Peter started in toward his wife and the cop caught him with both hands, now using his butt to keep the right hand door open. He slung an arm around Peter’s shoulders. His face looked open and friendly.
Most of all, best of all, it looked sane—as if his good angels had won out, at least for now. Peter felt an instant’s hope, and at first did not associate the thing pressing into his stomach with the cop’s monster handgun. He thought of his father, who would sometimes poke him with the tip of his finger while giving him advice—using the finger to sort of tamp his aphorisms home—things like No one ever gets pregnant if one of you keeps your pants on, Petie.
He didn’t realize it was the gun, not the cop’s oversized sausage of a finger, until Mary shrieked: “No!
Oh, no!’
“Don’t—” Peter began.
“I don’t care if you’re a Jew or a Hindu,” the cop said, hugging Peter against him. He squeezed Peter’s shoulder chummily with his left hand as he cocked the .45 with his right. “In Desperation we don’t care about those things much.”
He pulled the trigger at least three times. There might have been more, but three reports were all Peter Jackson heard. They were muffled by his stomach, but still very loud. An incredible heat shot up through his chest and down through his legs at the same time, and he heard something wet drop on his shoes. He heard Mary, still screaming, but the sound seemed to come from far, far away.
Now I’ll wake up in my bed, Peter thought as his knees buckled and the world began to draw away, as bright as afternoon sunlight on the chrome side of a receding rail-road car.
Now I’ll— That was all. His last thought as the darkness swallowed him forever really wasn’t a thought at all, but an image: the bear on the dashboard next to the cop’s compass. Head jiggling. Painted eyes staring. The eyes turned into holes, the dark rushed out of them, and then he was gone.
Ralph Carver was somewhere deep in the black and didn’t want to come up. He sensed physical pain waiting—a hangover, perhaps, and a really spectacular one if he could feel his head aching even in his sleep—but not just that. Something else. Something to do with Kirsten this morning. Something to do with their vacation. He had gotten drunk, he supposed pulled a real horror show, Ellie was undoubtedly pissed at him, but even that didn’t seem enough to account for how horrible he felt…
Screaming. Someone was screaming. But distant.
Ralph tried to burrow even deeper into the black, but now hands seized his shoulder and began shaking him Every shake sent a monstrous bolt of pain through his poor hung over head.
“Ralph! Ralph, wake up! You have to wake up!”
Ellie shaking him. Was he late for work? How could he be late for work? They were on vacation.
Then, shockingly loud, penetrating the blackness like the beam of a powerful light, gunshots. Three of them then a pause, then a fourth.
His eyes flew open and he bolted into a sitting position no idea for a moment where he was or what was happening, only knowing that his head hurt horribly and felt the size of a float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Something sticky that fell like jam or maple syrup all down the side of his face. Ellen looking at him, one eye wide and frantic, the other nearly lost in a puffy complication of blue-black flesh.
Screaming. Somewhere. A woman. From below them. Maybe— He tried to get on his feet but his knees wouldn’t lock.
He fell forward off the bed he was sitting on (except it wasn’t a bed, it was a cot) and landed on his hands and knees. A fresh bolt of pain passed through his head, and for a moment he thought his skull would split open like an eggshell. Then he was looking down at his hands through clotted clumps of hair.
Both hands were streaked with blood, the left considerably redder than the right. As he looked at them, sudden memory (Kirsten oh Jesus Ellie catch her) burst in his head like a poison firework and he screamed himself, screamed down at his bloodstained hands, screamed as what he had been trying to burrow away from dropped into his mind like a stone into a pond. Kirsten had fallen down the stairs—
No. Pushed the crazy bastard who had brought them here had pushed his seven-year-old daughter down the stairs. Ellie had reached for her and the crazy bastard had punched his wife in the eye and knocked her down. But Ellie had fallen on the stairs and Kirsten had plunged down them, her eyes wide open, full of shocked surprise, Ralph didn’t think she’d known what was happening, and if he could hold onto anything he would hold onto that, that it had all happened too fast for her to have any real idea, and then she had hit, she had cart-wheeled, feet flying first upward and then backward, and there had been this sound, this awful sound like a branch breaking under a weight of ice, and suddenly everything about her had changed, he had seen the change even before she came to a stop at the foot of the stairs, as if that were no little girl down there but a stuffed dummy, headpiece full of straw.
Don’t think it, don ‘t think it, don’t you dare think it. Except he had to. The way she had landed . . . the way she had lain at the foot of the stairs with her head on one side … Fresh blood was pattering down on his left hand, he saw. Apparently something was wrong with that side of his head. What had happened?
Had the cop hit him, too, maybe with the butt of the monster sidearm he had been wearing? Maybe, but that part was mostly gone. He could remember the gruesome somersault she had done, and the way she had slid down the rest of the stairs, and how she had come to rest with her head cocked that way, and that was all. Christ, wasn’t it enough?
“Ralph?” Ellie was tugging at him and panting harshly “Ralph, get up! Please get up!”
“Dad! Daddy, come on!” That was David, from farther away. “He okay, Mom? He’s bleeding again, isn’t he?’
“No. . . no, he—”
“Yes he is, I can see it from here. Daddy, are you okay?”
“Yes,” he said. He got one foot planted beneath him groped for the bunk, and tottered upright. His left eye was bleary with blood. The lid felt as if it had been dipped in plaster of Paris. He wiped it with the heel of his hand wincing as fresh pain stung him in the area above his left eye felt like freshly tenderized meat. He tried to turn around, toward the sound of his son’s voice, and staggered. It was like being on a boat. His balance was shot, and even when he stopped turning it felt to something in his head like he was
still doing it, reeling and rocking going round and round. Ellie grabbed him, supported him, helped him forward.
“She’s dead, isn’t she?” Ralph asked. His choked voice came out of a throat plated with dead blood.
He couldn’t believe what he heard that voice saying, but he supposed that in time he would. That was the worst of it. In time he would. “Kirsten’s dead.”
“I think so, yes.” Ellie staggered this time. “Grab the bars, Ralph, can you? You’re going to knock me over.”
They were in a jail cell. In front of him, just out of reach, was the barred door. The bars were painted white and in some places the paint had dried and hardened in thick runnels.
Ralph lunged forward a step and grabbed them. He was looking out at a desk, sitting in the middle of a square of floor like the single bit of stage dressing in a minimalist play.
There were papers on it, and a double-barreled shotgun, and a strew of fat green shotgun shells The old-fashioned wooden desk chair in the kneehole was on casters, and there was a faded blue pillow on the seat. Overhead was a light fixture encased in a mesh bowl. The dead flies inside the fixture made huge, grotesque shadows.
There were jail cells on three sides of this room. The one in the middle, probably the drunk-tank, was large and empty. Ralph and Ellie Carver were in a smaller one. A second small cell to their right was empty. Across from them were two other closet-sized cells.
In one of them was their eleven-year-old son, David, and a man with white hair. Ralph could see nothing else of this man, because he was sitting on the bunk with his head lowered onto his hands. When the woman screamed from below them again, David turned in that direction, where an open door gave on a flight of stairs (Kirsten, Kirsten falling, the snapping sound of her neck breaking) going down to street level, but the white-haired man did not shift his position in the slightest.