Stephen King – Desperation

“My dose!” Johnny cried. It had started bleeding again, and he once more sounded like a human foghorn. “Oh Christ, it hurts!”

“Shut up, you baby,” the cop said. “Gosh, aren’t you spleeny?”

He backed up a little, then turned the cruiser so it was facing west on the cross-street. He cranked his window down and poked his head out. The nape of his neck was now the color of age-darkened bricks, badly blistered, crisscrossed with cracks. Bright lines of blood filled some of these. “Billy!” the cop yelled. “Yo, you Billy Ran- court! Hey, you old cuss!”

The western end of Desperation appeared to be a residential section-dusty and dispirited, but maybe a cut or two above the trailer park. Through his watering eyes, Johnny saw a man in bluejeans and a cowboy hat standing in the center of the street. He had been looking at two bicycles which sat there upside down, with their wheels sticking up. There had been three, but the smallest-a candy-pink little girl’s bike-had fallen over in the strengthening wind. The wheels of the other two spun madly. Now this fellow looked up, saw the cruiser, waved hesitantly, then started toward them.

The cop pulled his large square head back in. He turned to look at Johnny, who understood at once that the guy out there couldn’t have gotten a good look at this particular officer of the law; if he had, he would be running in the other direction right now. The cop’s mouth had the sunken, infirm, look of lips with no teeth to back them up, and blood ran from the corners in little streams. One of his eyes was a cauldron of gore except for an occasional gray flash from its swimming depths, it could have been a plucked socket.

A shiny mat of blood covered the top half of his khaki shirt.

“That’s Billy Rancourt,” he confided happily. “He cuts my hair. I been looking for him.”

He lowered his voice to that register at which confidences are imparted and added, “He drinks a bit.”

Then he faced front, dropped the transmission into Drive, and floored the accelerator. The rumbling engine howled; the tires squalled; Johnny was thrown backward, yelling with surprise. The cruiser shot forward.

Johnny reached out, hooked his fingers through the mesh, and hauled himself back to a sitting position.

He saw the man in the jeans and cowboy hat-Big-Balls Billy Rancourt just standing there in the street ten feet or so in front of the bikes, frozen, watching them come. He seemed to swell in the windshield as the cruiser ran at him; it was like watching some crazy camera trick.

“No!” Johnny shrieked, beating his left hand at the mesh behind the cop’s head. “No, don‘t! Don’t!

MISTER, LOOK OUT!”

At the last minute, Billy Rancourt understood and tried to run. He broke to his right, toward a ramshackle house squatting tiredly behind a picket fence, but it was too little and too late. He yelled, then there was a crump as the cruiser struck him hard enough to make the frame shudder. Blood spattered the picket fence, there was a double thud from beneath the car as the wheels ran over the fallen man, and then the cruiser hit the fence and knocked it down. The big cop jammed on the brakes, bringing the cruiser to a stop in the bald dirt dooryard of the ramshackle house. Johnny was thrown forward into the mesh again, but this time he managed to get his arm up and his head down, protecting his nose.

“Billy, you bugger!” the cop cried happily. “Tak an lah!”

Billy Rancourt screamed. Johnny turned in the back seat of the cruiser and saw him crawling as fast as he could toward the north side of the Street. That wasn’t very fast; he was trailing a broken leg. There were tread-marks running across the back of his shirt and the set of his jeans. His cowboy hat was sitting on the pavement, now turned upside down like the bicycles. Billy Rancourt bumped it with one knee, knocking it aslant, and blood poured out over the brim like water.

More blood was gushing from his split skull and broken face. He was badly hurt, but although he had been struck amidships and then run over, he didn’t appear even close to dead. That didn’t surprise Johnny much. Most times it took a lot to kill a man-he had seen it again and again in Vietnam Guys alive with half their heads blown off, guys alive with their guts piled in their laps and drawing flies, guys alive with their jugulars spouting through their dirty fin-gers. People usually died hard.

That was the horror of it.

“YeeHAw!” the cop yelled, and dropped the cruiser s transmission into Reverse. The tires screamed and smoked across the sidewalk, bounced back into the street and ran over Billy Rancourt’s cowboy hat. The cruiser s back deck hit one of the bikes (it made a hell of a bang cracked the rear window, then flew out of sight for a moment before coming down in front). Johnny had time to see that Billy Rancourt had stopped crawling, that he was looking back over his shoulder at them, that his blood-streaked broken-nosed face wore an expression of unspeakable resignation. He can’t even be thirty, Johnny thought, and then the man was borne under the reversing car. It lurched over the body and came to a stop, idling against the far curb. The cop hit the horn with the point of his elbow, making it blip briefly, as he turned to face for ward again. Ahead of the cruiser’s nose, Billy Rancourt lay face-down in a huge splat of blood. One of his feet twitched, then stopped.

“Whoa,” the cop said. “What a damn mess, huh?”

“Yeah, you killed him,” Johnny said. Suddenly he didn’t care anymore about playing this guy up, outlasting him. He didn’t care about the book, or his Harley, or where Steve Ames might be. Maybe later-if there was a later-he would care about some of those things, but not now. Now, in his shock and dismay, an earlier draft of himself had come out from someplace inside; a pre-edited version of Johnny Marinville who didn’t give a shit about the Pulitzer Prize or the National Book Award or fucking actresses, with or without emeralds. “Ran him over in the street like a damn rabbit. Brave boy!”

The cop turned, gave him a considering look with his one good eye, then turned back to face the windshield again. “ ‘I have taught thee in the way of wisdom,’” he said, “‘I have led thee in right paths. When thou goest, thy steps shall not be straitened; and when thou run- nest, thou shalt not stumble.’ That’s from the Book of Adverbs, John.

But I think old Billy stumbled. Yes, I do. He was always a gluefoot. I think that was his basic problem.”

Johnny opened his mouth. For one of the few times in his entire life, nothing came out.

Maybe that was just as well.

“‘Take fast hold of instruction; let her not go: keep her; for she is thy life.’ That’s a little advice you could afford to take, Mr. Marinville, sir. Excuse me a minute.”

He got out and walked to the dead man in the street, his boots seeming to shimmer as the strengthening wind blew sand across them. There was a large bloody patch on the seat of his uniform pants now, and when he bent to pick up the late Billy Rancourt, Johnny saw more blood oozing out through the ripped seams under the cop’s arms. It was as if he were literally sweating blood.

Maybe so. Probably so. I think he’s on the verge of crashing and bleeding out, the way hemophiliacs some-times do. if he wasn’t so Christing big, he’d probably be dead already. You know what you have to do. Don‘t you?

Yes, of course he did. He had a bad temper, a horrible temper, and it seemed that not even getting the shit kicked out of him by a homicidal maniac had changed that. What he had to do now was keep that temper of his under control. No more cracks, like calling the cop a brave boy just now. That had earned him a look Johnny hadn’t liked at all. A dangerous look.

The cop carried Billy Rancourt’s body across the street, stepping between the two fallen bikes and past the one with its wheels still whirring and its spokes shining in the evening light. He tromped over the knocked-down piece of picket fence, climbed the steps of the house behind it, and shifted his burden so he could try the door. It opened with no trouble. Johnny wasn’t surprised. He supposed that people out here did not, as a rule, bother locking their doors.

He’ll have to kill the people inside, he thought. That’s pretty much automatic.