Стивен Кинг - Desperation

But you stand here… with the lights on… playing party-games!”

“The lights wouldn’t show from the outside even if we had all of them on,” Billingsley said. He was looking at Audrey in a way that was both thoughtful and intense.

as if, Johnny thought, he had the idea he’d seen her some—where before. Possibly in Dirty Debutantes. “It’s a movie theater, remember. Pretty much soundproof and light proof. That’s what we liked about it, my gang.”

“But he’ll come looking. And if he looks long enough and hard enough, he’ll find us.

When you’re in Despera tion, there aren’t that many places to hide.”

“Let him,” Ralph Carver said hollowly, and raised the Ruger.44. “He killed my little girl and took my wife away. I saw what he’s like as much as you did, lady. So let him come. I got some Express Mail for him.”

Audrey looked at him uncertainly for a moment. He looked back at her with dead eyes.

She glanced at Mary found nothing there to interest her, and looked at Bill ingsley again.

“He could sneak up. A place like this must have half a dozen ways in. Maybe more.”

“Yup, and every one locked except for the ladies’-room window,” Billingsley said. “I went back there just now and set up a line of beer-bottles on the windowledge inside. If he opens the window, it’ll swing in, hit the bottles, knock em over, smash em on the floor. We’ll hear him, ma’am, and when he walks out here we’ll fill him so full of lead you could cut im up and use im for sinkers He was looking at her closely as he uttered this grandi osity, eyes alternating between her face, which was okay and her legs, which were, in John Edward Marinville s umble opinion, pretty fooking spectacular.

She continued to look at Billingsley as if she had never seen a bigger fool. “Ever heard of keys, oldtimer. The cops have keys to all the businesses in these little towns “To the open ones, that’s so,” Billingsley replied qui etly. “But The American West hasn’t been open for a long time. The doors ain’t just locked, they’re boarded shut The kids used the fire escape to get in up front, but that ended last March, when it fell down.

Nope, I reckon we’re as safe here as anywhere.”

“Probably safer than out on the street,” Johnny said.

Audrey turned to him, hands on her hips. “Well, what do you intend to do. Stay here and amuse yourselves by making shadow-animals on the goddam movie screen.”

“Take it easy,” Steve said.

“You take it easy!” she almost snarled. “I want to get out of here!”

“We all do, but this isn’t the time,” Johnny said. He looked around at the others. “Does anyone disagree.”

“It’d be insanity to go out there in the dark,” Mary said. “The wind’s got to be blowing fifty miles an hour, and with the sand flying the way it is, he’d be apt to pick us off one by one.”

“What do you think’s going to change tomorrow, when the storm ends and the sun comes out.” Audrey asked. It was Johnny she was asking, not Mary.

“I think that friend Entragian may be dead by the time the storm ends,” he said. “If he’s not already.”

Ralph looked over and nodded. David hunkered by the TV, hands loosely clasped between his knees, looking at Johnny with deep concentration.

“Why.” Audrey asked. “How.”

“You haven’t seen him.” Mary asked her.

“Of course I have. Just not today. Today I only heard him driving around… walking around… and talking to himself. I haven’t actually seen him since yesterday.”

“Is there anything radioactive around here, ma’am.” Ralph asked Audrey. “Was it ever, like, some sort of dumping ground for nuclear waste, or maybe old weap-ons. Missile warheads, or something. Because the cop looked like he was falling apart.”

“I don’t think it was radiation sickness,” Mary said. “I’ve seen pictures of that, and-”

“Whoa,” Johnny said, raising his hands. “I want to make a suggestion. I think we should sit down and talk this out. Okay. It’ll pass the time, if nothing else, and an idea of what we should do next may come Out of it.” He looked at Audrey, gave her his most winning smile, and was delighted to see her relax a little, if not exactly melt. Maybe not all of the old charm had departed after all. “At the very least, it will be more constructive than making shadows on the movie screen.”

His smile faded a little and he turned to look at them: Audrey, standing on the edge of the rug in her gawky—sexy dress; David, squatting by the TV; Steve and Cyn-thia, now sitting on the arms of an overstuffed easy chair that looked like it might also have come from the old Circle Ranch; Mary, standing by the screen and looking schoolteacherly with her arms folded under her breasts; Tom Billingsley, now inspecting the open upper cabinet of the bar, with his hands tightly clasped behind his back; Ralph in the wing-chair at the edge of the light, with his left eye now puffed almost completely shut. The Collie Entragian Survival Society, all present and accounted for What a crew, Johnny thought. Manhattan Transfer in the desert.

“There’s another reason we have to talk,” he said. He glanced at their shadows bobbing on the curtainless movie screen. For a moment they all looked to him like the shadows of giant birds. He thought of Entragian, telling him buzzards farted, they were the only birds that did. Of Entragian saying Oh shit, we’re all beyond why you know that. Johnny thought that might well be the scariest thing anyone had said to him in his whole life Mostly because it rang true.

Johnny nodded slowly, as if in agreement with some interior speaker, then went on.

“I’ve seen some extraordinary things in my life, but I’ve never had what I could in any way characterize as a supernatural experience. Until-maybe-today. And what scares me the most about it is that the experience may be ongoing. I don’t know. All I can say for sure is that things have happened to me in the last few hours that I can explain.”

“What are you talking about.” Audrey sounded close to tears. “Isn’t what’s happening bad enough without turning it into some kind of a… a campfire story.”

“Yes,” Johnny said, speaking in a low, compassionate voice that he hardly recognized.

“But that doesn’t change things.”

“I listen and talk better when I’m not starving to death, Mary remarked. “I don’t suppose there’s anything to eat in this place, is there.”

Tom Billingsley shuffled his feet and looked embar rassed. “Well, no, not a whole lot, ma’am. Mostly we came here in the evenings to drink and talk over the old days.”

She sighed. “That’s what I thought.”

He pointed vaguely across toward the stage-right en trance. “Marty Ives brought in a little bag of somethin a r couple of nights ago. Probably sardines. Marty loves sar-dines and crackers.”

“Yuck,” Mary said, but she looked interested almost in spite of herself. Johnny supposed that in another two or three hours even anchovies would look good to her.

“I’ll take a peek, maybe he brought in something else,” Billingsley said. He didn’t sound hopeful.

David got up. “I’ll do it, if you want.”

Billingsley shrugged. He was looking at Audrey again and seemed to have lost interest in Marty Ives’s sardines. “There’s a light-switch to the left just as you get offstage. Straight ahead you’ll see some shelves. Anything people brought to eat, they most generally put it on those. You might find some Oreos, too.”

“You guys might’ve drunk a tad too much, but at least you kept the minimum nutrition needs in mind,” Johnny said. “I like that.” The vet gave him a glance, shrugged, and went back to Audrey Wyler’s legs. She seemed not to notice his interest in them. Or to care.