Stinger

Stinger.

By Robert McCammon.

Prologue.

The motorcycle roared out of Bordertown, carrying the blond boy and dark-haired girl away from the horror behind them.

Smoke and dust whirled into the boy"s face; he smelled blood and his own scared sweat, and the girl trembled as she clung to him. The bridge was ahead of them, but the motorcycle"s headlight was smashed out and the boy was steering by the dim violet glow that filtered through the smoke clouds. The air was hot, heavy, and smelled burnt: the odor of a battleground. The tires gave a slight b.u.mp. They were on the bridge, the boy knew. He cut his speed slightly as the bridge"s concrete sides narrowed, and swerved to avoid a hubcap that must have fallen off one of the cars that had just raced to the Inferno side. The thing that both he and the girl had just seen still clawed at their minds, and the girl looked back with tears in her eyes and her brother"s name on her lips. Almost across, the boy thought. We"re gonna make it! We"re gonna- Something rose up from the smoke directly in front of them. The boy instinctively hit the brakes, started to swerve the machine, but knew there wasn"t enough time. The motorcycle smacked into the figure, then skidded out of control. The boy lost his grip, felt the girl go off the motorcycle too, and then he seemed to turn head over heels in midair and slid in a fury of friction burns.

He lay curled up, gasping for breath. Must"ve been the Mumbler, he thought as he struggled to stay conscious. The Mumbler... crawled up on the bridge... and gave us a whack. He tried to sit up. Not enough strength yet. His left arm was hurting, but he could move the fingers and that was a good sign. His ribs felt like splintered razors, and he wanted to sleep, just close his eyes and let go... but if he did that, he was sure he would never awaken again. He smelled gasoline. Motor"s tank ruptured, he realized. About two seconds later there was a whump! of fire and orange light flickered. Pieces of metal clattered down around him. He got up on his knees, his lungs. .h.i.tching, and in the firelight could see the girl lying on her back about six feet away, her arms and legs splayed like those of a broken doll. He crawled to her. There was blood on her mouth from a split lower lip and a blue bruise on the side of her face. But she was breathing, and when he spoke her name her eyelids fluttered. He tried to cradle her head, but his fingers found a lump on her skull and he thought he"d better not move her.

And then he heard footsteps-two boots: one clacking, one sliding. He looked up, his heart hammering. Someone was lurching toward them from the Bordertown side. Rivulets of gasoline burned on the bridge, and the thing strode on through the streams of flame, the cuffs of its jeans catching fire. It was hunchbacked, a grotesque mockery of a human being, and as it got nearer the boy could see a grin of needles.

He crouched protectively over the girl. The clacking boot and dragging boot closed in. The boy started to rise to fight it off, but pain shot through his ribs, stole his breath, and hobbled him. He fell back to his side, wheezing for air.

The hunchbacked, grinning thing reached them, and stood staring down. Then it bent lower, and a hand with metal, saw-edged fingernails slid over the girl"s face. The boy"s strength was gone. The metal nails were about to crush the girl"s head, about to rip the flesh off her skull. It would happen in a heartbeat, and the boy knew that on this long night of horror there was only one chance to save her life...

1 Dawn

The sun was rising, and as the heat shimmered in phantom waves the night things crept back to their holes.

The purple light took on a tint of orange. Muted gray and dull brown gave way to deep crimson and burnt amber. Stovepipe cactus and knee-high sagebrush grew violet shadows, and slabs of rough-edged boulders glowed as scarlet as Apache warpaint. The colors of morning mingled and ran along gullies and cracks in the rugged land, sparkling bronze and ruddy in the winding trickle of the Snake River. As the light strengthened and the alkali odor of heat drifted up from the desert floor, the boy who"d slept under the stars opened his eyes. His muscles were stiff, and he lay for a minute or two looking up at the cloudless sky as it flooded with gold. He thought he remembered dreaming-something about his father, the drunken voice bellowing his name over and over again, distorting it with each repet.i.tion until it sounded more like a curse-but he wasn"t sure. He didn"t usually have good dreams, especially not those in which the old man capered and grinned.

He sat up and drew his knees to his chest, resting his sharp chin between them, and watched the sun explode over the series of jagged ridges that lay far to the east beyond Inferno and Bordertown. The sunrise always reminded him of music, and today he heard the crash and bl.u.s.ter of an Iron Maiden guitar solo, full-throttle and wailing. He liked sleeping out here, even though it took awhile for his muscles to unkink, because he liked to be alone, and he liked the desert"s early colors. In another couple of hours, when the sun really started getting hot, the desert would turn the hue of ashes, and you could almost hear the air sizzle. If you didn"t find shade at midday, the Great Fried Empty would cook a person"s brains to twitching cinders.

