He saw what was spray-painted on the wall and pointed to it. “‘In these silences something may rise.’ What do you suppose that means”.”
“Don’t know, don’t care. I just want to get to some-place where there are lights and people and phones and we can—She was turning to the right as she spoke, her eyes touching on the fold of green di’ape below the tall win-dows with no particular interest (the shape beneath it was too slight for her to recognize). Then she saw the bodies hung Ofl the wall. She gasped and doubled over, as if someone had struck her in the belly, then turned to flee.
Johnny caught her, but for a moment he was sure she wasp going to get away from him—there was a lot of strength_ hidden in that slim body.
“No!” he said, shaking her in what was partly—exasperation. He was ashamed of that but couldn’t entirely suppress it. “No, you have to help me! Just don’t-—look at them!”
“But one of them’s Peter!”
“And he’s dead. I’m sony. hut he is. We’re not. Yet>—anyhow. Don’t look at him. Come on.”
He led her swiftly toward the door marked TOWN — SAFETY OFF]CER, trying to think how they should proceed. _ And here was another disgusting little facet of this experi-ence: he was becoming aroused by Mary Jackson. She was quivering in the circle of his arm, he could feel the softness of her breast just above his hand, and he wanted her.
Her husband was hung up like a fucking over-coat right behind them, hut he was still getting a fairly respectable stiffy, especially for a man with possible prostate woes. Terry was right all along, he thought. 1 am an asshole.
“Come on,” he said, squeezing her in what he hoped was a brotherly way. “If that kid could do what he did, _ then you can hang in there. I know you can. Get it together, Mary.”
She pulled in a deep breath. “I’m trying.”
“Good g… oh shit. We’ve got another mess here. I’d—tell you not to look, but 1 think we’re a little beyond the niceties.”
Mary looked at the sprawled body of the Town Safety Officer and made a thick noise in her throat. “The boy… David… Jesus Christ… how did he do it.”
“1 don’t know.” Johnny said. “He’s some kid, all right. I think he must have knocked Sheriff Jim there out of his chair trying to get his keys. Can you go next door to the Fire Chief’s office”. It’ll be quicker if we toss both of em at Once.”
“Yes.”
“Be prepared; if Fireman Bob was at home when Entra-gian went nuclear, he’s probably just as dead as the rest of them.”
“I’ll be okay. Take these.”
She handed him the keys, then went to the door marked FIRE CHIEF. Johnny saw her start to glance toward her husband, then look away again.
He nodded and tried to send her some mental encouragement-good girl, good idea. She turned the knob of the Fire Chiefs door, then pushed it open with tented fingers, as if it might be booby-trapped. She looked in, let out a breath, and gave Johnny a thumbs-up.
“Three things, Mary: lights, guns, any car-keys you spot. Okay.”
“Okay.”
He went into the cop’s office, running quickly through the keys on the ring David had gotten as he did. There was a set of GM car-keys which Johnny guessed probably belonged to the cruiser Entragian had brought him back in. If it was out there in the parking lot it would help them, but Johnny didn’t think it was. He had heard an engine start up shortly after the madman had taken Carver’s wife away.
The desk drawers were locked, but the right key in the lock of the wide drawer above the kneehole opened all of them. He found a flashlight in one and a locked box marked RUGER in another. He tried several different little keys on the box. None worked.
Take it anyway. Maybe. If neither of them found other guns somewhere else.
He crossed the room, pausing to look out a window. Flying dust was all he could see.
Probably all there was to see. God, why hadn’t he taken the interstate.
That struck him funny; he giggled under his breath as he looked at the closed door behind Reed’s desk. Sound like a crazyman, he thought. Never mind Travels with Harley; if you get out of this alive, you should think about calling the book Travels with Loony.
That made him laugh even harder. He put one hand over his mouth to stifle it and opened the door. The laughter stopped in a hurry. Sitting amid the boots and shoes, partly obscured by hanging coats and spare uni-forms, was a dead woman. She was propped against the closet’s side wall and dressed in clothes Johnny thought of as Boot Scootin Secretarial-tapered slacks, not denim, and a silk shirt with entwined roses embroidered over the left breast. The woman appeared to be staring at him with round-eyed wonder, but that was only an illusion.
Because you expect to see eyes, he thought, and not just big red sockets where they used to be.
He restrained an urge to slam the closet shut and pushed the hanging garments to either side along the pole instead, so he could see the rear wall. A good idea. There was a gun—rack with half a dozen rifles and a shotgun in it back there. One of the grooves was empty, third from the right, and Johnny guessed that was where another shot-gun, the one Entragian had pointed at him, usually went.
“Hot damn, paydirt!” he exclaimed, and stepped into the closet. He planted one foot on either side of the sitting corpse’s body, but that made him acutely uncomfortable; he had once gotten head from a woman who had been sit-ting against a bedroom wall in almost that exact same position. At a party in East Hampton, that had been. Spielberg had been there. Joyce Carol Oates, too.
He stepped back, put one foot onthe corpse’s shoulder, and pushed. The woman’s body slid slowly and stiffly to the right. Her huge red eyesockets seemed to stare at him with an expression of surprise as she went, as if she were wondering how a cultured fellow such as himself, a National Book Award winner, for goodness’ sake, could possibly stoop to pushing over a lady in a closet. Tendrils of her hair slid along the wall, trailing after her.
“Sony, ma’am,” he said, “but it’s better for both of us this way, believe me.”
The guns were held in place by a length of cable threaded through the trigger-guards. The cable was pad-locked to an eyebolt on the side of the case. Johnny hoped he would have better luck finding the key to this lock than he’d have finding the one that opened the box with the Ruger in it.
The third key he tried popped the padlock. He stripped the cable back through the trigger—guards with a jerk so hard that one of them-a Remington.30-.06-came tum-bling out. He caught it, turned… and the woman, Mary, was standing right there. Johnny gave a strangled little whoop that probably would have been a scream if he hadn’t been so scared. His heart stopped beating, and for one very long moment he was positive it wasn’t going to restart; he’d be dead of fright even before he fell back-ward onto the corpse in the silk shirt. Then, thank God, it got going again. He slammed a fist into his chest just above the left nipple (an area which had once been hard and now wasn’t very) just to show the pump underneath who was the boss.
“Don’t ever do that,” he told Mary, trying not to wheeze. “What’s wrong with you.”
“I thought you heard me.” She didn’t look terribly sym-pathetic. There was a golfbag, of all things, slung over her shoulder. A tartan golfbag. She looked at the corpse in the closet. “There’s a body in the Fire Chiefs closet, too. A man.”
“What was his handicap, any idea.” His heart was still galloping, but maybe not so fast now.
“You never quit, do you.”
“Fuck you, Mary, I’m trying to kid myself out of dying, here. Every martini I ever drank just jumped on my heart. Christ, you scared me.”
“I’m sorry, but we’ve got to hurry up. He could come back any time.”