Dreamcatcher

Chapter Ten KURTZ AND UNDERHILL

The only thing in the cps area was a little beer n deer store called Gosselin’s Country Market. Kurtz’s cleaners began arriving there shortly after the snow began to fall. By the time Kurtz himself got there, at ten-thirty, support was starting to appear. They were getting a grip on the situation.

The store was designated Blue Base. The barn, the adjacent stable (dilapidated but still standing), and the corral had been designated Blue Holding. The first detainees had already been deposited there.

Archie Perlmutter, Kurtz’s new aide-de-camp (his old one, Calvert, had died of a heart attack not two weeks before-goddam bad timing), had a clipboard with a dozen names on it. Perlmutter had arrived with both a laptop computer and a Palm Pilot only to discover that electronic gear was currently FUBAR in the Jefferson Tract: tucked up beyond all recognition. The top two names on the clipboard were Gosselins: the old man who ran the store and his wife.

“More on the way,” Perlmutter said.

Kurtz gave the names on Pearly’s clipboard a cursory look, then handed it back. Big recreational vehicles were being parked behind them; semi trailers were being jacked and leveled; light poles were going up. When night came, this place would be as well-lighted as Yankee Stadium at World Series time.

“We missed two guys by this much,” Perlmutter said, and held up his right hand with the thumb and forefinger a quarter of an inch apart. “They came in for supplies. Principally beer and hot dogs.” Perlmutter’s face was pale, with a wild pink rose blooming in each cheek. He had to raise his voice against the steadily increasing noise level. Helicopters were coming in two by two and landing on the blacktop lane that eventually made its way out to Interstate 95, where you could go north toward one dull town (Presque Isle) or south toward any number of other dull towns (Bangor and Derry, for starters). The helicopters were fine, as long as their pilots didn’t have to depend on all the sophisticated navigational equipment, which was also FUBAR.

“Did those fellows go in or out?” Kurtz asked.

“Back in,” Perlmutter said. He could not quite bring himself to meet Kurtz’s eyes; he looked everywhere but. “There’s a woods road, Gosselin says it’s called the Deep Cut Road. It’s not on the standard maps, but I have a Diamond International Paper survey map that shows”

“That’s fine. Either they’ll come back out or stay in. Either way, it’s fine.” More helicopters, some unshipping their.50s now that they were safely away from the wrong eyes. This could end up being as big as Desert Storm. Maybe bigger.

“You understand your mission here, Pearly, don’t you?” Perlmutter most definitely did. He was new, he wanted to make an impression, he was almost jumping up and down. Like a spaniel that smells lunch, Kurtz thought. And he did it all without making eye contact. “Sir, my job is triune in nature.”

Triune, Kurtz thought. Triune, how about that? “I am to a, intercept, b, turn intercepted persons over to medical, and c, contain and segregate pending further orders. “'Exactly. That’s-''But sir, beg your pardon, sit, but we don’t have any doctors here yet, only a few corpsmen, and-”

“Shut up,” Kurtz said. He didn’t speak loudly, but half a dozen men in unmarked green coveralls (they were all wearing unmarked green coveralls, including Kurtz himself) hesitated as they went double-timing on their various errands. They glanced toward where Kurtz and Perlmutter were standing, then got moving again. Triple-time, As for Perlmutter, the roses in his cheeks died at once. He stepped back, putting another foot between himself and Kurtz.

“If you ever interrupt me again, Pearly, I’ll knock you down. Interrupt me a second time and I’ll put you in the hospital. Do you understand?”

With what was clearly a tremendous effort, Perlmutter brought his gaze up to Kurtz’s face. To Kurtz’s eyes. He snapped off a salute so crisp it almost crackled with static electricity. “Sir, yes sir!”

“You can quit that too, you know better.” And when Perhnutter’s gaze began to drop: “Look at me when I’m talking to you, laddie.”

Very reluctantly, Perlmutter did so. His complexion was now leaden. Although the noise of the helicopters lined up along the road was cacophonous, it somehow seemed very quiet right here, as if Kurtz traveled in his own weird air-pocket. Perlmutter was convinced that everyone was watching them and that they could all see how terrified he was. Some of it was his new boss’s eyes-the cataclysmic absence in those eyes, as if there were really no brain behind them at all. Perlmutter had heard of the thousand-yard stare, but Kurtz’s seemed to go on for a million yards, maybe light-years.

Yet somehow Perlmutter held Kurtz’s gaze. Looked into the absence. He was not off to a good start here. It was important-it was imperative-that the slide be stopped before it could become an avalanche.

“All right, good. Better, anyway.” Kurtz’s voice was low but Perlmutter had no problem hearing him despite the overlapping chunter of the helicopters. “I’m going to say this to you Just once, and only because you’re new to my service and you clearly don’t know your asshole from your piehole. I have been asked to run a phooka operation here. Do you know what a phooka is.

“No,” Perlmutter said. It caused him almost physical pain not to be able to say No sir.

“According to the Irish, who as a race have never entirely crawled from the bath of superstition in which their mothers gat them, a phooka is a phantom horse that kidnaps travelers and carries them away on its back. I use it to mean an operation which is both covert and wide open. A paradox, Perlmutter! The good news is that we’ve been developing contingency plans for just this sort of clusterfuck since 1947, when the Air Force first recovered the sort of extraterrestrial artifact now known as a flashlight. The bad news is that the future is now and I have to face it with guys like you in support. Do you understand me, buck?”

“Yes, s… yes.”

“I hope so. What we’ve got to do here, Perlmutter, is go in fast and hard and utterly phooka. We’re going to do as much dirtywork as we have to and come out as clean as we can clean yes, Lord, and smilin…”

Kurtz bared his teeth in a brief smile of such brutally satiric intensity that Perlmutter felt a little like screaming. Tall and stoop-shouldered, Kurtz had the build of a bureaucrat. Yet something about him was terrible. You saw some of it in his eyes, sensed some of it in the still, prim way he held his hands in front of him… but those weren’t the things that made him scary, that made the men call him Old Creepy Kurtz. Perlmutter didn’t know exactly what the really scary thing was, and didn’t want to know. What he wanted right now-the only thing he wanted-was to get out of this conversation with his ass on straight. Who needed to go twenty or thirty miles west to make contact with an alien species? Perlmutter had one standing right here in front of him.

Kurtz’s lips snapped shut over his teeth. “On the same page, are we?”

“Yes.”

“Saluting the same flag? Pissing in the same latrine?”

“Yes.”

“How are we going to come out of this, Pearly?”

“Clean?”

“Boffo! And how else?”

For one horrible second he didn’t know. Then it came to him. “Smiling, sir.”

“Call me sir again and I’ll knock you down.”

“I’m sorry,” Perlmutter whispered. He was, too.

Here came a school bus rolling slowly up the road with its offside wheels in the ditch and canted almost to the tipover point so it could get past the helicopters. MILLINOCKET SCHOOL DEPT was written up the side, big black letters against a yellow background. Commandeered bus. Owen Underhill and his men inside. The A-team. Perlmutter saw it and felt better. At different times both men had worked with Underhill.

“You’ll have doctors by nightfall,” Kurtz said. “All the doctors you need. Check?”

“Check.”

As he walked toward the bus, which stopped in front of Gosselin’s single gasoline pump, Kurtz looked at his pocket-watch. Almost eleven. Gosh, how the time flew when you were having fun. Perlmutter walked with him, but all the cocker spaniel spring had gone out of Perlmutter’s step.

“For now, Archie, eyeball em, smell em, listen to their tall tales, and document any Ripley you see. You know about the Ripley, I assume?” “Yes.” “Good. Don’t touch it. “'God, no!” Perlmutter exclaimed, then flushed. Kurtz smiled thinly. This one was no more real than his shark’s grin. “Excellent idea,

Perlmutter! You have breathing masks?” “They just arrived. Twelve cartons of them, and more on the w-''Good. We want Polarolds of the Ripley. We need mucho documentation. Exhibit A, Exhibit B, so on and so forth. Got it?” “Yes.” “And none of our… our guests get away, right?” “Absolutely not.” Perlmutter was shocked by the idea, and looked it. Kurtz’s lips stretched. The thin smile grew and once more became the shark’s grin. Those empty eyes looked through Perlmutter-looked all the way to the center of the earth, for all Perlmutter knew. He found himself wondering if anyone would leave Blue Base when this was over. Except Kurtz, that was.

“Carry on, Citizen Perlmutter. In the name of the government, I order you to carry on.”

Archie Perlmutter watched Kurtz continue on toward the bus, where Underhill-a squat jug of a man-was climbing off. Never in his life had he been so utterly delighted to see a man’s back.

“Hello, boss,” Underhill said. Like the rest, he wore a plain green coverall, but like Kurtz, he also wore a sidearm. Sitting in the bus were roughly two dozen men, most of them just finishing an early lunch.

“What have they got there, buck?” Kurtz asked. At six-foot-six he towered above Underhill, but Underhill probably outweighed him by seventy pounds.

“Burger King. We drove through. I didn’t think the bus would fit, but Yoder said it would, and he was right. Want a Whopper? They’re probably a little on the cold side by now, but there must be a microwave in there someplace.” Underhill nodded toward the store.

“I’ll pass. Cholesterol’s not so good these days.”

“Groin okay?” Six years before, Kurtz had suffered a serious groin-pull while playing racquetball, This had indirectly led to their only disagreement. Not a serious one, Owen Underhill judged, but with Kurtz, it was hard to tell. Behind the man’s patented game-face, thoughts came and went at near light-speed, agendas were constantly being rewritten, and emotions were turning on a dime, There were people-quite a few of them, actually-who thought Kurtz was crazy. Owen Underhill didn’t know if he was or not, but he knew you wanted to be careful around this one. Very.

“As the Irish might put it,” Kurtz said, “me groin’s foine.” He reached between his legs, gave his balls a burlesque yank, and favored Owen with that teeth-baring grin.

“Good.”

“And you? Been okay?”

“Me groin’s foine,” Owen said, and Kurtz laughed.

Now coming up the road, rolling slowly and carefully but having an easier time than the bus, was a brand-new Lincoln Navigator with three orange-clad hunters inside, hefty boys all three, gawking at the helicopters and the double-timing soldiers in their green coveralls. Gawking at the guns, mostly. Vietnam comes to northern Maine, praise God. Soon they would join the others in the Holding Area.

Half a dozen men approached as the Navigator pulled up behind the bus, with its stickers reading BLUE DEVIL PRIDE and THIS VEHICLE STOPS AT ALL RR CROSSINGS. Three lawyers or bankers with their own cholesterol problems and fat stock portfolios, lawyers or bankers pretending to be good old boys, under the impression (of which they would soon be disabused) that they were still in an America at peace. Soon they would be in the barn (or the corral, if they craved fresh air), where their Visa cards would not be honored. They would be allowed to keep their cell phones. They wouldn’t work this far up in the willywags, but hitting REDIAL might keep them amused.

“You plugged in tight?” Kurtz asked.

“I think so, yes.”

“Still a quick study?”

Owen shrugged.

“How many people in the Blue Zone altogether, Owen?”

“We estimate eight hundred. No more than a hundred in Zones Prime A and Prime B.”

That was good, assuming no one slipped through. In terms of possible contamination, a few slips wouldn’t matter-the news, at least so far, was good on that score. In terms of information management, however, it would not be good at all. It was hard to ride a phooka horse these days. Too many people with videocams. Too many TV station helicopters. Too many watching eyes.

Kurtz said, “Come inside the store. They’re setting me up a “Bago, but it’s not here yet.”

“Un momento,” Underhill said, and dashed up the steps of the bus. When he came back down, he had a grease-spotted Burger King sack in his hand and a tape recorder over his shoulder on a strap.

Kurtz nodded toward the bag. “That stuff’ll kill you.”

“We’re starring in The War of the Worlds and you’re worried about high cholesterol?”

Behind them, one of the newly arrived mighty hunters was saying he wanted to call his lawyer, which probably meant he was a banker. Kurtz led Underhill into the store. Above them, the flashlights were back, running their glow over the bottoms of the clouds, jumping and dancing like animated characters in a Disney cartoon.

Old Man Gosselin’s office smelled of salami, cigars, beer, Musterole, and sulfur-either farts or boiled eggs, Kurtz reckoned. Maybe both. There was also a smell, faint but discernible, of ethyl alcohol. The smell of them. It was everywhere up here now. Another man might have been tempted to ascribe that smell to a combination of nerves and too much imagination, but Kurtz had never been overburdened with either. In any case, he did not believe the hundred or so square miles of forestland surrounding Gosselin’s Country Market had much future as a viable ecosystem. Sometimes you just had to sand a piece of furniture down to the bare wood and start again.

Kurtz sat behind the desk and opened one of the drawers. A cardboard box with CHEM/U.S./IO UNITS stamped on it lay within. Good for Perlmutter. Kurtz took it out and opened it. Inside were a number of small plastic masks, the transparent sort that fitted over the mouth and nose. He tossed one to Underhill and then put one on himself, quickly adjusting the elastic straps.

“Are these necessary?” Owen asked. “We don’t know. And don’t feel privileged; in another hour, everyone is going to be wearing them. Except for the John Q’s in the Holding Area, that is.”

Underhill donned his mask and adjusted the straps without further comment. Kurtz sat behind the desk with his head leaning back against the latest piece of OSHA paperwork (post it or die) taped to the wall behind him.

“Do they work?” Underhill’s voice was hardly muffled at all. The clear plastic did not fog with his breathing. It seemed to have no pores or filters, but he found he could breathe easily enough.

“They work on Ebola, they work on anthrax, they work on the new super-cholera. Do they work on Ripley? Probably. If not, we’re tucked, soldier. In fact, we may be tucked already. But the clock is running and the game is on. Should I hear the tape you’ve doubtless got in that thing over your shoulder?”

“There’s no need for you to hear all of it, but you ought to taste, I think.”

Kurtz nodded, made a spinning motion in the air with his forefinger Oike an ump signalling a home run, Owen thought), and leaned back further in Gosselin’s chair.

Underhill unslung the tape recorder, set it on the desk facing

Kurtz, and pushed PLAY. A toneless robot voice said: “NSA radio intercept. Multiband. 62914A44. This material is classified top secret. Time of intercept 0627, November fourteen, two-zero-zero-one. Intercept recording begins after the tone. If you are not rated Security 91 Clearance One, please press STOP now.”

“Please,” Kurtz said, nodding. “Good. That’d stop most unauthorized personnel, don’t you think?”

There was a pause, a two-second beep, then a young woman’s voice said: “One. Two. Three. Please don’t hurt us. Ne tious blessez pas.” A two-second silence, and then a young man’s voice said. “Five. Seven. Eleven. We are helpless. Nous sommes sans defense. Please don’t hurt us, we are helpless. Ne nous faites-”

“By God, it’s like a Berlitz language lesson from the Great Beyond,” Kurtz said.

“Recognize the voices?” Underhill asked.

Kurtz shook his head and put a finger to his lips.

The next voice was Bill Clinton’s. “Thirteen. Seventeen. Nineteen.” In Clinton’s Arkansas accent, the last one came out Nahnteen. “There is no infection here. Il n'y a pas d'infection ici.” Another two-second pause, and then Tom Brokaw spoke from the tape recorder. “Twenty-three. Twenty-seven. Twenty-nine. We are dying. On se meurt, on creve. We are dying.”

Underhill pushed STOP. “In case you wondered, the first voice is Sarah Jessica Parker, an actress. The second is Brad Pitt.”

“Who’s he?”

“An actor.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Each pause is followed by another voice. All the voices are or would be recognizable to large segments of the people in this area. There’s Alfred Hitchcock, Paul Harvey, Garth Brooks, Tim Sample-he’s a Maine-style humorist, very popular-and hundreds of others, some of which we haven’t identified.”

“Hundreds of others? How long did this intercept last?”

“Strictly speaking, it’s not an intercept at all but a clear-band transmission which we have been jamming since 0800. Which means a bunch of it got out, but we doubt if anyone who picked it up will have understood much of it. And if they do-” Underhill gave a little What can you do shrug. “It’s still going on. The voices appear to be real. The few voiceprint comparisons that were run are identical. Whatever else they are, these guys could put Rich Little out of business.”

The whup-whup-whup of the helicopters came clearly through the walls. Kurtz could feel it as well as hear it. Through the boards, through the OSHA poster, and from there into the gray meat that was mostly water, telling him to come on come on come on, hurry up hurry up hurry up. His blood responded to it, but he sat quietly, looking at Owen Underhill. Thinking about Owen Underhill. Make haste slowly; that was a useful saying. Especially when dealing with folks like Owen. How’s your groin, indeed.

You fucked with me once, buck, Kurtz thought. Maybe didn’t cross my line, but by God, you scuffed at it, didn’t you? Yes, I think so. And I think you’ll bear watching. “Same four messages over and over,” Underhill said, and ticked them off on the fingers of his left hand. “Don’t hurt us. We’re helpless. There’s no infection here. The last one-” “No infection,” Kurtz mused. “Huh. They’ve got their nerve, don’t they?”

He had seen pictures of the reddish-gold fuzz growing on all the trees around Blue Boy. And on people. Corpses, mostly, at least so far. The techs had named it Ripley fungus, after the tough broad Sigourney Weaver had played in those space movies. Most of them were too young to remember the other Ripley, who had done the “Believe It or Not” feature in the newspapers. “Believe It or Not” was pretty much gone, now; too freaky for the politically correct twenty-first century. But it fit this situation, Kurtz thought. Oh yes, like a glove. Made old Mr Ripley’s Siamese twins and two-headed cows look positively normal by comparison.

“The last one is We’re dying,” Underhill said. “That one’s interesting because of the two different French versions accompanying the English. The first is straightforward. The second-on creve-is slangy. We might say “Our goose is cooked."” He looked directly at Kurtz, who wished Perlmutter were here to see that yes, it could be done, “Are they cooked? I mean, assuming we don’t help them along?”

“Why French, Owen?”

Underhill shrugged. “It’s still the other language up here.”

“Ah. And the prime numbers? just to show us we’re dealing with intelligent beings? As if any other kind could travel here from another star system, or dimension, or wherever it is they come from?”

“I guess so. What about the flashlights, boss?”

“Most are now down in the woods. They disintegrate fairly rapidly, once they run out of juice. The ones we’ve been able to retrieve look like soup cans with the labels stripped off. Considering their size, they put on a hell of a show, don’t they? Scared the living hell out of the locals.”

When the flashlights disintegrated, they left patches of the fungus or ergot or whatever the hell it was behind. The same seemed true of the aliens themselves. The ones that were left were just up there standing around their ship like commuters standing around a broken-down bus, bawling that they weren’t infectious, il n'y a pas d'infection ici, praise the Lord and pass the biscuits. And once the stuff was on you, you were most likely-what had Owen said? A cooked goose. They didn’t know that for sure, of course, it was early yet, but they had to make the assumption.

“How many ETs still up there?” Owen asked.

“Maybe a hundred.”

“How much don’t we know? Does anybody have any idea?” Kurtz waved this aside. He was not a knower; knowing was someone else’s department, and none of those guys had been invited to this particular pre-Thanksgiving party.

“The survivors,” Underhill persisted. “Are they crew?” “Don’t know, but probably not. Too many for crew; not enough to be colonists; nowhere near enough to be shock-troops.”

“What else is going on up here, boss? Something is.”

“Pretty sure of that, are you?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Underhill shrugged. “Intuition?”

“It’s not intuition,” Kurtz said, almost gently. “It’s telepathy.”

“Say what?”

“Low-grade, but there’s really not any question about it. The men sense something, but they haven’t put a name on it yet. Give them a few hours and they will. Our gray friends are telepaths, and they seem to spread that just as they spread the fungus.”

“Holy fucking shit,” Owen Underhill whispered.

Kurtz sat calmly, watching him think. He liked watching people think, if they were any good at it, and now there was more: he was hearing Owen think, a faint sound like the ocean in a conch shell.

“The fungus isn’t strong in the environment,” Owen said. “Neither are they. What about the ESP?”

“Too soon to tell. If it lasts, though, and if it gets out of this pine-tree pisspot we’re in, everything changes. You know that, don’t you?”

Underhill knew. “I can’t believe it,” he said.

“I’m thinking of a car,” Kurtz said. “What car am I thinking of?”

Owen looked at him, apparently trying to decide if Kurtz was serious. He saw that Kurtz was, then shook his head. “How should I…” He paused. “Fiat.”

“Ferrari, actually. I’m thinking of an ice cream flavor. Which f-”

“Pistachio,” Owen said.

“There you go.”

Owen sat another moment, then asked Kurtz-hesitantly-if Kurtz could tell him his brother’s name.

“Kellogg,” Kurtz replied. “Jesus, Owen, what kind of name is

that for a kid?”

“My mother’s maiden name. Christ. Telepathy.”

“It’s going to fuck with the ratings of Jeopardy and Wants to Be a Millionaire, I can tell you that,” Kurtz said, then repeated, it gets loose. “From outside the building there came a gunshot and a scream. “You didn’t have to do that!”

someone cried in a voice filled with outrage and fear. “You didn’t have to do that!”

They waited, but there was no more.

“The confirmed grayboy body-count is eighty-one,” Kurtz said. “There are probably more. Once they go down, they decompose pretty fast. Nothing left but goo… and then the fungus.” “Throughout the Zone?”

Kurtz shook his head. “Think of a wedge pointing east. The thick end is Blue Boy. Where we are is about the middle of the wedge. There are a few more illegal immigrants of the gray persuasion wandering around east of here. The flashlights have mostly stayed over the wedge area. ET Highway Patrol.”

“It’s all toast, isn’t it?” Owen asked. “Not just the grayboys and the ship and the flashlights-the whole fucking geography.”

“I’m not prepared to speak to that just now,” Kurtz said.

No, Owen thought, of course you’re not. He wondered immediately if Kurtz could read his

thought. There was no way of telling, certainly not from those pale eyes. “We are going to take out the rest of the grayboys, I can tell you that much. Your men will crew the gunships and your men only. You are Blue Boy Leader. Got that?” “Yes, sir.” Kurtz did not correct it. In this context, and given Underhill’s obvious distaste for the mission,

sir was probably good. “I am Blue One.”

Owen nodded.

Kurtz got up and drew out his pocket-watch. It had gone noon.

“This is going to get out,” Underhill said. “There are a lot of U.S. citizens in the Zone. There’s simply no way to keep it quiet. How many have those… those implants?”

Kurtz almost smiled. The weasels, yes. A good many here, a few more over the years. Underhill didn’t know, but Kurtz did. Nasty little fellows they were. And one good thing about being the boss: you didn’t have to answer questions you didn’t want to answer.

“What happens later is up to the spin doctors,” he said. “Our job is to react to what certain people-the voice of one of them is probably on your tape-have determined is a clear and present danger to the people of the United States. Got it, buck?”

Underhill looked into that pale gaze and at last looked away,

“One other thing,” Kurtz said. “Do you remember the phooka?”

“The Irish ghost-horse.”

“Close enough. When it comes to nags, that one’s mine. Always has been. Some folks in

Bosnia saw you riding my phooka. Didn’t they?'Owen chanced no reply. Kurtz didn’t look put out by that, but he looked intent. “I want no repeat, Owen. Silence is golden. When we ride the phooka horse, we must be invisible. Do you understand that?” “Yes.” “Perfect understanding?”

“Yes,” Owen said. He wondered again how much of his mind Kurtz could read. Certainly he could read the name currently in the front of Kurtz’s mind, and supposed Kurtz wanted him to. Bosanski Novi.

They were on the verge of going, four gunship crews with Owen Underhill’s men from the bus replacing the ANG guys who had brought the CH-47s this far, they were cranking up, filling the air with the thunder of the rotors, and then came Kurtz’s order to stand down.

Owen passed it on, then flicked his chin to the left. He was now on Kurtz’s private corn channel.

“Beg pardon, but what the fuck?” Owen asked. If they were going to do this thing, he wanted to do it and get it behind him. It was worse than Bosanski Novi, worse by far. Writing it off by saying the grayboys weren’t human beings just did not wash. Not for him, anyway. Beings that could build something like Blue Boy-or fly it, at least-were more than human.

“It’s none of mine, lad,” Kurtz said. “The weather boys in Bangor say this shit is moving out fast. It’s what they call an Alberta Clipper. Thirty minutes, forty-five, max, and we’re on our way. With our nav gear all screwed up, it’s better to wait if we can… and we can. You’ll thank me at the other end.”

Man, I doubt that. “Roger, copy.” He flicked his head to the right. “Conklin,” he said. No rank designations to be used on this mission, especially not on the radio. “I’m here, s… I’m here. “'Tell the men we’re on hold thirty to forty-five. Say again, thirty to forty-five.” “Roger that. Thirty to forty-five.” “Let’s have some jukebox rhythm.” “Okay. Requests?”

“Go with what you like. Just save the Squad Anthem.” “Roger, Squad Anthem is racked back.” No smile in Conk’s voice. There was one man, at least, who liked this as little as Owen did. Of course, Conklin had also been on the Bosanski Novi mission in “95. Pearl jam started up in Owen’s cans. He pulled them off and laid them around his neck like a horse-collar. He didn’t care for Pearl jam, but in this bunch he was a minority.

Archie Perlmutter and his men ran back and forth like chickens with their heads cut off. Salutes were snapped, then choked off, with many of the saluters sneaking did-he-see-that looks at the small green scout copter in which Kurtz sat with his own cans clamped firmly in place and a copy of the Derry News upraised. Kurtz looked engrossed in the paper, but Owen had an idea that the man marked every half-salute, every soldier who forgot the situation and reverted to old beast habit. Beside Kurtz, in the left seat, was Freddy Johnson. Johnson had been with Kurtz roughly since Noah’s ark grounded on Mount Ararat. He had also been at Bosanski, and had undoubtedly given Kurtz a full report when Kurtz himself had been forced to stay behind, unable to climb into the saddle of his beloved phooka horse because of his groin-pub.

In June of “95, the Air Force had lost a scout pilot in NATO’s no-fly zone, near the Croat border. The Serbs had made a very big deal of Captain Tommy Callahan’s plane, and would have made an even bigger one of Callahan himself, if they caught him; the brass, haunted by images of the North Vietnamese gleefully parading brainwashed pilots before the international press, made recovering Tommy Callahan a priority.

The searchers had been about to give up when Callahan contacted them on a low-frequency radio band. His high-school girlfriend gave them a good ID marker, and when the man on the ground was queried, he confirmed it, telling them his friends had started calling him The Pukester following a truly memorable night of drinking in his junior year.

Kurtz’s boys went in to get Callahan in a couple of helicopters much smaller than any of the ones they were using today. Owen

Underhill, already tabbed by most (including himself, Owen supposed) as Kurtz’s successor, had been in charge. Callahan’s job was to pop some smoke when he saw the birds, then stand by. Underhill’s job-the phooka part of it-had been to yank Callahan without being seen. This was not strictly necessary, so far as Owen could see, but was simply the way Kurtz liked it: his men were invisible, his men rode the Irish horse.

The extraction had worked perfectly. There were some SAMs fired, but nothing even close-Milosevic had shit, for the most part. It was as they were taking Callahan on board that Owen had seen his only Bosnians: five or six children, the oldest no more than ten, watching them with solemn faces. The idea that Kurtz’s directive to make sure there were no witnesses might apply to a group of dirtyface kids had never crossed Owen’s mind. And Kurtz had never said anything about it.

Until today, that was.

That Kurtz was a terrible man Owen had no doubt. Yet there were many terrible men in the service, more devils than saints, most certainly, and many were in love with secrecy. What made Kurtz different Owen had no idea-Kurtz, that long and melancholy man with his white eyelashes and still eyes. Meeting those was hard because there was nothing in them-no love, no laughter, and absolutely no curiosity. That lack of curiosity was somehow the worst.

A battered Subaru pulled up at the store, and two old men got carefully out. One clutched a black cane in a weather-chapped hand. Both wore red-and-black-checked hunting overshirts. Both wore faded caps, one with CASE above the bill and the other with DEERE. They looked wonderingly at the contingent of soldiers that descended upon them. Soldiers at Gosselin’s? What in the tarnal? They were in their eighties, by the look of them, but they had the curiosity Kurtz lacked. You could see it in the set of their bodies, the tilt of their heads.

All the questions Kurtz had not voiced. What do they want? Do they really mean us harm? Will doing this bring the harm? Is it the wind we sow to bring the whirlwind? at was there in all the previous encounters the flaps, the flashlights, the falls of angel hair and red dust, the abductions that began in the late sixties-that has made the powers that be so afraid? Has there been any real effort to communicate with these creatures?

And the last question, the most important question: Were the grayboys like us? Were they by any definition human? Was this murder, pure and simple? No question in Kurtz’s eyes about that, either.

The snow lightened, the day brightened, and exactly thirty-three minutes after ordering the stand-down, Kurtz gave them a go. Owen relayed it to Conklin and the Chinnies revved hard again, pulling up gauzy veils of snow and turning themselves into momentary ghosts. Then they rose to treetop level, aligned themselves on Underhill Blue Boy Leader-and flew west in the direction of Kineo. Kurtz’s Kiowa 58 flew below them and slightly to starboard, and Owen thought briefly of a troop of soldiers in a John Wayne movie, bluelegs with a single Indian scout riding his pony bareback off to one side. He couldn’t see, but guessed Kurtz would still be reading the paper. Maybe his horoscope. “Pisces, this is your day of infamy. Stay in bed.”

The pines and spruces below appeared and disappeared in vapors of white. Snow flew against the Chinook’s two front windows, danced, disappeared. The ride was extremely rough-like a ride in a washing machine-and Owen wouldn’t have had it any other way. He clapped the cans back on his head. Some other group, maybe Matchbox Twenty. Not great, but better than Pearl Jam. What Owen dreaded was the Squad Anthem. But he would listen. Yes indeed, he would listen.

In and out of the low clouds, vapory glimpses of an apparently endless forest, west west west.

“Blue Boy Leader, this is Blue Two.”

“Roger, Two.”

“I have visual contact with Blue Boy. Confirm?”

For a moment Owen couldn’t, and then he could. What he saw took his breath away. A photograph, an image inside a border, a thing you could hold in your hand, that was one thing. This was something else entirely.

“Confirm, Two. Blue Group, this is Blue Boy Leader. Hold your current positions. I say again, hold your current positions.”

One by one the other copters rogered. Only Kurtz did not, but he also stayed put. The Chinooks and the Kiowa hung in the air perhaps three quarters of a mile from the downed spacecraft. Leading up to it was an enormous swath of trees that had been whacked off in a slanted lane, as if by an enormous hedge-clipper. At the end of this lane was a swampy area. Dead trees clutched at the white sky, as if to snatch the clouds open. There were zig-zags of melting snow, some of it turning yellow where it was oozing into the damp ground. In other places there were veins and capillaries of open black water.

The ship, an enormous gray plate nearly a quarter of a mile across, had torn through the dead trees at the center of the swamp, exploding them and casting the splintery fragments in every direction. The Blue Boy (it was not blue at all, not a bit blue) had come to rest at the swamp’s far end, where a rocky ridge rose at a steep angle. A long arc of its curved edge had disappeared into the watery, unstable earth. Dirt and bits of broken trees had sprayed up and littered the ship’s smooth hull.

The surviving grayboys were standing around it, most on snow-covered hummocks under the upward-tilted end of their ship; if the sun had been shining, they would have been standing in the crashed ship’s shadow. Well… clearly there was someone who thought it was more Trojan Horse than crashed ship, but the surviving grayboys, naked and unarmed, didn’t look like much of a threat. About a hundred, Kurtz had said, but there were fewer than that now; Owen put the number at sixty. He saw at least a dozen corpses, in greater or lesser states of red-tinged decay, lying on the snow-covered hummocks. Some were facedown in the shallow black water. Here and there, startlingly bright against the snow, were reddish-gold patches of the so-called Ripley fungus… except not all of the patches were bright, Owen realized as he raised his binoculars and looked through them. Several had begun to gray out, victims of the cold or the atmosphere or both. No, they didn’t survive well here not the grayboys, not the fungus they had brought with them.

Could this stuff actually spread? He just didn’t believe it.

“Blue Boy Leader?” Conk asked. “You there, boy?”

“I’m here, shut up a minute.”

Owen leaned forward, reached under the pilot’s elbow (Tony Edwards, a good man), and flicked the radio switch to the common channel. Kurtz’s mention of Bosanski Novi never crossed his mind; the idea that he was making a terrible mistake never crossed his mind; the idea that he might have seriously underestimated Kurtz’s lunacy never crossed his mind. In fact, he did what he did with almost no conscious thought at all. So it seemed to him later, when he cast his mind back and reexamined the incident not just once but again and again. Only a flip of the switch. That was all it took to change the course of a man’s life, it seemed.

And there it was, loud and clear, a voice none of Kurtz’s laddie-bucks would recognize. They knew Eddie Vedder; Walter Cronkite was a different deal. “-here. Il n'y a pas d'infection ici.” Two seconds, and then a voice that might have belonged to Barbra Streisand: “One hundred and thirteen. One hundred and seventeen. One hundred and nineteen.”

At some point, Owen realized, they had started over counting primes from one. On the way up to Gosselin’s in the bus, the various voices had reached primes in the high four figures.

“We are dying,” said the voice of Barbra Strelsand. “On se meurt, on creve.” A pause, then the voice of David Lettertman: “One hundred and twenty-seven. One hundred-”

“Belay that!” Kurtz cried. For the only time in the years Owen had known him, Kurtz sounded really upset. Almost shocked. “Owen, why do you want to run that filth into the ears of my boys? You come back and tell me, and right now.”

“Just wanted to hear if any of it had changed, boss,” Owen said. That was a lie, and of course Kurtz knew it and at some point would undoubtedly make him pay for it. it was failing to shoot the kids all over again, maybe even worse. Owen didn’t care. Fuck the phooka horse. If they were going to do this, he wanted Kurtz’s boys (Skyhook in Bosnia, Blue Group this time, some other name next time, but it always came back to the same hard young faces) to hear the grayboys one last time. Travelers from another star system, perhaps even another universe or time-stream, knowers of things their hosts would never know (not that Kurtz would care). Let them hear the grayboys one last time instead of Pearl Jam or Jar of Flies or Rage Against the Machine; the grayboys appealing to what they had foolishly hoped was some better nature.

“And has it changed?” Kurtz’s voice crackled back. The green Kiowa was still down there, just below the hanging line of gunships, its rotors beating at the split top of a tall old pine Just under it, making it ruffle and sway. “Has it, Owen?”

“No,” he said. “Not at all, boss.”

“Then belay that chatter. Daylight’s wasting, praise Jesus.” Owen paused, then said, with careful deliberation: “Yes, sir.”

Kurtz sat bolt-upright in the Kiowa’s right seat-“ramrod-straight” was how they always put it in the books and movies. He had donned his sunglasses in spite of the day’s niild gray light, but Freddy, his pilot, still only dared to look at him from the corners of his eyes. The sunglasses were wraparounds, hipster-hodaddy shades, and now that they were on, you couldn’t tell where the boss was looking. You certainly couldn’t trust the way his head was pointing.

The Derry News lay on Kurtz’s lap (MYSTERIOUS SKYLIGHTS, MISSING HUNTERS SPARK PANIC IN JEFFERSON TRACT, read the headline). Now he picked up the paper and folded it carefully. He was good at this, and soon the Derry News would be folded into what Owen Underhill’s career had just become: a cocked hat. Underhill no doubt thought he would face some sort of disciplinary action-Kurtz’s own, since this was a black-ops deal, at least so far-followed by a second chance. What he didn’t seem to realize (and that was probably good; unwarned usually meant unarmed) was that this had been his second chance. Which was one more than Kurtz had ever given anyone else, and one he now regretted. Bitterly regretted. For Owen to go and pull a trick like that after their conversation in the office of the store after he had been specifically warned…

“Who gives the order?” Underhill’s voice crackled in Kurtz’s private comlink.

Kurtz was surprised and a little dismayed by the depth of his rage. Most of it was caused by no more than surprise, the simplest emotion, the one babies registered before any other. Owen had zinged him a good one, putting the grayboys on the squad channel like that; just wanted to hear if any of it had changed indeed, that was one you could roll tight and stick up your ass. Owen was probably the best second Kurtz had ever had in a long and complicated career that stretched all the way back to Cambodia in the early seventies, but Kurtz was going to break him, just the same. For the trick with the radio; because Owen hadn’t learned. It wasn’t about kids in Bosanski Novi, or a bunch of babbling voices now. It wasn’t about following orders, or even the principle of the matter. It was about the line. His line. The Kurtz Line.

Also, there was that sir. That damned snotty sir. “Boss?” Owen sounding Just a tad nervous now, and he was right to sound nervous, Jesus love him. “Who gives-” “Common channel, Freddy,” Kurtz said. “Key me in.” The Kiowa, much lighter than the gunships, caught a gust of wind and took a giddy bounce. Kurtz and Freddy ignored it. Freddy keyed him wide.

“Listen up, boys,” Kurtz said, looking at the four gunships hanging in a line, glass dragonflies above the trees and beneath the clouds. Just ahead of them was the swamp and the vast pearlescent tilted dish with its surviving crew-or whatever they were-standing beneath its aft lip.

“Listen now, boys, Daddy’s gonna sermonize. Are you listening? Answer up.”

Yes, yes, affirmative, affirm, roger that (with an occasional sir thrown in, but that was all right; there was a difference between forgetfulness and insolence).

“I’m not a talker, boys, talking’s not what I do, but I want you to know that this is not repeat not a case of what you see is what you get. What you see is about six dozen gray, apparently unsexed humanoids standing around naked as a loving God made them and you say, some would say anyway, “Why, those poor folks, all naked and unarmed, not a cock or a cunt to share among em, pleading for mercy there by their crashed intergalactic Trailways, and what kind of a dog, what kind of a monster could hear those pleading voices and go in just the same?" And I have to tell you, boys, that I am that dog, I am that monster, I am that post-industrial post-modern cryptofascist politically incorrect male cocka-rocka warpig, praise Jesus, and for anyone listening in I am Abraham Peter Kurtz, USAF Retired, serial number 241771699, and I am leading this charge, I’m the Lieutenant Calley in charge of this particular Alice’s Restaurant Massacree.”

He took a deep breath, eyes fixed on the hovering helicopters.

“But fellows, I’m here to tell you that the grayboys have been messing with us since the late nineteen-forties, and I have been messing with them since the late nineteen-seventies, and I can tell you that just because a fellow comes walking toward you with his hands raised saying I surrender, that doesn’t mean, praise Jesus, that he doesn’t have a pint of nitroglycerine shoved up his ass. Now the big old smart goldfish who go swimming around in the think-tanks, most of those guys say the grayboys came when we started lighting off atomic and hydrogen bombs, that they came to that the way bugs come to a buglight. I don’t know about that, I am not a thinker, I leave the thinking to others, leave it to the cabbage, cabbage got the head on him, as the saying goes, but there’s nothing wrong with my eyes, fellows, and I tell you those grayboy sons of bitches are as harmless as a wolf in a henhouse. We have taken a good many of them over the years, but not one has lived. When they die, their corpses decompose rapidly and turn into exactly the sort of stuff you see down there, what you lads call Plpley fungus. Sometimes they explode. Got that? They explode. The fungus they carry-or maybe it’s the fungus that’s in charge, some of the think-tank goldfish believe that might be the case-dies easily enough unless it gets on a living host, I say again living host, and the host it seems to like the best, fellows, praise Jesus, is good old homo sap. Once you’ve got it so much as under the nail of your little finger, it’s Katie bar the door and Homer run for home.”

This was not precisely the truth-not precisely anywhere near the truth, as a matter of fact-but nobody fought for you as ferociously as a scared soldier. This Kurtz knew from experience.

“Boys, our little gray buddies are telepathic, and they seem to pass this ability on to us through the air. We catch it even when we don’t catch the fungus, and while you might think a little mind-reading could be fun, the sort of thing that would make you the life of the party, I can tell you what lies a little farther down that road: schizophrenia, paranoia, separation from reality, and total I say again TOTAL FUCKING INSANITY. The think-tank boys, God bless em, believe that this telepathy is relatively short-acting right now, but I don’t have to tell you what could happen in that regard if the grayboys are allowed to settle in and be comfortable. I want you fellows to listen to what I’m going to say now very carefully want you to listen as if your lives depended on it, all right? When they take us, boys-say again, when they take us-and you all know there have been abductions, most people who claim to have been abducted by aliens are lying through their asshole neurotic teeth, but not all-those who are let go have often undergone implants. Some are nothing but instruments-transmitters, perhaps, or monitors of some sort-but some are living things which eat their hosts, grow fat, and then tear them apart.

These implants have been put in place by the very creatures you see down there, milling around all naked and innocent. They claim there’s no infection among them even though we know they are infected right up the ying-yang and the old wazoo and everywhere else. I have seen these things at work for twenty-five years or more, and I tell you this is it, this is the invasion, this is the Super Bowl of Super Bowls, and you fellows are on defense. They are not helpless little ETs, boys, waiting around for someone to give them a New England TEL phone card so they can phone home, they are a disease. They are cancer, praise Jesus, and boys, we’re one big hot radioactive shot of chemotherapy. Do you hear me, boys?” No affirmatives this time. No rogers, no I-copy-thats. Raw cheers, nervous and neurotic, jigging with eagerness. The comlink bulged with them.

“Cancer, boys. They are cancer. That’s the best I can put it, although as you know, I’m no talker. Owen, do you copy?”

“Copy, boss.” Flat. Flat and calm, damn him. Well, let him be cool. Let him be cool while he still could. Owen Underhill was all finished. Kurtz raised the paper hat and looked at it admiringly. Owen Underhill was over.

“What is it down there, Owen? What is it shuffling around that ship? What is it forgot to put on their pants and their shoes before they left the house this morning?”

“Cancer, boss.”

“That’s right. Now you give the order and in we go. Sing it out, Owen.” And, with great deliberation, knowing that the men in the gunships would be watching him (never had he given such a sermon, never, and not a word of it preplanned, unless in his dreams), he turned his own hat around backward.

Owen watched Tony Edwards turn his Mets cap around so that the bill pointed down the nape of his neck, heard Bryson and Bertinelli racking the.50s, and understood this was really happening. They were going hot. He could get in the car and ride or stand in the road and get run down. Those were the only choices Kurtz had left him.

And there was something more, something bad he remembered from long ago, when he had been-what? Eight? Seven? Maybe even younger. He had been out on the lawn of his house, the one in Paducah, his father still at work, his mother off somewhere, probably at the Grace Baptist, getting ready for one of her endless bake sales (unlike Kurtz, when Randi Underhill said praise Jesus, she meant it), and an ambulance had pulled up next door, at the Rapeloews”. No siren, but lots of flashing lights. Two men in jumpsuits very much like the coverall Owen now wore had gone running up the Rapeloews” walk, unfolding a gleaming stretcher. Never even breaking stride. It was like a magic trick.

Less than ten minutes later they were back out with Mrs Rapeloew on the stretcher. Her eyes had been closed. Mr Rapeloew came along behind her, not even bothering to close the door. Mr Rapeloew, who was Owen’s Daddy’s age, looked suddenly as old as a grampy. It was another magic trick. Mr Rapeloew glanced to his right as the men loaded his wife into the ambulance and saw Owen kneeling on his lawn in his short pants and playing with his ball. They say it was a stroke! Mr Rapeloew called. St Mary’s Memorial! Tell your mother, Owen! And then he climbed into the back of the ambulance and the ambulance drove away. For the next five minutes or so Owen continued to play with his hall, throwing it up and catching it, but in between throws and catches he kept looking at the door Mr Rapeloew had left open and thinking he ought to close it. That closing it would be what his mother called a Christian Act of Charity.

Finally he got up and crossed to the Rapeloews” lawn. The Rapeloews had been good to him. Nothing really special (“Nothing to get up in the night and write home about,” his mother would have said), but Mrs Rapeloew made lots of cookies and always remembered to save him some; many were the bowls of frosting and cookie-dough he had scraped clean in chubby, cheery Mrs Rapeloew’s kitchen. And Mr Rapeloew had shown him how to make paper airplanes that really flew. Three different kinds. So the Rapeloews deserved charity, Christian charity, but when he stepped through the open door of the Rapeloews” house, he had known perfectly well that Christian charity wasn’t the reason he was there. Doing Christian charity did not make your dingus hard.

For five minutes-or maybe it was fifteen minutes or half an hour, the time passed like time in a dream-Owen had just walked around in the Rapeloews” house, doing nothing, but all the time his dingus had been just as hard as a rock, so hard it throbbed like a second heartbeat, and you would think something like that would hurt, but it hadn’t, it had felt good, and all these years later he recognized that silent wandering for what it had been: foreplay, The fact that he had nothing against the Rapeloews, that he in fact liked the Rapeloews, somehow made it even better. If he was caught (he never was), he could say I dunno if asked why he did it, and be telling the God’s honest.

Not that he did so much. In the downstairs bathroom he found a toothbrush with Dick printed on it. Dick was Mr Rapeloew’s name. Owen tried to piss on the bristles of Mr Rapeloew’s toothbrush, that was what he wanted to do, but his dingus was too hard and no piss would come out, not a single drop. So he spat on the bristles instead, then rubbed the,pit in and put the brush back in the toothbrush holder. In the kitchen, he poured a glass of water over the electric stove-burners. Then he took a large china serving platter from the sideboard. “They said it was the stork,” Owen said, holding the platter over his head. “It must be a baby, because he said it was a stork.” And then he heaved the platter into the comer, where it shattered into a thousand pieces. Once that was done he had fled from the house. Whatever had been inside him, the thing that had made his dingus hard and his eyeballs feel too big for their sockets, the shattering sound of the plate had broken it, popped it like a pimple, and if his parents hadn’t been so worried about Mrs Rapeloew, they almost certainly would have seen something wrong with him. As it was, they probably just assumed that he was worried about Mrs R… too. For the next week he had slept little, and what sleep he did get had been haunted by bad dreams. In one of these, Mrs Rapeloew came home from the hospital with the baby the stork had brought her, only the baby was black and dead. Owen had been all but consumed with guilt and shame (never to the point of confessing, however; what in God’s name would he have said when his Baptist mother asked him what had possessed him), and yet he never forgot the blind pleasure of standing in the bathroom with his shorts down around his knees, trying to piss on Mr Rapeloew’s toothbrush, or the thrill that had gusted through him when the serving platter shattered. If he had been older, he would have come in his pants, he supposed. The purity was in the senselessness; the joy was in the sound of the shatter; the afterglow was the slow and pleasurable wallow in remorse for having done it and the fear of being caught. Mr Rapeloew had said it was a stork, but when Owen’s father came in that night, he told him it was a stroke. That a blood-vessel in Mrs Rapeloew’s brain had sprung a leak and that was a stroke.

And now here it was again, all of that.

Maybe this time I will come, he thought. It’ll certainly be a lot goddam grander than trying to piss on Mr Rapeloew’s toothbrush. And then, as he turned his own hat around: Same basic concept, though.

“Owen?” Kurtz’s voice. “Are you there, son? If you don’t roger me right now, I’m going to assume you either can’t or won’t-”

“Boss, I’m here.” Voice steady. In his mind’s eye he saw a sweaty little boy holding a china serving platter over his head. “Boys, are you ready to kick a little interstellar ass?”

A roar of affirmation that included one goddam right and one let’s tear em up.

“What do you want first, boys?”

Squad Anthem and Anthem and Fucking Stones, right now!

“Anyone want out, sing out.”

Radio silence. On some other frequency where Owen would never go again, the grayboys were pleading in famous voices. Starboard and below was the little Kiowa OH-58. Owen didn’t need binoculars to see Kurtz with his own hat now turned around, Kurtz watching him. The newspaper was still on his lap, now for some reason folded into a triangle. For six years Owen Underhill had needed no second chances, which was good because Kurtz didn’t give them-in his heart Owen supposed he had always known that. He would think about that later, however. If he had to. One final coherent thought flared in his mind-You’re the cancer, Kurtz, you-and then died. Here was a fine and perfect darkness in its place.

“Blue Group, this is Blue Boy Leader. Come in on me. Commence firing at two hundred yards. Avoid hitting the Blue Boy if possible, but we are going to sweep those motherfuckers clean. Conk, play the Anthem.”

Gene Conklin flicked a switch and racked a CD in the Discman sitting on the floor of Blue Boy Two. Owen, no longer inside himself, leaned forward in Blue Boy Leader and cranked the volume.

Mick Jagger, the voice of the Rolling Stones, filled his earphones. Owen raised his hand, saw Kurtz snap him a salute-whether sarcastic or sincere Owen neither knew nor cared-and then Owen brought his arm down. As Jagger sang it out, sang the Anthem, the one they always played when they went in hot, the helicopters dropped, tightened, and flew to target.

The grayboys-the ones that were left-stood beneath the shadow of their ship which lay in turn at the end of the shattered aisle of trees it had destroyed in its final descent. They made no initial effort to run or hide; in fact half of them actually stepped forward on their naked toeless feet, squelching in the melted snow, the muck, and the scattered fuzz of reddish-gold moss. These faced the oncoming line of gunships, long-fingered hands raised, showing that they were empty. Their huge black eyes gleamed in the dull daylight.

