David went to his father and began to hug him. As Ralph’s arms went around the boy in response, David felt that enormous force grab at him again. It ran through him like hard rain. He jerked convulsively in his father’s arms, gasping, then took a blind step backward. His hands, shaking wildly, were held out before him.
“David!” Ralph cried. “David, what-”
And it was over. As quickly as that. The force left. But he could still see the China Pit as he had seen it for a moment in the circle of his father’s arms; it had been like looking down from a low-flying plane. It glimmered in the last of the moonlight, a wretched alabaster sinkhole.
He could hear the ruffle of the wind in his ears and a voice
(mi him, en tow! mi him, en tow!)
calling. A voice that wasn’t human.
He made an effort to clear his mind and look around at them-so few left now, so few of The Collie Entragian Survival Society. Steve and Cynthia standing together, his father bending down toward him; behind them, the moon- drenched night.
“What is it?” Ralph asked unsteadily. “Christ Al-mighty, what now?”
He saw he had dropped the wallet, and bent to pick it up. Wouldn’t do to leave it here, gosh no. He thought of putting it into his own back pocket, then thought of how it had fallen out of Johnny’s and dumped it down the front of his shirt instead.
“You have to go to the pit.” he told his father. “Daddy, you and Steve and Cynthia have to go out to the China Pit right now. Mary needs help. Do you understand? Mary needs help!”
“What are you talk-”
“She got out, she’s running down the road toward town, and Tak is chasing her. You have to go now.
Right now!”
Ralph reached for him again, but this time in a tentative, strengthless way. David ducked easily beneath
his arm and jumped from the Ryder truck’s tailgate into the street.
“David!” Cynthia cried. “Splitting up like this … are you sure it’s right?”
‘No!” he shouted back. He felt desperate and confused and more than a little stunned. “I know how wrong it feels, it feels wrong to me, too, but there’s nothing else! I swear to you! There’s just nothing else!”
“You get back in here!” Ralph bawled.
David turned, dark eyes meeting his father’s frantic gaze. “Go, Dad. All three of you.
Now. You have to. Help her! For God’s sake, help Mary!”
And before anyone could ask another question, David Carver turned on his heel and went pelting off into the dark. With one hand he pumped the air; the other he held against the front of his shirt, cupping John Edward Marinville’s genuine crocodile wallet, three hundred and ninety-five dollars, Barneys of New York.
Ralph tried to jump out after his son. Steve grabbed him by the shoulders, and Cynthia grabbed him around the waist.
“Let me go!” Ralph shouted, struggling … but not struggling too hard, at that. Steve felt marginally encouraged. ‘Let me go after my son!”
“No,” Cynthia said. “We have to believe he knows what he’s doing, Ralph.”
“I can’t lose him, too,” Ralph whispered, but he relaxed, quit trying to pull away from them. “I can’t.”
“Maybe the best way to make sure that doesn’t happen is to go along with what he wants,” Cynthia said.
Ralph drew a deep breath, then exhaled it. “My son went after that asshole,” he said. He sounded as if he were talking to himself. Explaining to himself. “He went after that conceited asshole to give him back his wallet, and if we asked him why, he’d say because it’s God’s will. Am 1 right?”
“Yeah, probably,” Cynthia said. She reached out and touched Ralph’s shoulder. He opened his eyes and she smiled at him. “And you know the bitch of it? it’s probably the truth.”
Ralph looked at Steve. “You wouldn’t leave him, would you? Pick up Mary, take that equipment-road back to the highway, and leave my boy behind?”
Steve shook his head.
Ralph put his hands to his face, seemed to gather him-self, dropped his hands, and stared at them. There was a stony cast to his features now, a look of resolves taken and bridges burned. A queer thought came to Steve: for the first time since he’d met the Carvers, he could see the son in the father.
“All right,” Ralph said. “We’ll leave God to protect my kid until we get back.” He jumped off the back of the truck and looked grimly down the street. “It’ll have to be God.
That bastard Marinville sure won’t do it.”
The thought which flashed across Johnny’s mind as the wolf charged him was the kid saying that the creature running this show wanted them to leave town, would be happy to let them go. Maybe it was a little glitch in the kid’s second sight … or maybe Tak had just seen a chance to pick one of them off and was taking it. Never look a gift-horse in the mouth, and all that.
In either case, he thought, I am royally fucked.
You deserve to be, sweetheart, Terry said from behind him-yeah, that was Terry, all right, helpful to the end.
He brandished the hammer at the oncoming wolf and yelled “Get outta here!” in a shrill voice he barely recognized as his own.
The wolf broke left and turned in a tight circle, growling as it went, hindquarters low to the ground, tail tucked. One of its powerful shoulders struck a cabinet as it completed its turn, and a teacup balanced on top of it fell off and shattered on the floor. The radio coughed out a long, loud bray of static.
Johnny took one step toward the door, visualizing how be would pelt down the hail and out into the parking lot- fuck the ATV, he’d find wheels elsewhere-and then the wolf was in the aisle again, head down and hackles up, eyes (horribly intelligent, horribly aware eyes) glowing. Johnny retreated, holding the hammer up in front of him like a knight saluting the king with his sword, waggling it slightly. He could feel his palm sweating against the hammer’s perforated rubber sleeve. The wolf looked huge, the size of a fullgrown German Shepherd at least. By comparison, the hammer looked ridiculously small, the kind of pantry-cabinet accessory one kept around for repairing shelves or installing picture-hooks.
“God help me,” Johnny said … but he felt no presence here; God was just something you said, a word you used when you could see the shit once more getting ready to obey the law of gravity and fall into the fan. No God, no God, he wasn’t a suburban kid from Ohio still three years away from his first encounter with a razor, prayer was just a manifestation of what psychologists called “magical thinking,” and there was no God.
If there was, why would he come see about me, anyhow? Why would he come see about me after I left the others back in that truck?
The wolf suddenly barked at him. It was an absurd sound, high-pitched, the kind of bark Johnny would have expected from a poodle or a cocker spaniel. There was nothing absurd about its teeth, though.
Thick curds of spit flew out from between them with each high-pitched bark.
“Get out!” Johnny yelled at it in his shrill, wavering voice. “Get out right now!”
Instead of getting out, the wolf screwed its hindquarters down toward the floor. For a moment Johnny
thought it was going to take a crap, that it was every damn bit as scared as he was, and it was going to take a crap on the laboratory floor. Then, a split second before it happened, be realized the wolf was preparing not to crap but to leap. At him.
“No, God no, please!” he screamed, and turned to run-back toward the ATV and the bodies hanging stiffly on their hooks.
In his head he did this; his body moved in the opposite direction, forward, as if directed by hands he could not see. There was no sense of being possessed, but a clear and unmistakable feeling of being no longer alone. His terror fell away. His first powerful instinct-to turn and run-also fell away. He took a step forward instead, pushing off from the table with his free hand. He cocked the hammer back to beyond his right shoulder and hurled it just as the wolf launched itself at him.
He expected the hammer to spin and was sure it would sail over the animal’s head-he had pitched at Lincoln Park High School about a thousand years ago and still knew the feeling of one that was going to be wild-high – but it didn’t. It was no Excalibur, just a plain old Crafts- man hammer with a perforated rubber sleeve on it to _ improve the grip, but it didn’t turn over and it didn’t go high.