But for right now it was fine, while the air was still soft and everything-if just for a short while-held the illusion of beauty. At a time like this he could pretend he"d awakened a long, long way from Inferno. He was sitting on the flat surface of a boulder as big as a pickup truck, one of a jumble of huge rocks wedged together and known locally as the Rocking Chair because of its curved shape. The Rocking Chair was marred by a barrage of spray-painted graffiti, rude oaths and declarations like "RATTLERS BITE JURADO"S c.o.c.k" obscuring the remnants of pictographs etched there by Indians three hundred years ago. It sat atop a ridge stubbled with cactus, mesquite, and sagebrush, and rose about a hundred feet from the desert"s surface. It was the boy"s usual roost when he slept out here, and from this vantage point he could see the edges of his world.

To the north lay the black, razor-straight line of Highway 67, which came out of the Texas flatlands, became Republica Road for two miles as it sliced along Inferno"s side, crossed the Snake River Bridge, and pa.s.sed mangy Bordertown; then it became Highway 67 again as it disappeared south toward the Chinati Mountains and the Great Fried Empty. For as far as the boy could see, both north and south, no cars moved on Highway 67, but a few vultures were circling something dead-an armadillo, jackrabbit, or snake-that lay on the roadside. He wished them a good breakfast as they swooped down to feast. To the east of the Rocking Chair lay the flat, intersecting streets of Inferno. The blocky, adobe-style buildings of the central "business district" stood around the small rectangle of Preston Park, which held a white-painted bandstand, a collection of cacti planted by the Board of Beautification, and a life-size white marble statue of a donkey. The boy shook his head, took a pack of Winstons from the inside pocket of his faded denim jacket, and lit the first cigarette of the day with a Zippo lighter; it was his dumb luck, he mused, to have spent his life in a town named after a jacka.s.s. Then again, the statue was probably a pretty fair likeness of Sheriff Vance"s mother too.

The wooden and stone houses along Inferno"s streets threw purple shadows over the gritty yards and heat-cracked concrete. Multicolored plastic flags drooped over Mack Cade"s used-car lot on Celeste Street. The lot was surrounded by an eight-foot-tall chainlink fence topped with barbed wire, and a big red sign trumpeted TRADE WITH CADE THE WORKINGMAN"S FRIEND. The boy figured that every one of those cars were chopshop specials; the best junker on the lot couldn"t make five hundred miles, but Cade was making a killing off the Mexicans. Anyway, selling used cars was just pocket change to Cade, whose real business lay elsewhere.

Further east, where Celeste Street crossed Brazos Street at the edge of Preston Park, the windows of the Inferno First Texas Bank glowed orange with the sun"s fireball. Its three floors made it the tallest structure in Inferno, not counting the looming gray screen of the StarLite Drive-in off to the northeast. Used to be, you could sit up here on the Rocking Chair and see the movies for free, make up your own dialogue, do a little zooming and freaking around, and have a real scream. But times do change, the boy thought. He drew on his cigarette and puffed a couple of smoke rings. The drive-in shut down last summer, the concession building a nest for snakes and scorpions. About a mile north of the StarLite was a small cinder-block building with a roof like a brown scab. The boy could see that the gravel parking lot was empty, but round about noontime it would start filling up. The Bob Wire Club was the only place in town making money anymore. Beer and whiskey were mighty potent painkillers. The electric sign in front of the bank spelled out 5:57 in lightbulbs, then abruptly changed to display the present temperature: 78F. Inferno"s four stoplights all blinked caution yellow, and not one of them was in sync with another.

He didn"t know if he felt like going to school today or not. Maybe he"d just go for a ride in the desert and keep going until the road trailed out, or maybe he"d wander over to the Warp Room and try to beat his best scores on Gunfighter and Galaxian. He looked way east, across Republica Road toward the W. T. Preston High School and the Inferno Community Elementary School, two long, low-slung brick buildings that made him think of prison movies. They faced each other over a common parking lot, and behind the high school was a football field, the meager gra.s.s of autumn long burned away. No new gra.s.s would be planted, and there would be no more games on that field. Anyway, the boy thought, the Preston High Patriots had only won twice during the season and had come in dead last in Presidio County, so who gave a flying f.u.c.k?

He"d skipped school yesterday, and tomorrow-Friday, May 25-was the last day for the seniors. The ordeal of finals was over, and he would graduate with the rest of his cla.s.s if he finished his manual-arts project. So maybe he ought to be a choirboy today, go to school like he was supposed to, or at least check in to see what the action was. Maybe Tank, Bobby Clay Clemmons, or somebody would want to go somewhere and zoom, or maybe one of the Mexican b.a.s.t.a.r.ds needed a nitro lesson. If that was so, he"d be real happy to oblige.

