Desperation

He dropped to his knees beside her, wincing as some thing pulled in his back. She saw, even through her tears, the bruises on his throat where Audrey had tried to choke him—ugly black-purple blotches like thunderheads.

“Shhh, Mary,” he said, and felt along the inside of the bumper with his own hand. She could hear his fingers fluttering in that darkness, and suddenly wanted to cry out: Be careful! There might be spiders! Spiders!

Then he showed her a small gray box. “Give it a shot why don’t you. if it doesn’t start He shrugged to show it didn’t matter much, one way or the other-there was always the truck.

Yes, always the truck. Except Peter had never ridden in the truck, and maybe she did want the smell of him a little longer. The feel of him. That’s a nice set of cantaloupes, ma ‘am, he’d said, and then touched her breast.

The memory of his smell, his touch, his voice. The glasses he wore when he drove. Those things would hurt, but—“Yeah, I’ll come with you,” David said. They were kneeling in front of Deirdre Fi

“Yes,” she said. “I do want.”

Steve and Cynthia joined them, helped them to their feet.

“I feel like I’m a hundred and eight,” Mary said. “Don’t worry, you don’t look a day over eighty-nine Steve said, and smiled when she made as if to pop him one. “Do you really want to try making Austin in that little car. What if it gets stuck in the sand.”

“One thing at a time. We’re not even sure it’ll start, are we, David.”

“No,”’david said in a kind of sigh. He was going away from her again, Mary could feel it, but she didn’t know what to do about it. He stood with his head bent, looking at the Acura’ s grille as if all the secrets of life and death were there, the emotion draining out of his face again, leaving it distant and thoughtful. One hand was wrapped loosely around the gray metal Magna—Cube with the spare key in it.

“If it does start, we’ll caravan,” she told Steve. “Me behind you. If I get stuck, we’ll hop into the truck. I don’t think we will, though. It isn’t such a bad car, actually. If my goddamned sister-in-law just hadn’t used it as a dope—stash…” Her voice trembled and she closed her lips tightly.

“I don’t think we’ll have to go far to get in the clear,” David said without looking up from the Acura’s grille. ‘Thirty miles. Forty. Then open road.”

Mary smiled at him. “I hope you’re right.”

“There’s a slightly more important question,” Cynthia said. “What are we going to tell the police about all this. The real police, I mean.”

No one said anything for a moment. Then David, still looking at the grille of the Acura, said: “The front part. Let them figure out the rest for themselves.”

“I don’t get you,” Mary said. She actually thought she did, but wanted to keep him talking. Wanted him out here with the rest of them mentally as well as physically.

“I’ll tell about how we had flat tires and the bad cop took us back to town. How he got us to go with him by saying there was a guy out in the desert with a rifle. Mary, you tell about how he stopped you and Peter. Steve, you tell about how you were looking for Joh

How we went to the theater. How we called you on the phone, Steve. Then you can tell how you came to the theater, too. And that’s where we were all night. In the theater.”

“We never went up to the pit at all,” Steve mused. Testing it. Tasting it.

David nodded. The bruises on his throat glared in the strengthening sun. Already the day was begi

“And-sorry, David, I have to-your dad. What about him.”

“Went looking for my mom. He wanted me tos—y with you guys in the theater, so I did.”

“We never saw anything,” Cynthia said.

“No. Not really.” He opened the Magna-Cube, took out the key inside, gave it to Mary.

“Why don’t you try the engine.”

“In a sec. What are the authorities going to think about what they do find. All the dead people and dead animals. And what will they say. What will they give out.”

Steve said: “There are people who believe a flying saucer crashed not too far from here, back in the forties. — Did you know that.”

She shook her head.

“In Roswell, New Mexico. According to the story, there were even survivors. Astronauts from another 2 world. I don’t know if any of it’s true, but it might be. The evidence suggests that something pretty outrageous hap-pened in Roswell. The government covered it up, what—L ever it was. The same way they’ll cover this up.”

Cynthia punched his arm. “Pretty paranoid, cookie.” He shrugged. “As to what they’ll think… poison gas, maybe. Some weird shit that belched out of a pocket in the earth and made people crazy. And that’s not so far wrong, is it. Really.”

“No,” Mary said. “I think the most important thing is that we all tell the same story, just the way that David out-lined it.”

Cynthia shrugged, and a ghost of her old pert who-gives-a-shit look came over her face.

“Like if we break down and tell them what really happened they’re going to believe us, right.”

“Maybe they wouldn’t,” Steve said, “but if it’s all the same to you, I’d rather not spend the next six weeks taking polygraph tests and looking at inkblots when I could spend them looking at your exotic and mysterious face.”

She punched his arm again. A little harder this time She caught David watching this byplay and nodded to him. “You think I got a mysterious and exotic face.”

David turned away, studied the mountains to the north. Mary went around to the driver’s door of the Acura and opebed it, reminding herself she’d have to pull the seat up before she could drive-Peter had been a foot taller than she. The glovebox was open from when she’d been pawing around in it for the registration, but surely a bulb as small as the one in there couldn’t draw more than a trickle of juice, could it. Well, it wasn’t exactly life and death in any—“Oh my Lord,”

Steve said in a soft, strengthless voice.

“Oh my dear Lord, look.”

She turned. On the horizon, looking small at this dis-tance, was the north face of the China Pit embankment. Above it was a gigantic cloud of dark gray dust. It hung in the sky, still co

The snout hung open. Protruding from it was a strange shape, amorphous but somehow reptilian. There was something of the scorpion in that shape, and of the lizard as well.

Can tak, can tah.

Mary screamed through raised hands. Looked up at the shape in the sky, eyes bulging over her dirty fingers, head shaking from side to side in a useless gesture of negation.

“Stop,” David said, and put his arm around her waist. “Stop, Mary. It can’t hurt us. And it’s going away already. See.”

It was true. The hide of the skywolf was tearing open in some places, appearing to melt in others, letting the sun shine through in long, golden rays that were both beau-tiful and somehow comical-the sort of shot you expected to see at the end of a Bible epic.

“I think we ought to go,” Steve said at last.

“I think we never should have come in the first place,” Mary said faintly, and got into the car. Already she could smell the aroma of her dead husband’s aftershave.

David stood watching as she pulled the seat forward and slipped the key into the ignition. He felt distant from himself, a creature floating in space somewhere between a dark star and a light one. He thought of sitting at the kitchen table back home, sitting there. and playing slap-jacks with Pie. He thought he would see Steve and Mary and Cynthia, nice as they were, dead and in hell for just one more game of Slap-jacks in the kitchen with her-Pie with a glass of Cranapple juice, him with a Pepsi, both of them giggling like mad. He would see him-self in hell, for that matter. How far could it be, after all, from Desperation.