The gunships did not slow, although all of them heard the final transmissions briefly in their heads: Please don’t hurt us, we are helpless, we are dying. With that, twining through it like a pigtail, came the voice of Mick Jagger: “Please allow me to introduce myself, I’m a man Of wealth and taste; I’ve been around for many a long year, stolen many man’s soul and faith…”

The gunships heeled around as briskly as a marching band doing a square turn on the fifty-yard line of the Pose Bowl, and the.50s opened up. The bullets plowed into the snow, struck dead branches from already wounded trees, struck pallid little sparks from the edge of the great ship. They ripped into the bunched grayboys standing with their arms upraised and tore them apart. Arms spun free of rudimentary bodies, spouting a kind of pink sap. Heads exploded like gourds, raining a reddish backsplash on their ship and their shipmates-not blood but that mossy stuff, as if their heads were full of it, not really heads at all but grisly produce baskets. Several of them were cut in two at the midsection and went down with their hands still raised in surrender. As they fell, the gray bodies went a dirty white and seemed to boil.

Mick Jagger confided: “I was around when Jesus Christ had His moment of doubt and pain…”

A few grays, still standing under the lip of the ship, turned as if to run, but there was nowhere to go. Most of them were shot down immediately. The last few survivors-maybe four in all-retreated into the scant shadows. They seemed to be doing something, fiddling with something, and Owen had a horrible premonition.

“I can get them!” came crackling over the radio. That was Deforest in Blue Boy Four, almost panting with eagerness. And, anticipating Owen’s order to go for it, the Chinook dropped almost to ground-level, its rotors kicking up snow and muddy water in a filthy blizzard, battering the underbrush flat.

“No, negative, belay that, back off, resume station plus fifty!” Owen shouted, and whacked Tony’s shoulder. Tony, looking only slightly odd in the transparent mask over his mouth and nose, yanked back on the yoke and Blue Boy Leader rose in the unsteady air. Even over the music-the mad bongos, the chorus going Hoo-hoo, “Sympathy for the Devil” hadn’t played through to its conclusion even a single time, at least not yet-Owen could hear his crew grumbling. The Kiowa, he saw, was already small with distance. Whatever his mental peculiarities might be, Kurtz was no fool-And his instincts were exquisite.

“Ah, boss “Deforest, sounding not just disappointed but on fire.

“Say again, say again, return to station, Blue Group, return-”

The explosion hanmered him back in his seat and tossed the Chinook upward like a toy. Beneath the roar, he heard Tony Edwards cursing and wrestling with the yoke. There were screams from behind them, but while most of the crew was injured, they lost only Pinky Bryson, who had been leaning out the bay for a better look and fen when the shockwave hit.

“Got it, got it, got it,” Tony yammered, but Owen thought it was at least thirty seconds before Tony actually did, seconds that felt like hours. On the sound systems, the Anthem had cut off, a fact that did not bode well for Conk and the boys in Blue Boy Two.

Tony swung Blue Boy Leader around, and Owen saw the windscreen Perspex was cracked in two places. Behind them someone was still screaming-Mac Cavanaugh, it turned out, had somehow managed to lose two fingers.

“Holy shit,” Tony muttered, and then: “You saved our bacon, boss. Thanks.”

Owen barely heard him. He was looking back at the remains of the ship, which now lay in at least three pieces. It was hard to tell because the shit was flying and the air had turned a hazy reddish-orange. It was a little easier to see the remains of Deforest’s gunship. It lay canted on its side “in the muck with bubbles bursting all around it. On its port side, a long piece of busted rotor floated in the water like a “ant’s canoe-paddle. About fifty yards away, more rotors protruded, black and crooked, from a furious ball of yellow-white fire. That was Conklin and Blue Boy Two.

Graggle and bleep from the radio. Blakey in Blue Boy Three. “Boss, hey boss, I see”

“Three, this is Leader. I want you to-”

“Leader, this is Three, I see survivors, repeat, I see Blue Boy Four survivors, at least three no, four I am going down to-”

“Negative, Blue Boy Three, not at all. Resume station plus fifty-belay that, station plus one-fifty, one-five-oh, and do it now!”

“Ah, but sir boss, I mean… I can see Friedman, he’s on fucking fire”

“Joe Blakey, listen up.”

No mistaking Kurtz’s rasp, Kurtz who had gotten clear of the red crap in plenty of time. Almost, Owen thought, as if he knew what was going to happen.

“Get your ass out of there now, or I guarantee that by next week you’ll be shovelling camel-shit in a hot climate where booze is illegal. Out.”

Nothing more from Blue Boy Three. The two surviving gunships pulled back to their original rally-point plus a hundred and fifty yards. Owen sat watching the furious upward spiral of the Ripley fungus, wondering if Kurtz had known or just intuited, wondering if he and Blakey had cleared the area in time. Because they were infectious, of course; whatever the grayboys said, they were infectious. Owen didn’t know if that justified what they had just done, but he thought the survivors of Pay Deforest’s Blue Boy Four were most likely dead men walking. Or worse: live men changing. Turning into God knew what.

“Owen.” The radio.

Tony looked at him, eyebrows raised.

“Owen.”

Sighing, Owen flicked the toggle over to Kurtz’s closed channel with his chin. “I’m here, boss.”

Kurtz sat in the Kiowa with the newspaper hat still in his lap. He and Freddy were wearing their masks; so were the rest of boys in the attack group. Likely even the poor fellows now on the ground were still wearing them. The masks were probably unnecessary, but Kurtz, who had no intention of contracting Ripley if he could avoid it, was the big cheese. Among other things, he was supposed to set an example. Besides, he played the odds. As for Freddy Johnson… well, he had plans for Freddy.

“I’m here, boss,” Underhill said in his phones.

“That was good shooting, better flying, and superlative thinking. You saved some lives. You and I are back where we were. Right back to Square One. Got that?”

“I do, boss. Got it and appreciate it.”

And if you believe it, Kurtz thought, you’re even stupider than you look.

Behind Owen, Cavanaugh was still making noises, but the volume was decreasing now. Nothing from Joe Blakey, who was maybe coming to understand the implications of that gauzy red-gold whirlwind, which they might or might not have managed to avoid.

“Everything okay, buck?” Kurtz asked.

“We have some injuries,” Owen replied, “but basically five-by. Work for the sweepers, though; it’s a mess back there,” Kurtz’s crowlike laughter came back, loud in Owen’s headphones.

“Freddy-”

“Yes, boss.”

“We need to keep an eye on Owen Underhill.”

“Okay.”

“If we need to leave suddenly-Imperial Valley-Underhill stays here.”

Freddy Johnson said nothing, just nodded and flew the helicopter. Good lad. Knew which side of the line he belonged on, unlike some.Kurtz again turned to him. “Freddy, get us back to that godforsaken little store and don’t spare the horses. I want to be

there at least fifteen minutes before Owen and Joe Blakey. Twenty, if possible.”

“Yes, boss.”

“And I want a secure satellite uplink to Cheyenne Mountain.”

“You got it. Take about five.”

“Make it three, buck. Make it three.”

Kurtz settled back and watched the pine forest flow under them. So much forest, so much wildlife, and not a few human beings-most of them at this time of year wearing orange. And a week from now maybe in seventy-two hours-it would all be as dead as the mountains of the moon. A shame, but if there was one thing of which there was no shortage in Maine, it was woods.

Kurtz spun the cocked hat on the end of his finger. If possible, he intended to see Owen Underhill wearing it after he had ceased breathing.

“He just wanted to hear if any of it had changed,” Kurtz said softly.

Freddy Johnson, who knew which side his bread was buttered on, said nothing.

Halfway back to Gosselin’s and Kurtz’s speedy little Kiowa already a speck that might or might not still be there, Owen’s eyes fixed on Tony Edward’s right hand, which was gripping one branch of the Chinook’s Y-shaped steering yoke. At the base of the right thumbnail, fine as a spill of sand, was a curving line of reddish-gold. Owen looked down at his own hands, inspecting them as closely as Mrs. Jankowski had during Personal Hygiene, back in those long-ago days when the Rapeloews had been their neighbors. He could see nothing yet, not on his, but Tony had his mark, and Owen guessed his own would come in time.

Baptists the Underhills had been, and Owen was familiar with the story of Cain and Abel. The voice of thy brother’s blood cried unto me from the ground, God had said, and he had sent Cain out to live in the land of Nod, to the east of Eden. With the low men, according to his mother. But before Cain was set loose to wander, God had put a mark upon him, so even the low men of Nod would know him for what he was. And now, seeing that red-gold thread on the nail of Eddie’s thumb and looking for it on his own hands and wrists, Owen guessed he knew what color Cain’s mark had been.

Chapter Eleven THE EGGMAN’s JOURNEY

Suicide, Henry had discovered, had a voice. It wanted to explain itself The problem was that it didn’t speak much English; mostly it lapsed into its own fractured pidgin. But it didn’t matter; just the talking seemed to be enough. Once Henry allowed suicide its voice, his life had improved enormously. He even had nights when he slept again (not a lot of them, but enough), and he had never had a really bad day.

Until today. It had been Jonesy’s body on the Arctic Cat, but the thing now inside his old friend was full of alien images and alien purpose. Jonesy might also still be inside-Henry rather thought he was-but if so, he was now too deep, too small and powerless, to be of any use. Soon Jonesy would be gone completely, and that would likely be a mercy.

Henry had been afraid the thing now running Jonesy would sense him, but it went by without slowing. Toward Pete. And then what? Then where? Henry didn’t want to think, didn’t want to care.

At last he started back to camp again, not because there was anything left at Hole in the Wall but because there was no place else to go. As he reached the gate with its one-word sign-CLARENDON-he spat another tooth into his gloved hand, looked at it, then tossed it away. The snow was over, but the sky was still dark and he thought the wind was picking up again. Had the radio said something about a storm with a one-two punch? He couldn’t remember, wasn’t sure it mattered.

Somewhere to the west of him, a huge explosion hammered the day. Henry looked dully in that direction, but could see nothing. Something had either crashed or exploded, and at least some of the nagging voices in his head had stopped. He had no idea if those things were related or not, no idea if he should care. He stepped through the open gate, walking on the packed snow marked with the tread of the departing Arctic Cat, and approached Hole in the Wall.

The generator brayed steadily, and above the granite slab that served as their welcome mat, the door stood open. Henry paused outside for a moment, examining the slab. At first he thought there was blood on it, but blood, either fresh or dried, did not have that unique red-gold sheen. No, he was looking at some sort of organic growth. Moss or maybe fungus. And something else…

Henry tipped his head back, flared his nostrils, and sniffed gently-he had a memory, both clear and absurd, of being in Maurice’s a month ago with his ex-wife, smelling the wine the sommelier had just poured, seeing Rhonda there across the table and thinking, We sniff the wine, dogs sniff each other’s assholes, and it all comes to about the same. Then, in a flash, the memory of the milk running down his father’s chin had come, He had smiled at Rhonda, she had smiled back, and he had thought what a relief the end would be, and if it were done, than “twere well it were done quickly.

What he smelled now wasn’t wine but a marshy, sulfurous odor. For a moment he couldn’t place it, then it came: the woman who had wrecked them. The smell of her wrong innards was here, too.

Henry stepped onto the granite slab, aware that he had come to this place for the last time, feeling the weight of all the years-the laughs, the talks, the beers, the occasional lid of pot, a food-fight in “96 (or maybe it had been “97), the gunshots, that bitter mixed smell of powder and blood that meant deer season, the smell of death and friendship and childhood’s brilliance.

As he stood there, he sniffed again. Much stronger, and now more chemical than organic, perhaps because there was so much of it. He looked inside. There was more of that fuzzy, mildev,7ystuff on the floor, but you could see the hardwood. On the Navajo rug, however, it had already grown so thick that it was hard to make out the pattern. No doubt whatever it was did better in the heat, but still, the rate of growth was scary.

Henry started to step in, then thought better of it. He backed two or three paces away from the doorway instead and only stood there in the snow, very aware of his bleeding nose and the holes in his gums where there had been teeth when he woke up this morning. If that mossy stuff was producing some sort of airborne virus, like Ebola or Hanta, he was probably cooked already, and anything he did would amount to no more than locking the barn door after the horse had been stolen. But there was no sense taking unnecessary risks, was there?

He turned and walked around Hole in the Wall to the Gulch side, still walking in the packed tread of the departed Arctic Cat to keep from sinking into the new snow.

The door to the shed was open, too. And Henry could see Jonesy, yes, clear as day, Jonesy pausing in the doorway before going in to get the snowmobile, Jonesy holding to the side of the doorway with a casual hand, Jonesy listening to… to the what?

To the nothing. No crows cawing, no jays scolding, no woodpeckers pecking, no squirrels scuttering. There was only the wind and an occasional padded plop as a clot of snow slid off a pine or spruce and hit the new snow beneath. The local wildlife was gone, had moved on like goofy animals in a Gary Larson cartoon.

He stood where he was for a moment, calling up his memory of the shed’s interior. Pete would have done better-Pete would have stood here with his eyes closed and his forefinger ticking back and forth, then told you where everything was, right down to the smallest jar of screws-but in this case Henry thought he could do without Pete’s special skill. He’d been out here just yesterday, looking for something to help him open a kitchen cabinet door that was swelled shut. He had seen then what he wanted now.

Henry inhaled and exhaled rapidly several times, hyperventilating his lungs clean, then pressed his gloved hand tight over his mouth and nose and stepped in. He stood still for a moment, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dim. He didn’t want to be surprised by anything if he could help it.

When he could see well again, Henry stepped across the empty place where the snowmobile had been. There was nothing on the floor now but an overlaid pattern of oil stains, but there were more patches of that reddish-gold crud growing on the green tarp which had covered the Cat and was now cast aside in the comer.

The worktable was a mess-a jar of nails and one of screws overturned so that what had been kept carefully separate was now mixed together, an old pipe-holder that had belonged to Lamar Clarendon knocked to the floor and broken, all the drawers built into the table’s thickness yanked open and left that way. One of them, Beaver or Jonesy, had gone through this place like a whirlwind, looking for something.

It was Jonesy.

Yeah. Henry might never know what it was, but it had been Jonesy, he knew that, and it had clearly been almighty important to him or to both of them. Henry wondered if Jonesy had found it. He would probably never know that, either. Meanwhile, what he wanted was clearly visible in the far comer of the room, hung on a nail above a pile of paint-cans and sprayguns.

Still holding his hand over his mouth and nose, breath held, Henry crossed the interior of the shed. There were at least four of the little nose-and-mouth painters” masks hanging from elastics which had lost most of their snap. He took them all and turned in time to see something move behind the door. He kept himself from gasping, but his heartbeat jumped, and all at once the double lungful of air that had gotten him this far seemed too hot and heavy. Nothing there, either, it had just been his imagination. Then he saw that yeah, there was something. Light came in through the open door; a little more came in through the single dirty window over the table, and Henry had literally jumped at his own shadow.

He left the shed in four big steps, the painters” masks swinging from his right hand. He held onto his lungfill of decayed air until he’d made four more steps along the packed track of the snowmobile, then let it out in an explosive rush. He bent over, hands planted on his thighs above his knees, small black dots flocking before his eyes and then dissolving.

From the east came a distant crackle of gunfire. Not rifles; it was too loud and fast for that. Those were automatic weapons. In Henry’s mind there came a vision as clear as the memory of milk running down his father’s chin or Barry Newman fleeing his office with rockets on his heels. He saw the deer and the coons and the chucks and the feral dogs and the rabbits being cut down in their dozens and their hundreds as they tried to escape what was now pretty clearly a plague zone; he could see the snow turning red with their innocent (but possibly contaminated) blood. This vision hurt him in a way he had not expected, piercing through to a place that wasn’t dead but only dozing. It was the place that had resonated so strongly to Duddits’s weeping, setting up a harmonic tone that made you feel as if your head were going to explode.

Henry straightened up, saw fresh blood on the palm of his left glove, and cried “Ah, shit!” at the sky in a voice that was both furious and amused. He had covered his mouth and nose, he had gotten the masks and was planning on wearing at least two when he went inside Hole in the Wall, but he had completely forgotten the gash in his thigh, the one he’d gotten when the Scout rolled over. If there had been a contaminant out there in the shed, something given off by the fungus, the chances were excellent that it was in him now. Not that the precautions he had taken were any such of a much. Henry imagined a sign, big red letters reading BIOHAZARD AREA! PLEASE HOLD BREATH AND COVER ANY SCRATCHES YOU MAY HAVE WITH YOUR HAND!

He grunted laughter and started back toward the cabin. Well, good God, Maude, it wasn’t as if he had planned to live forever, anyway-Off to the east, the gunfire crackled on and on.

Once again standing outside Hole in the Wall’s open door, Henry felt in his back pocket for a handkerchief without much hope of finding one… and didn’t. Two of the unadvertised attractions of spending time in the woods were urinating where you wanted and just leaning over and giving a honk when your nose felt in need of a blow. There was something primally satisfying about letting the piss and the snot fly… to men, at least. When you thought about it, it was sort of a blue-eyed wonder that women could love the best of them, let alone the rest of them.

He took off his coat, the shirt under it, and the thermal undershirt beneath that. The final layer was a faded Boston Red Sox tee-shirt with GARCIAPARRA 5 on the back. Henry took this off, spun it into a bandage, and wrapped it around the blood-caked tear in the left leg of his jeans, thinking again that he was locking the barn door after the horse had been stolen. Still, you filled in the blanks, didn’t you? Yes, you filled in the blanks and you printed neatly and legibly. These were the concepts upon which life ran. Even when life was running out, it seemed.

He put the rest of his outerwear back on over his goosepimply top half, then donned two of the teardrop-shaped painters” masks. He considered fixing two of the others over his ears, imagined those narrow bands of elastic crisscrossing the back of his head like the straps of a shoulder holster, and burst out laughing. What else? Use the last mask to cover one eye?

“If it gets me, it gets me,” he said, at the same time reminding himself that it wouldn’t hurt to be careful; a little dose of careful never hurt a man, old Lamar used to say.

Inside Hole in the Wall, the fungus (or mildew, or whatever it was) had gone forward appreciably even during the short time Henry had been in the shed. The Navajo rug was now covered side to side, with not even the slightest pattern showing through. There were patches on the couch, the counter between the kitchen and the dining area, and on the seats of two of the three stools which stood on the living-room side of the counter. A crooked capillary of red-gold fuzz ran up one leg of the dining-room table, as if following the line of a spill, and Henry was reminded of how ants will congregate on even the thinnest track of spilled sugar. Perhaps the most distressing thing of all was the red-gold fuzz of cobweb hanging high over the Navajo rug. Henry looked at it fixedly for several seconds before realizing what it really was: Lamar Clarendon’s dreamcatcher. Henry didn’t think he would ever know exactly what had happened here, but of one thing he was sure: the dreamcatcher had snared a real nightmare this time.

You aren’t really going any farther in here, are you? Now that you’ve seen how fast it grows? Jonesy looked all right when he went by, but he wasn’t all right, and you know it. You felt it. So… you aren’t really going on, are you?

“I think so,” Henry said. The doubled thickness of masks bobbed on his face when he spoke. “If it gets hold of me… why, I’ll just have to kill myself” Laughing like Stubb in Moby-Dick, Henry moved farther into the cabin.

With one exception, the fungus grew in thin mats and clumps. The exception was in front of the bathroom door, where there was an actual hill of fungus, all of it matted together and growing upward in the doorway, bearding both jambs to a height of at least four feet. This hill-like clump of growth seemed to be lying over some grayish, spongy growth medium. On the side facing the living room, the gray stuff split in two, making a V-shape that reminded Henry unpleasantly of splayed legs. As if someone had died in the doorway and the fungus had overgrown the corpse. Henry recalled an offprint from med school, some article quickly scanned in the search for something else. It had contained photographs, one of them a gruesome medical exarniner’s shot he had never quite forgotten. It showed a murder victim dumped in the woods, the nude body discovered after approximately four days. There had been toadstools growing from the nape of the neck, the creases at the backs of the knees, and from the cleft of the buttocks.

Four days, all right. But this place had been clean this morning, only…

Henry glanced at his watch and saw that it had stopped at twenty till twelve. It was now Eastern Standard No Time At All.

He turned and peeked behind the door, suddenly convinced that something was lurking there.

Nah. Nothing but Jonesy’s Garand, leaning against the wall.

Henry started to turn away, then turned back again. The Garand looked clear of the goo, and Henry picked it up. Loaded, safety on, one in the chamber. Good. Henry slung it over his shoulder and turned back toward the unpleasant red Jump growing outside the bathroom door. The smell of ether, mingled with something sulfurous and even more unpleasant, was strong in here. He walked slowly across the room toward the bathroom, forcing himself forward a step at a time, afraid (and increasingly certain) that the red hump with the leglike extrusions was all that remained of his friend Beaver. In a moment he would see the straggly remains of the Beav’s long black hair or his Doc Martens, which Beaver called his “lesbian solidarity statement”. The Beav had gotten the idea that Doc Martens were a secret sign by which lesbians recognized each other, and no one could talk him out of this. He was likewise convinced that people named Rothschild and Goldfarb ran the world, possibly from a bedrock-deep bunker in Colorado. Beaver, whose preferred expression of surprise was fuck me Freddy.

But there was absolutely no way of telling if the lump in the doorway had once been the Beav, or indeed if it had once been anyone at all. There was only that suggestive shape. Something glinted in the spongy mass of growth and Henry leaned a little closer, wondering even as he did it if microscopic bits of the fungus were already growing on the wet, unprotected surfaces of his eyes. The thing he spotted turned out to be the bathroom doorknob. Off to one side, sporting its own fuzz of growth, was a roll of friction tape. He remembered the mess scattered across the surface of the worktable out back, the yanked-open drawers. Had this been what Jonesy had been out there looking for? A goddam roll of tape? Something in his head-maybe the click, maybe not-said it was. But why? In God’s name, why?

In the last five months or so, as the suicidal thoughts came more frequently and visited for longer and longer periods of time, chatting in their pidgin language, Henry’s curiosity had pretty much deserted him. Now it was raging, as if it had awakened hungry. He had nothing to feed it. Had Jonesy wanted to tape the door shut? Yeah? Against what? Surely he and the Beav must have known it wouldn’t work against the fungus, which would just send its fingers creeping under the door.

Henry looked into the bathroom and made a low grunting sound. Whatever obscene craziness had gone on, it had started and ended in there-he had no doubt of it. The room was a red cave, the blue tiles almost completely hidden under drifts of the stuff. It had grown up the base of the sink and the toilet, as well. The seat’s lid was back against the tank, and although he couldn’t be positive-there was too much overgrowth to be positive-he thought that the ring itself had been broken inward. The shower curtain was now a solid red-gold instead of filmy blue; most of it had been tom off the rings (which had grown their own vegetable beards) and lay in the tub.

Jutting from the edge of the tub, also overgrown with fungus, was a boot-clad foot. The boot was a Doc Marten, Henry was sure of it. He had found Beaver after all, it seemed. Memories of the day they had rescued Duddits suddenly filled him, so bright and clear it might have been yesterday. Beaver wearing his goofy old leather jacket, Beaver taking Duddits’s lunchbox and saying You like this show? But they never change their clothes! And then saying-

“Fuck me Freddy,” Henry told the overgrown cabin. “That’s what he said, what he always said.” Tears running from his eyes and down his cheeks. If it was just wetness the fungus wanted and judging by the jungle growing out of the toilet-bowl, it liked wetness just fine-it could land on him and have a feast.

Henry didn’t much care. He had Jonesy’s rifle. The fungus could start on him, but he could make sure that he was long gone before it ever got to the dessert course. If it came to that.

It probably would.

He was sure he’d seen a few rug-remnants heaped up in one comer of the shed. Henry debated going out and getting them. He could lay them down on the bathroom floor, walk over them, and get a better look into the tub. But to what purpose? He knew that was Beaver, and he had no real desire to see his old friend, author of such witticisms as Kiss my bender, being overgrown by red fungus as the pallid corpse in that long-ago medical offprint had been growing its own colony of toadstools. If it might have answered some of his questions about what had happened, yes, perhaps. But Henry didn’t think that likely.

Mostly what he wanted was to get out of here. The fungus was creepy, but there was something else. An even creepier sensation that he was not alone.

Henry backed away from the bathroom door. There was a paperback on the dining table, a pattern of dancing devils with pitchforks on its cover. One of Jonesy’s, no doubt, already growing its own little colony of crud.

He became aware of a whickering noise from the west, one that quickly rose to a thunder. Helicopters, and not just one, this time. A lot. Big ones. They sounded as if they were coming in at rooftop level, and Henry ducked without even being aware of it. Images from a dozen Vietnam War movies filled his head and he was momentarily sure that they would open up with their machine-guns, spraying the house. Or maybe they’d hose it down with napalm.

They passed over without doing either, but came close enough to rattle the cups and dishes on the kitchen shelves. Henry straightened up as the thunder began to fade, becoming first a chatter and then a harmless drone. Perhaps they had gone off to join the animal slaughter at the east end of Jefferson Tract. Let them. He was going to get the fuck out of here and-

And what? Exactly what?

While he was thinking this question over, there was a sound from one of the two downstairs bedrooms. A rustling sound. This was followed by a moment of silence, just long enough for Henry to decide it was his imagination pulling a little more overtime. Then there came a series of low clicks and chitters, almost the sound of a mechanical toy-a tin monkey or parrot, maybe-on the verge of running down. Gooseflesh broke out all over Henry’s body. The spit dried up in his mouth. The hairs on the back of his neck began to straighten in bunches.

Get out of here, run!

Before he could listen to that voice and let it get a hold on him, he crossed to the bedroom door in big steps, unshouldering the Garand as he went. The adrenaline dumped into his blood, and the world stood forth brightly. Selective perception, that unacknowledged gift to the safe and cozy, fell away and he saw every detail: the trail of blood which ran from bedroom to bathroom, a discarded slipper, that weird red mold growing on the wall in the shape of a handprint. Then he went through the door.

It was on the bed, whatever it was; to Henry it looked like a weasel or a woodchuck with its legs amputated and a long, bloody tail strung out behind it like an afterbirth. Only no animal he’d ever seen-with the possible exception of the moray eel at the Boston Seaquarium-had such disproportionately large black eyes. And another similarity: when it yawned open the rudimentary line that was its mouth, it revealed a nest of shocking fangs, as long and thin as hatpins.

Behind it, pulsing on the blood-soaked sheet, were a hundred or more orange-and-brown eggs. They were the size of large marbles and coated with a murky, snotlike slime. Within each Henry could see a moving, hairlike shadow.

The weasel-thing rose up like a snake emerging from a snake-charmer’s basket and chittered at him. It lurched on the bed Jonesy’s bed-but seemed unable to move much. Its glossy black eyes glared. Its tail (except Henry thought it might actually be some sort of gripping tentacle) lashed back and forth, then laid itself over as many of the eggs as it could reach, as if protecting them.

Henry realized he was saying the same word, no, over and over in a monotonous drone, like a helpless neurotic who has been loaded up on Thorazine. He shouldered the rifle, aimed, and tracked the thing’s repulsive wedge of a head as it twitched and dodged. It knows what this is, it knows at least that much, Henry thought coldly, and then he squeezed the trigger.

It was close range and the creature wasn’t up to much in the way of evasion; either laying its eggs had exhausted it or it wasn’t doing well in the cold-with the main door open, Hole in the Wan had gotten quite cold indeed. The report was very loud in the closed room, and the thing’s upraised head disintegrated in a liquid splatter that blew back against the wall in strings and clots. Its blood was the same red-gold as the fungus. The decapitated body tumbled off the bed and onto a litter of clothes Henry didn’t recognize: a brown coat, an orange flagman’s vest, a pair of jeans with cuffs (none of them had ever worn cuffed jeans; in junior high school, those who did had been branded shitkickers). Several of the eggs tumbled off with the body. Most landed on either the clothes or the litter of Jonesy’s books and remained whole, but a couple hit the floor and broke open. Cloudy stuff like spoiled eggwhite oozed out, about a tablespoonful from each egg. Within it were those hairs, writhing and twisting and seeming to glare at Henry with black eyes the size of pinheads. Looking at them made him feel like screaming.

He turned and walked jerkily out of the room on legs with no more feeling in them than the legs of a table. He felt like a puppet being manipulated by someone who means well but has just begun to learn his craft. He had no real idea where he was going until he reached the kitchen and bent over the cabinet under the sink.

“I am the eggman, I am the eggman, I am the walrus! Goo-goo-joob!”

He didn’t sing this but declaimed it in a loud, hortatory voice he hadn’t realized was in his repertoire. It was the voice of a ham actor from the nineteenth century. That idea called up an image God knew why-of Edwin Booth dressed as d'Artagnan, plumed hat and all, quoting from the lyrics of John Lennon, and Henry uttered two loud laugh-syllables-Ha! Ha!

I’m going insane, he thought… but it was okay. Better d'Artagnan reciting “I Am the Walrus” than the image of that thing’s blood splattering onto the wall, or the mold-covered Doc Marten sticking out of the bathtub, or, worst of all, those eggs splitting open and releasing a load of twitching hairs with eyes. All those eyes looking at him.

He moved aside the dish detergent and the floor-bucket, and there it was, the yellow can of Sparx barbecue lighter fluid. The inept puppeteer who had taken him over advanced Henry’s arm in a series of jerks, then clamped his right hand on the Sparx can. He carried it back across the living room, pausing long enough to take the box of wooden matches from the mantel.

“I am he and you are me and we are all together!” he declaimed, and stepped briskly back into Jonesy’s bedroom before the terrified person inside his head could seize the controls, turn him, and make him run away. That person wanted to make him run until he fell down unconscious. Or dead.

The eggs on the bed were also splitting open. Two dozen or more of those hairs were crawling around on the blood-soaked sheet or squirming on Jonesy’s pillow. One raised its nub of a head and chittered at Henry, a sound almost too thin and high-pitched to be heard.

Still not allowing himself any pause, if he paused he would never get started again (in any direction save doorward, that was), Henry took two steps to the foot of the bed. One of the hairs came sliding across the floor toward him, propelling itself with its tail like a spermatozoon under a microscope.

Henry stepped on it, thumbing the red plastic cap off the spout of the can as he did. He aimed the spout at the bed and squeezed, flicking his wrist back and forth, making sure he got plenty on the floor as well. When the lighter fluid hit the hairlike things, they made high, mewling cries like kittens which had just been born.

“Eggman… eggman… walrus!”

He stepped on another of the hairs and saw that a third was clinging to the leg of his jeans, holding on with its wisp of a tail and trying to bite through the cloth with its still soft teeth.

“Eggman,” Henry muttered, and scraped it off with the side of his other boot. When it tried to squirm away he stepped on it. He was suddenly aware that he was drenched with sweat, sopping from head to toe, if he went out into the cold like this (and he would have to; he couldn’t stay here), he’d probably catch his death.

“Can’t stay here, can’t take no rest!” Henry cried in his new hortatory voice.

He opened the matchbox, but his hands were shaking so badly he spilled half of them on the floor. More of the threadlike worms were crawling toward him. They might not know much, but they knew he was the enemy, all right; they knew that.

Henry got hold of a match, held it up, put his thumb against the tip. A trick Pete had taught him in the way back when. It was your friends who always taught you the finer things, wasn’t it? Like how to give your old pal Beaver a Viking funeral and get n’d of these noisome little snakelets at the same time.

“Eggman!”

He scratched the tip of the match and it popped fire. The smell of the burning sulfur was like the smell that had greeted him when he stepped into the cabin, like the smell of the burly woman’s farts.

“Walrus!”

He flung the match at the foot of the bed, where there was a crumpled duvet now soaked with lighter fluid. For a moment the flame guttered down blue around the little stick, and Henry

thought it would go out. Then there was a soft flump sound, and the duvet grew a modest crown of yellow flames.

“Goo-goo-joob!”

The flames crawled up the sheet, turning the blood soaked into it black. It reached the mass of jelly-coated eggs, tasted them, and found them good. There was a series of thick popping sounds as the eggs began to burst. More of those mewling cries as the worms burned. Sizzling noises as fluid ran out of the burst eggs.

Henry backed out of the room, squirting lighter fluid as he went. He got halfway across the Navajo rug before the can ran empty. He tossed it aside, scratched another match, and tossed it. This time the flump! was immediate, and the flames sprang up orange. The heat baked against his sweat-shiny face, and he felt a sudden urge-it was both strong and joyful-to cast the painters” masks aside and simply stride into the fire. Hello heat, hello summer, hello darkness, my old friend.

What stopped him was as simple as it was powerful. If he pulled the pin now, he would have suffered the unpleasant awakening of all his quiescent emotions to no purpose. He would never be clear on the details of what had happened here, but he might get at least some answers from whoever was flying the helicopters and shooting the animals. If they didn’t just shoot him, too, that was.

At the door, Henry was struck by a memory so clear that his heart cried out inside him: Beaver kneeling in front of Duddits, who is trying to put on his sneaker backwards. Let me fix that, man, Beaver says, and Duddits, looking at him with a wide-eyed perplexity that you could only love, replies. Fit neek?

Henry was crying again. “So long, Beav,” he said. “Love you, man-and that’s straight from the heart.” Then he stepped out into the cold.

He walked to the far end of Hole in the Wall, where the woodpile was. Beside it was another tarp, this one ancient, black fading to gray. It was frost-frozen to the ground, and Henry had to yank hard with both hands in order to pull it free. Under it was a tangle of snowshoes, skates, and skis. There was an antediluvian ice-auger, as well.

As he looked at this unprepossessing pile of long-dormant winter gear, Henry suddenly realized how tired he was… except tired was really too mild a word. He had just come ten miles on foot, much of it at a fast trot. He had also been in a car accident and discovered the body of a childhood friend. He believed both his other two childhood friends were likewise lost to him.

If I hadn’t been suicidal to begin with, I’d be stark-raving crazy by now, he thought, and then laughed. It felt good to laugh, but it didn’t make him feel any less tired. Still, he had to get out of here. Had to find someone in authority and tell them what had happened. They might already know-based on the sounds, they sure as shit knew something, although their methods of dealing with it made Henry feel uneasy-but they might not know about the weasels. And the eggs. He, Henry Devlin, would tell them-who better? He was the eggman, after all.

The rawhide lacings of the snowshoes had been chewed by so many mice that the shoes were little more than empty frames. After some sorting, however, he found a stubby pair of crosscountry skis that looked as if they might have been state-of-the-art around 1954 or so. The clamps were rusty, but when he pushed them with both thumbs, he was able to move them enough to take a reluctant grip on his boots.

There was a steady crackling sound coming from inside the cabin now. Henry laid one hand on the wood and felt the heat. There was a clutch of assorted ski-poles leaning under the eave, their handgrips buried in a dirty cobweb caul. Henry didn’t like to touch that stuff-the memory of the eggs and the weasel-thing’s wriggling spawn was still too fresh-but at least he had his gloves on. He brushed the cobwebs aside and sorted through the poles, moving quickly. He could now see sparks dancing inside the window beside his head.

He found a pair of poles that were only a little short for his lanky height and skied clumsily to the comer of the building. He felt like a Nazi snow-trooper in an Alistair MacLean film, with the old skis on his feet and Jonesy’s rifle slung over his shoulder. As he turned around, the window beside which he had been standing blew out with a surprisingly loud report-as if someone had dropped a large glass bowl from a second-story window. Henry hunched his shoulders and felt pieces of glass spatter against his coat. A few landed in his hair. It occurred to him that if he had spent another twenty or thirty seconds sorting through the skis and poles, that exploding glass would have erased most of his face.

He looked up at the sky, spread his hands palms-out beside his cheeks like Al Jolson, and said, “Somebody up there likes me! Hotcha!”

Flames were shooting through the window now, licking up under the eaves, and he could hear more stuff breaking inside as the heat-gradient zoomed. Lamar Clarendon’s father’s camp, originally built just after World War Two, now burning merry hell. It was a dream, surely.

Henry skied around the house, giving it a wide berth, watching as gouts of sparks rose from the chimney and swirled toward the low-bellied clouds. There was still a steady crackle of gunfire off to the east. Someone was bagging their limit, all right. Their limit and more. Then there was that explosion in the west-what in God’s name had that been? No way of telling. If he got back to other people in one piece, perhaps they would tell him.

“If they don’t just decide to bag me, too,” he said. His voice came out in a dry croak, and he realized he was all but dying of thirst. He bent down carefully (he hadn’t been on skis of any type in ten years or more), scooped up a double handful of snow, and took a big mouthful. He let it melt and trickle down his throat. The feeling was heavenly. Henry Devlin, psychiatrist and onetime author of a paper about the Hemingway Solution, a man who had once been a virgin boy and who was now a tall and geeky fellow whose glasses always slid down to the tip of his nose, whose hair was going gray, whose friends were either dead, fled, or changed, this man stood in the open gate of a place to which he would never come again, stood on skis, stood eating snow like a kid eating a Sno-Cone at the Shrine Circus, stood and watched the last really good place in his life bum. The flames came through the cedar shingles. Melting snow turned to steaming water and ran hissing down the rusting gutters. Arms of fire popped in and out of the open door like enthusiastic hosts encouraging the newly arrived guests to hurry up, hurry up, dammit, get your asses in here before the whole place bums down. The mat of red-gold fuzz growing on the granite slab had crisped, lost its color, turned gray. “Good,” Henry muttered under his breath. He was clenching his fists rhythmically on the grips of his ski-poles without being aware of it. “Good, that’s good.”

He stood that way for another fifteen minutes, and when he could bear it no more, he set his back to the flames and started back the way he had come.

There was no hustle left in him. He had twenty miles to go (22.2 to be exact, he told himself), and if he didn’t pace himself he’d never make it. He stayed in the packed track of the snowmobile, and stopped to rest more frequently than he had going the other way.

Ah, but I was younger then, he thought with only slight irony.

Twice he checked his watch, forgetting that it was now Eastern Standard No Time At All in the Jefferson Tract. With the mat of clouds firmly in place overhead, all he knew for sure was that it was daytime. Afternoon, of course, but whether mid or late he couldn’t tell. On another afternoon his appetite might have served as a gauge, but not today. Not after the thing on Jonesy’s bed, and the eggs, and the hairs with their protuberant black eyes. Not after the foot sticking out of the bathtub. He felt that he would never eat again… and if he did, he would never eat anything with even a slight tinge of red. And mushrooms? No thanks.

Skiing, at least on cross-country stubs like these, was sort of like riding a bike, he discovered: you never forgot how to do it. He fell once going up the first hill, the skis slipping out from under him, but glided giddily down the other side with only a couple of wobbles and no spills. He guessed that the skis hadn’t been waxed since the peanut-farmer was President, but if he stayed in the crimped and flattened track of the snowmobile, he should be all right. He marvelled at the stippling of animal tracks on the Deep Cut Road he had never seen a tenth as many. A few critters had gone walking along it, but most of the tracks only crossed it, west to east. The Deep Cut took a lazy northwest course, and west was clearly a point of the compass the local animal population wanted to avoid.

I’m on a journey, he told himself. Maybe someday someone will write an epic poem about it: “Henry’s journey”.

“Yeah,” he said. “'Time slowed and reality bent; on and on the eggman went."” He laughed at that, and in his dry throat the laughter turned to hacking coughs. He skied to the side of the snowmobile track, got another double handful of snow, and ate it down.

“Tasty and good for you!” he proclaimed. “Snow! Not just for breakfast anymore!”

He looked up at the sky, and that was a mistake. For a moment he was overwhelmed with dizziness and thought he might go right over on his back. Then the vertigo retreated. The clouds overhead looked a little darker. Snow coming? Night coming? Both coming at the same time? His knees and ankles hurt from the steady shuffle-shuffle of the skis, and his arms hurt even worse from wielding the poles. The pads of muscle on his chest were the worst. He had already accepted as certainty that he wouldn’t make it to Gosselin’s before dark; now, standing here and eating more snow, it occurred to him that he might not make it at all.

He loosened the Red Sox tee-shirt he’d tied around his leg, and terror leaped in him when he saw a brilliant thread of scarlet against his bluejeans. His heart beat so hard that white dots appeared in his field of vision, flocking and pumping. He reached down to the red with shaking fingers.

What do you think you’re going to do? he jeered at himself. Pick it off like it was a thread or a piece of lint?

Which was exactly what he did do, because it was a thread: a red one from the shirt’s printed logo. He dropped it and watched it float down to the snow. Then he retied the shirt around the tear in his jeans. For a man who had been considering all sorts of final options not four hours ago-the rope and the noose, the tub and the plastic bag, the bridge abutment and the ever-popular Hemingway Solution, known in some quarters as The Policeman’s Farewell-he had been pretty goddamned scared there for a second or two.

Because I don’t want to go like that, he told himself. Not eaten alive by…

“By toadstools from Planet X,” he said.

The eggman got moving again.

The world shrank, as it always does when we approach exhaustion with our work not done, or even close to done. Henry’s life was reduced to four simple, repetitive motions: the pump of his arms on the poles and the push of the skis in the snow. His aches and pains faded, at least for the time being, as he entered some other zone. He only remembered anything remotely like this happening once before, in high school, when he’d been the starting center on the Derry Tigers basketball team. During a crucial pre-playoff game, three of their four best players had somehow fouled out before three minutes of the third quarter were gone. Coach had left Henry in for the rest of the game-he didn’t get a single blow except for time-outs and trips to the foul line. He made it, but by the time the final buzzer honked and put an end to the affair (the Tigers had lost gaudily), he had been floating in a kind of happy dream. Halfway down the corridor to the boys” locker room, his legs had given out and down he had gone, with a silly smile still on his face, while his teammates, clad in their red travelling unis, laughed and cheered and clapped and whistled.

No one to clap or whistle here; only the steady crackle-and-stutter of gunfire off to the east. Slowing a little bit now, maybe, but still heavy.More ominous were the occasional gunshots from up ahead. Maybe from Gosselin’s? It was impossible to tell.

He heard himself singing his least favorite Polling Stones song, “Sympathy for the Devil” (Made damn sure that Pilate washed his hands and sealed His fate, thank you very much, you’ve been a wonderful audience, good night), and made himself stop when lie realized the song had gotten all mixed up with memories of Jonesy in the hospital, Jonesy as he had looked last March, not just gaunt but somehow reduced, as if his essence had pulled itself in to form a protective shield around his surprised and outraged body. Jonesy had looked to Henry like someone who was probably going to die, and although he hadn’t died, Henry realized now that it was around that time that his own thoughts of suicide had become really serious. To the rogues gallery of images that haunted him in the middle of the night blue-white milk running down his father’s chin, Barry Newman’s giant economy-sized buttocks jiggling as he flew from the office, Richie Grenadeau holding out a dog-turd to the weeping and nearly naked Duddits Cavell, telling him to eat it, he had to eat it-there was now the image of Jonesy’s too-thin face and addled eyes, Jonesy who had been swopped into the street without a single rhyme or reason, Jonesy who looked all too ready to put on his boogie shoes and get out of town. They said he was in stable condition, but Henry had read critical in his old fi7iend’s eyes. Sympathy for the devil? Please. There was no god, no devil, no sympathy. And once you realized that, you were in trouble. Your days as a viable, paying customer in the great funhouse that was Kulture Amerika were numbered.

He heard himself signing it again-But what’s puzzling you is the nature of my game-and made himself stop it. What, then? Something really Undress. Mindless and pointless and tasty, something just oozing Kulture Amerika. How about that one by the Pointer Sisters? That was a good one.

Looking down at his shuffling skis and the horizontal crimps left by the snowmobile treads, he began to sing it. Soon he was droning it over and over in a whispery, tuneless monotone while the sweat soaked through his shirts and clear mucus ran from his nose to freeze on his upper lip: “I know we can make it, I know we can, we can work it out, yes we can-can yes we can yes we can…”

Better. Much better. All those yes we can-cans were as Amerikan Kulture as a Ford pickup in a bowling alley parking lot, a lingerie sale at JC Penney, or a dead rock star in a bathtub.

And so he eventually returned to the shelter where he had left Pete and the woman. Pete was gone. No sign of him at all.

The rusty tin roof of the lean-to had fallen, and Henry lifted it, peeking under it like a metal bedsheet to make sure Pete wasn’t there. He wasn’t, but the woman was. She had crawled or been moved from where she’d been when Henry set out for Hole in the Wall, and somewhere along the line she’d come down with a bad case of dead. Her clothes and face were covered with the rust-colored mold that had choked the cabin, but Henry noticed an interesting thing: while the growth on her was doing pretty well (especially in her nostrils and her visible eye, which had sprouted a jungle), the stuff which had spread out from her, outlining her body in a ragged sunburst, was in trouble. The fungus behind her, on the side blocked from the fire, had turned gray and stopped spreading. The stuff in front of her was doing a little better-it had had warmth, and ground to grow on which had been melted clear of snow-but the tips of the tendrils were turning the powdery gray of volcanic ash.

Henry was pretty sure it was dying.

So was the daylight-no question of that now. Henry dropped the rusty piece of corrugated tin back on the body of Becky Shue and on the embery remains of the fire. Then he looked at the track of the Cat again, wishing as he had back at the cabin that he had Natty Bumppo with him to explain what he was seeing. Or maybe Jonesy’s good friend Hercule Poirot, he of the little gray cells.

The track swerved in toward the collapsed roof of the lean-to before continuing on northwest toward Gosselin’s. There was a pressed-down area in the snow that almost made the shape of a human body. To either side, there were round divots in the snow.

“What do you say, Hercule?” Henry asked. “What means this, mon ami?” But Hercule said nothing.

Henry began to sing under his breath again and leaned closer to one of the round divots, unaware that he had left the Pointer Sisters behind and switched back to the Rolling Stones.

There was enough light for him to see a pattern in the three dimples to the left of the body shape, and he recalled the patch on the right elbow of Pete’s duffel coat. Pete had told him with an odd sort of pride that his girlfriend had sewed that on there, declaring he had no business going off hunting with a ripped jacket. Henry remembered thinking it was sad and funny at the same time, how Pete had built up a wistful fantasy of a happy future from that single act of kindness… an act which probably had more to do, in the end, with how the lady in question had been raised than with any feelings she might have for her beer-soaked boyfriend.

Not that it mattered. What mattered was that Henry felt he could draw a bona fide deduction at last. Pete had crawled out from under the collapsed roof Jonesy-or whatever was now running Jonesy, the cloud-had come along, swerved over to the remains of the lean-to, and picked Pete up.

Why?

Henry didn’t know.

Not all of the splotches in the flattened shape of his thrashing friend, who had crawled out from under the piece of tin by hooking himself along on his elbows, were that mold stuff. Some of it was dried blood. Pete had been hurt. Cut when the roof fell in? Was that all?

Henry spotted a wavering trail leading away from the depression which had held Pete’s body. At the end of it was what he first took to be a fire-charred stick. Closer examination changed his mind. It was another of the weasel things, this one burned and dead, now turning gray where it wasn’t seared. Henry flipped it aside with the toe of his boot. Beneath it was a small frozen mass. More eggs. It must have been laying them even as it died.

Henry kicked snow over both the eggs and the little monster’s corpse, shuddering. He unwrapped the makeshift bandage for another look at the wound on his leg, and as he did it he realized what song was coming out of his mouth. He quit singing. New snow, just a scattering of light flakes, began to skirt down.

“Why do I keep singing that?” he asked. “Why does that fucking song keep coming back?” He expected no answer; these were questions uttered aloud mostly for the comfort of hearing his own voice (this was a death place, perhaps even a haunted place), but one came anyway. “Because it’s our song. It’s the Squad Anthem, the one we play when we go in hot. We’re Cruise’s boys.” Cruise? Was that right? As in Tom Cruise? Maybe not quite.

The gunfire from the east was much lighter now. The slaughter of the animals was almost done. But there were men, a long skirmish line of hunters who were wearing green or black instead of orange, and they were listening to that song over and over again as they did their work, adding up the numbers of an incredible butcher’s bill: I rode a tank, held a general’s rank, when the blitzkrieg raged and the bodies stank… Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name.

What exactly was going on here? Not in the wild, wonderful, wacky Outside World, but inside his own head? He’d had flashes of understanding his whole life-his life since Duddits, anyway-but nothing like this. What was this? Was it time to examine this new and powerful way of seeing the line?

No. No, no, no.

And, as if mocking him, the song in his head: general’s rank, bodies stank.

“Duddits!” he exclaimed in the graying, dying afternoon; lazy flakes falling like feathers from a split pillow. Some thought struggled to be born but it was too big, too big.

“Duddits!” he cried again in his hortatory eggman’s voice, and one thing he did understand: the luxury of suicide had been denied him. Which was the most horrible thing of all, because these weird thoughts-I shouted out who killed the Kennedys-were tearing him apart. He began to weep again, bewildered and afraid, alone in the woods. All his friends except Jonesy were dead, and Jonesy was in the hospital. A movie star in the hospital with Mr Gray.

“What does that mean?” Henry groaned. He clapped his hands to his temples (he felt as though his head were bulging, bulging) and his rusty old ski-poles flapped aimlessly at the ends of their wrist-loops like broken propeller blades. “Oh Christ, what does that MEAN?”

Only the song came in answer: Pleased to meet you! Hope you guess my name!

