“It should say ‘Y’all come back, son.’ Then it would be perfect.” He glanced at his watch and saw that it was twenty past seven. Which meant they were closed, of course. Except if they were closed, what were those cars and trucks doing in the parking lot.
He tried the door. It pushed open. From inside came the sound of country music, broken by heavy static. “I built it one piece at a time,” Johnny Cash sang, “And it didn’t cost me a dime.”
They stepped in. The door closed on a pneumatic arm. Outside, the wind played rattle and hum along the ridged metal sides of the building. They were in a reception area. To the right were four chairs with patched vinyl seats. They looked like they were mostly used by beefy men wearing dirty jeans and workboots. There was a long coffee-table in front of the chairs, piled with magazines you didn’t find in the doctor’s office: Guns and Ammo, Road and Track, MacLean ’s Mining Report, Metallurgy Newsletter, Arizona Highways. There was also a very old Penthouse with Tonya Harding on the cover.
Straight ahead of them was a field-gray receptionist’s desk, so dented that it might have been kicked here all the way from Highway 50. It was loaded down with papers, a crazily stacked set of volumes marked MSHA Guidelines (an overloaded ashtray sat on top of these), and three wire baskets full of rocks. A manual typewriter perched on one end of the desk; no computer that Steve could see, and a chair in the kneehole, the kind that runs on casters, but nobody sitting in it. The air conditioner was running, and the room was uncomfortably cool.
Steve walked around the desk, saw a cushion sitting on the chair, and picked it up so Cynthia could see it. PARK YER ASS had been crocheted across the front in old—fashioned Western-style lettering.
“Oh, tasteful,” she said. “Operators are standing by, use Tootie.”
On the desk, flanked by a joke sign (LEAD ME NOT INTO TEMPTATION, FOR I SHALL FIND IT MYSELF) and a name—plaque (BRAD JOSEPHSON), was a stiff studio photo of an overweight but pretty black woman flanked by two cute kids. A male receptionist, then, and not exactly Mr. Neat. The radio, an old cracked Philco, sat on a nearby shelf along with the phone. “Right about then my wife walked out,” Johnny Cash bawled through wild cannonades of static, “And I could see right away that she had her doubts, But she opened the door and said ‘Honey, take me for a-’ Steve turned off the radio. The hardest gust of wind yet hit the building, making it creak like a submarine under pressure. Cynthia, still with the bandanna he’d given her pulled up over her nose, looked around uneasily. The radio was off, but-very faintly-Steve could still hear Johnny Cash singing about how he’d smuggled his car out of the GM plant in his lunchbucket, one piece at a time. Same station, different radio, way back. Where the lights were, he guessed.
Cynthia pointed to the phone. Steve picked it up, lis—tened, dropped it back into its cradle again. “Dead. Must be a line down somewhere.”
“Aren’t they underground these days.” she asked, and Steve noticed an interesting thing: they were both talking in low tones, really not more than a step or two above a whisper.
“I think maybe they haven’t gotten around to that in Desperation just yet.”
There was a door behind the desk. He reached for the handle, and she grabbed his arm.
“What.” Steve asked.
“I don’t know.” She let go of him, reached up, pulled her bandanna down. Then she laughed nervously. “I don’t know, man, this is just so… wacky.”
“Got to be someone back there,” he said. “The door’s unlocked, lights on, cars in the parking lot.”
“You’re scared, too. Aren’t you.”
He thought it over and nodded. Yes. It was like before the thunderstorms-the benders—when he’d been a kid, only with all the strange joy squeezed out of it. “But we still ought to…
“Yeah, I know. Go on.” She swallowed, and he heard something go click in her throat.
“Hey, tell me we’re gonna be laughin at each other and feelin stupid in a few seconds.
Can you do that, Lubbock.”
“In a few seconds we’re gonna be laughing at each other and feeling stupid.”
“Thanks.”
“No problem,” he said, and opened the door. A narrow hallway ran down it, thirty feet or so. There was a double run of fluorescent bars overhead and all-weather carpet on the floor. There were two doors on one side, both open, and three on the other, two open and one shut. At the end of the corridor, bright yellow light filled up what looked to Steve like a work area of some kind-a shop, maybe, or a lab. That was where the lighted windows they’d seen from the outside were, and where the music was coming from.
Johnny Cash had given way to The Tractors, who claimed that baby liked to rock it like a boogie-woogie choo-choo train. Sounded like typical brag and bluster to Steve.
This isfucked. You know that, don’t you.
He knew. There was a radio. There was the wind, loaded with sour alkali grit, now hitting the building’s metal sides hard enough to sound like a Montana blizzard. But where were the voices. Men talking, joking, shooting the shit. The men who went with the vehicles parked out front.
He started slowly down the corridor, thinking that he should call out something like Hey!
Anybody home. and not quite daring to. The place felt simultaneously empty and somehow not empty, although how it could be both things at the same time was—Cynthia yanked on the back of his shirt. The tug was so hard and so sudden that he almost screamed.
“What.” he asked-exasperated, heart pounding-and realized that now he was whispering.
“Do you hear that.” she asked. ’sounds like… I dunno… a kid bubbling Kool-Aid through a straw.”
At first he could only hear The Tractors—“She said her name was Emergency and asked to see my gun, She said her telephone number was 911 “-and then he did hear it, a fast liquid sound. Mechanical, not human. A sound he almost knew. “Yeah, I hear it.”
“Steve, I want to get out of here.”
“Go back to the truck, then.”
““‘Jo… ’ “Cynthia, for Christ’s sake-”
He looked at her, at. her big eyes looking back up at him, her pursed, anxious mouth, and quit it. No, she didn’t want to go back to the Ryder van by herself, and he didn’t blame her. She’d called herself a hard-headed babe, and maybe she was, but right now she was also an almost—scared-to-death babe. He took her by her thin shoulders, pulled her toward him, and planted a loud smackeroo on her forehead, right between the eyes. “Do not worry, little Nell,” he said in a very passable Dudley Do-Right imita-tion, “for I will protect you.”
She grinned in spite of herself. “Fuckin dork.”
“Come on. Stay close. And if we do have to run, run fast. Or else I might trample you.”
“You don’t need to worry about that,” Cynthia said. 2r “i’ll be out the door and gone before you even get it in gear.”
The first door on the right was an office. Empty. There was a cork-board on the wall covered with Polaroid shots of an open-pit mine. That was the big wall of earth they’d seen looming behind the town, Steve assumed.
The first door on the left, also an office. Also empty. The bubbling sound was louder now, and Steve knew what it was even before he looked into the next door on the right.
He felt a measure of relief. “It’s an aquarium,” he said, “that’s all it is.”
This was a much nicer office than the first two they’d peeped into, with a real rug on the floor. The aquarium was on a stand to the left of the desk, under a photograph of two men in boots, hats, and Western-style business suits shaking hands by a flagpole—the one out back, most likely. It was a well-populated aquarium—he saw tigers, angelfish.
goldfish, and a couple of black beauties. There was also some strange geegaw lying on the sand at the bottom, one of the things people put into their aquar-iums to decorate them, he assumed, except this one wasn’t a sunken ship or a pirate chest or King Neptune’s castle. This one was something else, something that looked like—“Hey Steve,”