Desperation by Stephen King
The cop stood there looking down at the bike, his shadow now seeming to stretch out across half a mile of desert, and Johnny peered at him through the bottom of the window with his clotted hair in his eyes and the phone mashed against his right ear. He let out a long, shaky sigh of relief as the cop stepped forward and began to kick sand again, this time spraying it over the Harley's handlebars.
In his ear the telephone began to ring, and this time the sound was scratchy and distant. If the signal was going through--and the quality of this ring seemed to indicate that it was--another Motorola telephone, this one on the dashboard of a Ryder truck somewhere between fifty and two hundred and fifty miles east of John Edward Marinville's current position, was now ringing.
Down in the desert, the cop went on kicking and kicking, burying the handlebars of Johnny's scoot.
Two rings ... three rings ... four ...
He had one more, two at the most, before another robot voice came on the line and told him that the customer he was calling was either out of range or had left the vehicle. Johnny, still crying, closed his eyes. In the throbbing, red-tinged darkness behind his lids he saw the Ryder truck parked in front of a roadside gas station/general store just west of the Utah-Nevada state line. Steve was inside, buying a pack of his damned cigars and goofmg with the counter girl, while outside, on the Ryder's dashboard, the cellular phone--Steve's half of the com-link Johnny's agent had insisted upon--rang in the empty cab.
Five rings ...
And then, distant, almost lost in static but sounding like the voice of an angel bent down from heaven all the same, he heard Steve's flat West Texas drawl: "Hello ... you ... boss?"
An eastbound semi blew by outside, rocking the cruiser in its backwash. Johnny barely noticed, and made no attempt to flag the driver. He probably wouldn't have done even if his attention hadn't been focused on the telephone and Steve's tenuous voice. The rig was doing seventy at least. What the hell was the driver going to see in the two-tenths of a second it would take him to pass the parked cruiser, especially through the thick dust matted on the windows?
He drew in breath through his nose and hawked back blood, ignoring the pain, wanting to clear his voice as much as he could.
"Steve! Steve, I'm in trouble. I'm in bad trouble!"
There was a heavy crackle of static in his ear and he was sure he'd lost Steve, but when it cleared he heard: "... up, boss? Say again!"
"Steve, it's Johnny! Do you hear me?"
... hear you ... What's ..." Another crackle. It almost completely buried the next word, but Johnny thought it might have been "trouble." I hear you, what's the trouble?
God, let that not just be wishful thinking. Please God.
The cop had stopped kicking sand again. He stepped away for another critical look at his handiwork, then turned and began to plod back toward the road, head down, hatbrim shading his face, hands plunged deep into his pockets. And then, with a sense of mounting horror, Johnny realized he had no idea what to tell Steve. All his attention had been focused on making the call, ramming it through by sheer willpower, if that was what it took.
Now what?
He had no clear idea of where he was, only that--
"I'm west of Ely on Highway 50," he said. More sweat ran into his eyes, stinging. "I'm not sure how far west--forty miles at least, probably more. There's an RV pulled off the road a little farther up from me. There's a cop ... not a state cop, a townie, I think, but I don't know which town ... I didn't see it on the door ... I don't even know his name ..." He was talking faster and faster as the cop got closer and closer; soon he would be babbling.
Take it easy, he's still a hundred yards away, you've got plenty of time. For the love of God, just do what comes naturally-do what they pay you for, do what you've been doing all your life. Communicate, for Christ's sake!
But he had never had to do it for his life. To make money, to be known in the right circles, to occasionally raise his voice in the roar of the brave old lion, yes, all those things, but never for his literal life. And if the cop looked up out of his head-down plod and saw him ... be was crouched down but the phone's antenna was sticking up, of course, it had to be sticking up ...
"He took my bike, Steve. He took my bike and drove it out into the desert. He covered it up with sand, but the way the wind's blowing ... it's out in the desert a mile or so east of the RV I told you about and north of the road. You might see it, if the sun's still up."
He swallowed.
