Stephen King – Desperation

Laths snapped; nails squealed as they divorced the boards to which they had been wedded. Then, at last, the balcony began to tilt. Audrey tumbled over the side. For just a moment Steve saw her feet sticking out of the dust, and then she was gone. A moment later and the balcony was gone, too, falling like a stone and hitting the seats below with a tremendous crash. Dust boiled up in a miniature mushroom cloud.

“David!” Steve shouted. “What about David? Is he alive?”

“I don’t know,” Ralph said. He looked at them with dazed and teary eyes. “I’m sure he was when I brought him out of the projection-booth, but now I don’t know. I can’t feel him breathing at all.”

ALL the doors leading into the auditorium had been chocked open, and the lobby was glazed with dust from the fallen balcony. They carried David over to one of the street doors, where a draft from the outside pushed the worst of the drifting dust away.

“Put him down,” Cynthia said. She was trying to think what to do next-hell, what to do first-but her thoughts kept junking up on her. “And lay him straight. Let’s turn his airways into freeways.”

Ralph looked at her hopefully as he and Steve lowered David to the threadbare carpet.

“Do you know anything about . .. this?”

“Depends on what you mean,” she said. “Some first aid-including artificial respiration from when I was back at Daughters and Sisters, yeah. But if you’re asking if I know anything about ladies who turn into homicidal maniacs and then decay, no.”

“He’s all I got, miss,” Ralph said. “All that’s left of my family.”

Cynthia closed her eyes and bent toward David. What she felt relieved her enormously. The faint but clear touch of breath on her face. “He’s alive. I can feel him breathing.” She looked up at Ralph and smiled. “I’m not surprised you couldn’t. Your face is swelled up like an inner tube.”

“Yeah. Maybe that was it. But mostly I was just so afraid He tried to smile back at her and failed. He let out a gusty sigh and groped backward to lean against the boarded-over candy counter.

“I’m going to help him now,” Cynthia said. She looked down at the boy’s pale face and closed eyes.

“I’m just going to help you along, David. Speed things up. Let me help you, okay? Let me help you.”

She turned his head gently to one side, wincing at the fingermarks on his neck. In the auditorium, a hanging piece of the balcony gave up the ghost and fell with a crash. The others looked that way, but Cynthia’s concentration remained on David. She used the fingers of her left hand to open his mouth, leaned forward, and gently pinched his nostrils shut with her right hand. Then she put her mouth on his and exhaled. His chest rose more steeply, then settled as she released his nose and pulled away from him. She bent to one side and spoke into his ear in a low voice. “Come back to us, David. We need you.

And you need us.”

She breathed deep into his mouth again, and said, “Come back to us, David,” as he exhaled a mixture of his air and hers. She looked into his face. His unassisted breathing was a little stronger now, she thought, and she could see his eyeballs moving beneath his blue-tinged lids, but he showed no signs of waking up.

“Come back to us, David. Come back.”

Johnny looked around, blinking like someone just back from the further reaches of his thoughts. Where’s Mary You don’t suppose the goddamn balcony fell on her, do you?”

“Why would it have?” Steve asked. “She was with the old guy.”

‘And you think she’s still with the old guy? After all the yelling? After the goddamn balcony fell off the goddamn wall?”

“You’ve got a point,” Steve said.

“Here we go again,” Johnny said, “I knew it. Come on, I guess we better go look for her.”

Cynthia took no notice. She knelt with her face in front of David’s, searching it earnestly with her eyes.

“I dunno where you are, kid, but get your ass back here. It’s time to saddle up and get out of Dodge.”

Johnny picked up the shotgun and the rifle. He handed the latter to Ralph. “Stay here with your boy and the young lady,” he said. “We’ll be back.”

“Yeah? What if you’re not?”

Johnny looked at him uncertainly for a moment, then broke into a sunny grin. “Burn the documents, trash the radio, and swallow your death capsule.”

“Huh?”

“How the fuck should 1 know? Use your judgement. I can tell you this much, Ralph: as soon as we’ve collected Ms. Jackson, we’re totally historical. Come on, Steve Down the far lefthand aisle, unless you’ve an urge to climbMountBalcony .”

Ralph watched them through the door, then turned back to Cynthia and his son. “What’s wrong with David, do you have any idea? Did that bitch choke him into a coma9 He had a friend who was in a coma once, David did. He came out of it-it was a miracle, everyone said-but I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy. Is that what’s wrong with him, do you think?”

“I don’t think he’s unconscious at all, let alone in a coma. Do you see the way his eyelids are moving?

It’s more like he’s asleep and dreaming. . . or in a trance.”

She looked up at him. Their eyes met for a moment, and then Ralph knelt down across from her. He brushed his son’s hair off his brow and then kissed him gently between the eyes, where the skin was puckered in a faint frown. “Come back, David,” he said. “Please come back.”

David breathed quietly through pursed lips. Behind his bruised eyelids, his eyes moved and moved.

In the men’s room they found one dead cougar, its head mostly blown off, and one dead veterinarian with his eyes open. In the ladies’ room, they found nothing… or so it seemed to Steve.

“Shine your light back over there,” Johnny told him. When Steve retrained the flashlight on the window he said, “No, not the window. The floor underneath it.”

Steve dropped the beam and ran it along half a dozen beer-bottles standing against the wall just to the right of the window.

“The doc’s booby-trap,” Johnny said. “Not broken but neatly set aside. Interesting.”

“I didn’t even notice they were gone from the window- ledge. That’s good on you, boss.”

“Come on over here.” Johnny crossed to the window, held it up, peeked out, then moved aside enough for Steve to join him. “Cast your mind back to your arrival at this bucolic palace of dreams, Steven.

What’s the last thing you did before sliding all the way into this room? Can you remember?”

Steve nodded. “Sure. We stacked two crates to make it easier to climb in the window. I pushed the top one off, because I figured if the cop came back here and saw them piled up that way, it would be like a pointing arrow.”

“Right. But what do you see now?”

Steve used his flashlight, although he didn’t really need to; the wind had died almost completely, and all but the most errant skims of dust had dropped. There was even a scantling of moon.

“They’re stacked again,” he said, and turned to Johnny

with an alarmed look. “Oh shit! Entragian came while we were occupied with David.

Came and took her was how he meant to finish, but he saw the boss shaking his head and stopped.

“That’s not what this says.” Johnny took the flashlight and ran it along the row of bottles again. “Not smashed set neatly aside in a row. Who did that? Audrey? No she went the other way-after David.

Billingsley? Not possible, considering the shape he was in before he died. That leaves Mary, but would she have done it for the cop?”

“I doubt it,” Steve said.

“Me too. I think that if the cop had shown up back here _ she would have come running to us, screaming bloody murder. And why the stacked crates? I’ve got some personal experience of Collie Entragian; he’s six-six at least, probably more. He wouldn’t have needed a step up to get in the window.

To me those stacked crates suggest either LL. a shorter person, a ruse to get Mary into a position where she could be grabbed, or maybe both. I could be over- deducing, I suppose, but-”

“So there could be more of them. More like Audrey.”

“Maybe, but I don’t think you can conclude that out of what we see here. I just don’t think she would have put those beer-bottles aside for any stranger. Not even a bawling little kid. You know? I think she would have come to get us.”