Stephen King – Desperation

“Why?” she whispered. “Why?”

He shook his head. He didn’t know why, didn’t have a clue. The only two things he was sure of were that the people who had done this were gone, or he and Cynthia would have been dead already, and that he, Steven Ames ofLubbock,Texas , did not want to be here if they decided to come back.

The large space at the end of the Quonset hut looked like a combination workroom, lab, and storage area. It was lit by hanging hi-intensity lamps with metal hoods, a little like the lights which hang over the tables in billiard emporiums. They cast a bright lemony glow. It looked to Steve as if two crews might have worked here at the same time, one doing assay work on the left side of the room, the other sorting and cataloguing on the right. There were Dandux laundry baskets lined up against the wall on the sorting side, each with chunks of rock in it. These had clearly been sorted; one basket was filled with rocks that were mostly black, another with smaller rocks, almost pebbles, that were shot through with glitters of quartz.

On the assay side (if that was what it was), there was a line of Macintosh computers set up on a long table littered with tools and manuals. The Macs were running screen- saver programs. One featured pretty, multicolored helix shapes above the words GAS CHROMATOGRAPH READY. Another, surely not Disney-sanctioned, showed Goofy pulling down his pants every seven seconds or so, revealing a large boner with the words HYUCK HYUCK HYUCK written on it.

At the far end of the room, inside a closed overhead garage door with the words WELCOME TO

HERNANDO’S HIDEAWAY printed on it in blue paint, was an ATV with an open carrier hooked up behind it. This was also full of rock samples. On the wall to its left was a sign reading YOU MUST

WEAR A HARDHAT MSHA REGULATIONS NO EXCUSES. There was a row of hooks running below the sign, but there were no hardhats hung from them. The hardhats were scattered on the floor, below the dangling feet of the people who had been hung from the hooks, hung like roasts in a butcher’s walk-in freezer.

“Steve . . . Steve, are they like . . . dummies? Depart-ment store mannequins? Is it… you know.., a joke?”

“No.” The word was small and felt as dusty as the air outside, but it was a start. “You know they’re not.

Let up, Cynthia, you’re breaking my hand.”

“Don’t make me let go,” she said in a wavery voice. Her hand was still up to her face and she stared one-eyed at the dangling corpses across the room. On the radio, The Tractors had been replaced by David Lee Murphy, and David Lee Murphy had given way to an ad for a place called Whalen’s, which the announcer described as “Austin’s Anything Store!”

“You don’t have to let go, just let up a little,” Steve said. He raised an unsteady finger and began to count. One.., two.. . three…

“I think I wet my pants a little,” she said.

“Don’t blame you.” Four. . . five.., six…

“We have to get out of here, Steve, this makes the guy who broke my nose look like Santa Cl-”

“Be quiet and let me count!”

She fell silent, her mouth trembling and her chest hitching as she tried to contain her sobs. Steve was sorry he’d shouted-this one had been through a lot even before today-but he wasn’t thinking very well.

Christ, he wasn’t entirely sure he was thinking at all.

“Thirteen,” he said.

“Fourteen,” she corrected in a shaky, humble voice. “Do you see? In the corner? One of them fell off.

One of them fell off the h-h-h-”

“Hook” was what she was trying to say, but the stutter turned into miserable little cries and she began to weep. Steve took her in his arms and held her, feeling her hot, wet face throb against his chest. Low on his chest. She was so goddamn small.

Over the fuzz of her extravagantly colored hair he could see the other side of the room, and she was right- there was another body crumpled in the corner. Fourteen dead in all, at least three of them women.

With their heads hanging and their chins on their chests, it was hard to tell for sure about some of the others. Nine were wearing lab coats-no, ten, counting the one in the corner-and two were in jeans and open-necked shirts. Two others were wearing suits, string ties, dress boots. One of these appeared to have no left hand, and Steve had a pretty good idea of where that hand might be, oh yes indeed he did.

Most had been shot, and they must have been facing their killers, because Steve could see gaping exit wounds in the backs of most of the dropped heads. At least three, however, had been opened like fish.

They hung with their white coats stained maroon and pools of blood beneath them and their guts dangling.

“Now here’s Mary Chapin Carpenter to tell us why she feels lucky today,” the radio announcer said, emerging gamely from another blast of static. “Maybe she’s been to Whalen’s inAustin . Let’s find out.”

Mary Chapin Carpenter began to tell the hanging dead men and women in the lab of the Desperation Mining Corporation about her lucky day, how she’d won the lottery and all, and Steve let go of Cynthia.

He took a step into the lab and sniffed the air. No gunsmoke that he could smell, and maybe that didn’t mean much-the air conditioners probably turned over the air in here pretty fast-but the blood was dry on the corpses which had been eviscerated, and that probably meant whoever had done this was long gone.

“Let’s go!” Cynthia hissed, tugging his arm.

“Okay,” he said. “Just-”

He broke off as something caught his eye. It was sitting on the end of the computer table, to the right of the screen with the Goofy-flasher on it. Not a rock, or not just a rock, anyway. Some kind of stone artifact. He walked over and looked down at it.

The girl scurried after him and yanked his arm again. “What’s the matter with you? This isn’t a guided tour! What if-” Then she saw what he was looking at-really saw it-and broke off. She reached out a tentative finger and touched it. She gasped and drew her finger back. At the same moment her hips jerked forward as if she’d gotten an electric shock and her pelvis banged into the edge of the table.

“Holy shit,” she breathed. “I think I just-” And there she stopped.

“Just what?”

“Nothing.” But she looked as if she was blushing, so Steve guessed maybe it was something, at that.

“There ought to be a picture of that thing next to ugly in the dictionary.”

It was a rendering of what might have been a wolf or a coyote, and although it was crude, it had enough power to make them both forget, at least for a few seconds, that they were standing sixty feet from the leftovers of a mass murder. The beast’s head was twisted at a strange angle (a somehow hungry angle), and its eyeballs appeared to be starting out of their sockets in utter fury. Its snout was wildly out of proportion to its body-almost the snout of an alligator-and it was split open to show a jagged array of teeth. The statue, if that was what it was, had been broken off just below the chest. There were stumps of forelegs, but that was all. The stone was pitted and eroded with age. It was glittery in places, too, like

the rocks collected in one of the Dandux baskets. Beside it, anchored by a plastic box of pushpins, was a note: Jim-What the hell is this? Any idea? Barbie.

“Look at its tongue,” Cynthia said in a strange, dreaming voice.

“What about it?”

“It’s a snake.”

Yes, he saw, it was. A rattler, maybe. Something with fangs, anyway.

Cynthia’s head snapped up. Her eyes were wide and alarmed. She grabbed his shirt again and pulled it.

“What are we doing?” she asked, “This isn’t art-appreciation class, for Christ’s sake-we’ve got to get out of here!”

Yeah, we do, Steve thought. The question is, where do we go?

They’d worry about it when they got to the truck. Not in here. He had an idea it would be impossible to do any productive thinking in here.

“Hey, what happened to the radio?” she asked.

“Huh?” He listened, but the music was gone. “I don’t know.”

With a strange, set expression on her face, Cynthia reached out to the crumbling fragment on the table again. This time she touched it between the ears. She gasped. The hanging lights flickered-Steve saw them flicker- and the radio came back on. “Hey Dwight, hey Lyle, boys, you don ‘t need to fight,” Mary Chapin Carpenter sang through the static, “hot dog, I feel lucky tonight!”