His pale gray eyes narrowed behind a screen of smoke. Looking down on Inferno like this disturbed him, made him feel antsy and mean, like he had an itch he couldn"t scratch. He"d decided it must be because there were so many dead-end streets in Inferno. Cobre Road, which intersected Republica and ran west along the Snake River"s gulley, continued for about eight more miles-but only past more failure: the copper mine and the Preston Ranch, as well as a few other struggling old spreads. The strengthening sunlight did not make Inferno any prettier; it only exposed all the scars. The town was scorched and dusty and dying, and Cody Lockett knew that by this time next year there"d be n.o.body left. Inferno would dry up and blow away; already a lot of the houses were empty, the people who"d lived in them packed up and gone for greener pastures.

Travis Street ran north and south, and divided Inferno into its east and west sections. The east section was mostly wooden houses that would not hold paint and that, in the middle of summer, would become ovens of misery. The west section, where the shopowners and "upper cla.s.s" lived, was predominantly white stone and adobe houses, and in the yards were an occasional sprout of wildflowers. But it was clearing out fast: every week saw more businesses shutting down; amid the wildflowers bloomed FOR SALE signs. And at the northern end of Travis Street, across a parking lot strewn with tumbleweeds, stood a two-story red-brick apartment building, its first-floor windows covered with sheet metal. The building had been constructed back in the late fifties-in the boomtown years-but now it was a warren of empty rooms and corridors that the Renegades, the gang of which Cody Lockett was president, had taken over and made into their fortress. Any member of el Culebra de Cascabel-the Rattlesnakes, a gang of Mexican kids over in Bordertown-was meat to be fried if he or she was caught on "Gade territory after dark. And "Gade territory was everything north of the Snake River Bridge. That was how it had to be. Cody knew the Mexicans would stomp you if you let them. They"d take your money and your job and they"d spit in your face while they were doing it. So they had to be kept in their place, and knocked back if they got out of line. That was what Cody"s old man had drilled into his head, day after day, year after year. Wetbacks, Cody"s father said, were like dogs that had to be kicked every so often just so they"d know who the masters were around here. But sometimes, when Cody slowed down and thought about it, he didn"t see what harm the Mexicans did. They were out of work, same as everybody else. Still, Cody"s father said the Mexicans had ruined the copper mine. Said they fouled everything they touched. Said they"d ruined the state of Texas, and they were going to ruin this country before they were through. Gonna be screwin" white women in the streets before long, the elder Lockett had warned. Gotta kick "em down and make "em taste dust. Sometimes Cody believed it; sometimes he didn"t. It depended on his mood. Things were bad in Inferno, and he knew things were bad inside himself too. Maybe it was easier to kick Mexican a.s.s than to let yourself think too much, he reasoned. Anyway, it all boiled down to keeping the Rattlers out of Inferno after sunset, a responsibility that had been pa.s.sed down to Cody through the six other "Gade presidents before him.

Cody stood up and stretched. The sunlight shone in his curly, sandy-blond hair, which was cropped close on the sides and left s.h.a.ggy on top. A small silver skull hung from the hole in his left earlobe. He cast a long, lean shadow; he stood six feet, was rangy and fast, and looked as mean as rusty barbed wire. His face was made up of hard angles and ridges, nothing soft about it at all, his chin and nose sharp, and even his thick blond eyebrows bristling and angry. He could outstare a sidewinder and give a jackrabbit a good foot race, and when he walked he took long strides as if he were trying to stretch his legs free of Inferno"s boundaries.

He"d turned eighteen on the fifth of March and he had no idea what he was going to do with the rest of his life. The future was a place he avoided thinking about, and beyond a week from Sunday, when he would graduate with the sixty-three other seniors, the world was a patchwork of shadows. His grades weren"t good enough for college, and there wasn"t enough money for technical school. The old man drank everything he earned at the bakery and most of what Cody brought home from the Texaco station too. But Cody knew he could keep the job pumping gas and working on cars for as long as he wanted. Mr. Mendoza, who owned the place, was the only good Mexican he knew-or cared to know. Cody"s gaze shifted to the south, across the river toward the small houses and buildings of Bordertown, the Mexican section. Over there, the four narrow, dusty streets had no names, just numbers, and all of them but Fourth Street were dead ends. The steeple of the Sacrifice of Christ Catholic Church, its cross glinting with orange sunlight, was Bordertown"s highest point. Fourth Street led west into Mack Cade"s auto junkyard-a two-acre maze of car hulks, heaps of parts and discarded tires, enclosed workshops and concrete pits, all surrounded by a nine-foot-tall sheet-metal fence and another foot of vicious concertina wire atop that. Cody could see the flare of welding torches through the windows of a workshop, and a lug-nut gun squealed. Three tractor-trailer trucks were parked in there, awaiting cargo. Cade kept shifts working around the clock, and his business had bought him a huge modernistic adobe mansion with a swimming pool and a tennis court about two miles south of Bordertown and that much closer to the border of Mexico. Cade had offered Cody a job working in the autoyard, but Cody knew what the man was dealing in, and he wasn"t yet ready for that kind of dead end.

