One hand was wrapped loosely around the gray metal Magna-Cube with the spare key in it.
“If it does start, we’ll caravan,” she told Steve. “Me behind you. If I get stuck, we’ll hop into the truck. I don’t think we will, though. It isn’t such a bad car, actually. If my goddamned sister-in-law just hadn’t used it as a dope- stash . . .“ Her voice trembled and she closed her lips tightly.
“I don’t think we’ll have to go far to get in the clear,” David said without looking up from the Acura’s grille. ‘Thirty miles? Forty? Then open road.”
Mary smiled at him. “I hope you’re right.”
“There’s a slightly more important question,” Cynthia said. “What are we going to tell the police about all this? The real police, I mean.”
No one said anything for a moment. Then David, still looking at the grille of the Acura, said: “The front part. Let them figure out the rest for themselves.”
“I don’t get you,” Mary said. She actually thought she did, but wanted to keep him talking. Wanted him out here with the rest of them mentally as well as physically.
“I’ll tell about how we had flat tires and the bad cop took us back to town. How he got us to go with him by saying there was a guy out in the desert with a rifle. Mary, you tell about how he stopped you and Peter. Steve, you tell about how you were looking for Johnny and Johnny phoned you. I’ll say how we escaped after he took my mother away.
How we went to the theater. How we called you on the phone, Steve. Then you can tell how you came to the theater, too. And that’s where we were all night. In the theater.”
“We never went up to the pit at all,” Steve mused. Testing it. Tasting it.
David nodded. The bruises on his throat glared in the strengthening sun. Already the day was beginning to grow hot. “Right,” he said.
‘And-sorry, David, I have to-your dad? What about him?”
“Went looking for my mom. He wanted me to say with you guys in the theater, so I did.”
“We never saw anything,” Cynthia said.
“No. Not really.” He opened the Magna-Cube, took out the key inside, gave it to Mary.
“Why don’t you try the engine?”
“In a sec. What are the authorities going to think about what they do find? All the dead people and dead animals? And what will they say? What will they give out?”
Steve said: “There are people who believe a flying saucer crashed not too far from here, back in the forties. – Did you know that?”
She shook her head.
“In Róswell, New Mexico. According to the story, there were even survivors. Astronauts from another 2 world. I don’t know if any of it’s true, but it might be. The evidence suggests that something pretty outrageous happened in Roswell. The government covered it up, what- L ever it was. The same way they’ll cover this up.”
Cynthia punched his arm. “Pretty paranoid, cookie.” He shrugged. “As to what they’ll think.., poison gas, maybe. Some weird shit that belched out of a pocket in the earth and made people crazy. And that’s not so far wrong, is it? Really?”
“No,” Mary said. “I think the most important thing is that we all tell the same story, just the way that David out-lined it.”
Cynthia shrugged, and a ghost of her old pert who-gives-a-shit look came over her face.
“Like if we break down and tell them what really happened they’re going to believe us, right?”
“Maybe they wouldn’t,” Steve said, “but if it’s all the same to you, I’d rather not spend the next six weeks taking polygraph tests and looking at inkblots when I could spend them looking at your exotic and mysterious face.”
She punched his arm again. A little harder this time She caught David watching this byplay and nodded to him. “You think I got a mysterious and exotic face?”
David turned away, studied the mountains to the north. Mary went around to the driver’s door of the Acura and opened it, reminding herself she’d have to pull the seat up before she could drive-Peter had been a foot taller than she. The glovebox was open from when she’d been pawing around in it for the registration, but surely a bulb as small as the one in there couldn’t draw more than a trickle of juice, could it? Well, it wasn’t exactly life and death in any- “Oh my Lord,” Steve said in a soft, strengthless voice.
“Oh my dear Lord, look.”
She turned. On the horizon, looking small at this distance, was the north face of the China Pit embankment. Above it was a gigantic cloud of dark gray dust. It hung in the sky, still connected to the pit by a hazy umbilicus of rising dust and powdered earth: the remains of a mountain rising into the sky like poisoned ground after a nuclear blast. It made the shape of a wolf, its tail pointing toward the newly risen sun, its grotesquely elongated snout pointed west, where the night was still draining sullenly from the sky.
The snout hung open. Protruding from it was a strange shape, amorphous but somehow reptilian. There was something of the scorpion in that shape, and of the lizard as well.
Can tak, can tah.
Mary screamed through raised hands. Looked up at the shape in the sky, eyes bulging over her dirty fingers, head shaking from side to side in a useless gesture of negation.
“Stop,” David said, and put his arm around her waist. “Stop, Mary. It can’t hurt us. And it’s going away already. See?”
It was true. The hide of the skywolf was tearing open in some places, appearing to melt in others, letting the sun shine through in long, golden rays that were both beautiful and somehow comical-the sort of shot you expected to see at the end of a Bible epic.
“I think we ought to go,” Steve said at last.
“I think we never should have come in the first place,” Mary said faintly, and got into the car. Already she could smell the aroma of her dead husband’s aftershave.
David stood watching as she pulled the seat for-ward and slipped the key into the ignition. He felt distant from himself, a creature floating in space somewhere between a dark star and a light one. He thought of sitting at the kitchen table back home, sitting there. and playing slap-jacks with Pie. He thought he would see Steve and Mary and Cynthia, nice as they were, dead and in hell for just one more game of Slap-jacks in the kitchen with her-Pie with a glass of Cranapple juice, him with a Pepsi, both of them giggling like mad. He would see him-self in hell, for that matter. How far could it be, after all, from Desperation?
Mary turned the key in the ignition. The engine cranked briskly and started almost at once. She grinned and clapped her hands.
“David? Ready to go?”
“Sure. I guess.”
“Hey?” Cynthia put a hand on the back of his neck. “You all right, my man?”
He nodded, not looking up.
Cynthia bent over and kissed his cheek. “You have to fight it,” she whispered in his ear.
“You have to fight it, you know?”
“I’ll try,” he said, but the days and weeks and months ahead looked impossible to him.
Go to your friend Brian, Johnny had said. Go to your friend and make him your brother.
And that might be a place to start, yes, but after that?
There were holes in him that cried out in pain, and would go on crying out for so much of the future. One for his mother, one for his father, one for his sister. Holes like faces.
Holes like eyes.
In the sky, the wolf had gone except for a paw and what might have been-perhaps-the tip of a tail. Of the reptilian thing in its mouth there was no sign.
“We beat you,” David whispered, starting around to the passenger side of the car. “We beat you, you son of a bitch, there’s that.”
Tak, whispered a smiling, patient voice far back in his mind. Tak ah lah. Tak ah wan.
He turned his mind and heart from it with an effort.
Go to your friend and make him your brother.
Maybe. But Austin first. With Mary and Steve and Cynthia. He intended to stay with them as long as possible. They, at least, could understand. . . and in a way no one else would ever be able to. They had been in the pit together.
As he reached the passenger-side door, he closed the small metal box and slipped it absently into his pocket. He stopped suddenly, free band frozen in midair as it reached for the doorhandle.
Something was gone; the shotgun shell.