Only the snow: red with the blood of slaughtered animals and they lay everywhere, a Dachau of deer and raccoon and rabbit and weasel and bear and groundhog and-

Henry screamed, held his head and screamed so loud and so hard that he felt sure for a moment that he was going to pass out. Then his lightheartedness passed and his rm'nd seemed to clear, at least for the time being. He was left with a brilliant image of Duddits as he had been when they first met him, Duddits not under the light of a blitzkrieg winter as in that Stones song but under the sane light of a cloudy October afternoon, Duddits looking up at them with his tilted, somehow wise Chinese eyes. Duddits was our finest hour, he had told Pete.

“Fit wha?” Henry said now. “Fit neek?”

Yeah, fit neek. Turn it around, put it on the right way, fit neek.

Smiling a little now (although his cheeks were still wet with tears that were beginning to freeze), Henry began to ski along the crimped track of the snowmobile again.

Ten minutes later he came to the overturned wreck of the Scout. He suddenly realized two things: that he was ragingly hungry after all and that there was food in there. He had seen the tracks both going and coming and hadn’t needed Natty Bumppo to know that Pete had left the woman and returned to the Scout. Nor did he need Hercule Poirot to tell him that the food they’d bought at the store-most of it, at least-would still be in there. He knew what Pete had come back for.

He skied around to the passenger side, following Pete’s tracks, then froze in the act of loosening the ski bindings. This side was away from the wind, and what Pete had written in the snow as he sat drinking his two beers was mostly still here: DUDDITS, printed over and over again. As he looked at the name in the snow, Henry began to shiver. It was like coming to the grave of a loved one and hearing a voice speak out of the ground.

There was broken glass inside the Scout. Blood, as well. Because most of the blood was on the back seat, Henry felt sure it hadn’t been spilled in the original accident; Pete had cut himself on his return trip. To Henry, the interesting thing was that there was none of the red-gold fuzz. It grew rapidly, and so the logical conclusion was that Pete hadn’t been infected when he’d come for the beer. Later, maybe, but not then.

He grabbed the bread, the peanut butter, the milk, and the carton of orange juice. Then he backed out of the Scout and sat with his shoulders against the overturned rear end, watching the fresh snow sift down and gobbling bread and peanut butter as fast as he could, using his index finger as a knife and licking it clean between spreads. The peanut butter was good and the orange juice went down in two long drafts, but it wasn’t enough.

“What you’re thinking of,” he announced to the darkening afternoon, “is grotesque. Not to mention red. Red food.”

Red or not, he was thinking of it, and surely it wasn’t all that grotesque; he was, after all, a man who had spent long nights thinking about guns and ropes and plastic bags. All of that seemed a little childish just now, but it was him, all right. And so-

“And so let me close, ladies and gentlemen of the American Psychiatric Association, by quoting the late Joseph “Beaver" Clarendon: “Said fuck it and put a dime in the Salvation Army bucket. And if you don’t like it, grab my cock and suck it." Thank you very much.”

Having thus discoursed to the American Psychiatric Association, Henry crawled back into the Scout, once more successfully avoiding the broken glass, and got the package wrapped in butcher’s paper ($2.79 printed on it in Old Man Gosselin’s shaky hand). He backed out again with the package in his pocket, then took it out and snapped the twine. Inside were nine plump hot dogs. The red kind.

For a moment his mind tried to show him the legless reptilian thing squirming on Jonesy’s bed and looking at him with its empty black eyes, but he banished it with the speed and ease of one whose survival instincts have never wavered.

The hot dogs were fully cooked, but he warmed them up just the same, running the flame of his butane lighter back and forth beneath each one until it was at least warm, then wrapping it in Wonder Bread and gobbling it down. He smiled as he did it, knowing how ridiculous he would look to an observer. Well, didn’t they say that psychiatrists eventually ended up as loony as their patients, if not more so?

The important thing was that he was finally full. Even more important, all the disconnected thoughts and fragmented images had drained out of his mind. Also the song. He hoped none of that crap would come back. Ever, please God.

He swallowed more milk, belched, then leaned his head against the side of the Scout and closed his eyes. No going to sleep, though; these woods were lovely, dark and deep, and he had twelve-point-seven miles to go before he could sleep.

He remembered Pete talking about the gossip in Gosselin’s missing hunters, lights in the sky-and how blithely The Great American Psychiatrist had dismissed it, gassing about the Satanism hysteria in Washington State, the abuse hysteria in Delaware. Playing Mr Smartass Shrink-Boy with his mouth and the front of his mind while the back of his mind went on playing with suicide like a baby who’s just discovered his toes in the bathtub. He had sounded entirely plausible, ready for any TV panel show that wanted to spend sixty minutes on the interface between the unconscious and the unknown, but things had changed. Now he had become one of the missing hunters. Also, he had seen things you couldn’t find on the Internet no matter how big your search engine was.

He sat there, head back, eyes closed, belly full. Jonesy’s Garand was propped against one of the Scout’s tires. The snow lit on his cheeks and forehead like the light touch of a kitten’s paws. “This is it, what all the geeks have been waiting for,” he said. “Close encounters of the third kind. Hell, maybe the fourth or fifth kind. Sorry I made fun of you, Pete. You were right and I was wrong. Hell, it’s worse than that. Old Man Gosselin was right and I was wrong, So much for a Harvard education.”

And once he’d said that much out loud, things began to make sense. Something had either landed or crashed. There had been an armed response from the United States government. Were they telling the outside world what had happened? Probably not, that wasn’t their style, but Henry had an idea they would have to before much longer. You couldn’t put the entire Jefferson Tract in Hangar 57.

Did he know anything else? Maybe, and maybe it was a little more than the men in charge of the helicopters and the firing parties knew. They clearly believed they were dealing with a contagion, but Henry didn’t think it was as dangerous as they seemed to. The stuff caught, bloomed… but then it died. Even the parasite that had been inside the woman had died. This was a bad time of year and a bad place to culture interstellar athlete’s foot, if that was what it was. All that argued strongly for the possibility of a crash landing… but what about the lights in the sky? What about the implants? For years people who claimed they’d been abducted bv ETs had also claimed they had been stripped… examined… forced to undergo implants. All ideas so Freudian they were almost laughable…

Henry realized he was drifting and snapped awake so strongly that the unwrapped package of hot dogs tumbled off his lap and into the snow. No, not just drifting; dozing. A good deal more light had seeped out of the day, and the world had gone a dull slate color. His pants were speckled with the fresh snow. If he’d gone any deeper, he’d’ve been snoring.

He brushed himself off and stood up, wincing as his muscles screamed in protest. He regarded the hot dogs lying there in the snow with something like revulsion, then bent down, rewrapped them, and tucked them into one of his coat pockets. They might start looking good to him again later on. He sincerely hoped not, but you never knew.

“Jonesy’s in the hospital,” he said abruptly. No idea what he meant. “Jonesy’s in the hospital with Mr Gray. Got to stay there. ICU.”

Madness. Prattling madness. He clamped the skis to his boots again, praying that his back wouldn’t lock up while he was bent over, and then pushed off along the track once more, the snow starting to thicken around him now, the day darkening.

By the time he realized that he had remembered the hot dogs but forgotten Jonesy’s rifle (not to mention his own), he’d gone too far to turn around.

He stopped what might have been three quarters of an hour later, peering stupidly down at the Arctic Cat’s print. There was little more than a glimmer of light left in the day now, but enough to see that the track-what was left of it-veered abruptly to the right and went into the woods.

Into the fucking woods. Why had Jonesy (and Pete, if Pete was with him) gone into the woods? What sense did that make when the Deep Cut ran straight and clear, a white lane between the darkening trees?

“Deep Cut goes northwest,” he said, standing there with his skis toeing in toward each other and the loosely wrapped package of hot dogs poking out of his coat pocket. “The road to Gosselin’s-the blacktop-can’t be more than three miles from here. Jonesy knows that. Pete knows that. Still… snowmobile goes…” He held up his arms like the hands of a clock, estimating. “Snowmobile goes almost dead north. Why?”

Maybe he knew. The sky was brighter in the direction of Gosselin’s, as if banks of lights had been set up there. He could hear the chatter of helicopters, waxing and waning but always tending in that same direction. As he drew closer, he expected to hear other heavy machinery as well: supply vehicles, maybe generators. To the east there was still the isolated crackle of gunfire, but the big action was clearly in the direction he was going.

“They’ve set up a base camp at Gosselin’s,” Henry said. “And Jonesy didn’t want any part of it. “That felt like a bingo to Henry. Only… there was no more Jonesy, was there? just the redblack cloud. “Not true,” he said. “Jonesy’s still there. Jonesy’s in the hospital with Mr Gray. That’s what the cloud is-Mr Gray.” And then, apropos of nothing (at least that he could tell): “Fit wha? Fit neek?” Henry looked up into the sifting snow (it was much less urgent than the earlier snowfall, at least so far, but it was starting to accumulate) as if he believed there was a God above it somewhere, studying him with all the genuine if detached interest of a scientist looking at a wriggling paramecium. “What the fuck am I talking about? Any idea?”

No answer, but an odd memory came, He, Pete, Beaver, and Jonesy’s wife had kept a secret among them last March. Carla had felt Jonesy could do without knowing that his heart had stopped twice, once just after the EMTs put him in the back of their ambulance, and again shortly after he had arrived at Mass General. Jonesy knew he’d come close to stepping out, but not (at least as far as Henry knew) just how close. And lf Jonesy had had any Kubler-Ross step-into-the-light experiences, he had either kept them to himself or forgotten thanks to repeated doses of anesthetic and lots of pain-killers.

A roar built out of the south with terrifying speed and Henry ducked, putting his hands to his ears as what sounded like a full squadron of “et fighters passed in the clouds overhead. He saw nothing, but when the roar of the “ets faded as fast as it had come, he straightened with his heart beating hard and fast. Yow! Christ! It occurred to him that this was what the airbases surrounding Iraq must have sounded like during the days leading up to Operation Desert Storm.

That big boom. Did it mean the United States of America had just gone to war against beings from another world? Was he now living in an H.G. Wells novel? Henry felt a hard, squeezing flutter under his breastbone. If so, this enemy might have more than a few hundred rusty Soviet Scuds to throw back at Uncle Sammy.

Let it go. You can’t do anything about any of that. What’s next for you, that’s the question. What’s next for you?

The rave of the jets had already faded to a mutter. He guessed that they would be back, though. Maybe with friends.

“Two paths diverged in a snowy wood, is that how it goes? Something like that, anyway.”

But following the snowmobile’s track any farther was really not an option. He’d lose it in the dark half an hour from now, and this new snowfall would wipe it out in any case. He would end up wandering and lost… as Jonesy very likely was now.

Sighing, Henry turned away from the snowmobile track and continued along the road.

By the time he neared the place where the Deep Cut joined up with the two-lane blacktop known as the Swanny Pond Road, Henry was almost too tired to stand, let alone ski. The muscles in his thighs felt like old wet teabags. Not even the lights on the northwestern horizon, now much brighter, or the sound of the motors and helicopters could offer him much comfort. Ahead of him was a final long, steep hill. On the other side, Deep Cut ended and Swanny Pond began. There he might actually encounter traffic, especially if there were troops being moved in.

“Come on,” he said. “Come on, come on, come on.” Yet he stood where he was awhile longer. He didn’t want to go over that hill. “Better Underhill than overhill,” he said. That seemed to mean something but it was probably just another idiotic non sequitur. Besides, there was nowhere else to go.

He bent, scooped up more snow-in the dark the double handful looked like a small pillowcase. He nibbled some, not because he wanted it but because he really didn’t want to start moving again. The lights coming from Gosselin’s were more understandable than the lights he and Pete had seen playing in the sky (They’re back! Becky had screamed, like the little girl sitting in front of the TV in that old Steven Spielberg movie), but Henry liked them even less, somehow. All those motors and generators sounded somehow… hungry.

“That’s right, rabbit,” he said. And then, because there really were no other options, he started up the last hill between him and a real road.

He paused at the top, gasping for breath and bent over his skipoles. The wind was stronger up here, and it seemed to go right through his clothing. His left leg throbbed where it had been gored by the turnsignal stalk, and he wondered again if he was incubating a little red-gold colony under the makeshift bandage. Too dark to see, and when the only possible good news would be no news, maybe that was just as well.

“Time slowed, reality bent, on and on the eggman went.” No yuks left in that one, so he started down the hill toward the T-junction where the Deep Cut Road ended.

This side of the hill was steeper and soon he was skiing rather than walking. He picked up speed, not knowing if what he felt was terror, exhilaration, or some unhealthy mix of the two. Certainly he was going too fast for the visibility, which was almost nil, and his abilities, which were as rusty as the clamps holding the skis to his boots. The trees blurred past on either side, and it suddenly occurred to him that all his problems might be solved at a stroke. Not the Hemingway Solution after all. Call this way out the Bono Solution.

His hat blew off his head. He reached for it automatically, one of his poles flailing out ahead of him, half-seen in the dark, and all at once his balance was gone. He was going to take a tumble. And maybe that was good, as long as he didn’t break his goddam leg. Falling would stop him, at least. He would just pick himself up, and-

Lights blazed out, big truck-mounted spotlights, and before his vision disappeared into dazzle, Henry glimpsed what might have been a flatbed pulp-truck pulled across the end of the Deep Cut Road. The lights were undoubtedly motion-sensitive, and there was a line of men standing in front of them,

“HALT!” a terrifying, amplified voice commanded. It could have been the voice of God. “HALT OR WE’ll FIRE!”

Henry went down hard and awkwardly. His skis shot off his feet. One ankle bent painfully enough to make him cry out. He lost one skipole; the other snapped off halfway up its shaft. The wind was knocked out of him in a large, frosty whoop of breath.

He slid, snowplowing with his wide-open crotch, then came to rest, bent limbs forming a shape something like a swastika.

His vision began to come back, and he heard feet crunching in the snow. He flailed and managed to sit up, not able to tell if anything was broken or not.

Six men were standing about ten feet down the hill from him, their shadows impossibly long and crisp on the diamond-dusted new snow. They were all wearing parkas. They all had clear plastic masks over their mouths and noses-these looked more efficient than the painters” masks Henry had found in the snowmobile shed, but Henry had an idea that the basic purpose was the same.

The men also had automatic weapons, all of them pointed at him. It now seemed rather lucky to Henry that he had left Jonesy’s Garand and his own Winchester back at the Scout. If he’d had a gun, he might have a dozen or more holes in him by now.

“I don’t think I’ve got it,” he croaked. “Whatever it is you’re worried about, I don’t think-”

“ON YOUR, FEET!” God’s voice again. Corning from the truck. The men standing in front of him blocked out at least some of the glare and Henry could see more men at the foot of the hill where the roads met. All of them had weapons, too, except for the one holding the bullhorn.

“I don’t know if I can g-”

“ON YOUR FEET NOW!” God commanded, and one of the men in front of him made an expressive little erking motion with the barrel of his gun.

Henry got shakily to his feet. His legs were trembling and the ankle he’d bent was outraged, but everything was holding together, at least for the time being. Thus ends the eggman’s journey, he thought, and began to laugh. The men in front of him looked at each other uneasily, and although they pointed their rifles at him again, he was comforted to see even that small demonstration of human emotion.

In the brilliant glow of the lights mounted on the pulper’s flatbed, Henry saw something lying in the snow-it had fallen from his pocket when he wiped out. Slowly, knowing they might shoot him anyway, he bent down.

“DON’T TOUCH THAT!” God cried from His loudspeaker atop the cab of the pulp-truck, and now the men down there also raised their weapons, a little hello darkness my old friend peeping from the muzzle of each.

“Bite shit and die,” Henry said-one of the Beav’s better efforts-and picked up the package. He held it out to the armed and masked men in front of him, smiling. “I come in peace for all mankind,” he said. “Who wants a hot dog?”

Chapter Twelve JONESY IN THE HOSPITAL

This was a dream.

It didn’t feel like one, but it had to be. For one thing, he’d already been through March fifteenth once, and it seemed monstrously unfair to have to go through it again. For another, he could remember all sorts of things from the eight months between mid-March and mid-November-helping the kids with their homework, Carla on the phone with her friends (many from the Narcotics Anonymous program), giving a lecture at Harvard… and the months of physical rehab, of course. All the endless bends, all the tiresome screaming as his joints stretched themselves out again, oh so reluctantly. He telling Jeannie Morin, his therapist, that he couldn’t. She telling him that he could. Tears on his face, big smile on hers (that hateful undeniable junior-miss-smile), and in the end she had turned out to be right. He could, he was the little engine that could, but what a price the little engine had paid.

He could remember all those things and more: getting out of bed for the first time, wiping his ass for the first time, the night in early May when he’d gone to bed thinking I’m going to get through this for the first time, the night in late May when he and Carla had made love for the first time since the accident, and afterward he’d told her an old joke: How do porcupines fuck? Very carefully. He could remember watching fireworks on Memorial Day, his hip and upper thigh aching like a bastard; he could remember eating watermelon on the Fourth of July, spitting seeds into the grass and watching Carla and her sisters play badminton, his hip and upper leg still aching but not so fiercely; he could remember Henry calling in September-“Just to check in,” he’d said-and talking about all sorts of things, including the annual hunting trip to Hole in the Wall come November. “Sure I’m coming,” Jonesy had said, not knowing then how little he would like the feel of the Garand in his hands. They had talked about their work (Jonesy had taught the final three weeks of summer session, hopping around pretty spryly on one crutch by then), about their families, about the books they had read and the movies they had seen; Henry had mentioned again, as he had in January, that Pete was drinking too much. Jonesy, having already been through one substance-abuse war with his wife, hadn’t wanted to talk about that, but when Henry passed along Beaver’s suggestion that they stop in Derry and see Duddits Cavell when their week of hunting was over, Jonesy had agreed enthusiastically. It had been too long, and there was nothing like a shot of Duddits to cheer a person up. Also…

“Henry?” he had asked. “We made plans to go see Duddits, didn’t we? We were going on St Patrick’s Day. I don’t remember it, but it’s written on my office calendar.”

“Yeah,” Henry had replied. “As a matter of fact, we did.”

“So much for the luck of the Irish, huh?”

As a result of such memories, Jonesy was positive March fifteenth had already happened. There were all sorts of evidence supporting the thesis, his office calendar being Exhibit A. Yet here they were again, those troublesome Ides… and now, oh goddam, how was this for unfair, now there seemed to be more of the fifteenth than ever.

Previously, his memory of that day faded out at around ten A.M. He’d been in his office, drinking coffee and making a stack of books to take down to the History Department office, where there was a FREE WITH STUDENT ID table. He hadn’t been happy, but he couldn’t for the life of him remember why. According to the same office calendar on which he had spied the unkept March seventeenth appointment to go see Duddits, he’d had a March fifteenth appointment with a student named David Defuniak. Jonesy couldn’t remember what it had been about, but he later found a notation from one of his grad assistants about a make-up essay from Defuniak-short-term results of the Norman Conquest-so he supposed it had been that. Still, what was there in a make-up assignment that could possibly have made Associate Professor Gary Jones feel unhappy?

Unhappy or not, he had been humming something, humming and then scatting the words, which were close to nonsense: Yes we can, yes we can-can, great gosh a’mighty yes we can-can. There were a few little shreds after that-wishing Colleen, the Department secretary, a nice St Paddy’s Day, grabbing a Boston Phoenix from the newspaper box outside the building, dropping a quarter into the saxophone case of a skinhead just over the bridge on the Cambridge side, feeling sorry for the guy because he was wearing a light sweater and the wind coming off the Charles was sharp-but mostly what he remembered after making that stack of giveaway books was darkness. Consciousness had returned in the hospital, with that droning voice from a nearby room: Please stop, I can’t stand it, give me a shot, where’s Marcy, I want Marcy. Or maybe it had been where’s Jonesy, I want Jonesy. Old creeping death. Death pretending to be a patient. Death had lost track of him-sure, it was possible, it was a big hospital stuffed full of pain, sweating agony out its very seams-and now old creeping death was trying to find him again. Trying to trick him. Trying to make him give himself away.

This time around, though, all that merciful darkness in the middle is gone. This time around he not only wishes Colleen a happy St. Paddy’s Day, he tells her a joke: What do you call a Jamaican proctologist? A Pokemon. He goes out, his future self-his November self-riding in his March head like a stowaway. His future self hears his March self think foat a beautiful day it turned out to be as he starts walking towards his appointment with destiny in Cambridge. He tries to tell his March self that this is a bad idea, a grotesquely bad idea, that he can save himself months of agony just by hailing a Red Top or taking the T, but he can’t get through. Perhaps all the science-fiction stories he read about time when he was a teenager had it right: you can’t change the past, no matter how you try.

He walks across the bridge, and although the wind is a little cold, he still enjoys the sun on his face and the way it breaks into a million bright splinters on the Charles. He sings a snatch of “Here Comes the Sun,” then reverts to the Pointer Sisters: Yes we cancan, great gosh a’mighty. Swinging his briefcase in rhythm. His sandwich is inside. Egg salad. Mmm-mmmm, Henry said. SSDD, Henry said.

Here is the saxophonist, and surprise: he’s not on the end of the Mass Ave Bridge but farther up, by the MIT campus, outside one of those funky little Indian restaurants. He’s shivering in the cold, bald, with nicks on his scalp suggesting he wasn’t cut out to be a barber. The way he’s playing “These Foolish Things” suggests he wasn’t cut out to be a horn-player, either, and Jonesy wants to tell him to be a carpenter, an actor, a terrorist, anything but a musician. Instead, Jonesy actually encourages him, not dropping the quarter he previously remembered into the guy’s case (it’s lined with scuffed purple velvet), but a whole fistful of change-these foolish things, indeed. He blames it on the first warm sun after a long cold winter; he blames it on how well things turned out with Defuniak.

The sax-man rolls his eyes to Jonesy, thanking him but still blowing, Jonesy thinks of another joke: What do you call a sax-player with a credit card? An optimist.

He walks on, swinging his case, not listening to the Jonesy inside, the one who has swum upstream from November like some time-travelling salmon. “Hey Jonesy, stop. Just a few seconds should be enough. Tie your shoe or something. (No good, he’s wearing loafers. Soon he will be wearing a cast, as well.) That intersection up there is where it happens, the one where the Red Line stops, Mass Ave and Prospect. There’s an old guy coming, a wonked-out history professor in a dark blue Lincoln Town Car and he’s going to clean you like a house.”

But it’s no good. No matter how hard he yells, it’s no good. The phone lines are down. You can’t go back, can’t kill your own grandfather, can’t shoot Lee Harvey Oswald as he kneels at a sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository, congealing fried chicken on a paper plate beside him and his mail-order rifle aimed, can’t stop yourself walking across the intersection of Mass Ave and Prospect Street with your briefcase in your hand and your copy of the Boston Phoenix-which you will never read-under your arm. Sorry, sir, the lines are down somewhere in the Jefferson Tract, it’s a real fuckarow up there, your call cannot go through-

And then, oh God, this is new-the message does go through! As he reaches the corner, as he stands there on the curb, just about to step down into the crosswalk, it does go through!

“What?” he says, and the man who was stopped beside him, the first one to bend over him in a past which now may be blessedly canceled, looks at him suspiciously and says “I didn’t say anything,” as though there might be a third with them. Jonesy barely hears him because there is a third, there is a voice inside him, one which sounds suspiciously like his own, and it’s screaming at him to stay on the curb, to stay out of the street-

Then he hears someone crying. He looks across to the far side of Prospect and oh God, Duddits is there, Duddits Cavell naked except for his Underoos, and there is brown stuff smeared all around his mouth. It looks like chocolate, but Jonesy knows better. It’s dogshit, that bastard Richie made him eat it after all, and people over there are walking back and forth regardless, ignoring him, as if Duddits wasn’t there.

“Duddits!” Jonesy calls. “Duddits, hang on, man, I’m coming!”

And he plunges into the street without looking, the passenger inside helpless to do anything but ride along, understanding at last that this was exactly how and why the accident happened-the old man, yes, the old man with early-stage Alzheimer’s who had no business behind the wheel of a car in the first place, but that had only been part of it. The other part, concealed in the blackness surrounding the crash until now, was this: he had seen Duddits and had simply bolted, forgetting to look.

He glimpses something more, as well: some huge pattern, something like a dreamcatcher that binds all the years since they first met Duddits Cavell in 1978, something that binds the future as well.

Sunlight twinkles on a windshield; he sees this in the comer of his left eye. A car coming, and too fast. The man who was beside him on the curb, old Mr I-Didn’t-Say-Anything, cries out: “Watch it, guy, watch it!” but Jonesy barely hears him. Because there is a deer on the sidewalk behind Duddits, a fine big buck, almost as big as a man. Then, just before the Town Car strikes him, Jonesy sees the deer is a man, a man in an orange cap and an orange flagman’s vest. On his shoulder, like a hideous mascot, is a legless weasel-thing with enormous black eyes. Its tail-or maybe it’s a tentacle-is curled around the man’s neck. How in God’s name could I have thought he was a deer? Jonesy thinks, and then the Lincoln strikes him and he is knocked into the street. He hears a bitter, muffled snap as his hip breaks.

There is no darkness, not this time; for better or worse, arc-sodiums have been installed on Memory Lane. Yet the film is confused, as if the editor took a few too many drinks at lunch and forgot just how the story was supposed to go. Part of this has to do with the strange way time has been twisted out of shape: he seems to be living in the past, present, and future all at the same time.

This is how we travel, a voice says, and Jonesy realizes it is the voice he heard weeping for Marcy, for a shot. Once acceleration passes a certain point, all travel becomes time travel. Memory is the basis of every journey.

The man on the corner, old Mr I-Didn’t-Say-Anything, bends over him, asks if he’s all right, sees that he isn’t, then looks up and says, “Who’s got a cell phone? This guy needs an ambulance.” When he raises his head, Jonesy sees there’s a little cut under the guy’s chin, old Mr I-Didn’t-Say-Anything probably did it that morning without even realizing it. That’s sweet, Jonesy thinks, then the film jumps and here’s an old dude in a rusty black topcoat and a fedora hat-call this elderly dickweed old Mr What’d-l-Do. He’s wandering around asking people that. He says he looked away for a moment and felt a thump-what’d I do? He says he has never liked a big car what’d I do? He says he can’t remember the name of the insurance company, but they call themselves the Good Hands People-what’d I do? There is a stain on the crotch of his trousers, and as Jonesy lies there in the street he can’t help feeling a kind of exasperated pity for the old geezer-wishes he could tell him You want to know what you did, take a look at your pants. You did Number One, Q-E-fuckin-D.

The film jumps again. Now there are even more people gathered around him. They look very tall and Jonesy thinks it’s like having a coffin’s-eye view of a funeral. That makes him remember a Ray Bradbury story, he thinks it’s called “The Crowd,” where the people who gather at accident sites-always the same ones determine your fate by what they say. If they stand around you murmuring that it isn’t so bad, he’s lucky the car swerved at the last second, you’ll be okay. If, on the other hand, the people who make up the crowd start saying things like He looks bad or I don’t think he’s going to make it, you’ll die. Always the same people. Always the same empty, avid faces. The lookie-loos who just have to see the blood and hear the groans of the injured.

In the cluster surrounding him, just behind old Mr I-Didn’t-Say-Anything, Jonesy sees Duddits Cavell, now fully dressed and looking okay-no dogshit mustache, in other words. McCarthy is there, too. Call him old Mr I-Stand-at-the-Door-and-Knock, Jonesy thinks. And someone else, as well. A gray man. Only he’s not a man at all, not really; he’s the alien that was standing behind him while Jonesy was at the bathroom door. Huge black eyes dominate a face which is otherwise almost featureless. The saggy dewlapping elephant’s skin is tighter here; old Mr ET-Phone-Home hasn’t started to succumb to the environment yet. But he will. In the end, this world will dissolve him like acid.

Your head exploded, Jonesy tries to tell the gray man, but no words come out; his mouth won’t even open. And yet old Mr ET-Phone-Home seems to hear him, because that gray head inclines slightly.

He’s passing out, someone says, and before the film jumps again he hears old Mr What’d-I-Do, the guy who hit him and smashed his hip like a china plate in a shooting gallery, telling someone People used to say I look like Laurence Welk.

He’s unconscious in the back of an ambulance but watching himself, having an actual out-of-body experience, and here is something else new, something no one bothers to tell him about later: he goes into V-tach while they are cutting his pants off, exposing a hip that looks as 1 if someone had sewn two large and badly made doorknobs under it. V-tach, he knows exactly what that is because he and Carla never miss an episode of ER, they even watch the reruns on TNT, and here come the paddles, here comes the goo, and one of the EMTs is wearing a gold crucifix around his neck, it brushes Jonesy’s nose as old Mr EMT bends over what is essentially a dead body, and holy fuck he died in the ambulance! Why did no one ever tell him that he died in the fucking ambulance? Did they think that maybe he wouldn’t be interested, that maybe he’d just go Ho-hum, been there, done that, got the tee-shirt?

“Clear!” shouts the other EMT, and just before they hit him the driver looks back and he sees it’s Duddits’s Mom. Then they whack him with the juice and his body jumps, all that white meat shakin on the bone, as Pete would say, and although the Jonesy watching has no body, he feels the electricity just the same, a great big pow that lights up the tree of his nerves like a skyrocket. Praise Jesus and get-down hallelujah.

The part of him on the stretcher jumps like a fish pulled from the water, then lies still. The EMT crouched behind Roberta Cavell looks down at his console and says, “Ah, man, no, flatline, hit him again.” And when the other guy does, the film jumps and Jonesy’s in an operating room.

No, wait, that’s not quite right. Part of him’s in the OR, but the rest of him is behind a piece of glass and looking in. Two other doctors are here, but they show no interest in the surgical team’s efforts to put Jonesy-Dumpty back together again. They are playing cards. Above their heads, wavering in the airflow from a heating-vent, is the dreamcatcher from Hole in the Wall.

Jonesy has no urge to watch what’s going on behind the glass-he doesn’t like the bloody crater where his hip was, or the bleary gleam of shattered bone nosing out of it. Although he has no stomach to be sick to in his disembodied state, he feels sick to it just the same.

Behind him, one of the card-playing does says, Duddits was how we defined ourselves. Duddits was our finest hour. To which the other replies, You think so? And Jonesy realizes the docs are Henry and Pete.

He turns toward them, and it seems he’s not disembodied after all, because he catches a ghost of his reflection in the window looking into the operating room. He is not Jonesy anymore. Not human anymore. His skin is gray and his eyes are black bulbs staring out of his noseless face. He has become one of them, one of the-

One of the grayboys, he thinks. That’s what they call us, the grayboys. Some of them call us the space-niggers.

He opens his mouth to say some of this, or perhaps to ask his old friends to help him-they have always helped each other, if they could-but then the film jumps again (goddam that editor, drinking on the job) and he’s in bed, a hospital bed in a hospital room, and someone is calling Where’s Jonesy, I want Jonesy.

There, he thinks with wretched satisfaction, I always knew it was Jonesy, not Marcy. That’s death calling, or maybe Death, and I must be very quiet if I’m to avoid him, he missed me in the crowd, made a grab for me in the ambulance and missed again, and now here he is in the hospital, masquerading as a patient.

Please stop, crafty old Mr Death groans in that hideous coaxing monotone, I can’t stand it, give me a shot, where’s Jonesy, I want Jonesy. I'Il just lie here until he stops, Jonesy thinks, I can’t get up anyway, just had two pounds of metal put in my hip and it’ll be days until I’m able to get up, maybe a week.

But to his horror he realizes he is getting up, throwing the covers aside and getting out of bed, and although he can feel the sutures in his hip and across his belly straining and breaking open, spilling what is undoubtedly donated blood down his leg and into his pubic hair, soaking it, he walks across the room without a limp, through a patch of sunlight that casts a brief but very human shadow on the floor (not a grayboy now, there is that to be grateful for, at least, because the grayboys are toast), and to the door. He strolls unseen down a corridor, past a parked gumey with a bedpan on it, past a pair of laughing, talking nurses who are looking at photographs, passing them from hand to hand, and toward that droning voice. He is helpless to,top and understands that he is in the cloud. Not a redblack cloud, as both Pete and Henry sensed it, however; the cloud is gray and he floats within it, a unique particle that is not changed by the cloud, and Jonesy thinks: I’m what they were looking for, I don’t know how it can be, but I am just what they were looking for. Because… the cloud doesn’t change me?

Yes, sort of

He passes three open doors. The fourth is closed. On it is a sign which reads COME IN, THERE IS NO INFECTION HERE, IL N'Y A PAS D'INFECTION ICI.

You lie, Jonesy thinks. Cruise or Curtis or whatever his name is may be a madman, but he’s right about one thing: there is infection.

Blood is pouring down his legs, the bottom half of his johnny is now a bright scarlet (the claret has really begun to flow, the old boxing announcers used to say), but he feels no pain. Nor does he fear infection. He is unique and the cloud can only carry him, not change him. He opens the door and goes inside.

Is he surprised to see the gray man with the big black eyes lying in the hospital bed? Not even a little bit. When Jonesy turned and discovered this guy standing behind him back at Hole in the Wall, the sucker’s head exploded. That was, all things considered, one hell of an Excedrin headache. It would put anyone in the hospital. The guy’s head looks okay now, though; modem medicine is wonderful.

The room is crepitant with fungus, florid with red-gold growth. It’s growing on the floor, the windowsill, the slats of the venetian blinds; it has bleared its way across the surface of the overhead light fixture and the glucose bottle (Jonesy assumes it’s glucose) on the stand by the bed; little reddish-gold beards dangle from the bathroom doorknob and the crank at the foot of the bed.

As Jonesy approaches the gray thing with the sheet pulled up to its narrow hairless chest, he sees there is a single get-well card on the bedtable. FEEL BETTER SOON! is printed above a cartoon picture of a sad-looking turtle with a Band-Aid on its shell. And below the picture: FROM STEVEN SPIELBERG AND ALL YOUR PALS IN HOLLYWOOD.

This is a dream, full of a dream’s tropes and in-jokes, Jonesy thinks, but he knows better. His mind is mixing things, pureeing them, making them easier to swallow, and that is the way of dreams; past, present, and future have all been stirred together, which is also like dreams, but he knows that he’d be wrong to dismiss this as nothing but a fractured fairy-tale from his subconscious. At least some of it is happening.

The bulbous black eyes are watching him. And now the sheet stirs and humps up beside the thing in the bed. What emerges from beneath it is the reddish weasel-thing that got the Beav. It is staring at him with those same glassy black eyes as it propels itself with its tail up the pillow, where it curls itself next to that narrow gray head. It was no wonder McCarthy felt a little indisposed, Jonesy thinks.

Blood continues to pour down Jonesy’s legs, sticky as honey and hot as fever. It patters on to the floor and you’d think it would soon be sprouting its own colony of that reddish mold or fungus or whatever it is, a regular jungle of it, but Jonesy knows better. He is unique. The cloud can carry him, but it cannot change him.

No bounce no play, he thinks, and then, immediately: Shhh, shhh, keep that to yourself

The gray creature raises its hand in a kind of weary greeting. On it are three long fingers ending in rosy-pink nails. Thick yellow pus is oozing from beneath them. More of this stuff gleams loosely in the folds of the guy’s skin, and from the comers of his-its?-eyes.

You’re right, you do need a shot, Jonesy says. Maybe a little Drano or Lysol, something like that. Put you out of your mi-

A terrible thought occurs to him then; for a moment it’s so strong he is unable to resist the force moving him toward the bed. Then his feet begin to move again, leaving big red tracks behind him.

You’re not going to drink my blood, are you? Like a vampire? The thing in the bed smiles without smiling. We are, so far as can express it in your terms, vegetarians. Yeah, but what about Bowser there? Jonesy points to the legless weasel, and it bares a mouthful of needle teeth in a grotesque grin. Is Bowser a vegetarian?

You know he’s not, the gray thing says, its slit of a mouth not moving-this guy is one hell of a ventriloquist, you had to give him that; they’d love him in the Catskills. But you know you have nothing to fear from him.

Why? How am I different?

The dying gray thing (of course it’s dying, its body is breaking down, decaying from the inside out) doesn’t reply, and Jonesy once again thinks No bounce, no play. He has an idea this is one thought the gray fellow would dearly love to read, but no chance of that; the ability to shield his thoughts is another part of what makes him different, unique, and vive la difference is all Jonesy can say (not that he does say it).

How am I different?

Who is Duddits? the gray thing asks, and when Jonesy doesn’t answer, the thing once more smiles without moving its mouth. There, the gray thing says. We both have questions the other will not answer. Let’s put them aside, shall we? Facedown. They are… what do you call it? What do you call it in the game?

The crib, Jonesy says. Now he can smell the thing’s decay. It’s the smell McCarthy brought into camp with him, the smell of ether-spray. He thinks again that he should have shot the ohgosh oh-dear son of a bitch, shot him before he could get in where it was warm. Left the colony inside him to die beneath the deer-stand in the old maple as the body grew cold.

The crib, yes, the gray thing says. The dreamcatcher is now in here, suspended from the ceiling and spinning slowly above the gray thing’s head. These things we each don’t want the other to know, we’ll set them aside to count later. We’ll put them in the crib.

What do you want from me?

The gray creature gazes at Jonesy unblinkingly. So far as Jonesy can tell, it can’t blink; it has neither lids nor lashes. Nyther lids nor lashes, it says, only it’s Pete’s voice Jonesy hears. Always nyther, never neether. who’s Duddits?

And Jonesy is so surprised to hear Pete’s voice that he almost by-God tells him… which, of course, was the intention: to surprise it out of him. This thing is crafty, dying or not. He would do well to be on his guard. He sends the gray fellow a picture of a big brown cow with a sign around its neck. The sign reads DUDDITS THE COW.

Again the gray fellow smiles without smiling, smiles inside Jonesy’s head. Duddits the cow, it says. I think not

Where are you from? Jonesy asks.

Planet X. We come from a dying planet to eat Domino’s Pizza, buy on easy credit terms, and learn Italian the easy Berlitz way. Henry’s voice this time. Then Mr ET-Phone-Home reverts to its own voice… except, Jonesy realizes with a weary lack of surprise, its voice is his voice, Jonesy’s voice. And he knows what Henry would say: that he’s having one whopper of a hallucination in the wake of Beaver’s death.

Not anymore, he wouldn’t, Jonesy thinks. Not anymore. Now he’s the eggman, and the eggman knows better.

Henry? He’ll be dead soon, the gray fellow says indifferently. Its hand steals across the counterpane; the trio of long gray fingers enfolds Jonesy’s hand. Its skin is warm and dry.

What do you mean? Jonesy asks, afraid for Henry… but the dying thing in the bed doesn’t answer. It’s another card for the crib, so Jonesy plays another one from his hand: Why did you call me here?

The gray creature expresses surprise, although its face still doesn’t move. No one wants to die alone, it says. I just want someone to be with. I know, we’ll watch television. I don’t want-There’s a movie I particularly want to see. You’ll enjoy it, too. It’s called Sympathy for the Grayboys. Bowser! The remote!

Bowser favors Jonesy with what seems a particularly ill-natured look, then slithers off the pillow, its flexing tail making a dry rasp like a snake crawling over a rock. On the table is a TV remote, also overgrown with fungus. Bowser seizes it, turns, and slithers back to the gray creature with the remote held in its teeth. The gray thing releases Jonesy’s hand (its touch is not repulsive, but the release is still something of a relief), takes the controller, points it at the TV, and pushes the ON button. The picture that appears-blurred slightly but not hidden by the light fuzz growing on the glass-is of the shed behind the cabin. In the center of the screen is a shape hidden by a green tarp. And even before the door opens and he sees himself come in, Jonesy understands that this has already happened. The star of Sympathy for the Grayboys is Gary Jones.

Well, the dying creature in the bed says from its comfortable spot in the center of his brain, we missed the credits, but really, the movie’s just starting.

That’s what Jonesy’s afraid of.

The shed door opens and Jonesy comes in. Quite the motley fellow he is, dressed in his own coat, Beaver’s gloves, and one of Lamar’s old orange hats. For a moment the Jonesy watching in the hospital room (he has pulled up the visitor’s chair and is sitting by Mr Gray’s bed) thinks that the Jonesy in the snowmobile shed at Hole in the Wall has been infected after all, and that red moss is growing all over him. Then he remembers that Mr Gray exploded right in front of him-his head did, anyway-and Jonesy is wearing the remains.

Only you didn’t explode, he says. You… you what? Went to seed?

Shhh! says Mr Gray, and Bowser bares its formidable headful of teeth, as if to tell Jonesy to stop being so impolite. I love this song, don’t you?

The soundtrack is the Rolling Stones” “Sympathy for the Devil,” fitting enough since this is almost the name of the movie (my screen debut, Jonesy thinks, wait’ll Carla and the kids see it), but in fact Jonesy doesn’t love it, it makes him sad for some reason.

How can you love it? he asks, ignoring Bowser’s bared teeth Bowser is no danger to him, and both of them know it, How can you? It’s what they were playing when they slaughtered you.

They always slaughter us, Mr Gray says. Now be quiet, watch the movie, this part is slow but it gets a lot better.

Jonesy folds his hands in his red lap-the bleeding seems to have stopped, at least-and watches Sympathy for the Grayboys, starring the one and only Gary Jones.

The one and only Gary Jones pulls the tarp off the snowmobile, spots the battery sitting on the worktable in a cardboard box, and puts it in, being careful to clamp the cables to the correct terminals. This pretty well exhausts his store of mechanical knowledge-he’s a history teacher, not a mechanic, and his idea of home improvement is making the kids watch the History Channel once in a while instead of Xena. The key is in the ignition, and the dashboard lights come on when he turns the key-got the battery right, anyway-but the engine doesn’t start. Doesn’t even crank. The starter makes a tut-tutting sound and that’s all.

“Oh dear oh gosh dadrattit number two,” he says, running them all together in a monotone. He isn’t sure he could manifest much in the way of emotion now even if he really wanted to. He’s a horror-movie fan, has seen Invasion of the Body Snatchers two dozen times (he has even seen the wretched remake, the one with Donald Sutherland in it), and he knows what’s going on here. His body has been snatched, most righteously and completely snatched. Although there will be no army of zombies, not even a townful. He is unique. He senses that Pete, Henry, and the Beav are also unique (was unique, in the Beav’s case), but he is the most unique of all. You’re not supposed to be able to say that-like the cheese belonging to the Farmer in the Dell, unique supposedly stands alone-but this is a rare case where that rule doesn’t apply. Pete and Beaver were unique, Henry is uniquer, and he, Jonesy, is uniquest. Look, he’s even starring in his own movie! How unique is that, as his oldest son would say.

The gray fellow in the hospital bed looks from the TV where Jonesy I is sitting astride the Arctic Cat to the chair where Jonesy II sits in his blood-sodden johnny.

What are you hiding? Mr Gray asks.

Nothing.

Why do you keep seeing a brick wall? What is 19, besides a prime number? Who said “Fuck the Tigers'? What does that mean? What is the brick wall? When is the brick wall? What does it mean, why do you keep seeing it?

He can feel Mr Gray prying at him, but for the time being that one kernel is safe. He can be carried, but not changed. Not entirely opened, either, it seems. Not yet, at least.

Jonesy puts his finger to his lips and gives the gray fellow’s own words back to him: Be quiet, watch the movie.

It studies him with the black bulbs of its eyes (they are insectile, Jonesy thinks, the eyes of a praying mantis), and Jonesy can feel it prying for a moment or two longer. Then the sensation fades. There is no hurry; sooner or later it will dissolve the shell over that last kernel of pure uninvaded Jonesy, and then it will know everything it wants to know.

In the meantime, they watch the movie. And when Bowser crawls into Jonesy’s lap-Bowser with his sharp teeth and his ethery antifreeze smell-Jonesy barely notices.

Jonesy I, Shed Jonesy (only that one’s now actually Mr Gray), reaches out. There are many minds to reach out to, they are hopping all over each other like late-night radio transmissions, and he finds one with the information he needs easily enough. It’s like opening a file on your personal computer and finding a wonderfully detailed 3-D movie instead of words.

Mr Gray’s source is Emil “Dawg” Brodsky, from Menlo Park, New Jersey. Brodsky is an Army Tech Sergeant, a motor-pool munchkin. Only here, as part of Kurtz’s Tactical Response Team, Tech Sergeant Brodsky has no rank. No one else does, either. He calls his superiors boss and those who rank below him (there are not many of those at this particular barbecue) hey you. If he doesn’t know which is which, pal or buddy will do.

There are jets overlying the area, but not many (they’ll be able to get all the pix they need from low earth orbit if the clouds ever clear), and they are not Brodsky’s job, anyway. The jets fly out of the Air National Guard base in Bangor, and he is here in Jefferson Tract. Brodsky’s job is the choppers and the trucks in the rapidly growing motor-pool (since noon, all the roads in this part of the state have been closed and the only traffic is olive-green trucks with their insignia masked), He’s also in charge of setting up at least four generators to provide the electricity needed to serve the compound growing around Gosselin’s Market. These needs include motion sensors, Pole lights, perimeter lights, and the makeshift operating theatre which is being hastily equipped in a Windstar motor home.

Kurtz has made it clear that the lights are a big deal-he wants this place as bright as day all night long. The greatest number of pole lights is going up around the barn and what used to be a horse corral and paddock behind the barn. In the field where old Reggie Gosselin’s forty milkers once grazed away their days, two tents have been erected. The larger has a sign on its green roof: COMMISSARY. The other tent is white and unmarked. There are no kerosene heaters in it, as there are in the larger tent, and no need of them. This is the temporary morgue, Jonesy understands. There are only three bodies in there now (one is a banker who tried to run away, foolish man), but soon there may be lots more. Unless there’s an accident that makes collecting bodies difficult or impossible. For Kurtz, the boss, such an accident would solve all sorts of problems.

And all that is by the way. Jonesy I’s Job is Emil Brodsky of Menlo Park.

Brodsky is striding rapidly across the snowy, muddy, churned-up ground between the helicopter landing zone and the paddock where the Ripley-positives are to be kept (there are already a good number of them in there, walking around with the bewildered expressions of freshly interned prisoners the world over, calling out to the guards, asking for cigarettes and information and making vain threats). Emil Brodsky is squat and crewcut, with a bulldog face that looks made for cheap cigars (in fact, Jonesy knows, Brodsky is a devout Catholic who has never smoked). He’s as busy as a one-armed paperhanger just now. He’s got earphones on and a receptionist’s mike hung in front of his lips. He is in radio contact with the fuel-supply convoy coming up I-95-those guys are critical, because the helicopters out on mission are going to come back low-but he’s also talking to Cambry, who is walking next to him, about the control-and-surveillance center Kurtz wants set up by nine P.m… midnight at the latest. This mission is going to be over in forty-eight hours at the outside, that’s the scuttlebutt, but who the fuck knows for sure? According to the scuttlebutt, their prime target, Blue Boy, has already been taken out, but Brodsky doesn’t know how anyone can be sure of that, since the big assault choppers haven’t come back yet. And anyhow, their “ob here is simple: turn the whole works up to eleven and then yank the knobs off.

And ye gods, all at once there are three Jonesys: the one watching TV in the fungus-crawling hospital room, the one in the snowmobile shed… and Jonesy III, who suddenly appears in Emil Brodsky’s crewcut Catholic head. Brodsky stops walking and simply looks up into the white sky.

Cambry walks on three or four steps by himself before realizing that Dawg has stopped cold, is just standing there in the middle of the muddy cow pasture. In the midst of all this frantic bustle-running men, hovering helicopters, revving engines-he’s standing there like a robot with a dead battery.

“Boss?” Cambry asks. “Everything all right?” Brodsky makes no reply… at least not to Cambry, he doesn’t. To Jonesy I- Shed Jonesy- he says: Open the engine cowling and show me the plugs.

Jonesy has some trouble finding the catch that opens the cowling, but Brodsky directs him. Then Jonesy leans over the small engine, not looking for himself but turning his eyes into a pair of high-res cameras and sending the picture back to Brodsky.

“Boss?” Cambry asks with increasing concern. “Boss, what is it? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing wrong,” Brodsky says, slowly and distinctly. He puts the headphones down around his neck; the chatter in them is a distraction. “Just let me think a minute.”

And to Jonesy: Someone yanked the plugs. Look around… yeah, there they are. End of the table.

On the end of the worktable is a mayonnaise jar half filled with gasoline. The jartop has been vented-two punches with the tip of a screwdriver-to keep the fumes from building up. Sunk in it like exhibits preserved in formaldehyde are two Champion sparkplugs.

Aloud, Brodsky says “Dry them off good,” and when Cambry asks, “Dry what off good?” Brodsky tells him absently to put a sock in it.

Jonesy fishes the plugs out, dries them off, then seats and connects them as Brodsky directs. Try it now, Brodsky says, this time without moving his lips, and the snowmobile starts up with a roar. Check the gas, too.

Jonesy does, and says thank you.

“No problem, boss,” Brodsky says, and starts walking briskly again. Cambry has to trot a little to catch up. He sees the faintly bewildered look on Dawg’s face when Dawg discovers his headphones are now around his neck.

“What the hell was that all about?” Cambry asks.