He turned toward the west, and his shadow lay before him. His gaze followed the dark line of Cobre Road. Three miles away was the huge red crater of the Preston Copper Mining Company, rimmed with gray like an ulcerous wound. Around the crater stood empty office buildings, storage sheds, the aluminum-roofed refinery building, and abandoned machinery. Cody thought they looked like what was left of dinosaurs after the desert sun had melted their skins away. Cobre Road kept going past the crater in the direction of the Preston Ranch, following the power poles to the west. He looked down again at the quiet town-population about nineteen hundred and slipping fast-and could imagine he heard the clocks ticking in the houses. Sunlight was creeping around curtains and through blinds to streak the walls with fire. Soon those alarm clocks would go off, shocking the sleepers into another day; those with jobs would get dressed and leave their houses, running before the electric prod of time, to their work either in the remaining stores of Inferno or up north in Fort Stockton and Pecos. And at the end of the day, Cody thought, they would all return to those little houses, and they would watch the flickering tube and fill up the empty s.p.a.ces as best they could until those b.a.s.t.a.r.d clocks whispered sleep. That was the way it would be, day after day, from now until the last door shut and the last car pulled out-and then nothing would live here but the desert, growing larger and shifting over the streets.

"So what do I care?" Cody said, and exhaled cigarette smoke through his nostrils. He knew there was nothing for him here; there never had been. The whole freaking town, he told himself, might"ve been a thousand miles from civilization except for the telephone poles, the stupid American and even stupider Mexican TV shows, and the chattering bilingual voices that floated through the radios. He looked north along Brazos, past more houses and the white stone Inferno Baptist Church. Just before Brazos ended stood an ornate wrought-iron gate and fence enclosing Joshua Tree Hill, Inferno"s cemetery. It was shaded by thin, wind-sculpted Joshua trees, but it was more of a b.u.mp than a hill. He stared for a moment toward the tombstones and old monuments, then returned his attention to the houses; he couldn"t see much difference.

"Hey, you freakin" zombies!" he shouted on impulse. "Wake up! " His voice rolled over Inferno, leaving the sound of barking dogs behind it.

"I"m not gonna be like you," he said, the cigarette clamped in a corner of his mouth, "I swear to G.o.d I"m not."

He knew to whom he was speaking, because as he said the words he was staring down at a gray wooden house near where a street called Sombra crossed Brazos. He figured the old man didn"t even know he hadn"t come home last night, wouldn"t have cared anyway. All his father needed was a bottle and a place to sleep it off.

Cody glanced at Preston High. If that project wasn"t finished today, Odeale might give him some grief, might even screw up his graduation. He couldn"t stand for some bow-tied sonofab.i.t.c.h to watch over his shoulder and tell him what to do, so he"d purposefully slowed his work to a snail"s pace. Today, though, he had to finish it; he knew he could"ve built a roomful of furniture in the six weeks it had taken him to do one lousy tie rack.

The sun had a fierce glare now. Already the bright hues of the desert were fading. A truck was coming down Highway 67, its headlights still on, bringing the morning newspapers from Odessa. A dark blue Chevy backed out of a driveway on Bowden Street, and a woman in a robe waved to her husband from the front porch. Somebody opened their back door and let out a yellow cat, which promptly chased a rabbit into a thicket of cactus. On the side of Republica Road, the buzzards were plucking at their breakfast and other birds of prey were slowly circling in the sullen air above. Cody took one last pull at his cigarette and then flicked it off the Rocking Chair. He decided he could do with something to eat before school. There were usually stale doughnuts in the house, and those would do.

He turned his back on Inferno and climbed carefully down the rocks to the ridge below. Nearby stood the red Honda 250cc motorcycle he"d salvaged from parts bought at Cade"s junkyard two years ago. Cade had given him a good deal, and Cody was smart enough not to ask questions. The ID numbers on the Honda"s engine had been filed off, just as they were removed from most of the engines and body parts Mack Cade sold.

As he approached the motorcycle, a slight movement beside his right cowboy boot snagged his attention. He stopped.

His shadow had fallen across a small brown scorpion that crouched on a flat rock. As Cody watched, the scorpion"s segmented stinger arced up and struck at the air. The scorpion stood its ground, and Cody lifted his boot to smash the little b.a.s.t.a.r.d to eternity.

But he paused an instant before his boot came down. The insect was only about three inches long from head to barb, and Cody knew he could crush it in a heartbeat but he admired its courage. There it was, fighting a giant shadow for a piece of rock in a burning desert. It didn"t have too much sense, Cody mused, but it had more than its share of guts. Anyway, there was too much death in the air today, and Cody decided not to add to it.

"It"s all yours, amigo," he said, and as he walked past, the scorpion jabbed its stinger at his departing shadow.

