Desperation   ::   Кинг Стивен

Go to your friend Brian, Johnny had said. Go to your friend and make him your brother.

And that might be a place to start, yes, but after that.

There were holes in him that cried out in pain, and would go on crying out for so much of the future. One for his mother, one for his father, one for his sister. Holes like faces.

Holes like eyes.

In the sky, the wolf had gone except for a paw and what might have been-perhaps-the tip of a tail. Of the rep-tilian thing in its mouth there was no sign.

“We beat you,” David whispered, starting around to the passenger side of the car. “We beat you, you son of a bitch, there’s that.”

Tak, whispered a smiling, patient voice far back in his mind. Tak ah lah. Tak ah wan.

He turned his mind and heart from it with an effort.

Go to your friend and make him your brother.

Maybe. But Austin first. With Mary and Steve and Cynthia. He intended to stay with them as long as pos-sible. They, at least, could understand… and in a way no one else would ever be able to. They had been in the pit together.

As he reached the passenger-side door, he closed the small metal box and slipped it absently into his pocket. He stopped suddenly, free band frozen in midair as it reached for the doorhandle.

Something was gone; the shotgun shell.

Something bad been put in its place: a piece of stiff paper.

“David.” Steve called from the open window of the truck. “Something wrong.”

He shook his head, opening the car door with one hand and taking the folded paper from his pocket with the other. It was blue. And there was something familiar about it, although he couldn’t remember having a paper like this in his pocket yesterday. There was a ragged hole in it, as if it had been punched onto something. As if—Leave your pass.

It was the last thing the voice had said on that day last fall when he had prayed for God to make Brian better. He hadn’t understood, but he had obeyed, had hung the blue pass on a nailhead. The next time he’d shown up at the Viet Cong Lookout-a week later. two.-it had been gone. Taken by some kid who wanted to write down a girl’s telephone number, maybe, or blown off by the wind. Except… here it was.

All I want is lovin’, all I need is lovin”.

Felix Cavaliere on vocal, most severely cool.

No, he thought. This can’t be.

“David.” Mary. Far away. “David, what is it.