“That’s Marielle under that coverlet?” Audrey asked.
Tom nodded.
“We have to get with the others, Tom. Before it starts again. Before they come back.”
“Do you know what’s happening here, Aud?”
“I don’t think anyone knows exactly what’s happening here, but I know some stuff, yes.” She pressed the heels of her palms against her forehead and closed her eyes. To Tom she looked like a math student wrestling with some massive equation. Then she dropped her hands and looked at him again. “We better go next door. We should all be together.”
He lifted his chin toward the snoring Gary. “What about him?”
“We couldn’t carry him, couldn’t lift him over David Carver’s back fence even if we could. You’ll be doing well to get over it yourself.”
“I’ll manage,” he said, stung a little. “Don’t you worry about me, Aud, I’ll manage fine.”
From the greenbelt there came a cry, another gunshot, and then an animal howling in agony. What seemed like a thousand coyotes howled in response.
“They shouldn’t have gone out there,” Audrey said. “I know why they did, but it was a bad idea.”
Old Doc nodded. “I think they know that now,” he said.
Peter reached the fork in the path and looked into the desert, bone-white in the glare of a rising moon, beyond it. Then he looked down and saw the man in the patched khaki pants pinned to the cactus.
“Hello… friend,” he said. He moved the bum’s shopping cart so he could sit down beside him. As he settled against the cactus spines, feeling them slide into his back, he heard a cry and a gunshot and an agonized howl. All from far away. Not important. He put his hand on the dead bum’s shoulder. Their grins were identical. “Hello… friend,” the erstwhile James Dickey scholar said again.
He looked south. His remaining sight was almost gone, but there was enough left for him to see the perfectly round moon rising between the fangs of the black Crayola mountains. It was as silver as the back of an old-time pocket watch, and upon it was the smiling, one-eye-winked face of Mr Moon from a child’s book of Mother Goose rhymes.
Only this version of Mr Moon appeared to be wearing a cowboy hat.
“Hello… friend,” Peter said to it, and settled back further against the cactus. He did not feel the exaggerated spines that punctured his lungs, or the first trickles of blood that seeped out of his grinning mouth. He was with his friend. He was with his friend and now everything was all right, they were looking at Mr Cowpoke Moon and everything was all right.
The light dropped out of the day with a speed that reminded Johnny of the tropics, and soon the spiny landscape around them was only a black blur. The path was clear, at least for the time being-a gray streak about two feet wide winding through the shadows-but if the moon hadn’t come up, they would probably be in even deeper shit than they already were. He had watched the weather forecast that morning and knew the moon was new, not full, but that little contradiction didn’t seem very important under the current circumstances.
They went up the path two by two, like animals mounting the gangplank to Noah’s Ark: Cammie and her surviving son, then he and Brad (with the corpse of Jim Reed swinging between them), then Cynthia and the hippie, whose name was Steve. The girl had picked up the.30-.06, and when the coyote-a nightmare even more misbegotten than the mountain lion had been-came out of a cactus grove to the east of the path, it was the girl who settled its account.
The moon was bringing out fantastic tangles of shadow everywhere, and for a moment
Johnny thought the coyote was one of them. Then Brad yelled “Hey, look OUT!” and the girl fired almost at once. The recoil would have knocked her over like a bowling pin if the hippie hadn’t grabbed her by the back of her pants.
The coyote yowled and flipped over backward, its mismatched legs spasming. There was enough moonlight for Johnny to see that its paws ended in appendages that looked horribly like human fingers, and that it wore a cartridge belt for a collar. Its mates raised their voices in howls of what might have been mourning or laughter.
The thing began to decay at once, paw-fingers turning black, ribcage collapsing, eyes falling in like marbles. Steam began to rise from its fur, and the stench rose with it. A moment or two later, those thick pink streams began to ooze out of its liquefying corpse.
Johnny and Brad set Jim Reed’s body gently down. Johnny reached for the.30-.06 and poked the barrel at the coyote. He blinked with surprise (moderate surprise; his capacity for any large emotional reaction seemed pretty well drained) as it slid past the darkening hide with no feeling of resistance at all.
“It’s like prodding cigarette smoke,” he said, handing the gun back to Cynthia. “I don’t think it’s here at all. I don’t think any of it’s here, not really.”
Steve Ames stepped forward, took Johnny’s hand, and guided it to the shoulder of his shirt. Johnny felt a line of ragged punctures made by the mountain lion’s claws. Blood had soaked through the cotton enough for it to squelch under Johnny’s fingers. “The thing that did this to me wasn’t cigarette smoke,” Steve said.
Johnny started to reply, then was distracted by a strange rattling sound. It reminded him of cocktail shakers in the be-bop bars of his youth. Back in the fifties, that had been, when you couldn’t get smashed without a tie on if you were a member of the country club set. The sound was coming from Dave Reed, who was standing rigidly beside his mother. It was his teeth.
“Come on,” Brad said. “Let’s get the hell back under cover before something else comes. Vampire bats, maybe, or-”
“You want to stop right there,” Cynthia said. “I’m warning you, big boy.”
“Sorry,” Brad said. Then, gently: “Get moving, Cammie, okay?”
“Don’t you tell me to get moving!” she responded crossly. Her arm was around Dave’s waist. She might as well have been hugging an iron bar, so far as Johnny could see. Except for the shivering, that was. And that weird thing with the teeth. “Can’t you see he’s scared to death?”
More howls drifted through the darkness. The stench of the coyote Cynthia had shot was rapidly becoming unbearable.
“Yes, Cammie, I can,” Brad said. His voice was low and kind. Johnny thought the man could have made a fortune as a psychiatrist. “But you have to get moving. Else we’ll have to go on and leave you here. We have to get inside. We have to get to shelter. You know that, don’t you?”
“See that you bring my other boy,” she said sharply. “You’re not leaving him beside the path for the… you’re just not leaving him beside the path. Not!”
We’ll bring him,” Brad said in the same low, soothing voice. He bent and took hold of Jim Reed’s legs again. Won’t we, John?”
“Yes,” Johnny said, wondering what was going to be left of poor old Collie Entragian come morning… assuming there would be a morning. Collie didn’t have a mother present to stand up for him.
Cammie watched them lift her son’s corpse between them, then stood on tiptoe and whispered something into Dave’s ear. It must have been the right thing, because the kid got moving again.
They had made only a few steps when there was a subdued rattle up ahead, the gritty crunch of a footstep on the new surface of the ground, then a muffled cry of exasperated pain. Dave Reed shrieked as piercingly as a starlet in a horror movie. This sound more than that of strangers in the woods made Johnny’s balls pull up against his groin. From the corner of his eye he saw the hippie grab hold of the rifle barrel when Cynthia brought it up. Steve pushed it back down again, murmuring for her to hold on, just hold on.
“Don’t shoot!” a voice called from the tangle of shadows up ahead and to their left. It was a voice Johnny recognized. “We’re friends, so just take it easy. Okay?”
“Doc?” Johnny, who had come close to dropping his end of Jim Reed, now renewed his grip in spite of his aching arms and shoulders. Before the sounds from up ahead had begun, he’d been thinking of something from Intruder in the Dust. People got heavier just after they died, Faulkner had written. It was as if death was the only way stupid thief gravity knew how to celebrate its existence. “Doc, that you?”
“Yeah.” Two shapes appeared in the dark and moved cautiously toward them. “I stuck hell out of myself on a goddam cactus. What are cactuses doing in Ohio?”