Cody swung one leg over the motorcycle and settled himself in the patched leather seat. The dual chrome exhausts were full of dings, the red paint had mottled and faded, the engine sometimes burned oil and had a mind of its own, but the machine got Cody where he wanted to go. Out on Highway 67, once he was far beyond Inferno, he could coax the engine up to seventy, and there were few things he enjoyed better than its husky growl and the wind hissing past his ears. It was at times like that, when he was alone and depending on no one but himself, that Cody felt the most free. Because he knew depending on people freaked your head. In this life, you were alone and you"d better learn to like it. He took a pair of leather aviator"s goggles off the handlebars and slipped them on, put the key in the ignition and brought his weight down on the kick starter. The engine backfired a gout of oily smoke and vibrated as if unwilling to wake up-then the machine came to life under him like a loyal, if sometimes headstrong, mustang, and Cody drove down the ridge"s steep slope toward Aurora Street, a trail of yellow dust rising behind him. He didn"t know what shape his father would be in today, and he was already toughening himself for it. Maybe he could get in and out without the old man even knowing. Cody glanced at the straight line of Highway 67, and he vowed that very soon, maybe right after Graduation Day, he was going to hit that d.a.m.ned road and keep on riding, following the telephone poles north, and he would never look back at what he was leaving.

I"m not gonna be like you, he swore.

But inside he feared that every day he saw a little more of his old man"s face looking back at him from the mirror.

He throttled up, and the rear tire left a black scrawl as he shot along Aurora Street. The sun lay hot and red in the east, and another day had begun in Inferno.

2 The Great Fried Empty

Jessie Hammond awakened, as was her habit, about three seconds before the alarm clock buzzed on the bedside table. As it went off she reached out, her eyes still closed, and popped the alarm b.u.t.ton down with the flat of her hand. She sniffed the air, could smell the inviting aromas of bacon and freshly brewed coffee. "Breakfast"s on, Jess!" Tom called from the kitchen.

"Two more minutes." She burrowed her head into the pillow.

"Big minutes or little ones?"

"Tiny ones. Minuscule." She rolled over to find a better position and caught his clean, pleasantly musky scent on the other pillow. "You smell like a puppy," she said sleepily.

"Pardon?"

"What?" She opened her eyes to the bright streamers of sunlight that hit the opposite wall through the window blinds and immediately shut them again.

"How about some lizard eyeb.a.l.l.s in your eggs today?" Tom asked. He and Jessie had stayed up until well after one in the morning, talking and sharing a bottle of Blue Nun. But he"d always been a quick starter and enjoyed cooking breakfast, while Jessie took a little longer to get her spark plugs going even on the best of days.

"Make mine rare," she answered, and tried seeing again. The early light was already glary, promising another scorcher. The past week had been one ninety-degree day after the next, and the Odessa weatherman on Channel 19 had said today might break the hundred mark. Jessie knew that meant trouble. Animals weren"t acclimated to such heat so soon. Horses would get sluggish and go off their feed, dogs would be surly and snap without cause, and cats would have major spells of claw-happy craziness. Stock animals got unruly too, and bulls were downright dangerous. But it was also rabies season, and her worst fear was that somebody"s pet would go chasing after an infected jackrabbit or prairie dog, be bitten, and bring rabies back into the community. All the domesticated animals she could think of had already been given their boosters, but there were always a few folks who didn"t bring their pets in for the treatment. It might be a good idea, she decided, to get in the pickup truck today and drive around to some of the small communities near Inferno-like Klyman, No Trees, and Notch Fork-to spread the antirabies gospel.

""Morning." Tom was standing over her, offering her coffee in a blue clay mug. "This"ll get you started."

She sat up and took the mug. The coffee, as usual whenever Tom made it, was ebony and ominous. The first sip puckered her mouth; the second brooded on her tongue for a while, and the third sent the caffeine charging through her system. She needed it too. She"d never been a morning person, but as the only veterinarian within a forty-mile radius she"d learned a long time ago that the ranchers and farmers were up long before the sun first blushed the sky. "Smooth," she managed to say.

"Always is." Tom smiled slightly, walked over to the window, and pushed aside the blinds. Red fire hit his face and glowed in the lenses of his eyegla.s.ses. He looked east, along Celeste Street toward Republica Road and Preston High School-"the Hotbox," he called it, because the air conditioning broke down so often. His smile began to fade.

She knew what he was thinking. They"d talked about it last night, and many nights before that one. The Blue Nun eased, but it did not heal.

"Come here," she said, and motioned him to the bed.

"Bacon"ll get cold," he answered. His accent was the unhurried drawl of east Texas, whereas Jessie"s was west Texas"s gritty tw.a.n.g.

"Let it freeze."

Tom turned away from the window, could feel the hot stripes of sun across his bare back and shoulders. He wore his faded and comfortable khaki trousers, but he hadn"t yet pulled on his socks and shoes. He pa.s.sed under the bedroom"s lazily revolving ceiling fan, and Jessie leaned over in her pale blue, oversized shirt and patted the edge of the bed. When he sat down, she began ma.s.saging his shoulders with her strong brown hands. Already his muscles were as tight as piano wire.

