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.

Flanking the scorpions were coyotes, two on each side. They appeared to be grinning nervously.

The wind gusted. The truck rocked on its springs. To their left, the fallen piece of awning flapped like a torn sail.

“The wolf’s carrying something,” she said hoarsely.

“You’re nuts,” he said, but as it drew closer, he saw that she wasn’t nuts. The wolf stopped about twenty feet from the truck, as bald and real as something in a high—resolution crime-scene photograph. Then it lowered its head and dropped the thing it had been holding in its mouth. It looked at it attentively for a moment, then backed off three steps. It sat down and began to pant.

It was the statue-fragment, lying there on its side at the entrance to the cafe parking lot, lying there in the blowing dust, mouth snarling, head twisted, eyes starting from their sockets. Fury, rage, sex, power-it seemed to broad-cast these things at the truck in a tight cone, like some sort of magnetic field.

The image of fucking Cynthia recurred, of being buried in her like a sword jammed hilt—deep in hot, packed mud, the two of them face-to-face, lips drawn back in identical snarls as they gripped the snarling stone coyote between them like a thong.

“Should I get it.” she asked, and now she was the one who sounded as if she were sleeping.

“Are you kidding.” he asked. His voice, his Texas accent, but not his words, not now.

These words were coming from the radio in his head, the one the piece of stone statue had turned on.