The boy held up the wallet. “Taking this back.”
“No you don’t,” Ralph said, shaking his head rapidly. “No way. For God’s sake, David, you don’t even know where that man is-out of town by now, is my guess. And good riddance to bad rubbish.”
“I know where he is,” David said calmly. “I can find him. He’s close.” He hesitated, then added: “I’m sup-posed to find him.”
“David.” To his own ears, Steve’s voice sounded tenta-tive. oddly young. “You said the chain was broken.”
“That was before I saw the picture in his wallet. I have to go to him. I have to go now.
It’s the only chance we have.”
“I don’t understand,” Ralph said, but he stepped away from the door. “What does that picture mean.”
“There’s no time, Dad. I’m not sure I could explain even if there was.”
“Are we coming with you.” Cynthia asked. “We’re not, are we.”
David shook his head. “I’ll come back if I can. With Johnny, if I can.”
“This’s nuts,” his father said, but he spoke hollowly, with no strength. “If you go wandering around out there, you’ll be eaten alive.”
“No more than the coyote ate me alive when I got out of the cell,” David said. “The danger isn’t if I go out there; it’s if we all stay in here.”
He looked at Steve, then at the rear door of the Ryder truck. Steve nodded and ran the door up on its tracks. The desert night slipped in, pressed against his face like a cold kiss.
David went to his father and began to hug him. As Ralph’s arms went around the boy in response, David felt that enormous force grab at him again. It ran through him like hard rain. He jerked convulsively in his father’s arms, gasping, then took a blind step backward. His hands, shaking wildly, were held out before him.
“David!” Ralph cried. “David, what-”
And it was over. As quickly as that. The force left. But he could still see the China Pit as he had seen it for a moment in the circle of his father’s arms; it had been like looking down from a low-flying plane. It glimmered in the last of the moonlight, a wretched alabaster sinkhole.
He could hear the ruffle of the wind in his ears and a voice (mi him, en tow! mi him, en tow!) calling. A voice that wasn’t human.
He made an effort to clear his mind and look around at them-so few left now, so few of The Collie Entragian Survival Society. Steve and Cynthia standing together, his father bending down toward him; behind them, the moon—drenched night.
“What is it.” Ralph asked unsteadily. “Christ Al-mighty, what now.”
He saw he had dropped the wallet, and bent to pick it up. Wouldn’t do to leave it here, gosh no. He thought of putting it into his own back pocket, then thought of how it had fallen out of Johnny’s and dumped it down the front of his shirt instead.
“You have to go to the pit.” he told his father. “Daddy, you and Steve and Cynthia have to go out to the China Pit right now. Mary needs help. Do you understand. Mary needs help!”
“What are you talk-”
“She got out, she’s running down the road toward town, and Tak is chasing her. You have to go now. Right now!”
Ralph reached for him again, but this time in a tenta-tive, strengthless way. David ducked easily beneath his arm and jumped from the Ryder truck’s tailgate into the street.
“David!” Cynthia cried. “Splitting up like this… are you sure it’s right.”
“No!” he shouted back. He felt desperate and confused and more than a little stunned. “I know how wrong it feels, it feels wrong to me, too, but there’s nothing else! I swear to you! There’s just nothing else!”
“You get back in here!” Ralph bawled.
David turned, dark eyes meeting his father’s frantic gaze. “Go, Dad. All three of you.
Now. You have to. Help her! For God’s sake, help Mary!”
And before anyone could ask another question, David Carver turned on his heel and went pelting off into the dark. With one hand he pumped the air; the other he held against the front of his shirt, cupping John Edward Marinville’s genuine crocodile wallet, three hundred and ninety-five dollars, Barneys of New York.
RaLph tried to jump out after his son. Steve grabbed him by the shoulders, and Cynthia grabbed him around the waist.
“Let me go!” Ralph shouted, struggling… but not struggling too hard, at that. Steve felt marginally encour-aged. ‘Let me go after my son!”
“No,” Cynthia said. “We have to believe he knows what he’s doing, Ralph.”
“I can’t lose him, too,” Ralph whispered, but he relaxed, quit trying to pull away from them. “I can’t.”
“Maybe the best.way to make sure that doesn’t happen is to go along with what he wants,” Cynthia said.
Ralph drew a deep breath, then exhaled it. “My son went after that asshole,” he said. He sounded as if he were talking to himself. Explaining to himself. “He went after that conceited asshole to give him back his wallet, and if we asked him why, he’d say because it’s God’s will. Am 1 right.”
“Yeah, probably,” Cynthia said. She reached out and touched Ralph’s shoulder. He opened his eyes and she smiled at him. “And you know the bitch of it. it’s probably the truth.”
Ralph looked at Steve. “You wouldn’t leave him, would you. Pick up Mary, take that equipment-road back to the highway, and leave my boy behind.”
Steve shook his head.
Ralph put his hands to his face, seemed to gather him-self, dropped his hands, and stared at them. There was a stony cast to his features now, a look of resolves taken and bridges burned. A queer thought came to Steve: for the first time since he’d met the Carvers, he could see the son in the father.
“All right,” Ralph said. “We’ll leave God to protect my kid until we get back.” He jumped off the back of the truck and looked grimly down the street. “It’ll have to be God.
That bastard Marinville sure won’t do it.”
The thought which flashed across Johnny’s mind as the wolf charged him was the kid saying that the crea-ture running this show wanted them to leave town, would be happy to let them go. Maybe it was a little glitch in the kid’s second sight… or maybe Tak had just seen a chance to pick one of them off and was taking it. Never look a gift-horse in the mouth, and all that.
In either case, he thought, I am royally fucked.
You deserve to be, sweetheart, Terry said from behind him-yeah, that was Terry, all right, helpful to the end.
He brandished the hammer at the oncoming wolf and yelled “Get outta here!” in a shrill voice he barely recog-nized as his own.
The wolf broke left and turned in a tight circle, growling as it went, hindquarters low to the ground, tail tucked. One of its powerful shoulders struck a cabinet as it completed its turn, and a teacup balanced on top of it fell off and shattered on the floor. The radio coughed out a long, loud bray of static.
Johnny took one step toward the door, visualizing how be would pelt down the hail and out into the parking lot—fuck the ATV, he’d find wheels elsewhere-and then the wolf was in the aisle again, head down and hackles up, eyes (horribly intelligent, horribly aware eyes) glowing. Johnny retreated, holding the hammer up in front of him like a knight saluting the king with his sword, waggling it slightly. He could feel his palm sweating against the hammer’s perforated rubber sleeve. The wolf looked huge, the size of a full—grown German Shepherd at least. By comparison, the hammer looked ridiculously small,
the kind of pantry-cabinet accessory one kept around for repairing shelves or installing picture-hooks.
“God help me,” Johnny said… but he felt no presence here; God was just something you said, a word you used when you could see the shit once more getting ready to obey the law of gravity and fall into the fan. No God, no God, he wasn’t a suburban kid from Ohio still three years away from his first encounter with a razor, prayer was just a manifestation of what psychologists called “magical thinking,” and there was no God.