"Call the cops--the state cops. Tell them I've been grabbed by a cop who's blond and huge--I meap, this guy's a fucking giant. Have you got that?"
Nothing from the phone but windy silence with an occasional burst of static knifing through it.
"Steve! Steve, are you there?"
No. He wasn't.
There was only one transmission-bar showing in the phone's display window now, and no one was there. He had lost the connection, and he'd been concentrating so hard on what he was saying that he had no idea when it had happened, or how much Steve might have heard.
Johnny, are you sure you got through to him at all?
That was Terry's voice, a voice-he sometimes loved and sometimes hated. Now he hated it. Hated it worse than any voice he had ever heard in his life, it seemed. Hated it even worse for the sympathy he heard in it.
Are you sure you didn't just imagine the whole thing?
"No, he was there, he was there, sonofabitch was there," Johnny said. He heard the pleading quality in his own voice and hated that, too. "He was, you bitch. For a few seconds, at least."
Now the cop was only fifty yards away. Johnny shoved the antenna down with the heel of his left hand, flipped the mouthpiece closed, and tried to drop the phone back into his right pocket. The flap was closed. The phone fell into his lap, then bounced to the floor. He felt around frantically for it, at first finding nothing but crumpled papers--DARE anti-drug handouts, for the most part--and hamburger wrappers coated with ancient grease. His fingers closed on something narrow, not what he wanted, but even the brief glance he gave it before tossing it away chilled him. It was a little girl's plastic barrette.
Never mind it. you've got no time to think about what a kid might've been doing in the back of his car. Find your damn phone, he must almost be here--
Yes. Almost. He could hear the crunch-scuffle of the big cop's boots even over the wind, which had now grown strong enough to rock the cruiser on its springs when it gusted.
Johnny's hand found a nest of styrofoam coffee cups, and, amid them, his phone. He seized it, dropped it in his jacket pocket, and pushed the snap closed. When he sat up again, the cop was coming around the front of the car, bent over at the waist so he could peer through the windshield. His face was more sunburned than ever, almost blistered in places. In fact, his lower lip actually was blistered, Johnny saw, and there was another blistery spot at his right temple.
Good. That doesn't cross my eyes in the slightest.
The cop opened the driver's-side door, leaned in, and stared through the mesh between the front seat and the back. His nostrils flared as he sniffed. To Johnny, .each one of them looked roughly the size of a bowling alley.
"Did you puke in the back of my cruiser, Lord Jim? Because if you did, the first thing you're gonna get when we hit town is a big old spoon."
"No," Johnny said. He could feel fresh blood trickling down his throat and his voice was fogging up again. "I dry-heaved, but I didn't puke." He was actually relieved by what the cop had said. The first thing you're gonna get when we hit town indicated that he didn't intend to drag him out of the car, blow his brains out, and bury him next to his scoot.
Unless he's trying to lull me. Soothe me down, make it easier for him to do ... well, to do whatever.
"You scared?" the cop inquired, still leaning in and looking through the mesh. "Tell me the truth, Lord Jimmy, I'll know a lie. Tak!"
"Of course I'm scared." "Course" came out "gorse," as if he had a bad cold.
"G
"Too bad," Johnny said, not having the slightest idea what the cop was talking about.
"Lips which lie are best kept silent," the cop said, tossing the hat that wasn't his over into the passenger seat. It landed on a tangle of meshy stuff that appeared studded with spikes. The seat, bowed into a tired curve by the cop's weight, settled against Johnny's left knee, squeezing it.
"Sit up!" Johnny yelled. "You're crushing my leg! Sit up and let me pull it out! Jesus, you're killing me!"
The cop made no reply and the pressure on Johnny's already outraged left leg increased. He seized it in both hands and tore it free of the sagging seat-back with an indrawn hiss of effort that pulled blood down his throat and started him dry-heaving for real.
"Bastard!" Johnny yelled, the word popping out in a red-misted coughing spasm before he could pull it back. The cop seemed not to notice that, either. He sat with his head lowered and his fingers tapping lightly on the wheel. His breath was wheezing in his throat, and for a moment Johnny wondered if the man was mocking him. He didn't think so. I hope it's asthma, he thought. And I hope you choke on it.
