“Christ,” Steve said. “Why’d you do that?”
Cynthia looked at Steve. Her eyes looked oddly hazy. She shrugged, touched her tongue to the middle of her upper lip. “I don’t know.” Suddenly she put her hand to her forehead and squeezed her temples, hard. When she took it away, her eyes were clear again, but frightened. “What the hell?” she said, more to herself than to him.
Steve reached out to touch the thing himself. She grabbed his wrist before he could.
“Don’t. It feels nasty.”
He shook her off and put his finger on the wolf’s back (all at once he was sure that was what it was, not a coyote but a wolf). The radio went dead again. At the same time there was a cough of broken glass from somewhere be-hind them. Cynthia yelped.
Steve had already taken his finger off the rock; he would have done that even if nothing at all had happened, because she was right: it felt nasty. But for a moment, something did happen. It felt as if one of the more vital circuits in his head had shorted out, for one thing. Except … hadn’t he been thinking about the girl? Doing some-thing to the girl, with the girl? The kind of thing both of you might like to try but would never talk about to your friends? A kind of experiment?
Even as he was mulling this over, trying to remember what the experiment might have been, he was reaching out for the stone again with his finger. He didn’t make a conscious decision to do this, but now that he was, it seemed like a good idea. Just let that old finger go where it wants, he thought, bemused.
Let it touch whatever it- She grabbed his hand and twisted it away from the piece of stone Just as he was about to put his finger on the wolf’s back. “Hey, sport, read my lips: I want to get out of here! Right now!”
He took a deep breath, let it out. Repeated the process. His head began to feel like familiar territory again, but he was suddenly more frightened than ever. Of exactly what he didn’t know. Wasn’t sure he wanted to know. “Okay. Let’s go.”
Holding her hand, he led her back into the hallway. He glanced over his shoulder once, at the crumbled gray bit of carving. Twisted, predatory head. Bulging eyes. Too- long snout. Snake tongue. And beyond it, something else. Both the helix and the exhibitionist Goofy were gone. Those screens were dark, as if
some power-surge had shorted them out.
Water was pouring through the open door of the office with the aquarium in it. There was a molly stranded on the edge of the hallway carpet, flopping its last. Well, Steve thought, now we know what broke, no need to wonder about that.
“Don’t look when we go by,” he said. “Just-”
“Did you hear something just then?” she asked. “Bangs or booms or something like that?”
He listened, heard only the wind . .. then thought he heard a stealthy shuffling from behind him.
He wheeled around quickly. Nothing there. Of course there wasn’t, what had he been thinking? That one of the corpses had wriggled down off its hook and was coming after them? Dumb. Even under these stressful circum-stances, that was plumb loco, Wild Bill.
But there was something else, something he couldn’t dismiss, dumb or not: that statue. It was like a physical presence in his head, a thumb poking rudely into the actual tissue of his brain. He wished he hadn’t looked at it. Even more, he wished he hadn’t touched it.
“Steve? Did you hear anything? It could have been gun-shots. There! There’s another one!”
The wind screamed along the side of the building and something else fell over out there, making them cry out and grab for each other like kids in the dark. The thing that had fallen over went scraping along the ground outside.
“I don’t hear anything but the wind. Probably what you heard was a door banging shut somewhere. If you heard anything.”
“There were at least three of them,” she said. “Maybe they weren’t gunshots, more like thuds, but-”
“Could have been something flying in the wind, too. Come on, cookie, let’s shake some tailfeathers.”
“Don’t call me cookie and I won’t call you cake,” she said faintly, not looking when they passed the office with the water still draining out of it.
Steve did. The aquarium was now nothing but a rectangle of wet sand surrounded by jags of glass. The hand lay on the soaked carpet beside the desk. It had landed on its back. There was a dead guppy stranded on its palm. The fingers seemed almost to beckon him-come on in, stranger, pull up a chair, take a load off, mi casa es su casa.
No thanks, Steve thought.
He had no more than started to open the door between the littery reception area and the outside when it was snatched prankishly out of his hands. Dust was blowing past in ribbons. The mountains to the west had been completely obliterated by moving membranes of darkening gold-sand and alkali grit flying in the day’s last ten minutes or so of light-but he could see the first stars glowing clearly overhead. The wind was at near gale force now. A rusty old barrel with the words ZOOM CHEMTRONICS DISPOSE OF
PROPERLY stencilled on it rolled across the parking lot, past the Ryder truck, and across the road. Into the desert it went. The tink-tink-tink of the lanyard-clip against the flagpole was feverish now, and something to their left thumped twice, hard, a sound like silencer-muffled pistol shots. Cynthia jerked against him. Steve turned toward the sound and saw a big blue Dumpster. As he looked, the wind half-lifted its lid, then dropped it. There was another muffled thump.
“There’s your gunshots,” he said, raising his voice to be heard over the wind.
“Well … it didn’t sound just like that.”
A concatenation of coyote-howls rose in the night, some from the west, flying to them on the wind and grit, some from the north. The sound reminded Steve of old newsclips he’d seen of Beatlemania, girls screaming their heads off for the moptops fromLiverpool . He and Cynthia looked at each other. “Come on,” he said. “The truck. Right now.”
They hurried to it, arms around each other and the wind at their backs. When they were in the cab again,
Cynthia locked her door, bopping the button down decisively with the heel of her hand, Steve did the same, then started the engine. Its steady rumble and the glow from the dash board when he pulled the headlight knob comforted him He turned to Cynthia.
“All right, where do we go to report this?Austin ’s out It’s too far west and in the direction this shit is coming from. We’d end up by the side of the road, hoping we could start the damn engine again once the storm passed That leaves Ely, which is a two-hour drive-longer, if the storm overtakes us-or downtown Desperation, which is maybe less than a mile.”
“Ely,” she said at once. “The people who did this could be up there in town, and I doubt if a couple of local cops or even county mounties could match up to guys who could do what we saw in there.”
“The people who did it could also be back on Route 50,” he said. “Remember the RV, and the boss’s bike.”
“But we did see traffic,” she said, then jumped as some- thing else fell over nearby. It sounded big and metallic. “Christ, Steve, can’t we please just get the fuck out of here?”
He wanted to as badly as she did, but he shook his head. “Not until we figure this out. It’s important.
Fourteen dead people, and that doesn’t count the boss or the people from the RV.”
“The Carver family.”
“This is gonna be big when it comes out-nationwide. If we go back to Ely and if it turns out there were two cops with phones and radios less than a mile up the road, 21 and if the people who did this get away because we took too long blowing the whistle… well, our decision is go- mg to be questioned. Harshly.”
The dashlights made her face look green and sick. “Are you saying they’d think we had something to do with it?”
“I don’t know, but I’ll tell you this: You’re not the Duchess of Windsor and I’m not the Duke of Earl.
We’re a couple of roadbums, is what we are. How much ID do you have?
A driver’s license?”
“I never took the test. Moved around too much.”
“Social Security?”
“Well, I lost the card someplace, I think I left it behind when I split from the guy who fucked up my ear, but I remember the number.”