"It"s going to work out," she told him, her voice calm and deliberate. "This isn"t the end of the world."

He nodded, said nothing. The nod wasn"t very convincing. Tom Hammond was thirty-seven years old, stood a bit over six feet, was slim and in pretty good shape except for a little potbelly that resisted sit-ups and jogging. His light brown hair was receding to show what Jessie called a "n.o.ble forehead," and his tortoisesh.e.l.l-framed gla.s.ses gave him the look of an intelligent if slightly dismayed schoolteacher. Which was exactly what he was: Tom had been a social studies teacher at Preston High for eleven years. And now, with the impending death of Inferno, that was coming to an end. Eleven years of the Hotbox. Eleven years of watching the faces change. Eleven years, and still he hadn"t defeated his worst enemy. It was still there, and it would always be there, and every day for eleven years he"d seen it working against him.

"You"ve done everything you could," Jessie said. "You know you have."

"Maybe. Maybe not." One corner of his mouth angled downward in a bitter smile, and his eyes were pinched with frustration. A week from tomorrow, when school closed, he and the other teachers would have no job. His resumes had brought in only one offer from the state of Texas-a field job, running literacy exams on immigrants who followed the melon crops. Still, he knew that most of the other teachers hadn"t landed jobs yet either, but that didn"t make the pill any sweeter going down. He"d gotten a nice letter stamped with the state seal of Texas that told him the education budget had been cut for the second year in a row and at present there was a freeze on the hiring of teachers. Of course, since he"d been in the system so long, his name would be put on the waiting list of applicants, thank you and keep this letter for your files. It was the same letter many of his colleagues had received, and the only file it went into was circular.

But he knew that, eventually, another position would come his way. Running the exams on the migrant workers wouldn"t be so bad, really, but it would require a lot of time on the road. What had chewed at him day and night for the past year was the memory of all the students who"d pa.s.sed through his social studies cla.s.s-hundreds of them, from red-haired American sons to copper-skinned Mexicans to Apache kids with eyes like bullet holes. Hundreds of them: doomed freight, pa.s.sing through the badlands on tracks already warped. He"d checked; over an eleven-year period with a senior cla.s.s averaging about seventy to eighty kids, only three hundred and six of them had enrolled as freshmen in either a state or technical college. The rest had just drifted away or set roots in Inferno to work at the mine, drink their wages, and raise a houseful of babies who would probably repeat the pattern. Only now there was no mine, and the pull of drugs and crime in the big cities was stronger. It was stronger, as well, right here in Inferno. And for eleven years he"d seen the faces come and go: boys with knife scars and tattoos and forced laughter, girls with scared eyes and gnawed fingernails and the secret twitches of babies already growing in their bellies.

Eleven years, and tomorrow was his final day. After the senior cla.s.s walked out at last period, it would be over. And what haunted him, day after day, was the realization that he could recall maybe fifteen kids who"d escaped the Great Fried Empty. That was what they called the desert between Inferno and the Mexican border, but Tom knew it was a state of mind too. The Great Fried Empty could suck the brains out of a kid"s skull and replace it with dope smoke, could burn out the ambition and dry up the hope, and what almost killed Tom was the fact that he"d fought it for eleven years but the Great Fried Empty had always been winning.

Jessie kept ma.s.saging, but Tom"s muscles had tensed. She knew what must be going through his mind. It was the same thing that had slowly burned his spirit to a cinder. Tom stared at the bars of fire on the wall. "I wish I had three more months. Just three." He had a sudden, startling image of the day he and Jessie had graduated together from the University of Texas, walking out into a flood of sunlight and ready to take on the world. It seemed like a hundred years ago. He"d been thinking a lot about Roberto Perez lately, could not get the boy"s face out of his mind, and he knew why. "Roberto Perez," he said. "Do you remember me talking about him?"

"I think so."

"He was in my senior cla.s.s six years ago. He lived in Bordertown, and his grades weren"t very high, but he asked questions. He wanted to know. But he held himself back from doing too well on tests, because that wouldn"t be cool." His bitter smile surfaced again. "The day he graduated, Mack Cade was waiting for him. I saw him get into Cade"s Mercedes. They drove off. Roberto"s brother told me later that Cade got the boy a job up in Houston. Good money, but it wasn"t exactly clear what the job was. Then one day Roberto"s brother came to me and said I ought to know: Roberto had been killed in a Houston motel. Cocaine deal went bad. He got both barrels of a shotgun in his stomach. But the Perez family didn"t blame Cade. Oh, no. Roberto sent home a lot of money. Cade gave Mr. Perez a new Buick. Sometimes I drive by the Perez house after school; the Buick"s up on concrete blocks in the front yard."