“Nothing,” Brodsky says, but it was something, all right; it sure as shit was something. Talking. A conversation. A… consultation? Yeah, that. He just can’t remember exactly what the subject was. What he can remember is the briefing they got this morning, before daylight, when the team went hot. One of the directives, straight from Kurtz, had been to report anything unusual. Was this unusual? What, exactly, had it been?

“Had a brain-cramp, I guess,” Brodsky says. “Too many things to do and not enough time to do them in. Come on, son, keep up with me.”

Cambry keeps up. Brodsky resumes his divided conversation convoy there, Cambry here-but remembers something else, some third conversation, one that is now over. Unusual or not? Probably not, Brodsky decides. Certainly nothing he could talk about to that incompetent bastard Perlmutter-as far as Pearly’s concerned, if it isn’t on his ever-present clipboard, it doesn’t exist. Kurtz? Never. He respects the old buzzard, but fears him even more. They all do. Kurtz is smart, Kurtz is brave, but Kurtz is also the craziest ape in the jungle. Brodsky doesn’t even like to walk where Kurtz’s shadow has run across the ground.

Underhill? Could he talk to Owen Underhill?

Maybe… but maybe not. A deal like this, you could get into hack without even knowing why. He’d heard voices there for a minute or two-a voice, anyway-but he feels okay now. Still…

At Hole in the Wall, Jonesy roars out of the shed and heads up the Deep Cut Road. He senses Henry when he passes him Henry hiding behind a tree, actually biting into the moss to keep from screaming-but successfully hides what he knows from the cloud which surrounds that last kernel of his awareness. It is almost certainly the last time he will be near his old friend, who will never make it out of these woods alive.

Jonesy wishes he could have said goodbye.

I don’t know who made this movie, Jonesy says, but I don’t think they have to bother pressing their tuxes for the Academy Awards. In fact-

He looks around and sees only snow-covered trees. Eyes front again and nothing but the Deep Cut Road unrolling in front of him and the snowmobile vibrating between his thighs. There was never any hospital, never any Mr Gray. That was all a dream.

But it wasn’t. And there is a room. Not a hospital room, though. No bed, no TV, no IV pole. Not much of anything, actually; just a bulletin board. Two things are tacked to it: a map of northern New England with certain routes mapped-the Tracker Brothers routes and a Polaroid photo of a teenage girl with her skirt raised to reveal a golden tuft of hair. He is looking out at the Deep Cut Road from the window. It is, Jonesy feels quite sure, the window that used to be in the hospital room. But the hospital room was no good. He had to get out of that room, because

The hospital room wasn’t safe, Jonesy thinks as if this one is, as if anyplace is. And yet… this one’s safe-er, maybe. This is his final refuge, and he has decorated it with the picture he supposed they all hoped to see when they went up that driveway back in 1978. Tina Jean Sloppinger, or whatever her name had been.

Some of what I saw was real… valid recovered memories, Henry might say. I really did think I saw Duddits that day. That’s why I went into the street without looking. As for Mr Gray… that’s who I am now. Isn’t it? Except for the part of me in this dusty, empty, uninteresting room with the used rubbers on the floor and the picture of the girl on the bulletin board, I’m all Mr Gray. Isn’t that the truth?

No answer. Which is all the answer he needs, really.

But how did it happen? How did I get here? And why? What’s it for?

Still no answers, and to these questions he can supply none of his own. He’s only glad he has a place where he can still be himself, and dismayed at how easily the rest of his life has been hijacked. He wishes again, with complete and bitter sincerity, that he had shot McCarthy.

A huge explosion ripped through the day, and although the source had to be miles away, it was still strong enough to send snow sliding off the trees. The figure on the snowmobile didn’t even look around. It was the ship. The soldiers had blown it up. The byrum were gone.

A few minutes later, the collapsed lean-to hove into view on his right. Lying in front of it in the snow, one boot still caught beneath the tin roof, was Pete. He looked dead but wasn’t. Playing dead wasn’t an option, not in this game; he could hear Pete thinking. And as he pulled up on the snowmobile and shifted into neutral, Pete raised his head and bared his remaining teeth in a humorless grin. The left arm of his parka was blackened and melted. There seemed to be only one working finger remaining on his right hand. All of his visible skin was stippled with the byrus.

“You’re not Jonesy,” Pete said. “What have you done with Jonesy?”

“Get on, Pete,” Mr Gray said.

“I don’t want to go anywhere with you.” Pete raised his right hand-the swooning fingers, the red-gold clumps of byrus-and used it to wipe his forehead. “The fuck out of here. Get on your pony and ride.”

Mr Gray lowered the head that had once belonged to Jonesy (Jonesy watching it all from the window of his bolt-hole in the abandoned Tracker Brothers depot, unable to help or to change anything) and stared at Pete. Pete began to scream as the byrus growing all over his body tightened, the roots of the stuff digging into his muscles and nerves. The boot can lit under the collapsed tin roof jerked free and Pete, still screaming, pulled himself up into a fetal position. Fresh blood burst from his mouth and nose. When he screamed again, two more teeth popped out of his mouth.

“Get on, Pete.”

Weeping, holding his savaged right hand to his chest, Pete tried to get to his feet. The first effort was a failure; he sprawled in the snow again. Mr Gray made no comment, simply sat astride the idling Arctic Cat and watched.

Jonesy felt Pete’s pain and despair and wretched fear. The fear was by far the worst, and he decided to take a risk.

Pete.

Only a whisper, but Pete heard. He looked up, his face haggard and speckled with fungus-what Mr Gray called byrus. When Pete licked his lips, Jonesy saw it was growing on his tongue, too. Outer-space thrush. Once Pete Moore had wanted to be an astronaut. Once he had stood up to some bigger boys on behalf of someone who was smaller and weaker. He deserved better than this.

No bounce, no play.

Pete almost smiled. It was both beautiful and heartbreaking. This time he made it to his feet and plodded slowly toward the snowmobile.

In the deserted office to which he had been exiled, Jonesy saw the doorknob be in to twist back and forth. What does that mean? Mr Gray asked. What is no bounce, no play? What are you doing in there? Come back to the hospital and watch TV with me, why don’t you? How did you get in there to begin with?

It was Jonesy’s turn not to answer, and he did so with great pleasure.

I’ll get in, Mr Gray said. When I’m ready, I’ll come in. You may think you can lock the door against me, but you’re wrong.

Jonesy kept silent-there was no need to provoke the creature currently in charge of his body-but he didn’t think he was wrong. On the other hand, he didn’t dare leave; he would be swallowed up if he tried. He was just a kernel in a cloud, a bit of undigested food in an alien gut. Best to keep a low profile.

Pete got on behind Mr Gray and put his arms around Jonesy’s waist. Ten minutes later they motored past the over-turned Scout, and Jonesy understood what had made Pete and Henry so late back from the store. It was a wonder either of them had lived through it. He would have liked a longer look, but Mr Gray didn’t slow, just went on with the Cat’s skis bouncing up and down, riding the crown of the road between the two snow-filled ruts.

Three miles or so beyond the Scout, they topped a rise and Jonesy saw a brilliant hall of yellow-white light hanging less than a foot above the road, waiting for them. It looked as hot as the flame of a welder’s torch, but obviously wasn’t; the snow just inches below it hadn’t melted. It was almost certainly one of the lights he and Beaver had seen playing in the clouds, above the fleeing animals coming out of The Gulch.

That’s right, Mr Gray said. What your people call a flashlight. This is one of the last. Perhaps the very last.

Jonesy said nothing, only stared out the window of his office cell. He could feel Pete’s arms around his waist, holding on mostly by instinct now, the way a nearly beaten fighter clinches with his opponent to keep from hitting the canvas. The head lying against his back was as heavy as a stone. Pete was a culture-medium for the byrus now, and the byrus liked him fine; the world was cold and Pete was warm. Mr Gray apparently wanted him for something-what, Jonesy had no idea.

The flashlight led them another half a mile or so up the road, then veered into the woods. It slipped in between two big pines and then waited for them, spinning just above the snow. Jonesy heard Mr Gray instruct Pete to hold on as tight as he could.

The Arctic Cat bounced and growled its way up a slight incline, its skis digging into the snow, then splashing it aside. Once they were actually under the forest canopy there was less of it, in some places none at all. In those spots the snowmobile’s tread clattered angrily on the frozen ground, which was mostly rock beneath a thin cover of soil and fallen needles. They were headed north now.

Ten minutes later they bounced hard over a jut of granite and Pete went tumbling off the back with a low cry. Mr Gray let go of the snowmobile’s throttle. The flashlight also stopped, spinning above the snow. Jonesy thought it looked dimmer now.

“Get up,” Mr Gray said. He was turned around on the saddle, looking back at Pete.

“I can’t,” Pete said. “I’m done, fella. I-”

Then Pete began to howl and thrash on the ground again, feet kicking, his hands-one burned, the other mangled-jerking.

Stop it! Jonesy yelled. You’re killing him!

Mr Gray paid him no attention whatever, just remained as he was, swung around at the waist and watching Pete with deadly, emotionless patience as the byrus tightened and pulled at Pete’s flesh. At last Jonesy felt Mr Gray let up. Pete got groggily to his feet. There was a fresh cut on one cheek, and already it was swarming with byrus. His eyes were dazed and exhausted and swimming with tears. He got back on the snowmobile and his hands crept around Jonesy’s waist once more.

Hold onto my coat, Jonesy whispered, and as Mr Gray turned forward and clapped the snowmobile back into gear, he felt Pete take hold. No bounce, no play, right?

No play, Pete agreed, but faintly.

Mr Gray paid no attention this time. The flashlight, less bright but still speedy, started north again… or at least in a direction Jonesy assumed was north. As the snowmobile wove its way around trees, thick clumps of bushes, and knobs of rock, his sense of direction pretty much gave up. From behind them came a steady crackle of gunfire. It sounded as though someone was having a turkey-shoot.

About an hour later, Jonesy finally discovered why Mr Gray had bothered with Pete. That was when the flashlight, which had dimmed to an anemic shadow of its original self, finally went out. It disappeared with a soft plosive sound-as if someone had popped a paper sack. Some leftover bit of detritus fell to the ground.

They were on a tree-lined ridge spang in the middle of the God-only-knows. Ahead of them was a snowy, forested valley; on its far side were eroded hills and brush-tangled brakes where not a single light shone. And to finish things off, the day was fading toward dusk.

Another fine mess you’ve gotten us into, Jonesy thought, but he sensed no dismay on Mr Gray’s part. Mr Gray stopped the snowmobile by releasing the throttle, and then simply sat there. North, Mr Gray said. Not to Jonesy. Pete answered out loud, his voice weary and slow. “How am I supposed to know? I can’t even see where the sun’s going down, for Christ’s sake. One of my eyes is all fucked up, too.”

Mr Gray turned Jonesy’s head and Jonesy saw that Pete’s left eye was gone. The lid had been shoved up high, giving him a half-assed look of surprise. Growing out of the socket was a small jungle of byrus. The longest strands hung down, tickling against Pete’s stubbly cheek. More strands twined through his thinning hair in lush red-gold streaks.

You know.

“Maybe I do,” Pete said. “And maybe I don’t want to point you there.”

Why not?

“Because I doubt if what you want is healthy for the rest of us, fuckface,” Pete said, and Jonesy felt an absurd sense of pride.

Jonesy saw the growth in Pete’s eyesocket twitch. Pete screamed and clutched at his face. For a moment-brief but far too long-Jonesy fully imagined the reddish-gold tendrils reaching from that defunct eye into Pete’s brain, where they spread like strong fingers clutching a gray sponge.

Go on, Pete, tell him! Jonesy cried. For Christ’s sake, tell him!

The byrus grew still again. Pete’s hand dropped from his face, which was now deathly pale where it wasn’t reddish-gold. “Where are you, Jonesy?” he asked. “Is there room for two?”

The short answer, of course, was no. Jonesy didn’t understand what had happened to him, but knew that his continued survival that last kernel of autonomy-somehow depended on his staying right where he was. If he so much as opened the door, he would be gone for good.

Pete nodded. “Didn’t think so,” he said, and then spoke to the other. “Just don’t hurt me anymore, fella.”

Mr Gray only sat, looking at Pete with Jonesy’s eyes and making no promises.

Pete sighed, then raised his scorched left hand and extended one finger. He closed his eyes and began to tick his finger back and forth, back and forth. And as he did it, Jonesy came close to understanding everything. What had that little girl’s name been? Rinkenhauer, wasn’t it? Yes. He couldn’t remember the first name, but a clumsy handle like Rinkenhauer was hard to forget. She had also gone to Mary M. Snowe, aka The Retard Academy, although by then Duddits had gone on to Vocational. And Pete? Pete had always had a funny trick of remembering things, but after Duddits-

The words came back to Jonesy as he crouched in his dirty little cell, looking out at the world which had been stolen from him… only they weren’t really words at all, only those open vowel sounds, so strangely beautiful:

Ooo eee a yine, Ete? Do you see the line, Pete?

Pete, his face full of dreamy, surprised wonder, had said yes, he saw it. And he had been doing the thing with his finger then, that tick-tock thin, just as he was now.

The finger stopped, the tip still trembling minutely, like a dowsing rod at the edge of an aquifer. Then Pete pointed at the ridge on a line slightly to starboard of the snowmobile’s current heading,

“There,” he said, and dropped his hand. “Due north. Sight on that rock-face. The one with the pine growing out of the middle. Do you see it?” Yes, I see it. Mr Gray turned forward and put the snowmobile back into gear, Jonesy wondered fleetingly how much gas was left in the tank. “Can I get off now?” Meaning, of course, could he die now.

No.

And they were off again, with Pete clinging weakly to Jonesy’s coat.

They skirted the rock-face, climbed to the top of the highest hill beyond it, and here Mr Gray paused again so his substitute flashlight could rehead them. Pete did so and they continued on, now moving on a path that was a little bit west of true north. Daylight continued to fade. Once they heard helicopters-at least two, maybe as many as four-coming toward them. Mr Gray hulled the snowmobile into a thick stand of underbrush, heedless of the branches that slapped at Jonesy’s face, drawing blood from his cheeks and brow. Pete tumbled off the back again. Mr Gray killed the Cat’s engine, then dragged Pete, who was moaning and semi-conscious, under the thickest growth of bushes. There they waited until the helicopters passed over. Jonesy felt Mr Gray reach up to one of the crew and quickly scan him, perhaps cross-checking what the man knew with what Pete had been telling him. When the choppers had passed off to the southeast, apparently heading back to their base, Mr Gray re-started the snowmobile and they went on. It had begun to snow again.

An hour later they stopped on another rise and Pete fell off the Cat again, this time tumbling to the side. He raised his face, but most of his face was gone, buried under a beard of vegetation. He tried to speak aloud and couldn’t; his mouth was stuffed, his tongue buried under a lush mat of byrus.

I can’t, man. I can’t, no more, please, let me be.

“Yes,” Mr Gray said. “I think you’ve served your purpose.”

Pete! Jonesy cried. Then, to Mr Gray: No, no, don’t!

Mr Gray paid no attention, of course. For a moment Jonesy saw silent understanding in Pete’s remaining eye. And relief For that moment he was still able to touch Pete’s mind-his boyhood friend, the one who always stood outside the gate at DJHS, one hand cupped over his mouth, hiding a cigarette that wasn’t really there, the one who was going to be an astronaut and see the world entire from earth orbit, one of the four who had helped save Duddits from the big boys.

For one moment. Then he felt something leap from Mr Gray’s mind and the stuff growing on Pete did not just twitch but clenched. There was a tenebrous creaking sound as Pete’s skull cracked in a dozen places. His face-what remained of it-pulled inward in a kind of yank, making him old at a stroke. Then he fell forward and snow began to fleck the back of his parka.

You bastard.

Mr Gray, indifferent to Jonesy’s curse and Jonesy’s anger, made no reply. He faced forward again. The building wind dropped momentarily when he did, and a hole opened in the curtain of snow. About five miles northwest of their current position, Jonesy saw moving lights-not flashlights but headlights. Lots of them. Trucks moving in convoy along the turnpike. Trucks and nothing else, he supposed. This part of Maine belonged to the military now.

And they’re all looking for you, asshole, he spat as the snowmobile began to roll again. The snow closed back around them, cutting off their momentary view of the trucks, but Jonesy knew that Mr Gray would have no trouble finding the turnpike. Pete had gotten him this far, to a part of the quarantine zone where Jonesy supposed little trouble was expected. He was counting on Jonesy to take him the rest of the way, because Jonesy was different. For one thing, he was clear of the byrus. The byrus didn’t like him for some reason.

You’ll never get out of here, Jonesy said.

I will, Mr Gray said. We always die and we always live. We always lose and we always win, Like it or not, Jonesy, we’re the future.

If that’s true, it’s the best reason I ever heard for living in the past, Jonesy replied, but from Mr Gray there was no answer, Mr Gray as an entity, a consciousness, was gone, merged back into the cloud. There was only enough of him left to run Jonesy’s motor skills and keep the snowmobile pointed toward the turnpike. And Jonesy, carried helplessly forward on whatever mission this thing had, took slender comfort from two things. One was that Mr Gray didn’t know how to get at the last piece of him, the tiny part that existed in his memory of the Tracker Brothers office. The other was that Mr Gray didn’t know about Duddits-about no bounce, no play.

Jonesy intended to make sure Mr Gray didn’t find out.

At least not yet.

Chapter Thirteen AT GOSSELIN’S

To Archie Perlmutter, high-school valedictorian (speech topic: “The Joys and the Responsibilities of Democracy”), onetime Eagle Scout, faithful Presbyterian, and West Point grad, Gosselin’s Country Market no longer looked real. Now spotlighted by enough candlepower to illuminate a small city, it looked like a set in a movie. Not just any movie, either, but the sort of James Cameron extravaganza where the catering costs alone would amount to enough to feed the people of Haiti for two years. Even the steadily increasing snow did not cut into the glare of the lights very much, or change the illusion that the whole works, from the crappy siding to the pair of tin woodstove stacks sticking acrooked out of the roof to the single rusty gas-pump out front, was simply set-dressing.

This would be Act One, Pearly thought as he strode briskly along with his clipboard tucked under his arm (Archie Perlmutter had always felt he was a man of considerable artistic nature… commercial, too). We fade in on an isolated country store. The oldtimers are sitting around the woodstove-not the little one in Gosselin’s office but the big one in the store itself-while the snow pelts down outside. They’re talking about lights in the sky… missing hunters… sightings of little gray men skulking around in the woods. The store owner-call him Old Man Rossiter-scoffs. “Oh gosh fishes, you’re all a buncha old wimmin!” he says, and just then the whole place is bathed in these brilliant lights (think Close Encounters of the Third Kind) as a UFO settles down to the ground! Bloodthirsty aliens come piling out, firing their deathrays! It’s like Independence Day, only, here’s the hook, in the woods!

Beside him, Melrose, the cook’s third (which was about as close as anyone got to an official rating on this little adventure), struggled to keep up. He was wearing sneakers on his feet instead of shoes or boots-Perlmutter had dragged him out of Spago’s, which was what the men called the cook-tent-and he kept slipping. Men (and a few women) passed everywhere around them, mostly at the double. Many were talking into lavalier mikes or walkie-talkies. The sense that this was a movie-set instead of a real place was enhanced by the trailers, the semis, the idling helicopters (the worsening weather had brought them all back in), and the endless conflicting roar of motors and generators.

“Why does he want to see me?” Melrose asked again. Out of breath and whinier than ever. They were passing the paddock and corral to one side of Gosselin’s barn, now. The old and dilapidated fence (it had been ten years or more since there’d been an actual horse in the corral or exercised in the paddock) had been reinforced by alternating strands of barbwire and smoothwire. There was an electrical charge running through the smoothwire, probably not lethal but high enough to lay you out on the ground, convulsing… and the charge could be jacked up to lethal levels if the natives became restless. Behind this wire, watching them, were twenty or thirty men, Old Man Gosselin among them (in the James Cameron version, Gosselin would be played by some craggy oldtimer like Bruce Dern). Earlier, the men behind the wire would have called out, issuing threats and angry demands, but since they’d seen what happened to that banker from Massachusetts who tried to run, their peckers had wilted considerably, poor fellows. Seeing someone shot in the head took a lot of the fuck-you out of a man. And then there was the fact that all the cps guys were now wearing nose-and-mouth masks. That had to take whatever fuck-you was left.

“Boss?” Almost whining had given way to actual whining. The sight of American citizens standing behind barbed wire had apparently added to Melrose’s unease. “Boss, come on-why does the big boy want to see me? Big boy shouldn’t know a cook’s third even exists.”

“I don’t know,” Pearly replied. It was the truth.

Up ahead, standing at the head of what had been dubbed Eggbeater Alley, was Owen Underhill and some guy from the motorpool. The motor-pool guy was almost shouting into Underhill’s ear in order to make himself heard over the racket of the idling helicopters. Surely, Perlmutter thought, they’d shut the choppers down soon; nothing was going to fly in this shit, an early-season blizzard that Kurtz called “our gift from God”. When he said stuff like that, you couldn’t tell if Kurtz really meant it or was just being ironic. He always sounded like he meant it… but then sometimes he would laugh. The kind of laugh that made Archie Perlmutter nervous. In the movie, Kurtz would be played by James Woods. Or maybe Christopher Walken. Neither one of them looked like Kurtz, but had George C. Scott looked like Patton? Case closed.

Perlmutter abruptly detoured toward Underhill. Melrose tried to follow and went on his ass, cursing. Perlmutter tapped Underhill on his shoulder, then hoped his mask would at least partially conceal his expression of surprise when the other man turned. Owen Underhill looked as if he had aged ten years since stepping off the Millinocket School Department bus.

Leaning forward, Pearly shouted over the wind: “Kurtz in fifteen! Don’t forget!'Underhill gave him an impatient wave to say he wouldn’t, and turned back to the motor-pool guy. Perlmutter had him placed now; Brodsky, his name was. The men called him Dawg.

Kurtz’s command post, a humongous Winnebago (if this were a movie-set, it would be the star’s home away from home, or perhaps Jimmy Cameron’s), was just ahead. Pearly picked up the pace, facing boldly forward into the flick-flick-flick of the snow. Melrose scurried to catch up, brushing snow off his coverall.

“C’mon, Skipper,” he pleaded. “Don’tcha have any idea?”

“No,” Perlmutter said. He had no clue as to why Kurtz would want to see a cook’s third with everything up and running in high gear. But he thought both of them knew it couldn’t be anything good.

Owen turned Emil Brodsky’s head, placed the bulb of his mask against the man’s ear, and said: “Tell me again. Not all of it, Just about the part you called the mind-fuck.”

Brodsky didn’t argue but took ten seconds or so to arrange his thoughts. Owen gave it to him. There was his appointment with Kurtz, and debriefing after that-plenty of crew, reams of paperwork-and God alone knew what gruesome tasks to follow, but he sensed this was important.

Whether or not he would tell Kurtz remained to be seen. At last Brodsky turned Owen’s head, placed the bulb of his own mask against Owen’s car, and began to talk. The story was a little more detailed this time, but essentially the same, He had been walking across the field next to the store, talking to Cambry beside him and to an approaching fuel-supply convoy at the same time, when all at once he felt as if his mind had been hijacked. He had been in a cluttery old shed with someone he couldn’t quite see. The man wanted to get a snowmobile going, and couldn’t. He needed the Dawg to tell him what was wrong with it.

“I asked him to open the cowling!” Brodsky shouted into Owen’s ear. “He did, and then it seemed like I was looking through his eyes… but with my mind, do you see?”

Owen nodded.

“I could see right away what was wrong, someone had taken the plugs out. So I told the guy to look around, which he did. Which we both did. And there they were, in a jar of gasoline on the table. My Dad used to do the same thing with the plugs from his Lawnboy and his rototiller when the cold weather came.”

Brodsky paused, clearly embarrassed either by what he was saying or how he imagined it must sound. Owen, who was fascinated, gestured for him to go on.

“There ain’t much more. I told him to fish em out, dry em off, and pop em in. It was like a billion times I’ve helped some guy work on somethin except I wasn’t there-I was here. None of it was happening.”

Owen said: “What next?” Bellowing to be heard over the engines, but the two of them still as private as a priest and his customer in a church confessional.

“Started up first crank. I told him to check the gas while he was at it, and there was a full tank. He said thanks.” Brodsky shook his head wonderingly. “And I said, No problem, boss. Then I kind of thumped back into my own head and I was just walking along. You think I’m crazy?”

“No. But I want you to keep this to yourself for the time being.” Under his mask, Brodsky’s lips spread in a grin. “Oh man, no problem there, either. I just… well, we’re supposed to report anything unusual, that’s the directive, and I thought-” Quickly, not giving Brodsky time to think, Owen rapped: “What was his name?” “Jonesy Three,” Dawg replied, and then his eyes widened in surprise. “Holy shit! I didn’t know I

knew that.”

“Is that some sort of Indian name, do you think? Like Sonny Sixkiller or Ron Nine Moons?”

“Coulda been, but…” Brodsky paused, thinking, then burst out: “It was awful! Not when it was happening, but later on… thinking about it… it was like being…” He dropped his voice. “Like being raped, sir.”

“Let it go,” Owen said. “You must have a few things to do?”

Brodsky smiled. “Only a few thousand.”

“Then get started.”

“Okay.” Brodsky took a step away, then turned back. Owen was looking toward the corral, which had once held horses and now held men. Most of the detainees were in the barn, and all but one of the two dozen or so out here were huddled up together, as if for comfort. The one who stood apart was a tall, skinny drink of water wearing big glasses that made him look sort of like an owl. Brodsky looked from the doomed owl to Underhill. “You’re not gonna get me in hack over this, are you? Send me to see the shrink?” Unaware, of course, both of them unaware that the skinny guy in the old-fashioned horn-rims was a shrink.

“Not a ch-” Owen began. Before he could finish, there was a gunshot from Kurtz’s Winnebago and someone began to scream. “Boss?” Brodsky whispered. Owen couldn’t hear him over the contending motors; he read the word off Brodsky’s lips. And: “Ohh, fuck.”

“Go on, Dawg,” Owen said. “Not your business.”

Brodsky looked at him a moment longer, wetting his lips inside his mask. Owen gave him a nod, trying to project an air of confidence, of command, of everything’s-under-control. Maybe it worked, because Brodsky returned the nod and started away.

From the Winnebago with the hand-lettered sign on the door (THE BUCK STOPS HERE), the screaming continued. As Owen started that way, the man standing by himself in the compound spoke to him. “Hey! Hey, you! Stop a minute, I need to talk to you!”

I’ll bet, Underhill thought, not slowing his pace. I bet you’ve got a whale of a tale to tell and a thousand reasons why you should be let out of here right now.

“Overhill? No, Underhill. That’s your name, isn’t it? Sure it is. I have to talk to you-it’s important to both of us!”

Owen stopped in spite of the screaming from the Winnebago, which was breaking up into hurt sobs now. Not good, but at least it seemed that no one had been killed. He took a closer look at the man in the spectacles. Skinny as a rail and shivering in spite of the down parka he was wearing.

“It’s important to Rita,” the skinny man called over the contending roar of the engines. “To Katrina, too.” Speaking the names seemed to sap the geeky guy, as if he had drawn them up like stones from some deep well, but in his shock at hearing the names of his wife and daughter from this stranger’s lips, Owen barely noticed. The urge to go to the man and ask him how he knew those names was strong, but he was currently out of time… he had an appointment. And just because no one had been killed yet didn’t mean no one would be killed.

Owen gave the man behind the wire a final look, marking his face, and then hurried on toward the Winnebago with the sign on the door.

Perlmutter had read Heart of Darkness, had seen Apocalypse Now, and had on many occasions thought that the name Kurtz was simply a little too convenient. He would have bet a hundred dollars (a great sum for a non-wagering artistic fellow such as himself) that it wasn’t the boss’s real name-that the boss’s real name was Arthur Holsapple or Dagwood Elgart, maybe even Paddy Maloney. Kurtz? Unlikely. It was almost surely an affectation, as much a prop as George Patton’s pearl-handled.45. The men, some of whom had been with Kurtz since Desert Storm (Archie Perlmutter didn’t go back nearly that far), thought he was one crazy motherfucker, and so did Perlmutter… crazy like Patton had been crazy. Crazy like a fox, in other words. Probably when he was shaving in the morning he looked at his reflection and practiced saying “The horror, the horror” in just the right Marlon Brando whisper.

So Pearly felt disquiet but no unusual disquiet as he escorted Cook’s Third Melrose into the over-warm command trailer. And Kurtz looked pretty much okay. The skipper was sitting in a cane rocking chair in the living-room area. He had removed his coverall-it hung on the door through which Perlmutter and Melrose had entered-and received them in his longjohns. From one post of the rocking chair his pistol hung by its belt, not a pearl-handled.45 but a nine-millimeter automatic.

All the electronic gear was rebounding. On Kurtz’s desk the fax hummed constantly, piling up paper. Every fifteen seconds or so, Kurtz’s iMac cried “You’ve got mail!” in its cheery robot voice. Three radios, all turned low, crackled and hopped with transmissions. Mounted on the fake pine behind the desk were two framed photographs. Like the sign on the door, the photos went with Kurtz everywhere. The one on the left, titled INVESTMENT, showed an angelic young fellow in a Boy Scout uniform, right hand raised in the three-fingered Boy Scout salute. The one on the right, labeled DIVIDEND, was an aerial photograph of Berlin taken in the spring of 1945. Two or three buildings still stood, but mostly what the camera showed was witless brick-strewn rubble.

Kurtz waved his hand at the desk. “Don’t mind all that, boys-it’s just noise. I’ve got Freddy Johnson to deal with it, but I sent him over to the commissary to grab some chow. Told him to take his time, go through the whole four courses, soup to nuts, poisson to sorbet, because this situation here… boys, this situation here is near-bout… STABILIZED!” He gave them a ferocious FDR grin and began to rock in his chair. Beside him, the pistol swung in the holster at the end of its belt like a pendulum.

Melrose returned Kurtz’s smile tentatively, Perlmutter with less reserve. He had Kurtz’s number, all right; the boss was an existential wannabe… and you wanted to believe that was a good call. A brilliant call. A liberal arts education didn’t have many benefits in the career Military, but there were a few. Phrase-making was one of them.

“My only order to Lieutenant Johnson-whoops, no rank on this one, to my good pal Freddy Johnson is what I meant to say-was that he say grace before chowing in. Do you pray, boys?” Melrose nodded as tentatively as he had smiled; Perlmutter did so indulgently. He felt sure that, like his name, Kurtz’s oft-professed belief in God was plumage.

Kurtz rocked, looking happily at the two men with the snow melting from their footgear and puddling on the floor. “The best prayers are the child’s prayers,” Kurtz said. “The simplicity, you know. “God is great, God is good, let us thank Him for our food." Isn’t that simple? Isn’t it beautiful?”

“Yes, b-” Pearly began.

“Shut the fuck up, you hound,” Kurtz said cheerfully. Still rocking. The gun still swinging back and forth at the end of its belt. He looked from Pearly to Melrose. “What do you think, laddie-buck? Is that a beautiful little prayer, or is that a beautiful little prayer?”

“Yes, s-”

“Or Allah akhbar, as our Arab friends say; there is no God but God." What could be more simple than that? It cuts the pizza directly down the middle, if you see what I mean.”

They didn’t reply. Kurtz was rocking faster now, and the pistol was swinging faster, and Perlmutter began to feel a little antsy, as he had earlier in the day, before Underhill arrived and sort of cooled Kurtz out. This was probably just more plumage, but-

“Or Moses at the burning bush!” Kurtz cried. His lean and rather horsey face lit with a daffy smile. “'Who’m I talking to?" Moses asks, and God gives him the old “I yam what I yam and that’s all that I yam, uck-uck-uck." What a kidder, that God, eh, Mr Melrose, did you really refer to our emissaries from the Great Beyond as “space-niggers"?”

Melrose’s mouth dropped open.

“Answer me, buck.”

“Sir, I-”

“Call me sir again while the group is hot, Mr Melrose, and you will celebrate your next two birthdays in the stockade, do you understand that? Catch my old drift-ola?''Yes, boss.” Melrose had snapped to attention, his face dead white except for the patches of cold-induced red on his cheeks, patches that were cut neatly in two by the straps of his mask. “Now did you or did you not refer to our visitors as “space-niggers"?”

“Sir, I may have just in passing said something-”

Moving with a speed Perlmutter could scarcely credit (it was like a special effect in a James Cameron movie, almost), Kurtz snatched the nine-millimeter from the swinging holster, pointed it without seeming to aim, and fired. The top half of the sneaker on Melrose’s left foot exploded. Fragments of canvas flew. Blood and flecks of flesh splattered Perlmutter’s pantsleg.

I didn’t see that, Pearly thought. 7hat didn’t happen.But Melrose was screaming, looking down at his ruined left foot with agonized disbelief and howling his head off. Perlmutter could see bone in there, and felt his stomach turn over. Kurtz didn’t get himself out of his rocker as quickly as he’d gotten his gun out of his holster-Perlmutter could at least see this happening-but it was still fast. Spookily fast. He grabbed Melrose by the shoulder and peered into the cook third’s contorted face with great intensity. “Stop that blatting, laddie-buck.”

Melrose carried on blatting. His foot was gushing, and the part with the toes on it looked to Pearly as if it might be severed fi7om the part with the heel on it. Pearly’s world went gray and started to lose focus. With all the force of his will, he forced that grayness away. If he passed out now, Christ alone knew what Kurtz might do to him. Perlmutter had heard stories and had dismissed ninety per cent of them out of hand, thinking they were either exaggerations or Kurtz-planted propaganda designed to enhance his loony-crafty image.

Now I know better, Perlmutter thought. This isn’t myth-making; this is the myth.Kurtz, moving with a finicky, almost surgical precision, placed the barrel of his pistol against the center of Melrose’s cheese-white forehead. “squelch that womanish bawling, buck, or I’ll squelch it for you. These are hollow-points, as I think even a dimly lit American like yourself must now surely know.” Melrose somehow choked the screams off, turned them into low, in-the-throat sobs. This seemed to satisfy Kurtz.

“Just so you can hear me, buck, You have to hear me, because you have to spread the word. I believe, praise God, that your foot, what’s left of it, will articulate the basic concept, but it’s your own sacred mouth that must share the details. So are you listening, bucko? Are you listening for the details?”

Still sobbing, his eyes starting from his face like blue glass balls, Melrose managed a nod.

Quick as a striking snake, Kurtz’s head turned and Perlmutter clearly saw the man’s face. The madness there was stamped into the features as clearly as a warrior’s tattoos. At that moment everything Perlmutter had ever believed about his OIC fell down.

“What about you, bucko? Listening? Because you’re a messenger, too. All of us are messengers. “Pearly nodded. The door opened and he saw, with unutterable relief, that the newcomer was Owen Underhill. Kurtz’s eyes flew to him. “Owen! Me foine bucko! Another witness! Another, praise God, another messenger! Are you

listening? Will you carry the word hence from this happy place?”

Expressionless as a poker-player in a high-stakes game, Underhill nodded.

“Good! Good!”

Kurtz returned his attention to Melrose.

“I quote from the Manual of Affairs, Cook’s Third Melrose, Part 16, Section 4, Paragraph 3-"Use of inappropriate epithets, whether racial, ethnic, or gender-based, are counterproductive to morale and run counter to armed service protocol. When use is proven, the user will be punished immediately by court-martial or in the field by appropriate command personnel," end quote.

Appropriate command personnel, that’s me, user of inappropriate epithets, that’s you. Do you understand, Melrose? Do you get the drift-ola?”

Melrose, blubbering, tried to speak, but Kurtz cut him off. In the doorway Owen Underhill continued to stand completely still as the snow melted on his shoulders and ran down the transparent bulb of his mask like sweat. His eyes remained fixed on Kurtz.

“Now, Cook’s Third Melrose, what I have quoted to you in the presence of these, these praise God witnesses, is called “an order of conduct", and it means no spicktalk, no mockietalk, no krauttalk or redskin talk. It also means as is most applicable in the current situation no spaceniggertalk, do you understand that?”

Melrose tried to nod, then reeled, on the verge of passing out. Perlmutter grabbed him by the shoulder and got him straight again, praying that Melrose wouldn’t conk before this was over. God only knew what Kurtz might do to Melrose if Melrose had the temerity to turn out the lights before Kurtz was done reading him the riot act.

“We are going to wipe these invading assholes out, my friend, and if they ever come back to Terra Firma, we are going to rip off their collective gray head and shit down their collective gray neck; if they persist we will use their own technology, which we are already well on our way to grasping, against them, returning to their place of origin in their own ships or ships like them built by General Electric and DuPont and praise God Microsoft and once there we will burn their cities or hives or goddam anthills, whatever they live in, we “II napalm their amber waves of grain and nuke their purple mountains” majesty, praise God, Allah akhbar, we will pour the fiery piss of America into their lakes and oceans… but we will do it in a way that is proper and appropriate and without regard to race or gender or ethnicity or religious preference. We’re going to do it because they came to the wrong neighborhood and knocked on the wrong fucking door. This is not Germany in 1938 or Oxford Mississippi in 1963. Now, Mr Melrose, do you think you can spread that message?”

Melrose’s eyes rolled up to the wet whites and his knees unhinged. Perlmutter once more grabbed his shoulder in an effort to hold him up, but it was a lost cause this time; down Melrose went.

“Pearly,” Kurtz whispered, and when those burning blue eyes fell on him, Perlmutter thought he had never been so frightened in his life. His bladder was a hot and heavy bag inside him, wanting only to squirt its contents into his coverall. He felt that if Kurtz saw a dark patch spreading on his adjutant’s crotch, Kurtz might shoot him out of hand, in his present mood… but that didn’t seem to help the situation. In fact, it made it worse.

“Yes, s… boss?” “Will he spread the word? Will he be a good messenger? Do you reckon he took enough in to do that, or was he too concerned with his damned old foot?''I… I…” In the doorway, he saw Underhill nod at him almost imperceptibly, and Pearly took heart. “Yes, boss-I think he heard you five-by.” Kurtz seemed first surprised by Perlmutter’s vehemence, then gratified. He turned to Underhill. “What about you, Owen? Do you think he’ll spread the word?''Uh-huh,” Underhill said. “If you get him to the infirmary before he bleeds to death on your rug.”

Kurtz’s mouth turned up at the comers and he barked, “See to that, Pearly, will you?”

“Right now,” Perlmutter said, starting toward the door. Once past Kurtz, he gave Underhill a look of fervent gratitude which Underhill either missed or chose not to acknowledge.

“Double-time, Mr Perlmutter. Owen, I want to talk to you mano a mano, as the Irish say.” He stepped over Melrose’s body without looking down at it and walked briskly into the kitchenette. “Coffee? Freddy made it, so I can’t swear it’s drinkable… no, I can’t swear, but…”

“Coffee would be good,” Owen Underhill said. “You pour and I’ll try to stop this fellow’s bleeding.”

Kurtz stood by the Mr Coffee on the counter and gave Underhill a look of darkly brilliant doubt. “Do you really think that’s necessary?” That was where Perlmutter went out. Never before in his life had stepping into a storm felt so much like an escape.

Henry stood at the fence (not touching the wire; he had seen what happened when you did that), waiting for Underhill-that was his name, all right-to come back out of what had to be the command post, but when the door opened, one of the other fellows he’d seen go in came hustling out. Once down the steps, the guy started running. The guy was tall, and possessed one of those earnest faces Henry associated with middle management. Now the face looked terrified, and the man almost fell before he got fully into stride. Henry was rooting for that.

The middle manager managed to keep his balance after the first ship, but halfway to a couple of semi trailers that had been pushed together, his feet flew out from beneath him and he went on his ass. The clipboard he’d been carrying went sliding like a toboggan for leprechauns.

Henry held his hands out and clapped as loudly as he could. Probably not loud enough to be heard over all the motors, so he cupped them around his mouth and yelled: “Way to go shitheels! Let’s look at the videotape!”

The middle manager got up without looking at him, retrieved his clipboard, and ran on toward the two semi trailers.

There was a group of eight or nine guys standing by the fence about twenty yards from Henry. Now one of them, a portly fellow in an orange down-filled parka that made him look like the Pillsbury Dough Boy, walked over.

“I don’t think you should do that, fella.” He paused, then lowered his voice. “They shot my brother-in-law.”

Yes. Henry saw it in the man’s head. The portly man’s brother-in-law, also portly, talking about his lawyer, his rights, his job with some investment company in Boston. The soldiers nodding, telling him it was just temporary, the situation was normalizing and would be straightened out by dawn, all the time hustling the two overweight mighty hunters toward the barn, which already held a pretty good trawl, and all at once the brother-in-law had broken away, running toward the motor-pool, and boom-boom, out go the lights.

The portly man was telling Henry some of this, his pale face earnest in the newly erected lights, and Henry interrupted him.

“What do you think they’re going to do to the rest of us?” The portly man looked at Henry, shocked, then backed off a step, as if he thought Henry might have something contagious. Quite funny, when you thought about it, because they all had something contagious, or at least this team of government-funded cleaners thought they did, and in the end it would come to the same.

“You can’t be serious,” the portly man said. Then, almost indulgently: “This is America, you know.”

“Is it? You seeing a lot of due process, are you?”

“They’re just… I’m sure they’re just…” Henry waited, interested, but there was no more, at least not in this vein. “That was a gunshot, wasn’t it?” the portly man asked, “And I think I heard some screaming.”

From the two pushed-together trailers there emerged two hurrying men with a stretcher between them. Following them with marked reluctance came the middle manager, his clipboard once more tucked firmly beneath his arm.

“I’d say you got that right.” Henry and the portly man watched as the stretcher-bearers burned up the steps of the Winnebago. As Mr Middle Management made his closest approach to the fence, Henry called out to him, “How’s it going, shitheels? Having any fun yet?” The portly man winced. The guy with the clipboard gave Henry a single dour look and then trudged on toward the Winnebago.

“This is just… it’s just some sort of emergency situation,” the portly man said. “It’ll be straightened out by tomorrow morning, I’m sure.”

“Not for your brother-in-law,” Henry said.

The portly man looked at him, mouth tucked in and trembling slightly. Then he returned to the other men, whose views no doubt more closely corresponded to his own. Henry turned back to the Winnebago and resumed waiting for Underhill to come out. He had an idea that Underhill was his only hope… but whatever Underhill’s doubts about this operation might be, the hope was a thin one. And Henry had only one card to play. The card was Jonesy. They didn’t know about Jonesy.

The question was whether or not he should tell Underhill. Henry was terribly afraid that telling the man would do no good.

About five minutes after Mr Middle Management followed the stretcher-bearers into the “Bago, the three of them came out again, this time with a fourth on the stretcher. Under the brilliant overhead lights, the wounded man’s face was so pale it looked purple. Henry was relieved to see that it wasn’t Underhill, because Underhill was different from the rest of these maniacs.

Ten minutes passed. Underhill still hadn’t come out of the command post. Henry waited in the thickening snow. There were soldiers watching the inmates (that was what they were, inmates, and it was best not to gild the lily), and eventually one of them strolled over. The men who had been stationed at the T-junction of the Deep Cut and Swanny Pond Roads had pretty well blinded Henry with their lights, and he didn’t recognize this man by his face. Henry was both delighted and deeply unsettled to realize that minds also had features, every bit as distinctive as a pretty mouth, a broken nose, or a crooked eye. This was one of the guys who had been out there, the one who had hit him in the ass with the stock of his rifle when he decided Henry wasn’t moving toward the truck fast enough. Whatever had happened to Henry’s mind was skitzy; he couldn’t pick out this guy’s name, but he knew that the man’s brother’s name was Frankie, and that in high school Frankie had been tried and acquitted on a rape charge. There was more, as well-unconnected jumbles of stuff, like the contents of a wastebasket. Henry realized that he was looking at an actual river of consciousness, and at the flotsam and jetsam the river was carrying along. The humbling thing was how prosaic most of it was.

“Hey there,” the soldier said, amiably enough. “It’s the smartass. Want a hot dog, smartass?” He laughed.

“Already got one,” Henry said, smiling himself And Beaver popped out of his mouth, as Beaver had a way of doing. “Fuck off Freddy.”

The soldier stopped laughing. “Let’s see how smart your ass is twelve hours from now,” he said. The image that went floating by, home on the river between this man’s ears, was of a truck filled with bodies, white limbs all tangled together. “You growing the Ripley yet, smartass?”

Henry thought: the byrus. 7lat’s what he means. The byrus is what it’s really called. Jonesy knows.

Henry didn’t reply and the soldier started away, wearing the comfortable look of a man who has won on points. Curious, Henry summoned all his concentration and visualized a rifle-Jonesy’s Garand, as a matter of fact. He thought: I have a gun. I’m going to kill you with it the second you turn your back on me, asshole.

The soldier swung around again, the comfortable look going the way of the grin and the laughter. What replaced it was a look of doubt and suspicion. “What’d you say, smartass? You say something?”

“Just wondering if you got your share of that girl-you know, the one Frankie broke in. Did he give you sloppy seconds?”

For a moment, the soldier’s face was idiotic with surprise. Then it filled in with black Italian rage. He raised his rifle. To Henry, its muzzle looked like a smile. He unzipped his jacket and held it open in the thickening snow. “Go on,” he said, and laughed. “Go on, Rambo, do your thing.”

Frankie’s brother held the gun on Henry a moment longer, and then Henry felt the man’s rage pass. It had been close-he had seen the soldier trying to think of what he would say, some plausible story-but he had taken a moment too long and his forebrain had pulled the red beast back to heel. It was all so familiar. The Richie Grenadeaus never died, not really. They were the world’s dragon’s teeth.

“Tomorrow,” the soldier said. “Tomorrow’s time enough for you, smartass.”

This time Henry let him go-no more teasing the red beast, although God knew it would have been easy enough. He had learned something, too… or confirmed what he’d already suspected. The soldier had heard his thought, but not clearly. If he’d heard it clearly he would have turned around a lot faster. Nor had he asked Henry how Henry knew about his brother Frankie. Because on some level the soldier knew what Henry did: they had been infected with telepathy, the whole walking bunch of them-they had caught it like an annoying low-grade virus.

“Only I got it worse,” he said, zipping his coat back up again. So had Pete and Beaver and Jonesy. But Pete and the Beav were both dead now, and Jonesy… Jonesy…

“Jonesy got it worst of all,” Henry said. And where was Jonesy now?

South. Jonesy had hooked back south. These guys” precious quarantine had been breached. Henry guessed they had foreseen that that might happen. It didn’t worry them. They thought one or two breaches wouldn’t matter.

Henry thought they were wrong.

Owen stood with a mug of coffee in his hand, waiting until the guys from the infirmary were gone with their burden, Melrose’s sobs mercifully reduced to mutters and moans by a shot of morphine. Pearly followed them out and then Owen was alone with Kurtz.

Kurtz sat in his rocker, looking up at Owen Underhill with curious, head-cocked amusement. The raving crazyman was gone again, put away like a Halloween mask.

“I’m thinking of a number,” Kurtz said. “What is it?”

“Seventeen,” Owen said. “You see it in red. Like on the side of a fire engine.”

Kurtz nodded, pleased. “You try sending one to me.” Owen visualized a speed limit sign: 60 MPH.

“Six,” Kurtz said after a moment. “Black on white.”

“Close enough, boss.”

Kurtz drank some coffee. His was in a mug with I LUV MY GRANDPA printed on the side. Owen sipped with honest pleasure. It was a dirty night and a dirty job, and Freddy’s coffee wasn’t bad.

Kurtz had found time to put on his coverall. Now he reached into the inner pocket and brought out a large bandanna. He regarded it for a moment, then got to his knees with a grimace (it was no secret that the old man had arthritis) and began to wipe up the splatters of Melrose’s blood. Owen, who thought himself surely unshockable at this point, was shocked.

“Sir… Oh, fuck. “Boss…”

“Stow it,” Kurtz said without looking up. He moved from spot to spot, as assiduous as any washerwoman. “My father always said that you should clean up your own messes. Might make you stop and think a little bit the next time. What was my father’s name, buck?”

Owen looked for it and caught just a glimpse, like a glimpse of slip under a woman’s dress. “Paul?” “Patrick, actually… but close. Anderson believes it’s a wave, and it’s expending its force now,

A telepathic wave. Do you find that an awesome concept, Owen?”

“Yes.”

Kurtz nodded without looking up, wiping and cleaning. “More awesome in concept than in fact, however-do you also find that?”

Owen laughed. The old man had lost none of his capacity to surprise. Not playing with a full deck, people sometimes said of unstable individuals. The trouble with Kurtz, Owen reckoned, was that he was playing with more than a full deck. A few extra aces in there. Also a few extra deuces, and everyone knew that deuces were wild.

“Sit down, Owen. Drink your coffee on your ass like a normal person and let me do this, I need to.”

Owen thought maybe he did. He sat down and drank the coffee. Five minutes passed in this fashion, then Kurtz got painfully back to his feet. Holding the bandanna fastidiously by one comer, he carried it to the kitchen, dropped it into the trash, and returned to his rocker. He took a sip of his coffee, grimaced, and put it aside. “Cold.”

Owen rose. “I’d get you a fresh-”

“No. Sit down. We need to talk.” Owen sat.

