Стивен Кинг - Desperation

“Yeah, but what did you really think of.”

She looked for a moment as if she were going to tell him not to be a wise-ass, then didn’t.

“Sex,” she said, and let out a shaky sigh. “Not just fucking, either. All of it. The dirtier the better.”

Yes, he thought, the dirtier the better. Things you might like to try but would never talk about. Experimental stuff “What are you thinking about.” Her voice was oddly sharp, at the same time oddly pungent, like a smell. Steve looked over at her and suddenly wondered if her pussy was tight. An insane thought to be having at a time like this, but it was what came into his head.

“Steve.” Sharper than ever. “What are you thinking.”

“Nothing,” he said. His voice was thick, the voice of a man struggling out of a deep sleep. “Nothing, never mind.”

“Does it start with C and end with E.”

Actually, my dear, “cunt” ends with a T, but you’re in the ballpark.

What was wrong with him. What in God’s name. It was as if that funny piece of rock had turned on another radio, this one in his head, and it was broadcasting a voice that was almost his own.

“What are you talking about.” he asked her.

“Coyote, coyote,” she said, lilting the words like a child. No, she wasn’t accusing him of anything, although he supposed that briefly thinking so had been a natural enough mistake; she was just falling all over herself with excitement. “The thing we saw back in the lab! If we had it, we could get out of here! I know we could, Steve! And don’t waste my time-our time-by telling me I’m crazy!”

Considering the stuff they had seen and the stuff that had happened to them in the last ninety minutes or so, he had no intention of doing that. If she was crazy, they both were.

But—“You told me not to touch it.” He was still struggling to talk; it was as if there were mud packed into his think-ing equipment. “You said it felt Felt what. What had she said.

Nice. That was it. “Touch it, Steve. It feels nice.”

No. Wrong.

“You said it felt nasty.”

She smiled at him. In the green glow of the dashlights, the smile looked cruel. “You want to feel something nasty. Feel this.”

She took his hand, put it between her legs, and twitched her hips upward twice. Steve closed his hand on her down there-hard enough to hurt, maybe-but her smile stayed on.

Widened, even.

What are we doing. And why in God’s name are we doing it now.

He heard the voice, but it was almost lost-like a voice screaming fire in a ballroom full of yelling people and jagged music. The cleft between her legs was closer, more urgent. He could feel it right through her jeans, and it was burning. Burning.

She said her name was Emergency and asked to see my gun, Steve thought. You’re going to see it, all right, honey, thirty-eight pistol on a forty-five frame, shoots tombstone bullets with a ball and chain.

He made a tremendous effort to catch hold of himself, grabbing for anything that would shut the pile down before the containment rods melted. What he got hold of was an image-the curious, wary expression on her face as she looked at him through the truck’s open passenger door, not getting in right away, wide blue eyes checking him out first, trying to decide if he was the kind of guy who might bite or maybe try to yank something off her. An ear, for instance. Are you a nice person. she’d asked him, and he had said Yeah, I guess so, and then, nice person that he was, he had brought her to this town of the dead, and his hand was in her crotch, and he was thinking he’d like to fuck her and hurt her at the same time, kind of an expenment, you could say, one having to do with plea-sure and pain, the sweet and the salty. Because that was the way it was done in the place of the wolf, that was how it was done in the house of the scorpion, it was what passed for love in Desperation.

Are you a nice person. Not a crazy serial killer or any-thing. Are you nice, are you nice, are you a nice person.

He pulled his hand away from her, shuddering. He turned to the window and looked out into the blowing blackness where sand danced like snow. He could feel sweat on his chest and arms and in his armpits, and although it was a little better now, he still felt like a sick man between fits of delirium. Now that he had thought of the stone wolf, he couldn’t unthink it, it seemed; he kept seeing its crazy corkscrewed head and bulging eyes. It hung in his head like an unsatisfied habit.

“What’s wrong.” she moaned from beside him. “Oh, Jesus, Steve, I didn’t mean to do that, what’s wrong with us.”

“I don’t know,” he said hoarsely, “but I’ll tell you something I do know-we just got us a little taste of what happened in this town, and I don’t like it much. I can’t get that fucking stone thing out of my mind.”

He finally found enough courage to look at her. She was all the way over against the passenger door, like a scared teenager on a first date that had gone too far, and although she looked calm enough, her cheeks were fiery red and she was wiping away tears with the side of her hand.

“Me, either,” she said. “I remember once I got a little piece of glass in my eye. That’s what this feels like. I keep thinking I’d like to take that stone and rub it against my… you know. Except it’s not much like thinking. It’s not like thinking at all.”

“I know,” he said, wishing savagely that she hadn’t said that. Because now the idea was in his mind, too. He saw himself rubbing that ugly damned thing-ugly but pow-erful—against his erect penis. And from there he saw the two of them fucking on the floor beneath that row of hooks, beneath those dangling corpses, with that crum-bling gray piece of stone held between them, in their teeth.

Steve swept the images away… although how long he would be able to keep them away he didn’t know. He looked at her again and managed a smile. “Don’t call me cookie,” he said. “Don’t call me cookie and I won’t call you cake.”

She let out a long, trembling, half-vocalized breath that fell just a little short of laughter.

“Yeah. Somethin like that, anyway. I think it might be getting a little better.”

He nodded cautiously. Yes. He still had a world-class hardon, and he could badly use a reprieve from that, but now his thoughts seemed a little more his own. If he could keep them diverted from that piece of stone a little while longer, he thought he’d be okay. But for a few seconds there it had been bad, maybe the worst thing that had ever happened to him. In those seconds he had known how guys like Ted Bundy must feel. He could have killed her. Maybe would have killed her, if he hadn’t broken his physical contact with her when he had. Or, he supposed, she might have killed him. It was as if sex and murder had somehow changed places in this horrible little town. Except even sex wasn’t what it was about, not really. He remembered how, when she had touched the wolf, the lights had flickered and the radio had come back on.

“Not sex,” he said. “Not murder, either. Power.”

“Huh.”

“Nothing. I’m going to drive us right back through the middle of town. Out toward the mine.”

“That big wall off to the south.”

He nodded. “It’s an open-pit. There’ll have to be at least one equipment road out there that cuts back to 50. We’re going to find it and take it. I’m actually glad this one is blocked off. I don’t want to go anywhere near that Quonset, or that-”

She reached out and grabbed his arm. Steve followed her gaze and saw something come slinking into the arc of the truck’s headlights. The dust was now so thick that at first the animal looked like a ghost, some Indian-conjured spirit from a hundred years ago. It was a timberwolf, easily the length and height of a German Shepherd, but leaner. Its eyes were sockets of crimson in the headlights. Following it like attendants in some malign fairy-tale were two files of desert scorpions with their stingers furled over their backs.