Desperation

He can’t take them all and leave me! Do you hear. HE CAN’T TAKE THEM ALL AND-”

“David! Quit it!”

David stopped struggling and merely hung in Steve’s arms like a puppet with its strings cut. His eyes were red and raw. Joh

The motorcycle helmet was lying where Joh

He bent, picked it up, and looked at the boy in Steve’s arms. Steve looked the way Joh

“David-” he began, “is God in you.” David asked. “Can you feel him in there, Joh

“Yes,” Joh

“Then you won’t take this wrong.” David spit into his face. It was warm on the skin below Joh

Joh

David only looked at him, saying nothing.

“You said ‘God is cruel’ the way a person who’s lived his whole life on Tahiti might say ’snow is cold.’ You knew, but you didn’t understand.” He stepped close to David and put his palms on the boy’s cold cheeks. “Do you know how cruel your God can be, David.

How fantas-tically cruel.”

David waited, saying nothing. Maybe listening, maybe not. Joh

“Sometimes he makes us live.”

Joh

Then start telling yourself there was an accident out on the highway, a bad one, a no—brain drunk crossed the centerline, the RV you were in rolled over and only you survived.

It happens all the time. Just read the paper.”

“But that’s not the truth!”

“It might as well be. And when you get back to Ohio or Indiana or wherever it is you hang your hat, pray for God to get you over this. To make you well again. As for now, you’re excused.”

“I’ll never say another… what. What did you say.”

“I said you’re excused.” Joh

“Boss, what-”

“The tour’s over, Tex. Get them into the truck and up the road. If you want to be safe, I’d get going right now Joh

He tripped over something in spite of the flash—light, almost went sprawling, and slowed to a walk. The Chinese miners had dropped what stuff they had in their frantic, useless rush to escape, and in the end they had dropped themselves, as well. He walked over a littered landscape of bones, powdering them to dust, and moved the light in a steady triangle-left to right, down to the floor, up to the left again-to keep the landscape clear and current in his mind. He saw that the walls fairly jostled with Chinese characters, as if the survivors of the cave-in had succumbed to a sort of writing mania as death first approached and then overtook them.

In addition to the bones, he saw tin cups, ancient picks with rusty heads and fu

And everywhere, everywhere scattered among the remains, were can tahs: coyotes with spider-tongues, spt ders with weird albino ratlings poking from their mouths spread—winged bats with obscene baby-tongues (the babies were leering, gnomish). Some depicted night-marish creatures that had never existed on earth, halfling freaks that made Joh

Had Steve gotten them out yet. He’d have to hope so, and hope that Steve could manage to get them a good dis-tance away in his trusty truck before the end came. A hell of a bang was coming. He only had the two bags of ANFO hung around his neck on the knotted drawstrings, but that would be plenty, all they had ever needed. It had seemed wiser not to tell the others that, though. Safer.

Now he could hear the soft groaning sound of which David had spoken: the squall and shift of hornfels, as if the very earth were speaking. Protesting his intrusion. And now he could see a dim zigzag of red light up ahead. Hard to tell how far away in the dark. The smell was stronger, too, and clearer: cold ashes. To his left, a skeleton-probably not Chin—ese, judging by its size—knelt against the wall as if it had died praying. Abruptly it turned its head and favored Joh

— Get out while there’s still time. Tak ah wan. Tak ah lah.

Joh

He stood outside it, looking into the light, not able to see much from the drift side, hearing David’s voice in his head almost as a trance-subject must hear the voice of the hypnotist who has put him under: At ten minutes past one on the afternoon of September twenty-first, the guys at the face broke through into what they at first thought was a cave…

Joh

reptilian shape Joh

How had it gotten Ripton.

If it was stuck dOwn there, exactly how had it gotten Ripton.

He suddenly realized he was crossing the an tak, walking toward the mi. He tried to stop his legs and dis-covered he couldn’t. He tried to imagine Cary Ripton making the same discovery and found it was easy.

Easy.

The long bags of ANFO swung back and forth against his chest. Images danced crazily in his mind: Terry grab-bing his belt-loops and yanking him tight to her belly as he began to come, the best orgasm of his life and it had gone nowhere but into his pants, tell that one to Ernest Hemingway; coming out of the pool at the Bel-Air, laughing, hair plastered to his forehead, holding up the beer-bottle as the cameras flashed; Bill Harris telling him that going across country on his motorcycle might change his life and his whole career… if he was really up to it, that was. Last of all he saw the cop’s empty gray eyes staring at him in the rearview mirror, the cop saying he thought Joh