiently. You have to go now, or it will be too late.

All right. . . but she didn't have to see her landing zone. No way. Not if she didn't want to.

She turned off the flashlight and tossed it out through the hole. She heard a soft thunk as it landed on . . . well, on something. She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and slipped out. Rust-ragged metal pulled her shirt out of her jeans and scraped her belly. She tilted forward, and then she was falling, still with her eyes squeezed shut. She put her hands out in front of her. One landed on someone's face - she felt the cold, unbreathing prow of the nose in her palm and the eyebrows (bushy ones, by the feel) under her fingers. The other hand squashed into some cold jelly and skidded.

She pressed her lips together, sealing whatever wanted to come out of her - a scream or a cry of revulsion - behind them. If she screamed, she'd have to breathe. And if she breathed, she'd have to smell these corpses, which had been lying out here in the summer sun for God knew how long. She landed on things that shifted and belched dead breath. Telling herself not to panic, to just hold on, Mary rolled away from them, already rubbing the hand which had skidded in the jelly-stuff on her pants.

Now there was sand beneath her, and the sharp points of small, broken rocks. She rolled once more, onto her belly, got her knees under her, and plunged both hands into this rough, broken scree, rubbing them back and forth, dry-washing them as best she could. She opened her eyes and saw the flashlight lying by an outstretched, waxy hand. She looked up, wanting-needing-the cleanliness and calm disconnection of the sky. A brilliant white crescent of moon rode low in it, seeming almost to be impaled on a sharp devil's prong of rock jutting from the east side of the China Pit.

I'm out, she thought, taking the flashlight. At least there's that. Dear God, thank you for that.

She backed away from the dead pile on her knees, the flashlight once more clamped between her arm and breast, still dragging her tingling hands through the broken ground, scouring them.

There was light to her left. She looked that way, and felt a burst of terror as she saw Entragian's cruiser. Would you step out of the car, please, Mr. Jackson? he'd said, and that was when it had happened, she decided, when everything she'd once believed solid had blown away like dust in the wind.

It's empty, the car's empty, you can see that, can't you?

Yes, she could, but the residue of the terror remained. It was a taste in her mouth, as if she had been sucking pennies.

The cruiser-road-dusty, even the flasher bars on the roof now crusted with the storm's residue-was standing next to a small concrete building that looked like a pillbox emplacement. The driver's door had been left open (she could see the hideous little plastic bear next to the dash-board compass), and that was why the domelight was on. Ellen had brought her out here in the cruiser, then gone somewhere else. Ellen had other fish to fry, other hooks to bait, other joints to roll. If only she'd left the keys -

Mary got to her feet and hurried to the car, jogging bent over at the waist like a soldier crossing no-man's-land. The cruiser reeked of blood and piss and pain and fear. The dashboard, the wheel, and the front seat were splashed with gore. The instruments were unreadable. Lying in the footwell on the passenger's side was a small stone spider. It was an old thing, and pitted, but just looking at it made Mary feel cold and weak.

Not that she would have to worry about it much; the cruiser's ignition slot was empty.

"Shit!" Mary whispered fiercely. "Shit on toast!" She turned and shone her light first on a cluster of mining equipment and then over to the base of the road leading up the pit's north slope. Packed dirt surfaced with gravel, at least four lanes wide to accommodate the heavy equipment she had just been looking at, probably smoother than the highway she and Peter had been on when the goddam cop stopped them . . . and she couldn't drive the police-cruiser up and out of here because she didn't have the fucking key.

If I can't, I have to make sure he can't either. Or she. Or whatever in hell it is.

She bent into the car again, wincing at the sour smell (and keeping an eye on the nasty statuette in the footwell, as if it might come to life and leap at her). She yanked the hood release, then walked around to the front of the car. She felt along the top of the grille for the catch, found it, and raised the Caprice's hood. The engine inside was huge, but she had no trouble spotting the air-cleaner. She leaned over it, grasped the butterfly nut in the center, and applied pressure. Nothing happened.

She hissed with frustration and blinked more sweat out of her eyes. It stung. A little over a year ago, she had read poems as part of a cultural event called "Women Poets Celebrate Their Sense and Sexuality." She had worn a suit from Donna Karan, and a silk blouse underneath. Her hair had been freshly done, feathered in bangs across her brow. Her long poem, "My Vase," had been quite the hit of the evening. Of course all that had been before her visit to the historic and beautiful China Pit, home of the unique and fascinating Rattlesnake Number Two mine. She doubted if any of the people who had heard her read "My Vase" -

Smooth sided fragrance of stems

brimmed with shadows

curved like the line of a shoulder

the line of a thigh

- at that event would recognize her now. She no longer recognized herself.

Her right hand, the one she was using on the air-cleaner, itched and throbbed. The fingers slipped. A nail tore painfully, and she gasped. "Please God, help me do this, I wouldn't know the distributor cap from the camshaft, so it has to be the carburetor. Please help me be strong enough to - "

This time when she applied pressure, the butterfly nut turned.

"Thanks," she panted. "Oh yeah, thanks very much. You stay close. And take care of David and the others, will you? Don't let them leave this shithole without me."

She spun the butterfly nut off and let it fall into the engine. She pulled the air-cleaner off its post and tossed it aside, revealing a carburetor almost as big as . . . well, almost as big as a vase. Laughing, Mary squatted, got a fistful of China Pit, pushed down a metal flap-thingie over one of the carb's chambers, and stuffed the sand and rock in. She added two more handfuls, filling the throat of the carburetor, strangling it, then stepped back.

"Let's see you drive that, you bitch," she panted.

Hurry. Mary, you have to hurry.

She shone the flashlight over the parked equipment. There were two pickup trucks among the bigger, bulkier stuff. She walked across to them and shone the light into the cabs. No keys here, either. But there was a hatchet in with the litter of equipment in the back of the Ford F-150, and she used it to flatten two tires on both trucks. She started to throw the hatchet away, then reconsidered. She shone the light around once more, and this time she saw the gaping vaguely square hole twenty yards or so up from the bottom of the pit.

There. The source of all this trouble.

She didn't know how she knew that, if it was the voice or God or just some intuition of her own, and she didn't care. Right now she only cared about one thing: getting the bloody hell out of here.

She snapped off the flash - the moon would give her all the light she needed, at least for awhile - and began to trudge up the road which led out of China Pit.