He stood up abruptly, went to the window, and pulled the blinds aside again. He could feel the heat out there, gathering power and shimmering off the sand and concrete. "There are two boys in my last-period cla.s.s who remind me of Perez. Neither one of them ever made higher than a C-minus on a test, but I see it in their faces. They listen; something sinks in. But they both do just enough to get by, and no more. You probably know their names: Lockett and Jurado." He glanced at her. Jessie had heard Tom mention the names before, and she nodded.

"Neither of them took the college entrance exams," Tom continued. "Jurado laughed in my face when I suggested it. Lockett looked at me like I fell out of a dog"s a.s.s. But their last day is tomorrow, and they"ll graduate a week from Sunday, and that"ll be it. Cade"ll be waiting. I know it."

"You"ve done what you could," Jessie said. "Now it"s up to them."

"Right." He stood for a moment framed in crimson light, as if on the rim of a blast furnace. "This town," he said softly. "This d.a.m.ned, G.o.dforsaken town. Nothing can grow here. I swear to G.o.d, I"m beginning to believe there"s more use for a vet than there is for a teacher."

She tried for a smile, but wasn"t very successful. "You take care of your beasts, I"ll take care of mine."

"Yeah." He summoned up a wan smile. He walked to the bed, cupped his hand to the back of Jessie"s head, his fingers disappearing into her dark brown, short-cut hair, and kissed her forehead. "I love you, doc." He let his head rest against hers. "Thanks for listening to me."

"I love you," she answered, and put her arms around him. They stayed that way for a minute, until Jessie said, "Lizard eyeb.a.l.l.s?"

"Yep!" He straightened up. His face was more relaxed now, but his eyes were still troubled and Jessie knew that, however good a teacher he was, Tom thought of himself as a failure. "I guess they"re good and cold by now. Come and get "em!"

Jessie got out of bed and followed her husband through the short hallway into the kitchen. In this room also, a ceiling fan was turning, and Tom had pulled up the blinds on the west-facing windows. The light in that direction was still tinged with violet, but the sky was turning bright blue over Rocking Chair Ridge. Tom had already fixed all four of the breakfast plates-each with bacon, scrambled eggs (no lizard eyeb.a.l.l.s today), and toast-and they were waiting on the little circular table in the corner. "Let"s go, sleepyheads!" Tom called toward the kids" rooms, and Ray answered with an unenthusiastic grunt. Jessie went to the refrigerator and liberally doused milk into her muscular coffee while Tom switched on the radio to catch the six-thirty news from KOAX in Fort Stockton. Stevie bounded into the kitchen.

"It"s horsie day, Mama!" she said. "We get to go see Sweetpea!"

"We sure do." It amazed her that anybody could be so full of energy in the morning, even a six-year-old child. Jessie poured a gla.s.s of orange juice for Stevie while the little girl, clad in her University of Texas nightshirt, climbed into her chair. She sat perched on the edge, swinging her legs and chewing at a piece of toast. "How"d you sleep?"

"Good. Can I ride Sweetpea today?"

"Maybe. We"ll see what Mr. Lucas has to say." Jessie was scheduled to drive out to the Lucas place, about six miles west of Inferno, and give their golden palomino Sweetpea a thorough checkup this morning. Sweetpea was a gentle horse that Tyler Lucas and his wife Bess had raised from a colt, and Jessie knew how much Stevie looked forward to their trip.

"Eat your breakfast, cowgirl," Tom said. "Gotta be strong to stay on a bronco."

They heard the television snap on in the front room and the channels being clicked around. Rock music pounded through the speaker on MTV. In back of the house was a satellite dish that picked up about three hundred channels, bringing all parts of the world through the air to Inferno. "No TV!" Tom called, jarred by the noise. "Come on to breakfast!"

"Just one minute!" Ray pleaded, as he always did. He was a TV addict, particularly drawn to the scantily clad models in the videos on MTV.

"Now! "

The television set was clicked off, and Ray Hammond walked into the kitchen. He was fourteen years old, beanpole thin and gawky-looks just like me when I was that age, Tom thought-and wore eyegla.s.ses that slightly magnified his eyes: not much, but enough to earn him the nickname of X-Ray from the kids at school. He yearned for contacts and a build like Arnold Schwarzenegger; the first had been promised to him when he turned sixteen, and the second was a fever dream that no number of push-ups could accomplish. His hair was light brown, cropped close except for a few orange-dyed spikes on top that neither his father nor mother could talk him out of, and he was the proud possessor of a wardrobe of paisley-patterned shirts and tie-dyed jeans that made Tom and Jessie think the sixties had come back full vengeful circle. Right now, though, he wore only bright red pajama bottoms, his chest sunken and sallow.

""Morning, alien," Jessie said.

""Morning, "lien," Stevie parroted.

