“No,” Mary said immediately.
Johnny looked at her, irritated-he didn’t like women answering questions that had been aimed at him-and then let it go. She was right. “There’s no time,” he told Billingsley.
“We’ll carry it anyway, though. Somebody in town’ll have .22s. You take it, Mary.”
“No thanks,” she said coolly, and selected the shotgun, which the veterinarian had identified as a Rossi twelve- gauge. “If it’s to be used as a club instead of a firearm, it ought to be a man who swings it. Don’t you agree?”
Johnny realized he had been mousetrapped. Quite neatly, too. You bitch, he thought, and might have said it aloud, husband hung on a coathook or not, except that David Carver cried out “Truck!” at that moment, and tore open one of the municipal building’s glass doors.
They had been hearing the wind for some time now, and had felt it shake the brick building they were in, but none of them was quite prepared for the ferocity of the gust that ripped the door out of David’s hand and slammed it against the wall hard enough to crack the glass. The posters thumbtacked to the hallway bulletin board rattled. Some tore free and went swirling up the stairwell. Sand sheeted in, stinging Johnny’s face. He put a hand up to shield his eyes and accidentally bumped his nose instead. He yelled with pain.
“David!” Ralph cried, and grabbed for his son’s shirt. Too late. The boy darted out into the howling dark, unmindful of anything that might be waiting. And now Johnny understood what had galvanized David: head-lights. Turning headlights that swept across the street from right to left, as if mounted on a gimbal. Sand danced wildly in the moving beams.
“Hey!” David screamed waving his arms. “Hey, you! You in the truck!”
The headlights began to ebb. Johnny snatched up one of the flashlights from the floor and ran out after the Carvers. The wind assaulted him, making him stagger on his feet and grab at the doorjamb so he wouldn’t go tumbling off the steps. David had run into the middle of the street, dropping one shoulder to dodge a dark, speeding object which Johnny at first thought was a buzzard. He clicked on the flashlight and saw a tumbleweed instead.
He turned the flashlight toward the departing taillights and swung it back and forth in an arc, slitting his eyes against the sand. The light appeared puny in the sand- thickened dark.
“HEY!” David screamed. His father was behind him, the revolver in his hand. He was trying to look in all directions at once, like a presidential bodyguard who senses danger.
“HEY, COME BACK!”
The taillights were receding, heading north along the road which led back to Highway 50.
The blinker was dancing in the wind, and Johnny caught just a glimpse of the departing truck in its stuttery glow. A panel-job with something printed on the back. He couldn’t read it-there was too much flying sand.
“Get back inside, you guys!” he shouted. “It’s gone!”
The boy stood in the Street a moment longer, looking toward where the taillights had disappeared. His shoulders were slumped. His father touched one of his hands.
“Come on, David. We don’t need that truck. We’re in town. We’ll just find someone who can help us, and..
He trailed off, looking around and seeing what Johnny had seen already. The town was dark. That might only mean that people were hunkered down, that they knew what had been happening and were hiding from the crazyman until the cavalry arrived. That made a certain degree of sense, but it wasn’t how it felt to Johnny’s heart.
To his heart, the town felt like a graveyard.
David and his father started back toward the steps, the boy head-down dejected, the man still looking every-where for trouble. Mary stood in the doorway, watching them come, and Johnny thought she looked extraordinarily beautiful, with her hair flying around her head.
The truck, Johnny. Was there something about the truck? There was, wasn’t there?
Terry’s voice.
Howls rose in the windy dark. They sounded mocking, like laughter, and seemed to come from everywhere. Johnny hardly heard them. Yes, something about the truck. Definitely.
About the size of it, and the lettering, and just the look of it, even in the dark and the blowing sand.
Something- “Oh, shit!” he cried, and clutched his chest again. Not at his heart, not this time, but for a pocket that was no longer there. In his mind’s eye he saw the coyote shaking his expensive motorcycle jacket back and forth, ripping the lining, spilling shit to the four points of the compass. Including- “What?”
Mary asked, alarmed at the look on his face.
“What?”
“You-all better get back in here till these guns’re loaded,” Billingsley told them, “‘less you want some varmint down on you.”
Johnny barely heard that, either. The letters on the back of the truck receding into the windy dark could have spelled Ryder. It made sense, didn’t it? Steve Ames was looking for him. He had poked his head into Desperation, seen nothing, and was now driving out of town again to look somewhere else.
Johnny leaped past the astonished Billingsley, down on one knee loading guns, and pelted upstairs toward the holding area, praying to David Carver’s God that his cellular telephone was still intact.
If things are normal, feel normal, Steve Ames had said, we’ll try reporting it there. But if we see any-thing that looks the slightest bit wrong, we head for Ely on the double.
And, as the Ryder truck sat idling beneath the dancing blinker-light which marked Desperation’s only inter-section, Cynthia reached out and twitched Steve’s shirt. “Time to head for Ely,” she said, and pointed out her window, west along the cross-street.
“Bikes in the street down there, see them? My old grammy used to say bikes in the street are one of those bigtime whammies, like breaking a mirror or leaving a hat on the bed.
Time to boogie.”
“Your grammy said that, huh?”
“Actually, I never had a grammy, not one that I knew, anyway, but get real-what are they doing there?
Why hasn’t anybody taken them out of the storm? Don’t you see how wrong all this is?”
He looked at the bikes, which were lying on their sides as if they had fallen over in the wind, then farther down the east-west cross-street. “Yeah, but people’re home. There are lights.” He pointed.
Yes, she saw there were lights in some of the houses, but she thought the pattern they made looked random, somehow. And- ‘There were lights on at that mining place, too,” she said. “Besides, take a good look-most of the houses are dark. Now why is that, do you think?” She heard the little sarcastic edge rising in her voice, didn’t like it, couldn’t stop it. “Do you think maybe most of the local yokels chartered a bus to go watch the Desperation Dorks play a doubleheader with the Austin Assholes? Big desert rivalry?
Something they look forward to all y … hey, what are you doing?”
Not that she needed to ask. He was turning west along the cross-street. A tumbleweed flew at the truck like something jumping out of the screen at you in a 3-D movie. Cynthia cried out and raised an arm over her face. The tumbleweed hit the windshield, bounced, scraped briefly on the roof of the cab, and was gone.
“This is stupid,” she said. “And dangerous.”
He glanced over at her briefly, smiled, and nodded. She should have been pissed at him, smiling at a
time like this, but she wasn’t. It was hard to be pissed at a man who could light up that way, and she knew that was half her damned problem. As Gert Kinshaw back at D & S had been fond of saying, those who do not learn from the past are condemned to get beat up by it. She didn’t think Steve Ames was the sort of man who would use his fists on a woman, but that wasn’t the only way that men hurt women. They also hurt them by smiling pretty, so pretty, and getting them to follow along into the lion’s jaws. Usually with a covered-dish casserole in their hands.
“If you know it’s dangerous, why’re you doing itLubbock ?”
“Because we need to find a phone that works, and because I don’t trust the way I feel. It’s almost dark and I’ve got the worst case of the jimjams in history. I don’t want to let them control me. Look, just let me check a couple of places. You can stay in the truck.”
“The fuck I… hey, check it out. Over there.” She pointed at a length of picket fence that had been knocked over and was lying on the lawn of a small frame house. In the glare of the headlights it was all but impossible to tell what color the house was, but she had no trouble seeing the tire-tracks printed on the length of downed fence; they were too clear to miss.