“We had a little confrontation out there at the ship, you and I, didn’t we?”

“I wouldn’t say-”

“No, I know you wouldn’t, but I know what went on and so do you. When the situation’s hot, tempers also get hot. But we’re past that now. We have to be past it because I’m the OIC and you’re my second and we’ve still got this job to finish. Can we work together to do that?”

“Yes, sir.” Fuck, there it was again. “Boss, I mean.”

Kurtz favored him with a wintry smile.

“I lost control just now.” Charming, frank, open-eyed and honest. This had fooled Owen for a lot of years. It did not fool him now. “I was going along, drawing the usual caricature-two parts Patton, one part Rasputin, add water, stir and serve-and I just… whew! I just lost it. You think I’m crazy, don’t you?”

Careful, careful. There was telepathy in this room, honest-to-God telepathy, and Owen had no idea how deeply Kurtz might be able to see into him. “Yes, sir. A little, sir.”

Kurtz nodded matter-of-factly. “Yes. A little. That pretty well describes it. I’ve been doing this for a long time-men like me are necessary but hard to find, and you have to be a little crazy to do the job and not just high-side it completely. It’s a thin line, that famous thin line the armchair psychologists love to talk about, and never in the history of the world has there been a cleanup job like this one… assuming, that is, the story of Hercules neatening up the Augean Stables is just a myth. I am not asking for your sympathy but for your understanding. If we understand each other, we’ll get through this, the hardest job we’ve ever had, all right. If we don’t…” Kurtz shrugged. “If we don’t, I’ll have to get through it without you. Are you following me?”

Owen doubted if he was, but he saw where Kurtz wanted him to go and nodded. He had read that there was a certain kind of bird that lived in the crocodile’s mouth, at the croc’s sufferance. He supposed that now he must be that kind of bird. Kurtz wanted him to believe he was forgiven for putting the alien broadcast on the common channel-heat of the moment, just as Kurtz had blown off Melrose’s foot in the heat of the moment. And what had happened six years ago in Bosnia? Not a factor now. Maybe it was true. And maybe the crocodile had tired of the bird’s tiresome pecking and was preparing to close its jaws. Owen got no sense of the truth from Kurtz’s mind, and either way it behooved him to be very careful. Careful and ready to fly.

Kurtz reached into his coverall again and brought out a tarnished pocket watch. “This was my grandfather’s and it works just fine,” he said. “Because it winds up, I think-no electricity. My wristwatch, on the other hand, is still FUBAR.”

“Mine too.”

Kurtz’s lips twitched in a smile. “See Perlmutter when you have a chance, and feel you have the stomach for him. Among his many other chores and activities, he found time to take delivery of three hundred wind-up Timexes this afternoon. just before the snow shut down our air-ops, this was. Pearly’s damned efficient. I just wish to Christ he’d get over the idea that he’s living in a movie.”

“He may have made strides in that direction tonight, boss.”

“Perhaps he has at that.”

Kurtz meditated. Underhill waited.

“Laddie-buck, we should be drinking the whiskey. It’s a bit of an Irish deathwatch we’re having tonight.”

“Is it?”

“Aye. Me beloved phooka is about to keel over dead.”

Owen raised his eyebrows.

“Yes. At which point its magical cloak of invisibility Will be whisked away. Then it will become just another dead horse for folks to beat. Primarily politicians, who are best at that sort of thing.”

“I don’t follow you.”

Kurtz took another look at the tarnished pocket watch, which he’d probably picked up in a pawnshop… or looted off a corpse. Underhill wouldn’t have doubted either.

“It’s seven o'clock. In just about forty hours, the President is going to speak before the UN General Assembly. More people are going to see and hear that speech than any previous speech in the history of the human race. It’s going to be part of the biggest story in the history of the human race… and the biggest spin-job since God the Father Almighty created the cosmos and set the planets going round and round with the tip of his finger.”

“What’s the spin?”

“It’s a beautiful tale, Owen. Like the best ties, it incorporates large swatches of the truth. The President will tell a fascinated world, a world hanging on every word with its breath caught in its throat, praise Jesus, that a ship crewed by beings from another world crashed in northern Maine on either November sixth or November seventh of this year. That’s true. He Will say that we were not completely surprised, as we and the heads of the other countries which constitute the UN Security Council have known for at least ten years that ET has been scoping us out. Also true, only some of us here in America have known about our pals from the void since the late nineteen-forties. We also know that Russian fighters destroyed a grayboy ship over Siberia in 1974… although to this day the Russkies don’t know we know. That one was probably a drone, a test-shot. There have been a lot of those. The grays have handled their early contacts with a care which strongly suggests that we scare them quite a lot.”

Owen listened with a sick fascination he hoped didn’t show on his face or at the top level of his thoughts, where Kurtz might still have access.

From his inner pocket, Kurtz now brought out a dented box of Marlboro cigarettes. He offered the pack to Owen, who first shook his head, then took one of the remaining four fags. Kurtz took another, then lit them up.

“I’m getting the truth and the spin mixed in together,” Kurtz said after he’d taken a deep drag and exhaled. “That may not be the most profitable way to get on. Let’s stick to the spin, shall we?'Owen said nothing. He smoked rarely these days and the first drag made him feel light-headed, but the taste was wonderful.

“The President will say that the United States government quarantined the crash site and the area around it for three reasons. The first was purely logistical: because of the Jefferson Tract’s remote location and low population, we could quarantine it. If the grayboys had come down in Brooklyn, or even on Long Island, that would not have been the case. The second reason is that we are not clear on the aliens” intentions. The third reason, and ultimately the most persuasive, is that the aliens carry with them an infectious substance which the on-scene personnel calls “Ripley fungus". While the alien visitors have assured us passionately that they are not infectious, they have brought a highly infectious substance with them. The President will also tell a horrified world that the fungus may in fact be the controlling intelligence, the grayboys just a growth medium. He will show videotape of a grayboy literally exploding into the Ripley fungus. The footage has been slightly doctored to improve visibility, but is basically true.”

You’re lying, Owen thought. The footage is entirely fake from be inning to end, as fake as that Alien Autopsy shit. And why are you lying? Because you can. It’s as simple as that, isn’t it? Because to you, a lie comes more naturally than the truth.

“Okay, I’m lying,” Kurtz said, never missing a beat. He gave Owen a quick gleaming look before dropping his gaze to his cigarette again. “But the facts are true and verifiable. Some of them do explode and turn into red dandelion fluff. The fluff is Ripley. You inhale enough of it and in a period of time we can’t yet predict-it could be an hour or two days-your lungs and brain are Ripley salad. You look like a walking patch of poison sumac. And then you die.

“There will be no mention of our little venture earlier today. According to the President’s version, the ship, which had apparently been badly damaged in the crash, was either blown up by its crew or blew up on its own. All the grayboys were killed. The Ripley, after some initial spread, is also dying, apparently because it does very poorly in the cold. The Russians corroborate that, by the way. There has been a fairly large kill-off of animals, which also carry the infection.”

“And the human population of Jefferson Tract?”

“POTUS is going to say that about three hundred people-seventy or so locals and about two hundred and thirty hunters are currently being monitored for the Ripley fungus. He will say that while some appear to have been infected, they also appear to be beating the infection with the help of such standard antibiotics as Ceftin and Augmentin.”

“And now this word from our sponsor,” Owen said. Kurtz laughed, delighted.

“At a later time, it’s going to be announced that the Ripley seems a little more antibiotic-resistant than was first believed, and that a number of patients have died. The names we give out will be those of people who have in fact already died, either as a result of the Ripley or those gruesome fucking implants, Do you know what the men are calling the implants?”

“Yeah, shit-weasels. Will the President mention them?”

“No way. The guys in charge believe the shit-weasels are just a little too upsetting for John Q. Public. As would be, of course, the facts concerning our solution to the problem here at Gosselin’s Store, that rustic beauty-spot.”

“The final solution, you could call it,” Owen said. He had smoked his cigarette all the way down to the filter, and now crushed it out on the rim of his empty coffee cup.

Kurtz’s eyes rose to Owen’s and met them unflinchingly. “Yes, you could call it that. We’re going to wipe out approximately three hundred and fifty people-mostly men, there’s that, but I can’t say the cleansing won’t include at least a few women and children. The upside, of course, is that we will be insuring the human race against a pandemic and, very possibly, subjugation. Not an inconsiderable upside.”

Owen’s thought-I’m sure Hitler would like the spin-was unstoppable, but he covered it as well as he could and got no sense that Kurtz had heard it or sensed it. Impossible to tell for sure, of course; Kurtz was sly.

“How many are we holding now?” Kurtz as ed. “About seventy. And twice that number on the way from Kineo; they’ll be here around nine, if the weather doesn’t get any worse.” It was supposed to, but not until after midnight.

Kurtz was nodding. “Uh-huh. Plus I’m going to say fifty more from up north, seventy or so from St Cap’s and those little places down south… and our guys. Don’t forget them. The masks seem to work, but we’ve already picked up four cases of Ripley in the medical debriefings. The men, of course, don’t know.”

“Don’t they?”

“Let me rephrase that,” Kurtz said. “Based on their behavior, I have no reason to believe the men know. All right?”

Owen shrugged.

“The story,” Kurtz resumed, “will be that the detainees are being flown to a top-secret medical installation, a kind of Area 51, where they will undergo further examination, and, if necessary, long-term treatment. There will never be another official statement concerning them-not if all goes according to plan-but there will be time-release leaks over the next two years: encroaching infection despite best medical efforts to stop it… madness… grotesque physical changes better left undescribed… and finally, death comes as a mercy. Far from being outraged, the public will be relieved.”

“While in reality…?”

He wanted to hear Kurtz say it, but he should have known better. There were no bugs here (except, maybe, for the ones hiding between Kurtz’s ears), but the boss’s caution was ingrained. He raised one hand, made a gun of his thumb and forefinger, and dropped his thumb three times. His eyes never left Owen’s as he did this. Crocodile’s eyes, Owen thought.

“All of them?” Owen asked. “The ones who aren’t showing Ripley-Positive as well as those who are? And where does that leave us? The soldiers who also show Negative?”

“The laddies who are okay now are going to stay okay,” Kurtz said. “Those showing Ripley were all careless. One of them… well, there’s a little girl out there, about four years old, cute as the devil. You almost expect her to start tap-dancing across the barn floor and singing “On the Good Ship Lollipop."”

Kurtz obviously thought he was being witty, and Owen supposed that in a way he was, but Owen himself was overcome by a wave of intense horror. There’s a four-year-old out there, he thought. Just four years old, how about that.

“She’s cute, and she’s hot,” Kurtz was saying. “Visible Ripley on the inside of one wrist, growing at her hairline, growing in the corner of one eye. Classic spots. Anyway, this soldier gave her a candybar, just like she was some starving Kosovar rug-muncher, and she gave him a kiss. Sweet as pie, a real Kodak moment, only now he’s got a lipstick print that ain’t lipstick growing on his cheek.” Kurtz grimaced. “He had himself a little tiny shaving cut, barely visible, but there goes your ballgame. Similar stuff with the others. The rules don’t change, Owen; carelessness gets you killed. You may go along lucky for awhile, but in the end it never fails. Carelessness gets you killed. Most of our guys, I’m delighted to say, will walk away from this. We’re going to face scheduled medical exams for the rest of our lives, not to mention the occasional surprise exam, but look at the upside-they’re gonna catch your ass-cancer wicked early.”

“The civilians who appear clean? What about them?”

Kurtz leaned forward, now at his most charming, his most persuasively sane. You were supposed to be flattered by this, to feel yourself one of the fortunate few to see Kurtz with his mask (“two parts Patton, one part Rasputin, add water, stir and serve”) laid aside. It had worked on Owen before, but not now. Rasputin wasn’t the mask; this was the mask.

Yet even now-here was the hell of it-he wasn’t completely sure.

“Owen, Owen, Owen! Use your brain-that good brain God gave you! We can monitor our own without raising suspicions or opening the door to a worldwide panic-and there’s going to be enough panic anyway, after our narrowly elected President slays the phooka horse. We couldn’t do that with three hundred civilians. And if we really flew them out to New Mexico, put them up in some model village for fifty or seventy years at the taxpayers” expense? What if one or more of them escaped? Or what if-and I think this is what the smart boys are really afraid of-given time, the Ripley mutates? That instead of dying off, it turns into something a lot more infectious and a lot less vulnerable to the environmental factors that are killing it here in Maine? If the Ripley’s intelligent, it’s dangerous. Even if it isn’t, what if it serves the grayboys as a kind of beacon, an interstellar road-flare marking our world out-yum-yum, come and get it, these guys are tasty… and there’s plenty of them?”

“You’re saying better safe than sorry.”

Kurtz leaned back in his chair and beamed. “That’s it. That’s it in a nutshell.”

Well, Owen thought, it might be the nut, but the shell is something we’re not talking about. We watch out for our own. We’re merciless if we have to be, but even Kurtz watches out for his laddie-bucks. Civilians, on the other hand, are just civilians. If you need to burn em, they go up pretty easy.

“If you doubt there’s a God and that He spends at least some of His time looking out for good old Homo sap, you might look at the way we re coming out of this,” Kurtz said. “The flashlights arrived early and were reported-one of the reports came from the store owner, Reginald Gosselin, himself Then the grayboys arrive at the only time of year when there are actually people in these godforsaken Woods, and two of them saw the ship go down.”

“That was lucky.”

“God’s grace is what it was. Their ship crashes, their presence is known, the cold kills both them and the galactic dandruff they brought along.” He ticked the points off rapidly on his long fingers, his white eyelashes blinking. “But that’s not all. They do some implants and the goddam things don’t work-far from establishing a harmonious relationship with their hosts, they turn cannibal and kill them.

“The animal kill-off went well-we’ve censused something like a hundred thousand critters, and there’s already one hell of a barbecue going on over by the Castle County line. In the spring or summer we would’ve needed to worry about bugs carrying the Ripley out of the zone, but not now. Not in November.”

“Some animals must have gotten through.”

“Animals and people both, likely. But the Ripley spreads slowly. We’re going to be all right on this because we netted the vast majority of infected hosts, because the ship has been destroyed, and because what they brought us smolders rather than blazes. We’ve sent them a simple message: come in peace or come with your rayguns blazing, but don’t try it this way again, because it doesn’t work. We don’t think they will come again, or at least not for awhile. They played fiddly-fuck for half a century before getting this far. Our only regret is that we didn’t secure the ship for the science-boffins but it might’ve been too Ripley-infected, anyway. Do you know what our great fear has been? That either the grayboys or the Ripley would find a Typhoid Mary, someone who could carry it and spread it without catching it him-or herself”.”

“Are you sure there isn’t such a person?”

“Almost sure. If there is… well, that’s what the cordon’s for.” Kurtz smiled. “We lucked out, soldier. The odds are against a Typhoid Mary, the grayboys are dead, and all the Ripley is confined to the Jefferson Tract. Luck or God. Take your choice.”

Kurtz lowered his head and pinched the bridge of his nose high up, like a man suffering a sinus infection. When he looked up again, his eyes were swimming. Crocodile tears, Owen thought, but in truth he wasn’t sure. And he had no access to Kurtz’s mind. Either the telepathic wave had receded too far for that, or Kurtz had found a way to slam the door. Yet when Kurtz spoke again, Owen was almost positive he was hearing the real Kurtz, a human being and not Tick-Tock the Croc.

“This is it for me, Owen. Once this job is finished, I’m going to punch my time. There’ll be work here for another four days, I’d guess-maybe a week, if this storm’s as bad as they say-and it’ll be nasty, but the real nightmare’s tomorrow morning. I can hold up my end, I guess, but after that… well, I’m eligible for full retirement, and I’m going to give them their choice: pay me or kill me. I think they’ll pay, because I know where too many of the bodies are buried-that’s a lesson I learned from J. Edgar Hoover-but I’ve almost reached the point of not caring. This won’t be the worst one I’ve ever been involved in, in Haiti we did eight hundred in a single hour-1989, that was, and I still dream about it-but this is worse. By far. Because those poor schmucks out there in the barn and the paddock and the corral… they’re Americans. Folks who drive Chevvies, shop at Kmart, and never miss ER. The thought of shooting Americans, massacring Americans… that turns my stomach. I’ll do it only because it needs to be done in order to bring closure to this business, and because most of them would die anyway, and much more horribly. Capish?”

Owen Underhill said nothing. He thought he was keeping his face properly expressionless, but anything he said would likely give away his sinking horror. He had known this was cormng, but to actually hear it…

In his mind’s eye he saw the soldiers drifting toward the fence through the snow, heard the loudspeakers summoning the detainees in the barn. He had never been part of an operation like this, he’d missed Haiti, but he knew how it was supposed to go. How it would go.

Kurtz was watching him closely.

“I won’t say all is forgiven for that foolish stunt you pulled this afternoon, that water’s under the bridge, but you owe me one, buck. I don’t need ESP to know how you feel about what I’m telling you, and I’m not going to waste my breath telling you to grow up and face reality. All I can tell you is that I need you. You have to help me this one time.”

The swimming eyes. The infirm twitch, barely perceptible, at the corner of his mouth. It was easy to forget that Kurtz had blown a man’s foot off not ten minutes ago.

Owen thought: If I help him do this, it doesn’t matter if I actually pull a trigger or not, I’m as damned as the men who herded the Jews into the showers at Bergen-Belsen.

“If we start at eleven, we can be done at eleven-thirty,” Kurtz said. “Noon at the very worst. Then it’s behind us.”

“Except for the dreams.”

“Yes. Except for them. Will you help me, Owen?”

Owen nodded. He had come this far, and wouldn’t let go of the rope now, damned or not. At the very least he could help make it merciful… as merciful as any mass murder could be. Later he would be struck by the lethal absurdity of this idea, but when you were with Kurtz, up close and with his eyes holding yours, perspective was a joke. His madness was probably much more infectious than the Ripley, in the end.

“Good.” Kurtz slumped back in his rocker, looking relieved and drained. He took out his cigarettes again, peered in, then held the pack out. “Two left. Join me?”

Owen shook his head. “Not this time, boss.”

“Then get on out of here. If necessary, shag ass over to the infirmary and get some Sonata.”

“I don’t think I’ll need that,” Owen said. He would, of course he needed it already-but he wouldn’t take it. Better to be awake. “All right, then. Off you go.” Kurtz let him get as far as the door. “And Owen?”

Owen turned back, zipping his parka. He could hear the wind out there now. Building, starting to blow seriously, as it had not during the relatively harmless Alberta Clipper that had come through that morning.

“Thanks,” Kurtz said. One large and absurd tear overspilled his left eye and ran down his cheek. Kurtz seemed unaware. In that moment Owen loved and pitied him. In spite of everything, which included knowing better. “Thank you, buck.”

Henry stood in the thickening snow, turned away from the worst of the wind and looking over his left shoulder at the Winnebago, waiting for Underhill to come back out. He was alone now-the storm had driven the rest of them back into the barn, where there was a heater. Rumors would already be growing tall in the warmth, Henry supposed. Better the rumors than the truth that was right in front of them.

He scratched at his leg, realized what he was doing, and looked around, turning in a complete circle. No prisoners; no guards. Even in the thickening snow the compound was almost as bright as noonday, and he could see well in every direction. For the time being, at least, he was alone.

Henry bent and untied the shirt knotted around the place where the turnsignal stalk had cut his skin. He then spread the slit in his bluejeans. The men who had taken him into custody had made this same examination in the back of the truck where they had already stored five other refugees (on the way back to Gosselin’s they had picked up three more). At that point he had been clean.

He wasn’t clean now. A delicate thread of red lace grew down the scabbed center of the wound. If he hadn’t known what he was looking for, he might have mistaken it for a fresh seep of blood.

Byrus, he thought. Ah, fuck. Goodnight, Mrs Calabash, wherever you are.

A flash of light winked at the top of his vision. Henry straightened and saw Underhill just pulling the door of the Winnebago shut. Quickly, Henry retied the shirt around the hole in his jeans and then approached the fence. A voice in his head asked what he’d do if he called to Underhill and the man just kept on going. That voice also wanted to know if Henry really intended to give Jonesy up.

He watched Underhill trudge toward him in the glare of the security lights, his head bent against the snow and the intensifying wind.

The door closed. Kurtz sat looking at it, smoking and slowly rocking. How much of his pitch had Owen bought? Owen was bright, Owen was a survivor, Owen was not without idealism… and Kurtz thought Owen had bought it all, with hardly a single dicker. Because in the end most people believed what they wanted to believe. John Dillinger had also been a survivor, the wiliest of the thirties desperadoes, but he had gone to the Biograph Theater with Anna Sage just the same. Manhattan Melodrama had been the show, and when it was over, the feds had shot Dillinger down in the alley beside the theater like the dog he was. Anna Sage had also believed what she wanted to believe, but they deported her ass back to Poland just the same.

No one was going to leave Gosselin’s Market tomorrow except for his picked cadre-the twelve men and two women who made up Imperial Valley. Owen Underhill would not be among them, although he could have been. Until Owen had put the grayboys on the common channel, Kurtz had been sure he would be. But things changed. So Buddha had said, and on that one, at least, the old chink heathen had spoken true.

“You let me down, buck,” Kurtz said. He had lowered his mask to smoke, and it bobbed against his grizzled throat as he spoke. “You let me down.” Kurtz had let Owen Underhill get away with letting him down once. But twice?

“Never,” Kurtz said. “Never in life.”

Chapter Fourteen GOING SOUTH

Mr Gray ran the snowmobile down into a ravine which held a small frozen creek. He drove north along this for the remaining mile to 1-95. Two or three hundred yards from the lights of the army vehicles (there were only a few now, moving slowly in the thickening snow), he stopped long enough to consult the part of Jonesy’s mind that he-it-could get at. There were files and files of stuff that wouldn’t fit into Jonesy’s little office stronghold, and Mr Gray found what he was looking for easily enough. There was no switch to turn off the Arctic Cat’s headlight. Mr Gray swung Jonesy’s legs off the snowmobile, looked for a rock, picked it up with Jonesy’s right hand, and smashed the headlight dark. Then he remounted and drove on. The Cat’s fuel was almost gone, but that was all right; the vehicle had served its purpose.

The pipe which carried the creek beneath the turnpike was big enough for the snowmobile, but not for the snowmobile and its rider. Mr Gray dismounted again. Standing beside the snowmobile, he revved the throttle and sent the machine bumping and yawing into the pipe. It went no more than ten feet before stopping, but that was far enough to keep it from being seen from the air if the snow lightened, allowing low-level recon.

Mr Gray set Jonesy to climbing up the turnpike embankment. He stopped just shy of the guardrails and lay down on his back. Here he was temporarily protected from the worst of the wind. The climb had released a last little cache of endorphins, and Jonesy felt his kidnapper sampling them, enjoying them the way Jonesy himself might have enjoyed a cocktail, or a hot drink after watching a football game on a brisk October afternoon.

He realized, with no surprise, that he hated Mr Gray.

Then Mr Gray as an entity-something that could actually be hated-was gone again, replaced by the cloud Jonesy had first experienced back in the cabin when the creature’s head had exploded. It was going out, as it had gone out in search of Emil Brodsky. It had needed Dawg because the information about how to get the snowmobile started hadn’t been in Jonesy’s files. Now it needed something else. A ride was the logical assumption.

And what was left here? What was left guarding the office where the last shred of Jonesy cowered-Jonesy who had been turned out of his own body like lint out of a pocket? The cloud, of course; the stuff Jonesy had breathed in. Stuff that should have killed him but had for some reason not done so.

The cloud couldn’t think, not the way Mr Gray could. The man of the house (who was now Mr Gray instead of Mr Jones) had departed, leaving the place under the control of the thermostats, the refrigerator, the stove. And, in case of trouble, the smoke detector and the burglar alarm, which automatically dialed the police.

Still, with Mr Gray gone, he might be able to get out of the office. Not to regain control; if he tried that, the redblack cloud would report him and Mr Gray would return from his scouting expedition at once. Jonesy would almost certainly be seized before he could retreat to the safety of the Tracker Brothers office with its bulletin board and its dusty floor and its one dirt-crusted window on the world… only there were four crescent-shaped clean patches in that dirt, weren’t there? Patches where four boys had once leaned their foreheads, hoping to see the picture that was pinned to the bulletin board now: Tina Jean Schlossinger with her skirt up.

No, seizing control was far beyond his ability and he’d better accept that, bitter as it was.

But he might be able to get to his files.

Was there any reason to risk it? Any advantage? There might be, if he knew what Mr Gray wanted. Beyond a ride, that was. And speaking of that, a ride where?

The answer was unexpected because it came in Duddits’s voice: Ow. Ih-her Ay onna oh ow.

Mr Gray wanna go south.

Jonesy stepped back from his dirty window on the world. There wasn’t much to be seen out there just now, anyway; snow and dark and shadowy trees. This morning’s snow had been the appetizer; here was the main course.

Mr Gray wanna go south.

How far? And why? What was the big picture?

On these subjects Duddits was silent.

Jonesy turned and was surprised to see that the route-map and the picture of the girl were no longer on the bulletin board. Where they had been were four color snapshots of four boys. Each had the same background, Derryjunior High, and the same caption beneath: SCHOOL DAYS, 1978. Jonesy himself on the far left, face split in a trusting ear-to-ear grin that now broke his heart. Beav next to him, the Beav’s grin revealing the missing tooth in front, victim of a skating fall, which had been replaced by a false one a year or so later… before high school, anyway. Pete, with his broad, olive-tinted face and his shamefully short hair, mandated by his father, who said he hadn’t fought in Korea so his kid could look like a hippie. And Henry on the end, Henry in his thick glasses that made Jonesy think of Danny Dunn, Boy Detective, star of the mysteries Jonesy had read as a kid.

Beaver, Pete, Henry. How he had loved them, and how unfairly sudden the severing of their long friendship had been. No, it wasn’t a bit fair-

All at once the picture of Beaver Clarendon came alive, scaring the hell out of Jonesy. Beav’s eyes widened and he spoke in a low voice. “His head was off, remember? It was laying in the ditch and his eyes were full of mud. What a fuckarow! I mean, Jesus-Christ-bananas.”

Oh my God, Jonesy thought, as it came back to him-the one thing about that first hunting trip to Hole in the Wall that he had forgotten… or suppressed. Had all of them suppressed it? Maybe so. Probably so. Because over the years since, they had talked about everything in their childhoods, all those shared memories… except that one.

His head was qff… his eyes were full of mud. Something had happened to them then, something that had to do with what was happening to him now. If only I knew what it was, Jonesy thought. If I only knew.

Andy Janas had lost the other three trucks in his little squadron had gotten ahead of them because they weren’t used to driving in shit like this and he was. He had grown up in northern Minnesota, and you better believe he was used to it. He was by himself in one of Chevrolet’s finer Army vehicles, a modified four-wheel-drive pickup, and he had the four-wheel drive engaged tonight. His father hadn’t raised any fools.

Still, the turnpike was mostly clear; a couple of Army plows had gone by an hour or so ago (he would be catching up to them soon, he guessed, and when he did he would cut speed and fall in behind them like a good boy), and no more than two or three inches had piled up on the concrete since then. The real problem was the wind, which lifted the fluff and turned the road into a ghost. You had the reflectors to guide you, though. Keeping the reflectors in sight was the trick those other gomers didn’t understand… or maybe with the convoy trucks and the Humvees, the headlights were set too high to pick the reflectors up properly. And when the wind really gusted, even the reflectors disappeared; the goddam world went totally white and you had to take your foot off the go-pedal until the air stilled again and just try to stay on course in the meantime. He would be all right, and if anything happened, he was in radio contact and more plows would be coming up behind, keeping the southbound barrel of the turnpike open all the way from Presque Isle to Millinocket.

In the back of his truck were two triple-wrapped packages. In one were the bodies of two deer which had been killed by the Ripley. In the other-this Janas found moderately to seriously gruesome was the body of a grayboy turning slowly to a kind of reddish-orange soup. Both were bound for the docs at Blue Base, which had been set up at a place called…

Janas looked up at the driver’s visor. There, held in place by a rubber band, was a piece of notepaper and a ballpoint pen. Scrawled on the paper was GOSSELIN’s STO, TAKE EX 16, TURN L.

He’d be there in an hour. Maybe less. The docs would undoubtedly tell him they had all the animal samples they needed and the deer-carcasses would be burned, but they might want the grayboy, if the little fella hadn’t turned entirely to mush. The cold might retard that process a little bit, but whether it did or didn’t was really none of Andy Janas’s nevermind. His concern was to get there, turn over his samples, and then await debriefing from whoever was in charge of asking questions about the q-zone’s northern-and most quiet perimeter. While he was awaiting, he would grab some hot coffee and a great big plate of scrambled eggs. If the right someone was around, he might even be able to promote something to spike his coffee with. That would be good. Get a little buzz going, then just hunker down and

pull over

Janas frowned, shook his head, scratched his ear as if something-a flea, perhaps-had bitten him there. The goddam wind gusted hard enough to shake the truck. The turnpike disappeared and so did the reflectors. He was encased in total white again and he had no doubt that this scared the everloving bejabbers out of the other guys, but not him, he was Mr Minnesota-Twins-Taking-Care-of-Business, just puff the old foot off the gas (and never rm'nd the brake, when you were driving in a snowstorm the brake was the best way he knew to turn a good n’de bad), just coast and wait for

pull over

“Huh?” He looked at the radio, but there was nothing there, just static and dim background chatter.

pull over

“Ow!” Janas cried, and grabbed at his head, which suddenly hurt like a motherfucker. The olive-green pickup swerved, skidded, then came back under control as his hands automatically steered into the skid. His foot was still off the gas and the Chevy’s speedometer needle unwound rapidly.

The plows had made a narrow path down the center of the two southbound lanes. Now Janas steered into the thicker snow to the right of this path, the truck’s wheels spurning up a haze of snow which the wind quickly whipped away. The guardrail reflectors were very bright, glaring in the dark like cat’s eyes.

Janas screamed with pain. From a great distance he heard himself shouting, “Okay, okay, I am! just stop it! Quit yanking me!” Through watering eyes he saw a dark form rear up on the far side of the guardrails not fifty feet ahead. As the headlights struck the shape fully, he saw it was a man wearing a parka.

Andy Janas’s hands no longer felt like his own. They felt like gloves with someone else’s hands inside them. This was an odd and entirely unpleasant sensation. They turned the steering wheel farther to the left entirely without his help, and the pickup truck coasted to a stop in front of the man in the parka.

This was his chance, with Mr Gray’s attention entirely diverted. Jonesy sensed that if he thought about it he would lose his courage, so he didn’t think. He simply acted, knocking back the bolt on the office door with the heel of his hand and yanking the door open.

He had never been inside Tracker Brothers as a kid (and it had been gone since the big storm of “85), but he was pretty sure that it had never looked like what he saw now. Outside the dingy office was a room so vast Jonesy couldn’t see the end of it. Overhead were endless acres of fluorescent bars. Beneath them, stacked in enormous columns, were millions of cardboard boxes.

No, Jonesy thought. Not millions. Trillions.

Yes, probably trillions was closer. Thousands of narrow aisles ran between them. He was standing at one edge of eternity’s own warehouse, and the idea of finding anything in it was ludicrous. If he ventured away from the door into his office hideout, he would become lost in no time. Mr Gray wouldn’t need to bother with him; Jonesy would wander until he died, lost in a mind-boggling wasteland of stored boxes.

That’s not true. I could no more get lost in there than I could in my own bedroom. Nor will I have to hunt for what I want. 7his is my place. Welcome to your own head, big boy.

The concept was so huge that it made him feel weak… only he couldn’t afford to be weak right now, or to hesitate. Mr Gray, everyone’s favorite invader from the Great Beyond, wouldn’t be occupied with the truck driver for long, If Jonesy meant to move some of these files to safety, he had to do it right now. The question was, which ones?

Duddits, his mind whispered. This has something to do with Duddits. You know it does. He’s been o your mind a lot lately. The other guys were thinking of him, too. Duddits is what held you and Henry and Pete and Beaver together-you’ve always known that, but now you know something else, as well. Don’t you?

Yes. He knew that his accident in March had been caused by thinking he’d seen Duddits once again being teased by Richie Grenadeau and his friends. Only “teased” was a ludicrously inapt word for what had been going on behind Tracker Brothers that day, wasn’t it? Tortured was the word. And when he’d seen that torture being reenacted, he had plunged into the street without looking, and-

His head was off, Beaver suddenly said from the storeroom’s overhead speakers, his voice so loud and sudden it made Jonesy cringe. It was laying in the ditch and his eyes were full of mud, A d sooner or later every murderer pays the price. What a fuckarow!

Richie’s head. Richie Grenadeau’s head. And Jonesy had no time for this. He was a trespasser in his own head now, and he’d do well to move quickly.

When he had first looked out at this enormous storeroom, all the boxes had been plain and unmarked. Now he saw that those at the head of the row closest to him were labeled in black grease-pencil: DUDDITS. Was that surprising? Fortuitous? Not at all. They were his memories, after all, stored flat and neatly folded in each of the trillions of boxes, and when it came to memory, the healthy mind was able to access them pretty much at will.

Need something to move them with, Jonesy thought, and when he looked around he was not exactly amazed to see a bright red hand-dolly. This was a magic place, a make-it-up-as-you-go-along place, and the most marvelous thing about it, Jonesy supposed, was that everybody had one.

Moving quickly, he stacked some of the boxes marked DUDDITS on the dolly and ran them into the Tracker Brothers office at a trot. He dumped them by tipping the dolly forward, spilling them across the floor. Untidy, but he could worry about the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval later.

He ran back out, feeling for Mr Gray, but Mr Gray was still with the truck-driver… Janas, his name was. There was the cloud, but the cloud didn’t sense him. It was as dumb as… well, as dumb as fungus.

Jonesy got the rest of the DUDDITS boxes, and saw that the next stack had also acquired scribbled grease-pencil labels. These latter said DERRY, and there were too many to take. The question was whether or not he needed to take any of them.

He pondered this as he pushed the second load of memory-boxes into the office. Of course the Derry boxes would be stacked near the Duddits boxes; memory was both the act and the art of association. The question remained whether or not his Derry memories mattered. How was he supposed to know that when he didn’t know what Mr Gray wanted?

But he did know.

Mr Gray wanna go south.

Derry was south.

Jonesy sprinted back into the memory storehouse, pushing the dolly ahead of him. He’d take as many of the boxes marked DERRY as he could, and hope they were the right ones. He would also hope that he sensed Mr Gray’s return in time. Because if he was caught out here, he would be swatted like a fly.

Janas watched, horrified, as his left hand reached out and opened the driver’s-side door of his truck, letting in the cold, the snow, and the relentless wind. “Don’t hurt me anymore, mister, please don’t, you can have a ride if you want a ride, just don’t hurt me anymore, my head-”

Something suddenly rushed through Andy Janas’s mind. It was like a whirlwind with eyes. He felt it prying into his current orders, his expected arrival time at Blue Base… and what he knew of Derry, which was nothing. His orders had taken him through Bangor, he’d never been to Derry in his life.

He felt the whirlwind pull back and had one moment of delirious relief-I don’t have what it needs, it’s going to let me go-and then understood that the thing in his mind had no intention of letting him go. It needed the truck, for one thing. It needed to shut his mouth, for another.

Janas put up a brief but bitterly energetic struggle. It was this unexpected resistance that allowed Jonesy time to remove at least one stack of the boxes marked DERRY. Then Mr Gray once more resumed his place at Janas’s motor controls.

Janas saw his hand shoot out and up to the driver’s-side visor. His hand gripped the ballpoint pen and yanked it free, snapping the rubber band which held it.

No! Janas shouted, but it was too late. He caught a shiny zipping glitter as his hand, which was gripping the ballpoint like a dagger, plunged the pen into his staring eye. There was a popping sound and he jittered back and forth behind the wheel like a badly managed puppet, his fist digging the pen in deeper and deeper, up to the halfway mark, then to the three-quarter mark, his split eyeball now running down the side of his face like a freakish tear. The tip struck something that felt like thin gristle, bound up for a moment, then passed through into the meat of his brain.

You bastard, he thought, what are you, you bas-

There was a final brilliant flash of light inside his head and then everything went dark. Janas slumped forward over the wheel. The pickup’s horn began to blow.

Mr Gray hadn’t gotten much from Janas-mostly that unexpected struggle for control at the end-but one thing which came through clearly was that Janas wasn’t on his own. The transport column of which he had been a part had strung out because of the storm, but they were all headed to the same place, which Janas had identified in his mind as both Blue Base and Gosselin’s. There was a man there that Janas had been afraid of, the man in charge, but Mr Gray could not have cared less about Creepy Kurtz/the boss/Crazy Abe. Nor did he have to care, since he had no intention of going anywhere near Gosselin’s store. This place was different and this species, although only semi-sentient, composed mostly of emotions, was different, too. They fought. Mr Gray had no idea why, but they did.

Best to finish it quickly. And to that end, he had discovered an excellent delivery system.

Using Jonesy’s hands, Mr Gray pulled Janas from behind the wheel and carried him to the guardrails. He threw the body over the side, not bothering to watch as it tumbled down the slope to the frozen streambed. He went back to the truck, looked fixedly at the two plastic-wrapped bundles in the back, and nodded. The animal corpses were good for nothing. The other, though… that would be useful. It was rich with what he needed.

He looked up suddenly, Jonesy’s eyes widening in the blowing snow. The owner of this body was out of its hiding place. Vulnerable. Good, because that consciousness was starting to annoy

him, a constant muttering (sometimes rising to a panicky squeal) on the lower level of his thought-process. Mr Gray paused a moment longer, trying to make his mind blank, not wanting Jonesy to have the slightest warning… and then he pounced.He didn’t know what he had expected, but not this. Not this dazzling white light.

Jonesy was nearly caught out. Would have been caught out if not for the fluorescents with which he had lit his mental storeroom. This place might not actually exist, but it was real enough to him, and that made it real enough to Mr Gray when Mr Gray arrived.

Jonesy, who was pushing the dolly filled with boxes marked DERRY, saw Mr Gray appear like magic at the head of a corridor of high-stacked cartons. It was the rudimentary humanoid that had been standing behind him at Hole in the Wall, the thing he had visited in the hospital. The dull black eyes were finally alive, hungry. It had crept up, caught him outside his office refuge, and it meant to have him.

But then its bulge of a head recoiled, and before its three-fingered hand shielded its eyes (it had no lids, not even any lashes), Jonesy saw an expression on its gray sketch of a face that had to be bewilderment. Maybe even pain. It had been out there, in the snowy dark, disposing of the driver’s body. It had come in here unprepared for the discount-mart glare. He saw something else, too: The invader had borrowed its expression of surprise from the host. For a moment, Mr Gray was a horrible caricature of Jonesy himself.

Its surprise gave Jonesy just enough time. Pushing the dolly ahead of him almost without realizing it and feeling like the imprisoned princess in some fucked-up fairy-tale, he ran into the office. He sensed rather than saw Mr Gray reaching out for him with his three-fingered hands (the gray skin was raw-looking, like very old uncooked meat), and slammed the office door just ahead of their clutch. He bumped the dolly with his bad hip as he spun around-he accepted that he was inside his own head, but all of this was nevertheless completely real-and just managed to run the bolt before Mr Gray could turn the knob and force his way in. Jonesy engaged the thumb-lock in the center of the doorknob for good measure. Had the thumb-lock been there before, or had he added it? He couldn’t remember.

Jonesy stepped back, sweating, and this time ran his butt into the handle of the dolly. In front of him, the doorknob turned back and forth, back and forth. Mr Gray was out there, in charge of the rest of his mind-and his body, as well-but he couldn’t get in here. Couldn’t force the door, didn’t have the heft to break it down, didn’t have the wit to pick the lock.

Why? How could that be?

“Duddits,” he whispered. “No bounce, no play.”

The doorknob rattled. “Let me in!” Mr Gray snarled, and to Jonesy he didn’t sound like an emissary from another galaxy but like anyone who has been denied what he wants and is pissed off about it. Was that because he was interpreting Mr Gray’s behavior in terms which he, Jonesy, understood? Humanizing the alien? Translating him?

“Let…me…IN!'Jonesy responded without thinking: “Not by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin.” And thought: To which you say, “Then I’ll huff… and I’ll PUFF…and I’ll BLO W your house in!”

But Mr Gray only rattled the knob harder than ever. He was not used to being balked in this manner (or in any manner, Jonesy guessed) and was very pissed. Janas’s momentary resistance had startled him, but this was resistance on a whole other level.

“Where are you?” Mr Gray called angrily. “How can you be in there? Come out!” Jonesy didn’t reply, only stood among the tumbled boxes, listening. He was almost positive Mr Gray couldn’t get in, but it would be just as well not to provoke him.And after a little more knob-rattling, he sensed Mr Gray leaving him. Jonesy went to the window, stepping over the tumbled boxes marked DUDDITS and DERRY to get there, and stared out into the snowy night.

Mr Gray climbed Jonesy’s body back behind the wheel of the truck, slammed the door, and pushed the accelerator. The truck bolted forward, then lost purchase. All four wheels spun, and the truck skidded into the guardrails with a jarring bang.

“Fuck!” Mr Gray cried, accessing Jonesy’s profanity almost without being aware of it. “Jesus-Christ-bananas! Kiss my bender! Doodlyfuck! Bite my bag!”

Then he stopped and accessed Jonesy’s driving skills again. Jonesy had some information on driving in weather like this, but nowhere near as much as Janas had possessed. Janas was gone, however, his files erased. What Jonesy knew would have to do. The important thing was to get beyond what Janas had thought of as the “q-zone”. Beyond the q-zone he would be safe. Janas had been clear about that.

Jonesy’s foot pressed down on the gas pedal again, much more gently this time. The truck started to move. Jonesy’s hands steered the Chevrolet back into the fading path left by the plow. Under the dash, the radio crackled to life. “Tubby One, this is Tubby Four. I got a rig off the road and turned over on the median. Do you copy?”

Mr Gray consulted the files. What Jonesy knew about military communication was skimpy, mostly gleaned from books and something called the movies, but it might do. He took the mike, felt for the button Jonesy seemed to think would be on the side, found it, pushed it. “I copy,” he said. Would Tubby Four be able to tell that Tubby One was no longer Andy Janas? Based on Jonesy’s files, Mr Gray doubted it.

“A bunch of us are going to get him up, see if we can get him back on the road. He’s got the goddam food, you copy?” Mr Gray pushed the button. “Got the goddam food, copy.”

A longer pause, long enough for him to wonder if he’d said something wrong, stepped in some kind of a trap, and then the radio said: “We’ll have to wait for the next bunch of plows, I guess. You might as well keep rolling, over?” Tubby Four sounded disgusted. Jonesy’s files suggested that might be because Janas, with his superior driving skills, had gotten too far ahead to help. All this was good. He would’ve kept moving in any case, but it was good to have Tubby Four’s official sanction, if that’s what it was.

He checked Jonesy’s files (which he now saw as Jonesy saw them-boxes in a vast room) and said, “Copy. Tubby One, over and out.” And, as an afterthought: “Have a nice night.”

The white stuff was horrible. Treacherous. Nonetheless, Mr Gray risked driving a little faster. As long as he was in the area controlled by Creepy Kurtz’s armed force, he might be vulnerable. Once out of the net, however, he would be able to complete his business very quickly.

What he needed had to do with a place called Derry, and when Mr Gray went into the big storeroom again, he discovered an amazing thing: his unwilling host had either known that or sensed it, because it was the Derry files Jonesy had been moving when Mr Gray had returned and almost caught him.

Mr Gray searched the boxes that were left with sudden anxiety, and then relaxed.

What he needed was still here.

Lying on its side near the box which contained the most important information was another box, very small and very dusty. Written on the side in black pencil was the word DUDDITS. If there were other Duddits-boxes, they had been removed. Only this one had been overlooked.

More out of curiosity than anything else (his curiosity also borrowed from Jonesy’s store of emotions), Mr Gray opened it. Inside was a bright yellow container made of plastic. Outlandish figures capered upon it, figures Jonesy’s files identified as both cartoons and the Scooby-Doos. On one end was a sticker reading I BELONG TO DUDDITS CAVELL, 19 MAPLE LANE, DERRY, MAINE. IF THE BOY I BELONG TO IS LOST, CALL

This was followed by numbers too faint and illegible to read, probably a communication-code Jonesy no longer remembered. Mr Gray tossed the yellow plastic container, probably meant for carrying food, aside. It could mean nothing… although if that was really the case, why had Jonesy risked his existence getting the other DUDDITS-boxes (as well as some of those marked DERRY) to safety?

DUDDITS=CHILDHOOD FRIEND. Mr Gray knew this from his initial encounter with Jonesy in “the hospital”… and if he had known what an annoyance Jonesy would turn out to be, he would have erased his host’s consciousness right then. Neither the term CHILDHOOD nor the term FRIEND had any emotional resonance for Mr Gray, but he understood what they meant. What he didn’t understand was how Jonesy’s childhood friend could have anything to do with what was happening tonight.

One possibility occurred to him: his host had gone mad. Being turned out of his own body had driven him insane, and he’d simply taken the boxes closest to the door of his perplexing stronghold, assigning them in his madness an importance they did not actually have.

“Jonesy,” Mr Gray said, speaking the name with Jonesy’s vocal cords. These creatures were mechanical geniuses (of course they would have to be, to survive in such a cold world), but their thought-processes were odd and crippled: rusty mentation sunk in corrosive pools of emotion. Their telepathic abilities were minus; the transient telepathy they were now experiencing thanks to the byrus and the kim (“flashlights”, they called them) bewildered and frightened them. It was difficult for Mr Gray to believe they hadn’t murdered their entire species yet. Creatures incapable of real thought were maniacs-this was surely beyond argument.

Meanwhile, no answer from the creature in that strange, impregnable room.

“Jonesy.”

Nothing. But Jonesy was listening. Mr Gray was sure of it.

“There is no necessity for this suffering, Jonesy. See us for what we are-not invaders but saviors. Buddies.”

Mr Gray considered the various boxes. For a creature that couldn’t actually think much, Jonesy had an enormous amount of storage capacity. Question for another day: why would beings who thought so poorly have so much retrieval capability? Did it have to do with their overblown emotional makeup? And the emotions were disturbing. He found Jonesy’s emotions very disturbing. Always there. Always on call. And so much of them.

“War… famine… ethnic cleansing… killing for peace… massacring the heathen for Jesus… homosexual people beaten to death… bugs in bottles, the bottles sitting on top of missiles aimed at every city in the world… come on, Jonesy, compared to type-four anthrax, what’s a little byrus between friends? Jesus-Christ-bananas, you’ll all be dead in fifty years, anyway! This is good! Relax and enjoy it!”

“You made that guy stick a pen in his eye.”

Grumpy, but better than nothing. The wind gusted, the pickup skidded, and Mr Gray rode with it, using Jonesy’s skills. The visibility was almost nil; he had dropped to twenty miles an hour and might do well to pull over completely for awhile once he cleared Kurtz’s net. Meanwhile, he could chat with his host. Mr Gray doubted that he could talk Jonesy out of his room, but chatting at least passed the time.

“I had to, buddy. I needed the truck. I’m the last one.”

“And you never lose.”

“Right,” Mr Gray agreed.

“But you’ve never had a situation like this, have you? You’ve never had someone you can’t get at. “Was Jonesy taunting him? Mr Gray felt a ripple of anger. And then he said something Mr Gray had already thought of himself. “Maybe you should have killed me in the hospital. Or was that only a dream?”

Mr Gray, unsure what a dream was, didn’t bother responding. Having this barricaded mutineer in what by now should have been Mr Gray’s mind and his alone was increasingly annoying. For one thing, he didn’t like thinking of himself as “Mr Gray”-that was not his concept of himself or the species-mind of which he was a part; he did not even like to think of himself as “he”, for he was both sexes and neither. Yet now he was imprisoned by these concepts, and would be as long as the core being of Jonesy remained unabsorbed. A terrible thought occurred to Mr Gray: what if it was his concepts that had no meaning?

He hated being in this position.

“Who’s Duddits, Jonesy?”

No answer.

“Who is Richie? Why was he a shit? Why did you kill him?”

“We didn’t!”

A little tremble in the mental voice. Ah, that shot had gone home. And something interesting: Mr Gray had meant “you” in the singular, but Jonesy had taken it in the plural.

“You did, though. Or you think you did.”

“That’s a lie.”

“How silly of you to say so. I have the memories, right here in one of your boxes. There’s snow in the box. Snow and a moccasin. Brown suede. Come out and look.”

For one giddy second he thought Jonesy might do just that. If he did, Mr Gray would sweep him back to the hospital at once. Jonesy could see himself die on television. A happy ending to the movie they had been watching. And then, no more Mr Gray. just what Jonesy thought of as “the cloud”.

Mr Gray looked eagerly at the doorknob, willing it to turn. It didn’t.

“Come out.”

Nothing.

“You killed Richie, you coward! You and your friends. You… you dreamed him to death.” And although Mr Gray didn’t know what dreams were, he knew that was true. Or that Jonesy believed it was.

Nothing.