"Hi." Ray plopped down in a chair and yawned hugely. "Juice." He held out a hand.

"Please and thank you." Jessie poured him a gla.s.s, gave it to him, and watched as he put it down the awesome hatch. For a boy who only weighed around a hundred and fifteen pounds in a soaking wet suit, he could eat and drink faster than a horde of hungry Cowboy linebackers. He began digging into his eggs and bacon.

There was purpose in Ray"s all-out attack on his plate. He"d had a dream about Belinda Sonyers, the blond fox who sat on the next row in his freshman English cla.s.s, and the details were still percolating. If he got a hard-on here at the table with his folks, he would be in danger of serious embarra.s.sment; so he concentrated on the food, which seemed the second-best thing to s.e.x. Not that he knew, of course. The way his zits were popping up, he could forget about girls for the next thousand years. He stuffed his mouth full of toast.

"Where"s the fire?" Tom asked.

Ray almost gagged, but he got the toast down and attacked the eggs because the gauzy p.o.r.no dream was making his pencil twitch again. After a week from tomorrow, though, he could forget about Belinda Sonyers and all the other foxes who paraded down the halls of Preston High; the school would be shut down, the doors locked, and the dreams would be just so much red-hot dust. But at least it would be summer, and that was okay too. Still, with the whole town closing down, summer was going to be about as much fun as cleaning out the attic.

Jessie and Tom sat down to breakfast, and Ray got his thoughts under rein again. Stevie, the red highlights in her auburn hair shining in the sunlight, ate her food knowing that cowgirls did have to be strong to ride broncos-but Sweetpea was a nice horse, who wouldn"t dream of bucking and throwing her. Jessie glanced at the clock on the wall-one of those goofy plastic things shaped like a cat"s head, with eyeb.a.l.l.s that ticked back and forth to mark the pa.s.sing seconds; it was quarter to seven, and she knew Tyler Lucas was an early riser and would already be waiting for her to show up. Of course she didn"t expect to find anything wrong with Sweetpea, but the horse was getting on in years and the Lucases treated it like a household pet.

After breakfast, as Tom and Ray cleared away the plates, Jessie helped Stevie get dressed in a pair of jeans and a white cotton shirt with the Jetsons pictured on its front. Then she returned to her own bedroom and pulled off her nightshirt, exposing the tight, lithe body of a woman who enjoyed working outdoors; she had a "Texas tan"-arms brown to the shoulders, a deeply bronzed face, and the rest of her body almost ivory in contrast. She heard the TV click on; Ray was grabbing some more of the tube before he and his father left for school-but that was all right, because Ray was an avid reader as well and his brain pulled in information like a sponge. And the way he wore his hair and his taste in clothes were no causes for alarm, either, he was a good boy, a lot shier than he let on, and he was simply doing what he could to get along with his peers. She knew about his nickname, and she remembered that it was sometimes tough to be young.

The harsh desert sun had added lines to Jessie"s face, but she possessed a strong, natural beauty that required no aid from jars and tubes. Anyway, she knew, vets weren"t expected to win beauty pageants. They were expected to be available at all hours and to work d.a.m.ned hard, and Jessie did not disappoint. Her hands were brown and st.u.r.dy, and the things she"d had to grab with them during her thirteen years as a veterinarian would"ve made most women swoon. Gelding a vicious stallion, delivering a stillborn calf jammed in a cow"s birth ca.n.a.l, removing a nail from the trachea of a five-hundred-pound prize boar-all those were operations she"d performed successfully, as well as hundreds of other tasks ranging from treating a canary"s injured beak to operating on a Doberman"s infected jaw. But she was up to the task; working with animals was all she"d ever wanted to do, even as a child when she used to bring home every stray dog and cat off the streets of her neighborhood in Fort Worth. She"d always been a tomboy, and growing up with three brothers had taught her to roll with the punches-but she gave as good as she got too, and she could vividly recall knocking her oldest brother"s front tooth out with a football when she was nine years old. He laughed about it now, whenever they spoke on the phone, and he kidded her that the ball might"ve sailed to the Gulf if his mouth hadn"t been in the way. She walked into the bathroom to sprinkle on some baby powder and brush the taste of coffee and Blue Nun from her mouth. She quickly ran her hands through her short, dark brown hair. Flecks of gray were creeping back from the temples. The march of time, she thought. Not as startling as watching your kids grow up, of course; it seemed like only yesterday that Stevie was a baby and Ray was in third grade. The years were flying, that was for sure. She went to the closet, pulled out a pair of her well-worn and comfortable jeans and a red T-shirt, put them on and then a pair of white socks and her sneakers. She got her sungla.s.ses and a baseball cap, stopped in the kitchen to fill up two canteens because you never knew what might happen in the desert, and took her veterinary satchel from its place on the upper shelf of the hall closet. Stevie was hopping around like a jumping bean on a hot griddle, eager to get going.