"Listen," he said, allowing none of that sentiment to enter his voice, "I need something for my dose ... nose. It's killing me. Even an aspirin. Do you have an aspirin?"
The cop said nothing. Went on tapping the wheel with his head down, that was all.
Johnny opened his mouth to say something else, then closed it again. He was in terrible pain, a1l right, the worst he could remember, even worse than the gallstone he had passed in '89, but he still didn't want to die. And something in the cop's posture, as if he were very far away in his own head, deciding something important, suggested that death might be close.
So he kept silent and waited.
Time spun out. The shadows of the mountains grew a bit thicker and moved a bit closer, but the coyotes had fallen silent. The cop sat with his head lowered and his fingers tapping the sides of the wheel, seeming to meditate, not looking up when another semi went by headed east and a car passed them going west, swinging out to give the parked police-cruiser with the ticking roof-flashers a wide berth.
Then he picked up something which had been lying beside him on the front seat: an old-fashioned shotgun with a double-trigger setup. The cop looked at it fixedly. "I guess that woman wasn't really a folk-singer," he said, "but she tried her best to kill me, no doubt about that. With this."
Johnny said nothing, only waited. His heart was beating slowly but very hard in his chest.
"You have never written a truly spiritual novel," the cop told him. He spoke slowly, enunciating each word with care. "It is your great unrecognized failing, and it is at the center of your petulant, self-indulgent behavior. You have no interest in your spiritual nature. You mock the God who created you, and by doing so you mortify your own pneuma and glorify the mud which is your sarx. Do you understand me?"
Johnny opened his mouth, then closed it again. To speak or not to speak, that was the question.
The cop solved the dilemma for him. Without looking up from the wheel, without so much as a glance into the rearview mirror, he placed the double barrels of the shot gun on his right shoulder and pointed them back through the wire mesh. Johnny moved instinctively, sliding to the left, trying to get away from those huge dark holes.
And although the cop still did not look up, the muzzles of the gun tracked him as precisely as a radar-controlled servomotor.
He might have a mirror in his lap, Johnny thought, and then: But what good would that do? He wouldn't see anything but the roof of the fucking car. What in the hell is going on here?
"Answer me," the cop said. His voice was dark and brooding. His head was still bent. The hand not holding the shotgun continued to tap at the wheel, and another gust of wind hammered the cruiser, driving sand and alkali dust against the window in a fine spray. "Answer me now. I won't wait. I don't have to wait. There's always another one coming along. So ... do you understand what I just told you?"
"Yes," Johnny said in a trembling voice. "Pneuma is the old Gnostic word for spirit. Sarx is the body. You said, correct me if I'm wrong---2' Just not with the shotgun, please don't correct me with the shotgun. "--that I've ignored my spirit in favor of my body. And you could be right. You could very well be."
He moved to the right again. The shotgun muzzles tracked his movements precisely, although he could swear that the springs of the back seat made no sound beneath him and the cop could not see him unless he was using a television monitor or something.
"Don't toady to me," the cop said wearily. "That will only make your fate worse." .
"I ..." He licked his lips. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to--"
"Sarx is not the body; soma is the body. Sarx is the flesh of the body. The body is made of flesh--as the word was reputedly made flesh by the birth of Jesus Christ--but the body is more than the flesh that makes it. The sum is greater than the parts. Is that so hard for an intellectual such as yourself to understand?"
The shotgun barrel, moving and moving. Tracking like an autogyro.
"I ... I never ..."
"Thought of it that way? Oh please. Even a spiritual naif like you must understand that a chicken dinner is not a chicken. Pneuma ... soma ... and s-s-s--"
His voice had thickened and now he was hitching in breath, trying to talk as a person does only when trying to finish his thought before the sneeze arrives. He abruptly dropped the shotgun onto the seat again, gasped in a deep breath (the. abused seat creaked backward, almost pinning Johnny's left knee again), and let fly. What came out of his mouth and nose was not mucus but blood and red filmy stuff that looked like nylon mesh. This stuff--raw tissue from the big cop's throat and sinuses--hit the windshield, the steering wheel, the dashboard. The smell was awful, the smell of rotted meat.
