Desperation

“Besides, what about Mary.” Cynthia asked. “He says she’s alive!”

Joh

“We’ll listen to him,” Ralph said in a low voice.

Joh

Joh

The eyes were not just looking, though. The eyes were pleading.

Forget it, kid, he thought. When people like you drive, the bus always seems to crash.

if it wasn’t for David, 1 think your personal bus would have crashed already, Terry said from Der Bitchen Bunker inside his head. 1 think you’d be dead and hung up on a hook somewhere. Listen to him, Joh

In a much lower voice, Joh

“Yes,” David said. “The animals, too. The coyotes and wolves-hundreds of them, it must have taken, maybe thousands-moved the trailers off the road. Dumped them over the side and onto the hardpan. Now most of them have drawn away, into ml him, the watchman’s circle.” He drank from the bottle of Jolt. The hand holding it shook slightly. He looked at each of them in turn, but it was Joh

“Then why did he bring us here in the first place.” “He didn’t.”

“What.”

“He thinks he did, but he didn’t.”

“I don’t have any idea what you’re-”

“God brought us,” David said. “To stop him.”

In the silence which followed this, Steve discov-ered he was listening for the wind outside. There was none. He thought he could hear a plane far away-sane people on their way to some sane destination, sleeping or eating or reading U.S. News & World Report—but that was all.

It was Joh

“You speak as if we all had the same God, David,” he said. “I don’t mean to patronize you, but I hardly think that’s the case.”

“But it is the case,” David replied calmly. “Compared to Tak, you and a ca

Joh

“Yes. I know. The dope came from Mary’s car. He put something like nails in the road to get us. It’s fu

“Pretext,” Steve’s erstwhile boss said.

“Yes, right, a pretext. It’s like how, in the old horror movies, a vampire can’t just come in on his own. You have to invite him in.”

“Why.” Cynthia asked.

“Maybe because Entragian-the real Entragian-was still inside his head. Like a shadow. Or a person that’s locked out of his house but can still look in the windows and pound on the doors. Now Tak’s in my mother—what’s left of her-and it would kill us if it could… but it could probably still make the best Key lime pie in the world, too. If it wanted to.”

David looked down for a moment, his lips trembling, then looked back up at them.

“Him needing a pretext to take us doesn’t really matter. Many times what he does or says doesn’t matter-it’s nonsense, or impulse. Although there are clues. Always clues. He gives himself away, shows his real self, like someone who says what he sees in inkblots.”

Steve asked, “If that doesn’t matter, what does.”

“That he took us and let other people go. He thinks he took us at random, like a little kid in a supermarket, just pulling any can that catches his eye off the shelf and drop… ping it into his mom’s cart, but that’s not what happened.”

“It’s like the Angel of Death in Egypt, isn’t it.” Cyn-thia said in a curiously flat voice.

“Only in reverse. We had a mark on us that told our Angel of Death-this guy Entragian-to stop and grab instead of just going on by.”

David nodded. “Yeah. He didn’t know it then, but he does now-mi him en tow, he’d say—our God is strong, our God is with us.”

“If this is an example of God being with us, I hope r I never attract his attention when he’s in a snit,” Joh

“David.” Ralph asked. “What is it. What’s wrong.” David shrugged. “Nothing. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that God never makes us do what he wants us to do. He tells us, that’s all, then steps back to see how it turns out. Reverend Martin’s wife came in and listened for awhile while he was talking about the free-will covenant. She said her mother had a motto: ‘God says take what you want, and pay for it.’ Tak’s opened the door back to Highway 50… but that isn’t where we’re supposed to go. If we do go, if we leave Desperation without doing what God sent us here to do, we’ll pay the price.

He glanced at the circle of faces around him once again, and once again he finished by looking directly at Joh

“I’ll stay no matter what, but to work, it really has to be all of us. We have to give our will over to God’s will, and we have to be ready to die. Because that’s what it might come to.”

“You’re insane, my boy,” Joh

Jimi Hendrix was playing ‘Purple Haze’ on Armed Ser-vices Radio at the time.”

“Listen to the rest, okay. Will you do that much.”

“Why should I.”

“Because there’s a story.” David drank more Jolt, gri-macing as he swallowed. “A good one. Will you listen.”