She leaned into Entragian’s stink-except it was really Tak ‘s stink, she knew that now and ripped the bear off the dashboard. Now its blank can toi eyes stared directly up at hers, as if asking her what all this foolishness could possibly be about, what good it could possibly accomplish, what evil it could possibly change. “Well,” she told it, “you ‘re gone, motherfucker, and that’s step one.” She dropped it to the rough surface of the pit and then stamped down on it. Hard. She felt it crunch under her sneaker. It was, in some fundamental way, the most satisfying moment of the whole miserable nightmare.
“Don’t tell me,” Johnny said. “It’s some new variation of est therapy. A symbolic affirmation expressly designed for stressful life-passages, sort of an ‘I’m okay, you’re stomped to shit’ kind of thing. Or-”
“Shut up,” she said, not unkindly. “And you can let loose of me now.”
“Do I have to?” His hand moved on her waist. “I was just getting familiar with the topography.”
“Too bad I’m not a map.”
Johnny dropped his hand and they walked back to the others.
“David?” Steve asked. “Is that the place?”
He pointed past the cluster of heavy machinery and to the left of the rusty Quonset with the stove-stack.
About – twenty yards up the slope was the squarish hole she had seen earlier. Then she hadn’t given it much consideration, as she’d had other fish to frystaying alive, chiefly-but now looking at it gave her a bad feeling. A weak-in the knees feeling. Well, she thought, I did the bear, anyway it’ll never stare at anyone else cooped up in the back of that police-cruiser There’s that much.
“That’s it,” David said. “China Shaft.”
“Can tak in can tah,” his father said, as if in a dream
“Yes.”
”And we have to blow it up?” Steve asked. “Just how do we go about that?”
David pointed to the concrete cube near the field office “First we have to get inside there.”
They walked over to the powder magazine. Ralph yanked at the padlock on the door, as if to get the feel of it, then racked the Ruger. The metallic clack-clack sound it made was very loud in the stillness of the pit. “The rest of you stand back,” he said. “This always works great in the movies, but in real life, who knows.”
Wait a sec, wait a sec,” Johnny said, and ran back to the Ryder truck. They heard him rummaging through the cartons of stuff just behind the cab, then: “Oh! There you are, you ugly thing.”
He came back carrying a black Bell motorcycle helmet with a full face-shield. He handed it to Ralph.
“Brain bucket deluxe. I hardly ever wear this one, because there’s too much of it. I get it over my head and my claustrophobia kicks in. Put it on.”
Ralph did. The helmet made him look like a futuristic welder. Johnny stepped back from him as he turned to the lock again. So did the others. Mary had her hands on David’s shoulders.
“Why don’t you guys turn around?” Ralph said. His voice was muffled by the helmet.
Mary kept expecting David to protest-concern for his father, perhaps even exaggerated concern, wouldn’t be unusual, given the fact that he had lost the other two members of his family in the last twelve
hours-but David said nothing. His face was only a pale blur in the dark, impossible to read, but she sensed no agitation in him. Certainly the shoulders under her hands were calm enough, at least for now.
Maybe he saw it was going to be all right, she thought. In that vision he had.., or whatever it was. Or maybe- She didn’t want to finish that thought, but was slow closing it off.
-maybe he just knows there ‘s no other choice.
There was a long moment of silence-very long, it seemed to Mary-and then a high whip crack rifle report that should have echoed and didn’t. It was just there and then gone, absorbed by the walls and benches and valleys of the open pit. In its aftermath she heard one startled bird-cry-Quowwwk!-and then nothing more. She wondered why Tak hadn’t sent the animals against them as it had sent them against so many of the people in town.
Because the six of them together were something special? Maybe. If so, it was David who had made them special, the way a single great player can elevate a whole team.
They turned and saw Ralph bent over the padlock (to Mary he looked like the Pieman bent over Simple Simon on the Howard Johnson’s signs), peering at it through the helmet’s faceplate. The lock was now warped and twisted, with a large black bullet-hole through the center of it, but when he yanked on it, it continued to hold fast.
