Maybe he saw it was going to be all right, she thought. In that vision he had… or whatever it was. Or maybe—She didn’t want to finish that thought, but was slow closing it off.
— maybe he just knows there ’s no other choice.
There was a long moment of silence-very long, it seemed to Mary-and then a high whipcrack rifle report that should have echoed and didn’t. It was just there and then gone, absorbed by the walls and benches and valleys of the open pit. In its aftermath she heard one startled bird-cry-Quowwwk! — and then nothing more. She wondered why Tak hadn’t sent the animals against them as it had sent them against so many of the people in town.
Because the six of them together were something special. Maybe. If so, it was David who had made them special, the way a single great player can elevate a whole team.
They turned and saw Ralph bent over the padlock (to Mary he looked like the Pieman bent over Simple Simon on the Howard Johnson’s signs), peering at it through the helmet’s faceplate. The lock was now warped and twisted, with a large black bullet-hole through the center of it, but when he yanked on it, it continued to hold fast.
“One more time,” he said, and twirled his finger at them, telling them to turn around.
They did and there was another whipcrack. No bird-cry followed his one. Mary supposed whatever had called was far away by now, although she had heard no flapping wings. Not that she would have, probably, with two gun-shots ringing in her ears.
This time when Ralph yanked, the lock’s arm popped free of its ruined innards. Ralph pulled it off the hasp and threw it aside. When he took Johnny’s helmet off, he was grinning.
David ran to him and gave him a high-five. “Good go-ing, Dad!”
Steve pulled the door open and peered in. “Man! Darker than a carload of assholes.”
“Is there a light-switch.” Cynthia asked. “No windows, there must be.”
He felt around, first on the right, then the left. “Watch for spiders,” Mary said nervously.
“There could be spiders.”
“Here it is, I got it,” Steve said. There was a click-click, click-click, but no light.
“Who’s still got a flashlight.” Cynthia asked. “I must’ve left mine back in the damned movie theater. I don’t have it, anyway.”
There was no answer. Mary had also had a flashlight—the one she’d found in the field office-and she thought she had tucked it into the waistband of her jeans after dis-abling the—pickup trucks. If so, it was gone now. The hatchet, too. She must have lost both items in her flight from the pit.
“Crap,” Johnny said. “Boy Scouts we ain’t.”
“There’s one in the truck, behind the seat,” Steve said. “Under the maps.”
“Why don’t you go get it.” Johnny said, but for a moment or two, Steve didn’t move.
He—was looking at Johnny with a strange expression, one Mary couldn’t quite read, on his face. Johnny saw it, too. “What. Some-thing wrong.”
“Nope,” Steve said. “Nothing wrong, boss.”
“Then step on it.”
Steve Ames marked the exact moment when control over their little expeditionary force passed from David to Johnny; the moment when the boss became the boss again. Why don’t you go get it, he’d said, a question that wasn’t a question at all but the first real order Mar-inville had given him since they’d started out in Con-necticut, Johnny on his motorcycle, Steve rolling leisurely along behind in the truck, puffing the occasional cheap cigar. He had called him boss (until Johnny told him to stop) because it was a tradition in the entertainment busi-ness: in the theater, sceneshifters called the stage manager boss; on a movie set, key grips called the director boss; out on tour, roadies called the tour-manager or the guys in the band boss. He had simply carried that part of his old life over into this job, but he hadn’t thought of Johnny as the boss, in spite of his booming stage-voice and his chin—thrust-forward, I-know-exactly-what-I’ rn-doing manner, until now. And this time, when Steve had called him boss, Johnny hadn’t objected.
Why don’t you go get it.
Anominal question, just six words, and everything had changed.
What’s changed. What, exactly.
“I don’t know,” he muttered, opening the driver’ s-side door of the Ryder truck and starting to rummage through the crap behind the seat. “That’s the hell of it, I don’t really know. — The flashlight-a long-barrelled, six-battery job-was under a crushed litter of maps, along with the first-aid kit and a cardboard box with a few road-flares in it. He tried the light, saw that it worked, and jogged back to the others.
“Look for spiders first,” Cynthia said. Her voice was just a little too high for normal conversation. “Spiders and snakes, just like in that old song. God, I hate em.”
Steve stepped into the powder magazine and shone his light around, first running it over the floor, then the cinderblock walls, then the ceiling. “No spiders,” he reported. “No snakes.”
“David, stand right outside the door,” Johnny said. “We shouldn’t all cram in there together, I think. And if you see anyone or anything-”
“Give a yell,” David finished. “Don’t worry.
Steve centered the beam of the flashlight on a sign in the middle of the floor-it was on a stand, like the one in restaurants that said PLEASE WAIT FOR HOSTESS TO SEAT you. Only what this one said-in big red letters-was:
WARNING WARNING WARNING
BLASTING AGENTS AND BOOSTERS MUST BE KEPT
SEPARATE!
THIS IS A FEDERAL REGUL4TION CARELESSNESS WITH EXPLOSIVES WILL NOT BE TOLERATED!
The rear wall was studded with spikes driven into the cinderblock. Hung on these were coils of wire and fat _ white cord. Det-cord, Steve assumed. Against the right and left walls, facing each other like bookends with no books between them, were two heavy wooden chests. The _ one marked DYNAMITE and BLASTING CAPS and USE EXTREME CAUTION was open, the lid up like the lid of a child’s toybox. The other, marked simply BLASTING AGENT in black letters against an orange background, was padlocked shut.
“That’s the ANFO,” Johnny said, pointing at the pad locked cabinet. “Acronym stands for ammonium nitrate and fuel oil.”
“How do you know that.” Mary asked.
“Picked it up somewhere,” he said absently. “Just picked it up somewhere.”
“Well, if you think I’m gonna blow the padlock off that one, you’re nuts,” Ralph said.
“You guys have any ideas that don’t involve shooting.”
“Not just this second,” Johnny said, but he didn’t sound very concerned.
Steve walked toward the dynamite chest.
“No dyno in there,” Johnny said, still sounding weirdly serene.
He was right about the dynamite, but the chest was far from empty. The body of a man in jeans and a George town Hoyas tee-shirt was crammed into it. He had been shot in the head. His glazed eyes stared up at Steve from below what might once have been blond hair. It was hard to tell.
Steeling himself against the smell, Steve leaned over and worked at the keyring hanging on the man’s belt.
“What is it.” Cynthia asked, starting toward him. A beetle came out of the corpse’s open mouth and trundled down his chin. Now Steve could hear a faint rustling. More insects under the dead guy. Or maybe one of his nice new friend’s beloved rattlers.
“Nothing,” he said. “Stay where you are.”
The keyring was stubborn. After several fruitless efforts to depress the clef-shaped clip holding it to the belt-loop, Steve simply tore the whole thing off, loop and all. He closed the lid and crossed the room with the keyring. Johnny, he noticed, was standing about three paces inside the door, gazing raptly down at his motor-cycle helmet. “Alas, poor Urine,”