Johnny clapped his hands to his face and screamed. There was no way not to scream. He could feel his eyeballs pulsing in their sockets, could feel adrenaline roar into his system as the shock-reaction set in.
"Gosh, there's nothing worse than a summer cold, is there?" the cop asked in his dark, musing voice. He cleared his throat and spat a clot the size of a crabapple onto the face of the dashboard. It hung where it was for a moment, then oozed down the front of the police-radio like an unspeakable snail, leaving a trail of blood behind. It hung briefly from the bottom of the radio, then dropped to the floormat with a plop.
Johnny closed his eyes behind his hands and moaned.
"That was sarx, " the cop said, and started the engine. "You might want to keep it in mind. I'd say 'for your next book,' but I don't think there's going to be a next book, do you, Mr. Marinville?"
Johnny didn't answer, only kept his hands over his face and his eyes closed. It occurred to him that quite possibly none of this was happening, that he was in a nuthouse some-place, having the world's ugliest hallucination. But his better, deeper mind knew that wasn't true. The stench of what the man had sneezed out--
He's dying, he's got to be dying, that's infection and internal bleeding, he's sick, his mental illness is only one symptom of something else, some radiation thing, or maybe rabies, or... or...
The cop hauled the Caprice cruiser around in a U, pointing it east. Johnny kept his hands over his face a little longer, trying to get himself under control, then lowered them and opened his eyes. What he saw out the right-hand window made his jaw drop.
Coyotes sat along the roadside at fifty-foot intervals like an honor guard--silent, yellow-eyed, tongues lolling. They appeared to be grinning.
He turned and looked out the other window, and here were more of them, sitting in the dust, in the blazing sun of late afternoon, watching the police-cruiser go by. Is that a symptom, too? he asked himself. What you're seeing out there, is that a symptom, too? If so, how come I can see it?
He looked out
"You'll learn, Lord Jim," the cop said, and Johnny turned back toward him. He saw gray eyes staring from the rearview mirror. One was filmed with blood. "Before your time is up, I think you'll understand a great deal more than you do now."
Ahead was a sign by the side of the road, an arrow pointing the way toward some little town or other. The cop put on his turnblinker, although there was no one to see it.
"I'm taking you to the classroom," the big cop said. "School will be in shortly."
He made the right turn, the cruiser lifting onto two wheels and then settling back. It headed south, toward the cracked bulwark of the open-pit mine and the town huddled at its base.
CHAPTER 4
1
Steve Ames was breaking one of the Five Commandments--the last one on the list, as a matter of fact.
The Five Commandments had been given to him a month ago, not by God but by Bill Harris. They had been sitting in Jack Appleton's office. Appleton had been Johnny Marinville's editor for the last ten years. He was present for the handing down of the commandments but did not participate in this part of the conversation until near the end--onty sat back in his desk chair with his exquisitely manicured fingers spread on the lapels of his suitcoat. The great man himself had left fifteen minutes before, head up and studly gray hair flying out behind him, saying he had promised to join someone at an art gallery down in SoHo.
"All these commandments are thou shalt nots, and I don't expect you to have any trouble remembering them," Harris had said. He was a tubby little guy, and there probably wasn't much harm in him, but everything he said came out sounding like the decree of a weak king. "Are you listening?"
"Listening," Steve had agreed.
"First, thou shalt not drink with him. He's been on the wagon for awhile--five years, he claims--but he's stopped going to Alcoholics Anonymous, and that's not a good sign. Also, for Johnny the wagon's always had a nonstick surface, even with AA. But he doesn't like to drink alone, so if he asks you to join him for a few after a hard day on the old Harley, you say no. If he starts bullying you, telling you it's part of your job, you still say no."