“Climb up and get on in here,” a voice whispered. It was one Steve was delighted to hear.
“Boss.”
“You bet.” Marinville sounded as if he might be smiling. “Love the coverall look-it’s so masculine. Get on in here, Steve.”
“There are three of us.”
“The more the merrier.
The dark-haired woman hiked her skirt in order to get up on the crates, and Steve could see the boss helping himself to an eyeful. Even the apocalypse couldn’t change some things, apparently.
Steve helped Cynthia up next, then followed. He turned around, slid partway in, then reached down and pushed the top crate off the one underneath. He didn’t know if it would be enough to fool the guy the dark-haired woman was so afraid of if he came back here snirfing around, but it was better than nothing.
He slid into the room, a wino-hideout if he had ever seen one, then grabbed the boss and hugged him. Mar-inville laughed, sounding both surprised and pleased. “Just no tongue, Steve, I insist.”
Steve held him by the shoulders, grinning. “I thought you were dead. We found your scoot buried in the sand.”
“You found it.” Now Marinville sounded delighted. “Son of a bitch!”
“What happened to your face.”
Marinville held the lens of the flashlight under his chin, turning his lumpy, discolored face into something out of a horror movie. His nose looked like roadkill. His grin, although cheerful, made matters even worse. “If I made a speech to PEN America looking like this, do you think the assholes would finally listen.”
“Man,” Cynthia said, awed, “someone put a real hurt on you.”
“Entragian,” Marinville said gravely. “Have you met him.”
“No,” Steve said. “And judging from what I’ve heard and seen so far, I don’t want to.”
The bathroom door swung open, squalling on its hinges, and a kid stood there-short hair, pale face, blood—smeared Cleveland Indians tee-shirt. He had a flashlight in one hand, and he moved it quickly, picking out the newcomers’ faces one at a time. Things came together in Steve’s mind as neatly as jigsaw-puzzle pieces. He sup-posed the kid’s shirt was the key connection.
“Are you Steve.” the boy asked.
Steve nodded. “That’s me. Steve Ames. This is Cynthia Smith. And you’re my phone—pal.”
The boy smiled wanly at that.
“That was good timing, David. You’ll probably never know how good. It’s nice to meet you. David Carver, isn’t it.”
He stepped forward and shook the boy’s free hand, enjoying the look of surprise on his face. God knew the kid had surprised him, coming through on the phone that way.
“How do you know my last name.”
Cynthia took David’s hand when Steve let it go. She shook it once, firmly. “We found your Humvee or Win-nebago or whatever it is. Steve there checked out your baseball cards.”
“Be honest,” Steve said to David. “Do you think Cleve-land’s ever gonna win the World Series.”
“I don’t care, just as long as I’m around to see them play another game,” David said with a trace of a smile.
Cynthia turned toward the woman from the laundry—mat, the one they might have shot if they’d had guns. “And this is-”
“Audrey Wyler,” the dark-haired woman said. “I’m a consulting geologist for Diablo Mining. At least, I was.” She scanned the ladies’ room with large dazed eyes, taking in the carton of liquor bottles, the bins of beer—cans, the fabulous fish swimming on one dirty tiled wall. “Right now I don’t know what I am. What I feel like is meatloaf three days left over.”
She turned, little by little, toward Marinville as she spoke, much as she had turned toward Steve outside the laundrymat, and took up her original scripture.
“We have to get out of town. Your pal here says the road out is blocked, but I know another one. It’s goes from the staging area down at the bottom of the embank-ment out to Highway 50. It’s a mess, but there are ATVs in the motor-pool, half a dozen of them-”
“I’m sure your knowledge will come in very handy, but I think we ought to pass that part by, for the time being,” Marinville said. He spoke in a professionally soothing voice, one Steve recognized right away. It was how the boss talked to the women (it was invariably women, usu-ally in their fifties or early sixties) who set up his literary lectures-what he called his cultural bombing runs. “We had better talk things over a little, first. Come on into the theater. There’s quite a setup there. I think you’ll be amazed.”
“What are you, stupid.” she asked. “We don’t need to talk things over, we need to get out of here.” She looked around at them. “You don’t seem to grasp what has hap-pened here.
This man, Collie Entragian-”
Marinville raised his flashlight and shone it full into his face for a moment, letting her get a good look. “I’ve met the man, as you can see, and I grasp plenty. Come on out front, Ms. Wyler, and we’ll talk. I see you’re impatient with that idea, but it’s for the best. The carpenters have a saying-measure twice, cut once.
It’s a good saying. All right.”
She gave him a reluctant look, but when he started toward the door, she followed. So did Steve and Cynthia. Outside, the wind screamed around the theater, making it groan in its deepest joints.
The dark shape ofacar, one with lightbars on the roof, rolled slowly north through the windscreaming dark, away from the rampart that marked China Pit at the south end of Desperation. It rolled with its lights off; the thing behind the wheel saw quite well in the dark, even when that darkness was stuffed with flying grit.
The car passed the bodega at the town’s south end. The fallen sign reading MEXICAN FOOD’s was now mostly cov-ered by blowing sand; all that still showed in the weak glow of the porch bulb was CAN FOO. The cruiser drove slowly on up the street to the Municipal Building, turned into the lot, and parked where it had before. Behind the wheel, the large, slumped figure wearing the Sam Browne belt with the badge on the cross-strap was singing an old song in a tuneless, droning voice: “And we’ll go danc in, baby, then you’ll see… How the magic’s in the music and the music’s in me…
The creature in the driver’s seat killed the Caprice’s engine and then just sat there, head down, fingers tapping at the wheel. A buzzard flapped out of the flying dirt, made a last—minute course adjustment as the wind gusted, then landed on the hood of the cruiser. A second fol-lowed, and a third. This latest arrival squalled at his mates, then squirted a thick stream of guano onto the car’s hood.
They lined up, looking in through the dirty windshield. “Jews,” the driver said, “must die.
And Catholics. Mor-mons, too. Tak.”
The door opened. One foot swung out, then another.
The figure in the Sam Browne belt stood up, slammed the door shut. It held its new hat under its arm for the time being. In its other hand it held the shotgun the woman, Mary, had grabbed off the desk. It walked around to the front door. Here, flanking the steps, were two coyotes. They whined uneasily and shrank down on their haunches, grinning sycophantic doggy grins at the approaching figure, which passed them with no acknowl-edgement at all.
It reached for the door, and then its hand froze. The door was ajar. A vagary of the wind had sucked it most of the way shut… but not completely.
“What the fuck.” it muttered, and opened the door. It went upstairs fast, first putting the hat on (jamming it down hard; it didn’t fit so well now) and then shifting the shotgun to both hands.
Acoyote lay dead at the top of the stairs. The door which led into the holding area was also standing open. The thing with the shotgun in its hands stepped in, knowing already what it would see, but the knowing did not stop the angry roar which came out of its chest. Out-side, at the foot of the steps, the coyotes whined and cringed and squirted urine. On the police-cruiser, the buz-zards also heard the cry of the thing upstairs and fluttered their wings uneasily, almost lifting off and then settling back, darting their heads restlessly at each other, as if to peck.