Стивен Кинг - Desperation

“But I couldn’t stay in the store. The sound of the flies was driving me crazy, for one thing, and it was hot. I don’t usually mind the heat, you can’t mind it if you live _ in central Nevada, but I kept thinking I smelled them. So I—waited until I heard him shooting somewhere over by the town garage-that’s on Dumont Street, about as far east as you can go before you run out of town-and then I left Stepping out of the market and back onto the sidewalk was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life Like being a soldier and stepping out into no-man’s-land At first I couldn’t move at all; I just froze right where I was. I remember thinking that I had to walk, I couldn t run because I’d panic if I did, but I had to walk. Except I couldn’t. Couldn’t. It was like being paralyzed.

Then I heard him coming back. It was weird. As if he sensed me Sensed someone, anyway, moving around while his back was turned. Like he was playing a new kind of kid s game, one where you got to murder the losers instead of just sending them back to the Prisoner’s Base, or some thing. The engine… it’s so loud when it starts to rev. So powerful. So loud. Even when I’m not hearing it. I m imagining I hear it. You know. It sounds kind of like a catamount getting f… like a wildcat in heat. That’s what I heard coming toward me, and still I couldn’t move I could only stand there and listen to it getting closer I thought about the Tastykake man, how he was shivering like the jay I shot when I was a kid, and that finally got me going. I went into the laundrymat and threw myself down on the floor just as he went by. I heard more screaming north of town, but I don’t know what that was about, because I couldn’t look up. I couldn’t get up I must have lain there on that floor for almost twenty mm utes, that’s how bad I was. I can say I was way beyond scared by then, but I can’t make you understand how weird it gets in your bead when you’re that way. I lay there on the floor, looking at dust-balls and mashed-up cigarette butts and thinking how you could tell this was a laundrymat even down at the level I was, because of the smell and because all of the butts had lipstick on them. I lay there and I couldn’t have moved even if I’d heard him coming up the sidewalk. I would have lain there until he put the barrel of his gun on the side of my head and-”

“Don’t,” Mary said, wincing. “Don’t talk about it.”

“But I can’t stop thinking about it!” she shouted, and something about that jagged on Johnny Marinville’s ear as nothing else she’d said had. She made a visible effort to get herself under control, then went on. “What got me past that was the sound of people outside. I got up on my knees and crawled over to the door. I saw four people across the street, by the Owl’s. Two were Mexican-the Escolla boy who works on the crusher up at the mine, and his girlfriend. I don’t know her name, but she’s got a blonde streak in her hair-natural, I’m almost sure-and she’s awfully pretty. Was awfully pretty. There was another woman, quite heavy, I’d never seen her before. The man with her I’ve seen playing pooi with you in Bud’s, Tom. Flip somebody.”

“Flip Moran. You saw the Flipper.”

She nodded. “They were working their way up the other side of the street, trying cars, looking for keys. I thought about mine, and how we could all go together. I started to get up. They were passing that little alley over there, the one between the storefront where the Italian restaurant used to be and The Broken Drum, and Entragian came roaring right out of the alley in his cruiser. Like he’d been waiting for them. Probably he was waiting for them. He hit them all, but I think your friend Flip was the only one killed outright.

The others just went skidding off to one side, like bowling-pins when you miss a good hit. They kind of grabbed each other to keep from falling down. Then they ran. The Escolla boy had his arm around his girlfriend. She was crying and holding her arm against her breasts. It was broken. You could see it was, it looked like it had an extra joint in it above the elbow. The other woman had blood pouring down her face. When she heard Entragian coming after them-that big, powerful engine—she spun around and held her hands up like she was a crossing guard or something. He was driving with his right hand and leaning out the window like a locomotive engineer. He shot her twice before he hit her with the car and ran her under. That was the first really good look I got at him, the first time I knew for sure who I was dealing with.”

She looked at them one by one, as if trying to measure the effect her words were having.

“He was grinning. Grinning and laughing like a kid on his first visit to Disney World.

Happy, you know. Happy.”

Audrey had crouched there at the laundrymat door, watching Entragian chase the Escolla boy and his girl north on Main Street with the cruiser. He caught them and ran them down as he had the older woman-it was easy to get them both at once, she said, because the boy was trying to help the girl, the two of them were running together. When they were down, Entragian had stopped, backed up, backed slowly over them (there had been no wind then, Audrey told them, and she had heard the sound of their bones snapping very clearly), got out, walked over to them, knelt between them, put a bullet in the back of the girl’s head, then took off the Escolla boy’s hat, which had stayed on through everything, and put a bullet in the back of his head.

“Then he put the hat back on him again,” Audrey said.

“If I live through this, that’s one thing I’ll never forget, no matter how long I live-how he took the boy’s hat off to shoot him, then put it back on again. It was as if he was saying he understood how hard this was on them, and he wanted to be as considerate as possible.”

Entragian stood up, turned in a circle (reloading as he did), seeming to look everywhere at once. Audrey said he was wearing a big, goony smile. Johnny knew the kind she meant. He had seen it. In a crazy way it seemed to him he had seen all of this-in a dream, or another life.

It’s just dem old kozmic Vietnam blues again, he told himself. The way she described the cop reminded him of certain stoned troopers he had run with, and certain sto-ries he had been told late at night-whispered tales from grunts who had seen guys, their own guys, do terrible, unspeakable things with that same look of immaculate good cheer on their faces. It’s Vietnam, that’s all, coming at you like an acid flashback.

All you need now to com-plete the circle is a transistor radio sticking out of some-one’s pocket, playing “People Are Strange” or “Pictures of Matchstick Men.”

But was that all. A deeper part of him seemed to doubt the idea. That part thought something else was going on here, something which had little or nothing to do with the paltry memories of a novelist who had fed on war like a buzzard on carrion… and had subsequently produced exactly the sort of bad book such behavior probably warranted.

All right, then-if it’s not you, what is it.

“What did you do then.” Steve asked her.

“Went back to the laundrymat office. I crawled. And when I got there, I crawled into the kneehole under the desk and curled up in there and went to sleep. I was very tired. Seeing all those things… all that death… it made me very tired.

“It was thin sleep. I kept hearing things. Gunshots, explosions, breaking glass, screams. I have no idea how much of it was real and how much was jvst in my mind. When I woke up, it was late afternoon. I was sore all over, at first I thought it had all been a dream, that I might even still be camping. Then I opened my eyes and saw where I was, curled up under a desk, and I smelled bleach and laundry soap, and realized I had to pee worse than ever in my life. Also, both my legs were asleep.