“Come out! Come out and… “He searched Jonesy’s memories. Many of them were in boxes called MOVIES, Jonesy seemed to love movies above all things, and Mr Gray plucked what he thought a particularly potent line from one of these: “… and fight like a man!”

Nothing.

You bastard, Mr Gray thought, once more dipping into the enticing pool of his host’s emotions. You son of a bitch. You stubborn asshole. Kiss my bender, you stubborn asshole.

Back in the days when Jonesy had been Jonesy, he had often expressed anger by slamming his fist down on something. Mr Gray did it now, bringing Jonesy’s fist down on the center of the truck’s wheel hard enough to honk the horn. “Tell me! Not about Richie, not about Duddits, about you! Something makes you different. I want to know what it is.”

No answer. “It’s in the crib-is that it?’still no answer, but Mr Gray heard Jonesy’s feet shuffle behind the door. And perhaps a low intake of breath. Mr Gray smiled with Jonesy’s mouth.

“Talk to me, Jonesy-we’ll play the game, we’ll pass the time. Who was Richie, besides Number 19? Why were you angry with him? Because he was a Tiger? A Derry Tiger? What were they? Who’s Duddits?”

Nothing.

The truck crept more slowly than ever through the storm, the headlights almost helpless against the swirling wall of white. Mr Gray’s voice was low, coaxing.

“You missed one of the Duddits-boxes, buddy, did you know that? There’s a box inside the box, as it happens-it’s yellow. There are Scooby-Doos on it. What are Scooby-Doos? They’re not real people, are they? Are they movies? Are they televisions? Do you want the box? Come out, Jonesy. Come out and I’ll give you the box.”

Mr Gray removed his foot from the gas pedal and let the truck coast slowly to the left, over into the thicker snow. Something was happening here, and he wanted to turn all his attention to it. Force had not dislodged Jonesy from his stronghold… but force wasn’t the only way to win a battle, or a war.

The truck stood idling by the guardrails in what was now a full-fledged blizzard. Mr Gray closed his eyes. Immediately he was in Jonesy’s brightly lit memory storehouse. Behind him were miles of stacked boxes, marching away under the fluorescent tubes. In front of him was the closed door, shabby and dirty and for some reason very, very strong. Mr Gray placed his three-fingered hands on it and began to speak in a low voice that was both intimate and urgent.

“Who is Duddits? Why did you call him after you killed Richie? Let me in, we need to talk. Why did you take some of the Derry boxes? What did you not want me to see? It doesn’t matter, I have what I need, let me in, Jonesy, better now than later.”

It was going to work. He sensed Jonesy’s blank eyes, could see Jonesy’s hand moving toward the knob and the lock.

“We always win,” Mr Gray said. He sat behind the wheel with Jonesy’s eyes closed, and in another universe the wind screamed and rocked the truck on its springs. “Open the door, Jonesy, open it now.”

Silence. And then, from less than three inches away and as surprising as a basinful of cold water dashed on warm skin: “Eat shit and die.” Mr Gray recoiled so violently that the back of Jonesy’s head connected with the truck’s rear window. The pain was sudden and shocking, a second unpleasant surprise.

He slammed a fist down again, then the other, then the first once more; he was hammering on the wheel, the horn beating out a Morse code of rage. A largely emotionless creature and part of a largely emotionless species, he had been hijacked by his host’s emotional juices-not just dipping in them this time but bathing. And again he sensed this was only happening because Jonesy was still there, an unquiet tumor in what should have been a serene and focused consciousness.

Mr Gray hammered on the wheel, hating this emotional ejaculation-what Jonesy’s mind identified as a tantrum-but loving it, too. Loving the sound of the horn when he hit it with Jonesy’s fists, loving the beat of Jonesy’s blood in Jonesy’s temples, loving the way Jonesy’s heart sped up and the sound of Jonesy’s hoarse voice crying “You fuckhead! You fuckhead!” over and over and over.

And even in the midst of this rage, a cold part of him realized what the true danger was. They always came, they always made the worlds they visited over in their image. It was the way things had always been, and the way they were meant to be.

But now…

Something’s happening to me, Mr Gray thought, aware even as the thought came that it was essentially a “Jonesy” thought. I’m starting to be human.

The fact that the idea was not without its attractions filled Mr Gray with horror.

Jonesy came out of a doze where the only sound was the soothing, lulling rhythm of Mr Gray’s voice, and saw that his hands were resting on the locks of the office door, ready to turn the lower and draw the bolt on the upper. The son of a bitch was trying to hypnotize him, and doing a pretty good job of it.

“We always win,” said the voice on the other side of the door. It was soothing, which was nice after such a stressful day, but it was also vilely complacent. The usurper who would not rest until he had it all… who took getting it all as a given. “Open the door, Jonesy, open it now.”

For a moment he almost did it, He was awake again, but he almost did it anyway. Then he remembered two sounds: the tenebrous creak of Pete’s skull as the red stuff tightened on it, and the wet squittering Janas’s eye had made when the tip of the pen pierced it.

Jonesy realized he hadn’t been awake at all, not really. But now he was.

Now he was.

Dropping his hands away from the lock and putting his lips to the door, he said “Eat shit and die” in his clearest voice. He felt Mr Gray recoil. He even felt the pain when Mr Gray thumped back against the window, and why not? They were his nerves, after all. Not to mention his head. Few things in his life gave him so much pleasure as Mr Gray’s outraged surprise, and he vaguely realized what Mr Gray already knew: the alien presence in his head was more human now.

If you could come back as a physical entity, would you still be Mr Gray? Jonesy wondered. He didn’t think so. Mr Pink, maybe, but not Mr Gray.

He didn’t know if the guy would try his Monsieur Mesmer routine again, but Jonesy decided to take no chances. He turned and went to the office window, tripping over one of the boxes and stepping over the rest. Christ, but his hip hurt. It was crazy to feel such pain when you were imprisoned in your own head (which, Henry had once assured him, had no nerves anyway, at least not once you got into the old gray matter), but the pain was there, all right. He had read that amputees sometimes felt horrible agonies and unscratchable itches in limbs that no longer existed; probably this was the same deal.

The window had returned to a tiresome view of the weedy, double-rutted driveway which had run alongside the Tracker Brothers depot back in 1978. The sky was white and overcast; apparently when his window looked into the past, time was frozen at midafternoon. The only thing the view had to recommend it was that, as he stood here taking it in, Jonesy was as far from Mr Gray as he could possibly get.

He guessed that he could change the view, if he really wanted to; could look out and see what Mr Gray was currently seeing with the eyes of Gary Jones. He had no urge to do that, however. There was nothing to look at but the snowstorm, nothing to feel but Mr Gray’s stolen rage.

Think of something else, he told himself.

What?

I don’t know-anything. Why not-

On the desk the telephone rang, and that was odd on an Alice in Wonderland scale, because a few minutes ago there had been no telephone in this room, and no desk for it to sit on. The litter of old used rubbers had disappeared. The floor was still dirty, but the dust on the tiles was gone. Apparently there was some sort of Janitor inside his head, a neatnik who had decided Jonesy was going to be here for awhile and so the place ought to be at least tolerably clean. He found the concept awesome, the implications depressing.

On the desk, the phone shrilled again. Jonesy picked up the receiver and said, “Hello?”

Beaver’s voice sent a sick and horrible chill down his back. A telephone call from a dead man-it was the stuff of the movies he liked. Had liked, anyway. “His head was off, Jonesy. It was laying in the ditch and his eyes were full of mud. “There was a click, then dead silence. Jonesy hung up the phone and walked back to the window. The driveway was gone. Derry was gone. He was looking at Hole in the Wall under a pale clear early-morning sky. The roof was black instead of green, which meant this was Hole in the Wall as it had been before 1982, when the four of them, then strapping high-school boys (well, Henry had never been what you’d call strapping), had helped Beav’s Dad put up the green shingles the camp still wore.

Only Jonesy needed no such landmark to know what time it was. No more than he needed someone to tell him the green shingles were no more, Hole in the Wall was no more, Henry had burned it to the ground. In a moment the door would open and Beaver would run out. It was 1978, the year all this had really started, and in a moment Beaver would run out, wearing only his boxer shorts and his many-zippered motorcycle jacket, the orange bandannas fluttering. It was 1978, they were young… and they had changed. No more same shit, different day. This was the day when they began to realize just how much they had changed.

Jonesy stared out the window, fascinated.

The door opened.

Beaver Clarendon, age fourteen, ran out.

Chapter Fifteen HENRY AND OWEN

Henry watched Underhill trudge toward him in the glare of the security lights. Underhill’s head was bent against the snow and the intensifying wind. Henry opened his mouth to call out, but before he could, he was overwhelmed, nearly flattened, by a sense of Jonesy. And then a memory came, blotting out Underhill and this brightly lit, snowy world completely. All at once it was 1978 again, not October but November and there was blood, blood on cattails, broken glass in marshy water, and then the bang of the door.

Henry awakes from a terrible confused dream-blood, broken glass, the rich smells of gasoline and burning rubber-to the sound of a banging door and a blast of cold air. He sits up and sees Pete sitting up beside him, Pete’s hairless chest covered with goosebumps. Henry and Pete are on the floor in their sleeping-bags because they lost the four-way toss. Beav and Jonesy got the bed Oater there will be a third bedroom at Hole in the Wall, but now there are only two and Lamar has one all to himself, by the divine right of adulthood), only now Jonesy is alone in the bed, also sitting up, also looking confused and frightened.

Scooby-ooby-Doo, where are you, Henry thinks for no appreciable reason as he gropes for his glasses on the windowsill. In his nose he can still smell gas and burning tires. We got some work to do now-

“Crashed,” Jonesy says thickly, and throws back the covers. His chest is bare, but like Henry and Pete, he wore his socks and longjohn bottoms to bed. “Yeah, went in the water,” Pete says, his face suggesting he doesn’t have the slightest idea what he’s talking about. “Henry, you got his shoe-” “moccasin-'Henry says, but he hasn’t any idea what he’s talking about either. Nor wants to. “Beav,” Jonesy says, and gets out of bed in a clumsy lunge. One of his stocking-clad feet comes down on Pete’s hand. “Ow!” Pete cries. “Ya stepped on me, ya fuckin gomer, watch where you’re-” “shut up, shut up,” Henry says, grabbing Pete’s shoulder and giving it a shake. “Don’t wake up Mr Clarendon!”

Which would be easy, because the door of the boys” bedroom is open. So is the door on the far side of the big central room, the one to the outside. No wonder they’re cold, there’s a hell of a draft. Now that Henry has his eyes back on (that is how he thinks of it), he can see the dreamcatcher out there dancing in the cold November breeze coming in through the open door.

“Where’s Duddits?” Jonesy asks in a dazed, I’m-still-dreaming voice. “Did he go out with Beaver?”

“He’s back in Derry, foolish,” Henry says, getting up and pulling on his thermal undershirt. And he doesn’t feel that Jonesy is foolish, not really; he also has a sense that Duddits was just here with them.

It was the dream, he thinks. Duddits was in the dream. He was sitting on the bank. He was crying. He was so. He didn’t mean to. If anyone meant to, it was us.

And there is still crying. He can hear it, coming in through the front door, carried on the breeze. It’s not Duddits, though; it’s the Beav. They leave the room in a line, pulling on scraps of clothes as they go, not bothering with their shoes, which would take too long.

One good thing-judging from the tin city of beer-cans on the kitchen table (plus a suburb of same on the coffee-table), it’ll take more than a couple of open doors and some whispering kids to wake up Beaver’s Dad.

The big granite doorstep is freezing under Henry’s stocking feet, cold in the deep thoughtless way death must be cold, but he barely notices.

He sees the Beaver right away. He’s at the foot of the maple tree with the deer-stand in it, on his knees as if praying. His legs and feet are bare, Henry sees. He’s wearing his motorcycle jacket, and tied up and down its arms, fluttering like pirate’s finery, are the orange bandannas his father made his son wear when Beaver insisted on wearing such a damned foolish unhunterly thing in the woods. The outfit looks pretty funny, but there’s nothing funny about that agonized face tilted up toward the maple’s nearly bare branches. The Beav’s cheeks are streaming with tears.

Henry breaks into a run. Pete and Jonesy follow suit, their breath puffing white in the chill morning air. The needle-strewn ground under Henry’s feet is almost as hard and cold as the granite doorstep.

He drops to his knees beside Beaver, scared and somehow awed by those tears. Because the Beav isn’t just misting up, like the hero of a movie who may be allowed to shed a manly drop or two when his dog or his girlfriend dies; Beav is running like Niagara Falls. From his nose hang two ropes of clear glistening snot. You never saw stuff like that in the movies.

“Gross,” Pete says.

Henry looks at him impatiently, but then he sees Pete isn’t looking at Beaver but past him, at a steaming puddle of vomit. In it are kernels of last night’s corn (Lamar Clarendon believes passionately in the virtues of canned food when it comes to camp cooking) and strings of last night’s fried chicken. Henry’s stomach takes a big unhappy lurch. And just as it starts to settle, Jonesy yarks. The sound is like a big liquid belch. The puke is brown.

“Gross!” Pete almost screams it this time.

Beaver doesn’t seem to even notice. “Henry!” he says. His eyes, submerged beneath twin lenses of tears, are huge and spooky. They seem to peer past Henry’s face and into the supposedly private rooms behind his forehead.

“Beav, it’s okay. You had a bad dream.”

“Sure, a bad dream.” Jonesy’s voice is thick, his throat still plated with puke. He tries to clear it with a thick ratching noise that is somehow worse than what just came out of him, then bends over and spits. His hands are planted on the legs of his longhandles, and his bare back is covered with bumps.

Beav takes no notice of Jonesy, nor of Pete as Pete kneels down on his other side and puts a clumsy, tentative arm around Beav’s shoulders. Beav continues to look only at Henry. “His head was off,” Beaver whispers.

Jonesy also drops to his knees, and now all three of them are surrounding the Beav, Henry and Pete to either side, Jonesy in front. There is vomit on Jonesy’s chin. He reaches to wipe it away, but Beaver takes his hand before he can. The boys kneel beneath the maple, and suddenly they are all one. It is brief, this sense of union, but as vivid as their dream. It is the dream, but now they are all awake, the sensation is rational, and they cannot disbelieve.

Now it is Jonesy the Beav is looking at with his spooky swimming eyes. Clutching Jonesy’s hand.

“It was laying in the ditch and his eyes were full of mud.”

“Yeah,” Jonesy whispers in an awed and shaky voice. “Oh jeez, it was.”

“Said he’d see us again, remember?” Pete asks. “One at a time or all together. He said that.”

Henry hears these things from a great distance, because he’s back in the dream. Back at the scene of the accident. At the bottom of a trash-littered embankment where there is a soggy piece of marsh, created by a blocked drainage culvert. He knows the place, it’s on Route 7, the old Derry-Newport Road. Lying overturned in the muck and the murk is a burning car. The air stinks of gas and burning tires. Duddits is crying. Duddits is sitting halfway down the trashy slope and holding his yellow Scooby-Doo lunchbox against his chest and crying his eyes out.

A hand protrudes from one of the windows of the overturned car. It’s slim, the nails painted candy-apple red. The car’s other two occupants have been thrown clear, one of them almost thirty damn feet. This one’s facedown, but Henry still recognizes him by the masses of soaked blond hair. It’s Duncan, the one who said you’re not gonna tell anyone anything, because you’ll be fuckin dead. Only Duncan’s the one who wound up dead.

Something floats against Henry’s shin. “Don’t pick that up!” Pete says urgently, but Henry does. It’s a brown suede moccasin. He has just time to register this, and then Beaver and Jonesy shriek in terrible childish harmony. They are standing together, ankle-deep in the muck, both of them wearing their hunting clothes: Jonesy in his new bright orange parka, bought special from Sears for this trip (and Mrs Jones still tearfully, unpersuadably convinced that her son win be killed in the woods by a hunter’s bullet, cut down in his prime), Beaver in his tattered motorcycle jacket (What a lot of zippers! Duddie’s Mom had said admiringly, thus winning Beaver’s love and admiration forever) with the orange bandannas tied up and down the arms. They aren’t looking at the third body, the one lying just outside the driver’s door, but Henry does, just for a moment (still holding the moccasin, like a small waterlogged canoe, in his hands), because something is terribly, fundamentally wrong with it, so wrong that for a moment he cannot tell what it might be. Then he realizes that there’s nothing above the collar of the corpse’s high-school jacket. Beaver and Jonesy are screaming because they have seen what should have been above it. They have seen Richie Grenadeau’s head lying faceup, glaring at the sky from a blood-spattered stand of cattails. Henry knows it’s Richie at once. Even though the swatch of tape no longer rides the bridge of his nose, there is no mistaking the guy who was trying to feed Duddits a piece of shit that day behind Tracker’s.

Duds is up there on the bank, crying and crying, that crying that gets into your head like a sinus headache, and if it goes on it will drive Henry mad. He drops the moc and slogs around the back of the burning car to where Beaver and Jonesy stand with their arms around each other.

“Beaver! Beav!” Henry shouts, but until he reaches out and gives Beaver a hard shake, Beaver just continues to stare at the severed head, as if hypnotized.

Finally, though, Beaver looks at him. “His head’s off,” he says, as if this were not evident. “Henry, his head’s-”

“Never mind his head, take care of Duddits! Make him stop that goddam crying!”

“Yeah,” Pete says. He looks at Richie’s head, that final dead glare, then looks away, mouth

twitching. “It’s drivin me fuckin bugshit.” “Like chalk on a chalkboard,” Jonesy mutters. Above his new orange parka, his skin is the color of old cheese. “Make him stop, Beav. “'H-H-H-” “Don’t be a dweeb, sing him the fuckin song!” Henry shouts. He can feel mucky water oozing up between his toes. “The lullaby, the goddam lullaby!”

For a moment the Beav looks as though he still doesn’t understand, but then his eyes clear a little and he says “Oh!” He goes slogging toward the embankment where Duddits sits, clutching his bright yellow lunchbox and howling as he did on the day they met him. Henry sees something that he barely has time to notice: there is blood caked around Duddits’s nostrils, and there’s a bandage on his left shoulder. Something is poking out of it, something that looks like white plastic.

“Duddits,” the Beav says, climbing the embankment. “Duddle, honey, don’t. Don’t cry no more, don’t look at it no more, it’s not for you to look at, it’s so fuckin gross…”

At first Duddits takes no notice, just goes on howling. Henry thinks, He cried himself into a nosebleed and that’s the blood part, but what’s that white thing sticking out of his shoulder?

Jonesy has actually raised his hands to cover his ears. Pete has got one of his on top of his head, as if to keep it from blowing off. Then Beaver takes Duddits in his arms, just as he did a few weeks earlier, and be ins to sing in that high clear voice that you’d never think could come out of a scrub like the Beav.

“Baby’s boat’s a silver dream, sailing near and far…”

And oh miracle of blessed miracles, Duddits begins to quiet. Speaking from the comer of his mouth, Pete says: “Where are we, Henry? Where the fuck are we?''In a dream,” Henry says, and all at once the four of them are back under the maple tree at Hole in the Wall, kneeling together in their underwear and shivering in the cold. “What?” Jonesy says. He pulls free to wipe at his mouth, and when the contact among them breaks, reality comes all the way back. “What did you say, Henry?” Henry feels the withdrawal of their minds, actually feels it, and he thinks, We weren’t meant to be like this, none of us. Sometimes being alone is better.

Yes, alone. Alone with your thoughts.

“I had a bad dream,” Beaver says. He seems to be explaining this to himself rather than to the rest of them. Slowly, as if he were still dreaming, he unzips one of his jacket pockets, rummages around inside, and comes out with a Tootsie Pop. Instead of unwrapping it, Beaver puts the stick end in his mouth and be ins to roll it back and forth, nipping and gnawing lightly. “I dreamed that-”

“Never mind,” Henry says, and pushes his glasses up on his nose. “We all know what you dreamed.” We ought to, we were there trembles on his lips, but he keeps it inside. He’s only fourteen, but wise enough to know that what is said cannot be unsaid. When it’s laid, it’s played they say when they’re playing rummy or Crazy Eights and someone makes a goofy-ass discard. If he says it, they’ll have to deal with it. If he doesn’t, then maybe… just maybe it’ll go away.

“I don’t think it was your dream, anyhow,” Pete says. “I think it was Duddits’s dream and we all-”

“I don’t give a shit what you think,” Jonesy says, his voice so harsh that it startles them all. “It was a dream, and I’m going to forget it. We’re all going to forget it, aren’t we, Henry?”

Henry nods at once.

“Let’s go back in,” Pete says. He looks vastly relieved. “My feet’re fre-

“One thing, though,” Henry says, and they all look at him nervously. Because when they need a leader, Henry is it. And if you don’t like the way I do it, he thinks resentfully, someone else can do it. Because this is no tit job, believe me.

“What?” Beaver asks, meaning What now?

“When we go into Gosselin’s later on, someone’s got to call Duds. In case he’s upset.”

No one replies to this, all of them awed to silence by the idea of calling their new retardo friend on the phone. It occurs to Henry that Duddits has likely never received a phone call in his life; this will be his first. “You know, that’s probably right,” Pete agrees and then slaps his hand over his mouth like someone who has said something incriminating.Beaver, naked except for his dopey boxers and his even dopier jacket, is now shivering violently. The Tootsie Pop jitters at the end of its gnawed stick. “Someday you’ll choke on one of those things,” Henry tells him. “Yeah, that’s what my Mom says. Can we go in? I’m freezing.” They start back toward Hole in the Wall, where their friendship will end twenty-three years from this very day. “Is Richie Grenadeau really dead, do you think?” Beaver asks. “I don’t know and I don’t care,” Jonesy says. He looks at Henry. “We’ll call Duddits, okay-

I’ve got a phone and we can bill the charges to my number.”

“Your own phone,” Pete says. “You lucky duck. Your folks spoil you fuckin rotten, Gary.”

Calling him Gary usually gets under his skin, but not this morning-Jonesy is too preoccupied. “It was for my birthday and I have to pay the long-distance out of my allowance, so let’s keep it short. And after that, this never happened-never happened, you got that?”

And they all nod. Never happened. Never fucking hap-

A gust of wind pushed Henry forward, almost into the electrified compound fence. He came back to himself, shaking off the memory like a heavy coat. It couldn’t have come at a more inconvenient time (of course, the time for some memories was never convenient). He had been waiting for Underhill, freezing his katookis off and waiting for his only chance to get out of here, and Underhill could have walked right by him while he stood daydreaming, leaving him up shit creek without a paddle.

Only Underhill hadn’t gone past. He was standing on the other side of the fence, hands in his pockets, looking at Henry. Snowflakes landed on the transparent, buglike bulb of the mask he wore, were melted by the warmth of his breath, and ran down its surface like…

Like Beaver’s tears that day, Henry thought. “You ought to go in the barn with the rest of them,” Underhill said. “You’ll turn into a snowman out here.”

Henry’s tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth. His life quite literally depended on what he said to this man, and he could think of no way to get started. Couldn’t even loosen his tongue. And why bother? the voice inside inquired-the voice of darkness, his old friend. Really and truly, why bother? Why not just let them do what you were going to do to yourself, anyway?

Because it wasn’t just him anymore. Yet he still couldn’t speak.

Underhill stood where he was a moment longer, looking at him. Hands in pockets. Hood thrown back to expose his short dark-blond hair. Snow melting on the mask the soldiers wore and the detainees did not, because the detainees would not be needing them; for the detainees, as for the grayboys, there was a final solution.

Henry struggled to speak and could not, could not. Ah God, it should have been Jonesy here, not him; Jonesy had always been better with his mouth. Underhill was going to walk away, leaving him with a lot of could-have-beens and might-have-beens.

But Underhill stayed a moment longer.

“I’m not surprised you knew my name, Mr… Henreld? Is your name Henreid?”

“Devlin. It’s my first name you’re picking up. I’m Henry Devlin.” Moving very carefully, Henry thrust his hand through the gap between a strand of barbed wire and one of electrified smoothwire. After Underhill did nothing but look at it expressionlessly for five seconds or so, Henry pulled his hand back to his part of the newly drawn world, feeling foolish and telling himself not to be such an idiot, it wasn’t as if he’d been snubbed at a cocktail party.

Once that was done, Underhill nodded pleasantly, as if they were at a cocktail party instead of out here in a shrieking storm, illuminated by the newly installed security lights.

“You knew my name because the alien presence in Jefferson Tract has caused a low-level telepathic effect.” Underhill smiled. “Sounds silly when you say it right out, doesn’t it? But it’s true. The effect is transient, harmless, and too shallow to be good for much except party games, and we’re a little too busy tonight for those.”

Henry’s tongue came finally, blessedly, unstuck. “You didn’t come over here in a snowstorm because I knew your name,” Henry said. “You came over because I knew your wife’s name. And your daughter’s.”

Underhill’s smile didn’t falter. “Maybe I did,” he said. “In any case, I think it’s time we both got under cover and got some rest-it’s been a long day.”

Underhill began walking, but his way took him alongside the fence, toward the other parked trailers and campers. Henry kept pace, although he had to work in order to do it; there was nearly a foot of snow on the ground now, it was drifting, and no one had tramped it down over here on the dead man’s side.

“Mr Underhill. Owen. Stop a minute and listen to me. I’ve got something important to tell you.”

Underhill kept walking along the path on his side of the fence (which was also the dead man’s side; did Underhill not know that?), head down against the wind, still wearing that faintly pleasant smile. And the awful thing, Henry knew, was that Underhill wanted to stop. It was just that Henry had not, so far, given him a reason to do so.

“Kurtz is crazy,” Henry said. He was still keeping pace but he was panting audibly now, his exhausted legs screaming. “But he’s crazy like a fox.”

Underhill kept walking, head down and little smile in place under the idiotic mask. If anything, he walked faster. Soon Henry would have to run in order to keep up on his side of the fence. If running was still possible for him.

“You’ll turn the machine-guns on us,” Henry panted. “Bodies go in the barn… barn gets doused with gasoline… probably from Old Man Gosselin’s own pump, why waste government issue… and then ploof, up in smoke… two hundred… four hundred… it’ll smell like a VFW pig-roast in hell…”

Underhill’s smile was gone and he walked faster still. Henry somehow found the strength to trot, gasping for air and fighting his way through knee-high snowdunes. The wind was keen against his throbbing face. Like a blade.

“But Owen… that’s you, right?… Owen?… you remember that old rhyme… the one that goes “Big fleas… got little fleas… to bite em… and so on and so on… and so on ad infinitum?" that’s here and that’s you… because Kurtz has got his own cadre the man under him, I think his name is Johnson…”

Underhill gave him a single sharp look, then walked faster than ever. Henry somehow managed to keep up, but he didn’t think he would be able to much longer. He had a stitch in his side. It was hot and getting hotter. “That was supposed… to be your job the second part of the clean-up… Imperial Valley, that’s the code name… mean anything to you?”

Henry saw it didn’t. Kurtz must never have told Underhill about the operation that would wipe out most of Blue Group. Imperial Valley meant exactly squat to Owen Underhill, and now, in addition to the stitch, Henry had what felt like an iron band around his chest, squeezing and squeezing.

“Stop… Jesus, Underhill… can’t you…?”

Underhill just kept striding along. Underhill wanted to keep his last few illusions. Who could blame him?

Johnson… a few others… at least one’s a woman… could have been you too if you hadn’t tucked up… you crossed the line, that’s what he thinks… not the first time, either… you did it before, at some place like Bossa Nova…”

That earned Henry a sudden sharp look. Progress? Maybe.

“In the end I think even Johnson goes… only Kurtz leaves here alive… the rest nothing but a pile of ashes and bones… your fucking telepathy doesn’t… tell you that, does it… your little parlor-trick mind-reading… won’t even… fucking touch… that…”

The stitch in his side deepened and sank into his right armpit like a claw. At the same time his feet slipped and he went flailing headfirst into a snowdrift. His lungs tore furiously for air and instead got a great gasp of powdery snow.

Henry flailed to his knees, coughing and choking, and saw Underhill’s back just disappearing into the wall of blowing snow. Not knowing what he was going to say, knowing only that it was his last chance, he screamed: “You tried to piss on Mr Rapeloew’s toothbrush and when you couldn’t do that you broke their plate! Broke their plate and ran away! Just like you’re running away now, you fucking coward!”

Ahead of him, barely visible in the snow, Owen Underhill stopped.

For a moment he only stood there, his back to Henry, who knelt panting like a dog in the snow with melting, icy water running down his burning face. Henry was aware in a way that was both distant and immediate that the scratch on his leg where the byrus was growing had begun to itch.

At last Underhill turned around and came back. “How do you know about the Rapeloews? The telepathy is fading. You shouldn’t be able to get that deep.”

“I know a lot,” Henry said. He got to his feet and then stood there, gasping and coughing. “Because it runs deep in me. I’m different. My friends and I, we were all different. There were four of us. Two are dead. I’m in here. The fourth one… Mr Underhill, the fourth one is your problem. Not me, not the people you’ve got in the barn or the ones you’re still bringing in, not your Blue Group or Kurtz’s Imperial Valley cadre. Only him.” He struggled, not wanting to say the name-Jonesy was the one to whom he had been the closest, Beaver and Pete were great, but only Jonesy could run with him mind for mind, book for book, idea for idea; only Jonesy also had the knack of dreaming outside the lines as well as seeing the line. But Jonesy was gone, wasn’t he? Henry was quite sure of that. He had been there, a tiny bit of him had been there when the redblack cloud passed Henry, but by now his old friend would have been eaten alive. His heart might still beat and his eyes might still see, but the essential Jonesy was as dead as Pete and the Beav.

“Jonesy’s your problem, Mr Underhill. Gary Jones, of Brookline, Massachusetts. “'Kurtz is a problem, too.” Underhill spoke too softly to be heard over the howling wind, but Henry heard him, anyway-heard him in his mind.

Underhill looked around. Henry followed the shift of his head and saw a few men running down the makeshift avenue between the campers and trailer boxes-no one close. Yet the entire area around the store and the barn was mercilessly bright, and even with the wind he could hear revving engines, the stuttery roar of generators, and men yelling. Someone was giving orders through a bullhorn. The overall effect was eerie, as if the two of them had been trapped by the storm in a place filled with ghosts. The running men even looked like ghosts as they faded into the dancing sheets of snow.

“We can’t talk here,” Underhill said. “Listen to me, and don’t make me repeat a single word, buck.”

And in Henry’s head, where there was now so much input that most of it was tangled into an incomprehensible stew, a thought from Owen Underhill’s mind suddenly rose clear and plain: Buck. His word. I can’t believe I used his word.

“I’m listening,” Henry said.

The shed was on the far side of the compound, as far from the barn as it was possible to get, and although the outside was as brilliantly lit as the rest of this hellish concentration camp, the inside was dark and smelled sweetly of old hay. And something else, something a little more acrid.

There were four men and a woman sitting with their backs against the shed’s far wall. They were all dressed in orange hunting togs, and they were passing a joint. There were only two windows in the shed, one facing in toward the corral, the other facing out toward the perimeter fence and the woods beyond. The glass was dirty, and cut the merciless white glare of the sodium lights a little. In the dimness, the faces of the pot-smoking prisoners looked gray, dead already.

“You want a hit?” the one with the Joint asked. He spoke in a strained, miserly voice, holding the smoke in, but he held the joint out willingly enough. It was a bomber, Henry saw, big as a panatela.

“No. I want you all to get out of here.” They looked at him, uncomprehending. The woman was married to the man currently holding the joint. The guy on her left was her brother-in-law. The other two were just along for the ride.

“Go back to the barn,” Henry said.

“No way,” one of the other men said. “Too crowded in there. We prefer to be more exclusive. And since we were here first, I suggest that if you don’t want to be sociable, you should be the one to-”

“I’ve got it,” Henry said. He put a hand on the tee-shirt knotted around his leg. “Byrus. What they call Ripley. Some of you may have it… I think you do, Charles-” He pointed at the fifth man, burly in his parka and balding.

“No!” Charles cried, but the others were already scrambling away from him, the one with the Cambodian cigar (his name was Darren Chiles and he was from Newton, Massachusetts) being careful to hold onto his smoke.

“Yeah, you do,” Henry said. “Major league. So do you, Mona. Mona? No, Marsha. It’s Marsha.”

“I don’t!” she said. She got up, pressing her back against the shed wall and looking at Henry with large, terrified eyes. Doe’s eyes. Soon all the does up here would be dead, and Marsha would be dead, as well. Henry hoped she could not see that thought in his mind. “I’m clean, mister, we’re all clean in here except you!”

She looked at her husband, who was not big, but bigger than Henry. They all were, actually. Not taller, maybe, but bigger. “Throw him out, Dare.”

“There are two types of Ripley,” Henry said, stating as fact what he only believed but the more he thought about it, the more sense it made. “Call them Ripley Prime and Ripley Secondary. I’m pretty sure that if you didn’t get a hot dose-in something you ate or inhaled or something that went live into an open wound-you can get better. You can beat it.”

Now they were all looking at him with those big doe eyes, and Henry felt a moment of surpassing despair. Why couldn’t he just have had a nice quiet suicide?

“I’ve got Ripley Prime,” he said. He unknotted the tee-shirt. None of them would do more than glance at the rip in Henry’s snow-powdered jeans, but Henry took a good big look for all of them. The wound made by the turnsignal stalk had now filled up with byrus. Some of the strands were three inches long, their tips wavering like kelp in a tidal current. He could feel the roots of the stuff working in steadily, deeper and deeper, itching and foaming and fizzing. Trying to think. That was the worst of it-it was trying to think.

Now they were moving toward the shed door, and Henry expected them to bolt as soon as they caught a clear whiff of the cold air. Instead they paused. “mister, can you help us?” Marsha asked in a trembling child’s voice. Darren, her husband, put his arm around her. “I don’t know,” Henry said. “Probably not… but maybe. Go on, now. I’ll be out of here in half an hour, maybe less, but probably it’s best if you stay in the barn with the others. “'Why?” asked Darren Chiles from Newton. And Henry, who had only a ghost of an idea-nothing resembling a plan-said, “I don’t know. I just think it is.” They went out, leaving Henry in possession of the shed.

Beneath the window facing the perimeter fence was an ancient bale of hay. Darren Chiles had been sitting on it when Henry came in (as the one with the dope, Chiles had rated the most comfortable seat), and now Henry took his place. He sat with his hands on his knees, feeling immediately sleepy in spite of the voices tumbling around in his head and the deep, spreading itch in his left leg (it was starting in his mouth, as well, where he had lost one of his teeth).

He heard Underhill coining before Underhill actually spoke from outside the window; heard the approach of his mind. “I’m in the lee of the wind and mostly in the shadow of the building,” Underhill said. “I’m having a smoke. If someone comes along, you’re not in there.” “Okay. “'Lie to me, I’ll walk away and you’ll never in your short life speak to me again, out loud or…

otherwise.”

“Okay.”

“How did you get rid of the people in there?”

“Why?” Henry would have said he was too tired to be angry, but that seemed not to be the case. “Was it some kind of goddam test?”

“Don’t be a jerk.”

“I told them I’ve got Ripley Prime, which is the truth. They scatted in a hurry.” Henry paused. “You’ve got it too, don’t you?”

“What makes you think so?” Henry could detect no strain in Underhill’s voice, and as a psychiatrist, he was familiar with the signs. Whatever else Underhill might be, Henry had an idea that he was a man with a tremendously cool head, and that was a step in the right direction. Also, he thought, it can’t hurt if he understands he really has nothing to lose.

“It’s around your fingernails, isn’t it? And a little in one ear.” “You’d wow em in Vegas, buddy.” Henry saw Underhill’s hand go up, with a cigarette between the gloved fingers. He guessed the wind would end up smoking most of that one.

You get Primary direct from the source. I’m pretty sure Secondary comes from touching something that’s growing it-tree, moss, deer, dog, another person. You catch that kind like you catch poison ivy. This isn’t anything your own medical technicians don’t know. For all I can tell, I got the information from them. My head’s like a goddam satellite dish with everything beaming in on Free Preview and nothing blocked out. I can’t tell where half of” this stuff’s coming from and it doesn’t matter. Now here’s some stuff your med-techs don’t know. The grays call the red growth byrus, a word that means “the stuff of life”. Under some circumstances, the Prime version of it can grow the implants.”

“The shit-weasels, you mean.”

“Shit-weasels, that’s good. I like that. They spring from the byrus, then reproduce by laying eggs. They spread, lay more eggs, spread again. That’s the way it’s supposed to work, anyway. Here, most of the eggs go dead. I have no idea if it’s the cold weather, the atmosphere, or something else. But in our environment, Underhill, it’s all about the byrus. It’s all they’ve got that works.”

“The stuff of life.”

“Uh-huh, but listen: the grays are having big problems here, which is probably why they hung around so long-half a century-before making their move. The weasels, for instance. They’re supposed to be saprophytes… do you know what that means?”

“Henry… that’s you, right? Henry?… Henry, does this have any bearing on our present-”

It has plenty of bearing on our present situation. And unless you want to own a large part of the responsibility for the end of all life on Spaceship Earth-except for a lot of interstellar kudzu, that is-I advise you to shut up and listen.”

A pause. Then: “I’m listening.”

“Saprophytes are beneficial parasites. We have them living in our guts, and we deliberately swallow more in some dairy products. Sweet acidophilus milk, for instance, and yogurt. We give the bugs a place to live and they give us something in return. In the case of dairy bacteria, improved digestion. The weasels, under normal circumstances-normal on some other world, I guess, where the ecology differs in ways I can’t even guess at-grow to a size maybe no bigger than the bowl of a teaspoon. I think that in females they may interfere with reproduction, but they don’t kill. Not normally. They just live in the bowel. We give them food, they give us telepathy. That’s supposed to be the trade. Only they also turn us into televisions. We are Grayboy TV.”

“And you know all this because you have one living inside you?” There was no revulsion in Underhill’s voice, but Henry felt it clearly in the man’s mind, pulsing like a tentacle. “One of the quote-unquote normal weasels?”

“No.” At least, he thought, I don’t think so. “Then how do you know what you know? Or are you maybe just making it up as you go along? Trying to write yourself a pass out of here?” “How I know is the least important thing of all, Owen-but you know I’m not lying. You can read me.” “I know you think you’re not lying. How much more of this mind-reading shit can I expect to get?”

“I don’t know. More if the byrus spreads, probably, but not in my league.”

“Because you’re different.” Skepticism, both in Underhill’s voice and in Underhill’s thoughts.

“Pal, I didn’t know how different until today. But never mind that for a minute. For now, I just want you to understand that the grays are in a shitpull here. For maybe the first time in their history, they’re in an actual battle for control. First, because when they get inside people, the weasels aren’t saprophytic but violently parasitic.

They don’t stop eating and they don’t stop growing. They’re cancer, Underhill.

“Second, the byrus. It grows well on other worlds but poorly on ours, at least so far. The scientists and the medical experts who are running this rodeo think the cold is slowing it down, but I don’t think that’s it, or not all of it. I can’t be positive because they don’t know, but-”

“Whoa, whoa.” There was a brief cupped flame as Underhill lit another cigarette for the wind to smoke. “You’re not talking about the medical guys, are you?”

“No.”

“You think you’re in touch with the grayboys. Telepathically in touch.”

“I think… with one of them. Through a link.”

“This Jonesy you spoke of?”

“Owen, I don’t know. Not for sure. The point is, they’re losing. Me, you, the men who went out there to the Blue Boy with you today, we might not be around to celebrate Christmas. I won’t kid you about that. We got high, concentrated doses. But-”

“I’ve got it, all right,” Underhill said. “Edwards, too-it showed up on him like magic.” “But even if it really takes hold on you, I don’t think you can spread it very far. It’s not just that catchable. There are people in that barn who’ll never get it, no matter how many byrus-infected

people they mingle with. And the people who do catch it like a cold come down with Byrus

Secondary… or Ripley, if you like that better.”

“Let’s stick to byrus.”

“Okay. They might be able to pass it on to a few people, who would have a very weak version we could call Byrus Three. It might even be communicable beyond that, but I think once you got to Byrus Four you’d need a microscope or a blood-test to pick it up. Then it’s gone.

“Here’s the instant replay, so pay attention.

“Point one. The grays-probably no more than delivery-systems for the byrus-are gone already. The ones the environment didn’t kill, like the microbes finally killed the Martians in War of the Worlds, were wiped out by your gunships. All but one, that is, the one-yeah, must be-that I got my information from. And in a physical sense, he’s gone, too.

“Point two. The weasels don’t work. Like all cancers, they ultimately eat themselves to death. The weasels that escape from the lower intestine or the bowel quickly die in an environment they find hostile.

“Point three. The byrus doesn’t work, either, not very well, but given a chance, given time to hide and grow, it could mutate. Learn to fit in. Maybe to rule.”

“We’re going to wipe it out,” Underhill said. “We’re going to turn the entire Jefferson Tract into a burn-scar.”

Henry could have screamed with frustration, and some of that must have gotten through. There was a thud as Underhill jerked, striking the flimsy shed wall with his back.

“What you do up here doesn’t matter,” Henry said. “The people you’ve got interned can’t spread it, the weasels can’t spread it, and the byrus can’t spread itself. If your guys folded their tents and just walked away right now, the environment would take care of itself and erase all this nonsense like a bad equation. I think the grays showed up the way they did because they just can’t fucking believe it. I think it was a suicide mission with some gray version of your Mistuh Kurtz in charge. They simply cannot conceptualize failure. “We always win," they think.”

“How do you-”

“Then, at the last minute, Underhill-maybe at the last second one of them found a man who was remarkably different from all the others with whom the grays, the weasels, and the byrus had come in contact. He’s your Typhoid Mary. And he’s already out of the q-zone, rendering anything you do here meaningless.”

“Gary Jones.”

“Jonesy, right.”

“What makes him different?”

Little as he wanted to go into this part of it, Henry realized he had to give Underhill something.

“He and I and our two other friends-the ones who are dead-once knew someone who was very different. A natural telepath, no byrus needed. He did something to us. If we’d gotten to know him when we were a little older, I don’t think that would have been possible, but we met him when we were particularly… vulnerable, I suppose you’d say… to what he had. And then, years later, something else happened to Jonesy, something that had nothing to do with… with this remarkable boy.”

But that wasn’t the truth, Henry suspected; although Jonesy had been hit and almost killed in Cambridge find Duddits had never to Henry’s knowledge been south of Derry in his life, Duds had somehow been a part of Jonesy’s final, crucial change. A part of that, too. He knew it.

“And I’m supposed to what? Just believe all this? Swallow it like cough-syrup?”

In the sweet-smelling darkness of the shed, Henry’s lips spread in a humorless grin. “Owen,” he said, “you do believe it. I’m a telepath, remember? The baddest one in the jungle. The question, though… the question is…”

Henry asked the question with his mind.

Standing outside the compound fence by the back wall of the old storage shed, freezing his balls off, filter-mask pulled down around his neck so he could smoke a series of cigarettes he did not want (he’d gotten a fresh pack in the PX), Owen would have said he never felt less like laughing in his life… but when the man in the shed responded to his eminently reasonable question with such impatient directness-you do believe it…I’m a telepath, remember?-a laugh was surprised out of him, nevertheless. Kurtz had said that if the telepathy became permanent and were to spread, society as they knew it would fall down. Owen had grasped the concept, but now he understood it on a gut level, too.

“The question, though… the question is…”

What are we going to do about it?

Tired as he was, Owen could see only one answer to that question. “We have to go after Jones, I suppose. Will it do any good? Do we have time?” “I think we might. Just.”

Owen tried to read what was behind Henry’s response with his own lesser powers and could not. Yet he was positive that most of what the man had told him was true. Either that or he believes it’s true, Owen thought. God knows I want to believe it’s true. Any excuse to get out of here before the butchery starts.

“No,” Henry said, and for the first time Owen thought he sounded upset, not entirely sure of himself. “No butchery. Kurtz isn’t going to kill somewhere between two hundred and eight hundred people. People who ultimately can’t influence this business one way or the other. They’re just-Christ, they’re just innocent bystanders!”

Owen wasn’t entirely surprised to find himself rather enjoying his new friend’s discomfort; God knew Henry had discomfited him. “What do you suggest? Bearing in mind that you yourself said that only your pal Jonesy matters.”

“Yes, but…” Floundering. Henry’s mental voice was a little surer, but only a little. I didn’t mean we’d walk away and let them die.

“We won’t be walking anywhere,” Owen said. “We’ll be running like a couple of rats in a corncrib.” He dropped his third cigarette after a final token puff and watched the wind carry it away. Beyond the shed, curtains of snow rippled across the empty corral, building up huge drifts against the side of the barn. Trying to go anywhere in this would be madness. It’ll have to be a Sno-Cat, at least to start with, Owen thought. By midnight, even a four-wheel drive might not be much good. Not in this.

“Kill Kurtz,” Henry said. “That’s the answer. It’ll make it easier for us to get away with no one to give orders, and it’ll put the… the biological cleansing on hold. “Owen laughed dryly. “You make it sound so easy,” he said. “Double-oh-Underhill, license to kill.”

He lit a fourth cigarette, cupping his hands around the lighter and the end of the smoke. In spite of his gloves, his fingers were numb. We better come to some conclusions pretty quick, he thought. Before I freeze to death.

“What’s the big deal about it?” Henry asked, but he knew what the big deal was, all right; Owen could sense (and half-hear) him trying not to see it, not wanting things to be worse than they already were. “Just walk in there and pop him.”

“Wouldn’t work.” Owen sent Henry a brief image: Freddy Johnson (and other members of the so-called Imperial Valley cadre) keeping an eye on Kurtz’s Winnebago. “Also, he’s got the place wired for sound. If anything happens, the hard boys come running. Maybe I could get him. Probably not, because he covers himself as thoroughly as any Colombian cocaine jefe, especially when he’s on active duty, but maybe. I like to think I’m not bad myself. But it would be a suicide mission. If he’s recruited Freddy Johnson, then he’s probably got Kate Gallagher and Marvell Richardson… Carl Friedman… Jocelyn McAvoy. Tough boys and tough girls, Henry. I kill Kurtz, they kill me, the brass running this show from under Cheyenne Mountain send out a new cleaner, some Kurtz clone that’ll pick up where Kurtz left off. Or maybe they just elect Kate to the job. God knows she’s crazy enough. The people in the barn might get twelve additional hours to stew in their own juice, but in the end they’ll still burn. The only difference is that, instead of getting a chance to go charging gaily through the snowstorm with me, handsome, you’ll burn with the rest of them. Your pal, meanwhile-this guy Jonesy-he’ll be off to… to where?”

“That’s something it might be prudent for me to keep to myself, for the time being.”

Owen nonetheless probed for it with such telepathy as he possessed. For a moment he caught a blurred and perplexing vision-a tall white building in the snow, cylindrical, like a barn silo and then it was gone, replaced by the image of a white horse that looked almost like a unicorn running past a sign. On the sign were red letters reading BANBURY CROSS under a pointing arrow.

He grunted in amusement and exasperation. “You’re jamming me.” “You can think of it that way. Or you can think of it as teaching you a technique you better learn if you’d like to keep our conversation a secret.”

“Uh-huh.” Owen wasn’t entirely displeased with what had just happened. For one thing, a jamming technique would be a very good thing to have. For another, Henry did know where his infected friend-call him Typhoid Jonesy-was going. Owen had seen a brief picture of it in Henry’s head.

“Henry, I want you to listen to me now.”

“All right.”

“Here’s the simplest, safest thing we can do, you and I. First, if time isn’t an utterly crucial factor, we both need to get some sleep.”

“I can buy that. I’m next door to dead.”

“Then, around three o'clock, I can start to move and shake. This installation is going to be on high alert till the time when there isn’t an installation here any longer, but if Big Brother’s eyeball ever glazes over a little, it’s apt to be between four and six A.M. I’ll make a diversion, and I can short out the fence-that’s the easiest part, actually. I can be here with a Sno-Cat five minutes after the shit hits the fan-”

Telepathy had certain shorthand advantages to verbal communication, Owen was discovering. He sent Henry the image of a burning MH-6 Little Bird helicopter and soldiers running toward it even as he continued to speak.

“-and off we go.”

“Leaving Kurtz with a barnful of innocent civilians he plans to turn into crispy critters. Not to mention Blue Group. What’s that, a couple-three hundred more?”

Owen, who had been full-time military since the age of nineteen and one of Kurtz’s eraserheads for the last eight years, sent two hard words along the mental conduit the two of them had established: Acceptable losses.

Behind the dirty glass, the vague shape that was Henry Devlin stirred, then stood.

No, he sent back.

No? What do you mean, no?

No. That’s what I mean.

Do you have a better idea?

And Owen realized, to his extreme horror, that Henry thought he did. Fragments of that idea-it would be far too generous to call it a plan-shot through Owen’s mind like the brightly fragmented tail of a comet. It took his breath away. The cigarette dropped unnoticed from between his fingers and zipped away on the wind.

You’re nuts.

No, I’m not. We need a diversion in order to get away, you already know that. This is a diversion.

They’ll be killed anyway!

Some will. Maybe even most of them. But it’s a chance. What chance will they have in a burning barn?

Out loud, Henry said: “And there’s Kurtz. If he’s got a couple of hundred escapees to worry about-most of whom who’d be happy to tell the first reporters they came across that the panic-stricken U.S. government had sanctioned a My Lai massacre right here on American soil-he’s going to be a lot less concerned about us. “You don’t know Abe Kurtz, Owen thought. You don’t know about the Kurtz Line. Of course, neither had he. Not really. Not until today.

Yet Henry’s proposal made a lunatic kind of sense. And it contained at least a measure of atonement. As this endless November fourteenth marched toward midnight and as odds of living until the end of the week grew longer, Owen was not surprised to find that the idea of atonement had its attractions.

“Henry.”

“Yes, Owen. I’m here.”

“I’ve always felt badly about what I did in the Rapeloews” house that day.”

“I know.”

“And yet I’ve done it again and again. How tucked up is that?” Henry, an excellent psychiatrist even after his thoughts had turned to suicide, said nothing. Fucked up was normal human behavior. Sad but true.

“All right,” Owen said at last. “You can buy the house, but I’m going to furnish it. Deal?”

“Deal,” Henry replied at once.

“Can you really teach me that jamming technique? Because I think I may need it.”

“I’m pretty sure I can.”

“All right. Listen.” Owen talked for the next three minutes, sometimes out loud, sometimes mind to mind. The two men had reached a point where they no longer differentiated between the modes of communication; thoughts and words had become one.

Chapter Sixteen DERRY

It’s hot in Gosselin’s-it’s so hot! The sweat pops out on Jonesy’s face almost immediately, and by the time the four of them get to the pay phone (which is near the woodstove, wouldn’t you know it), it’s rolling down his cheeks, and his armpits feel like jungle growth after a heavy rain… not that he has all that much growth there yet, not at fourteen. Don’t you wish, as Pete likes to say.

So it’s hot, and he’s still partly in the grip of the dream, which hasn’t faded the way bad dreams usually do (he can still smell gasoline and burning rubber, can still see Henry holding that moccasin… and the head, he can still see Richie Grenadeau’s awful severed head), and then the operator makes things worse by being a bitch. When Jonesy gives her the Cavells” number, which they call frequently to ask if they can come over (Roberta and Alfie always say yes, but it is only polite to ask permission, they have all been taught that at home), the operator asks: “Do your parents know you’re calling long-distance?” The words come out not in a Yankee drawl but in the slightly Frenchified tones of someone who grew up in this part of the world, where Letourneau and Bissonette are more common than Smith or Jones. The tightwad French, Pete’s Dad calls them. And now he’s got one on the telephone, God help him.

“They let me make toll calls if I pay the charges,” Jonesy says. And boy, he should have known that he would end up being the one to actually make it. He rakes down the zipper of his jacket. God, but it’s boiling in here! How those old geezers can sit around the stove like they’re doing is more than Jonesy can understand. His own friends are pressing in close around him, which is probably understandable-they want to know how things go-but still, Jonesy wishes they would step back a little. Having them so close makes him feel even hotter.

“And if I were to call them, mon fils, your mere et pere, d'ey say the same?”

“Sure,” Jonesy says. Sweat runs into one of his eyes, stinging, and he wipes it away like a tear. “My father’s at work, but my Mom should be home. Nine-four-nine, six-six-five-eight. Only I wish you’d make it quick, because-”

“I’ll jus” ring on your party,” she says, sounding disappointed. Jonesy slips out of his coat, switching the phone from one ear to the other in order to accomplish this, and lets it puddle around his feet. The others are still wearing theirs; Beav, in fact, hasn’t even unzipped his Fonzie Jacket. How they can stand it is beyond Jonesy. Even the smells are getting to him: Musterole and beans and floor-oil and coffee and brine from the pickle-barrel. Usually he likes the smells in Gosselin’s, but today they make Jonesy feel like blowing chunks.

Connections click in his ear. So slow. His friends pushing in too close to the pay phone on the back wall, crowding him. Two or three aisles over, Lamar is looking fixedly at the cereal shelf and rubbing his forehead like a man with a severe headache. Considering how much beer he put away last night, Jonesy thinks, a headache would be natural. He’s coming down with a headache himself, one that beer has nothing to do with, it’s just so gosh-damn hot in h-

He straightens up a little. “Ringing,” he says to his friends, and immediately wishes he’d kept his mouth shut, because they lean in closer than ever. Pete’s breath is fuckin awful, and Jonesy thinks, What do you do, Petesky? Brush em once a year, whether they need it or not?

The phone is picked up on the third ring. “Yes, hello?” It’s Roberta, but sounding distracted and upset rather than cheery, as she usually does. Not that it’s very hard to figure out why; in the background he can hear Duddits bawling. Jonesy knows that Alfie and Roberta don’t feel that crying the way Jonesy and his friends do-they are grownups. But they are also his parents, they feel some of it, and he doubts if this has exactly been Mrs Cavell’s favorite morning.

Christ, how can it be so hot in here”, What did they load that fuckin woodstove up with this morning, anyway? Plutonium?

“Come on, who is it?” Impatient, which is also completely unlike Mrs Cavell. If being the mother of a special person like Duddits teaches you anything, she has told the boys on many occasions, it’s patience. Not this morning, though. This morning she sounds almost pissed off, which is unthinkable. “If you’re selling something, I can’t talk to you. I’m busy right now, and…”

Duddits in the background, trumpeting and walling. You’re busy, all right, Jonesy thinks. He’s been going on like that since dawn, and by now you must be just about out of your sneaker.

Henry throws an elbow into Jonesy’s side and flicks a hand at him-Go on! Hurry up!-and although it hurts, the elbow is still a good thing. If she hangs up on him, Jonesy will have to deal with that bitch of an operator again.

“Miz Cavell-Roberta? It’s me, Jonesy.”

“Jonesy?” He senses her deep relief, she has wanted so badly for Duddie’s friends to call that she half-believes she is imagining this. “Is it really you?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Me and the other guys.” He holds out the telephone.

“Hi, Mrs Cavell,” Henry says.

“Hey, what’s up?” is Pete’s contribution.

“Hi, beautiful,” Beaver says with a goony grin. He has been more or less in love with Roberta from the day they met her.

Lamar Clarendon looks over at the sound of his son’s voice, winces, then goes back to his contemplation of the Cheerios and Shredded Wheat. Go right ahead, Lamar told the Beav when Beaver said they wanted to call Duddits. Dunno why you’d want to talk to that meringue-head, but it’s your buffalo nickel.

When Jonesy puts the phone back to his ear, Roberta Cavell is saying:-get back to Derry? I thought you were hunting up in Kineo or someplace.”

“We’re still up here,” Jonesy says. He looks around at his friends and is astounded to see they are hardly sweating at all-a slight sheen on Henry’s forehead, a few beads on Pete’s upper lip, and that’s all. Totally Weirdsville. “We just thought… um… that we better call.”

“You knew.” Her voice was flat-not unfriendly but unquestioning.

“Um…” He pulls at his flannel shirt, fanning it against his chest. “Yeah.”

There are a thousand questions most people would ask at this point, probably starting with How did you know? or What in God’s name is wrong with him? but Roberta isn’t most people, and she has already had the best part of a month to see how they are with her son. What she says is, “Hold on, Jonesy. I’ll get him.”

Jonesy waits. Far off he can still hear Duddits wailing and Roberta, softer. Talking to him. Cajoling him to the phone. Using what are now magic words in the Cavell household: Jonesy, Beaver,Pete, Henry. The blatting moves closer, and even over the phone Jonesy can feel it working its way into his head, a blunt knife that digs and gouges instead of cutting. Yowch. Duddits’s crying makes Henry’s elbow seem like a love-tap. Meanwhile, the old jungle-juice is rolling down his neck in rivers. His eyes fix on the two signs above the phone. PLEASE LIMIT ALL CALLS TO 5 MINS, reads one. PROFAINITY NOT TOLERIDED, reads the other. Beneath this someone has gouged Who the fuck says so. Then Duddits is on, those awful bellowing cries right there in his ear. Jonesy winces against them, but in spite of the pain it is impossible to be mad at Duds. Up here they are four, all together. Down there he is one, all alone, and what a strange one he is. God has hurt him and blessed him at the same time, it makes Jonesy giddy just to think of it.

“Duddits,” he says. “Duddits, it’s us. Jonesy…”

He hands the phone to Henry. “Hi, Duddits, it’s Henry…”

Henry hands the phone to Pete. “Hi, Duds, it’s Pete, stop crying now, it’s all right…”

Pete hands the phone to Beaver, who looks around, then stretches the phone as far toward the corner as the cord will allow. Cupping his hand over the mouthpiece so the old men by the stove (not to mention his own old man, of course) won’t hear him, he sings the first two lines of the lullaby. Then he falls quiet, listening. After a moment he flashes the rest of them a thumb-and-forefinger circle. Then he hands the phone back to Henry.

“Duds? Henry again. It was just a dream, Duddits. It wasn’t real. Okay? It wasn’t real and it’s over. Just…” Henry listens. Jonesy takes the opportunity to strip off his flannel shirt. The tee-shirt beneath is soaked right through.

There are a billion things in the world Jonesy doesn’t know-what kind of link he and his friends share with Duddits, for one-but he knows he can’t stay in here in Gosselin’s much longer. He feels like he’s in the goddam stove, not just looking at it. Those old farts around the checkerboard must have ice in their bones.

Henry is nodding. “That’s right, like a scary movie.” He listens, frowning. “No, you didn’t. None of us did. We didn’t hurt him. We didn’t hurt any of them.”

And just like that-bingo-Jonesy knows they did. They didn’t mean to, exactly, but they did. They were scared Richie would make good on his threat to get them… and so they got him first.

Pete is holding out his hand and Henry says, “Pete wants to talk to you, Dud.”

He hands the phone to Pete and Pete is telling Duddits to just forget it, be chilly, Willy, they’ll be home soon and they’ll all play the game, they’ll have fun, they’ll have a fuckin roll, but in the meantime-

Jonesy raises his eyes and sees one of the signs over the phone has changed. The one on the left still says PLEASE LIMIT ALL CALLS TO 5 MINS, but the one on the right now says WHY NOT GO OUTSIDE IT’s COOLER. And that’s a good idea, such a good idea. No reason not to, either-the Duddits situation is clearly under control.

But before he can make his move, Pete is holding the phone out to him and saying, “He wants to talk to you, Jonesy.”

For a moment he almost bolts anyway, thinking to hell with Duddits, to hell with all of them. But these are his friends, together they all caught the same terrible dream, did something they didn’t mean to do

(liar fuckin liar you meant it you did)

and their eyes hold him where he is in spite of the heat, which is now clamped around his chest like a suffocating pad. Their eyes insist that he’s a part of this and mustn’t leave while Duddits is still on the phone. It’s not how you play the game.

It’s our dream and it’s not over yet, their eyes insist-Henry’s most of all. It’s been going on since the day we found him there behind Tracker Brothers, down on his knees and all but naked. He sees the line and now we see it, too. And although we may perceive it in different ways, part of us will always see the line. We’ll see it until the day we die.

There’s something else in their eyes, too, something that will haunt them, all unacknowledged, until the day they die, and cast its shadow over even their happiest days. The fear of what they did. What they did in the unremembered part of their shared dream.

That’s what keeps him where he is and makes him take the telephone even though he is sweltering, roasting, fucking melting. “duddits,” he says, and even his voice sounds hot. “It’s really okay. I’m gonna let you talk to Henry again, it’s super-hot in here and I have to get a breath of fresh-” Duddits interrupts him, his voice strong and urgent. “Oh-oh-ow! Ohee, oh-oh-ow! Ay! Ay! Isser AY!”

They have always understood his gabble from the very first, and Jonesy understands it now:

Don’t go out! Jonesy, don’t go out! Gray! Gray! Mister GRAY!

Jonesy’s mouth drops open. He looks past the heat-shimmering stove, down the aisle where Beaver’s hungover father is now making a listless examination of the canned beans, past Mrs Gosselin at the old scrolled cash register, and out the front window. That window is dirty, and it’s filled with signs advertising everything from Winston cigarettes and Moosehead Ale to church suppers and Fourth of July picnics that happened back when the peanut-farmer was still President… but there’s still enough glass for him to look through and see the thing that’s waiting for him outside. It’s the thing that came up behind him while he was trying to hold the bathroom door closed, the thing that has snatched his body. A naked gray figure standing beside the Citgo pump on its toeless feet, staring at him with its black eyes. And Jonesy thinks: It’s not how they really are, it’s just the way we see them.

As if to emphasize this, Mr Gray raises one of his hands and brings it down. From the tips of his three fingers, little specks of reddish-gold float upward like thistle.

Byrus, Jonesy thinks.

As if it were a magic word in a fairy-tale, everything freezes. Gosselin’s Market becomes a still-life. Then the color drains out of it and it becomes a sepia-toned photograph. His friends are growing transparent and fading before his eyes. Only two things still seem real: the heavy black receiver of the pay phone, and the heat. The stifling heat.

“Ay UH!” Duddits cries into his ear. Jonesy hears a long, choking intake of breath which he remembers so well; it is Duddits readying himself to speak as clearly as he possibly can. “Ownzy! Ownzy, ake UH! Ake UH! Ake

up! Wake up! Jonesy, ake up!

Jonesy raised his head and for a moment could see nothing. His hair, heavy and sweat-clotted, hung in his eyes. He brushed it away, hoping for his own bedroom-either the one at Hole in the Wall, or, even better, the one back home in Brookline-but no such luck. He was still in the office at Tracker Brothers. He’d fallen asleep at the desk and had dreamed of how they’d called Duddits all those years ago. That had been real enough, but not the stuporous heat. If anything, Old Man Gosselin had always kept his place cold; he was chintzy that way. The heat had crept into his dream because it was hot in here, Christ, it had to be a hundred degrees, maybe a hundred and ten.

Furnace has gone nuts, he thought, and got up. Or maybe the place is on fire. Either way, I have to get out. Before I roast.

Jonesy went around the desk, barely registering the fact that the desk had changed, barely registering the feel of something brushing the top of his head as he burned toward the door. He was reaching for the knob with one hand and the lock with the other when he remembered Duddits in the dream, telling him not to go out, Mr Gray was out there waiting.

And he was. Right outside this door. Waiting in the storehouse of memories, to which he now had total access.

Jonesy spread his sweaty fingers on the wood of the door. His hair fell down over his eyes again, but he barely noticed. “Mr Gray,” he whispered. “Are you out there? You are, aren’t you?”

No response, but Mr Gray was, all right. He was standing with his hairless rudiment of a head cocked and his glass-black eyes fixed on the doorknob, waiting for it to turn. Waiting for Jonesy to come bursting out. And then-?

Goodbye annoying human thoughts. Goodbye distracting and disturbing human emotions.

Goodbye Jonesy.

“Mr Gray, are you trying to smoke me out?”

Still no answer. Jonesy didn’t need one. Mr Gray had access to all the controls, didn’t he? Including the ones that controlled his temperature. How high had he pushed it? Jonesy didn’t know, but he knew it was still going up. The band around his chest was hotter and heavier than ever, and he could hardly breathe. His temples were pounding.

The window. What about the window?

Feeling a burst of hope, Jonesy turned in that direction, putting his back to the door. The window was dark now-so much for the eternal afternoon in October of 1978-and the driveway which ran up the side of Tracker Brothers was buried under shifting drifts of snow. Never, even as a child, had snow looked so inviting to Jonesy. He saw himself bursting through the window like Errol Flynn in some old pirate movie, saw himself charging into the snow and then throwing himself into it, bathing his burning face in its blessed white chill-

Yes, and then the feel of Mr Gray’s hands closing around his neck. Those hands had only three digits each, but they would be strong; they would choke the life out of him in no time. If he even cracked the window, tried to let in some of the cold night air, Mr Gray would be in and battening on him like a vampire. Because that part of JonesyWorld wasn’t safe. That part was conquered territory.

Hobson’s choice. Fucked either way.

“Come out.” Mr Gray at last spoke through the door, and in Jonesy’s own voice. “I’ll make it quick. You don’t want to roast in there… or do you?”

Jonesy suddenly saw the desk standing in front of the window, the desk that hadn’t even been here when he first found himself in this room. Before he’d fallen asleep it had just been a plain wooden thing, the sort of bottom-of-the-line model you might buy at Office Depot if you were on a budget. At some point-he couldn’t remember exactly when-it had gained a phone. Just a plain black phone, as utilitarian and undecorative as the desk itself.

Now, he saw, the desk was an oak rolltop, the twin of the one in his Brookline study. And the phone was a blue Trimline, like the one in his office at Jay. He wiped a palmful of piss-warm sweat off his forehead, and as he did it he saw what he had brushed with the top of his head.

It was the dreamcatcher.

The dreamcatcher from Hole in the Wall.

“Holy shit,” he whispered. “I’m decorating the place.”

Of course he was, why not? Didn’t even prisoners on Death Row decorate their cells? And if he could add a desk and a dreamcatcher and a Trimline phone in his sleep, then maybe Jonesy closed his eyes and concentrated. He tried to call up an image of his study in Brookline. For a moment this gave him trouble, because a question intruded: if his memories were out there, how could he still have them in here? The answer, he realized, was probably simple. His memories were still in his head, where they had always been. The cartons in the storeroom were what Henry might call an externalization, his way of visualizing all the stuff to which Mr Gray had access.

Never mind. Pay attention to what needs doing. The study in Brookline. See the study in Brookline.

“What are you doing?” Mr Gray demanded. The smarmy self-confidence had left his voice. “What the doodlyfuck are you doing?”

Jonesy smiled a little at that-he couldn’t help it-but he held onto his image. Not just the study, but one wall of the study… there by the door leading into the little half-bath… yes, there it was. The Honeywell thermostat. And what was he supposed to say? Was there a magic word, something like alakazam?

Yeah.

With his eyes still closed and a trace of a smile still on his sweat-streaming face, Jonesy whispered: “Duddits.”

He opened his eyes and looked at the dusty, nondescript wall.

The thermostat was there.

“Stop it!” Mr Gray shouted, and even as Jonesy crossed the room he was amazed by the familiarity of that voice; it was like listening to one of his own infrequent tantrums (the wild disorder of the kids” rooms was a likely flashpoint) on a tape recorder. “You just stop it! 7'his has got to stop!”

“Kiss my bender, beautlful,” Jonesy replied, and grinned. How many times had his kids wished they could say something like that to him, when he started quacking? Then a nasty thought occurred to him. He’d probably never see the inside of his Brookline duplex again, but if he did, it would be through eyes which now belonged to Mr Gray. The cheek the kids kissed (“Eeu, scratchy, Daddy!” Misha would say) would now be Mr Gray’s cheek. The lips Carla kissed would likewise be Mr Gray’s. And in bed, when she gripped him and guided him into her-

Jonesy shivered, then reached for the thermostat… which, he saw, was set to 120. The only one in the world that went so high, no doubt. He backed it half a turn to the left, not knowing what to expect, and was delighted to feel an immediate waft of cool air on his cheeks and brow. He turned his face gratefully up to catch the breeze more fully, and saw a heating/cooling grate set high in one wall. One more fresh touch.

“How are you doing that?” Mr Gray shouted through the door. “Why doesn’t your body incorporate the byrus? How can you be there at all?”

Jonesy burst out laughing. There was simply no way to hold it in.

“Stop that,” Mr Gray said, and now his voice was chilly. This was the voice Jonesy had used when he had given Carla his ultimatum: rehab or divorce, hon, you choose. “I can do more than just turn up the heat, you know. I can burn you out. Or make you blind yourself.”

Jonesy remembered the pen going into Andy Janas’s eye-that terrible thick popping sound-and winced. Yet he recognized a bluff when he heard one. You’re the last and I’m your delivery-system, Jonesy thought. You won’t beat the machinery up too much. Not until your mission’s accomplished, anyhow.

He walked slowly back to the door, reminding himself to be wary… because, as Gollum had said of Bilbo Baggins, it was tricksy, precious, aye, very tricksy.

“Mr Gray?” he asked softly.

No answer.

“Mr Gray, what do you look like now? What do you look like when you’re yourself? A little less gray and a little more pink? A couple more fingers on your hands? Little bit of hair on your head?

Starting to get some toesies and some testes?”

No answer.

“Starting to look like me, Mr Gray? To think like me? You don’t like that, right? Or do you?”

Still no answer, and Jonesy realized Mr Gray was gone. He turned and hurried across to the window, aware of even more changes: a Currier and Ives woodcut on one wall, a Van Gogh print on another-Marigolds, a Christmas gift from Henry-and on this desk the Magic 8-Ball he kept on his desk at home. Jonesy barely noticed these things. He wanted to see what Mr Gray was up to, what had engaged his attention now.

For one thing, the interior of the truck had changed. Instead of the olive-drab plainness of Andy Janas’s government-issue pickup (clipboard of papers and forms on the passenger side, squawking radio beneath the dash), he was now in a luxy Dodge Ram with a club cab, gray velour seats, and roughly as many controls as a Learjet. On the glove compartment was a sticker reading I ? my BORDER, COLLIE. The border collie in question was still present and accounted for, asleep in the passenger-side footwell with its tail curled neatly around it. It was a male named Lad. Jonesy sensed that he could access the name and the fate of Lad’s master, but why would he want to? Somewhere north of their present position, Janas’s Army truck was now off the road, and the driver of this one would be lying nearby. Jonesy had no idea why the dog had been spared.

Then Lad lifted his tail and farted, and Jonesy did.

He discovered that by looking out the Tracker Brothers” office window and concentrating, he could look out through his own eyes. The snow was coming down more heavily than ever, but like the Army truck, the Dodge was equipped with four-wheel drive, and it poked along steadily enough. Going the other way, north toward Jefferson Tract, was a chain of headlights set high off the road: Army convoy trucks. Then, ahead on this side, a reflectorized sign-white letters, green background-loomed out of the flying Snow. DERRY NEXT 5 EXITS.

The city plows had been out, and although there was hardly any traffic (there wouldn’t have been much at this hour even on a clear night), the turnpike was in passable shape. Mr Gray increased the Ram’s speed to forty miles an hour. They passed three exits Jonesy knew well from his childhood (KANSAS STREET, AIRPORT, UPMILE HILL/STRAWFORD PARK) then slowed.

Suddenly Jonesy thought he understood.

He looked at the boxes he’d dragged in here, most marked DUDDITS, a few marked DERRY. The latter ones he’d taken as an afterthought. Mr Gray thought he still had the memories he needed-the information he needed-but if Jonesy was right about where they were going (and it made perfect sense), Mr Gray was in for a surprise. Jonesy didn’t know whether to be glad or afraid, and found he was both.

Here was a green sign reading EXIT 25-WITCHAM STREET. His hand flicked on the Ram’s turnsignal.

At the top of the ramp, he turned left onto Witcham, then left again, half a mile later, onto Carter Street. Carter went up at a steep angle, heading back toward Upmile Hill and Kansas Street on the other side of what had once been a high, wooded ridge and the site of a thriving Micmac Indian village. The street hadn’t been plowed in several hours, but the four-wheel drive was up to the task. The Ram threaded its way among the snow-covered humps on either side-cars that had been street-parked in defiance of municipal snow-emergency regulations.

Halfway up Mr Gray turned again, this time onto an even narrower track called Carter Lookout. The Ram skidded, its rear end fishtailing. Lad looked up briefly, whined, then put his nose back down on the floormat as the tires took hold, biting into the snow and puffing the Ram the rest of the way up.

Jonesy stood at his window on the world, fascinated, waiting for Mr Gray to discover… well, to discover.

At first Mr Gray wasn’t dismayed when the Ram’s high beams showed nothing at the crest but more swirling snow. He was confident he’d see it in a few seconds, of course he would… just a few more seconds and he’d see the big white tower which stood here overlooking the drop to Kansas Street, the tower with the windows marching around it in a rising spiral. In just a few more seconds…

Except now there were no more seconds. The Ram had chewed its way to the top of what had once been called Standpipe Hill. Here Carter Lookout-and three or four other similar little lanes-ended in a large open circle. They had come to the highest, most open spot in Derry. The wind howled like a banshee, a steady fifty miles an hour with gusts up to seventy and even eighty. In the Ram’s high beams, the snow flew horizontally, a storm of daggers.

Mr Gray sat motionless. Jonesy’s hands slid off the wheel and clumped to either side of Jonesy’s body like birds shot out of the sky. At last he muttered, “Where is it?”

His left hand rose, fumbled at the doorhandle, and at last pulled it up. He swung a leg out, then fell to Jonesy’s knees in a snowdrift as the howling wind snatched the door out of his hand. He got up again and floundered around to the front of the truck, his jacket rippling around him and the legs of his jeans snapping like sails in a gale. The wind-chill was well below zero (in the Tracker Brothers” office, the temperature went from cool to cold in the space of a few seconds), but the redblack cloud which now inhabited most of Jonesy’s brain and drove Jonesy’s body could not have cared less.

Where is it?” Mr Gray screamed into the howling mouth of the storm. Where’s the fucking STANDPIPE?”

There was no need for Jonesy to shout; storm or no storm, Mr Gray would hear even a whisper.

“Ha-ha, Mr Gray,” he said. “Hardy-fucking-har. Looks like the joke’s on you. The Standpipe’s been gone since 1985.”

Jonesy thought that if Mr Gray had remained still, he would have done a full-fledged pre-schooler’s tantrum, perhaps right down to the rolling around in the snow and the kicking of the feet; in spite of his best efforts not to, Mr Gray was bingeing on Jonesy’s emotional chemistry set, as helpless to stop now that he had started as an alcoholic with a key to McDougal’s Bar.

Instead of throwing a fit or having a snit, he thrust Jonesy’s body across the bald top of the hill and toward the squat stone pedestal that stood where he had expected to find the storage facility for the city’s drinking water: seven hundred thousand gallons of it. He fell in the snow, floundered back up, limped forward on Jonesy’s bad hip, fell again and got up again, all the time spitting Beaver’s litany of childish curses into the gale: doodlyfuck, kiss my bender, munch my meat, bite my bag, shit in your fuckin hat and wear it backward, Bruce. Coming from Beaver (or Henry, or Pete), these had always been amusing. Here, on this deserted hill, screamed into the teeth of the storm by this lunging, falling monster that looked like a human being, they were awful.

He, it, whatever Mr Gray was, at last reached the pedestal, which stood out clearly enough in the glow cast by the Ram’s headlights. It had been built to a child’s height, about five feet, and of the plain rock which had shaped so many New England stone walls. On top were two figures cast in bronze, a boy and a girl with their hands linked and their heads lowered, as if in prayer or in grief.

The pedestal was drifted to most of its height in snow, but the top of the plaque screwed to the front was visible. Mr Gray fell to Jonesy’s knees, scraped snow away, and read this:

TO THOSE LOST IN THE STORM MAY 31, 1985 AND TO THE CHILDREN ALL THE CHILDREN LOVE FROM BILL, BEN, BEV, EDDIE, RICHIE, STAN, MIKE THE LOSERS” CLUB

Spray-painted across it jagged red letters, also perfectly visible in the truck’s headlights, was this further message:

Mr Gray knelt looking at this for nearly five minutes, ignoring the creeping numbness in Jonesy’s extremities. (And why would he take care? Jonesy was just your basic rental job, drive it as hard as you want and butt out your cigarettes on the floormat.) He was trying to make sense of it. Storm? Children? Losers? Who or what was Pennywise? Most of all, where was the Standpipe, which Jonesy’s memories had insisted was here?

At last he got up, limped back to the truck, got in, and turned up the heater. In the blast of hot air, Jonesy’s body began to shake. Soon enough, Mr Gray was back at the locked door of the office, demanding an explanation.

“Why do you sound so angry?” Jonesy asked mildly, but he was smiling. Could Mr Gray sense that? “Did you expect me to help you? Come on, pal-I don’t know the specifics, but I have a pretty good idea what the overall plan is: twenty years from now and the whole planet is one big redheaded ball, right? No more hole in the ozone layer, but no more people, either.”

“Don’t you smartass me! Don’t you dare!”

Jonesy fought back the temptation to taunt Mr Gray into another tantrum. He didn’t believe his unwelcome guest would be capable of huffing down the door between them no matter how angry he became, but what sense was there in putting that idea to the test? And besides, Jonesy was emotionally exhausted, his nerves jumping and his mouth full of a burnt-copper taste.

“How can it not be here?”

Mr Gray brought one hand down on the center of the steering wheel. The horn honked. Lad the border collie raised his head and looked at the man behind the wheel with large, nervous eyes. “You can’t lie to me! I have your memories!”

“Well… I did get a few. Remember?”

“Which ones? Tell me.”

“Why should I?” Jonesy asked. “What’ll you do for me?”

Mr Gray fell silent. Jonesy felt him accessing various files. Then, suddenly, smells began to waft into the room from under the door and through the heating and cooling vent. They were his favorite aromas: popcorn, coffee, his mother’s fish chowder. His stomach immediately began to roar.

“Of course I can’t promise you your mother’s chowder,” Mr Gray said. “But I’ll feed you. And you’re hungry, aren’t you?''With you driving my body and pigging out on my emotions, it’d be a wonder if I wasn’t,” Jonesy replied. “There’s a place south of here-Dysart’s. According to you, it’s open twenty-four hours a day,

which is a way of saying all the time.

Or are you lying about that, too?”

“I never lied,” Jonesy replied. “As you said, I can’t. You’ve got the controls, you’ve got the memory banks, you’ve got everything but what’s in here.”

“Where is there? How can there be a there?”

“I don’t know,” Jonesy said truthfully. “How do I know you’ll feed me?”

“Because I have to,” Mr Gray said from his side of the door, and Jonesy realized Mr Gray was also being truthful. If you didn’t pour gas into the machine from time to time, the machine stopped running. “But if you satisfy my curiosity, I’ll feed you the things you like. If you don’t…”

The smells from under the door changed, became the greenly assaultive odor of broccoli and brussels sprouts. “All right,” Jonesy said. “I’ll tell you what I can, and you feed me pancakes and bacon at Dysart’s. Breakfast twenty-four hours a day, you know. Deal?” “Deal. Open the door and we’ll shake on it.”

Jonesy was surprised into a smile-it was Mr Gray’s first attempt at humor, and really not such a bad one. He glanced into the rearview mirror and saw an identical smile on the mouth which was no longer his. That was a little creepy.

“Maybe we’ll skip the handshake part,” he said. “Tell me.” “Yes, but a word of warning-break a promise to me, and you’ll never get to make another one.” “I’ll keep it in mind.”

The truck sat at the top of Standpipe Hill, rocking slightly on its springs, its headlamps blazing out cylinders of snow-filled light, and Jonesy told Mr Gray what he knew. It was, he thought, the perfect place for a scary story.

The years of 1984 and “85 were bad ones in Derry. In the summer of 1984, three local teenagers had thrown a gay man into the Canal, killing him. In the ten months which followed, half a dozen children had been murdered, apparently by a psychotic who sometimes masqueraded as a clown.

“Who is this John Wayne Gacey?” Mr Gray asked. “Was he the one who killed the children?”

“No, just someone from the midwest who had a similar modus operandi,” Jonesy said. “You don’t understand many of the cross-connections my mind makes, do you? Bet there aren’t many poets out where you come from.”

Mr Gray made no reply to this. Jonesy doubted if he knew what a poet was. Or cared.

“In any case,” Jonesy said, “the last bad thing to happen was a kind of freak hurricane. It hit on May thirty-first, 1985. Over sixty people died. The Standpipe blew over. It rolled down that hill and into Kansas Street.” He pointed to the right of the truck, where the land sloped sharply away into the dark.

“Almost three quarters of a million gallons of water ran down Upmile Hill, then into downtown, which more or less collapsed. I was in college by then. The storm happened during my Finals Week. My Dad called and told me about it, but of course I knew-it was national news.”

Jonesy paused, thinking, looking around the office which was no longer bare and dirty but nicely finished (his subconscious had added both a couch that he had at home and an Eames chair he’d seen in the Museum of Modem Art catalogue, lovely but out of his financial reach) and really quite pleasant… certainly nicer than the blizzardy world his body’s usurper was currently having to deal with.

“Henry was in school, too. Harvard. Pete was bumming around the West Coast, doing his hippie thing. Beaver was trying a junior college downstate. Majoring in hashish and video games, is what he said later.” Only Duddits had been here in Derry when the big storm blew through… but Jonesy discovered he didn’t want to speak Duddits’s name.

Mr Gray said nothing, but Jonesy got a clear sense of his impatience. Mr Gray cared only about the Standpipe. And how Jonesy had fooled him. “Listen, Mr Gray-if there was any fooling going on, you did it to yourself I got a few of the DERRY boxes, that’s all, and brought them in here while you were busy killing that poor soldier.” “The poor soldiers came in ships from the sky and massacred all of my kind that they could

find.”

“Spare me. You guys didn’t come here to welcome us into the Galactic Book Circle.”

“Would things have been any different if we had?”

“You can also spare me the hypotheticals,” Jonesy said. “After what you did to Pete and the Army guy, I could care less about having an intellectual discussion with you.”

“We do what we have to do.”

“That might be, but if you expect me to help you, you’re mad.”

The dog was looking at Jonesy with even more unease apparently not used to masters who held animated conversations with themselves.

“The Standpipe fell over in 1985-sixteen years ago-but you stole this memory?”

“Basically, yeah, although I don’t think you’d have much luck with that in a court of law, since the memories were mine to begin with.”

“What else have you stolen?”

“That’s for me to know and you to think about.”

There was a hard and ill-tempered thump at the door. Jonesy was once more reminded of the story about The Three Little Pigs. Huff and puff, Mr Gray; enjoy the dubious pleasures of rage.But Mr Gray had apparently left the door.

“Mr Gray? “Jonesy called. “Hey, don’t go “way mad, okay?” Jonesy guessed that Mr Gray might be off on another information search. The Standpipe was gone but Derry was still here; ergo, the town’s water had to be coming from somewhere. Did Jonesy know the location of that somewhere?

Jonesy didn’t. He had a vague memory of drinking a lot of bottled water after coming back from college for the summer, but that was all. Eventually water had started coming out of their taps again, but what was that to a twenty-one-year-old whose biggest concern had been getting into Mary Shratt’s pants? The water came, you drank it. You didn’t worry about where it came from as long as it didn’t give you the heaves or the squatters.

A sense of frustration from Mr Gray? Or was that just his imagination? Jonesy most sincerely hoped not.

This had been a good one… what the four of them, in the days of their misspent youth, would undoubtedly have called “a fuckin pisser”.

Roberta Cavell woke up from some unpleasant dream and looked to her right, half-expecting to see only darkness. But the comforting blue numbers were still glowing from the clock by her bed, so the power hadn’t gone out. That was pretty amazing, considering the way the wind was howling.

1:04 A.M… the blue numbers said. Roberta turned on the bedside lamp-might as well use it while she could-and drank some water from her glass. Was it the wind that had awakened

her? The bad dream? It had been bad, all right, something about aliens with deathrays and everyone running, but she didn’t think that was it, either.

Then the wind dropped, and she heard what had waked her: Duddits’s voice from downstairs. Duddits… singing? Was that possible? She didn’t see how, considering the terrible afternoon and evening the two of them had put in.

“Eeeyer-eh!'” for most of the hours between two and five-Beaver’s dead! Duddits seemingly inconsolable, finally bringing on a nosebleed. She feared these. When Duddits started bleeding, it was sometimes impossible to get him stopped without taking him to the hospital. This time she had been able to stop it by pushing cotton-wads into his nostrils and then pinching his nose high up, between the eyes. She had called Dr Briscoe to ask if she could give Duddits one of his yellow Valium tablets, but Dr Briscoe was off in Nassau, if you please. Some other doctor was on call, some whitecoat johnny who had never seen Duddits in his life, and Roberta didn’t even bother to call him. She just gave Duddits the Valium, painted his poor dry lips and the inside of his mouth with one of the lemon-flavored glycerine swabs that he liked-the inside of his mouth was always developing cankers and ulcers. Even when the chemo was over, these persisted. And the chemo was over. None of the doctors-not Briscoe, not any of them-would admit it, and so the plastic catheter stayed in, but it was over. Roberta would not let them put her boy through that hell again.

Once he’d taken his pill, she got in bed with him, held him (being careful of his left side, where the indwelling catheter hid under a bandage), and sang to him. Not Beaver’s lullaby, though. Not today.

At last he had begun to quiet, and when she thought he was asleep, she had gently pulled the cotton wads from his nostrils. The second one stuck a little, and Duddits’s eyes had opened-that beautiful flash of green. His eyes were his true gift, she sometimes thought, and not that other business… seeing the line and all that went with it.

“Urnma?”

“Yes, Duddie.”

“Eeeyer in hen?”

She felt such sorrow at that, and at the thought of Beaver’s absurd leather jacket, which he had loved so much and finally worn to tatters. If it had been someone else, anyone else but one of his four childhood friends, she would have doubted Duddie’s premonition. But if Duddits said Beaver was dead, then Beaver almost certainly was.

“Yes, honey, I’m sure he’s in heaven. Now go to sleep.”

For another long moment those green eyes had looked into hers, and she had thought he would start crying again-indeed, one tear, large and perfect, did roll down his stubbly cheek. It was so hard for him to shave now, sometimes even the Norelco started little cuts that dribbled for hours. Then his eyes had closed again and she had tiptoed out.

After dark, while she was making him oatmeal (all but the blandest foods were now apt to set off vomiting, another sign that the end was nearing), the whole nightmare started again. Terrified already by the increasingly strange news coming out of the Jefferson Tract, she had raced back to his room with her heart hammering. Duddits was sitting upright again, whipping his head from side to side in a child’s gesture of negation. The nosebleed had re-started, and at each jerk of his head, scarlet drops flew. They spattered his pillowcase, his signed photograph of Austin Powers (“Groovy,baby!” was written across the bottom), and the bottles on the table: mouthwash, Compazine, Percocet, the multi-vitamins that seemed to do absolutely no good, the tall jar of lemon swabs.

This time it was Pete he claimed was dead, sweet (and not terribly bright) Peter Moore. Dear God, could it be true? Any of it? All of it?

The second bout of hysterical grief hadn’t gone on as long, probably because Duddits was already exhausted from the first. She had gotten the nosebleed stanched again-lucky her-and had changed his bed, first helping him to his chair by the window. There he’d sat, looking out into the renewing storm, occasionally sobbing, sometimes heaving great, watery sighs that hurt her inside. Just looking at him hurt her: how thin he was, how pale he was, how bald he was. She gave him his Red Sox hat, signed across the visor by the great Pedro Martinez (you get so many nice things when you’re dying, she sometimes mused), thinking his head would be cold there, so close to the glass, but for once Duddits wouldn’t put it on. He only held it on his lap and looked out into the dark, his eyes big and unhappy.

At last she had gotten him back into bed, where once again her son’s green eyes looked up at her with all their terrible dying brilliance.

“Eeet in hen, ooo?”

“I’m sure he is.” She hadn’t wanted to cry, desperately hadn’t wanted to-it might set him off again-but she could feel the tears brimming. Her head was pregnant with them, and the inside of her nose tasted of the sea each time she pulled in breath.

“In hen wif Eeeyer?”

“Yes, honey.”

“I eee Eeeyer n Eeet in hen?”

“Yes, you will. Of course you will. But not for a long while.”

His eyes had closed. Roberta had sat beside him on the bed, looking down at her hands, feeling sadder than sad, more alone than lonely.

Now she hurried downstairs and yes, it was singing, all right. Because she spoke such fluent Duddits (and why not? it had been her second language for over thirty years), she translated the rolling syllables without even thinking much about them: Scooby-Dooby-Doo,where are you? We got some work to do now. I’ve been telling you, Scooby-Doo, we need a helping hand, now.

She went into his room, not knowing what to expect. Certainly not what she found: every light blazing, Duddits fully dressed for the first time since his last (and very likely final, according to Dr Briscoe) remission. He had put on his favorite corduroy pants, his down vest over his Grinch tee-shirt, and his Red Sox hat. He was sitting in his chair by the window and looking out into the night. No frown now; no tears, either. He looked out into the storm with a bright-eyed eagerness that took her back to long before the disease, which had announced itself with such stealthy, easy-to-overlook symptoms: how tired and out of breath he got after just a short game of Frisbee in the back yard, how big the bruises were from even little thumps and bumps, and how slowly they faded. This was the way he used to look when…

But she couldn’t think. She was too flustered to think.

“Duddits! Duddle, what-”

“Umma! Ere I unnox?”

Mumma! Where’s my lunchbox?

“In the kitchen, but Duddie, it’s the middle of the night. It’s snowing! You aren’t…”

Going anywhere was the way that one ended, of course, but the words wouldn’t cross her tongue. His eyes were so brilliant, so alive. Perhaps she should have been glad to see that light so strongly in his eyes, that energy, but instead she was terrified.

“I eed I unnox! I eed I unch!”

I need my lunchbox, I need my lunch.

“No, Duddits.” Trying to be firm. “You need to take off your clothes and get back into bed. That’s what you need and all you need. Here. I’ll help you.”

But when she approached, he raised his amis and crossed them over his narrow chest, the palm of his right hand pressed against his left cheek, the palm of his left against the right cheek. From earliest childhood, it was all he could muster in the way of defiance. It was usually enough, and it was now. She didn’t want to upset him again, perhaps start another nosebleed. But she wasn’t going to put up a lunch for him in his Scooby lunchbox at one-fifteen in the morning. Absolutely not.

She retreated to the side of his bed and sat down on it. The room was warm, but she was cold, even in her heavy flannel nightgown. Duddits slowly lowered his arms, watching her wanly. “You can sit up if you want,” she said, “but why? Did you have a dream, Duddie? A bad dream?”

Maybe a dream but not a bad one. Not with that eager look on his face, and now she recognized it well enough: it was the way he had looked so often back in the eighties, in the good years before Henry, Pete, Beaver, and Jonesy had all gone their separate ways, calling less frequently and coming by to see him less frequently still as they raced toward their grownup lives and forgot the one who had to stay behind.

It was the look he got when his special sense told him that his friends were coming by to play. Sometimes they’d all go off together to Strawford Park or the Barrens (they weren’t supposed to go there but they did, both she and Alfie had known that they did, and one of their trips there had gotten them all on the front page of the newspaper). Sometimes Alfie or one of their moms or dads would take them to Airport Minigolf or to Fun Town in Newport, and on those days she would always pack Duddits sandwiches and cookies and a thermos of milk in his Scooby-Doo lunchbox.

He thinks his friends are coming. It must be Henry and Jonesy he’s thinking of, because he says Pete and Beav-

Suddenly a terrible image came to her as she sat on Duddits’s bed with her hands folded in her lap. She saw herself opening the door to a knock that came at the empty hour of three in the morning, not wanting to open it but helpless to stop herself. And the dead ones were there instead of the living ones. Beaver and Pete were there, returned to the childhood in which they had been living on the day she had first met them, the day they had saved Duddie from God knew what nasty trick and then brought him home safe. In her mind’s eye Beaver was wearing his many-zippered motorcycle jacket and Pete was wearing the crewneck sweater of which he had been so proud, the one with NASA on the left breast. She saw them cold and pale, their eyes the lusterless grape-black glaze of corpses. She saw Beaver step forward-no smile for her now, no recognition of her now; when Joe “Beaver” Clarendon put out his pallid starfish hands, he was all business. We’ve come for Duddits, Missus Cavell. We’re dead, and now he is, too.

She clasped her hands tighter as a shudder twisted through her body. Duddits didn’t see; he was looking out the window again, his face eager and expectant. And very softly, he began to sing again.

“Ooby-Ooby-Ooo, eh ah ooo? Eee aht-sum urk-ooo ooo ow…”

“Mr Gray?”

No answer. Jonesy stood at the door of what was now most definitely his office, not a trace of Tracker Brothers left except for the dirt on the windows (the matter-of-fact pornography of the girl with her skirt raised had been replaced by Van Gogh’s Marigolds), feeling more and more uneasy. What was the bastard looking for?

“Mr Gray, where are you?” No answer this time either, but there was a sense of Mr Gray returning… and he was happy. The son of a bitch was happy. Jonesy didn’t like that at all.

“Listen,” Jonesy said. Hands still pressed to the door of his sanctuary; forehead now pressed to it, as well. “I’ve got a proposal for you, my friend-you’re halfway human already; why not just go native? We can coexist, I guess, and I’ll show you around. Ice cream’s good, beer’s even better. What do you say?”

He suspected Mr Gray was tempted, as only an essentially formless creature could be tempted when offered form-a trade right out of a fairy-tale.

Not tempted enough, however.

There was the spin of the starter, the roar of the truck’s motor.

“Where are we going, chum? Always assuming we can get off Standpipe Hill, that is?”

No answer, only that disquieting sense that Mr Gray had been looking for something… and found it.

Jonesy hurried across to the window and looked out in time to see the truck’s headlights sweep across the pillar erected to memorialize the lost. The plaque had drifted in again, which meant they must have been here awhile.

Slowly, carefully, now pushing its way through bumper-high drifts, the Dodge Ram started back down the hill.

Twenty minutes later they were on the turnpike again, once more headed south.

Chapter Seventeen HEROES

Owen couldn’t raise Henry by calling out loud, the man was too deep in exhausted sleep, and so he called with his mind. He found this was easier as the byrus continued to spread. It was growing on three of the fingers on his right hand now, and had all but plugged the cup of his left ear with its spongy, itching growth. He had also lost a couple of teeth, although nothing seemed to be growing in the sockets, at least not yet.

Kurtz and Freddy had stayed clean, thanks to Kurtz’s finely honed instincts, but the crews of the two surviving Blue Boy gunships, Owen’s and Joe Blakey’s, were lousy with byrus. Ever since talking to Henry in the shed, Owen had heard the voices of his compatriots, calling to each other across a previously unsuspected void. They were covering up the infection for now, as he himself was; lots of heavy winter clothing helped. But that wouldn’t be possible for much longer, and they didn’t know what to do.

In that regard, Owen supposed he was lucky. He at least had a wheel to which he could put his shoulder.

Standing outside the back of the shed and beyond the electrified wire, smoking another cigarette he didn’t want, Owen went in search of Henry and found him working his way down a steep, brushy slope. Above him was the sound of kids playing baseball or softball. Henry was a boy, a teenager, and he was calling someone’s name-Janey? Jolie? It didn’t matter. He was dreaming, and Owen needed him in the real world. He had let Henry sleep as long as he could (almost an hour longer than he had really wanted to), but if they were going to get this show on the road, now was the time.

Henry, he called.

The teenager looked around, startled. There were other boys with him; three-no four of them, one peering into some kind of pipe. They were indistinct, hard to see, and Owen didn’t care about them, anyway. Henry was the one he wanted, and not this pimply, startled version of him, either. Owen wanted the man.

Henry, wake up.

No, she’s in there. We have to get her out. We-

I don’t give a rat’s ass about her, whoever she is. Wake up,

No, I-

It’s time, Henry, wake up. Wake up. Wake

the fuck up!

Henry sat up with a gasp, not sure who or where he was. That was bad, but there was worse: he didn’t know when he was. Was he eighteen or almost thirty-eight or somewhere in between? He could smell grass, hear the crack of a bat on a ball (a softball bat; it had been girls playing, girls in yellow shirts), and he could still hear Pete screaming She’s in here! Guys, I think she’s in here!

“Pete saw it, he saw the line,” Henry murmured. He didn’t know exactly what he was talking about. The dream was already fading, its bright images being replaced by something dark. Something he had to do, or try to do. He smelled hay and, more faintly, the sweet-sour aroma of pot.

Mister, can you help us?

Big doe eyes. Marsha, her name had been. Things coming into focus now. Probably not, he’d answered her, then added but maybe.

Wake up, Henry! It’s quarter of four, time to drop your cock and grab your socks.

That voice was stronger and more immediate than the others, overwhelming them and damping them out; it was like a voice from a Walkman when the batteries were fresh and the volume was turned all the way up to ten. Owen Underhill’s voice. He was Henry Devlin. And if they were going to try this, the time was now.

Henry got up, wincing at the pain in his legs, his back, his shoulders, his neck. Where his muscles weren’t screaming, the advancing byrus was itching abominably. He felt a hundred years old until he took his first step toward the dirty window, then decided it was more like a hundred and ten.

Owen saw the man’s shape come into view inside the window and nodded, relieved. Henry was moving like Methuselah on a bad day, but Owen had something that would fix that, at least temporarily. He had stolen it from the brand-new infirmary, which was so busy no one had noticed him coming or going. And all the time he had protected the front of his mind with the two blocking mantras Henry had taught him: Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross and Yes we can-can, yes we can, yes we can-can, great gosh a’mighty. So far they seemed to be working-he’d gotten a few strange looks but no questions. Even the weather continued in their favor, the storm roaring on unabated.

Now he could see Henry’s face at the window, a pale oval blur looking out at him.

I don’t know about this, Henry sent. Man, I can hardly walk.

I can help with that. Stand clear of the window.

Henry moved back with no questions.

In one pocket of his parka, Owen had the small metal box (USMC stamped on the steel top) in which he kept his various IDs when he was on active duty-the box had been a present from Kurtz himself after the Santo Domingo mission last year, a fine irony. In his other pocket were three rocks which he had picked up from beneath his own helicopter, where the fall of snow was thin.

He took one of them-a good-sized chunk of Maine granite-then paused, appalled, as a bright image filled his mind. Mac Cavanaugh, the fellow from Blue Boy Leader who had lost two of his fingers on the op, was sitting inside one of the semi trailer-boxes in the compound. With him was Frank Bellson from Blakey’s Blue Boy Three, the other gunship that had made it back to base. One of them had turned on a powerful eight-cell flashlight and set it on its base like an electric candle. Its bright glow sprayed up into the gloom. This was happening right now, not five hundred feet from where Owen stood with a rock in one hand and his steel box in the other. Cavanaugh and Bellson sat side by side on the floor of the trailer. Both wore what looked like heavy red beards. Luxuriant growth had burst apart the bandages over the stumps of Cavanaugh’s fingers. They had service automatics, the muzzles in their mouths. Their eyes were linked. So were their minds. Bellson was counting down: Five…four…three…

“Boys, no!” Owen cried, but got no sense they heard him; their link was too strong, forged with the resolve of men who have made up their minds. They would be the first of Kurtz’s command to do this tonight; Owen did not think they would be the last.

Owen? That was Henry. Owen, what’s-

Then he tapped into what Owen was seeing and fell silent, horrified.

… two… one.

Two pistol-shots, muffled by the roar of the wind and four Zimmer electrical generators. Two fans of blood and brain-tissue appearing like magic over the heads of Cavanaugh and Bellson in the dim light. Owen and Henry saw Bellson’s right foot give a final dying jump. It struck the barrel of the flashlight, and for a moment they could see Cavanaugh’s and Bellson’s distorted, byrus-speckled faces. Then, as the flashlight went rolling across the bed of the box, casting cartwheels of light on the aluminum side, the picture went dark, like the picture on a TV when the plug has been pulled.

“Christ,” Owen whispered. “Good Christ.”

Henry had appeared behind the window again. Owen motioned him back, then threw the rock. The range was short, but his first shot missed anyway, bouncing harmlessly off the weathered boards to the left of the target. He took the second, pulled in a deep, settling breath, and threw. This one shattered the glass.

Got mail for you, Henry. Coming through.

He tossed the steel box through the hole where the glass had been.

It bounced across the shed floor. Henry picked the box up and undid the clasp. Inside were four foil-wrapped packets.

What are these?

Pocket rockets, Owen returned. How’s your heart?

Okay, as far as I know.

Good, because that shit makes cocaine feel like Valium. There are two in each pack. Take three. Save the rest.

I don’t have any water.

Owen sent a clear picture-south end of a northbound horse. Chew them, beautiful-you’ve got a few teeth left, don’t you? There was real anger in this, and at first Henry didn’t understand it, but then of course he did. If there was anything he should be able to understand this early morning, it was the sudden loss of friends.

The pills were white, unmarked by the name of any pharmaceutical company, and terribly bitter in his mouth as they crumbled. Even his throat tried to pucker as he swallowed.

The effect was almost instantaneous. By the time he had tucked Owen’s USMC box into his pants pocket, Henry’s heartbeat had doubled. By the time he stepped back to the window, it had tripled, His eyes seemed to pulse from their sockets with each quick rap in his chest. This wasn’t distressing, however; he actually found it quite pleasant. No more sleepiness, and his aches seemed to have flown away.

“Yow!” he called. “Popeye should try a few cans of this shit!” And laughed, both because speaking now seemed so odd-archaic, almost-and because he felt so fine.

Keep it down, what do you say?

Okay! OKAY!

Even his thoughts seemed to have acquired a new, crystalline force, and Henry didn’t think this was just his imagination. Although the light behind the old feed shed was a little less than in the rest of the compound, it was still strong enough for him to see Owen wince and raise a hand to the side of his head, as if someone had shouted directly into his ear.

Sorry, he sent.

It’s all right. It’s just that you’re so strong. You must be covered with that shit.

Actually, I’m not, Henry returned. A wink of his dream came back to him: the four of them on that grassy slope. No, the five of them, because Duddits had been there, too.

Henry-do you remember where I said I’d be?

Southwest corner of the compound. All the way across from the barn, on the diagonal, But-

No buts. That’s where I’ll be. If you want a ride out of here, it’s where you better be, too. It’s… A pause as Owen checked his watch. If it was still working, it must be the kind you wind up, Henry thought… two minutes to four. I’ll give you half an hour, then if the folks in the barn haven’t started to move, I’m going to short the fence.

Half an hour may not be long enough, Henry protested. Although he was standing still, looking out at Owen’s form in the blowing snow, he was breathing fast, like a man in a race. His heart felt as if it was in a race.

It’ll have to be, Owen sent. The fence is alarmed. 7here’ll be sirens. Even more lights. A general alert. I’ll give you five minutes after the shit starts hitting the fan-that’s a three hundred count-and if you haven’t shown up, I’m on my merry way.

You’ll never find Jonesy without me

That doesn’t mean I have to stay here and die with you, Henry. Patient. As if talking to a small child. If you don’t make it to where I am in five minutes, there’ll be no chance for either of us, anyway.

Those two men who just committed suicide…they’re not the only ones who are fucked up.

I know.

Henry caught a brief mental glimpse of a yellow school bus with MILLINOCKET SCHOOL DEPT. printed up the side. Looking out the windows were two score of grinning skulls. They were Owen Underhill’s mates, Henry realized. The ones he’d arrived with yesterday morning. Men who were now either dying or already dead.

Never mind them, Owen replied. It’s Kurtz’s ground support we have to worry about now. Especially the Imperial Valleys. If they exist, you better believe they’ll follow orders and that they’re well-trained. And training wins out over confusion every time-that’s what training is for. If you stick around, they’ll roast you and toast you. Five minutes is what you have once the alarms go. A three hundred count.

Owen’s logic was hard to like and impossible to refute.

All right, Henry said. Five minutes.

You have no business doing this in the first place, Owen told him. The thought came to Henry encrusted with a complex filigree of emotion: frustration, guilt, the inevitable fear-in Owen Underhill’s case, not of dying but of failure. If what you say is true, everything depends on whether or not we get out of here clean. For you to maybe put the entire world at risk because of a few hundred schmoes in a barn…

It’s not the way your boss would do it, right?

Owen reacted with surprise-no words, but a kind of comicbook ! in Henry’s mind. Then, even over the ceaseless howl and hoot of the wind, he heard Owen laugh.

You got me there, beautiful.

Anyway, I’ll get them moving. I’m a motivational master.

I know you’ll try. Henry couldn’t see Owen’s face, but felt him smiling. Then Owen spoke aloud. “And after that? Tell me again.”

“Why?”

“Maybe because soldiers need motivation, too, especially when they’re derailing. And belay the telepathy-I want you to say it out loud. I want to hear the word.”

Henry looked at the man shivering on the other side of the fence and said, “After that we’re going to be heroes. Not because we want to, but because there are no other options.”

Out in the snow and the wind, Owen was nodding. Nodding and still smiling. “Why not?” he said. “Just why the fuck not?”

In his mind, glimmering, Henry saw the image of a little boy with a plate raised over his head. What the man wanted was for the little boy to put the plate back-that plate that had haunted him so over the years and would forever stay broken.

Dreamless since childhood and thus unsane, Kurtz woke as he always did: at one moment nowhere, at the next completely awake and cognizant of his surroundings. Alive, hallelujah, oh yes, still in the big time. He turned his head and looked at the clock, but the goddam thing had gone off again in spite of its fancy anti-magnetic casing, flashing 12-12-12, like a stutterer caught on one word. He turned on the lamp beside the bed and picked up the pocket watch on the bedtable. Four-oh-eight.

Kurtz put it down again, swung his bare feet out on to the floor, and stood up. The first thing he became aware of was the wind, still howling like a woe-dog. The second was that the faraway mutter of voices in his head had disappeared entirely. The telepathy was gone and Kurtz was glad. It had offended him in an elemental, down-deep way, as certain sexual practices offended him. The idea that someone might be able to come into his very head, to be able to visit the upper levels of his mind… that had been horrible. The grayboys deserved to be wiped out for that alone, for bringing that disgustingly peculiar gift. Thank God it had proved ephemeral.

Kurtz shucked his gray workout shorts and stood naked in front of the mirror on the bedroom door, letting his eyes go up from his feet (where the first snarls of purple veins were beginning to show) to the crown of his head, where his graying hair stood up in a sleep-tousle. He was sixty, but not looking too bad; those busted veins on the sides of his feet were the worst of it. Had a bell of a good crank on him, too, although he had never made much use of it; women were, for the most part, vile creatures incapable of loyalty. They drained a man. In his secret unsane heart, where even his madness was starched and pressed and fundamentally not very interesting, Kurtz believed all sex was FUBAR. Even when it was done for procreation, the result was usually a brain-equipped tumor not much different from the shit-weasels.

From the crown of his head, Kurtz let his eyes descend again, slowly, looking for the least patch of red, the tiniest roseola blush. There was nothing. He turned around, looked at as much as he could see by craning back over his shoulder, and still saw nothing. He spread his buttocks, probed between them, slid a finger two knuckles deep into his anus, and felt nothing but flesh.

“I’m clean,” he said in a low voice as he washed his hands briskly in the Winnebago’s little bathroom. “Clean as a whistle.”

He stepped into his shorts again, then sat on his rack to slip into his socks. Clean, praise God, clean. A good word. Clean. The unpleasant feel of the telepathy-like sweaty skin pressed against sweaty skin-was gone. He wasn’t supporting a single strand of Ripley; he had even checked his tongue and gums.

So what had awakened him? Why were there alarm bells clanging in his head?

Because telepathy wasn’t the only form of extrasensory perception. Because long before the grayboys knew there was such a place as Earth tucked away in this dusty and seldom-visited carrel of the great interstellar library, there had been a little thing called instinct, the specialty of uniform-wearing Homo saps such as himself.

“The hunch,” Kurtz said. “The good old all-American hunchola.”

He put on his pants. Then, still bare-chested, he picked up the walkie which lay on the bedtable beside the pocket watch (four-sixteen now, and how the time seemed to be rushing, like a brakeless car plunging down a hill toward a busy intersection). The walkie was a special digital job, encrypted and supposedly unjammable… but one look at his supposedly impervious digital clock made him realize none of the gear was un-anything.

He clicked the SEND/SQUEAL button twice. Freddy Johnson came back quickly and not sounding too sleepy… oh, but now that crunch time was here, how Kurtz (who had been born Robert Coonts, name, name, what’s in a name) longed for Underhill. Owen, Owen, he thought, why did you have to skid just when I needed you the most, son?

“Boss?”

“I’m moving Imperial Valley up to six. That’s Imperial Valley at oh-six-hundred, come back and acknowledge me.”

He had to listen to why it was impossible, crap Owen would not have spouted in his weakest dream. He gave Freddy roughly forty seconds to vent before saying, “Close your clam, you son of a bitch.”

Shocked silence from Freddy’s end.

“We’ve got something brewing here. I don’t know what, but it woke me up out of a sound sleep with the alarm bells ringing. Now I put all you fellows and girls together for a reason, and if you expect to be still drawing breath come suppertime, you want to get them moving. Tell Gallagher she may wind up on point. Acknowledge me, Freddy.”

“Boss, I acknowledge. One thing you should know-we’ve had four suicides that I know of There may have been more. “Kurtz was neither surprised nor displeased. Under certain circumstances, suicide wasn’t just acceptable, but noble-the true gentleman’s final act.

“From the choppers?”

“Affirmative.”

“No Imperial Valleys.”

“No, boss, no Valleys.”

“All right. Floor it, buck. We got trouble. I don’t know what it is, but I know it’s coming. Big thunder.”

Kurtz tossed the walkie back on the table and continued dressing. He wanted another cigarette, but they were all gone.

A pretty good herd of milkers had once been stabled in Old Man Gosselin’s barn, and while the interior might not have passed USDA standards as it now stood, the building was still in okay shape. The soldiers had strung some high-wattage bulbs that cast a brilliant glare over the stalls, the milking stations in the parlor, and the upper and lower lofts. They had also put in a number of heaters, and the barn glowed with a pulsing, almost feverish warmth. Henry unzipped his coat as soon as he stepped in, but still felt the sweat break out on his face. He supposed Owen’s pills had something to do with that-he’d taken another outside the barn.

His first thought as he looked around was how similar the barn was to the various refugee camps he had seen: Bosnian Serbs in Macedonia, Haitian rebels after Uncle Sugar’s Marines had landed in Port-au-Prince, the African exiles who had left their home countries because of disease, famine, civil war, or a combination of all three. You got used to seeing such things on the TV news, but the pictures always came from far away; the horror with which one viewed them was almost clinical. But this wasn’t a place you needed a passport to visit. This was a cowbarn in New England. The people packed into it weren’t wearing rags and dirty dashikis but parkas from Bean’s, cargo pants (so perfect for those extra shotgun shells) from Banana Republic, underwear from Fruit of the Loom. The look was the same, though. The only difference he could discern was how surprised they all still seemed. This wasn’t supposed to be happening in the land of Sprint Nickel Nights.

The internees pretty well covered the main floor, where hay had been spread (jackets on top of that). They were sleeping in little clumps or family groups. There were more of them in the lofts, and three or four to each of the forty stalls. The room was full of snores and gurgles and the groans of people dreaming badly. Somewhere a child was weeping. And there was piped-in Muzak: to Henry, this was the final bizarre touch. Right now the dozing doomed in Old Man Gosselin’s barn were listening to the Fred Waring Orchestra float through a violin-heavy version of “Some Enchanted Evening”.

Hyped as he was, everything stood out with brilliant, exclamatory clarity. All the orange jackets and hats! he thought. Man! It’s Halloween in hell!

There was also a fair amount of the red-gold stuff. Henry saw patches growing on cheeks, in ears, between fingers; he also saw patches growing on beams and on the electrical cords of several dangling lights. The predominant smell in here was hay, but Henry had no trouble picking up the smell of sulfur-tinged ethyl alcohol under it. As well as the snores, there was a lot of farting going on-it sounded like six or seven seriously untalented musicians tootling away on tubas and saxophones. Under other circumstances it would have been funny… or perhaps even in these, to a person who hadn’t seen that weasel-thing wriggling and snarling on Jonesy’s bloody bed.

How many of them are incubating those things? Henry wondered. The answer didn’t matter, he supposed, because the weasels were ultimately harmless. They might be able to live outside their hosts in this barn, but outside in the storm, where the wind was blowing a gale and the chill-factor was below zero, they wouldn’t have a chance.

He needed to talk to these people

No, that wasn’t right. What he needed to do was scare the living hell out of them. Had to get them moving in spite of the warmth in here and the cold outside. There had been cows in here before; there were cows here again. He had to change them back into people scared, pissed-off people. He could do it, but not alone. And the clock was ticking, Owen Underhill had given him half an hour. Henry estimated that a third of that was already gone.

Got to have a megaphone, he thought. That’s step one.

He looked around, spotted a burly, balding man sleeping on his side to the left of the door leading to the milking parlor, and walked over to take a closer look. He thought it was one of the guys he’d kicked out of the shed, but he wasn’t sure. When it came to hunters, burly, balding men were a dime a peck.

But it was Charles, and the byrus was re-thatching what old Charlie no doubt referred to as his “solar sex-panel”. Who needs Rogaine when you’ve got this shit going for you? Henry thought, then grinned.

Charles was good; better yet, Marsha was sleeping nearby, holding hands with Darren, Mr Bomber-joint-from-Newton. Byrus was now growing down one of Marsha’s smooth cheeks. Her husband was still clean, but his brother-in-law-Bill, had that been his name?-was lousy with the stuff. Best-in-show, Henry thought.

He knelt by Bill, took his byrus-speckled hand, and spoke down into the tangled jungle of his bad dreams. Wake up, Bill. Wakey-wakey, We have to get out of here. And if you help me, we can. Wake up, Bill.

Wake up and be a hero.

It happened with a speed that was exhilarating.

Henry felt Bill’s mind rising toward his, floundering out of the nightmares that had entangled it, reaching for Henry the way a drowning man will reach for the lifeguard who has swum out to save him. Their minds connected like couplers on a pair of freight-cars.

Don’t talk, don’t try to talk, Henry told him. Just hoId on. We need Marsha and Charles. The four of us should be enough.

What-

No time, Billy. Let’s go.

Bill took his sister-in-law’s hand. Marsha’s eyes flashed open at once, almost as if she had been waiting for this, and Henry felt all the dials inside his head turn up another notch. She wasn’t supporting as much growth as Bill, but perhaps had more natural talent. She took Charles’s hand without a single question. Henry had an idea she had already grasped what was going on here, and what needed to be done. Thankfully, she also grasped the necessity of speed. They were going to bomb these people, then swing them like a club.

Charles sat with a jerk, eyes wide and bulging from their fatty sockets. He got up as if someone had goosed him. Now all four of them were on their feet, hands joined like participants in a s6xance… which, Henry reflected, this almost was.

Give it to me, he told them, and they did. The feeling was like having a magic wand placed in his hand.

Listen to me, he called.

Heads rose; some people sat up out of sound sleeps as if they had been electrified.

Listen to me and boost me…boost me up! Do you understand? Boost me up! This is your only chance, so BOOST ME UP!

They did it as instinctively as people whistling a tune or clapping to a beat. If he’d given them time to think about it, it probably would have been harder, perhaps even impossible, but he didn’t. Most of them had been sleeping, and he caught the infected ones, the telepaths, with their minds wide open.

Operating on instinct himself, Henry sent a series of images: soldiers wearing masks surrounding the barn, most with guns, some with backpacks connected to long wands. He made the faces of the soldiers into editorial-page caricatures of cruelty. At an amplified order, the wands unleashed streams of liquid fire: napalm. The sides of the barn and roof caught at once.

Henry shifted to the inside, sending pictures of screaming, milling people. Liquid fire dripped through holes in the blazing roof and ignited the hay in the lofts. Here was a man with his hair on fire; there a woman in a burning ski-parka still decorated with lift-tickets from Sugarloaf and Ragged Mountain.

They were all looking at Henry now-Henry and his linked friends. Only the telepaths were receiving the images, but perhaps as many as sixty per cent of the people in the barn were infected, and even those who weren’t caught the sense of panic; a rising tide lifts all boats.

Clamping Bill’s hand tightly with one of his own and Marsha’s with the other, Henry switched the images back to the outside perspective again. Fire; encircling soldier; an amplified voice shouting for the soldiers to be sure no one got clear.

The detainees were on their feet now, speaking in a rising babble of frightened voices (except for the deep telepaths; they only stared at him, haunted eyes in byrus-speckled faces). He showed them the barn burning like a torch in the snow-driven night, the wind turning an inferno into an explosion, a firestorm, and still the napalm hoses poured it on and still the amplified voice exhorted: “THAT’s RIGHT, MEN, GET THEM ALL, DON’T LET ANY OF THEM GET A WAY, THERRE THE CANCER AND WE’re THE CURE!”

Imagination fully pumped up now, feeding on itself in a kind of frenzy, Henry sent images of the few people who managed to find the exits or to wriggle out through the windows. Many of these were in flames. One was a woman with a child cradled in her arms. The soldiers machine-gunned all of them but the woman and the child, who were turned into napalm candles as they ran.

“No!” several women screamed in unison, and Henry realized with a species of sick wonder that all of them, even those without children, had put their own faces on the burning woman. They were up now, milling around like cattle in a thunderstorm. He had to move them before

they had a chance to think once, let alone twice.

Gathering the force of the minds linked to his, Henry sent them an image of the store.

THERE! he called to them. IT’s YOUR ONLY CHANCE! THROUGH THE STORE IF YOU CAN, BREAK DOWN THE FENCE IF THE DOOR’s BLOCKED! DON’T STOP, DON’T HESITATE! GET INTO THE WOODS! HIDE IN THE WOODS! THEY’re COMING TO BURN THIS PLACE DOWN, THE BARN AND EVERYONE IN IT, AND THE WOODS ARE YOUR ONLY CHANCE! NOW, NOW!

Deep in the well of his own imagination, flying on the pills Owen had given him and sending with all his strength-images of possible safety there, of certain death here, images as simple as those in a child’s picture-book-he was only distantly aware that he had begun chanting aloud: “Now, now, now.”

Marsha Chiles picked it up, then her brother-in-law, then Charles, the man with the overgrown solar sex-panel.

“Now! Now! Now!”

Although immune to the byrus and thus no more telepathic than the average bear, Darren was not immune to the growing vibe, and he also joined in.

“Now! Now! Now!”

It “umped from person to person and group to group, a panic-induced infection more catching than the byrus: “Now! Now! Now!” The barn shook with it. Fists were pumping in unison, like fists at a rock concert.

“NOW! NOW! NOW!”

Henry let them take it over and build it, pumping his own fist without even realizing it, flinging his hand into the air to the farthest reach of his aching arm even as he reminded himself not to be caught up in the cyclone of the mass mind he had created: when they went north, he was going south. He was waiting for some point of no return to be reached-the point of ignition and spontaneous combustion.

It came.

“Now,” he whispered.

He gathered Marsha’s mind, Bill’s, Charlie’s… and then the others that were close and particularly locked in. He merged them, compressed them, and then flung that single word like a silver bullet into the heads of the three hundred and seventeen people in Old Man Gosselin’s barn:

NOW.

There was a moment of utter silence before hell’s door flew open.

Just before dusk, a dozen two-man sentry huts (they were actually Porta-Potties with the urinals and toilet-seats yanked out) had been set up at intervals along the security fence. These came equipped with heaters that threw a stuporous glow in the small spaces, and the guards had no interest in going outside them. Every now and then one of them would open a door to allow in a snowy swirl of fresh air, but that was the extent of the guards” exposure to the outside world. Most of them were peacetime soldiers with no gut understanding of how high the current stakes were, and so they swapped stories about sex cars, postings, sex, their families, their future, sex, drinking and drugging expeditions, and sex. They had missed Owen Underhill’s two visits to the shed (he would have been clearly visible from both Post 9 and Post 10) and they were the last to be aware that they had a full-scale revolt on their hands.

Seven other soldiers, boys who had been with Kurtz a little longer and thus had a little more salt on their skins, were in the back of the store near the woodstove, playing five-card stud in the same office where Owen had played Kurtz the ne nous blessez pas tapes roughly two centuries ago. Six of the card-players were sentries. The seventh was Dawg Brodsky’s colleague Gene Cambry. Cambry hadn’t been able to sleep. The reason was concealed by a stretchy cotton wristlet. He didn’t know how long the wristlet would serve, however, because the red stuff under it was spreading. If he wasn’t careful, someone would see it… and then, instead of playing cards in the office, he might be out there in the barn with the John Q’s.

And would he be the only one? Ray Parsons had a big wad of cotton in one ear. He said it was an earache, but who knew for sure? Ted Trezewski had a bandage on one meaty forearm and claimed he’d gouged himself stringing compound barbed wire much earlier in the day. Maybe it was true. George Udall, the Dawg’s immediate superior in more normal times, was wearing a knitted cap over his bald head; damn thing made him look like some kind of elderly white rapper. Maybe there was nothing under there but skin, but it was warm in here for a cap, wasn’t it? Especially a knitted one.

“Kick a buck,” Howie Everett said.

“Call,” said Danny O'Brian.

Parsons Called; so did Udall. Cambry barely heard. In his mind there rose an image of a woman with a child cradled in her arms. As she struggled across the drifted-in paddock, a soldier turned her into a napalm road-flare. Cambry winced, horrified, thinking this image had been served up by his own guilty conscience.

“Gene?” Al Coleman asked. “Are you going to call, or-”

“What’s that?” Howie asked, frowning.

“What’s what?” Ted Trezewski said.

“If you listen, you’ll hear it,” Howie replied. Dumb Polack: Cambry heard this unspoken corollary in his head, but paid it no mind. Once it had been called to their attention, the chant was clear enough, rising above the wind, quickly taking on strength and urgency.

“Now! Now! Now! Now! NOW!”

It was coming from the barn, directly behind them.

“What in the blue hell?” Udall asked in a musing voice, blinking over the folding table with its scatter of cards, ashtrays, chips, and money. Gene Cambry suddenly understood that there was nothing under the stupid woolen cap but skin, after all. Udall was nominally in charge of this little group, but he didn’t have a clue. He couldn’t see the pumping fists, couldn’t hear the strong thought-voice that was leading the chant.

Cambry saw alarm on Parsons’s face, on Everett’s, on Coleman’s. They were seeing it, too. Understanding leaped among them while the uninfected ones only looked puzzled.

“Fuckers’re gonna break out,” Cambry said.

“Don’t be stupid, Gene,” George Udall said. “They don’t know what’s coming down. Besides, they’re civilians. They’re just letting off a little st-”

Cambry lost the rest as a single word-NOW-ripped through his brain like a buzzsaw. Ray Parsons and Al Coleman winced. Howie Everett cried out in pain, his hands going to his temples, his knees connecting with the underside of the table and sending chips and cards everywhere. A dollar bin landed atop the hot stove and began to bum.

“Aw, fuck a duck, look what you d-” Ted began.

“They’re coming,” Cambry said. “They’re coming at us.”

Parsons, Everett, and Coleman lunged for the M-4 carbines leaning beside Old Man Gosselin’s coatrack. The others looked at them, surprised, still three steps behind… and then there was a vast thud as sixty or more of the internees struck the barn doors. Those doors had been locked from the outside-big steel locks, Army issue. They held, but the old wood gave with a splintering crack.

The prisoners charged through the gap, yelling “Now! Now!” into the snowy mouth of the wind and trampling several of their number underfoot.Cambry also lunged, got one of the compact assault rifles, then had it snatched out of his hands. “That’s mine, muhfuh,” Ted Trezewski snarled.There was less than twenty yards between the shattered barn doors and the back of the store. The mob swept across the gap, shouting NOW! NOW! NOW!

The poker-table went over with a crash, spilling crap everywhere. The perimeter alarm went off as the first internees struck the double-strung fence and were either fried or hooked like fish on the oversized bundles of barbs. Moments later the alarm’s honking, pulsing bray was joined by a whooping siren, the General Quarters alert which was sometimes referred to as Situation Triple Six, the end of the world. In the plastic Porta-Potty sentry huts, surprised and frightened faces peered out dazedly.

“The barn!” someone shouted. “Collapse in on the barn! It’s an escape!”

The sentries trotted out into the snow, many of them bootless, moving along the outside of the fence, unaware that it had been shorted out by the weight of more than eighty kamikaze deer-hunters, all screaming NOW at the top of their lungs, even as they jittered and fried and died.

No one noticed the single man-tall, skinny, wearing a pair of old-fashioned horn-rim specs-who left from the back of the barn and set out diagonally across the drifts filling the paddock. Although Henry could neither see nor sense anyone paying attention to him, he began to run. He felt horribly exposed under the brilliant lights, and the cacophony of the siren and the perimeter alarm made him feel panicky and half-crazy… made him feel the way Duddits’s crying had, that day behind Tracker Brothers.

He hoped to God Underhill was waiting for him. He couldn’t tell, the snow was too thick to see the far end of the paddock, but he would be there soon enough and then he would know.

Kurtz had everything on but one boot when the alarm went off and the emergency lights went on, flooding this godforsaken piece of ground with even more glare. He felt no surprise, no dismay, only a mixture of relief and chagrin. Relief that whatever had been chewing on his nerve-endings was now out in the open. Chagrin that this fucking mess hadn’t held off for another two hours. Another two hours and he could have balanced the books on the whole deal.

He jerked open the door of the Winnebago with his right hand, still holding his other boot in his left. A savage roaring came from the barn, the sort of warrior’s cry to which his heart responded in spite of everything. The gale-force wind thinned it a little, but not much; they were all in it together, it seemed. From somewhere in their well-fed, timorous, it-can’t-happen-here ranks, a Spartacus had arisen-who would have thunk it?

It’s the goddam telepathy, he thought. His instincts, always superb, told him this was serious trouble, that he was watching an operation go tits-up on a truly grand scale, but he was smiling in spite of that. Got to be the goddam telepathy. They smelled out what was coming…and someone decided to do something about it.

As he watched, a motley mob of men, most in parkas and orange hats, came moiling through the sagging, shattered barn doors. One fell on a splintered board and was impaled like a vampire. Some stumbled in the snow and were trampled under. AR the lights were on now. Kurtz felt like a man with a ringside seat at a prizefight. He could see everything.

Wings of escapees, fifty or sixty in each complement, peeled off as neatly as squads in a drill-team and charged at the fence on either side of the ratty little store. Either they didn’t know there was a lethal dose of electricity coursing through the smoothwire or they didn’t care. The rest of them, the main body, charged directly at the back of the store. That was the weakest point in the perimeter, but it didn’t matter. Kurtz thought it was all going to go.

Never in any of his contingency plans had he so much as considered this scenario: two or three hundred overweight November warriors mounting a no-guts-no-glory banzai charge. He had never expected them to do anything but stay put, clamoring for due process right up to the point where they were barbecued.

“Not bad, boys,” Kurtz said. He smelled something else starting to burn-probably his goddam career-but the end had been coming anyway, and he’d picked one hell of an operation to go out on, hadn’t he? As far as Kurtz was concerned, the little gray men from space were strictly secondary. If he ran the news, the headline above the fold would read: SURPRISE! NEW-AGE AMERICANS SHOW SOME BACKBONE! Outstanding. It was almost a shame to cut them down.

The General Quarters siren rose and fell in the snowy night. The first wave of men hit the back of the store. Kurtz could almost see the whole place shudder.

“That goddam telepathy,” Kurtz said, grinning. He could see his guys responding, the first wave from the sentry huts, more coming from the motor-pool, the commissary, and the semi trailer-boxes that were serving as makeshift barracks. Then the smile on Kurtz’s face began to fade, replaced by an expression of puzzlement. “Shoot them,” he said. “Why don’t you shoot them?”

Some were firing, but not enough-nowhere near enough. Kurtz thought he smelled panic. His men weren’t shooting because they had gone chickenshit. Or because they knew they were next.

“The goddam telepathy,” he said again, and suddenly automatic rifle fire began inside the store. The windows of the office where he and Owen Underhill had had their original conference lit up in brilliant stutterflashes of light. Two of them blew out. A man attempted to exit the second of these, and Kurtz had time to recognize George Udall before George was seized by the legs and jerked back inside.

The guys in the office were fighting, at least, but of course they would; in there they were fighting for their lives. The laddie-bucks who had come running were, for the most part, still running. Kurtz thought about dropping his boot and grabbing his nine-millimeter. Shooting a few skedaddlers. Bagging his limit, in fact. It was falling down all around him, why not?

Underhill, that was why not. Owen Underhill had played a part in this snafu. Kurtz knew that as well as he knew his own name. This stank of line-crossing, and crossing the line was an Owen Underhill specialty.

More shooting fi7om Gosselin’s office screams of pain… then triumphant howls. The computer-savvy, Evian-drinking, salad-eating Goths had taken their objective. Kurtz slammed the Winnebago’s door on the scene and hurried back to the bedroom to call Freddy Johnson. He was still carrying his boot.

Cambry was on his knees behind Old Man Gosselin’s desk when the first wave of prisoners smashed its way in. He was opening drawers, looking frantically for a gun. The fact that he didn’t find one very likely saved his life.

“NOW! NOW! NOW!” the oncoming prisoners screamed.

There was a monstrous thud against the back of the store, as if a truck had driven into it. From outside, Cambry could hear a juicy crackling sound as the first detainees hit the fence. The lights in the office began to flicker.

“Stand together, men!” Danny O'Brian cried. “For the love of Christ, stand toge-”

The rear door came off its hinges with so much force that it actually skittered backward across the room, shielding the first of the screaming men who clogged the doorway. Cambry ducked, hands laced over the back of his head, as the door fell on the desk at an angle with him beneath it, in the kneehole.

The sound of rifles on full auto was deafening in the tiny room, drowning out even the screams of the wounded, but Cambry understood that not all of them were firing. Trezewski, Udall, and O'Brian were, but Coleman, Everett, and Ray Parsons were only standing there with their weapons held to their chests and dazed expressions on their faces.

From his accidental shelter, Gene Cambry saw the prisoners charge across the room, saw the first of them caught by the bullets and thrown like scarecrows; saw their blood splash across the walls and the bean-supper posters and the OSHA notices. He saw George Udall throw his gun at two beefy young men in orange, then whirl and lunge at one of the windows. George got halfway out and was then yanked back; a man with Ripley growing on his cheek like a birthmark sank his teeth into George’s calf as if it were a turkey drumstick while another man silenced the screaming head at the other end of George’s body by jerking it briskly to the left. The room was blue with powdersmoke, but he saw Al Coleman throw his gun down and pick up the chant-“Now! Now! Now!” And he saw Ray Parsons, normally the most pacific of men, turn his rifle on Danny O'Brian and blow his brains out.

Now the matter was simple. Now it was just the infected versus the immune.

The desk was hit and slammed against the wall. The door fell on top of Cambry, and before he could get up, people were running over the door, squashing him. He felt like a cowboy who has fallen off his horse during a stampede. I’m going to die under here, he thought, and then for a moment the murderous pressure was gone. He lunged to his knees, driving with adrenaline-loaded muscles, and the door slid off him to the left, saying goodbye with a vicious dig of the doorknob into his hip. Someone dealt him a passing kick in the ribcage, another boot scraped by his right ear, and then he was up. The room was thick with smoke, crazy with shouts and screams. Four or five bulky hunters were propelled into the woodstove, which tore free of its pipe and went crashing over on its side, spilling flaming chunks of maple onto the floor. Money and playing cards caught fire. There was the rancid smell of melting plastic poker chips. Those were Ray’s, Cambry thought incoherently. He had them in the Gu!f. Bosnia, too.

He stood ignored in the confusion. There was no need for the escaping internees to use the door between the office and the store; the entire wall-no more than a flimsy partition, really

–had been smashed flat. Pieces of this stuff were also catching fire from the overturned stove.

“Now,” Gene Cambry muttered. “Now.” He saw Ray Parsons running with the others toward the front of the store, Howie Everett at his heels. Howie snatched a loaf of bread as he ran down the center aisle.

A scrawny old party in a tassled cap and an overcoat was pushed forward onto the overturned stove, then stomped flat. Cambry heard his high-pitched, squealing screams as his face bonded to the metal and then began to boil.

Heard it and felt it.

“Now!” Cambry shouted, giving in and joining the others. “Now!”

He broad-jumped the growing flames from the stove and ran, losing his little mind in the big one.

For all practical purposes, Operation Blue Boy was over.

Three quarters of the way across the paddock, Henry paused, gasping for breath and clutching at his hammering chest. Behind him was the pocket armageddon he had unleashed; ahead of him he could see nothing but darkness. Fucking Underhill had run out on him, had-

Easy, beautiful-easy.

Lights flashed out twice. Henry had been looking in the wrong place, that was all; Owen was parked a little to the left of the paddock’s southwest comer. Now Henry could see the Sno-Cat’s boxy outline clearly. From behind him came screams, shouts, orders, shooting. Not as much shooting as he would have expected, but this was no time to wonder why.

Hurry up! Owen cried. We have to get out of here!

I’m coming as fast as I can-hold on.

Henry got moving again. Whatever had been in Owen’s kickstart pills was already wearing off, and his feet felt heavy. His thigh itched maddeningly, and so did his mouth. He could feel the stuff creeping over his tongue. It was like a soft-drink fizz that wouldn’t go away.

Owen had cut the fence-both the barbed wire and the smooth. Now he stood in front of the Sno-Cat (it was white to match the snow, and it was really no wonder Henry hadn’t seen it) with an automatic rifle propped against his hip, attempting to look everywhere at once. The multiple lights gave him half a dozen shadows; they radiated out from his boots like crazy clock-hands.

Owen grabbed Henry around the shoulders. You okay?

Henry nodded. As Owen began to pull him toward the Sno-Cat, there was a loud, high-pitched explosion, as if someone had just fired the world’s largest carbine. Henry ducked, stumbled over his own feet, and would have fallen if Owen hadn’t held him up.

What-?

LP gas. Gasoline, too, maybe. Look.

Owen took him by the shoulders and turned him around. Henry saw a vast pillar of fire in the snowy Might. Bits of the store-boards, shingles, flaming boxes of Cheerios, burning rolls of toilet paper-rose into the sky. Some of the soldiers were watching this, mesmerized. Others were running for the woods. In pursuit of the prisoners, Henry assumed, although he was hearing their panic in his head-Run! Run! Now! Now!-and simply could not credit it. Later, when he had time to think, he would understand that many of the soldiers were also fleeing. Now he understood nothing. Things were happening too fast.

Owen turned him around again and boosted him into the Sno-Cat’s passenger seat, pushing him past a hanging canvas flap that smelled strongly of motor oil. It was blessedly warm in the “Cat’s cab. A radio bolted to the rudimentary dashboard chattered and squawked. The only thing Henry could make out clearly was the panic in the voices. It made him savagely happy-happier than he’d been since the afternoon the four of them had put the fear of God into Richie Grenadeau and his bullyrag buddies. And that’s who was running this operation, as far as Henry could see: a bunch of grownup Richie Grenadeaus, armed with guns instead of dried-up pieces of dogshit.

There was something between the seats, a box with two blinking amber lights. As Henry bent over it, curious, Owen Underhill snatched back the tarp hanging beside the driver’s seat and flung himself into the “Cat. He was breathing hard and smiling as he looked at the burning store.

“Be careful of that, brother,” he said. “Mind the buttons.” Henry lifted the box, which was about the size of Duddits’s beloved Scooby-Doo lunchbox. The buttons of which Owen had spoken were under the blinking lights. “What are they?”

Owen turned the ignition key and the Sno-Cat’s hot engine rumbled into immediate life. The transmission ran off a high stick, which Owen jammed into gear. Owen was still smiling. In the bright light falling through the Sno-Cat’s windshield, Henry could now see a reddish-orange thread of byrus growing beneath each of the man’s eyes, like mascara. There was more in his brows.

“Too much light in this place,” he said. “We’re gonna dial em down a little.” He turned the “Cat in a surprisingly smooth circle; it was like being on a motorboat. Henry collapsed back against the seat, holding the box with the blinking lights on his lap. He felt that if he didn’t walk again for five years, that would be about right.

Owen glanced at him as he drove the Sno-Cat on a diagonal toward the snowbank-enclosed ditch that was the Swanny Pond Road. “You did it,” he said. “I doubted that you could, I freely admit it, but you pulled the fucker off.”

“I told you-I’m a motivational master.” Besides, he sent, most of them really are going to die anyway.

Doesn’t matter. You gave them a chance. And now-

There was more shooting, but it wasn’t until a bullet whined off the metal just above their heads that Henry realized it was aimed at them. There was a brisk clank as another slug ricocheted off one of the Sno-Cat’s treads and Henry ducked… as if that would do any good.

Still smiling, Owen pointed a gloved hand off to his right. Henry peered in that direction as two more slugs ricocheted off the “Cat’s squat pillbox body. Henry cringed both times; Owen seemed not even to notice.

Henry saw a cluster of trailer-boxes, some with brand names like Sysco and Scott Paper on them. In front of the trailers was a colony of motor homes, and in front of the biggest, a Winnebago that looked to Henry like a mansion on wheels, were six or seven men, all firing at the Sno-Cat. Although the range was long, the wind high, and the snow still heavy, too many were hitting. Other men, some only partially dressed (one bruiser came sprinting through the snow displaying a bare chest that would have looked at home on a comic-book superhero) were Joining the group. At its center stood a tall man with gray hair. Beside him was a stockier guy. As Henry watched, the skinny man raised his rifle and fired, seemingly without bothering to aim. There was a spanng sound and Henry sensed something pass right in front of his nose, a small wicked droning thing.

Owen actually laughed. “The skinny one with the gray hair is Kurtz. He’s in charge, and can that fucker shoot.”

More bullets spanged off the “Cat’s treads, its body. Henry sensed another of those buzzing, hustling presences in the cab, and suddenly the radio was silent. The distance between them and the shooters clustered around the Winnebago was getting longer, but it didn’t seem to matter. As far as Henry was concerned, all those fuckers could shoot. It was only a matter of time before one of them took a hit… and yet Owen looked happy. It occurred to Henry that he had hooked up with someone even more suicidal than himself.

“The guy beside Kurtz is Freddy Johnson. Those Mouseketeers are all Kurtz’s boys, the ones who were supposed to-whoops, look out!”

Another spang, another whining steel bee-between them, this time-and suddenly the knob on the transmission stick was gone. Owen burst out laughing. “Kurtz!” he shouted. “Bet you a nickel! Two years from mandatory retirement age and he still shoots like Annie Oakley!” He hammered a fist on the steering yoke. “But that’s enough. Fun is fun and done is done. Turn out their lights, beautiful.”

“Huh?”

Still grinning, Owen jerked a thumb at the box with the blinking amber bulbs. The curved streaks of byrus under his eyes now looked like warpaint to Henry. “Push the buttons, bub. Push the buttons and yank down the shades.”

Suddenly-it was always sudden, always magical-the world fell away and Kurtz was in the zone. The scream of the blizzard wind, the pelt of the snow, the howl of the siren, the beat of the buzzer-all gone. Kurtz lost his awareness of Freddy Johnson next to him and the other Imperial Valleys gathering around. He fixed on the departing Sno-Cat and nothing else. He could see Owen Underhill in the left seat, right through the steel shell of the cab he could see him, as if he, Abe Kurtz, were all at once equipped with Superman’s X-ray vision. The distance was incredibly long, but it didn’t matter. The next round he fired was going right into the back of Owen Underhill’s treacherous, line-crossing head. He raised the rifle, sighted down-

Two explosions ripped the night, one of them close enough to hammer Kurtz and his men with the shockwave. A trailer-box with the words INTEL INSIDE printed on it rose into the air, turned over, and came down on Spago’s, the cook-tent. “Holy Christ!” one of the men shouted.

Not all of the lights went out-a half hour wasn’t long and Owen had had time to equip only two of the gennies with thermite charges (all the time muttering “Banbury Cross, Banbury Cross, ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross” under his breath), but suddenly the fleeing Sno-Cat was swallowed in moving fire-flecked shadows, and Kurtz dropped his rifle into the snow without discharging it.

“Fuck a duck,” he said tonelessly. “Cease firing. Cease firing, you humps. Quit it, praise Jesus. Inside. Every one of you but Freddy. join hands and pray for God the Father Almighty to get our asses out of the sling they’re in. Come here, Freddy. Step lively.”

The others, nearly a dozen, trooped up the steps to the Winnebago, looking uneasily at the burning generators, the blazing cook-tent (already the commissary-tent next door was catching; the infirmary and the morgue would be next). Half the pole lights in the compound were out.

Kurtz put his arm around Freddy Johnson’s shoulders and walked him twenty paces into the blowing snow, which the wind was now lifting and carrying in veils that looked like mystic steam. Directly ahead of the two men, Gosselin’s-what was left of it was burning merry hell. The barn had already caught. Its shattered doors gaped.

“Freddy, do you love Jesus? Tell me the truth.”

Freddy had been through this before. It was a mantra. The boss was clearing his head.

“I love Him, boss.”

“Do you swear that’s true?” Kurtz looking keenly. Looking through him, more than likely. Planning ahead, if such creatures of instinct could be said to plan. “As you face the eternal pit of hell for a lie?”

“I swear it’s true.”

“You love Him a lot, do you?”

“Lots, boss.”

“More than the group? More than going in hot and getting the job done?” A pause. “More than you love me?'Not questions you wanted to answer wrong if you wanted to go on living. Fortunately, not hard ones, either. “No, boss.”

“Telepathy gone, Freddy?”

“I had a touch of something, I don’t know if it was telepathy, exactly, voices in my head-”

Kurtz was nodding. Red-gold flames the color of the Ripley fungus burst through the roof of the barn.

“-but that’s gone.”

“Other men in the group?”

“Imperial Valley, you mean?” Freddy nodded toward the Winnebago.

“Who else would I mean, The Firehouse Five Plus Two?

Yes, them!”

“They’re clean, boss.”

“That’s good, but it’s also bad. Freddy, we need a couple of infected Americans. And when I say we, I mean you and I. I want Americans who are crawling with that red shit, understand me?”

“I do.” What Freddy didn’t understand was why, but at the moment the why didn’t matter. He could see Kurtz taking hold, visibly taking hold, and that was a relief. When Freddy needed to know, Kurtz would tell him. Freddy looked uneasily at the blazing store, the blazing barn, the blazing cook-tent. This situation was FUBAR.

Or maybe not. Not if Kurtz was taking hold.

“Goddam telepathy’s responsible for most of this,” Kurtz mused, “but it wasn’t telepathy that triggered it. That was pure human fuckery, praise Jesus. Who betrayed Jesus, Freddy? Who gave him that traitor’s kiss?”

Freddy had read his Bible, mostly because Kurtz had given it to him. “Judas Iscariot, boss.”

Kurtz was nodding rapidly. His eyes were moving everywhere, tabulating the destruction, calculating the response, which would be severely limited by the storm. “That’s right, buck. Judas betrayed Jesus and Owen Philip Underhill betrayed us. Judas got thirty pieces of silver. Not much of a payday, do you think?”

“No, boss.” He delivered this reply partially turned away from Kurtz because something in the commissary had exploded. A steel hand clutched his shoulder and turned him back. Kurtz’s eyes were wide and burning. The white lashes made them look like ghost-eyes.

“Look at me when I talk to you,” Kurtz said. “Listen to me when I speak to you.” Kurtz put his free hand on the nine-millimeter’s grip. “Or I’ll blow your guts out on the snow. I have had a hard night here and don’t you make it any worse, you hound, do you understand me? Catch the old drift-ola?”

Johnson was a man of good physical courage, but now he felt something turn over in his stomach and try to crawl away. “Yes, boss, I’m sorry.”

“Accepted. God loves and forgives, we must do the same. I don’t know how many pieces of silver Owen got, but I can tell you this: we’re going to catch him, we’re going to spread his cheeks, and we are going to tear that boy a splendid new asshole. Are you with me?”

“Yes.” There was nothing Freddy wanted more than to find the person who had turned his previously ordered world upside down and fuck that person over. “How much of this do you reckon Owen’s responsible for, boss?”

“Enough for me,” Kurtz said serenely. “I have an idea I’m finally going down, Freddy-”

“No, boss.”

“-but I won’t go down alone.” Ann still around Freddy’s shoulders, Kurtz began to lead his new second back toward the “Bago. Squat, dying pillars of fire marked the burning gennies. Underhill had done that; one of Kurtz’s own boys. Freddy still found it difficult to believe, but he had begun to get steamed, just the same. How many pieces of silver, Owen? How many did you get, you traitor?

Kurtz stopped at the foot of the steps.

“Which one of those fellows do you like to command a search-and-destroy mission, Freddy?”

“Gallagher, boss.”

“Kate?”

“That’s right.”

“Is she a cannibal, Freddy? The person we leave in charge has to be a cannibal.”

“She eats em raw with slaw, boss.”

“Okay,” Kurtz said. “Because this is going to be dirty. I need two Ripley Positives, hopefully Blue Boy guys. The rest of them… like the animals, Freddy. Imperial Valley is now a search-and-destroy mission. Gallagher and the rest are to hunt down as many as they can. Soldiers and civilians alike. From now until 1200 hours tomorrow, it’s feeding time. After that, it’s every man for himself Except for us, Freddy.” The firelight painted Kurtz’s face with byrus, turned his eyes into weasel’s eyes. “We’re going to hunt down Owen Underhill and teach him to love the Lord.”

Kurtz bounded up the Winnebago’s steps, sure as a mountain goat on the packed and slippery snow. Freddy Johnson followed him.

The Sno-Cat plunged down the embankment to the Swanny Pond Road fast enough to make Henry’s stomach roll over. It slued, then turned south. Owen worked the clutch and mangled the stick-shift, working the “Cat up through the gears and into high. With the galaxies of snow flying at the windshield, Henry felt as if they were travelling at approximately mach one. He guessed it might actually be thirty-five miles an hour. That would get them away from Gosselin’s, but he had an idea Jonesy was moving much faster.

Turnpike ahead? Owen asked. It is, isn’t it?

Yes. About four miles.

We’ll need to switch vehicles when we get there.

No one gets hurt if we can help it. And no one gets killed.

Henry…I don’t know how to break it to you, but this isn’t high school basketball.

“No one gets hurt. No one gets killed. At least not when we’re swapping vehicles. Agree to that or I’m rolling out this door right now.”

Owen glanced at him. “You would, too, wouldn’t you? And goddam what your friend’s got planned for the world.” “my friend isn’t responsible for any of this. He’s been kidnapped.” “All right. No one gets hurt when we swap over. If we can help it. And no one gets killed. Except maybe us. Now where are we going?”

Derry.

That’s where he is? This last surviving alien?

I think so. In any case, I have a friend in Derry who can help us. He sees the line.

What line?

“Never mind,” Henry said, and thought: It’s complicated.

“What do you mean, complicated? And no bounce, no play what’s that?”

I’ll tell you while we’re driving south. If I can.

The Sno-Cat rolled toward the Interstate, a capsule preceded by the glare of its lights.

“Tell me again what we’re going to do,” Owen said.

“Save the world.”

“And tell me what that makes us-I need to hear it.”

“It makes us heroes,” Henry said. Then he put his head back and closed his eyes. In seconds he was asleep.