Desperation

“No, God no, please!” he screamed, and turned to run-back toward the ATV and the bodies hanging stiffly on their hooks.

In his head he did this; his body moved in the opposite direction, forward, as if directed by hands he could not see. There was no sense of being possessed, but a clear and unmistakable feeling of being no longer alone. His terror fell away. His first powerful instinct-to turn and run-also fell away. He took a step forward instead, pushing off from the table with his free hand. He cocked the hammer back to beyond his right shoulder and hurled it just as the wolf launched itself at him.

He expected the hammer to spin and was sure it would sail over the animal’s head-he had pitched at Lincoln Park High School about a thousand years ago and still knew the feeling of one that was going to be wild-high—but it didn’t. It was no Excalibur, just a plain old Crafts—man hammer with a perforated rubber sleeve on it to _ improve the grip, but it didn’t turn over and it didn’t go high.

What it did was strike the wolf dead center between the eyes.

There was a sound like a brick dropped on an oak plank. The green glare whiffed out of the wolf s eyes they turned into old marbles even as the’ blood began to pour out of the animal’s center-split skull. Then it hit him in the chest, driving him back against the table again, set ting off a brilliant burst of pain in the small of his back For a moment Joh

Joh

Is it time to reconsider David Carver’s God. Terry asked quietly. Stereo Terry now; she had a place in his head, and she also had a place on the wall under you MUST WEAR A HARDHAT.

“No,” he said. “It was a lucky shot, that’s all. Like the one-in-a-thousand at the carny when you actually do win your girlfriend the big stuffed panda-bear.”

Thought you said it was going high.

“Well, I was wrong, wasn’t I. Just like you used to tell me six or a dozen times every fucking day, you great bitch.” He was shocked by the hoarse, almost teary quality of his voice. “Wasn’t that pretty much your refrain 7 throughout the course of our charming union. You’re wrong, Joh

You left them, Terry’s voice said, and what stopped him was not the contempt he heard in that voice (which was, after all, only his own voice, his own mind up to its old bicameral tricks) but the despair. You left them to die. Worse, you continue to deny God even after you called on him… and he answered. What kind of man are you.

“A man who knows the difference between God and a free-throw,” he told the woman with the strawberry-blond hair and the bullet-hole in her lab coat. “A man who also knows enough to get while the getting’s good.”

He waited for Terry to respond. Terry didn’t. He con-sidered what had just happened a final time, sca

No London Philharmonic swelling with a hundred violins’ worth of phony awe in the background. The terror and emptiness and despair he felt were transi-tory emotions; they would pass. What he was going to do right now was divorce the ATV from the ore-cart behind it, using the hammer to knock loose the cotter-pin cou-pling. What he was going to do next was get the ATV run-ning and get the hell out of this creepy little—“Not bad, ace,” said a voice from the doorway.

Joh

“A lucky shot,” Joh

“Does your father know you’re out, David.”

“He knows.”

“If you came here to try and persuade me to stay, you’re shit out of luck,” Joh

He bent over the coupling between the ore-cart and the ATV and took a swing at the cotter pin. He missed it completely and smashed his hand painfully against an angle of metal. He cried out and stuck his scraped knuckles into his mouth. Yet he had hit the leaping wolf dead between the eyes with the hammer, he—Joh

And I’m not going to read anything into that, either.

“If you came to talk theology, you’re similarly out of luck,” Joh

He broke off. The boy now had something in his hand was holding it out to him. Between them, the dead wolf lay on the lab floor.

“What’s that.” Joh

“Your wallet,” David said. His eyes on him, so steady “It fell out of your pocket, in the truck. I brought it to you It’s got all your ID in it, in case you forget who you are “Very fu

“I wasn’t joking.”

“So what do you want.” Joh

David looked down at the wolf for a moment. “Pretty good shot for a man who can’t even hit a coupling dead on from four inches away.”

“Shut up, wiseguy,” Joh

“There’s a picture in it. You and two other guys stand ing in front of a place called The Viet Cong Lookout. A bar, I think.”

“Yeah, a bar,” Joh

“I was more interested in the ordinary-sized guy in the middle,” David said, and all at once a part of Joh

“The guy in the gray shirt and the Yankees hat. The guy that showed me the China Pit from my Viet Cong Lookout. That guy was you.

“What crap,” Joh