“One more time,” he said, and twirled his finger at them, telling them to turn around.
They did and there was another whip crack. No bird-cry followed his one. Mary supposed whatever had called was far away by now, although she had heard no flapping wings. Not that she would have, probably, with two gun-shots ringing in her ears.
This time when Ralph yanked, the lock’s arm popped free of its ruined innards. Ralph pulled it off the hasp and threw it aside. When he took Johnny’s helmet off, he was grinning.
David ran to him and gave him a high-five. “Good going, Dad!”
Steve pulled the door open and peered in. “Man! Darker than a carload of assholes.”
“Is there a light-switch?” Cynthia asked. “No windows, there must be.”
He felt around, first on the right, then the left. “Watch for spiders,” Mary said nervously.
“There could be spiders.”
“Here it is, I got it,” Steve said. There was a click-click, click-click, but no light.
“Who’s still got a flashlight?” Cynthia asked. “I must’ve left mine back in the damned movie theater. I don’t have it, anyway.”
There was no answer. Mary had also had a flashlight- the one she’d found in the field office-and she thought she had tucked it into the waistband of her jeans after disabling the – pickup trucks. If so, it was gone now. The hatchet, too. She must have lost both items in her flight from the pit.
“Crap,” Johnny said. “Boy Scouts we ain’t.”
“There’s one in the truck, behind the seat,” Steve said. “Under the maps.”
“Why don’t you go get it?” Johnny said, but for a moment or two, Steve didn’t move.
He was looking at Johnny with a strange expression, one Mary couldn’t quite read, on his face. Johnny saw it, too. “What? Some-thing wrong?”
“Nope,” Steve said. “Nothing wrong, boss.”
“Then step on it.”
Steve Ames marked the exact moment when control over their little expeditionary force passed from David to Johnny; the moment when the boss became the boss again. Why don’t you go get it, he’d said, a question that wasn’t a question at all but the first real order Marinville had given him since they’d started out in Connecticut, Johnny on his motorcycle, Steve rolling leisurely along behind in the truck, puffing the occasional cheap cigar. He had called him boss (until Johnny told him to stop) because it was a tradition in the entertainment business: in the theater, sceneshifters called the stage manager boss; on a movie set, key grips called the director boss; out on tour, roadies called the tour-manager or the guys in the band boss. He had simply carried that part of his old life over into this job, but he hadn’t thought of Johnny as the boss, in spite of his booming stage-voice and his chin- thrust-forward, I-know-exactly-what-I’m-doing manner, until now. And this time, when Steve had called him boss, Johnny hadn’t objected.
Why don’t you go get it?
A nominal question, just six words, and everything had changed.
What’s changed? What, exactly?
“I don’t know,” he muttered, opening the driver’ s-side door of the Ryder truck and starting to rummage through the crap behind the seat. “That’s the hell of it, I don’t really know.~~
The flashlight-a long-barrelled, six-battery job-was under a crushed litter of maps, along with the first-aid kit and a cardboard box with a few road-flares in it. He tried the light, saw that it worked, and jogged back to the others.
“Look for spiders first,” Cynthia said. Her voice was just a little too high for normal conversation.
“Spiders and snakes, just like in that old song. God, I hate em.”
Steve stepped into the powder magazine and shone his light around, first running it over the floor, then the cinderblock walls, then the ceiling. “No spiders,” he reported. “No snakes.”
“David, stand right outside the door,” Johnny said. “We shouldn’t all cram in there together, I think. And if you see anyone or anything-”
“Give a yell,” David finished. “Don’t worry.
Steve centered the beam of the flashlight on a sign in the middle of the floor-it was on a stand, like the one in restaurants that said PLEASE WAIT FOR HOSTESS TO SEAT you. Only what this one said-in big red letters-was: