Dreamcatcher

Chapter Eighteen THE CHASE BEGINS

Jonesy had no idea what time it was when the green DYSART’s Sign twinkled out of the snowy gloom-the Ram’s dashboard clock was bitched up, just flashing 12:00 A.M. over and over-but it was still dark and still snowing hard. Outside of Derry, the plows were losing their battle with the storm. The stolen Ram was “a pretty good goer”, as Jonesy’s Pop would have said, but it too was losing its battle, slipping and slueing more frequently in the deepening snow, fighting its way through the drifts with increasing difficulty. Jonesy had no idea where Mr Gray thought he was going, but Jonesy didn’t believe he would get there. Not in this storm, not in this truck.

The radio worked, but not very well; so far everything that came through was faint, blurred with static. He heard no time-checks, but picked up a weather report. The storm had switched over to rain from Portland south, but from Augusta to Brunswick, the radio said, the precipitation was a wicked mix of sleet and freezing rain. Most communities were without power, and nothing without chains on its wheels was moving.

Jonesy liked this news just fine.

When Mr Gray turned the steering wheel to head up the ramp toward the beckoning green sign, the Ram pickup slid broadside, spraying up great clouds of snow. Jonesy knew he likely would have gone off the exit ramp and into the ditch if he’d been in control, but he wasn’t. And although he was no longer immune to Jonesy’s emotions, Mr Gray seemed much less prone to panic in a stress situation. Instead of wrenching blindly against the skid, Mr Gray turned into it, held the wheel over until the slide stopped, then straightened the truck out again. The dog sleeping in the passenger footwell never woke up, and Jonesy’s pulse barely rose. If he had been in control, Jonesy knew, his heart would have been hammering like hell. But, of course, his idea of what to do with the car when it stormed like this was to put it in the garage.

Mr Gray obeyed the stop-sign at the top of the ramp, although Route 9 was a drifted wasteland in either direction. Across from the ramp was a huge parking lot brilliantly lit by arc-sodiums; beneath their glare, the wind-driven snow seemed to move like the frozen respiration of an enormous, unseen beast. On an ordinary night, Jonesy knew, that yard would have been full of rumbling diesel semis, Kenworths and Macks and Jimmy-Petes with their green and amber cab-lights glimmering. Tonight the area was almost deserted, except for the area marked LONGTERM SEE YARD MANAGER MUST HAVE TICKET. In there were a dozen or more freight-haulers, their edges softened by the drifts. Inside, their drivers would be eating, playing pinball, watching Spank-O-Vision in the truckers” lounge, or trying to sleep in the grim dormitory out back, where ten dollars got you a cot, a clean blanket, and a scenic view of a cinderblock wall. All of them no doubt thinking the same two thoughts: When can I roll? And How much is this going to cost me?

Mr Gray stepped down on the gas, and although he did it gently, as Jonesy’s file concerning winter driving suggested, all four of the pickup’s wheels spun, and the truck began to jitter sideways, digging itself in.

Go on! Jonesy cheered from his position at the office window. Go on, stick it! Stick it right up to the rocker-panels! Because when you’re stuck in a four-wheel drive, you’re really stuck!

Then the wheels caught-first the front ones, where the weight of the motor gave the Ram a little more traction-then the back ones. The Ram trundled across Route 9 and toward the sign marked ENTRANCE. Beyond it was another: WELCOME TO THE BEST TRUCK STOP IN NEW ENGLAND. Then the truck’s headlights picked out a third, snowcaked but readable: HELL, WELCOME TO THE BEST TRUCK STOP ON EARTH.

Is this the best truck stop on earth? Mr Gray asked.

Of course, Jonesy said. And then-he couldn’t help it-he burst out laughing.

Why do you do that? Why do you make that sound?

Jonesy realized an amazing thing, both touching and terrifying: Mr Gray was smiling with Jonesy’s mouth. Not much, just a little, but it was a smile. He doesn’t really know what laughter is, Jonesy thought. Of course he hadn’t known what anger was, either, but he had proved to be a remarkably fast learner; he could now tantrum with the best of them.

What you said struck me funny.

What exactly is funny?

Jonesy had no idea how to answer the question. He wanted Mr Gray to experience the entire gamut of human emotions, suspecting that humanizing his usurper might ultimately be his only chance of survival-we have met the enemy and he is us, Pogo had once said. But how did you explain funny to a collection of spores from another world? And what was funny about Dysart’s proclaiming itself the best truck stop on earth?

Now they were passing yet another sign, one with arrows pointing left and right. BIGUNS it said beneath the left arrow. And LITTLEUNS under the right.

Which are we? Mr Gray asked, stopping at the sign.

Jonesy could have made him retrieve the information, but what would have been the point? We’re a littleun, he said, and Mr Gray turned the Ram to the right. The tires spun a little and the truck lurched. Lad raised his head, let fly another long and fragrant fart, then whined. His lower midsection had swelled and distended; anyone who didn’t know better would no doubt have mistaken him for a bitch about to give birth to a good-sized litter.

There were perhaps two dozen cars and pickups parked in the littleuns” lot, the ones most deeply buried in snow belonging to the help-mechanics (always one or two on duty), waitresses, short-order cooks. The cleanest vehicle there, Jonesy saw with sharp interest, was a powder-blue State Police car with packed snow around the roof-lights. Being arrested would certainly put a spike in Mr Gray’s plans; on the other hand, Jonesy had already been present at three murder-sites, if you counted the cab of the pickup. No witnesses at the first two crime scenes, and probably no Gary Jones fingerprints, either, but here? Sure. Plenty of them. He could see himself standing in a courtroom somewhere and saying, But Judge, it was the alien inside me who committed those murders. It was Mr Gray. Another joke that Mr Gray wouldn’t get.

That worthy, meanwhile, had been rummaging again. Dry Farts, he said. Why do you call this place Dry Farts when the sign says Dysart’s?

It’s what Lamar used to call it, Jonesy said, remembering long, hilarious breakfasts here, usually going or coming back from Hole in the Wall. And this fit night into the tradition, didn’t it? My Dad called it that, too.

Is it funny?

Moderately, I guess. It’s a pun based on similar sounds. Puns are what we call the lowest form of humor.

Mr Gray parked in the rank closest to the lighted island of the restaurant, but all the way down from the State Police cruiser. Jonesy had no idea if Mr Gray understood the significance of the lightbars on top or not. He reached for the Ram’s headlight knob and pushed it in. He reached for the ignition, then stopped and issued several hard barks of laughter: “Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!”

How’d that feel? Jonesy asked, more than a little curious. A little apprehensive, too.

“Like nothing,” Mr Gray said flatly, and turned off the ignition. But then, sitting there in the dark with the wind howling around the cab of the truck, he did it again, and with a little more conviction: “Ha! Ha, ha, ha!” In his office refuge, Jonesy shivered. It was a creepy sound, like a ghost trying to remember how to be human.

Lad didn’t like it either. He whined again, looking uneasily at the man behind the steering wheel of his master’s truck.

Owen was shaking Henry awake, and Henry responded reluctantly. He felt as if he had gone to sleep only seconds ago. His limbs all seemed to have been dipped in cement.

“Henry.”

“I’m here.” Left leg itching. Mouth itching even worse; the goddam byrus was growing on his lips now, too. He rubbed it off with his forefinger, surprised at how easily it broke free. Like a crust.

“Listen up. And look. Can you look?”

Henry looked up the road, which was now dim and snow-ghostly-Owen had pulled the Sno-Cat over and turned off the lights. Farther along, there were mental voices in the dark, the auditory equivalent of a campfire. Henry went to them. There were four of them, young men with no seniority in… in…

Blue Group, Owen whispered. This time we’re Blue Group. Four young men with no seniority in Blue Group, trying not to be scared… trying to be tough… voices in the dark… a little campfire of voices in the dark…

By its light, Henry discovered he could see dimly: snow, of course, and a few flashing yellow lights illuminating a turnpike entrance ramp. There was also the lid of a pizza carton seen in the light of an instrument panel. It had been turned into a tray. On it were Saltines, several blocks of cheese, and a Swiss Army knife. The Swiss Army knife belonged to the one named Smitty, and they were all using it to cut the cheese. The longer Henry looked, the better he saw. It was like having your eyes adjust to the dark, but it was more than that too: what he saw had a creepy-giddy depth, as if all at once the physical world consisted not of three dimensions but of four or five. It was easy enough to understand why: he was seeing through four sets of eyes, all at the same time. They were huddled together in the

Humvee, Owen said, delighted. It’s a fucking Humvee, Henry! Custom-equipped for snow, too! Bet you anything it is!

The young men were sitting close together, yes, but still in four different places, looking at the world from four different points of view, and with four different qualities of eyesight, ranging from eagle-eye sharp (Dana from Maybrook, New York) to the merely adequate. Yet somehow Henry’s brain was processing them, just as it turned multiple still images on a reel of film into a moving picture. This wasn’t like a movie, though, nor like some tricky 3-D image. It was an entirely new way of seeing, the kind that could produce a whole new way of thinking.

If this shit spreads, Henry thought, both terrified and wildly excited, if it spreads… Owen’s elbow thumped into his side. “Maybe you could save the seminar for another day,” he said. “Look across the road.”

Henry did so, employing his unique quadruple vision and realizing only belatedly that he had done more than look; he had moved their eyeballs so he could peer over to the far side of the turnpike. Where he saw more blinking lights in the storm.

“It’s a choke-point,” Owen muttered. “One of Kurtz’s insurance policies. Both exits blocked, no movement onto the turnpike without authorization. I want the Humvee, it’s the best thing we could have in a shitstorm like this, but I don’t want to alert the guys on the other side. Can we do that?”

Henry experimented with their eyes again, moving them. He discovered that as soon as they weren’t all looking at the same thing, his sense of godlike four-or five-dimensional vision evaporated, leaving him with a nauseating, shattered perspective his processing equipment couldn’t cope with. But he was moving them. Not much, just their eyeballs, but…

I think we can if we work together, Henry told him. Get closer. And stop talking out loud. Get in my head. Link up.

Suddenly Henry’s head was fuller. His vision clarified again, but this time the perspective wasn’t quite as deep. Only two sets of eyes instead of four: his and Owen’s.

Owen put the Sno-Cat into first gear and crept forward with the lights off. The engine’s low growl was lost beneath the constant shriek of the wind, and as they closed the distance, Henry felt his hold on those minds ahead tightening.

Holy shit, Owen said, half-laughing and half-gasping.

What? That is it?

It’s you, man-it’s like being on a magic carpet. Christ, but you’re strong.

You think I’m strong, wait’ll you meet Jonesy.

Owen stopped the Sno-Cat below the brow of a little hill. Beyond it was the turnpike. Not to mention Bernie, Dana, Tommy, and Smitty, sitting in their Humvee at the top of the southbound ramp, eating cheese and crackers off their makeshift tray. He and Owen were safe enough from discovery. The four young men in the Humvee were clean of the byrus and had no idea they were being scoped.

Ready? Henry asked,

I guess. The other person in Henry’s head, cool as that storied cucumber when Kurtz and the others had been shooting at them, was now nervous. You take the lead, Henry. I’m just flying support this mission.

Here we go.

What Henry did next he did instinctively, binding the four men in the Humvee together not with images of death and destruction, but by impersonating Kurtz. To do this he drew on both Owen Underhill’s energy-much greater than his own, at this point-and Owen Underhill’s vivid knowledge of his OIC. The act of binding gave him a brilliant stab of satisfaction. Relief, as well. Moving their eyes was one thing; taking them over completely was another. And they were free of the byrus. That could have made them immune. Thank God it had not.

There’s a Sno-Cat over that rise east of you, laddies, Kurtz said. Want you to take it back to base. Right now, if you please-no questions, no comments, just get moving. You’ll find the quarters a little tight compared to your current accommodations, but I think you can all fit in, praise Jesus. Now move your humps, God love you.

Henry saw them getting out, their faces calm and blank around the eyes. He started to get out himself, then saw Owen was still sitting in the Sno-Cat’s driver’s seat, his own eyes wide. His lips moved, forming the words in his head: Move your humps, God love you.

Owen! Come on!

Owen looked around, startled, then nodded and pushed out through the canvas hanging over his side of the “Cat.

Henry stumbled to his knees, picked himself up, and looked wearily into the streaming dark. Not far to go, God knew it wasn’t, but he didn’t think he could slog through another twenty feet of drifted snow, let alone a hundred and fifty yards. On and on the eggman went, he thought, and then: I did it. 7hat’s the answer, Of course. I offed myself and now I’m in hell. This is the eggman in h-

Owen’s arm went around him… but it was more than his arm. He was feeding Henry his strength.

Thank y-

Thank me later. Sleep later, too. For now, keep your eye on the ball.

There was no ball. There were only Bernie, Dana, Tommy, and Smitty trooping through the snow, a line of silent somnambulists in coveralls and hooded parkas. They trooped east on the Swanny Pond Road toward the Sno-Cat while Owen and Henry struggled on west, toward the abandoned Humvee. The cheese and Saltines had also been abandoned, Henry realized, and his stomach rumbled.

Then the Humvee was dead ahead. They’d drive it away, no headlights at first, low gear and quiet-quiet-quiet, skirting the yellow flashers at the base of the ramp, and if they were lucky, the fellows guarding the northbound ramp would never know they were gone.

If they do see us, could we make them forget? Owen asked. Give them-oh, I don’t know-give them amnesia?

Henry realized they probably could.

Owen?

What?

If this ever got out, it would change eve thing. Everything.

A pause as Owen considered this. Henry wasn’t talking about knowledge, the usual coin of Kurtz’s bosses up the food-chain; he was talking about abilities that apparently went well beyond a little mind-reading.

I know, he replied at last.

They headed south in the Humvee, south into the storm. Henry Devlin was still gobbling

crackers and cheese when exhaustion turned out the lights in his overstimulated head.

He slept with crumbs on his lips.

And dreamed of Josie Rinkenhauer.

Half an hour after it caught fire, old Reggie Gosselin’s barn was no more than a dying dragon’s eye in the booming night, waxing and waning in a black socket of melted snow. From the woods east of the Swanny Pond Road came the pop-pop-pop of rifle fire, heavy at first, then diminishing a little in both frequency and volume as the Imperial Valleys (Kate Gallagher’s Imperial Valleys now) pursued the escaped detainees. It was a turkey shoot, and not many of the turkeys were going to get away. Enough of them to tell the tale, maybe, enough to rat them all out, but that was tomorrow’s worry.

While this was going on-also while the traitorous Owen Underhill was getting farther and farther ahead of them-Kurtz and Freddy Johnson stood in the command post (except, Freddy supposed, it was now nothing but a Winnebago again; that feeling of power and importance had gone), flipping playing-cards into a hat.

No longer telepathic in the slightest, but as sensitive to the men under him as ever-that his command had been reduced to a single soldier really made no difference-Kurtz looked at Freddy and said, “Make haste slowly, buck-that’s one saw that’s still sharp.” “Yes, boss,” Freddy said without much enthusiasm.

Kurtz flipped the two of spades. It fluttered down through the air and landed in the hat. Kurtz crowed like a child and prepared to flip again. There was a knock at the “Bago’s door. Freddy turned in that direction, and Kurtz fixed him with a forbidding look. Freddy turned back and watched Kurtz flip another card. This one started out well, then went long and landed on the cap’s bill. Kurtz muttered something under his breath, then nodded at the door. Freddy, with a mental prayer of thanks, went to open it.

Standing on the top step was Jocelyn McAvoy, one of the two female Imperial Valleys. Her accent was soft country Tennessee; the face under the boy-cropped blonde hair was hard as stone. She was holding a spectacularly non-reg Israeli burp-gun by the strap. Freddy wondered where she had gotten such a thing, then decided it didn’t matter. A lot of things had ceased to matter, most of them in the last hour or so.

“Joss,” Freddy said. “What’s up with your bad self?” “Delivering two Ripley Positives as ordered.” More shooting from the woods, and Freddy saw the woman’s eyes shift minutely in that direction. She wanted to get back over there across the road, wanted to bag her limit before the game was gone. Freddy knew how she felt.

“Send them in, lassie,” Kurtz said. He was still standing over the cap on the floor (the floor that was still faintly stained with Cook’s Third Melrose’s blood), still holding the deck of cards in his hand, but his eyes were bright and interested. “Let’s see who you found.” Jocelyn gestured with her gun. A male voice at the foot of the stairs growled, “The fuck up there. Don’t make me say it twice.” The first man to step past Jocelyn was tall and very black. There was a cut down one of his cheeks and another on his neck. Both cuts had been clogged with Ripley. More was growing in the creases in his brow. Freddy knew the face but not the name. The old man, of course, knew both. Freddy supposed he remembered the names of all the men he had commanded, both the quick and the dead.

“Cambry!” Kurtz said, eyes lighting even more brightly. He dropped the playing cards into the hat, approached Cambry, seemed about to shake hands, thought better of it, and snapped off a salute instead. Gene Cambry did not return it. He looked sullen and disoriented. “Welcome to the justice League of America.”

“Spotted him running through the woods along with the detainees he was supposed to be guarding,” Jocelyn McAvoy said. Her face was expressionless; all her contempt was in her voice. “Why not?” Cambry asked. He looked at Kurtz. “You were going to kill me, anyway. Kill all of us. Don’t bother lying about it, either. I can see it in your mind.”

Kurtz wasn’t discomfited by this in the slightest. He rubbed his hands together and smiled at Cambry in a friendly way. “Do a good job and p'raps you’ll change my mind, buck. Hearts were made to be broken and minds were made to be changed, that’s a big praise God. Who else have you got for me, Joss?”

Freddy regarded the second figure with amazement. Also with pleasure. The Ripley could not have found a better home, in his humble opinion. Nobody liked the son of a bitch much in the first place.

“Sir… boss… I don’t know why I’m here… I was in proper pursuit of the escapees when this… this… I’m sorry, I have to say it, when this officious bitch pulled me out of the sweep area and…”

“He was running with them,” McAvoy said in a bored voice. “Running with them and infected up the old wazoo.”

“A he!” said the man in the doorway. “A total lie! I’m perfectly clean! One hundred per cent-”

McAvoy snatched off the watchcap her second prisoner was wearing. The man’s thinning blond hair was much thicker now, and appeared to have been dyed red.

“I can explain, sir,” Archie Perlmutter said, his voice fading even as he spoke. “There is… you see… Then it died away entirely.

Kurtz was beaming at him, but he had donned his filter-mask again-they all had-and it gave his reassuring smile an oddly sinister look, the expression of a child molester inviting a little kid in for a piece of pie.

“Pearly, it’s going to be all right,” Kurtz said. “We’re going for a ride, that’s all. There’s someone we need to find, someone you know-”

“Owen Underhill,” Perlmutter whispered.

“That’s right, buck,” Kurtz said. He turned to McAvoy. “Bring this soldier his clipboard, McAvoy. I’m sure he’ll feel better once he has his clipboard. Then you can carry on hunting, which I feel quite sure you’re eager to do.”

“Yes, boss.”

“But first, watch this-a little trick I learned back in Kansas.” Kurtz sprayed the cards. In the crazy blizzard-wind coming through the door, they flew every whichway. Only one landed faceup in the hat, but it was the ace of spades.

Mr Gray held the menu, looking at the lists of stuff-meatloaf, sliced beets, roast chicken, chocolate silk pie-with interest and an almost total lack of understanding. Jonesy realized it wasn’t just not knowing how food tasted; Mr Gray didn’t know what taste was. How could he? When you cut to the chase, he was nothing but a mushroom with a high IQ.

Here came a waitress, moving under a vast tableland of frozen ash-blonde hair. The badge on her not inconsiderable bosom read WELCOME TO DYSART’s, I AM YOUR WAITRESS DARLENE.

“Hi, hon, what can I get you?”

“I’d like scrambled eggs and bacon. Crisp, not limp.”

“Toast?”

“How about canpakes?”

She raised her eyebrows and looked at him over her pad. Beyond her, at the counter, the State Trooper was eating some kind of drippy sandwich and talking with the short-order cook.

“Sorry-cakepans, I meant to say.”

The eyebrows went higher. Her question was plain, blinking at the front of her mind like a neon sign in a saloon window: was this guy a mushmouth, or was he making fun of her?

Standing at his office window, smiling, Jonesy relented.

“Pancakes,” Mr Gray said.

“Uh-huh, I sort of figured. Coffee with that?”

“Please.”

She snapped her pad closed and started away. Mr Gray was back at the locked door of Jonesy’s office at once, and furious all over again.

How could you do that? he asked. How could you do that from in there? An ill-natured thump as Mr Gray hit the door. And he was more than angry, Jonesy realized. He was frightened, as well. Because if Jonesy could interfere, everything was in jeopardy.

I don’t know, Jonesy said, and truthfully enough. But don’t take it so hard. Enjoy your breakfast. I was just fucking with you a little.

Why? Still furious. Still drinking from the well of Jonesy’s emotions, and liking it in spite of himself. Why would you do that?

Call it payback for trying to roast me in my office while I was sleeping, Jonesy said.

With the restaurant section of the truck stop almost deserted, Darlene was back with the food in no time. Jonesy considered seeing if he could gain control of his mouth long enough to say something outrageous (Darlene, can I bite your hair? was what came to mind), and thought better of it.

She set his plate down, gave him a dubious look, then started away. Mr Gray, looking at the bright yellow lump of eggs and the dark twigs of bacon (not just crispy but almost incinerated, in the great Dysart’s tradition) through Jonesy’s eyes, was feeling the same dubiety.

Go on, Jonesy said. He was standing at his office window, watching and waiting with amusement and curiosity. Was it possible that the bacon and eggs would kill Mr Gray? Probably not, but it might at least make the hijacking motherfucker good and sick. Go on, Mr Gray, eat up. Bon-fuckin-appetit.

Mr Gray consulted Jonesy’s files on the proper use of the silverware, then picked up a tiny clot of scrambled eggs on the tines of his fork, and put them in Jonesy’s mouth.

What followed was both amazing and hilarious. Mr Gray gobbled everything in huge bites, pausing only to drown the pancakes in fake maple syrup. He loved it all, but most particularly the bacon.

Flesh! Jonesy heard him exulting-it was almost the voice of the creature in one of those corny old monster movies from the thirties. Flesh! Flesh! This is the taste of flesh!

Funny… but maybe not all that funny, either. Maybe sort of horrible. The cry of a new-made vampire.

Mr Gray looked around, ascertained that he wasn’t being watched (the State Bear was now addressing a large piece of cherry pie), then picked up the plate and licked the grease from it with big swipes of Jonesy’s tongue. He finished by licking the sticky syrup from the ends of his fingers.

Darlene returned, poured more coffee, looked at the empty dishes. “Why, you get a gold star,” she said. “Anything else?” “More bacon,” Mr Gray said. He consulted Jonesy’s files for the correct terminology, and added: “A double order.” And may you choke on it, Jonesy thought, but now without much hope.

“Gotta stoke the stove,” Darlene said, a comment Mr Gray didn’t understand and didn’t bother hunting down in Jonesy’s files. He put two sugars in his coffee, looked around to make sure he wasn’t observed, then poured the contents of a third packet down his throat. Jonesy’s eyes half-closed for a few seconds as Mr Gray drowned happily in the bliss of sweet.

You can have that any time you want it, Jonesy said through the door. Now he supposed he knew how Satan felt when he took Jesus up on the mountaintop and tempted him with all the cities of the earth. Not good; not really bad; just doing the job, selling the product.

Except… check that. It did feel good, because he knew he was getting through. He wasn’t opening stab-wounds exactly, but he was at least pricking Mr Gray. Making him sweat little blood-beads of desire.

Give it up, Jonesy coaxed. Go native. You can spend years exploring my senses. They’re pretty sharp; I’m still under forty.

No reply from Mr Gray. He looked around, saw no one looking his way, poured fake maple syrup into his coffee, slurped it, and looked around again for his supplemental bacon. Jonesy sighed. This was like being with a strict Muslim who has somehow wound up on a Las Vegas holiday.

On the far side of the restaurant was an arch with a sign reading TRUCKERS” LOUNGE amp; SHOWERS above it. In the short hallway beyond, there was a bank of pay telephones. Several drivers stood there, no doubt explaining to spouses and bosses that they wouldn’t be back on time, they’d been shut down by a surprise storm in Maine, they were at Dysart’s Truck Stop (known to the cognoscenti as Dry Farts, Jonesy thought) south of Derry and here they would likely remain until at least noon tomorrow.

Jonesy turned from the office window with its view of the truck stop and looked at his desk, now covered with all his old and comforting clutter. There was his phone, the blue Trimline. Would it be possible to call Henry on it? Was Henry even still alive? Jonesy thought he was. He thought that if Henry were dead, he would have felt the moment of his passing-more shadows in the room, perhaps. Elvis has left the building, Beaver had often said when he spotted a name he knew in the obits. What a fuckitt pisser. Jonesy didn’t think Henry had left the building just yet. It was even possible that Henry had an encore in mind.

Mr Gray didn’t choke on his second order of bacon, but when his lower belly suddenly cramped up, he let out a dismayed roar. You poisoned me!

Relax, Jonesy said. You just need to make a little room, my friend.

Room? What do you-

He broke off as another cramp gripped his gut.

I mean that we had better hurry along to the little boys” room, Jonesy said. Good God, didn’t all those abductions you guys did in the sixties teach you anything about the human anatomy?

Darlene had left the check, and Mr Gray picked it up.

Leave her fifteen per cent on the table, Jonesy said. It’s a tip.

How much is fifteen per cent?

Jonesy sighed. These were the masters of the universe that the movies had taught us to fear? Merciless, star-faring conquerors who didn’t know how to take a shit or figure a tip?Another cramp, plus a fairly silent fart. It smelled, but not of ether. Thank God for small

favors, Jonesy thought. Then, to Mr Gray: Show me the check.

Jonesy looked at the green slip of paper through his office window.

Leave her a buck and a half And when Mr Gray seemed dubious: This is good advice I’m giving you, my friend. More and she remembers you as the night’s big tipper. Less, and she remembers you as a chintz.

He sensed Mr Gray checking for the meaning of chintz in Jonesy’s files. Then, without further argument, he left a dollar and two quarters on the table. With that taken care of, he headed for the cash register, which was on the way to the men’s room.

The cop was working his pie-with slightly suspicious slowness, Jonesy thought-and as they passed him, Jonesy felt Mr Gray as an entity (an ever more human entity) dissolve, going out to peek inside the cop’s head. Nothing out there now but the redblack cloud, running Jonesy’s various maintenance systems.

Quick as a flash, Jonesy grabbed the phone on his desk. For a moment he hesitated, unsure. just dial 1-800-HENRY, Jonesy thought. For a moment there was nothing… and then, in some other somewhere, a phone began to ring.

“Pete’s idea,” Henry muttered.

Owen, at the wheel of the Humvee (it was huge and it was loud, but it was equipped with oversized snow tires and rode the storm like the QE2), looked over. Henry was asleep. His glasses had slid down to the end of his nose. His eyelids, now delicately fuzzed with byrus, rippled as the eyeballs beneath them moved. Henry was dreaming. About what? Owen wondered. He supposed he could dip into his new partner’s head and have a look, but that seemed perverse.

“Pete’s idea,” Henry repeated. “Pete saw her first.” And he sighed, a sound so tired that Owen felt bad for him. No, he decided, he didn’t want any part of what was going on in Henry’s head. Another hour to Derry, more if the wind stayed high. Better to just let him sleep.

Behind Derry High School is the football field where Richie Grenadeau once strutted his stuff, but Richie is five years in his teenage hero’s grave, just another small-town car-crash James

Dean. Other heroes have risen, thrown their passes, and moved on. It’s not football season now, anyway. It’s spring, and on the field there is a gathering of what look like birds-huge red ones with black heads. These mutant crows are laughing and talking as they sit in their folding chairs, but Mr Trask, the principal, has no problem being heard; he’s at the podium on the makeshift stage, and he’s got the mike.

“One last thing before I dismiss you!” he booms. “I won’t tell you not to throw your mortarboards at the end of the ceremony, I know from years of experience I might as well be talking to myself on that score-”

Laughter, cheers, applause.

“-but I’m telling you to PICK THEM UP AND TURN THEM IN OR YOU WILL BE CHARGED FOR THEM!”

There are a few boos and some raspberries, Beaver Clarendon’s the loudest.

Mr Trask gives them a final surveying look. “Young men and women, members of the Class of “82, 1 think I speak for the entire faculty when I say I’m proud of you. This concludes rehearsal, so…”

The rest is lost, amplification or no amplification; the red crows rise in a gusty flap of nylon, and they fly. Tomorrow at noon they will fly for good; although the three crows laughing and grabassing their way toward the parking lot where Henry’s car is parked do not realize it, the childhood phase of their friendship is now only hours from the end. They don’t realize it, and that is probably just as well.

Jonesy snatches Henry’s mortarboard, slaps it on top of his own, and books for the parking lot.

“Hey, asshole, give that back!” Henry yells, and then he snatches Beaver’s. Beav squawks like a chicken and runs after Henry, laughing. So the three of them swoop across the grass and behind the bleachers, graduation robes billowing around their jeans. Jonesy has two hats on his head, the tassels swinging in opposite directions, Henry has one (far too big; it’s sitting on his ears), and Beaver runs bareheaded, his long black hair flowing out behind him and a toothpick jutting from his mouth.

Jonesy is looking back as he runs, taunting Henry (“Come on, Mr Basketball, ya run like a girl”), and almost piles into Pete, who is looking at DERRY DOIN’s, the glassed-in notice-board by the north entrance to the parking lot. Pete, who is graduating from nothing but the Junior class this year, grabs Jonesy, bends him backward like a guy doing a tango with some beautiful chick, and kisses him square on the mouth. Both mortarboards tumble off Jonesy’s head, and he screams in surprise.

“Queerboy!” Jonesy yells, rubbing frantically at his mouth… but he’s starting to laugh, too. Pete’s an oddity-he’ll go along quietly for weeks at a time, Norman Normal, and then he’ll break out and do something nutso. Usually the nutso comes out after a couple of beers, but not this afternoon.

“I’ve always wanted to do that, Gariella,” Pete says sentimentally. “Now you know how I really feel.”

“Fuckin queerboy, if you gave me the syph, I’ll kill you!” Henry arrives, snatches his mortarboard off the grass, and swats Jonesy with it. “There’s grass-stains on this,” Henry says. “If I have to pay for it, I’ll do a lot more than just kiss you, Gariella.”

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep, fuckwad,” Jonesy says.

“Beautiful Gariella,” Henry says solemnly.

The Beav comes steaming up, puffing around his toothpick. He takes Jonesy’s mortarboard, peers into it, and says, “There’s a come-stain in this one. Ain’t I seen enough on my own sheets to know?” He draws in a deep breath and bugles to the departing seniors in their Derry-red graduation gowns: “Gary Jones beats off in his graduation hat! Hey, everybody, listen up, Gary Jones beats off-”

Jonesy grabs him, pulls him to the ground, and the two of them roll over and over in billows of red nylon. Both mortarboards are cast off to one side and Henry grabs them to keep them from getting crushed.

“Get off me!” Beaver cries. “You’re crushin me! Jesus-Christ-bananas! For God’s sake-”

“Duddits knew her,” Pete says. He has lost interest in their foolery, doesn’t feel much of their high spirits anyway (Pete is perhaps the only one of them who senses the big changes that are coming). He’s looking at the notice-board again. “We knew her, too. She was the one who always stood outside The Petard Academy. “Hi, Duddie," she’d go.” When he says Hi, Duddie, Pete’s voice goes up high, becomes momentarily girlish in a way that is sweet rather than mocking. And although Pete isn’t a particularly good mimic, Henry knows that voice at once. He remembers the girl, who had fluffy blonde hair and great brown eyes and scabbed knees and a white plastic purse which contained her lunch and her BarbieKen. That’s what she always called them, BarbieKen, as if they were a single entity.

Jonesy and Beav also know who Pete’s imitating, and Henry knows, too. There is that bond among them; it’s been among them for years now. Them and Duddits. Jonesy and the Beav can’t remember the little blonde girl’s name any more than Henry can only that her last one was something impossibly long and clunky. And she had a crush on the Dudster, which was why she always waited for him outside The Retard Academy.

The three of them in their graduation gowns gather around Pete and look at the DERRY DOIN’s board.

As always, the board is crammed with notices-bake sales and car washes, tryouts for the Community Players version of The Fantasticks, summer classes at Fenster, the local junior college, plus plenty of hand-printed student ads-buy this, sell that, need ride to Boston after graduation, looking for roommate in Providence.

And, way up in the corner, a photo of a smiling girl with acres of blonde hair (frizzy rather than fluffy now) and wide, slightly puzzled eyes. She’s no longer a little girl-Henry is surprised again and again by how the children he grew up with (including himself) have disappeared-but he would know those dark and puzzled eyes anywhere.

MISSING, says the single block-capital word under the photo.

And below that, in slightly smaller type: JOSETTE RINKENHAUER, LAST SEEN STRAWFORD PARK SOFTBALL FIELD, JUNE 7, 1982. Below this there is more copy, but Henry doesn’t bother reading it. Instead he reflects on how odd Derry is about missing children-not like other towns at all. This is June eighth, which means the Rinkenhauer girl has only been gone a day, and vet this poster has been tacked way up in the comer of the notice-board (or moved there), like somebody’s afterthought. Nor is that all. There was nothing in the paper this morning-Henry knows, because he read it. Skimmed through it, anyway, while he was slurping up his cereal. Maybe it was buried way back in the Local section, he thinks, and knows at once that’s it. The key word is buried. Lots of things are buried in Derry. Talk of missing children, for instance. There have been a lot of child disappearances here over the years-these boys know it, it certainly crossed their minds on the day they met Duddits Cavell, but nobody talks much about it. It’s as if the occasional missing kid is the price of living in such a nice, quiet place. At this idea Henry feels a dawning indignation stealing in first to mix with and then replace his former goofy happiness. She was sweet, too, with her BarbieKen. Sweet like Duddits.

He remembers how the four of them would deliver Duddits to school-all those walks-and how often she’d be outside, Josie Rinkenhauer with her scabby knees and her great big plastic purse: “Hi, Duddie.” She was sweet.

And still is, Henry thinks. She’s-’she’s alive,” Beaver says flatly. He takes the chewed-up toothpick out of his mouth, looks at it, and drops it to the grass. “Alive and still around. Isn’t she?”

“Yeah,” Pete says. He’s still looking at the picture, fascinated, and Henry knows what Pete is thinking, almost the same thing as he is: she grew up. Even Josie, who in a fairer life might have been Doug Cavell’s girlfriend. “But I think she’s… you know…”

“She’s in deep shit,” Jonesy says. He has stepped out of his gown and now folds it over his arm.

“She’s stuck,” Pete says dreamily, still looking at the picture. His finger has begun to go back and forth, tick-tock, tick-tock.

“Where?” Henry asks, but Pete shakes his head. So does Jonesy.

“Let’s ask Duddits,” Beaver says suddenly. And they all know why. There is no need of discussion. Because Duddits sees the line. Duddits

“-sees the line!” Henry shouted suddenly, and jerked upright in the passenger seat of the Humvee. It scared the bell out of Owen, who was deep in some private place where there was only him and the storm and the endless line of reflectors to tell him he was still on the road. “Duddits sees the line!”

The Humvee swerved, skidded, came back under control. “Jesus, man!” Owen said. “Give me a little warning next time before you blow your top, would you?”

Henry ran a hand down his face, drew in a deep breath, and let it out. “I know where we’re going and what we have to do-”

“Well, good-”

“-but I have to tell you a story so you’ll understand.”

Owen glanced at him. “Do you understand?”

“Not everything, but more than I did.”

“Go ahead. We’ve got an hour before Derry. Is that time enough?”

Henry thought it would be more than enough, especially talking mind to mind. He started at the beginning-what he now understood the beginning to be. Not the coming of the grays, not the byrus or the weasels, but four boys who had been hoping to see a picture of the Homecoming Queen with her skirt pulled up, no more than that. As Owen drove, his mind filled with a series of connected images, more like a dream than a movie. Henry told him about Duddits, about their first trip to Hole in the Wall, and Beaver puking in the snow. He told Owen about all those walks to school, and about the Duddits version of the game: they played and Duddits pegged. About the time they had taken Duddits to see Santa Claus-what a fuckin pisser that had been. And about how they had seen Josie Rinkenhauer’s picture on the DERRY DOIN’s board the day before the three older boys graduated. Owen saw them going to Duddits’s house on Maple Lane in Henry’s car, the gowns and mortarboard caps piled in back; saw them saying hi to Mr and Mrs Cavell, who were in the living room with an ashy-pale man in a Derry Gas coverall and a weeping woman-Roberta Cavell has her arm around Ellen Rinkenhauer’s shoulders and is telling her it will be all right, she knows that God won’t let anything happen to dear little Josie.

It’s strong, Owen thought dreamily. Man, what this guy’s got is so strong. How can that be?

The Cavells barely look at the boys, because the boys are such frequent visitors here at 19 Maple Lane, and the Rinkenhauers are too deep in their terror to even notice them. They have not touched the coffee Roberta has served. He’s in his room, guys, Alfie Cavell says, giving them a wan smile. And Duddits, looking up at them from his GI Joe figures-he has all of them-gets up as soon as he sees them in the doorway. Duddits never wears his shoes in his room, always his bunny slippers that Henry gave him for his last birthday-he loves the bunny slippers, will wear them until they are nothing but pink rags held together with strapping tape-but his shoes are on now. He has been waiting for them, and although his smile is as sunny as ever, his eyes are serious. Eh ee own? Duddits asks-Where we goin? And-

“You were all that way?” Owen whispered. He supposed Henry had already told him that, but until now he hadn’t understood what Henry meant. “Even before this?” He touched the side of his face, where a thin fuzz of byrus was now growing down his cheek.

“Yes. No. I don’t know. Just be quiet, Owen. Listen.”

And Owen’s head once more filled up with those images from 1982.

By the time they get to Strawford Park it’s four-thirty and a bunch of girls in yellow DERRY HARDWARE shirts are on the softball field, all of them with their hair in near-identical ponytails that have been threaded through the backs of their caps. Most have braces on their teeth. “My, my-they flubbin and dubbin,” Pete says, and maybe they are, but they sure look like they’re having fun. Henry is having no fun at all, his stomach is full of butterflies, and he’s glad to see Jonesy at least looks the same, solemn and scared. Pete and Beaver don’t have a whole lot of imagination between them; he and old Gariella have too much. To Pete and the Beav, this is just Frank and Joe Hardy stuff, Danny Dunn stuff. But to Henry it’s different.

To not find Josie Rinkenhauer would be bad (because they could, he knows they could), but to find her dead…

“Beav,” he says.

Beaver has been watching the girls. Now he turns to Henry. “What?”

“Do you still think she’s alive?”

“I…” Beav’s smile fades, and he looks troubled. “I dunno, man. Pete?”

But Pete shakes his head. “I thought she was, back at school-shit, that picture almost talked to me-but now…” He shrugs. Henry looks at Jonesy, who also shrugs, then spreads his hands: Dunno. So Henry turns to Duddits.

Duddits is looking at everything from behind what he calls his ooo ays, Duddits-ese for cool shades-wraparounds with silver mirrored surfaces. Henry thinks the ooo ays make Duddits look like Ray Walston in My Favorite Martian, but he’d never say such a thing to Duds, or think it at him. Duds is also wearing Beaver’s mortarboard hat; he particularly likes to blow the tassel.

Duddits has no selective perception; to him the wino looking for returnables over by the trash barrels, the girls playing softball, and the squirrels running around on the branches of the trees

are equally fascinating. It is part of what makes him special. “Duddits,” Henry says. “There’s this girl you went to school with at the Academy, her name was Josie? Josie Rinkenhauer?”

Duddits looks politely interested because his friend Henry is talking to him, but there is no recognition of the name, and why would there be? Duds can’t remember what he had for breakfast, so why would he remember a little girl he went to school with three or four years ago? Henry feels a wave of hopelessness, which is strangely mixed with amusement. What were they thinking about?

Josie,” Pete says, but he doesn’t look very hopeful, either. “We used to tease you about how she was your girlfriend, remember? She had brown eyes… all this blonde hair sticking out from her head… and…” He sighs disgustedly. “Fuck.”

“Ay ih, iffun-nay,” Duddits says, because this usually makes them smile: same shit, different day. It doesn’t work, so Duddits tries another one: “No-wounce, no-lay.” “Yeah,” Jonesy says. “No bounce, no play, that’s right. We might as well take him home, guys, this isn’t gonna-”

“No,” Beaver says, and they all look at him. Beaver’s eyes are both bright and troubled. He’s chewing on the toothpick in his mouth so fast and hard that it jitters up and down between his lips like a piston. “Dreamcatcher,” he says.

“Dreamcatcher?” Owen asked. His voice seemed to come from far away, even to his own ears. The Humvee’s headlights conned the endless snowy wasteland ahead, which resembled a road only because of the marching yellow reflectors. Dreamcatcher, he thought, and once more his head filled up with Henry’s past, almost drowning him in the sights and sounds and smells of that day on the edge of summer:

Dreamcatcher.

“Dreamcatcher,” Beav says, and they understand each other as they sometimes do, as they think (mistakenly, Henry will later realize) all friends do. Although they have never spoken directly of the dream they all shared on their first hunting trip to Hole in the Wall, they know Beaver believed that it had somehow been caused by Lamar’s dreamcatcher. None of the others have tried to tell him differently, partly because they don’t want to challenge Beaver’s superstition about that harmless little string spiderweb and mostly because they don’t want to talk about that day at all. But now they understand that Beaver has latched onto at least half a truth. A dreamcatcher has indeed bound them, but not Lamar’s.

Duddits is their dreamcatcher.

“Come on,” Beaver says quietly. “Come on, you guys, don’t be afraid. Grab hold of him.”

And so they do, although they are afraid a little anyway; Beaver… too.

Jonesy takes Duddits’s right hand, which has become so clever with machinery out there at Voke. Duddits looks surprised, then smiles and closes his fingers over Jonesy’s. Pete takes Duddits’s left hand. Beaver and Henry crowd in and slip their arms around Duddits’s waist.

And so the five of them stand beneath one of Strawford Park’s vast old oaks, with a lace of Junelight and shadows dappling their faces. They are like boys in a huddle before some big game. The softball girls in their bright yellow shirts ignore them; so do the squirrels; so does the industrious wino, who is putting together a bottle of dinner one empty soda-can at a time.

Henry feels the light steal into him and understands that the light is his friends and himself, they make it together, that lovely lace of light and green shadow, and of them all, Duddits shines brightest. He is their hall; without him there is no bounce, there is no play. He is their dreamcatcher, he makes them one. Henry’s heart fills up as it never will again (and the void of that lack will grow and darken as the years pile up around him), and he thinks: Is it to find one lost retarded girl who probably matters to no one but her parents? Was it to kill one brainless bully-boy, joining together to somehow make him drive off the road, doing it, oh for God’s sake doing it in our sleep? Can that be all? Something so great, something so wondrous, for such tiny matters? Can that be all?

Because if it is-he thinks this even in the ecstasy of their joining-then what is the use? What can anything possibly mean?

Then that and all thought is swept away by the force of the experience. The face of Josie Rinkenhauer rises in front of them, a shifting image that is composed first of four perceptions and memories… then a fifth, as Duddits understands who it is they’re making all this fuss about.

When Duddits weighs in, the image grows a hundred times brighter, a hundred times sharper. Henry hears someone-Jonesy-gasp, and he would gasp himself, if he had the breath to do so. Because Duddits may be retarded in some ways, but not in this way; in this way, they are the poor stumbling enfeebled idiots and Duddits is the genius.

“Oh my God,” Henry hears Beaver cry, and in his voice there are equal parts ecstasy and dismay.

Because Josie is standing here with them. Their differing perceptions of her age have turned her into a child of about twelve, older than she was when they first encountered her waiting outside The Retard Academy, surely younger than she must be now. They have settled on a sailor dress with an unsteady color that cycles from blue to pink to red to pink to blue again. She is holding the great big plastic purse with BarbieKen peeking out the top and her knees are splendidly scabby. Ladybug earrings appear and disappear below her lobes and Henry thinks Oh yeah, I remember those and then they steady into the mix.

She opens her mouth and says, Hi, Duddie. Looks around and says, Hi, you guys.

Then, just like that, she’s gone. Just like that they are five instead of six, five big boys standing under the old oak with June’s ancient light printing their faces and the excited cries of the softball girls in their cars. Pete is crying. So is Jonesy. The wino is gone-he’s apparently collected enough for his bottle-but another man has come, a solemn man dressed in a winter parka in spite of the day’s warmth. His left check is covered with red stuff that could be a birthmark, except Henry knows it isn’t. It’s byrus. Owen Underhill has joined them in Strawford Park, is watching them, but that’s all right; no one sees this visitor from the far side of the dreamcatcher except for Henry himself.

Duddits is smiling, but he looks puzzled at the tears on two of his friends” cheeks. “Eye-ooo ine?” he asks Jonesy-why you cryin? “It doesn’t matter,” Jonesy says. When he slips his hand out of Duddits’s, the last of the connection breaks. Jonesy wipes at his face and so does Pete. Beav utters a sobbing little laugh. “I think I swallowed my toothpick,” he says.

“Nah, there it is, ya fag,” Henry says, and points to the grass, where the chewed-up pick is lying.

“Fine Osie?” Duddits asks.

“Can you, Duds?” Henry asks.

Duddits walks toward the softball field, and they follow him in a respectful little cluster. Duds walks right past Owen but of course doesn’t see him; to Duds, Owen Underhill doesn’t exist, at least not yet. He walks past the bleachers, past third base, past the little snackbar. Then he stops.

Beside him, Pete gasps.

Duddits turns and looks at him, bright-eyed and interested, almost laughing. Pete is holding out one finger, ticking it back and forth, looking past the moving finger at the ground. Henry follows his gaze and for a moment thinks he sees something-a bright flash of yellow on the grass, like paint-and then it’s gone. There’s only Pete, doing what he does when he’s using his special remembering gift.

“Ooo you eee-a yine, Eete?” Duddits inquires in a fatherly way that almost makes Henry laugh-Do you see the line, Pete? “Yeah,” Pete says, bug-eyed. “Fuck, yeah.” He looks up at the others. “She was here, you guys! She was right here!”

They walk across Strawford Park, following a line only Duddits and Pete can see while a man only Henry can see follows along behind them. At the north end of the park is a rickety board fence with a sign on it: D.B. amp;A. P,.R. PROPERTY KEEP OUT! Kids have been ignoring this sign for years, and it’s been years since the Derry, Bangor, and Aroostook actually ran freights along the spur through The Barrens, anyway. But they see the train-tracks when they push through a break in the fence; they are down at the bottom of the slope, gleaming rustily in the sun.

The slope is steep, a-riot with poison sumac and poison ivy, and halfway down they find Josie Rinkenhauer’s big plastic purse. It is old now and sadly battered-mended in several places with friction tape-but Henry would know that purse anywhere…

Duddits pounces on it happily, yanks it open, peers inside. “ArbyEn!” he announces, and pulls them out. Pete, meanwhile, has foraged on, bent over at the waist, grim as Sherlock Holmes on the trail of Professor Moriarty. And it is Pete Moore who actually finds her, looking wildly around at the others from a filthy concrete drainpipe that pokes out of the slope and tangled foliage: “She’s in here!” Pete screams deliriously. Except for two flaring patches of color on his checks, his face is as pale as paper. “Guys, I think she’s in here!”

There is an ancient and incredibly complex system of drains and sewers beneath Derry, a town which exists in what was once swampland shunned even by the Micmac Indians who lived all around it. Most of the sewer-system was built in the thirties, with New Deal money, and most of it will collapse in 1985, during the big storm that will flood the town and destroy the Derry Standpipe. Now the pipes still exist. This one slopes downward as it bores into the hill. josie Rinkenhauer ventured in, fell, then slid on fifty years” worth of dead leaves. She went down like a kid on a slide and lies at the bottom. She has exhausted herself in her efforts to climb back up the greasy, crumbling incline; she has eaten the two or three cookies she had in the pocket of her pants and for the last series of endless hours-twelve, perhaps fourteen-has only lain in the reeking darkness, listening to the faint hum of the outside world she cannot reach and waiting to die.

Now at the sound of Pete’s voice, she raises her head and calls with all of her remaining strength: “Help mee! I can’t get out! Pleeease, help meee!”

It never occurs to them that they should go for an adult perhaps for Officer Nell, who patrols this neighborhood. They are crazy to get her out; she has become their responsibility. They won’t let Duddits in, they maintain at least that much sanity, but the rest of them create a chain into the dark without so much as thirty seconds” discussion: Pete first, then the Beav, then Henry, then Jonesy, the heaviest, as their anchor.

In this fashion they crawl into the sewage-smelling dark (there’s the stench of something else, too, something old and nasty beyond belief), and before he’s gotten ten feet Henry finds one of Josie’s sneakers in the muck. He puts it in a back pocket of his jeans without even thinking about it.

A few seconds later, Pete calls back over his shoulder: “Whoa, stop.”

The girl’s weeping and pleas for help are very loud now, and Pete can actually see her sitting at the bottom of the leaf-lined slope. She’s peering up at them, her face a smudged white circle in the gloom.

They stretch their chain farther, being as careful as they can despite their excitement. Jonesy has got his feet braced against a huge chunk of fallen concrete. Josie reaches up… gropes… cannot quite touch Pete’s outstretched hand. At last, when it seems they must admit defeat, she scrambles a little way up. Pete grabs her scratched and filthy wrist.

“Yeah!” he screams triumphantly. “Gotcha!”

They pull her carefully back up the pipe toward where Duddits is waiting, holding up her purse in one hand and the two dolls in the other, shouting in to Josie not to worry, not to worry because he’s got BarbieKen. There’s sunlight, fresh air, and as they help her out of the pipe-

There was no telephone in the Humvee-two different radios but no telephone. Nevertheless, a phone rang loudly, shattering the vivid memory Henry had spun between them and scaring the hell out of both of them.

Owen jerked like a man coming out of a deep sleep and the Humvee lost its tenuous hold on the road, first skidding and then going into a slow and ponderous spin, like a dinosaur dancing.

“Holy fuck-”

He tried to turn into the skid. The wheel only spun, turning with sick ease, like the wheel of a sloop that has lost its rudder. The Humvee went backward down the single treacherous lane that was left on the southbound side of 1-95, and at last fetched up askew in the snowbank on the median side, headlights opening a cone of snowy light back in the direction they had come.

Brring! Brring! Brring! Out of thin air.

It’s in my head, Owen thought. I’m projecting it, but I think it’s actually in my head, more goddam telep-

There was a pistol on the seat between them, a Glock. Henry picked it up, and when he did, the ringing stopped. He put the muzzle against his ear with his entire fist wrapped around the gunbutt.

Of course, Owen thought. Makes perfect sense. He got a call on the Glock, that’s all. Happens all the time.

“Hello,” Henry said. Owen couldn’t hear the reply, but his companion’s tired face lit in a grin. “Jonesy! I knew it was you!” Who else would it be? Owen wondered. Oprah Winfrey?

“Where-” Listening. “Did he want Duddits, Jonesy? Is that why…” Listening again. Then: “The Standpipe? Why… Jonesy? Jonesy?” Henry held the pistol against the side of his head a moment longer, then looked at it without

seeming to realize what it was.

He laid it on the seat again. The smile had gone.

“He hung up. I think the other one was coming back. Mr Gray, he calls him.”

“He’s alive, your buddy, but you don’t look happy about it.” It was Henry’s thoughts that weren’t happy about it, but there was no longer any need to say this. Happy at first, the way you were always happy when someone you liked gave you a little ringy-dingy on the old Glock, but not happy now. Why?

“He-they-are south of Derry. They stopped to eat at a truck stop called Dysart’s… only Jonesy called it Dry Farts, like when we were kids. I don’t think he even knew it. He sounded scared.”

“For himself? For us?”

Henry gave Owen a bleak look. “He says he’s afraid Mr Gray means to kill a State Trooper and take his cruiser. I think that was mostly it. Fuck.” Henry struck his leg with his fist.

“But he’s alive.”

“Yeah,” Henry said with a marked lack of enthusiasm. “He’s immune. Duddits… you understand about Duddits now?”

No. I doubt if you do, either, Henry…but maybe I understand enough.

Henry lapsed into thoughtspeak-it was easier. Duddits changed us-being with Duddits changed s. When Jonesy got hit by that car in Cambridge, it changed him again. The brainwaves of people who undergo near-death experiences often change, I saw a Lancet article on that just last year. For Jonesy it must mean this Mr Gray can use him without infecting him or wearing him out. And it’s also enabled him to keep from being subsumed, at least so far.

“Subsumed?”

Co-opted. Gobbled up. Then aloud: “Can you get us out of this snowbank?”

I think so.

“That’s what I was afraid of,” Henry said glumly. Owen turned to him, face greenish in the glow of the dashboard instruments. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” Christ, don’t you understand? How many ways do I have to tell you this? “He’s still in there! Jonesy!”

For the third or fourth time since his and Henry’s run had started, Owen was forced to leap over the gap between what his head knew and what his heart knew. “Oh. I see.” He paused. “He’s alive. Thinking and alive. Making phone calls, even.” He paused again. “Christ.”

Owen tried the Hummer in low forward and got about six inches before all four wheels began to spin. He geared reverse and drove them backward into the snowbank-crunch. But the Hummer’s rear end came up a little on the packed snow, and that was what Owen wanted. When he went back to low, they’d come out of the snowbank like a cork out of a bottle. But he paused a moment with the brake pressed under the sole of his boot. The Hummer had a rough, powerful idle that shook the whole frame. Outside, the wind snarled and howled, sending snow-devils skating down the deserted turnpike.

“You know we have to do it, don’t you?” Owen said. “Always assuming we’re able to catch him in the first place. Because whatever the specifics might be, the general plan is almost certainly general contamination. And the math-”

“I can do the math,” Henry said. “Six billion people on Spaceship Earth, versus one Jonesy.” “Yep, those are the numbers.” “Numbers can lie,” Henry said, but he spoke bleakly. Once the numbers got big enough, they didn’t, couldn’t lie. Six billion was a very big number.

Owen let off the brake and laid on the accelerator. The Humvee rolled forward-a couple of feet, this time-started to spin, then caught hold and came roaring out of the snowbank like a dinosaur. Owen turned it south.

Tell me what happened after you pulled the kid out of the drainpipe.

Before Henry could do so, one of the radios under the dash crackled. The voice that followed came through loud and clear-its owner might have been sitting there in the Hummer with them.

“Owen? You there, buck?”

Kurtz.

It took them almost an hour to get the first sixteen miles south of Blue Base (the former Blue Base), but Kurtz wasn’t worried. God would take care of them, he was quite sure of that.

Freddy Johnson was driving them (the happy quartet was packed into another snow-equipped Humvee). Perlmutter was in the passenger seat, handcuffed to the doorhandle. Cambry was likewise cuffed in back. Kurtz sat behind Freddy, Cambry behind Pearly. Kurtz wondered if his two press-ganged laddie-bucks were conspiring in telepathic fashion. Much good it would do them, if they were. Kurtz and Freddy both had their windows rolled down, although it rendered the Humvee colder than old Dad’s outhouse in January; the heater was on high but simply couldn’t keep up. The open windows were a necessity, however. Without them, the atmosphere of the Hummer would quickly become uninhabitable, as sulfurous as a poisoned coalmine. Only the smell on top wasn’t sulfur but ether. Most of it seemed to be coming from Perlmutter. The man kept shifting in his seat, sometimes groaning softly under his breath. Cambry was hot with Ripley and growing like a wheat field after a spring rain, and he had that smell-Kurtz was getting it even with his mask on. But Pearly was the chief offender, shifting in his seat, trying to fart noiselessly (the one-cheek sneak, they had called such a maneuver back in the dim days of Kurtz’s childhood), trying to pretend that suffocating smell wasn’t coming from him. Gene Cambry was growing Ripley; Kurtz had an idea that Pearly, God love him, was growing something else.

To the best of his ability, Kurtz concealed these thoughts behind a mantra of his own: Davis and Roberts, Davis and Roberts, Davis and Roberts.

“Would you please stop that?” Cambry asked from Kurtz’s right. “You’re driving me crazy.” “Me too,” Perlmutter said. He shifted in his seat and a low pffft sound escaped him. The sound of a deflating rubber toy, perhaps.

“Oh, man, Pearly!” Freddy cried. He unrolled his window further, letting in a swirl of snow and cold air. The Humvee skated and Kurtz braced himself, but then it steadied again. “Would you please quit with the fuckin anal perfume?”

“I beg your pardon,” Perlmutter said stiffly. “if you’re insinuating that I broke wind, then I have to tell you-''I’m not insinuatin anything,” Freddy said. “I’m telling you to quit stinkin the place up or-”

Since there was no satisfactory way in which Freddy could complete this threat-for the time being they needed two telepaths, a primary and a backup-Kurtz broke in smoothly. “The story of Edward Davis and Franklin Roberts is an instructive one, because it shows there’s really nothing new under the sun. This was in Kansas, back when Kansas really was Kansas…”

Kurtz, a pretty decent storyteller, took them back to Kansas during the Korean conflict. Ed Davis and Franklin Roberts had owned similar smallhold farms not far from Emporia, and not far from the farm owned by Kurtz’s family (which had not quite been named Kurtz). Davis, never bolted together tightly in the first place, grew increasingly certain that his neighbor, the offensive Roberts, was out to steal his farm. Roberts was spreading tales about him in town, Ed Davis claimed. Roberts was poisoning his crops, Roberts was putting pressure on the Bank of Emporia to foreclose the Davis farm.

What Ed Davis had done, Kurtz said, was to catch him a rabid raccoon and put it in the henhouse-his own henhouse. The coon had slaughtered those chickens right and left, and when he was plumb wore out with killing, praise God, Farmer Davis had blown Mr Coon’s black-and-gray-striped head off.

They were silent in the rolling, chilly Humvee, listening.

Ed Davis had loaded all those dead chickens-and the dead raccoon-into the back of his International Harvester and had driven over onto his neighbor’s property with them and by the dark of the moon had chucked his truckload of corpses down both of Franklin Roberts’s wells-the stock-well and the house-well. Then, the next night, high on whiskey and laughing like hell, Davis had called his enemy on the phone and told him what he had done. Been pretty hot today, ain’t it? the lunatic had inquired, laughing so hard Franklin Roberts could barely make him out. Which did you and them girls of yours get, Roberts? The coon-water or the chicken-water? I can’t tell you, because I don’t remember which ones I chucked down which well! Ain’t that a shame?

Gene Cambry’s mouth was trembling at the left corner, like the mouth of a man who has suffered a serious stroke. The Ripley growing along the crease of his brow was now so advanced that Mr Cambry looked like a man whose forehead had been split open.

“What are you saying?” he asked. “Are you saying me and Pearly are no better than a couple of rabid chickens?''Watch how you talk to the boss, Cambry,” Freddy said. His mask bobbed up and down on his face.

“Hey man, fuck the boss. This mission is over"

Freddy raised a hand as if to swat Cambry over the back of the seat. Cambry jutted his truculent, frightened face forward to shorten the range. “Go on, Bubba. Or maybe you want to check your hand first, make sure there aren’t no cuts on it. Cause one little cut is all it takes.”

Freddy’s hand wavered in the air for a moment, then returned to the wheel.

“And while you’re at it, Freddy, you want to watch your back. You think the boss is going to leave witnesses, you’re crazy.”

“Crazy, yes,” Kurtz said warmly, and chuckled. “Lots of farmers go crazy, or they did then before Willie Nelson and Farm Aid, God bless his heart. Stress of the life, I suppose. Poor old Ed Davis wound up in the VA-he was in Big Two, you know-and not long after the thing with the wells, Frank Roberts sold out, moved to Wichita, got work as a rep for Allis-Chalmers. And neither well was actually polluted, either. He had a state water inspector out to do some tests, and the inspector said the water was good. Rabies doesn’t spread like that, anyway, he said. I wonder if the Ripley does?”

“At least call it by its right name,” Cambry nearly spat. “It’s byrus.” “Byrus or Ripley, it’s all the same,” Kurtz said. “These fellows are trying to poison our wells. To pollute our precious fluids, as somebody or other once said.”

“You don’t care a damn about any of that!” Pearly spat-Freddy actually jumped at the venom in Perlmutter’s voice. “All you care about is catching Underhill.” He paused, then added in a mournful voice: “You are crazy, boss.”

“Owen!” Kurtz cried, chipper as a chipmunk. “Almost forgot about him! Where is he, fellows?”

“Up ahead,” Cambry said sullenly. “Stuck in a fucking snowbanks”

“Outstanding!” Kurtz shouted. “Closing in!”

“Don’t get your face fixed. He’s pulling it out. Got a Hummer, just like us. You can drive one of those things straight through downtown hell if you know what you’re doing. And he seems to.”

“Shame. Did we make up any ground?”

“Not much,” Pearly said, then shifted, grimaced, and passed more gas.

“Fuuck,” Freddy said, low.

“Give me the mike, Freddy. Common channel. Our friend Owen likes the common channel.”

Freddy handed the mike back on its kinked cord, made an adjustment to the transmitter bolted to the dash, then said, “Give it a try, boss. “Kurtz depressed the button on the side of the mike. “Owen.” You there, buck?”

Silence, static, and the monotonous howl of the wind. Kurtz was about to depress the SEND button and try again when Owen came back-clear and crisp, moderate static but no distortion. Kurtz’s face didn’t change-it held the same look of pleasant interest-but his heartbeat kicked up several notches.

“I’m here.”

“Lovely to hear you, bucko! Lovely! I estimate you are our location plus about fifty. We just passed Exit 39, so I’d say that’s about right, wouldn’t you?” They had actually just passed Exit 36, and Kurtz thought they were quite a bit closer than fifty miles. Half that, maybe.

Silence from the other end.

“Pull over, buck,” Kurtz advised Owen in his kindliest, sanest voice. “It’s not too late to save something out of this mess. Our careers are shot, no question about that, I guess-dead chickens down a poisoned well-but if you’ve got a mission, let me share it. I’m an old man, son, and all I want is to salvage something a little decent from-”

“Cut the shit, Kurtz.” Loud and clear from all six of the Hummer’s speakers, and Cambry actually had the nerve to laugh. Kurtz marked him with a vile look. Under other circumstances that look would have turned Cambry’s black skin gray with terror, but this was not other circumstances, other circumstances had been cancelled, and Kurtz felt an uncharacteristic bolt of fear. It was one thing to know intellectually that things had gone tits-up; it was another when the truth landed in your gut like a heavy sack of meal.

“Owen… laddie-buck-”

“Listen to me, Kurtz. I don’t know if there’s a sane brain-cell left in your head, but if there is, I hope it’s paying attention. I’m with a man named Henry Devlin. Ahead of us-probably a hundred ahead of us now-is a friend of his named Gary Jones. Only it’s not really him anymore. He’s been taken over by an alien intelligence he calls Mr Gray.”

Gary… Gray, Kurtz thought. By their anagrams shall ye know em

“Nothing that happened in the Jefferson Tract matters,” came the voice from the speakers. “The slaughter you planned is redundant, Kurtz-kill em or let em die on their own, they’re not a threat.”

“You hear that?” Perlmutter asked hysterically. “No threat! No-”

“Shut up,” Freddy said, and backhanded him. Kurtz hardly noticed. He was sitting bolt-upright in the back seat, eyes glaring. Redundant? Was Owen Underhill telling him that the most important mission of his life had been redundant?

“-environment, do you understand? They can’t live in this ecosystem. Except for Gray. Because he happened to find a host who is fundamentally different. So here it is. If you ever stood for anything, Kurtz-if you can stand for anything now-you’ll stop chasing us and let us take care of business. Let us take care of Mr Jones and Mr Gray. You may be able to catch us, but it’s extremely doubtful that you can catch them. They’re too far south. And we think Gray has a plan. Something that will work.”

“Owen, you’re overwrought,” Kurtz said. “Pull over. Whatever needs to be done, we’ll do it together. We’ll-” “If you care, you’ll quit,” Owen said. His voice was flat. “That’s it. Bottom line. I’m over and out.” “Don’t do that, buck!” Kurtz shouted. “Don’t do that, I forbid you to do that!'There was a click, very loud, and then hissy silence from the speaker. “He’s gone,” Perlmutter said. “Pulled the mike out. Turned off the receiver. Gone.” “But you heard him, didn’t you?” Cambry asked. “There’s no sense in this. Call it off. “A pulse beat in the center of Kurtz’s forehead. “As though I’d take his word for anything, after what he participated in back there.”

“But he was telling the truth!” Cambry brayed. He turned fully to Kurtz for the first time, his eyes wide, the corners clogged with dabs of the Ripley, or the byrus, or whatever you wanted to call it. His spittle sprayed Kurtz’s cheeks, his forehead, the surface of his breathing mask. “I heard his thoughts! So did Pearly! HE WAS TELLING THE STONE TRUTH! HE-”

Once again moving with a speed that was eerie, Kurtz drew the nine-millimeter from the holster on his belt and fired. The report inside the Humvee was deafening. Freddy shouted in surprise and jerked the wheel again, sending the Humvee into a diagonal skid through the snow. Perlmutter screamed, turning his horrified, red-speckled face to look into the back seat. For Cambry it was merciful-his brains were out the back of his head, through the broken window, and blowing in the storm in the time it might have taken him to raise a protesting hand.

Didn’t see that coming at all, did you buck? Kurtz thought. Telepathy didn’t help you one damn bit there, did it?

“No,” Pearly said dolorously. “You can’t do much with someone who doesn’t know what he’s going to do until it’s done. You can’t do much with a crazyman.” The skid was back under control. Freddy was a superior motorman, even when he had been startled out of his wits. Kurtz pointed the nine at Perlmutter. “Call me crazy again. Let me hear you.”

“Crazy,” Pearly said immediately. His lips stretched in a smile, opening over a line of teeth in which there were now several vacancies. “Crazy-crazy-crazy. But you won’t shoot me for it. You shot your backup, and that’s all you can afford.” His voice was rising dangerously. Cambry’s corpse lolled back against the door, tufts of hair blowing around his misshapen head in the cold wind coming through the window.

“Hush, Pearly,” Kurtz said. He felt better now, back in control again. Cambry had been worth that much, at least. “Get a grip on your clipboard and just hush. Freddy?”

“Yes, boss.”

“Are you still with me?”

“All the way, boss.”

“Owen Underhill is a traitor, Freddy, can you give me a big praise God on that?”

“Praise God.” Freddy sat ramrod-straight behind the wheel, staring into the snow and the cones of the Humvee’s headlights.

“Owen Underhill has betrayed his country and his fellow-men. He-”

“He betrayed you,” Perlmutter said, almost in a whisper.

“That’s right, Pearly, and you don’t want to overestimate your own importance, son, that’s one thing you don’t want to do, because you never know what a crazyman is going to do next, you said so yourself”

Kurtz looked at the back of Freddy’s broad neck. “We’re going to take Owen Underhill down-him and this Devlin fellow, too, if Devlin’s still with him. Understood?” “Understood, boss.”

“Meanwhile, let’s lighten the load, shall we?” Kurtz produced the handcuff key from his pocket. He reached behind Cambry, wriggled his hand into the cooling goo that hadn’t exited through the window, and at last found the doorhandle. He unlocked the cuff and five seconds or so later Mr Cambry, praise God, rejoined the food-chain.

Freddy, meanwhile, had dropped one hand into his crotch, which itched like hell. His armpits, too, actually, and-

He turned his head slightly and saw Perlmutter staring at him-big dark eyes in a pallid, red-spotted face.

“What are you looking at?” Freddy asked.

Perlmutter turned away without saying anything more. He looked out into the night.

Chapter Nineteen THE CHASE CONTINUES

Mr Gray enjoyed bingeing on human emotions, Mr Gray enjoyed human food, but Mr Gray most definitely did not enjoy evacuating Jonesy’s bowels. He refused to look at what he’d produced, simply snatched up his pants and buttoned them with hands that trembled slightly.

Jesus, aren’t you going to wipe? Jonesy asked. At least flush the damned toilet!

But Mr Gray only wanted to get out of the stall. He paused long enough to run his hands beneath the water in one of the basins, then turned toward the exit.

Jonesy was not exactly surprised to see the State Trooper push in through the door.

“Forgot to zip your fly, my friend,” the Trooper said.

“Oh. So I did. Thank you, officer.”

“Come from up north, did you? Big doins up there, the radio says. When you can hear it, that is. Space aliens, maybe.”

“I only came from Derry,” Mr Gray said. “I wouldn’t know.”

“What brings you out on a night like this, could I ask?”

Tell him a sick friend, Jonesy thought, but felt a prickle of despair. He didn’t want to see this, let alone be a part of it.

“A sick friend,” Mr Gray said.

“Really. Well, sir, I’d like to see your license and regis-”

Then the Trooper’s eyes came up double zeros. He walked in stilted strides toward the wall with the sign on it reading SHOWERS ARE FOR TRUCKERS ONLY. He stood there for a moment, trembling, trying to fight back… and then began to beat his head against the tile in big, sweeping jerks. The first strike knocked his Stetson off. On the third the claret began to flow, first beading on the beige tiles, then splattering them in dark ropes.

And because he could do nothing to stop it, Jonesy scrambled for the phone on his desk.

There was nothing. Either while he had been eating his second order of bacon or taking his first shit as a human being, Mr Gray had cut the line. Jonesy was on his own.

In spite of his horror-or perhaps because of it-Jonesy burst out laughing as his hands wiped the blood from the tiled wall with a Dysart’s towel. Mr Gray had accessed Jonesy’s knowledge concerning body concealment and/or disposal, and had found the motherlode. As a lifelong connoisseur of horror movies, suspense novels, and mysteries, Jonesy was, in a manner of speaking, quite the expert. Even now, as Mr Gray dropped the bloody towel on the chest of the Trooper’s sodden uniform (the Trooper’s jacket had been used to wrap the badly bludgeoned head), a part of Jonesy’s mind was running the disposal of Freddy Miles’s corpse in The Talented Mr Ripley, both the film version and Patricia Highsmith’s novel. Other tapes were running, as well, so many overlays that looking too deeply made Jonesy dizzy, the way he felt when looking down a long drop. Nor was that the worst part. With Jonesy’s help, the talented Mr Gray had discovered something he liked more than crispy bacon, even more than bingeing on Jonesy’s well of rage.

Mr Gray had discovered murder.

Beyond the showers was a locker room. Beyond the lockers was a hallway leading to the truckers” dorm. The hall was deserted. On the far side of it was a door which opened on the rear of the building, where there was a snow-swirling cul-de-sac, now deeply drifted. Two large green Dumpsters emerged from the drifts. One hooded light cast a pallid glow and tall, lunging shadows. Mr Gray, who learned fast, searched the Trooper’s body for his car keys and found them. He also took the Trooper’s gun and put it in one of the zippered pockets of Jonesy’s parka. Mr Gray used the bloodstained towel to keep the door to the cul-de-sac from latching shut, then dragged the body behind one of the Dumpsters.

All of it, from the Trooper’s gruesome induced suicide to Jonesy’s re-entry to the back hall, took less than ten minutes. Jonesy’s body felt light and agile, all weariness gone, at least for the time being: he and Mr Gray were enjoying another burst of endorphin euphoria. And at least some of this wetwork was the responsibility of Gary Ambrose Jones. Not just the body-disposal knowledge, but the bloodthirsty urges of the id under the thin candy frosting of “it’s just make-believe”. Mr Gray was in the driver’s seat Jonesy was at least not burdened with the idea that he was the primary murderer-but he was the engine.

Maybe we deserve to be erased, Jonesy thought as Mr Gray walked back through the shower-room (looking for blood-splatters with Jonesy’s eyes and bouncing the Trooper’s keys in one of Jonesy’s palms as he went). Maybe we deserve to be turned into nothing but a bunch of red spores blowing in the wind. That might be the best thing, God help us.

The tired-looking woman working the cash-register asked him if he’d seen the Trooper.

“Sure did,” Jonesy said. “Showed him my driver’s license and registration, as a matter of fact.”

“Been a bunch of mounties in ever since late afternoon,” the cashier said. “Storm or no storm. They’re all nervous as hell. So’s everyone else. If I wanted to see folks from some other planet, I’d rent me a video. You heard anything new?”

“On the radio they’re saying it’s all a false alarm, he replied, zipping his jacket. He looked at the windows between the restaurant and the parking lot, verifying what he had already seen: with the combination of frost on the glass and the snow outside, the view was nil. No one in here was going to see what he drove away in.

“Yeah? Really?” Relief made her look less tired. Younger.

“Yeah. Don’t be looking for your friend too soon, darlin. He said he had to lay a serious loaf.”

A frown creased the skin between her eyebrows. “He said that?”

“Good night. Happy Thanksgiving. Merry Christmas. Happy New Year.”

Some of that, Jonesy hoped, was him. Trying to get through. To be noticed.

Before he could see if it was noticed, the view before his office window revolved as Mr Gray turned him away from the cash-register. Five minutes later he was heading south on the turnpike again, the chains on the Trooper’s cruiser thrupping and zinging, allowing him to maintain a steady forty miles an hour.

Jonesy felt Mr Gray reaching out, reaching back. Mr Gray could touch Henry’s mind but not get inside it-like Jonesy, Henry was to some degree different. No matter; there was the man with Henry, Overhill or Underhill. From him, Mr Gray was able to get a good fix. They were seventy miles behind, maybe more… and pulling off the turnpike? Yes, pulling off in Derry.

Mr Gray cast back farther yet, and discovered more pursuers. Three of them… but Jonesy felt this group’s main focus was not Mr Gray, but Overhill/Underhill. He found that both incredible and inexplicable, but it seemed to be true. And Mr Gray liked that just fine. He didn’t even bother to look for the reason why Overhill/Underhill and Henry might be stopping.

Mr Gray’s main concern was switching to another vehicle, a snowplow, if Jonesy’s driving skills would allow him to operate it. It would mean another murder, but that was all right with the increasingly human Mr Gray.

Mr Gray was just getting warmed up.

Owen Underhill is standing on the slope very near to the pipe which juts out of the foliage, and he sees them help the muddy, wild-eyed girl-Josie-out of the pipe. He sees Duddits (a large young man with shoulders like a football player’s and the improbable blonde hair of a movie idol) sweep her into a hug, kissing her dirty face in big smacks. He hears her first words: “I want to see my Mommy.”

It’s good enough for the boys; there’s no call to the police, no call for an ambulance. They simply help her up the slope, through the break in the board fence, across Strawford Park (the girls in yellow have been replaced by girls in green; neither they nor their coach pay any attention to the boys or their filthy, draggle-haired prize), and then down Kansas Street to Maple Lane. They know where Josie’s Mommy is. Her Daddy, too.

Not just the Rinkenhauers, either. When the boys get back, there are cars parked the length of the block on both sides of the Cavell house. Roberta was the one who proposed calling the parents of Josie’s friends and classmates. They will search on their own, and they will paper the town with the MISSING, posters, she says. Not in shadowy, out-of-the-way places (which is where missing children posters in Derry tend to wind up) either, but where people must see them. Roberta’s enthusiasm is enough to light some faint hope in the eyes of Ellen and Hector Rinkenhauer.

The other parents respond, too-it is as if they have just been waiting to be asked. The calls started shortly after Duddits and his friends trooped out the door (to play, Roberta assumed, and someplace close by, because Henry’s old jalopy is still parked in the driveway), and by the time the boys return, there are almost two dozen people crammed into the Cavells” living room, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. The man currently addressing them is a guy Henry has seen before, a lawyer named Dave Bocklin. His son, Kendall, sometimes plays with Duddits.

Ken Bocklin also has Down’s, and he’s a good enough guy, but he’s not like Duds. Get serious, though-who is?

The boys stand at the entrance to the living room, Josie among them. She is once more carrying her great big purse, with BarbieKen tucked away inside. Even her face is almost clean, because Beaver, seeing all the cars, has done a little work on it with his handkerchief out in the driveway. (“Tell you what, it made me feel funny,” the Beav confides later, after all the hoopdedoo and fuckaree has died down. “Here I’m cleanin up this girl, she’s got the bod of a Playboy Bunny and the brain, roughly speaking, of a lawn-sprinkler.”) At first no one sees them but Mr Bocklin, and Mr Bocklin doesn’t seem to realize what he’s looking at, because he goes right on talking.

“So what we need to do, folks, is divide up into a number of teams, let’s say three couples to each… each team… and we’ll… we… we Mr Bocklin slows like one of those toys you need to wind up and then just stands there in front of the Cavells” TV, staring. There’s a nervous rustle among the hastily assembled parents, who don’t understand what can be wrong with him-he was going along so confidently.

“Joise,” he says in a flat, uninflected voice utterly unlike his usual confident courthouse boom.

“Yes,” says Hector Rinkenhauer, “that’s her name. What’s up, Dave? Are you all r-”

“Josie,” Dave says again, and raises a trembling hand. To Henry (and hence to Owen, who is seeing this through Henry’s eyes) he looks like the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come pointing at Ebenezer Scrooge’s grave.

One face turns… two… four… Alfie Cavell’s eyes, huge and unbelieving behind his specs… and finally, Mrs Rinkenhauer’s. “Hi, Mom,” Josie says nonchalantly. She holds up her purse. “Duddie found my BarbieKen. I was stuck in a-” The rest is blotted out by the woman’s shriek of joy. Henry has never heard such a cry in his life, and although it is wonderful, it is also somehow terrible. “Fuck me Freddy,” Beaver says… low, under his breath. Jonesy is holding Duddits, who has been frightened by the scream.

Pete looks at Henry and gives a little nod: We did okay.

And Henry nods back. Yeah, we did.

It may not have been their finest hour, but surely it is a close second. And as Mrs Rinkenhauer sweeps her daughter into her arms, now sobbing, Henry taps Duddits on the arm. When Duddits turns to look at him, Henry kisses him softly on the cheek. Good old Duddits, Henry thinks. Good old-

“This is it, Owen,” Henry said quietly. “Exit 27.”

Owen’s vision of the Cavell living room popped like a soap bubble and he looked at the looming sign: KEEP RIGHT FOR EXIT 27-KANSAS STREET. He could still hear the woman’s happy, unbelieving cries echoing in his ears.

“You okay?” Henry asked.

“Yeah. At least I guess so.” He turned up the exit ramp, the Humvee shouldering its way through the snow. The clock built into the dashboard had gone as dead as Henry’s wristwatch, but he thought he could see the faintest lightening in the air. “Right or left at the top of the ramp? Tell me now, because I don’t want to risk stopping.”

“Left, left.”

Owen swung the Hummer left under a dancing blinker-light, rode it through another skid, and then moved south on Kansas Street. It had been plowed, and not that long ago, but it was drifting in again already.

“Snow’s letting up,” Henry said.

“Yeah, but the wind’s a bitch. You’re looking forward to seeing him, aren’t you? Duddits.”

Henry grinned. “A little nervous about it, but yeah.” He shook his head. “Duddits, man… Duddits just makes you feel good. He’s a tribble. You’ll see for yourself I just wish we weren’t busting in like this at the crack of dawn.” Owen shrugged. Can’t do anything about it, the gesture said. “They’ve been over here on the west side for four years, I guess, and I’ve never even been to the new place.” And, without even realizing, went on in mindspeak: They moved after Alfie died. Did you-And then, instead of words, a picture: people in black under black umbrellas. A graveyard in the rain. A coffin on trestles with R.I.P. ALFIE carved on top. No, Henry said, feeling ashamed. None of us did.

But Henry didn’t know why they hadn’t gone, although a phrase occurred to him: The moving finger writes; and having writ, moves on. Duddits had been an important (he guessed the word he actually wanted was vital) part of their childhood. And once that link was broken, going back would have been painful. Painful was one thing, uselessly painful another. He understood something now. The images he associated with his depression and his growing certainty of suicide-the trickle of milk on his father’s chin, Barry Newman hustling his doublewide butt out of the office-had been hiding another, more potent, image all along: the dreamcatcher. Hadn’t that been the real source of his despair? The grandiosity of the dreamcatcher concept coupled to the banality of the uses to which the concept had been put? Using Duddits to find Josie Rinkenhauer had been like discovering quantum physics and then using it to build a video game. Worse, discovering that was really all quantum physics was good for. Of course they had done a good thing-without them, Josie Rinkenhauer would have died in that pipe like a rat in a rainbarrel. But-come on-it wasn’t as if they’d rescued a future Nobel Peace Prize winner-

I can’t follow everything that just went through your head, Owen said, suddenly deep in Henry’s mind, but it sounds pretty goddam arrogant. Which street?Stung, Henry glared at him. “We haven’t been back to see him lately, okay? Could we just leave it at that?” “Yes,” Owen said. “But we all sent him Christmas cards, okay? Every year, which is how I know they moved to

Dearborn Street, 41 Dearborn Street, West Side Derry, make your right three streets up.”

“Okay. Calm down.”

“Fuck your mother and die.”

“Henry-”

“We just fell out of touch. It happens. Probably never happened to a Mr Perfection like your honored self, but to the rest of us… the rest of us…” Henri looked down, saw that his fists were clenched, and forced them to roll open.

“Okay, I said.”

“Probably Mr Perfection stays in touch with all his junior-high-school friends, right? You guys probably get together once a year to snap bras, play your Motley Crue records, and eat Tuna Surprise just like they used to serve in the cafeteria.”

“I’m sorry if I upset you.”

“Oh, bite me. You act like we fucking abandoned him.” Which, of course, was pretty much what they had done.

Owen said nothing. He was squinting through the swirling snow, looking for the Dearborn Street sign in the pallid gray light of early morning… and there it was, just up ahead. A plow passing along Kansas Street had plugged the end of Dearborn, but Owen thought the Humvee could beat its way past.

“It’s not like I stopped thinking about him,” Henry said. He started to continue by thought, then switched back to words again. Thinking about Duddits was too revealing. “We all thought about him. In fact, Jonesy and I were going to go see him this spring. Then Jonesy had his accident, and I forgot all about it. Is that so surprising?”

“Not at all,” Owen said mildly. He swung the wheel hard to the right, flicked it back the other way to control the skid, then floored the accelerator. The Hummer hit the packed and crusty wall of snow hard enough to throw both of them forward against their seatbelts. Then they were through, Owen jockeying the wheel to keep from hitting the drifted-in cars parked on either side of the street.

“I don’t need a guilt-trip from someone who was planning to barbecue a few hundred civilians,” Henry grumbled. Owen stamped on the brake with both feet, throwing them forward into their harnesses again, this time hard enough to lock them. The Humvee skidded to a diagonal stop in the street. “Shut the fuck up.”

Don’t be talking shit you don’t understand.

“I’m likely going to be a”

dead man because of

“you, so why don’t you just keep all your fucking”

self-indulgent

(picture of a spoiled-looking kid with his lower lip stuck out)

“rationalizing bullshit”

to yourself.

Henry stared at him, shocked and stunned. When was the last time someone had talked to him that way? The answer was probably never.

“I only care about one thing,” Owen said. His face was pale and strained and exhausted. “I want to find your Typhoid Jonesy and stop him. All right? Fuck your precious tender feelings, fuck how tired you are, and fuck you. I’m here.”

“All right,” Henry said.

“I don’t need lessons in morality from a guy planning to blow his overeducated, self-indulgent brains out.”

“Okay.”

“So fuck your mother and die.”

Silence inside the Humvee. Nothing from outside but the monotonous vacuum-cleaner shriek of the wind.

At last Henry said, “Here’s what we’ll do. I’ll fuck your mother, then die; you fuck my mother, then die. At least we’ll avoid the incest taboo.”

Owen began to smile. Henry smiled back.

Mat’re Jonesy and Mr Gray doing? Owen asked Henry. Can you tell?

Henry licked at his lips. The itching in his leg had largely stopped, but his tongue tasted like an old piece of shag rug. “No. They’re cut off. Gray’s responsible for that, probably. And your fearless leader? Kurtz? He’s getting closer, isn’t he?”

“Yeah. If we’re going to maintain any kind of lead on him at all, we better make this quick.” “Then we will.” Owen scratched the red stuff on the side of his face, looked at the bits of red that came off on his fingers, then got moving again.

Number 41, you said?

Yeah. Owen?

What?

I’m scared.

Of Duddits?

Sort of, yeah.

Why?

I don’t know.”

Henry looked at Owen bleakly.

I feel like there’s something wrong with him.

It was her after-midnight fantasy made real, and when the knock came at the door, Roberta was unable to get up. Her legs felt like water. The night was gone, but it had been replaced by a pallid, creepy morning light that wasn’t much better, and they were out there, Pete and Beav, the dead ones had come for her son.

The fist fell again, booming, rattling the pictures on the walls.

One of them was a framed front page of the Derry News, the photo showing Duddits, his friends, and Josie Rinkenhauer, all of them with their arms around each other, all of them grinning like mad (how well Duddits had looked in that picture, how strong and normal) below a headline reading HIGH-SCHOOL CHUMS PLAY DETECTIVE, FIND MISSING GIRL.

Wham! Wham! Wham!

No, she thought, I’ll just sit here and eventually they’ll go away, they’ll have to go away, because with dead people you have to invite them in and if I just sit tight-

But then Duddits was running past her rocker-running, when these days just walking wore him out, and his eyes were full of their old blazing brightness, such good boys they had been and such happiness they had brought him, but now they were dead, they had come to him through the storm and they were dead-

“Duddie, no!” she screamed, but he paid her no attention. He rushed past that old framed picture-Duddits Cavell on the front page, Duddits Cavell a hero, would wonders never cease-and she heard what he was shouting just as he opened the door on the dying storm:

“Ennie! Ennie! ENNIE!”

Henry opened his mouth-to say what he never knew, because nothing came out. He was thunderstruck, dumbstruck. This wasn’t Duddits, couldn’t be-it was some sickly uncle or older brother, pale and apparently bald beneath his pushed-back Red Sox cap. There was stubble on his cheeks, crusts of blood around his nostrils, and deep dark circles beneath his eyes. And yet-

“Ennie! Ennie! Ennie!”

The tall, pale stranger in the doorway threw himself into Henry’s arms with all of Duddie’s old extravagance, knocking him backward on the snowy step not by force of his weight-he was as light as milkweed fluff-but simply because Henry was unprepared for the assault. If Owen hadn’t steadied him, he and Duddits would have gone tumbling into the snow.

“Ennie! Ennie!”

Laughing. Crying. Covering him with those big old Duddits smackeroos. Deep in the storehouse of his memory, Beaver Clarendon whispered, If you guys tell anybody he did that… And Jonesy: Yeah, yeah, you’ll never chum with us again, ya fuckin wank. It was Duddits, all right, kissing Henry’s byrus-speckled cheeks… but the pallor on Duddits’s cheeks, what was that? He was so thin-no, beyond thin, gaunt-and what was that? The blood in his nostrils, the smell drifting off his skin… not the smell that had been coming from Becky Shue, not the smell of the overgrown cabin, but a deathly smell just the same.

And here was Roberta, standing in the hall beside a photograph of Duddits and Alfie at the Derry Days carnival, riding the carousel, dwarfing their wild-eyed plastic horses and laughing.

Didn’t go to Alfie’s funeral, but sent a card, Henry thought, and loathed himself

She was wringing her hands together, her eyes full of tears, and although she had put on weight at breast and hip, although her hair was now almost entirely gray, it was her, she was still she, but Duddits… oh boy, Duddits…

Henry looked at her, his arms wrapped around the old friend who was still crying his name. He patted at Duddits’s shoulder blade. It felt insubstantial beneath his palm, as fragile as the bone in a bird’s wing.

“Roberta,” he said. “Roberta, my God! What’s wrong with him?”

“ALL,” she said, and managed a wan smile. “Sounds like a laundry detergent, doesn’t it? It stands for acute lymphocytic leukemia. He was diagnosed nine months ago, and by then curing him was no longer an option. All we’ve been doing since then is fighting the clock.”

“Ennie!” Duddits exclaimed. The old goofy smile illuminated his gray and tired face. “Ay ih, iffun-nay!”

“That’s right,” Henry said, and began to cry. “Same shit, different day.”

“I know why you’re here,” she said, “but don’t. Please, Henry.

I’m begging you. Don’t take my boy away from me. He’s dying.”

Kurtz was about to ask Perlmutter for an update on Underhill and his new friend-Henry was the new friend’s name, Henry Devlin-when Pearly let out a long, ululating scream, his face turned up to the roof of the Humvee. Kurtz had helped a woman have a baby in Nicaragua (and they always call us the bad guys, he thought sentimentally), and this scream reminded him of hers, heard on the shores of the beautiful La Juvena River.

“Hold on, Pearly!” Kurtz cried. “Hold on, buck! Deep breaths, now!”

“Fuck you!” Pearly screamed. “Look what you got me into, you dirty cunt! FUCK YOU!”

Kurtz did not hold this against him. Women said terrible things in childbirth, and while Pearly was definitely one of the fellas, Kurtz had an idea that he was going through something as close to childbirth as any man had ever experienced. He knew it might be wise to put Perlmutter out of his misery-

“You better not,” Pearly groaned. Tears of pain were rolling down his red-bearded cheeks. “You better not, you lizard-skin old fuck.”

“Don’t you worry, laddie, Kurtz soothed, and patted Perlmutter’s shivering shoulder. From ahead of them came the steady clanking rumble of the plow Kurtz had persuaded to break trail for them (as gray light began to creep back into the world, their speed had risen to a giddy thirty-five miles an hour). The plow’s taillights glowed like dirty red stars.

Kurtz leaned forward, looking at Perlmutter with bright-eyed interest. It was very cold in the back seat of the Humvee because of the broken window, but for the moment Kurtz didn’t notice this. The front of Pearly’s coat was swelling outward like a balloon, and Kurtz once more drew his nine-millimeter,

“Boss, if he pops-”

Before Freddy could finish, Perlmutter produced a deafening fart. The stench was immediate and enormous, but Pearly appeared not to notice. His head lolled back against the seat, his eyes half-lidded, his expression one of sublime relief

“Oh my fuckin GRANDMOTHER!” Freddy cried, and cranked his window all the way down despite the draft already coursing through the vehicle.

Fascinated, Kurtz watched Perlmutter’s distended belly deflate. Not yet, then. Not yet and probably just as well. It was possible that the thing growing inside Perlmutter’s works might come in handy. Not likely, but possible. All things served the Lord, said the Scripture, and that might include the shit-weasels.

“Hold on, soldier,” Kurtz said, patting Pearly’s shoulder with one hand and putting the nine on the seat beside him with the other. “You just hold on and think about the Lord.”

“Fuck the Lord,” Perlmutter said sullenly, and Kurtz was mildly amazed. He never would have dreamed Perlmutter could have so much profanity in him.

Ahead of them, the plow’s taillights flashed bright and pulled over to the right side of the road.

“Oh-oh,” Kurtz said.

“What should I do, boss?”

“Pull right in behind him,” Kurtz said. He spoke cheerfully, but picked the nine-millimeter up off the seat again. “We’ll see what our new friend wants.” Although he believed he knew. “Freddy, what do you hear from our old friends? Are you picking them up?”

Very reluctantly, Freddy said, “Only Owen. Not the guy with him or the guys they’re chasing. Owen’s off the road. In a house. Talking with someone.”

“A house in Derry?”

“Yeah.”

And here came the plow’s driver, striding through the snow in great green gumrubber boots and a hooded parka fit for an Eskimo. Wrapped around the lower part of his face was a vast woolen muffler, its ends flying out behind him in the wind, and Kurtz didn’t have to be telepathic to know the man’s wife or mother had made it for him.

The plowman leaned in the window and wrinkled his nose at the lingering aroma of sulfur and ethyl alcohol. He looked doubtfully at Freddy, at the only-half-conscious Perlmutter, then at Kurtz in the back seat, who was leaning forward and looking at him with bright-eyed interest. Kurtz thought it prudent to hold his weapon beneath his left knee, at least for the time being.

“Yes, Cap'n?” Kurtz asked.

“I’ve had a radio message from a fella says his name is Randall.” The plowman raised his voice to be heard over the wind. His accent was pure downeast Yankee. “Gen'rul Randall. Claimed to be talkin to me by satellite relay straight from Cheyenne Mountain in Wyomin.”

“Name means nothing to me, Cap,” Kurtz said in the same bright tone-absolutely ignoring Perlmutter, who groaned “You lie, you lie, you lie.”

The plow driver’s eyes flicked to him, then returned to Kurtz. “Fella gave me a code phrase. Blue exit. Mean anything to you?”

"'The name is Bond, James Bond,"” Kurtz said, and laughed. “Someone’s pulling your leg, Cap.”

“Said to tell you that your part of the mission’s over and your country thanks you.”

“Did they mention anything about a gold watch, laddie-buck?” Kurtz asked, eyes sparkling.

The plowman licked his lips. It was interesting, Kurtz thought. He could see the exact moment the plowman decided he was dealing with a lunatic. The exact moment.

“Don’t know nawthin bout no gold watch. Just wanted to tell you I can’t take you any further. Not without authorization, that is.”

Kurtz produced the nine from where it had been hiding under his knee and pointed it into the plowman’s face. “Here’s your authorization, buck, all signed and filed in triplicate. Will it suit?” The plowman looked at the gun with his long Yankee eyes. He did not look particularly afraid. “Ayuh, that looks to be in order.” Kurtz laughed. “Good man! Very good man! Now let’s get going. And you want to speed it up a little, God love you. There’s someone in Derry I have to” Kurtz searched for le mot juste, and found it “to debrief”

Perlmutter half-groaned, half-laughed. The plowman glanced at him.

“Don’t mind him, he’s pregnant,” Kurtz said in a confiding tone. “Next thing you know, he’ll be yelling for oysters and dill pickles.”

“Pregnant,” the plowman echoed. His voice was perfectly flat.

“Yes, but never mind that. Not your problem. The thing is, buck”-Kurtz leaned forward, speaking warmly and confidentially over the barrel of his nine-millimeter-“this fellow I have to catch is in Derry now. I expect he’ll be back on the road again before too long, I’d guess he must know I’m coming for his ass-”

“He knows, all right,” Freddy Johnson said. He scratched the side of his neck, then dropped his hand into his crotch and scratched there. “-but in the meantime,” Kurtz continued, “I think I can make up some ground. Now do you want to put your elderly ass in gear, or what?” The plowman nodded and went walking back to the cab of his plow. The light was brighter now. This light very likely belongs to the last day of my life, Kurtz thought with mild wonder.Perlmutter began uttering a low sound of pain. It growled along for a bit, then rose to a scream. Perlmutter clutched his stomach again.

“Jesus,” Freddy said. “Lookit his gut, boss. Rising like a loaf of bread.”

“Deep breaths,” Kurtz said, and patted Pearly’s shoulder with a benevolent hand. Ahead of them, the plow had begun to move again. “Deep breaths, laddie. Relax. You just relax and think good thoughts.”

Forty miles to Derry. Forty miles between me and Owen, Kurtz thought. Not bad at all. I’m coming for you, buck. Need to take you to school. Teach you what you forgot about crossing the Kurtz Line.

Twenty miles later and they were still there-this according to both Freddy and Perlmutter, although Freddy seemed less sure of himself now. Pearly, however, said they were talking to the mother-Owen and the other one were talking to the mother. The mother didn’t want to let him go.

“Let who go?” Kurtz asked. He hardly cared. The mother was holding them in Derry, allowing them to close the distance, so God bless the mother no matter who she was or what her motivations might be.

“I don’t know,” Pearly said. His guts had been relatively still ever since Kurtz’s conversation with the plowman, but he sounded exhausted. “I can’t see. There’s someone, but it’s like there’s no mind there to look into.”

“Freddy?” Freddy shook his head. “Owen’s gone for me. I can barely hear the plow guy. It’s like… I dunno… like losing a radio signal.”

Kurtz leaned forward over the seat and took a close look at the Ripley on Freddy’s cheek. The stuff in the middle was still bright red-orange, but around the edges it appeared to be turning an ashy white.

It’s dying, Kurtz thought. Either Freddy’s system is killing it or the environment is. Owen was right. I’ll be damned.

Not that it changed anything. The line was still the line, and Owen had stepped over it.

“The plow guy,” Perlmutter said in his tired voice.

“What about the plow guy, buck?”

Only there was no need for Perlmutter to answer. Up ahead, twinkling in the blowing snow, was a sign reading EXIT 32-GRANDVIEW/GRANDVIEW STATION. The plow suddenly sped up, raising its blade as it did so. All at once the Humvee was running in slippery powder again, better than a foot of it. The plowman didn’t bother with his blinker, simply took the exit at fifty, yanking up a tall rooster-tail of snow in his wake.

“Follow him?” Freddy asked. “I can run him down, boss!” Kurtz mastered a strong urge to tell Freddy to go ahead-they’d run the long-eyed Yankee son of a bitch to earth and teach him what happened to folks who crossed the line. Give him a little dose of Owen Underhill’s medicine. Except the plow was bigger than the Hummer, a lot bigger, and who knew what might happen if they got into a game of bumper cars?

“Stay on the pike, laddie,” Kurtz said, settling back. “Eyes on the prize.” Still, he watched the plow angling off into the frigid, windy morning with real regret. He couldn’t even hope the damn Yankee had caught a hot dose from Freddy and Archie Perlmutter, because the stuff didn’t last.

They went on, speed dropping back to twenty in the drifts, but Kurtz guessed conditions would improve as they got farther south. The storm was almost over.

“And congratulations,” he told Freddy.

“Huh?”

Kurtz patted him on the shoulder. “You appear to be getting better.” He turned to Perlmutter. “I don’t know about you, laddie-buck.”

A hundred miles north of Kurtz’s position and less than two miles from the junction of back roads where Henry had been taken, the new commander of the Imperial Valleys-a woman of severe good looks, in her late forties-stood beside a pine tree in a valley which had been code-named Clean Sweep One. Clean Sweep One was, quite literally, a valley of death. Piled along its length were heaps of tangled bodies, most wearing hunter orange. There were over a hundred in all. If the corpses had ID, it had been taped around their necks. The majority of the dead were wearing their driver’s licenses, but there were also Visa and Discover cards, Blue Cross cards, and hunting licenses. One woman with a large black hole in her forehead had been tagged with her Blockbuster Video card.

Standing beside the largest pile of bodies, Kate Gallagher was finishing a rough tally before writing her second report. In one hand she held a Palm Pilot computer, a tool that Adolf Eichmann, that famous accountant of the dead, would certainly have envied. The Pilots hadn’t worked earlier, but now most of the cool electronics gear seemed to be back on-line.

Kate wore earphones and a mike suspended in front of her mouth-and-nose mask. Occasionally she would ask someone for clarification or give an order. Kurtz had chosen a successor who was both enthusiastic and efficient. Totting up the bodies here and elsewhere, Gallagher estimated that they had bagged at least sixty per cent of the escapees. The John Q’s had fought, which was certainly a surprise, but in the long run, most of them just weren’t survivors. It was as simple as that.

“Yo, Katie-Kate.”

Jocelyn McAvoy appeared through the trees at the south end of the valley, her hood pushed back, her short hair covered by a scarf of green silk, her burp-gun slung over her shoulder. There was a splash of blood across the front of her parka.

“Scared you, didn’t I?” she asked the new OIC.

“You might have raised my blood pressure a point or two.”

“Well, Quadrant Four is clear, maybe that’ll lower it a little.” McAvoy’s eyes sparkled. “We got over forty. Jackson has got hard numbers for you, and speaking of hard, right about now I could really use a hard-”

“Excuse me? Ladies?”

They turned. Emerging from the snow-covered brush at the north end of the valley was a group of half a dozen men and two women. Most were wearing orange, but their leader was a squat tugboat of a man wearing a regulation Blue Group coverall under his parka. He was also still wearing his transparent face-mask, although below his mouth there was a Ripley soul-patch which was definitely non-reg. All of the newcomers had automatic weapons.

Gallagher and McAvoy had time to exchange a single wide-eyed, caught-with-our-pants-down look. Then Jocelyn McAvoy went for her burp-gun and Kate Gallagher went for the Browning she had propped against the tree. Neither of them made it. The thunder of the guns was deafening. McAvoy was thrown nearly twenty feet through the air. One of her boots came off.

“That’s for Larry!” one of the orange-clad women was screaming. “That’s for Larry, you bitches, that’s for Larry!”

When the shooting was over, the squat man with the Ripley goatee assembled his group near the facedown corpse of Kate Gallagher, who had graduated ninth in her class at West Point before running afoul of the disease that was Kurtz. The squat man had appropriated her gun, which was better than his own.

“I’m a firm believer in democracy,” he said, “and you folks can do what you want, but I’m heading north now. I don’t know how long it’ll take me to learn the words to “O Canada", but I’m going to find out.”

“I’m going with you,” one of the men said, and it quickly became apparent that they were all going with him. Before they left the clearing the leader bent down and plucked the Palm Pilot out of a snowdrift.

“Always wanted one of these,” said Emil “Dawg” Brodsky. “I’m a sucker for the new technology.”

They left the valley of death from the direction they’d entered it, heading north. From around them came isolated pops and bursts of gunfire, but for all practical purposes, Operation Clean Sweep was also over.

Mr Gray had committed another murder and stolen another vehicle, this time a DPW plow. Jonesy didn’t see it happen. Mr Gray, having apparently decided he couldn’t get Jonesy out of his office (not, at least, until he could devote all his time and energy to the problem), had decided to do the next best thing, which was to wall him off from the outside world. Jonesy now thought he knew how Fortunato must have felt when Montresor bricked him up in the wine-cellar.

It happened not long after Mr Gray put the State Trooper’s car back in the turnpike’s southbound lane (there was just the one, at least for the time being, and that was treacherous). Jonesy was in a closet at the time, following up what seemed to him to be an absolutely brilliant idea.

Mr Gray had cut off his telephone service? Okay, he would simply create a new form of communication, as he had created a thermostat to cool the place down when Mr Gray tried to force him out by overloading him with heat. A fax machine would be just the thing, he decided. And why not? All the gadgets were symbolic, only visualizations to help him first focus and then exercise powers that had been in him for over twenty years. Mr Gray had sensed those powers, and after his initial dismay had moved very efficiently to keep Jonesy from using them. The trick was to keep finding ways around Mr Gray’s roadblocks, just as Mr Gray himself kept finding ways to move south.

Jonesy closed his eyes and visualized a fax like the one in the History Department office, only he put it in the closet of his new office. Then, feeling like Aladdin rubbing the magic lamp (only the number of wishes he was granted seemed infinite, as long as he didn’t get carried away), he also visualized a stack of paper and a Berol Black Beauty pencil lying beside it. Then he went into the closet to see how he’d done.

Pretty well, it appeared at first glance… although the pencil was a tad eerie, brand-new and sharpened to a virgin point, but still gnawed all along the barrel. Yet that was as it should be, wasn’t it? Beaver was the one who had used Black Beauty pencils, even way back in Witcham Street Grammar. The rest of them had carried the more standard yellow Eberhard Fabers.

The fax looked perfect, sitting there on the floor beneath a dangle of empty coathangers and one jacket (the bright orange parka his mother had bought him for his first hunting trip, then made him promise-with his hand over his heart-to wear every single moment he was out of doors), and it was humming in an encouraging way.

Disappointment set in when he knelt in front of it and read the message in the lighted window: GIVE UP JONESY COME OUT.

He picked up the phone on the side of the machine and heard Mr Gray’s recorded voice: “Give up, Jonesy, come out. Give up, Jonesy, come o-”

A series of violent bangs, almost as loud as thunderclaps, made him cry out and jump to his feet. His first thought was that Mr Gray was using one of those SWAT squad door-busters, battering his way in.

It wasn’t the door, though. It was the window, and in some ways that was even worse. Mr Gray had put industrial gray shutters steel, they looked like-across his window. Now he wasn’t just imprisoned; he was blind, as well.

Written across the inside, easily readable through the glass: GIVE UP COME OUT. Jonesy had a brief memory of The Wizard of Oz-SURRENDER DOROTHY Written across the sky

–and wanted to laugh. He couldn’t. Nothing was funny, nothing was ironic. This was horrible. “No!” he shouted. “Take them down! Take them down, damn you!”

No answer. Jonesy raised his hands, meaning to shatter the glass and beat on the steel shutters beyond, then thought, Are you crazy? That’s what he wants! The minute you break the glass, those shutters disappear and Mr Gray is in here. And you’re gone, buddy.

He was aware of movement-the heavy rumble of the plow.

Where were they by now? Waterville? Augusta? Even farther south? Into the zone where the precip had fallen as rain? No, probably not, Mr Gray would have switched the plow for something faster if they had gotten clear of the snow. But they would be clear of it, and soon. Because they were going south.

Going where?

I might as well be dead already, Jonesy thought, looking disconsolately at the closed shutter with its taunt of a message. I might as well be dead right now.

In the end it was Owen who took Roberta Cavell by the arms and-with one eye on the racing clock, all too aware that every minute and a half brought Kurtz a mile closer-told her why they had to take Duddits, no matter how ill he was. Even in these circumstances, Henry didn’t know if he could have uttered the phrase fate of the world may depend on it with a straight face. Underhill, who had spent his life carrying a gun for his country, could and did.

Duddits stood with his arm around Henry, staring raptly down at him with his brilliant green eyes. Those eyes, at least, had not changed. Nor had the feeling they’d always had when around Duddits-that things were either perfectly all right or soon would be.

Roberta looked at Owen, her face seeming to grow older with every sentence he spoke. It was as if some malign time-lapse photography were at work. “Yes,” she said, “yes, I understand you want to find Jonesy-to catch him-but what does he want to do? And if he came here, why didn’t he do it here?” “Ma’am, I can’t answer those questions-”

“War,” Duddits said suddenly. “Onesy ont war.”

War? Owen’s mind asked Henry, alarmed. What war?

Never mind, Henry responded, and all at once the voice in Owen’s head was faint, hard to hear.

We have to go.

“Ma’am. Mrs Cavell.” Owen took her arms again, very gently. Henry loved this woman a lot, although he had ignored her quite cruelly over the last dozen years or so, and Owen knew why he’d loved her. It came off her like a sweet smoke. “We have to go.”

“No. Oh please say no.” The tears coming again. Don’t do that, lady, Owen wanted to say. Things are bad enough already. Please don’t do that.

“There’s a man coming. A very bad man. We have to be gone when he gets here.”

Roberta’s distracted, sorrowing face filled with resolution. “All right, then. If you have to. But I’m coming with you.”

“Roberta, no,” Henry said.

“Yes! Yes, I can take care of him… give him his pills… his Prednisone… I’ll make sure to bring his lemon swabs and-”

“Umma, oo ay ere.”

“No, Duddie, no!”

“Umma, oo ay ere! Ayfe! Ayfe!” Safe, safe. Duddits growing agitated now.

“We really don’t have any more time,” Owen said.

“Roberta,” Henry said. “Please.”

“Let me come!” she cried. “He’s all I have!”

“Umma,” Duddits said. His voice was not a bit childish. “Ooo… ay… ERE.”

She looked at him fixedly, and her face sagged. “Allnight,” she said. “Just one more minute. I have to get something.” She went into Duddits’s room and came back with a paper bag, which she handed to Henry.

“It’s his pills,” she said. “He has his Prednisone at nine o'clock. Don’t forget or he gets wheezy and his chest hurts. He can have a Percocet if he asks, and he probably will ask, because being out in the cold hurts him.”

She looked at Henry with sorrow but no reproach. He almost wished for reproach. God knew he’d never done anything which had made him feel this ashamed. It wasn’t just that Duddits had leukemia; it was that he’d had it for so long and none of them had known.

“Also his lemon swabs, but only on his lips, because his gums bleed a lot now and the swabs sting him. There’s cotton for his nose if it bleeds. Oh, and the catheter. See it there on his shoulder?” Henry nodded. A plastic tube protruding from a packing of bandage. Looking at it gave him a weirdly strong feeling of deja vu.

“If you’re outside, keep it covered… Dr Briscoe laughs at me, but I’m always afraid the cold will get down inside… a scarf will work… even a handkerchief breaking through.

She was crying again, the sobs

“Roberta-” Henry began. Now he was looking at the clock, too.

“I’ll take care of him,” Owen said. “I saw my Pop through to the end of it. I know about Prednisone and Percocet.” And more: bigger steroids, better painkillers. At the end, marijuana, methadone, and finally pure morphine, so much better than heroin. Morphine, death’s sleekest engine.

He felt her in his head, then, a strange, tickling sensation like bare feet so light they barely touched down. Tickly, but not unpleasant. She was trying to make out if what he’d said about his father was the truth or a lie. This was her little gift from her extraordinary son, Owen realized, and she had been using it so long she no longer even knew she was doing it… like Henry’s friend Beaver chewing on his toothpicks. It wasn’t as powerful as what Henry had, but it was there, and Owen had never in his life been so glad he had told the truth.

“Not leukemia, though,” she said.

“Lung cancer. Mrs Cavell, we really have to-”

“I need to get him one more thing.”

“Roberta, we can’t-” Henry began.

“In a flash, in a flash.” She darted for the kitchen.

Owen felt really frightened for the first time. “Kurtz and Freddy and Perlmutter-Henry, I can’t tell where they are! I’ve lost them!”

Henry had unrolled the top of the bag and looked inside. What he saw there, lying on top of the box of lemon-flavored glycerine swabs, transfixed him. He replied to Owen, but his voice seemed to be coming from the far end of some previously undisclosed-hell, unsuspected-valley. There was such a valley, he knew that now. A trough of years. He would not, could not, say he had never suspected that such geography existed, but how in God’s name could he have suspected so little?

“They just passed Exit 29,” he said. “Twenty miles behind us now. Maybe even closer.”

“What’s wrong with you?”

Henry reached into the brown bag and brought out the little creation of string, so like a cobweb, which had hung over Duddits’s bed here, and over the bed at the Maple Lane house before Alfie had died.

“Duddits, where did you get this?” he asked, but of course he knew. This dreamcatcher was smaller than the one which had hung in the main room at Hole in the Wall, but was otherwise its twin.

“Eeeyer,” Duddits said. He had never taken his eyes off Henry. It was as if he could still not entirely believe that Henry was here. “Eeeyer ent ooo cee. Or eye Issmuss ass-eek.”

Although his mind-reading ability was fading rapidly as his body beat back the byrus, Owen understood this easily enough; Beaver sent to me, Duddits said. For my Christmas last week. Down’s sufferers had difficulty expressing concepts of time past and time to come, and Owen suspected that to Duddits the past was always last week, the future always next week. It seemed to Owen that if everyone thought that way, there would be a lot less grief and rancor in the world.

Henry looked at the little string dreamcatcher a moment longer, then returned it to the brown bag just as Roberta bustled back in. Duddits broke into a huge grin when he saw what she’d gone for. “Oooby-Doo!” he cried. “Ooby-Doo unnox!” He took it and gave her a kiss on each cheek.

“Owen,” Henry said. His eyes were bright. “I have some extremely good news.” “Tell me.” “The bastards just hit a detour-jackknifed tractor-trailer just shy of Exit 28. It’s going to cost them ten, maybe twenty minutes.”

“Thank Christ. Let’s use them.” He glanced at the coat-tree in the corner. Hanging from it was a huge blue duffel coat with RED SOX WINTER BALL printed on the back in bright scarlet. “That yours, Duddits?”

“Ine!” Duddits said, smiling and nodding. “I-acket.” And, as Owen reached for it: “Ooo saw us ine Osie.” He got that one, too, and it sent a chill up his back. You saw us find Josie.

So he had… and Duddits had seen him. Only last night, or had Duddits seen him on that day, nineteen years ago? Did Duddits’s gift also involve a kind of time travel?

This wasn’t the time to ask such questions, and Owen was almost glad.

“I said I wouldn’t pack his lunchbox, but of course I did. In the end, I did.”

Roberta looked at it-at Duddits holding it, shifting it from hand to hand as he struggled into the enormous parka, which had also been a gift from the Boston Red Sox. His face was unbelievably pale against the bright blue and even brighter yellow of the lunchbox. “I knew he was going. And that I wasn’t.” Her eyes searched Henry’s face. “Please may I not go, Henry?”

“If you do, you could die in front of him,” Henry said-hating the cruelty of it, also hating how well his life’s work had prepared him to push the right buttons. “Would you want him to see that, Roberta?”

“No, of course not.” And, as an afterthought, hurting him all the way to the center of his heart: “Damn you.”

She went to Duddits, pushed Owen aside, and quickly ran up her son’s zip per. Then she took him by the shoulders, pulled him down, and fixed him with her eyes. Tiny, fierce little bird of a woman. Tall, pale son, floating inside his parka. Roberta had stopped crying.

“You be good, Duddie.”

“I eee ood, Umma.”

“You mind Henry.”

“I-ill, Umma. I ine Ennie.”

“Stay bundled up.”

“I-ill.”

Still obedient, but a little impatient now, wanting to be off, and how all this took Henry back: trips to get ice cream, trips to play minigolf (Duddits had been weirdly good at the game, only Pete had been able to beat him with any consistency), trips to the movies; always you mind Henry or you mind Jonesy or you mind your friends; always you be good, Duddie and I ee oood, Umma.

She looked him up and down. “I love you, Douglas. You have always been a good son to me, and I love you so very much. Give me a kiss, now.”

He kissed her; her hand stole out and caressed his beard-sandy cheek. Henry could hardly bear to look, but he did look, was as helpless as any fly caught in any spiderweb. Every dreamcatcher was also a trap.

Duddits gave her another perfunctory kiss, but his brilliant green eyes shifted between Henry and the door. Duddits was anxious to be off. Because he knew the people after Henry and his friend were close? Because it was an adventure, like all the adventures the five of them had had in the old days? Both? Yes, probably both. Roberta let him go, her hands leaving her son for the last time.

“Roberta,” Henry said. “Why didn’t you tell any of us this was happening? Why didn’t you call?”

“Why didn’t you ever come?”

Henry might have asked another of his own-Why didn’t Duddits call?-but the very question would have been a lie. Duddits had called repeatedly since March, when Jonesy had had his accident. He thought of Pete, sitting in the snow beside the overturned Scout, drinking beer and writing DUDDITS over and over again in the snow. Duddits, marooned in Never-Never Land and dying there, Duddits sending his messages and receiving back only silence. Finally one of them had come, but only to take him away with nothing but a bag of pills and his old yellow lunchbox. There was no kindness in the dreamcatcher. They had meant only good for Duddits, even on that first day; they had loved him honestly. Still, it came down to this.

“Take care of him, Henry.” Her gaze shifted to Owen. “You too. Take care of my son.”

Henry said, “We’ll try.”

There was no place to turn around on Dearborn Street; every driveway had been plowed under. In the strengthening morning light, the sleeping neighborhood looked like a town deep in the Alaskan tundra. Owen threw the Hummer in reverse and went flying backward down the street, the bulky vehicle’s rear end wagging clumsily from side to side. Its high steel bumper smacked some snow-shrouded vehicle parked at the curb, there was a tinkle of breaking glass, and then they again burst through the frozen roadblock of snow at the intersection, swerving wildly back into Kansas Street, pointing toward the turnpike. During all this Duddits sat in the back seat, perfectly complacent, his lunchbox on his lap.

Henry, why did Duddits say Jonesy wants war? What war?

Henry tried to send the answer telepathically, but Owen could no longer hear him. The patches of byrus on Owen’s face had all turned white, and when he scratched absently at his cheek, he pulled clumps of the stuff out with his nails. The skin beneath looked chapped and irritated, but not really hurt. Like getting over a cold, Henry marvelled. Really not more serious than that.

“He didn’t say war, Owen.”

“War,” Duddits agreed from the back seat. He leaned forward to look at the big green sign reading 95 SOUTHBOUND. “Onesy ont war.

Owen’s brow wrinkled; a dust of dead byrus flakes sifted down like dandruff. “What-”

“Water,” Henry said, and reached back to pat Duddit’s bony knee. “Jonesy wants water is what he was trying to say. Only it’s not Jonesy who wants it. It’s the other one. The one he calls Mr Gray.”

Roberta went into Duddits’s room and began to pick up the litter of his clothes-the way he left them around drove her crazy, but she supposed she wouldn’t have to worry about that anymore. She had been at it scarcely five minutes before a weakness overcame her legs, and she had to sit in his chair by the window. The sight of the bed, where he had come to spend more and more of his time, haunted her. The dull morning light on the pillow, which still bore the circular indentation of his head, was inexpressibly cruel.

Henry thought she’d let Duddits go because they believed the future of the whole world somehow hinged on finding Jonesy, and finding him fast. But that wasn’t it. She had let him go because it was what Duddits wanted. The dying got signed baseball caps; the dying also got to go on trips with old friends.

But it was hard.

Losing him was so hard.

She put her handful of tee-shirts to her face in order to blot out the sight of the bed and there was his smell: Johnson’s shampoo, Dial soap, and most of all, worst of all, the arnica cream she put on his back and legs when his muscles hurt.

In her desperation she reached out to him, trying to find him with the two men who had come like the dead and taken him away, but his mind was gone.

He’s blocked himself off from me, she thought. They had enjoyed (mostly enjoyed) their own ordinary telepathy over the years, perhaps only different in minor degree from the telepathy most mothers of special children experienced (she had heard the word rapport over and over again at the support-group meetings she and Alfie sometimes attended), but that was gone now. Duddits had blocked himself off, and that meant he knew something terrible was going to happen.

He knew.

Still holding the shirts to her face and inhaling his scent, Roberta began to cry again.

Kurtz had been okay (mostly okay) until they saw the road-flares and blue police lightbars flashing in the grim morning light, and beyond it, a huge semi lying on its side like a dead dinosaur. Standing out front, so bundled up his face was completely invisible, was a cop waving them toward an exit ramp.

“Fuck!” Kurtz spat. He had to fight an urge to draw the nine and just start spraying away. He knew that would be disaster-there were other cops running around the stalled semi-but he felt the urge, all but ungovernable, just the same. They were so close! Closing in, by the hands of the nailed-up Christ! And then stopped like this! “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”

“What do you want me to do, boss?” Freddy had asked. Impassive behind the wheel, but he had drawn his own weapon-an automatic rifle-across his lap. “If I nail it, I think we can skate by on the night. Gone in sixty seconds.”

Again Kurtz had to fight the urge to just say Yeah, punch it, Freddy, and if one of those bluesuits gets in the way, bust his gut for him. Freddy might get by… but he might not. He wasn’t the driver he thought he was, that Kurtz had already ascertained. Like too many pilots, Freddy had the erroneous belief that his skills in the sky were mirrored by skills on the ground. And even if they did get by, they’d be marked. And that was not acceptable, not after General Yellow-Balls Randall had hollered Blue Exit. His Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card had been revoked. He was strictly a vigilante now.

Got to do the smart thing, he thought. That’s why they pay me the big bucks.

“Be a good boy and just go the way he’s pointing you,” Kurtz said. “In fact, I want you to give him a wave and a big thumb’s-up when you take the ramp. Then keep moving south and get back on the turnpike at your earliest opportunity.” He sighed. “Lord love a duck.” He leaned forward, close enough to Freddy to see the whitening fuzz of Ripley in his right ear. He whispered, ardent as a lover, “And if you ditch us, laddie-buck, I’ll put a round in the back of your neck.” Kurtz touched the place where the soft nape joined the hard skull. “Right here.”

Freddy’s wooden-Indian face didn’t change. “Yes, boss.” Next, Kurtz had gripped the now-nearl-comatose Perlmutter by the shoulder and had shaken him until Pearly’s eyes at last fluttered open.

“Lea” me “lone, boss. Need to sleep.”

Kurtz placed the muzzle of his nine-millimeter against the back of his former aide’s head. “Nope. Rise and shine, buck. Time for a little debriefing.”

Pearly had groaned, but he had also sat up. When he opened his mouth to say something, a tooth had tumbled out onto the front of his parka. The tooth had looked perfect to Kurtz. Look, Ma, no cavities.

Pearly said that Owen and his new buddy were still stopped, still in Derry. Very good. Yummy. Not so good fifteen minutes later, as Freddy sent the Humvee trudging down another snow-covered entrance ramp and back onto the turnpike. This was Exit 28, only one interchange away from their target, but a miss was as good as a mile.

“They’re on the move again,” Perlmutter said. He sounded weak and washed out.

“Goddammit!” He was full of rage-sick and useless rage at Owen Underhill, who now symbolized (at least to Abe Kurtz) the whole sorry, busted operation.

Pearly uttered a deep groan, a sound of utter, hollow despair. His stomach had begun to rise again. He was clutching it, his cheeks wet with perspiration. His normally unremarkable face had become almost handsome in his pain.

Now he let another long and ghastly fart, a passage of wind which seemed to go on and on. The sound of it made Kurtz think of gadgets they’d constructed at summer camp a thousand or so years ago, noisemakers that consisted of tin cans and lengths of waxed string. Bullroarers, they’d called them.

The stench that filled the Humvee was the smell of the red cancer growing in Pearly’s sewage-treatment plant, first feeding on his wastes, then getting to the good stuff. Pretty horrible. Still, there was an upside. Freddy was getting better and Kurtz had never caught the damned Ripley in the first place (perhaps he was immune; in any case, he had taken off the mask and tossed it indifferently in back fifteen minutes ago). And Pearly, although undoubtedly ill, was also valuable, a man with a really good radar jammed up his ass. So Kurtz patted Perlmutter on the shoulder, ignoring the stench. Sooner or later the thing inside him would get out, and that would likely mean an end to Pearly’s usefulness, but Kurtz wouldn’t worry about that until he had to.

“Hold on,” Kurtz said tenderly. “Just tell it to go back to sleep again.”

“You… fucking… idiot!” Perlmutter gasped.

“That’s right,” Kurtz agreed. “Whatever you say, buck.” After all, he was a fucking idiot. Owen had turned out to be a cowardly coyote, and who had put him in the damn henhouse?

They were passing Exit 27 now. Kurtz looked up the ramp and fancied he could almost see the tracks of the Hummer Owen was driving. Somewhere up there, on one side of the overpass or the other, was the house to which Owen and his new friend had made their inexplicable detour. Why?

“They stopped to get Duddits,” Perlmutter said. His belly was going down again and the worst of his pain seemed to have passed. For now, at least. “Duddits? What kind of name is that?” “I don’t know. I’m picking this up from his mother. Him I can’t see. He’s different, boss. It’s almost as if he’s a grayboy instead of human.” Kurtz felt his back prickle at that.

“The mother thinks of this guy Duddits as both a boy and a man,” Pearly said. This was the most unprompted communication from him Kurtz had gotten since they’d left Gosselin’s. Perlmutter sounded almost interested, by God.

“Maybe he’s retarded,” Freddy said. Perlmutter glanced over at Freddy. That could be. Whatever he is, he’s sick.” Pearly sighed. “I know how he feels.”

Kurtz patted Perlmutter’s shoulder again. “Chin up, laddie. What about the fellows they’re after? This Gary Jones and the supposed Mr Gray?” He didn’t much care, but there was the possibility that the course and progress of Jones-and Gray, if Gray existed outside of Owen Underhill’s fevered imagination-would impact upon the course and progress of Underhill, Devlin, and… Duddits?

Perlmutter shook his head, then closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the seat again. His little spate of energy and interest seemed to have passed. “Nothing,” he said. “Blocked off.”

“Maybe not there at all?”

“Oh, something’s there,” Perlmutter said. “It’s like a black hole.” Dreamily, he said: “I hear so many voices. They’re already sending in the reinforcements…”

As if Perlmutter had conjured it, the biggest convoy Kurtz had seen in twenty years appeared in the northbound lanes of 1-95. First came two enormous plows, as big as elephants, running side by side with their clifflike blades spurning up snow on either side, baring both lanes all the way down to the pavement. Behind them, a pair of sand-trucks, also running in tandem. And behind the sand-trucks, a double line of Army vehicles and heavy ordnance. Kurtz saw shrouded shapes on flatbed haulers and knew they could only be missiles. Other flatbeds held radar dishes, range-finders, God knew what else. Interspersed among them were big canvasback troop-carriers, their headlamps glaring in the brightening daylight. Not hundreds of men but thousands, prepared for God knew what World War Three, hand-to-hand combat with two-headed creatures or maybe the intelligent bugs from Starship Troopers, plague, madness, death, doomsday. If any of Katie Gallagher’s Imperial Valleys were still operating up there, Kurtz hoped they would soon cease what they were doing and head for Canada. Raising their hands in the air and calling out Il n'y a pas d'infection ici wouldn’t do them any good, certainly; that ploy had already been tried. And it was all so meaningless. In his heart of hearts, Kurtz knew Owen had been right about at least one thing: it was over up there. They could shut the barn door, praise God, but the horse had been stolen.

“They’re going to close it down for good,” Perlmutter said. “The Jefferson Tract just became the fifty-first state. And it’s a police state.”

“You can still key on Owen?”

“Yes,” Perlmutter said absently. “But not for long. He’s getting better, too. Losing the telepathy.”

“Where is he, buck?”

“They just passed Exit 25. They might have fifteen miles on us. Not much more.”

“Want me to punch it a little?” Freddy asked.

They had lost their chance to head Owen off because of the goddam semi. The last thing in the world Kurtz wanted was to lose another chance by skidding off the road.

“Negative,” Kurtz said. “For the time being, I think we’ll just lay back and let em run.” He crossed his arms and looked out at the linen-white world passing by. But now the snow had stopped, and as they continued south, road conditions would doubtless improve.

It had been an eventful twenty-four hours. He had blown up an alien spacecraft, been betrayed by the man he had regarded as his logical successor, had survived a mutiny and a civilian riot, and to top it all off, he had been relieved of his command by a sunshine soldier who had never heard a shot fired in anger. Kurtz’s eyes slipped shut. After a few moments, he dozed.

Jonesy sat moodily behind his desk for quite awhile, sometimes looking at the phone which no longer worked, sometimes at the dreamcatcher which hung from the ceiling (it wafted in some barely felt air-current), sometimes at the new steel shutters with which that bastard Gray had blocked his vision. And always that low rumble, both in his ears and shivering his buttocks as he sat in his chair. It could have been a rather noisy furnace, one in need of servicing, but it wasn’t. It was the plow, beating its way south and south and south. Mr Gray behind the wheel, likely wearing a DPW cap stolen from his most recent victim, horsing the plow along, working the wheel with Jonesy’s muscles, listening to developments on the plow’s CB with Jonesy’s ears.

So, Jonesy, how long you going to sit here feeling sorry for yourself?

Jonesy, who had been slumping in his seat-almost dozing, in fact-straightened up at that. Henry’s voice. Not arriving telepathically-there were no voices now, Mr Gray had blocked all but his own-but, rather, coining from his own mind. Nonetheless, it stung him.

I’m not feeling sorry for myself, I’m blocked off! Not liking the sulky, defensive quality of the thought; vocalized, it would no doubt have come out as a whine. Can’t fall out, can’t see out, can’t go out, I don’t know where you are, Henry, but I’m in a goddam isolation booth.

Did he steal your brains?

“Shut up.” Jonesy rubbed at his temple.

Did he take your memories?

No. Of course not. Even in here, with a double-locked door between him and those billions of labeled cartons, he could recall wiping a booger on the end of Bonnie Deal’s braid in first grade (and then asking that same Bonnie to dance at the seventh-grade Harvest Hop six years later), watching carefully as Lamar Clarendon taught them to play the game (known as cribbage to the low and the uninitiated), seeing Rick McCarthy come out of the woods and thinking he was a deer. He could remember all those things. There might be an advantage in that, but Jonesy was damned if he knew what it was. Maybe because it was too big, too obvious.

To be stuck like this after all the mysteries you’ve read, his mind’s version of Henry taunted him. Not to mention all those science-fiction movies where the aliens arrive, everything from The Day the Earth Stood Still to The Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. All of that and you still can’t figure this guy out? Can’t follow his smoke down from the sky and see where he’s camped?

Jonesy rubbed harder at his temple. This wasn’t ESP, it was his own mind, and why couldn’t he shut it up? He was fucking trapped, so what difference did it make, anyway? He was a motor without a transmission, a cart without a horse; he was Donovan’s Brain, kept alive in a tank of cloudy fluid and dreaming useless dreams.

What does he want? Start there.

Jonesy looked up at the dreamcatcher, dancing in the vague currents of warm air. Felt the rumble of the plow, strong enough to vibrate the pictures on the walls. Tina Jean Schlossinger, that had been her name, and supposedly there had been a picture of her in here, a picture of her holding her skirt up so you could see her pussy, and how many adolescent boys had been caught by such a dream?

Jonesy got up-almost leaped up-and began to pace around the office, limping only a little. The storm was over, and his hip hurt a bit less now.

Think like Hercule Poirot, he told himself Exercise those little gray cells. Never mind your memories for the time being, think about Mr Gray. Think logically. What does he want?

Jonesy stopped. What Gray wanted was obvious, really. He had gone to the Standpipe-where the Standpipe had been, anyway because he wanted water. Not just any water; drinking water. But the Standpipe was gone, destroyed in the big blow of “85-ha, ha, Mr Gray, gotcha last-and Derry’s current water supply was north and east, probably not reachable because of the storm, and not concentrated in one place, anyway. So Mr Gray had, after consulting Jonesy’s available store of knowledge, turned south again. Toward-

Suddenly it was all clear. The strength ran out of his legs and he collapsed to the carpeted floor, ignoring the flare of pain in his hip. The dog. Lad. Did he still have the dog? “Of course he does,” Jonesy whispered. “Of course the son of a bitch does, I can smell him even in here. Fartin just like McCarthy.”

This world was inimical to the byrus, and this world’s inhabitants fought with a surprising vigor which arose from deep wells of emotion. Bad luck. But now the last surviving grayboy had had an unbroken chain of good luck; he was like some daffy in-the-zone Vegas crapshooter rolling a string of sevens: four, six, eight, oh goddam, a dozen in a row. He had found Jonesy, his Typhoid Mary, had invaded him and conquered him. He had found Pete, who had gotten him where he wanted to go after the flashlight the kim-had given out. Next, Andy Janas, the Minnesota boy. He had been hauling the corpses of two deer killed by the Ripley. The deer had been useless to Mr Gray… but Janas had also been hauling the decomposing body of one of the aliens.

Fruiting bodies, Jonesy thought randomly. Fruiting bodies, what’s that from?

No matter. Because Mr Gray’s next seven had been the Dodge Ram, old Mr I ? MY BORDER COLLIE. What had Gray done? Fed some of the gray’s dead body to the dog? Put the dog’s nose to the corpse and forced him to inhale of that fruiting body? No, eating was much more likely; c’mon, boy, chow time. Whatever process started the weasels, it began in the gut, not the lungs. Jonesy had a momentary image of McCarthy lost in the woods. Beaver had asked What the hell have you been eating? Woodchuck turds? And what had McCarthy replied? Bushes and things… I don’t know just what…I was just so hungry, you know…

Sure. Hungry. Lost, scared, and hungry. Not noticing the red splotches of byrus on the leaves of some of the bushes, the red speckles on the green moss he crammed into his mouth, gagging it down because somewhere back there in his tame oh-gosh oh-dear lawyer’s life, he had read that you could eat moss if you were lost in the woods, that moss wouldn’t hurt you. Did everyone who swallowed some of the byrus (grains of it, almost too small to be seen, floating in the air) incubate one of the vicious little monsters that had torn McCarthy apart and then killed the Beav? Probably not, no more than every woman who had unprotected sex got pregnant. But McCarthy had caught and so had Lad.

“He knows about the cottage,” Jonesy said.

Of course. The cottage in Ware, some sixty miles west of Boston. And he’d know the story of the Russian woman, everyone knew it; Jonesy had passed it on himself. It was too gruesomely good not to pass on. They knew it in Ware, in New Salem, in Cooleyville and Belchertown, Hardwick and Packardsville and Pelham. All the surrounding towns. And what, pray tell, did those towns surround?

Why, the Quabbin, that was what they surrounded. Quabbin Reservoir. The water supply for Boston and the adjacent metropolitan area. How many people drank their daily water from the Quabbin? Two million? Three? Jonesy didn’t know for sure, but a lot more than had ever drunk from the supply stored in the Derry Standpipe. Mr Gray, rolling seven after seven, a run for the ages and now only one away from breaking the bank.

Two or three million people. Mr Gray wanted to introduce them to Lad the border collie, and to Lad’s new friend. And delivered in this new medium, the byrus would take.

Chapter Twenty THE CHASE ENDS

South and south and south.

By the time Mr Gray passed the Gardiner exit, the first one below Augusta, the snow-cover on the ground was considerably less and the turnpike was slushy but two lanes wide again. It was time to trade the plow for something less conspicuous, partly because he no longer needed it, but also because Jonesy’s arms were aching with the unaccustomed strain of controlling the oversized vehicle. Mr Gray didn’t care much for Jonesy’s body (or so he told himself, in truth it was hard not to feel at least some affection for something capable of providing such unexpected pleasures as “bacon” and “murder”), but it did have to take him another couple of hundred miles. He suspected that Jonesy wasn’t in very good shape for a man in the middle of his life. Part of that was the accident he’d been in, but it also had to do with his job, He was an “academic”. As a result, he had pretty much ignored the more physical aspects of his life, which stunned Mr Gray. These creatures were sixty per cent emotion, thirty per cent sensation, ten per cent thought (and ten per cent, Mr Gray reflected, was probably on the generous side). To ignore the body the way Jonesy had seemed both willful and stupid to Mr Gray. But, of course, that was not his problem. Nor Jonesy’s, either. Not anymore. Now Jonesy was what he had apparently always wanted to be: nothing but mind. Judging from the way he’d reacted, he didn’t actually care for that state much once he had attained it.

On the floor of the plow, where Lad lay in a litter of cigarette butts, cardboard coffee cups, and balled-up snack-wrappers, the dog whined in pain. Its body was grotesquely bloated, the torso the size of a water-barrel. Soon the dog would pass gas and its midsection would deflate again… Mr Gray had established contact with the byrum growing inside the dog, and would hence regulate its gestation.

The dog would be his version of what his host thought of as “the Russian woman”. And once the dog had been placed, his job would be done.

He reached behind him with his mind, feeling for the others. Henry and his friend Owen were entirely gone, like a radio station that has ceased to broadcast, and that was troubling. Farther behind (they were just passing the Newport exits, sixty or so miles north of Mr Gray’s current position), was a group of three with one clear contact: “Pearly”. This Pearly, like the dog, was incubating a byrum, and Mr Gray could receive him clearly. He had also been receiving another of that group-“Freddy”-but now “Freddy” was gone. The byrus on him had died; “Pearly” said so.

Here was one of the green turnpike signs: REST AREA. There was a Burger King here, which Jonesy’s files identified as both a “restaurant” and a “fast-food joint”. There would be bacon there, and his stomach gurgled at the thought. Yes, it would be hard in many ways to give this body up. It had its pleasures, definitely had its pleasures. No time for bacon now, however; now it was time to change vehicles. And he had to be fairly unobtrusive about it.

This exit into the rest area split in two, with one road for PASSENGER VEHICLES and one for TRUCKS AND BUSES. Mr Gray drove the big orange plow into the parking lot for trucks (Jonesy’s muscles trembling with the strain of turning the big steering wheel), and was delighted to see four other plows, practically identical to his own, all parked together. He nosed into a space at the end of the line and killed the engine.

He felt for Jonesy. Jonesy was there, hunkered in his perplexing safety zone. “What you up to, partner?” Mr Gray murmured.

No answer… but he sensed Jonesy listening.

“What you doing?”

No answer still. And really, what could he be doing? He was locked in and blind. Still, it would behoove him not to forget Jonesy… Jonesy with his somehow exciting suggestion that Mr Gray forgo the imperative-the need to seed-and simply enjoy life on earth. Every now and then a thought would occur to Mr Gray, a letter pushed under the door from Jonesy’s haven. This sort of thought, according to Jonesy’s files, was a “slogan”. Slogans were simple and to the point. The most recent said: BACON IS JUST THE BEGINNING. And Mr Gray was sure that was true. Even in his hospital room (what hospital room? what hospital? who is Marcy? who wants a shot?), he understood that life here was very delicious. But the imperative was deep and unbreakable: he would seed this world and then die. And if he got to eat a little bacon along the way, why, so much the better.

“Who was Richie? Was he a Tiger? Why did you kill him?”

No answer. But Jonesy was listening. Very carefully. Mr Gray hated having him in there. It was (the simile came from Jonesy’s store) like having a tiny fishbone stuck in your throat. Not big enough to choke you, but plenty big enough to “bug” you.

“You annoy the shit out of me, Jonesy.” Putting on his gloves now, the ones that had belonged to the owner of the Dodge Ram. The owner of Lad.

This time there was a reply. The feeling is mutual, partner. So why don’t you go someplace where you’re wanted? Take your act and put it on the road?

“Can’t do that,” Mr Gray said. He extended a hand to the dog, and Lad sniffed gratefully at the scent of its master on the glove. Mr Gray sent it a be-calm thought, then got out of the plow and began to walk toward the side of the restaurant. Around back would be the “employee’s parking lot”.

Henry and the other guy are right on top of you, asshole. Sniffing up your tailpipe. So relax. Spend as much time here as you want. Have a triple order of bacon.

“They can’t feel me,” Mr Gray said, his breath puffing out in front of him (the sensation of the cold air in his mouth and throat and lungs was exquisite, invigorating-even the smells of gasoline and diesel fuel were wonderful). “If I can’t feel them, they can’t feel me.”

Jonesy laughed-actually laughed. It stopped Mr Gray in his tracks beside the Dumpster.

The rules have changed, my friend. They stopped for Duddits, and Duddits sees the line.

“I don’t know what that means.”

Of course you do, asshole.

“Stop calling me that!” Mr Gray snapped.

If you stop insulting my intelligence, maybe I will.

Mr Gray started walking again, and yes, here, around the comer, was a little clutch of cars, most of them old and battered.

Duddits sees the line.

He knew what it meant, all right; the one named Pete had possessed the same thing, the same talent, although likely not as strongly as this puzzling other, this Duddits.

Mr Gray didn’t like the idea of leaving a trail “Duddits” could see, but he knew something Jonesy didn’t. “Pearly” believed that Henry, Owen, and Duddits were only fifteen miles south of Pearly’s own position. If that was indeed the case, Henry and Owen were forty-five miles back, somewhere between Pittsfield and Waterville. Mr Gray didn’t believe that actually qualified as “sniffing up one’s tailpipe”.

Still, it would not do to linger here.

The back door of the restaurant opened. A young man in a uniform the Jonesy-files identified as “cook’s whites” came out carrying two large bags of garbage, clearly bound for the Dumpsters. This young man s name was John, but his friends called him “Butch”. Mr Gray thought it would be enjoyable to kill him, but “Butch” looked a good deal stronger than Jonesy, not to mention younger and probably much quicker. Also, murder had annoying side effects, the worst being how quickly it rendered a stolen car useless.

Hey, Butch.

Butch stopped, looking at him alertly.

Which car is yours?

Actually, it wasn’t his but his mother’s, and that was good. Butch’s own rustbucket was back home, victim of a dead battery. He had his Mom’s unit, an all-wheel-drive Subaru. Mr Gray, Jonesy would have said, had just rolled another seven.

Butch handed over the keys willingly enough. He still looked alert (“bright-eyed and bushy-tailed” was how Jonesy put it, although the young cook had no tail Mr Gray could see), but his consciousness was gone. “Out on his feet,” Jonesy thought.

You won’t remember this, Mr Gray said.

“No,” Butch agreed.

Just back to work.

“You bet,” Butch agreed. He picked up his bags of garbage and headed for the Dumpsters again. By the time his shift was over and he realized his mother’s car was gone, all this would likely be over.

Mr Gray unlocked the red Subaru and got in. There was half a bag of barbecue potato chips on the seat. Mr Gray gobbled them greedily as he drove back to the plow. He finished by licking Jonesy’s fingers. Greasy. Good. Like the bacon. He got the dog. Five minutes later he was on the turnpike again.

South and south and south.

The night roars with music and laughter and loud voices; the air is big with the smell of grilled hotdogs, chocolate, roasted peanuts; the sky blooms with colored fire. Binding it all together, identifying it, signing it like summer’s own autograph, is an amplified rock-and-roll song from the speakers that have been set up in Strawford Park:

Hey pretty baby take a ride with me

We’re goin down to Alabama on the C amp;C.

And here comes the tallest cowboy in the world, a nine-foot Pecos Bill under the burning sky, towering over the crowd, little kids with their ice-cream-smeared mouths dropped open in wonder, their eyes wide; laughing parents hold them up or put them on their shoulders so they can see better. In one hand Pecos Bill waves his hat, in the other a banner which reads DERRY DAYS 1981.

We’re gonna walk the tracks, stay up all night

we get a little bored, then we’ll have a little fight.

“Ow eee-oh all?” Duddits asks. He has a cone of blue cotton candy in one hand, but it is forgotten; as he watches the stilt-walking cowboy pass under the burning fireworks sky, his eyes are as wide as any three-year-old’s. Standing on one side of Duddits are Pete and Jonesy; on the other are Henry and the Beav. Behind the cowboy comes a retinue of vestal virgins (surely some of them are still virgins, even in this year of grace 1981) in spangly cowboy skirts and white cowboy boots, tossing the batons that won the West,

“Don’t know how he can be so tall, Duds,” Pete says, laughing. He yanks a hank of blue floss from the cone in Duddits’s hand and tucks it into Duddits’s amazed mouth. “Must be magic.”

They all laugh at how Duddits chews without even taking his eyes from the cowpoke on stilts. Duds is taller than all of them now, even taller than Henry. But he’s still just a kid, and he makes them all happy. Magic is what he is; he won’t find Josie Rinkenhauer for another year, but they know-he’s fuckin magic. It was scary going up against Richie Grenadeau and his friends, but that was still the luckiest day of their lives-they all think so.

Don’t say no, baby, come with me

We’re gonna take a little ride on the C amp;C.

“Hey, Tex!” Beaver shouts, waving his own lid (a Derry Tigers baseball hat) up at the tall cowboy. “Kiss my bender, big boy! I mean, sit on it and spin!”

And they’re all killing themselves laughing (it is a memory for the ages, all right, the night Beaver ranked on the stilt-walking cowboy in the Derry Days Parade beneath that burning gunpowder sky), all but Duddits, who is staring with that expression of stoned wonder, and Owen Underhill (Owen! Henry thinks, how did you get here, buddy?), who looks worried.

Owen is shaking him, Owen is once more telling him to wake up, Henry, wake up, wake

up, for God’s sake!”

It was the fright in Owen’s voice that finally roused Henry from his dream. For a moment he could still smell peanuts and Duddits’s cotton candy. Then the world came back in: white sky, snow-covered turnpike lanes, a green sign reading AUGUSTA NEXT TWO EXITS. Also Owen shaking him, and from behind them a barking sound, hoarse and desperate. Duddits coughing.

“Wake up, Henry, he’s bleeding! Will you please wake the fuck-”

“I’m awake, I’m awake.”

He unbuckled his seatbelt, twisted around, got up on his knees. The overstrained muscles in his thighs shrieked in protest, but Henry paid no attention.

It was better than he expected. From the panic in Owen’s voice, he had expected some sort of hemorrhage, but it was just a trickle from one nostril and a fine spray of blood from Duddits’s mouth when he coughed. Owen had probably thought poor old Duds was coughing up his lungs, when in fact he’d probably strained something in his throat. Not that this wasn’t potentially serious. In Duddits’s increasingly fragile condition, anything was potentially serious; a random cold-germ could kill him. From the moment he’d seen him, Henry had known Duds was coming out of the last turn and heading for home.

“Duds!” he called sharply. Something different. Something different in him, Henry. What? No time to think about it now. “Duddits, breathe in through your nose! Your nose, Duds! Like this!”

Henry demonstrated, taking big breaths through flared nostrils… and when he exhaled, little threads of white flew from his nostrils. Like the fluff in milkweed pods, or dandelions gone to seed. Byrus, Henry thought. It was growing up my nose, but now it’s dead. I’m sloughing it off, literally breath by breath. And then he understood the difference: the itching had stopped, in his leg and in his mouth and in the thatch of his groin. His mouth still tasted as if it had been lined with someone’s old carpet, but it didn’t itch.

Duddits began to imitate him, breathing deep through his nose, and his coughing began to ease as soon as it did. Henry took his paper bag, found a bottle of harmless no-alcohol cough medicine, and poured Duddits a capful. “This’ll take care of you,” Henry said. Confidence in the thought as well as the words; with Duddits, how you sounded was only part of it.

Duddits drank the capful of Robitussin, grimaced, then smiled at Henry. The coughing had stopped, but blood was still trickling from one nostril… and from the corner of one eye as well, Henry saw. Not good. Nor was Duddits’s extreme pallor, much more noticeable than it had been at the house back in Derry. The cold… his lost night’s sleep all this untoward excitement in someone who was an invalid… not good. He was getting sick, and in a late-stage ALL patient, even a nasal infection could be fatal.

“He all right?” Owen asked.

“Duds? Duds is iron. Right, Duddits?”

“I ion,” Duddits agreed, and flexed one woefully skinny arm. The sight of his face-thin and tired but still trying to smile-made Henry feel like screaming. Life was unfair; that was something he supposed he’d known for years. But this went far beyond unfair. This was monstrous.

“Let’s see what she put in here for good boys to drink.” Henry took the yellow lunchbox.

“Oooby-Doo,” Duddits said. He was smiling, but his voice sounded thin and exhausted.

“Yep, got some work to do now,” Henry agreed, and opened the Thermos. He gave Duds his morning Prednisone tablet, although it hadn’t yet gone eight, and then asked Duddits if he wanted a Percocet, as well. Duddits thought about it, then held up two fingers. Henry’s heart sank.

“Pretty bad, huh?” he asked, passing Duddits a couple of Percocet tablets over the seat between them. He hardly needed an answer-people like Duddits didn’t ask for the extra pill so they could get high.

Duddits made a seesawing gesture with his hand-comme ci, comme ca. Henry remembered it well, that seesawing hand as much a part of Pete as the chewed pencils and toothpicks were of Beaver.

Roberta had filled Duddits’s Thermos with chocolate milk, his favorite. Henry poured him a cup, held it a moment as the Humvee skidded on a slick patch, then handed it over. Duddits took his pills.

“Where does it hurt, Duds?”

“Here.” Hand to the throat. “More here.” Hand to the chest. Hesitating, coloring a little, then a hand to his crotch. “Here, ooo.”

A urinary-tract infection, Henry thought. Oh, goody.

“Ills ake ee etter?”

Henry nodded. “Pills’ll make you better. Just give em a chance to work. Are we still on the line, Duddits?”

Duddits nodded emphatically and pointed through the windshield. Henry wondered (not for the first time) just what he saw. Once he’d asked Pete, who told him it was something like a thread, often faint and hard to see. It’s best when it’s yellow, Pete had said. Yellow’s always easier to pick up. I don’t know why. And if Pete saw a yellow thread, perhaps Duddits saw something like a broad yellow stripe, perhaps even Dorothy’s yellow brick road.

“If it goes off on another road, you tell us, okay?”

“I tell.”

“Not going to go to sleep, are you?”

Duddits shook his head. In fact he had never looked more alive and awake, his eyes glowing in his exhausted face. Henry thought of how lightbulbs would sometimes go mysteriously bright before burning out for good.

“If you do start to get sleepy, you tell me and we’ll pull over. Get you some coffee. We need you awake. “'O-ay.” Henry started to turn around, moving his aching body with as much care as he could muster,

when Duddits said something else.

“Isser Ay ont aykin.”

“Does he, now?” Henry said thoughtfully.

“What?” Owen asked. “I didn’t get that one.”

“He says Mr Gray wants bacon.”

“Is that important?”

“I don’t know. Is there a regular radio in this heap, Owen? I’d like to get some news.”

The regular radio was hanging under the dash, and looked freshly installed. Not part of the original equipment. Owen reached for it, then hit the brakes as a Pontiac sedan-two-wheel drive and no snow-tires-cut in front of them, The Pontiac slued from side to side, finally decided to stay on the road a little longer, and squirted ahead. Soon it was doing at least sixty, Henry estimated, and was pulling away. Owen was frowning after it.

“You driver, me passenger,” Henry said, “but if that guy can do it with no snows, why can’t we? It might be a good idea to make up some ground.”

“Hummers are better in mud than snow. Take my word for it.

“Still-”

“Also, we’re going to pass that guy in the next ten minutes. I’ll bet you a quart of good Scotch. He’ll either be through the guardrails and down the embankment or spun out on the median. If he’s lucky, he’ll be right-side-up. Plus-this is just a technicality-we’re fugitives running from duly constituted authority, and we can’t save the world if we’re locked up in some County… Jesus!”

A Ford Explorer-four-wheel drive but moving far too fast for the conditions, maybe seventy miles an hour-roared past them, pulling a rooster-tail of snow. The roof-rack had been piled

high and covered with a blue tarp. This had been indifferently lashed down, and Henry could see what was beneath: luggage. He guessed that much of it would soon be in the road.

With Duddits seen to, Henry took a clear-eyed look at the highway. What he saw did not exactly surprise him. Although the turnpike’s northern barrel was still all but deserted, the southbound lanes were now filling up fast… and yes, there were cars off it everywhere.

Owen turned on the radio as a Mercedes hurried past him, throwing up fans of slush. He hit SEEK, found classical music, hit it again, found Kenny G tootling away, hit it a third time… and happened on a voice.

“… great big fucking bomber joint,” the voice said, and Henry exchanged a glance with Owen. “He say uck onna rayo,” Duddits observed from the back seat. “That’s right,” Henry said, and, as the owner of the voice inhaled audibly into the mike: “Also, I’d say he’s smoking a fatty.”

“I doubt if the FCC’d be in favor,” the deejay said after a long and noisy exhale, “but if half of what I’m hearin is true, the FCC is the least of my worries. Interstellar plague on the loose, brothers and sisters, that’s the word. Call it the Hot Zone, the Dead Zone, or the Twilight Zone, you want to cancel your trip up north.”

Another long and noisy inhale.

“Marvin the Martian’s on the march, brothers and sisters, that’s the word from Somerset County and Castle County. Plague, deathrays, the living will envy the dead. I got a spot here for Century Tire, but fuck that shit.” Sound of something breaking. Plastic, from the sound. Henry listened, fascinated. Here it was once more, here was darkness his old friend, not in his head but on the goddam radio. “Brethren and sistern, if you’re north of Augusta right now, here’s a little tip from your pal Lonesome Dave at E: relocate south. Like, immediately. And here’s a little relocation music.”

Lonesome Dave at E spun The Doors, of course. Jim Morrison droning “The End”. Owen switched to the AM band.

Eventually he found a newscast. The fellow giving it didn’t sound wrecked, which was a step forward, and he said there was no need to panic, which was another step forward. He then played sound-bites from both the President and Maine’s Governor, both saying essentially the same thing: take it easy, people, chill. It’s all under control. Nice soothing stuff, Robitussin for the body politic. The President was scheduled to make a complete report to the American people at eleven A.M… EST.

“It’ll be the speech Kurtz told me about,” Owen said. “Just moved up a day or so.”

“What speech is-”

“Shhh.” Owen pointed to the radio.

Having soothed, the newscaster next proceeded to stir his listeners up again by repeating many of the rumors they had already heard from the stoned FM jock, only in politer language: plague, non-human invaders from space, deathrays. Then the weather: snow showers, followed by rain and gusty winds as a warm front (not to mention the killer Martians) moved in. There was a meee-eep, and then the newscast they’d just heard began playing again.

“Ook!” Duddits said. “Ey ent eye us, ember?” He was pointing through the dirty window. The pointing finger, like Duddits’s voice, wouldn’t hold steady. He was shivering now, his teeth clattering together.

Owen glanced briefly at the Pontiac-it had indeed ended up on the snowy median strip between the northbound and southbound barrels, and although it hadn’t rolled all the way over, it was on its side with its disconsolate passengers standing around it-and then looked back at Duddits. Paler than ever now, shivering, a blood-streaked fluff of cotton protruding from one nostril.

“Henry, is he all right?”

“I don’t know.”

“Run out your tongue.”

“Don’t you think you better keep your eyes on-”

–I’m fine, so don’t sass me. Run out your tongue.” Henry did. Owen looked at it and grimaced. “Looks worse, but it’s probably better. All that crap has turned white.”

“Same with the gash on my leg. Same with your face and eyebrows. We’re just lucky we didn’t get it in the lungs or the brain or the gut.” He paused. “Perlmutter got it in the gut. He’s growing one of those things.”

“How far back are they, Henry?''I’d say twenty miles. Maybe a little less. So if you could goose it… even if just a little…” Owen did, knowing that Kurtz would, as soon as he realized he was now part of a general exodus and much less likely to become a target of either the civilian or the military police.

“You’re still in touch with Pearly,” Owen said. “Even though the byrus is dying on you, you’re still hooked up. Is it…” He lifted a thumb to the back seat, where Duddits was leaning back. His shakes had eased, at least for the time being.

“Sure,” Henry said. “I had stuff from Duddits long before all this happened. Jonesy, Pete, and Beaver did, too. We hardly noticed. It was just a part of our lives.” Sure, that’s tight. Like all those thoughts about plastic bags and bridge abutments, and shotguns. just apart of my life.

“Now it’s stronger. Maybe in time it’ll drop back, but for now… He shrugged. “For now I hear

voices.” “Pearly.” “For one,” Henry agreed. “Others with the byrus in its active stage, too. Mostly behind us.” “Jonesy? Your friend Jonesy? Or Gray?” Henry shook his head. “But Pearly hears something.” “Pearly? How can he-''He’s got more mental range than I do right now, because of the byrum-” “The what?''The thing that’s up his ass,” Henry said. “The shit-weasel. “'Oh.” Owen felt momentarily sick to his stomach.

“What he hears doesn’t seem to be human. I don’t think it’s Mr Gray, but I suppose it might be. Whatever it is, he’s homing on it.”

They drove in silence for awhile. The traffic was moderately heavy and some of the drivers were wild (they passed the Explorer just south of Augusta, ditched and apparently abandoned with its load of luggage spread around it), but Owen counted himself lucky. The storm had kept plenty of folks off the road, he guessed. They might decide to flee now that the storm had stopped, but he and Owen had gotten ahead of the worst of the wave. In many ways, the storm had been their friend.

“I want you to know something,” Owen said finally. “You don’t need to say it. You’re sitting right next to me short range-and I’m still getting some of your thoughts.”

What Owen was thinking was that he would pull the Humvee over and get out, if he thought the pursuit would end once Kurtz had him. Owen did not, in fact, believe that. Owen Underhill was Kurtz’s prime objective, but he understood that Owen wouldn’t have committed such a monstrous act of treason had he not been coerced into it. No, he’d put a bullet in Owen’s head, and then continue on. With Owen, Henry had at least some chance. Without him, he’d likely be a dead duck. And Duddits too.

“We stay together,” Henry said. “Friends to the end, as the saying goes.”

And, from the back seat: “Otsum urk ooo do now.”

“That’s right, Duds,” Henry reached back and briefly squeezed

Duddits’s cold hand. “Got some work to do now.”

Ten minutes later, Duddits came fully to life, pointing them into the first turnpike rest area below Augusta. They were almost to Lewiston now, in fact. “Ine! Ine!” he shouted, then began to cough again.

“Take it easy, Duddits,” Henry said.

“They probably stopped for coffee and a Danish,” Owen said. “Or maybe a bacon sandwich.”

But Duddits directed them around back, to the employees” parking lot. Here they stopped, and Duddits got out. He stood quiet and muttering for a moment or so, looking frail under the cloudy sky and seemingly buffeted by every gust of wind.

“Henry,” Owen said, “I don’t know what bee he’s got in his bonnet, but if Kurtz is really close-”

But then Duddits nodded, got back in the Hummer, and pointed toward the exit sign. He looked more tired than ever, but he also looked satisfied.

“What in God’s name was that all about?” Owen asked, mystified.

“I think he switched cars,” Henry said. “Is that what he did, Duddits? Did he switch cars?”

Duddits nodded emphatically. “Tole! Tole a car!”

“He’ll be moving faster now,” Henry said. “You’ve got to step it up, Owen. Never mind Kurtz-we’ve got to catch Mr Gray.”

Owen looked over at Henry… then looked again. “What’s wrong with you? You’ve come over all pale.”

“I’ve been very stupid-I should have known what the bastard was up to from the first. My only excuses are being tired and scared, and none of that will matter if… Owen, you have to catch him. He’s headed for western Massachusetts, and you have to catch him before he can get there.”

Now they were running in slush, and the going was messy but far less dangerous. Owen walked the Hummer up to sixty-five, all he dared for now.

“I’ll try,” he said. “But unless he has an accident or a breakdown… Owen shook his head slowly back and forth. “I don’t think so, pal. I really don’t.”

This was a dream he’d had often as a child (when his name had been Coonts), but only once or twice since the squirts and sweats of adolescence. In it, he was running through a field under a

harvest moon and afraid to look behind him because it was after him, it. He ran as hard as he could but of course that wasn’t good enough, in dreams your best never is. Then it was close enough for him to hear its dry breathing, and to smell its peculiar dry smell.

He came to the shore of a great still lake, although there had never been any lakes in the dry and miserable Kansas town of his childhood, and although it was very beautiful (the moon burned in its depths like a lamp), it terrified him because it blocked his way and he could not swim.

He fell on his knees at the shore of the lake-in that way this dream was exactly like those childhood dreams-but instead of seeing the reflection of it in the still water, the terrible scarecrow man with his stuffed burlap head and pudgy blue-gloved hands, this time he saw Owen Underhill, his face covered with splotches. In the moonlight, the byrus looked like great black moles, spongy and shapeless.

As a child he had always wakened at this point (often with his stiff wang wagging, although why such an awful dream would give a kid a stilly God alone knew), but this time the it-Owen-actually touched him, the reflected eyes in the water reproachful. Maybe questioning. Because you disobeyed orders, buck! Because you crossed the line!

He raised his hand to ward Owen off, to remove that hand… and saw his own hand in the moonglow. It was gray.

No, he told himself, that’s just the moonlight.

Only three fingers, though-was that the moonlight?

Owen’s hand on him, touching him, passing on his filthy disease… and still daring to call him

boss. Wake up, boss!”

Kurtz opened his eyes and sat up with a grunt, simultaneously pushing Freddy’s hand away. On his knee instead of his shoulder, Freddy reaching back from his place behind the wheel and shaking his knee, but still intolerable.

“I’m awake, I’m awake.” He held his own hands up in front of his face to prove it. Not baby-pink, they were a long way from that, but they weren’t gray and each had the requisite five fingers.

“What time is it, Freddy?”

“Don’t know, boss-still morning’s all I can say for sure.”

Of course. Clocks all tucked up. Even his pocket watch had run down. As much a victim of modem times as anyone else, he had forgotten to wind it. To Kurtz, whose time sense had always been at least fairly sharp, it felt like about nine, which would mean he’d gotten about two hours of shuteye. Not much, but he didn’t need much. He felt better. Well enough, certainly, to hear the concern in Freddy’s voice.

“What’s up, bucko?”

“Pearly says he’s lost contact with all of them now, He says Owen was the last, and now he’s gone, too. He says Owen must have beat back the Ripley fungus, sir.”

Kurtz caught sight of Perlmutter’s sunken, I-fooled-you grin in the wide rearview mirror.

“What’s the deal, Archie?”

“No deal,” Pearly said, sounding considerably more lucid than before Kurtz’s nap. “I… boss, I could use a drink of water. I’m not hungry, but-”

“We could stop for water, I guess,” Kurtz allowed. “If we had a contact, that is. But if we’ve lost all of them-this guy Jones as well as Owen and Devlin-well, you know how I am, buck. I’ll bite when I die, and it’ll take two surgeons and a shotgun to get me to let go even then. You’re going to have a long and thirsty day sitting there while Freddy and I course the southbound roads, looking for a trace of them… unless you can help out. You do that, Archie, and I’ll order Freddy to pull off at the next exit. I will personally trot into the Stop n Go or Seven-Eleven and buy you the biggest bottle of Poland Spring water in the cooler. How does that sound?”

It sounded good, Kurtz could tell that just by the way Perlmutter first smacked his lips and then ran his tongue out to wet them (on Perlmutter’s lips and cheeks the Ripley was still full and rich, most patches the color of strawberries, some as dark as burgundy wine), but that sly look had come back. His eyes, rimmed with crusts of Ripley, darted from side to side. And all at once Kurtz understood the picture he was looking at. Pearly had gone crazy, God love him. Perhaps it took one to know one.

“I told him the God’s truth. I’m out of touch with all of them now.” But then Archie laid his finger alongside his nose and looked slyly up into the mirror again.

“We catch them, I think there’s a good chance we can get you cured up, laddie.” Kurtz said this in his driest just-making-my-report voice. “Now which of them are you still in touch with? Jonesy? Or is it the new one? Duddits?” What Kurtz actually said was “Dud-Duts”.

“Not him. None of them.” But still the finger by the nose, still the sly look.

“Tell me and you get water,” Kurtz said. “Continue to yank my crank, soldier, and I will put a bullet in you and roll you out into the snow. Now you go on and read my mind and tell me that’s not so.”

Pearly looked at him sulkily in the rearview a moment longer and then said, “Jonesy and Mr Gray are still on the turnpike. They’re down around Portland, now. Jonesy told Mr Gray how to go around the city on 295. Only it isn’t like telling. Mr Gray is in his head, and when he wants something, I think he just takes it.”

Kurtz listened to this with mounting awe, all the time calculating.

“There’s a dog,” Pearly said. “They have a dog with them. His name is Lad. He’s the one I’m in contact with. He’s… like me.” His eyes met Kurtz’s again in the mirror, only this time the slyness was gone. In its place was a miserable half-sanity. “Do you think there’s really a chance I could be… you know… myself again?”

Knowing that Perlmutter could see into his mind made Kurtz proceed cautiously. “I think there’s a chance you could be delivered of your burden, at least. With a doctor in attendance who understands the situation? Yes, I think that could be. A big whiff of cbloro, and when you wake up… poof.” Kurtz kissed the ends of his fingers, then turned to Freddy. “If they’re in Portland, what’s their lead on us?”

“Maybe seventy miles, boss.”

“Then step it up a little, praise Jesus. Don’t put us in the ditch, but step it up.” Seventy miles. And if Owen and Devlin and “Dud-Duts” knew what Archie Perlmutter knew, they were still on track.

“Let me get this straight, Archie. Mr Gray is in Jonesy-”

“Yes-”

“And they have a dog with them that can read their minds?”

“The dog hears their thoughts, but he doesn’t understand them. He’s stiff only a dog. Boss, I’m thirsty.” He’s listening to the dog like it’s a fucking radio, Kurtz marvelled. “Freddy, next exit. Drinks all around.” He resented having to make a pit-stop-resented losing even a couple of miles on Owen-but he needed Perlmutter. Happy, if possible.

Up ahead was the rest area where Mr Gray had traded his plow for the cook’s Subaru, where Owen and Henry had also briefly pulled in because the line went in there. The parking lot was crammed, but among the three of them they had enough change for the vending machines out front.

Praise God.

Whatever the triumphs and failures of the so-called “Florida” Presidency (that record is in large part still unwritten), there will always be this: he put an end to the Space Scare with his speech that November morning.

There were differing views on why the speech worked (“It wasn’t leadership, it was timing,” one critic sniffed), but it did work. Hungry for hard information, people who were already on the run pulled off the highway to see the President speak. Appliance stores in malls filled up with crowds of silent, staring people. At the food-fuel stops along 1-95, the counters shut down. TVs were placed beside the quiet cash-registers. Bars filled up. In many places, people threw their homes open to others who wanted to watch the speech. They could have listened on their car radios (as Jonesy and Mr Gray did) and kept on trucking, but only a minority did. Most people wanted to see the leader’s face. According to the President’s detractors, the speech did nothing but break the momentum of the panic-“Porky Pig could have given a speech at that particular time and gotten that particular result,” one of them opined. The other took a different view. “It was a pivotal moment in the crisis,” this fellow said. “There were maybe six thousand people on the road. If the President had said the wrong thing, there would have been sixty thousand by two in the afternoon and maybe six hundred thousand by the time the wave hit New York-the biggest wave of DPs since the Dust Bowl. The American people, especially those in New England, came to their narrowly-elected leader for help… for comfort and reassurance. He responded with what may have been the greatest my-fellow-Americans speech of all time. Simple as that.”

Simple or not, sociology or great leadership, the speech was about what Owen and Henry had expected… and Kurtz could have predicted every word and turn. At the center were two simple ideas, both presented as absolute facts and both calculated to soothe the terror which beat that morning in the ordinarily complacent American breast. The first idea was that, while they had not come waving olive branches and handing out free introductory gifts, the newcomers had evinced absolutely no signs of aggressive or hostile behavior. The second was that, while they had brought some sort of virus with them, it had been contained within the Jefferson Tract (the President pointed it out on a Chroma-Key green-screen as adeptly as any weatherman pointing out a low-pressure system). And even there it was dying, with absolutely no help from the scientists and military experts who were on the scene.

“While we cannot say for sure at this Juncture,” the President told his breathless watchers (those who found themselves at the New England end of the Northeast Corridor were, perhaps understandably, the most breathless of all), “we believe that our visitors brought this virus with them much as travellers from abroad may bring certain insects into their country of origin in their luggage or on the produce they’ve purchased. This is something customs officials look for, but of course”-big smile from Great White Father-“our recent visitors did not pass through a customs checkpoint.”

Yes, a few people had succumbed to the virus. Most were military personnel. The great in majority of those who contracted it (“a fungal growth not unlike athlete’s foot,” said the Great White Father) beat it quite easily on their own. A quarantine had been imposed around the area, but the people outside that zone were in no danger, repeat, no danger. “If you are in Maine and have left your homes,” said the President, “I suggest you return. In the words of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, we have nothing to fear but fear itself.” Nothing about the slaughter of the grayboys, the blown ship, the interred hunters, the fire at Gosselin’s, or the breakout. Nothing about the last of Gallagher’s Imperial Valleys being hunted down like dogs (they were dogs, in the view of many; worse than dogs). Nothing about Kurtz and not a whisper about Typhoid Jonesy. The President gave them just enough to break the back of the panic before it surged out of control.

Most people followed his advice and went home.

For some, of course, this was impossible.

For some, home had been cancelled.

The little parade moved south under dark skies, led by the rusty red Subaru that Marie Turgeon of Litchfield would never see again. Henry, Owen, and Duddits were fifty-five miles, or about fifty minutes, behind. Pulling out of the Mile 81 rest area (Pearly was greedily glugging down his second bottle of Naya water by the time they rejoined the traffic flow), Kurtz and his men were roughly seventy-five miles behind Jonesy and Mr Gray, twenty miles behind Kurtz’s prime quarry.

If not for the cloud cover, a spotter in a low-flying plane might have been able to see all three at the same time, the Subaru and both Humvees, at 11:43 EST, when the President finished his speech by saying, “God bless you, my fellow Americans, and God bless America.”

Jonesy and Mr Gray were crossing the Kittery-Portsmouth bridge into New Hampshire; Henry, Owen, and Duddits were passing Exit 9, which gives access to the communities of Falmouth, Cumberland, and Jerusalem’s Lot; Kurtz, Freddy, and Perlmutter (Perlmutter’s belly was swelling again; he lay back groaning and passing noxious gas, perhaps a kind of critical comment on the Great White Father’s speech) were near the Bowdoinham exit of 295, not far north of Brunswick. All three vehicles would have been easy enough to pick out because so many people had pulled in somewhere to watch the President give his soothing, Chroma-Key-aided lecture.

Drawing on Jonesy’s admirably organized memories, Mr Gray left 95 for 495 just after crossing over the New Hampshire Massachusetts border… and directed by Duddits, who saw Jonesy’s passage as a bright yellow line, the lead Humvee would follow. At the town of Marlborough, Mr Gray would leave 495 for 1-90, one of America’s major east-west highways. In the Bay State this road is known as the Mass Pike. Exit 8, according to Jonesy, was marked Palmer, UMass, Amherst, and Ware. Six miles beyond Ware was the Quabbin.

Shaft 12 was what he wanted; Jonesy said so, and Jonesy couldn’t lie, much as he might have liked to. There was a Massachusetts Water Authority office at the Winsor Dam, on the south end of the Quabbin Reservoir. Jonesy could get him that far, and then Mr Gray would do the rest.

Jonesy couldn’t sit behind the desk anymore-if he did, he’d start to blubber. From blubbering he would no doubt progress to gibbering, from gibbering to yammering, and once he started to yammer, he’d probably be out and rushing into Mr Gray’s arms, totally bonkers and ready to be extinguished.

Where are we now, anyway? he wondered. Marlborough yet? Leaving 495 for 90? 7hat sounds about right.

Not that there was any way to tell for sure, with his window shuttered. Jonesy looked at the window… and grinned in spite of himself. Had to. GIVE UP COME OUT had been replaced with what he’d been thinking of-SURRENDER DOROTHY.

I did that, he thought, and I bet I could make the goddam shutters vanish, if I wanted to.

And so what? Mr Gray would put up another set, or maybe just slop some black paint on the glass. If he didn’t want Jonesy looking out, Jonesy would stay blind. The point was, Mr Gray controlled the outside part of him. Mr Gray’s head had exploded, he’d sporulated right in front of Jonesy’s eyes-Dr Jekyll turns into Mr Byrus-and Jonesy had inhaled him. Now Mr Gray was…

He’s a pain, Jonesy thought. Mr Gray is the pain in my brain.

Something tried to protest this view, and he actually had a coherent dissenting thought-No, you’ve got it all backward, you were the one who got out, who escaped-but he pushed it away. That was pseudo-intuitive bullshit, a cognitive hallucination, not much different than a thirsty man seeing a nonexistent oasis in the desert. He was locked in here. Mr Gray was out there, eating bacon and ruling the roost. If Jonesy allowed himself to think differently, he’d be an April Fool in November.

Got to slow him down. If I can’t stop him, is there a way I can at least throw a monkeywrench into the works?

He got up and began to walk around the edge of the office. It was thirty-four paces. Hell of a short round-trip. Still, he supposed, it was bigger than your average jail cell; guys in Walpole or Danvers or Shawshank would think this was the cat’s ass. In the middle of the room, the dreamcatcher danced and turned. One part of Jonesy’s mind counted paces; the other wondered how close they were getting to Exit 8 of the Mass Pike.

Thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three, thirty-four. And here he was, back behind his chair again. Time for Round Two. They’d be in Ware soon enough… not that they’d stop there. Unlike the Russian woman, Mr Gray knew exactly where he wanted to go. Thirty-two, thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five, thirty-six. Behind his chair again and ready for another spin.

He and Carla had had three children by the time they turned thirty (number four had come less than a year ago), and neither of them had expected to own a summer cottage, not even a modest one like the place on Osborne Road in North Ware, any time soon. Then there had been a seismic shift in Jonesy’s department. A good friend had assumed the chairmanship, and Jonesy had found himself an associate professor at least three years earlier than his most optimistic expectations. The salary bump had been considerable.

Thirty-five, thirty-six, thirty-seven, thirty-eight, and behind his chair again. This was good. It was pacing the cell, no more than that, but it was calming him.

That same year, Carla’s grandmother had passed away, and there had been a considerable estate, settled between Carla and her sister, as the close blood kin in the intervening generation had died. So they got the cottage, and that first summer they’d taken the kids up to the Winsor Dam. From there they’d gone on one of the regularly scheduled summer tours. Their guide, an MWA employee in a forest-green uniform, had told them the area around the Quabbin Reservoir was called “the accidental wilderness”, and had become the major nesting area for eagles in Massachusetts. (John and Misha, the older kids, had hoped to see an eagle or two, but they had been disappointed.) The Reservoir had been formed in the thirties by flooding three fanning communities, each with its own little market-town. At that time the land surrounding the new lake had been tame. In the sixty or so years since, it had returned to what all of New England must have been like before the tillage and industry began midway through the seventeenth century. A tangle of rutted, unpaved roads ran up the east side of the lake-one of the purest reservoirs in North America, their guide had told them-but that was it. If you wanted to go much beyond Shaft 12 on the East Branch, you’d need your hiking shoes. That was what the guide said. Lorrington, his name had been.

There had been maybe a dozen other people on the tour, and by then they had been about back to their starting place again. Standing on the edge of the road which ran across Winsor Dam, looking north at the Reservoir (the Quabbin bright blue in the sunlight, sparkling with a million points of light, Joey fast asleep in the Papoose carrier on Jonesy’s back). Lorrington had been wrapping up his spiel, just about to wish them a nice day, when some guy in a Rutgers sweatshirt had raised his hand like a school kid and said: Shaft 12, Isn’t that where the Russian woman…?

Thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty, forty-one, and back to the desk chair. Counting without really thinking about the numbers, something he did all the time. Carla said it was a sign of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Jonesy didn’t know about that, but he knew that the counting was soothing him, and so he set off on another round.

Lorrington’s mouth had tightened at the words “Russian woman”. Not part of the lecture, apparently; not part of the good vibes the Water Authority wanted visitors to take with them. Depending upon which municipal pipes it flowed through during the last eight or ten miles of its journey, Boston tap water could be the purest, best tap water in the world: that was the gospel they wanted to spread.

I really don’t know much about that, sir, Lorrington had said, and Jonesy had thought: My goodness, I think our guide just told a little fibby-wibby,

Forty-one, forty-two, forty-three, back behind the chair and ready to start around again. Walking a little faster now. Hands clasped behind his back like a ship’s captain pacing the foredeck… or pacing the brig after a successful mutiny. He supposed that was really more like it.

Jonesy had been a history teacher most of his life, and curiosity came as second nature. He had gone to the library one day later that week, had looked for the story in the local paper, and had eventually found it. It had been brief and dry-there were stories about lawn-parties inside that had more detail and color-but their postman had known more and had been happy to share. Old Mr Beckwith. Jonesy still remembered his final words before he’d put his blue-and-white mail-truck back in gear and rolled on down Osborne Road to the next rural box; there was a lot of mail to be delivered on the south end of the lake in summertime. Jonesy had walked back to the cottage, their unexpected gift, thinking it was no wonder Lorrington hadn’t wanted to talk about the Russian woman.

Not good public relations at all.

Her name is either Ilena or Elaina Timarova-no one seems sure which. She turns up in Ware in the early fall of 1995 in a Ford Escort with a discreet yellow Hertz sticker on the windshield. The car turns out to be stolen, and a story makes the rounds-unsubstantiated but juicy-that she obtained it at Logan Airport, swapping sex for a set of car keys. Who knows, it could have happened that way.

However it happens, she is clearly disoriented, not quite right in the head. Someone remembers the bruise on the side of her face, someone else the fact that her blouse is buttoned wrong. Her English is poor, but good enough for her to get across what she wants: directions to the Quabbin Reservoir. These she writes down (in Russian) on a slip of paper. That evening, when the road across the Winsor Dam is closed, the Escort is found, abandoned, in the picnic area at Goodnough Dike. When the car is still there the next morning, two Water Authority guys (who knows, perhaps Lorrington was one of them) and two Forest Service rangers start looking for her.

Two miles up East Street, they find her shoes. Two miles farther up, where East Street goes to dirt (it winds through the wilderness on the east shore of the Reservoir and is really not a street at all but a Massachusetts version of the Deep Cut Road) they find her shirt… oh-oh. Two miles beyond the abandoned shirt, East Street ends, and a rutty logging stripe-Fitzpatrick Road-leads away from the lake. The searchers are about to go this way when one of them sees something pink hangin from a tree-limb down by the water.

It proves to be the lady’s bra.

The ground here is damp-not quite marshy-and they can follow both her tracks and the broken branches through which she has pushed, doing damage they don’t like to think of to her bare skin. Yet the evidence of the damage is there, and they must see it, like it or not-the blood on the branches and then on the rocks is part of her trail.

A mile from where East Street ends, they come to a stone building which stands on an outcropping. It looks across the East Branch at Mount Pomery. This building houses Shaft 12, and is accessible by car only from the north. Why Ilena or Elaina did not just start from the north is a question that will never be answered.

The water-bearing aqueduct which begins at the Quabbin runs sixty-five miles dead east to Boston, picking up more water from the Wachusett and Sudbury Reservoirs as it goes (the latter two sources are smaller and not quite so pure). There are no pumps; the aqueduct-pipe, thirteen feet high and eleven feet wide, needs none to do its job. Boston’s water supply is provided by simple gravity feed, a technique used by the Egyptians thirty-five centuries before. Twelve vertical shafts run between the ground and the aqueduct. These serve as vents and pressure-regulation points. They also serve as points of access, should the aqueduct become clogged. Shaft 12, the one closest to the Reservoir, is also known as the Intake Shaft. Water purity is tested there, and female virtue has often been tested there, as well (the stone building isn’t locked, and is a frequent stopping place for lovers in canoes).

On the lowest of the eight steps leading up to the door, they find the woman’s jeans, neatly folded. On the top step is a pair of plain white cotton underpants. The door is open. The men look at each other, but no one speaks. They have a good idea of what they’re going to find inside: one dead Russian lady, hold the clothes.

But they don’t. The circular iron cover over the top of Shaft 12 has been moved just enough to create a crescent moon of darkness on the Reservoir side. Beyond it is the crowbar the woman used to shift the lid-it would have been leaning behind the door, where there are a few other tools. And beyond the crowbar is the Russian woman’s purse. On top of it is her billfold, open to show her identification card. On top of the billfold-the apex of the pyramid, so to speak-is her passport. Poking out of it is a slip of paper, covered with chicken-scratches that have to be Russian, or Cyrillic, or whatever they call it. The men believe it is a suicide note, but upon translation it proves to be nothing but the Russian woman’s directions. At the very bottom she has written When road ends, walk along shore. And so she did, disrobing as she went, unmindful of the branches which poked and the bushes which scratched.

The men stand around the partially covered shaft-head, scratching their heads and listening to the babble of the water as it starts on its way to the taps and faucets and fountains and back-yard hoses of Boston. The sound is hollow, somehow dank, and there’s good reason for that: Shaft 12 is a hundred and twenty-five feet deep. The men cannot understand why she chose to do it the way she did, but they can see what she did all too clearly, can see her sitting on the stone floor with her feet dangling; she looks like a nakedy version of the girl on the White Rock labels. She takes a final look over her shoulder, perhaps, to make sure her billfold and her passport are still where she put them. She wants someone to know who passed this way, and there is something hideously, unassuageably sad about that. One look back, and then she slips into the eclipse between the partially dislodged cover and the side of the shaft. Perhaps she held her nose, like a kid cannonballing into the community swimming pool. Perhaps not. Either way, she is gone in less than a second. Hello darkness my old friend.

Old Mr Beckwith’s final words on the subject before driving on down the road in his mail-truck had been these: Way I heard it, the folks in Boston’ll be drinking her in their morning coffee tight around Valentine’s Day. Then he’d given Jonesy a grin. I don’t drink the water myself, I stick to beer.

In Massachusetts, as in Australia, you say that beah.

Jonesy had paced around his office twelve or fourteen times now. He stopped for a moment behind his desk chair, absently rubbing his hip, then set off again, still counting, good old obsessive-compulsive Jonesy.

One…two…three…

The story of the Russian woman was certainly a fine one, a superior example of the Small Town Creepy Yarn (haunted houses where multiple murders had taken place and the sites of terrible roadside accidents were also good), and it certainly cast a clear light on Mr Gray’s plans for Lad, the unfortunate border collie, but what good did it do him to know where Mr Gray was going? After all…

Back to the chair again, forty-eight, forty-nine, fifty, and wait a minute, just wait a goddam minute. The first time he’d gone around the room, he’d done it in just thirty-four paces, hadn’t he? So how could it be fifty this time? He wasn’t shuffling, taking baby steps, anything like that, so how-

You’ve been making it bigger. Walking around it and making it bigger. Because you were restless. It’s your room, after all. I bet you could make it as big as the Waldorf-Astoria ballroom, if you wanted to…and Mr Gray couldn’t stop you.

“Is that possible?” Jonesy whispered. He stood by his desk chair, one hand on the back, like a man posing for a portrait. He didn’t need an answer to his question; eyesight was enough. The room was bigger.

Henry was coming. If he had Duddits with him, following Mr Gray would be easy enough no matter how many times Mr Gray changed vehicles, because Duddits saw the line. He had led them to Richie Grenadeau in a dream, later he had led them to Josie Rinkenhauer in reality, and he could direct Henry now as easily as a keen-nosed hound leads a hunter to the fox’s earth. The problem was the lead, the goddam lead that Mr Gray had. An hour at least. Maybe more. And once Mr Gray had chucked the dog down Shaft 12, there went your ballgame. There’d be time to shut off Boston’s water supply-theoretically-but could Henry convince anyone to take such an enormous, disruptive step? Jonesy doubted it. And what about all the people along the way who would drink the water almost immediately? Sixty-five hundred in Ware, eleven thousand in Athol, over a hundred and fifty thousand in Worcester. Those people would have weeks instead of months. Only days in some cases.

Was there any way to slow the son of a bitch down? Give Henry a chance to catch up?

Jonesy looked up at the dreamcatcher, and as he did, something in the room changed-there was a sigh, almost, the sort of sound ghosts are reputed to make at seances. But this was no ghost, and Jonesy felt his arms prickle. At the same time his eyes filled with tears. A line from Thomas Wolfe occurred to him-o lost, a stone, a leaf, a unfound door. Thomas Wolfe, whose thesis had been that you can’t go home again.

“Duddits?” he whispered. The hair on his neck had stiffened. “Duddie, is that you?”

No answer… but when he looked at the desk where the useless phone had stood, he saw that something new had been added. Not a stone or a leaf, not an unfound door, but a cribbage board and a deck of cards.

Someone wanted to play the game.

Hurt pretty much all the time now. Mumma know, he tell Mumma. Jesus know, he tell Jesus. He don’t tell Henry, Henry hurts too, Henry tired and make sad. Beaver and Pete are in heaven where they sitteth at the right hand of God the Father all mighty, maker of heaven and earth forever and ever, Jesus” sake, hey man. That makes him sad, they were good friends and played games but never made fun. Once they found Josie and once they saw a tall guy, he a cowboy, and once they play the game.

This a game too, only Pete used to say Duddits it doesn’t matter if you win or booze it’s how you play the game only this time it does matter, it does, Jonesy say it does, Jonesy hard of hearing but pretty soon it’ll be better, pretty soon. If only he don’t hurt. Even his Perco don’t help. His throat make sore and his body shakes and his belly make hurry kind of like when he has to go poopoo, kind of like that, but he doesn’t have to go poopoo, and when he cough sometimes make blood. He would like to sleep but there is Henry and his new friend Owen that was there the day they found Josie and they say If only we could slow him down and If only we could catch up and he has to stay awake and help them but he has to close his eyes to hear Jonesy and they think he’s asleep, Owen says Shouldn’t we wake him up, what if the son of a bitch turns off somewhere, and Henry says I tell you I know where he’s going, but we’ll wake him up at 1-90 just to be sure. For now let him sleep, my God, he looks so tired. And again, only this time thinking it: If only we could slow the son of a bitch down.

Eyes closed. Arms crossed over his aching chest. Breathing slow, Mumma say breathe slow when you cough. Jonesy’s not dead, not in heaven with Beaver and Pete, but Mr Gray say Jonesy locked and Jonesy believes him. Jonesy’s in the office, no phone and no facts, hard to talk to because Mr Gray is mean and Mr Gray is scared. Scared Jonesy will find out which one is really locked up.

When did they talk most?

When they played the game.

The game.

A shudder racks him. He has to make hard think and it hurts, he can feel it stealing away his strength, the last little bits of his strength, but this time it’s more than just a game, this time it matters who wins and who boozes, so he gives his strength, he makes the board and he makes the cards, Jonesy is crying, Jonesy thinks o lost, but Duddits Cavell isn’t lost, Duddits sees the line, the line goes to the office, and this time he will do more than peg the pegs.

Don’t cry Jonesy, he says, and the words are clear, in his mind they always are, it is only his stupid mouth that mushes them up. Don’t cry, I’m not lost.

Eyes closed. Arms crossed.

In Jonesy’s office, beneath the dreamcatcher, Duddits plays the game.

“I’ve got the dog,” Henry said. He sounded exhausted. “The one Perlmutter’s homed in on. I’ve got it. We’re a little bit closer. Christ, if there was just a way to slow them down!”

It was raining now, and Owen could only hope they’d be south of the freeze-line if it went over to sleet. The wind was gusting hard enough to sway the Hummer on the road. It was noon, and they were between Saco and Biddeford. Owen glanced into the rearview mirror and saw Duddits in the back seat, eyes closed, head back, skinny arms crossed on his chest. His complexion was an alarming yellow, but a thin line of bright blood trickled from the comer of his mouth.

“Is there any way your friend can help?” Owen asked.

“I think he’s trying.”

“I thought you said he was asleep.”

Henry turned, looked at Duddits, then looked at Owen. “I was wrong,” he said.

Jonesy dealt the cards, threw two into the crib from his hand, then picked up the other hand and added two more.

“Don’t cry, Jonesy. Don’t cry, I’m not lost.”

Jonesy glanced up at the dreamcatcher, quite sure the words had come from there. “I’m not crying, Duds. Fuckin allergies, that’s all. Now I think you want to play-”

“Two,” said the voice from the dreamcatcher.

Jonesy played the deuce from Duddits’s hand-not a bad lead, actually-then played a seven from his own. That made nine. Duddits had a six in his hand; the question was whether or not-

“Six for fifteen,” said the voice from the dreamcatcher. “Fifteen for two. Kiss my bender!”

Jonesy laughed in spite of himself It was Duddits, all right, but for a moment he had sounded just like the Beav. “Go on and peg it, then.” And watched, fascinated, as one of the pegs on the board rose, floated, and settled back down in the second hole on First Street.

Suddenly he understood something.

“You could play all along, couldn’t you, Duds? You used to peg all crazy just because it made us laugh.” The idea brought fresh tears to his eyes. All those years they’d thought they were playing with Duddits, he had been playing with them. And on that day behind Tracker Brothers, who had found whom? Who had saved whom?

“Twenty-one,” he said. “Thirty-one for two.” From the dreamcatcher. And once again the unseen hand lifted the peg and played it two holes farther on. “He’s blocked to me, Jonesy.” “I know.” Jonesy played a three. Duddits called thirteen, and Jonesy played it out of Duddits’s hand. “But you’re not. You can talk to him.”

Jonesy played his own deuce and pegged two. Duddits played, pegged one for last card, and Jonesy thought: Outpegged by a retard-what do you know. Except this Duddits wasn’t retarded. Exhausted and dying, but not retarded.

They pegged their hands, and Duddits was far ahead even though it had been Jonesy’s crib. Jonesy swept the cards together and began to shuffle them.

“What does he want, Jonesy? What does he want besides water?”

Murder, Jonesy thought. He likes to kill people. But no more of that. Please God, no more of that.

“Bacon,” he said. “He does like bacon.”

He began to shuffle the cards… then froze as Duddits filled his mind. The real Duddits, young and strong and ready to fight.

Behind them, in the back seat, Duddits groaned loudly. Henry turned and saw fresh blood, red as byrus, running from his nostrils. His face was twisted in a terrible cramp of concentration. Beneath their closed lids, his eyeballs rolled rapidly back and forth.

“What’s the matter with him?” Owen asked. “I don’t know.”

Duddits began to cough: deep and racking bronchial sounds. Blood flew from between his lips in a fine spray.

“Wake him up, Henry! For Christ’s sake, wake him up!”

Henry gave Owen Underhill a frightened look. They were approaching Kennebunkport now, no more than twenty miles from the New Hampshire border, a hundred and ten from the Quabbin Reservoir. Jonesy had a picture of the Quabbin on the wall of his office; Henry had seen it. And a cottage nearby, in Ware.

Duddits cried out: a single word repeated three times between bursts of coughing. The sprays of blood weren’t heavy, not yet, the stuff was coming from his mouth and throat, but if his lungs began to rupture-

“Wake him up! He says he’s aching! Can’t you hear him-”

“He’s not saying aykin.”

“What, then? What?”

“He’s saying bacon.”

The entity which now thought of itself as Mr Gray-who thought of himself as Mr Gray-had a serious problem, but at least it (he) knew it.

Forewarned is forearmed was how Jonesy put it. There were hundreds of such sayings in Jonesy’s storage cartons, perhaps thousands. Some of them Mr Gray found utterly incomprehensible-A nod’s as good as a wink to a blind horse was one such, What goes around comes around was another-but forewarned is forearmed was a good one.

His problem could be best summed up with how he felt about Jonesy… and of course that he felt at all was bad enough. He could think Now Jonesy is cut off and I have solved my problem; I have quarantined him just as their military tried to quarantine us. I am being followed-chased, intact-but barring engine trouble or a flat tire, neither group of followers has much chance of catching me. I have too great a lead.

These things were facts-truth-but they had no savor. What had savor was the idea of going to the door behind which his reluctant host was imprisoned and yelling: “I fixed you, didn’t I? I fixed your little red wagon, didn’t I?” What a wagon, red or otherwise, had to do with any of this Mr Gray didn’t know, but it was an emotional bullet of fairly high caliber from Jonesy’s armory-it had a deep and satisfying childhood resonance. And then he would stick Jonesy’s tongue (my tongue now, Mr Gray thought with undeniable satisfaction) between Jonesy’s lips and “give him the old raspberry”.

As for the followers, he wanted to drop Jonesy’s pants and show them Jonesy’s buttocks. This was as senseless as What goes around comes around, as senseless as little red wagon, but he wanted to do it. It was called “mooning the assholes” and he wanted to do it.

He was, Mr Gray realized, infected with this world’s byrus. It began with emotion, progressed to sensory awareness (the taste of food, the undeniable savage pleasure of making the State Trooper beat his head in against the tiled bathroom wall-the hollow thud-thud of it), and then progressed to what Jonesy called higher thinking. This was a joke, in Mr Gray’s view, not much different from calling shit reprocessed food or genocide ethnic cleansing. And yet thinking had its attractions for a being which had always existed as part of a vegetative mind, a sort of highly intelligent not-consciousness.

Before Mr Gray had shut him up, Jonesy had suggested that he give over his mission and simply enjoy being human. Now he discovered that desire in himself as his previously harmonious mind, his not-conscious mind, began to fragment, to turn into a crowd of opposing voices, some wanting A, some wanting B, some wanting Q squared and divided by Z. He would have thought such babble would be horrible, the stuff of madness. Instead he found himself enjoying the wrangle.

There was bacon. There was “sex with Carla”, which Jonesy’s mind identified as a superlatively enjoyable act, involving both sensory and emotional input. There was fast driving and bumper pool in O'Leary’s Bar near Fenway Park and beer and live bands that played loud and Patty Loveless singing “Blame it on your lyin cheatin cold deadbeatin two-timin double-dealin mean mistreatin lovin heart” (whatever that meant). There was the look of the land rising from the fog on a summer morning. And murder, of course. There was that.

His problem was that if he didn’t finish this business quickly, he might never finish it at all. He was no longer byrum but Mr Gray. How long before he left Mr Gray behind and became Jonesy?

It’s not going to happen, he thought. He pressed the accelerator down, and although it didn’t have much, the Subaru gave him a little more. In the back seat the dog yipped… then howled in pain. Mr Gray sent out his mind and touched the byrum growing inside the dog. It was growing fast. Almost too fast. And here was something else-there was no pleasure in meeting its mind, none of the warmth that comes when like encounters like. The mind of the byrum felt cold… rancid…

“Alien,” he muttered.

Nevertheless, he quieted it. When the dog went into the water supply, the byrum should still be inside. It would need time to adapt. The dog would drown, but the byrum would live yet awhile, feeding on the dog’s dead body, until it was time. But first he had to get there.

It wouldn’t be long now.

As he drove west on I-90, past little towns (shitsplats, Jonesy thought them, but not without affection) like Westborough, Grafton, and Dorothy Pond (getting closer now, maybe forty miles to go), he looked for a place to put his new and uneasy consciousness where it wouldn’t get him in trouble. He tried Jonesy’s kids, then backed away-far too emotional. Tried Duddits again, but that was still a blank; Jonesy had stolen the memories. Finally he settled on Jonesy’s work, which was teaching history, and his specialty, which was gruesomely fascinating. Between 1860 and 1865, it seemed America had split in two, as byrus colonies did near the end of each growth cycle. There had been all sorts of causes, the chief of which had to do with “slavery”, but again, this was like calling shit or vomit reprocessed food. “Slavery” meant nothing. “Right of secession” meant nothing. “Preserving the Union” meant nothing. Basically, they had just done what these creatures did best: they “got mad,” which was really the same thing as “going mad” but more socially acceptable. Oh, but on such a scale!

Mr Gray was investigating boxes and boxes of fascinating weaponry-grapeshot, chainshot, minie balls, cannonballs, bayonets, landmines-when a voice intruded.

bacon

He pushed the thought aside, although Jonesy’s stomach gurgled. He’d like some bacon, yes, bacon was fleshy and greasy and slippery and satisfying in a primitive, physical way, but this was not the time. Perhaps after he’d gotten rid of the dog. Then, if he had time before the others caught up, he could eat himself to death if he so chose. But this was not the time. As he passed Exit 10-only two to go, now-he turned his mind back to the Civil War, to blue men and gray men running through the smoke, screaming and stabbing each other in the guts, fixing little red wagons without number, pounding the stocks of their rifles into the skulls of their enemies, producing those intoxicating thud-thud sounds, and-

bacon

His stomach gurgled again. Saliva squirted into Jonesy’s mouth and he remembered Dysart’s, the brown and crispy strips on the blue plate, you picked it up with your fingers, the texture was hard, the texture of dead and tasty flesh-

Can’t think of this.

A horn honked irritably, making Mr Gray jump, making Lad whine. He had wandered into the wrong lane, what Jonesy’s mind identified as “the passing lane”, and he pulled over to let one of the big trucks, going faster than the Subaru could go, sweep by. It splashed the small car’s windshield with muddy water, momentarily blinding him, and Mr Gray thought Catch you kill you beat the brains out of your head you unsafe johnny reb of a driver you, thud-thud, fix your wagon your little red

bacon sandwich

That one was like a gunshot in his head. He fought it but the strength of it was something entirely new. Could that be Jonesy? Surely not, Jonesy wasn’t that strong. But suddenly he seemed an stomach, and the stomach was hollow, hurting, craving. Surely he could stop long enough to assuage it. If he didn’t he was apt to drive right off the

Mr Gray let out an inarticulate cry, unaware that he’d begun to drool helplessly.

“I hear him,” Henry said suddenly. He put his fists to his temples, as if to contain a headache. “Christ, it hurts. He’s so hungry.” “Who?” Owen asked. They had just crossed the state line into Massachusetts. In front of the car, the rain fell in silver, wind-slanted lines. “The dog? Jonesy? Who?” “Him,” Henry said. “Mr Gray.” He looked at Owen, a sudden wild hope in his eye. “I think he’s pulling over. I think he’s stopping.”

“Boss.”

Kurtz was on the verge of dozing again when Perlmutter turned-not without effort-and spoke to him. They had just gone through the New Hampshire tolls, Freddy Johnson being careful to use the automated exact-change lane (he was afraid a human toll-taker might notice the stench in the Humvee’s cabin, the broken window in back, the weaponry… or all three).

Kurtz looked into Archie Perlmutter’s sweat-streaked, haggard face with interest. With fascination, even. The colorless bean-counting bureaucrat, he of the briefcase on station and clipboard in the field, hair always neatly combed and parted ruler-straight on the left? The man who could not for the life of him train himself out of using the word sir? That man was gone. Thin though it was, he thought Pearly’s countenance had somehow richened. He’s turning into Ma Joad, Kurtz thought, and almost giggled.

“Boss, I’m still thirsty.” Pearly cast longing eyes on Kurtz’s Pepsi, then blew out another hideous fart. Ma Joad on trumpet in hell Kurtz thought and this time he did giggle. Freddy cursed, but not with his former shocked disgust; now he sounded resigned, almost bored.

“I’m afraid this is mine, buck,” Kurtz. “And I’m a wee parched myself.”

Perlmutter began to speak, then winced as a fresh pain struck him. He fatted again, the sound thinner this time, not a trumpet but an untalented child blowing over a piccolo. His eyes narrowed, became crafty. “Give me a drink and I’ll tell you something you want to know.” A pause. “Something you need to know.”

Kurtz considered. Pain slapped the side of the car and came in through the busted window. The goddamned window was a pain in the ass, praise Jesus, the arm of his jacket was soaked right through, but he would have to bear up. Who was responsible, after all?

“You are,” Pearly said, and Kurtz jumped. The mind-reading thing was just so spooky. You thought you were getting used to it and then realized that no negative, you were not. “You’re responsible. So give me a fucking drink. Boss.”

“Watch your mouth, cheeseboy,” Freddy rumbled.

“Tell me what you know and you can have the rest of this.” Kurtz raised the Pepsi bottle, waggling it in front of Pearly’s tortured gaze. Kurtz was not without humorous self-loathing as he did this. Once he had commanded whole units and had used them to alter entire geopolitical landscapes. Now his command was two men and a soft drink. He had fallen low. Pride had brought him low, praise God. He had the pride of Satan, and if it was a fault, it was a hard one to give up. Pride was the belt you could use to hold up your pants even after your pants were gone.

“Do you promise?” Pearly’s red-fizzed tongue came out and licked at his parched lips.

“If I’m lyin I’m dyin,” Kurtz said solemnly. “Hell, buck, read my fucking mind!”

Pearly studied him for a moment and Kurtz could almost feel the man’s creepy little fingers (mats of red stuff now growing under each nail) in his head. An awful sensation, but he bore it.At last Perlmutter seemed satisfied. He nodded. “I’m getting more now,” he said, and then his voice lowered to a confidential, horrified whisper. “It’s eating me, you know. It’s eating my guts. I can feel it.”

Kurtz patted him on the arm. just now they were passing a sign which read WELCOME TO MASSACHUSETTS. “I’m going to take care of you, laddie-buck; I promised, didn’t I? Meantime, tell me what you’re getting.”

“Mr Gray is stopping. He’s hungry. “Kurtz had left his hand on Perlmutter’s arm. Now he tightened his grip, turning his fingernails into talons. “Where?”

“Close to where he’s going. It’s a store.” In a chanting, childish voice that made Kurtz’s skin crawl, Archie Perlmutter said: “'Best bait, why wait? Best bait, why wait?"” Then, resuming a more normal tone: “Jonesy knows Henry and Owen and Duddits are coming. That’s why he made Mr Gray stop.”

The idea of Owen’s catching Jonesy/Mr Gray filled Kurtz with panic. “Archie, listen to me carefully.”

“I’m thirsty,” Perlmutter whined. “I’m thirsty, you son of a bitch.”

Kurtz held the Pepsi bottle up in front of Perlmutter’s eyes, then slapped away Perlmutter’s hand when Pearly reached for it.

“Do Henry, Owen, and Dud-Duts know Jonesy and Mr Gray have stopped?”

“Dud-dits, you old fool!” Perlmutter snarled, then groaned with pain and clutched at his stomach, which was on the rise again. “Dits, dits, Dud-dits! Yes, they know! Duddits helped make Mr Gray hungry! He and Jonesy did it together!”

“I don’t like this,” Freddy said.

Join the club, Kurtz thought.

“Please, boss,” Pearly said. “I’m so thirsty.”

Kurtz gave him the bottle, watched with a jaundiced eye as Perlmutter drained it.

“495, boss,” Freddy announced. “What do I do?”

“Take it,” Perlmutter said. “Then 90 west.” He burped. It was loud but blessedly odorless. “It wants another Pepsi. It likes the sugar. Also the caffeine.”

Kurtz pondered. Owen knew their quarry had stopped, at least temporarily. Now Owen and Henry would sprint, trying to make up as much of that ninety to a hundred-minute lag as they could. Consequently, they must sprint, as well.

Any cops who got in their way would have to die, God bless them. One way or the other, this was coming to a head.

“Freddy.”

“Boss.”

“Pedal to the metal. Make this bitch strut, God love you. Make her strut.”

Freddy Johnson did as ordered.

There was no barn, no corral, no paddock, and instead Of OUT-OF-STATE LICS the sign in the window showed a photograph of the Quabbin Reservoir over the legend BEST BAIT, WHY WAIT?, but otherwise the little store could have been Gosselin’s all over again: same ratty siding, same mud-brown shingles, same crooked chimney dribbling smoke into the rainy sky, same rusty gas-pump out front. Another sign leaned against the pump, this one reading NO GAS BLAME THE RAGHEADS.

On that early afternoon in November the store was empty save for the proprietor, a gentleman named Deke McCaskell. Like most other folks, he had spent the morning glued to the TV. All the coverage (repetitive stuff, for the most part, and with that part of the North Woods cordoned off, no good pictures of anything but Army, Navy, and Air Force hardware) had led up to the President’s speech. Deke called the President Okeefenokee, on account of the fucked-up way he’d been elected-couldn’t anybody down there fucking count? Although he had not exercised his own option to vote since the Gipper (now there had been a President), Deke hated President Okeefenokee, thought he was an oily, untrustworthy motherfucker with big teeth (good-looking wife, though), and he thought the President’s eleven o'clock speech had been the usual blah-dee-blah. Deke didn’t believe a word old Okeefenokee said. In his view, the whole thing was probably a hoax, scare tactics calculated to make the American taxpayer more willing to hike defense spending and thus taxes. There was nobody out there in space, science had proved it. The only aliens in America (except for President Okeefenokee himself, that was) were the beaners who swam across the border from Mexico. But people were scared, sitting home and watching TV. A few would be in later for beer or bottles of wine, but for now the place was as dead as a cat run over in the highway.

Deke had turned off the TV half an hour ago-enough was enough, by the Christ-and when the bell over his door jangled at quarter past one, he was studying a magazine from the rack at the back of the store, where a sign proclaimed B 21 OR B GONE. This particular periodical was titled Lasses in Glasses, a fair title since all the lasses within were wearing spectacles. Nothing else, but glasses, si.

He looked up at the newcomer, started to say something like “How ya doin” or “Roads gettin slippery yet,” and then didn’t. He felt a bolt of unease, followed by a sudden certainty that he was going to be robbed… and if robbery was all, he’d be off lucky. He never had been robbed, not in the twelve years he’d owned the place-if a fellow wanted to risk prison for a handful of cash, there were places in the area where bigger handfuls could be had. A guy would have to be…

Deke swallowed. A guy would have to be crazy, he’d been thinking, and maybe this guy was, maybe he was one of those maniacs who’d just offed his whole family and then decided to ramble around a bit, kill a few more folks before turning one of his guns on himself.

Deke wasn’t paranoid by nature (he was lumpish by nature, his ex-wife would have told you), but that didn’t change the fact that he felt suddenly menaced by the afternoon’s first customer. He didn’t care very much for the fellows who sometimes turned up and loafed around the store, talking about the patriots or the Red Sox or telling stories about the whoppers they’d caught up to the Reservoir, but he wished for a few of them now. A whole gang of them, actually.

The man just stood there inside the door at first, and yeah, there was something wrong with him. He was wearing an orange hunting coat and deer season hadn’t started yet in Massachusetts, but that could have been nothing. What Deke didn’t like were the scratches on the man’s face, as if he had spent at least some of the last couple of days going cross-country through the woods, and the haunted, drawn quality of the features themselves. His mouth was moving, as though he was talking to himself. Something else, too. The gray afternoon light slanting in through the dusty front window glinted oddly on his lips and chin.

That sonofabitch is drooling, Deke thought. Be goddamned if he ain’t.

The newcomer’s head snapped around in quick little tics while his body remained perfectly still, reminding Deke of the way an owl remains perfectly still on its branch as it looks for prey. Deke thought briefly of sliding out of his chair and hiding under the counter, but before he could do more than begin to consider the pros and cons of such a move (not a particularly quick thinker, his ex-wife would have told you that, as well), the guy’s head did another of those quick flicks and was pointing right at him.

The rational part of Deke’s mind had been harboring the hope (it was not quite an articulated idea) that he was imagining the whole thing, just suffering the whimwhams from all the weird news and weirder rumors, each dutifully reported by the press, coming out of northern Maine. Maybe this was just a guy who wanted smokes or a six-pack or maybe a bottle of coffee brandy and a stroke-book, something to get him through a long, sleety night in a motel outside of Ware or Belchertown.

That hope died when the man’s eyes met his.

It wasn’t the gaze of a family-murdering maniac off on his own private cruise to nowhere; it almost would have been better if that had been the case. The newcomer’s eyes, far from empty, were too full. A million thoughts and ideas seemed to be crossing them, like one of those big-city

tickertapes being run at super speed. They seemed almost to be hopping in their sockets.

And they were the hungriest eyes Deke McCaskell had seen in his entire life.

“We’re closed,” Deke said. The words came out in a croak that didn’t sound like his voice at all. “Me and my partner-he’s in the back-we closed for the day. On account of the goings-on up north. I-we, I mean-just forgot to flip over the sign. We-”

He might have run on for hours-days, even-but the man in the hunting coat interrupted him. “Bacon,” he said. “Where is it?”

Deke knew, suddenly and absolutely, that if he didn’t have bacon, this man would kill him. He might kill him anyway, but without bacon… yes, certainly. He did have bacon. Thank God, thank Christ, thank Okeefenokee and all the hopping ragheads, he did have bacon.

“Cooler in back,” he said in his new, strange voice. The hand lying on top of his magazine felt as cold as a block of ice. In his head, he heard whispering voices that didn’t seem to be his own. Red thoughts and black thoughts. Hungry thoughts.

An inhuman voice asked, What’s a cooler? A tired voice, very human, responded: Go on up the aisle, handsome. You’ll see it.

Hearing voices, Deke thought. Aw, Jesus, no. That’s what happens to people just before they flip out.

The man moved past Deke and up the center aisle. He walked with a heavy limp.

There was a phone by the cash-register. Deke looked at it, then looked away. It was within reach, and he had 911 on the speed-dialer, but it might as well have been on the moon. Even if he was able to summon enough strength to reach for the phone-

I’ll know, the inhuman voice said, and Deke let out a breathless little moan. It was inside his head, as if someone had planted a radio in his brain.

There was a convex mirror mounted over the door, a gadget that came in especially handy in the summer, when the store was full of kids headed up to the Reservoir with their parents the Quabbin was only eighteen miles from here-for fishing or camping or just a picnic. Little bastards were always trying to kite stuff, particularly the candy and the girly magazines. Now Deke looked into it, watching with dread fascination as the man in the orange coat approached the cooler. He stood there a moment, gazing in, then grabbed not just one package of bacon but all four of them.

The man came back down the middle aisle with the bacon, limping along and scanning the shelves. He looked dangerous, he looked hungry, and he also looked dreadfully tired-like a marathon runner going into the last mile. Looking at him gave Deke the same sense of vertigo he felt when he looked down from a high place. It was like looking not at one person but at several, overlaid and shifting in and out of focus. Deke thought fleetingly of a movie he’d seen, some daffy cunt with about a hundred personalities.

The man stopped and got a jar of mayonnaise. At the foot of the aisle he stopped again and snagged a loaf of bread. Then he was at the counter again. Deke could almost smell the exhaustion coming out of his pores. And the craziness.

He set his purchases down and said, “Bacon sandwiches on white, with mayo. Those are the best.” And smiled. It was a smile of such tired, heartbreaking sincerity that Deke forgot his fear for a moment.

Without thinking, he reached out. “Mister, are you all r-”

Deke’s hand stopped as if it had run into a wall. It trembled for a moment over the counter, then flew up and slapped his own face-crack! It drew slowly away and stopped, floating like a Hovercraft.

The third and fourth fingers folded slowly down against the palm.

Don’t kill him!

Come out and stop me!

If you make me try, you might get a surprise.

These voices were in his head.

His Hovercraft hand floated forward and the first two fingers plunged into his nostrils, plugging them. For a moment they were still, and then oh dear Christ they began to dig. And while Deke McCaskell had many questionable habits, chewing his nails was not one of them. At first his fingers didn’t want to move much up there close quarters-but then, as the lubricating blood began to flow, they became positively frisky. They squirmed like worms. The dirty nails dug like fangs. They shoved up further, burrowing brainward… he could feel cartilage tearing… could hear it…

Stop it, Mr Gray, stop it!

And suddenly Deke’s fingers belonged to him again. He pulled them free with a wet plop. Blood pattered down on the counter, on the rubber change-pad with the Skoal logo on it, also on the unclad lass in glasses whose anatomy he had been studying when this creature had come in.

“How much do I owe you, Deke?”

“Take it!” Still that crow-croak, but now it was a nasal croak, because his nostrils were plugged with blood. “Aw, man, just take it and go! The fuck outta here!”

“No, I insist. This is commerce, in which items of real worth are exchanged for currency plain.”

“Three dollars!” Deke cried. Shock was setting in. His heart was beating wildly, his muscles thrumming with adrenaline. He believed the creature might be going, and this made everything infinitely worse: to be so close to a continued life and still know it could be snatched away at this fucking loony’s least whim.

The loony brought out a battered old wallet, opened it, and rummaged for what seemed an age. Saliva drizzled steadily from his mouth as he bent over the wallet. At last he came out with three dollars. He put them on the counter. The wallet went back into his pocket. He rummaged in his nasty-looking jeans (rode hard and put away wet, Deke thought), came out with a fistful of change, and laid three coins on the Skoal pad. Two quarters and a dime.

“I tip twenty per cent,” his customer said with unmistakable pride. “Jonesy tips fifteen. This is better. This is more.”

“Sure,” Deke whispered. His nose was full of blood.

“Have a nice day.”

“You… you take it easy.”

The man in the orange coat stood with his head lowered. Deke could hear him sorting through possible responses. It made him feel like screaming. At last the man said, “I will take it any way I can get it.” There was another pause. Then: “I don’t want you to call anyone, partner.”

“I won’t.”

“Swear to God?”

“Yeah. Swear to God.”

“I’m like God,” his customer remarked.

“Yeah, okay. Whatever you-”

“If you call someone, I’ll know. I’ll come back and fix your wagon.”

“I won’t!”

“Good idea.” He opened the door. The bell jangled. He went out.

For a moment Deke stood where he was, as if frozen to the floor. Then he rushed around the counter, bumping his upper leg hard on the comer. By nightfall there would be a huge black bruise there, but for the moment he felt nothing. He turned the thumb-lock, shot the bolt, then stood there, peering out. Parked in front of the store was a little red shitbox Subaru, mudsplattered, also looking rode hard and put away wet. The man juggled his purchases into the crook of one arm, opened the door, and got in behind the wheel.

Drive away, Deke thought. Please, mister, for the love of God just drive away.

But he didn’t. He picked something up instead-the loaf of bread-and pulled the tie off the end. He took out roughly a dozen slices. Next he opened the jar of mayonnaise, and, using his finger as a knife, began to slather the slices of bread with mayo. After finishing each slice, he licked his finger clean. Each time he did, his eyes slipped closed, his head tipped back, and an expression of ecstasy filled his features, radiating out from the mouth. When he had finished with the bread, he picked up one of the packages of meat and tore off the paper covering. He opened the plastic inner envelope with his teeth and shook out the pound of sliced bacon. He folded it and put it on a piece of bread, then put another piece on top. He tore into the sandwich as ravenously as a wolf. That expression of divine enjoyment never left his face; it was the look of a man enjoying the greatest gourmet meal of his life. His throat knotted as each huge bite went down. Three such bites and the sandwich was gone. As the man in the car reached for two more pieces of bread, a thought filled Deke McCaskell’s brain, flashing there like a neon sign. It’s even better this way! Almost alive! Cold, but almost alive!

Deke backed away from the door, moving slowly, as if underwater. The grayness of the day seemed to invade the store, dimming the lights. He felt his legs come unhinged, and before the dirty board floor tilted up to meet him, gray had gone to black.

When Deke came to, it was later-just how much later he couldn’t tell, because the Budweiser digital clock over the beer cooler was flashing 88:88. Three of his teeth lay on the floor, knocked out when he fell down, he assumed. The blood around his nose and on his chin had dried to a spongy cake. He tried to get up, but his legs wouldn’t support him. He crawled to the door instead, with his hair hanging in his face, praying.

His prayer was answered. The little red shitbox car was gone. Where it had been were four bacon packages, all empty, the mayonnaise jar, three-quarters empty, and half a loaf of Holsum white bread. Several crows-there were some almighty big ones around the Reservoir-had found the bread and were pecking slices out of the torn wrapper. At a distance-almost back to Route 32 two or three more were at work on a congealed mess of bacon and matted chunks of bread. Monsieur’s gourmet lunch had not agreed with him, it seemed.

God,Deke thought.I hope you puked so hard you tore your plumbing loose, you-

But then his own guts took a fantastical, skipping leap and he clapped his hand over his mouth, He had a hideously clear image of the man’s teeth closing on the raw, fatty meat hanging out between the pieces of bread, gray flesh veined with brown like the severed tongue of a dead horse. Deke began to make muffled yurking sounds behind his hand.

A car turned in-just what he needed, a customer while he was on the verge of tossing his cookies. Not really a car at all, on second glance, nor a truck, either. Not even an SUV. It was one of those godawful Humvees, painted in smeary camouflage blobs of black and green. Two people in front and-Deke was almost sure of it-another in back.

He reached out, flipped the OPEN sign hanging in the door over to CLOSED, then backed away. He had gotten to his feet, had managed at least that much, but now he felt perilously close to collapsing again. They saw me in here, just as sure as shit, he thought. They’ll come in and ask where the other one went, because they’re after him. They want him, they want the bacon sandwich man. And I’ll tell. They’ll make me tell. And then I’ll-

His hand rose in front of his eyes. The first two fingers, coated with dried blood up to the second knuckles, were poked out and hooked. They were trembling. To Deke, they almost looked like they were waving. Hello eyes, how you doing? Enjoy looking while you can, because we’ll be coming for you soon.

The person in the back of the Humvee leaned forward, seemed to say something to the driver, and the vehicle leaped backward, one rear wheel splashing through the puddle of vomit left by the store’s last customer. It wheeled around on the road, paused for just a moment, then set off in the direction of Ware and the Quabbin.

When they disappeared over the first hill, Deke McCaskell began to weep. As he walked back toward the counter (staggering and weaving but still on his feet), his gaze fell on the teeth lying on the floor. Three teeth. His. A small price to pay. Oh yes, teeny dues. Then he stopped, gazing at the three dollar bills which still lay on the counter. They had grown a coating of pale red-orange fuzz.

“Oht ear! Eep owen!” Owen, that’s me, Owen thought wearily, but he understood Duddits well enough (it wasn’t that hard, once your ear had become attuned): Not here! Keep going! Owen reversed the Humvee to Route 32 as Duddits sat back-collapsed back-and began

to cough again.

“Look,” Henry said, and pointed. “See that?”

Owen saw. A bunch of wrappers soaking into the ground under the force of the pelting downpour. And a jar of mayonnaise. He threw the Hummer back into drive and headed north. The rain hitting the windshield had a particularly fat quality that he recognized: soon it would turn back to sleet, and then-very likely-to snow. Close to exhausted now, and queerly sad in the wake of the telepathy’s withdrawing wave, Owen found that his chief regret was having to die on such a dirty day.

“How far ahead is he now?” Owen asked, not daring to ask the real question, the only one that mattered: Are we already too late? He assumed that Henry would tell him, were that the case.

“He’s there,” Henry said absently. He had turned around in the seat and was wiping Duddits’s face with a damp cloth. Duddits looked at him gratefully and tried to smile. His ashy cheeks were sweaty now, and the black patches under his eyes had spread, turning them into raccoon s eyes.

“If he’s there, why did we have to come here?” Owen asked. He had the Hummer up to seventy, very dangerous on this slick stretch of two-lane blacktop, but now there was no choice.

“I didn’t want to risk Duddits losing the line,” Henry said. “If that happens…”

Duddits uttered a vast groan, wrapped his arms around his midsection, and doubled over them. Henry, still kneeling on the seat, stroked the slender column of his neck.

“Take it easy, Duds,” Henry said. “You’re all right.”

But he wasn’t. Owen knew it and so did Henry. Feverish, crampy in spite of a second Prednisone pill and two more Percocets, now spraying blood every time he coughed, Duddits Cavell was several country miles from all right. The consolation prize was that the Jonesy-Gray combination was also a very long way from all right.

It was the bacon. All they’d hoped to do was to make Mr Gray stop for awhile; none of them had guessed how prodigious his gluttony would turn out to be. The effect on Jonesy’s digestion had been fairly predictable. Mr Gray had vomited once in the parking lot of the little store, and had had to pull over twice more on the road to Ware, leaning out the window and offloading several pounds of raw bacon with almost convulsive force.

Diarrhea came next. He had stopped at the Mobil on Route 9, southeast of Ware, and had barely made it into the men’s room. The sign outside the station read CHEAP GAS CLEAN TOILETS, but the CLEAN TOILETS part was certainly out of date by the time Mr Gray left. He didn’t kill anyone at the Mobil, which Henry counted as a plus.

Before turning onto the Quabbin access road, Mr Gray had needed to stop twice more and dash into the sopping woods, where he tried to evacuate Jonesy’s groaning bowels. By then the rain had changed over to huge flakes of wet snow. Jonesy’s body had weakened considerably, and Henry was hoping for a faint. So far it hadn’t happened.

Mr Gray was furious with Jonesy, railing at him continuously by the time he slipped back behind the wheel of the car after his second trip into the woods. This was all Jonesy’s fault, Jonesy had trapped him. He chose to ignore his own hunger and the compulsive greed with which he had eaten, pausing between bites only to lick the grease from his fingers. Henry had seen such selective arrangements of the facts-emphasizing some, ignoring others completely-many times before, in his patients. In some ways, Mr Gray was Barry Newman all over again.How human he’s becoming, he thought. How curiously human. “When you say he’s there,” Owen asked, “just how there do you mean?” “I don’t know. He’s closed down again, at least pretty much. Duddits, do you hear Jonesy?”

Duddits looked at Henry wearily, then shook his head. “Isser Ay ookar cards,” he said-Mr Gray took our cards-but that was like a literal translation of a slang phrase. Duddits hadn’t the vocabulary to express what had actually happened, but Henry could read it in his mind. Mr Gray was unable to enter Jonesy’s office stronghold and take the playing cards, but he had somehow turned them all blank.

“Duddits, how are you making out?” Owen said, looking into the rearview mirror.

“I o-ay,” Duddits said, and immediately began to shiver. On his lap was his yellow lunchbox and the brown bag with his medicines in it… his medicines and that odd little string thing. Surrounding him was the voluminous blue duffel coat, yet inside it, he still shivered.

He’s going fast, Owen thought, as Henry began to swab his old friend’s face again.

The Humvee skidded on a slick patch, danced on the edge of disaster-a crash at seventy miles an hour would probably kill them all, and even if it didn’t, it would put paid to any final thin chance they might have of stopping Mr Gray-and then came back under control again.

Owen found his eyes drifting back to the paper bag, his mind going again to that string-thing.

Beaver sent to me. For my Christmas last week.

Trying to communicate now by telepathy was, Owen thought, like putting a message into a bottle and then tossing the bottle into the ocean. But he did it anyway, sending out a thought in what he hoped was Duddits’s direction: What do you call it, son?

Suddenly and unexpectedly, he saw a large space, combination living room, dining room, and kitchen. The mellow pine boards glowed with varnish. There was a Navajo rug on the floor and a tapestry on one wall-tiny Indian hunters surrounding a gray figure, the archetypal alien of a thousand supermarket tabloids. There was a fireplace, a stone chimney, an oak dining table. But what riveted Owen’s attention (it had to; it was at the center of the picture Duddits had sent him, and glowed with its own special light) was the string creation which hung from the center rafter. It was the Cadillac version of the one in Duddits’s medicine bag, woven in bright colors instead of drab white string, but otherwise the same. Owen’s eyes filled with tears. It was the most beautiful room in the world. He felt that way because Duddits felt that way. And Duddits felt that way because it was where his friends went, and he loved them.

“Dreamcatcher,” said the dying man in the back seat, and he pronounced the word perfectly.

Owen nodded. Dreamcatcher, yes.

It’s you, he sent, supposing that Henry was overhearing but not caring one way or the other. This message was for Duddits, strictly for Duddits. You’re the dreamcatcher, aren’t you? Their dreamcatcher. You always were.

In the mirror, Duddits smiled.

They passed a sign which read QUABBIN RESERVOIR 8 MILES NO FISHING NO SERVICES PICNIC AREA OPEN HIKING TRAILS OPEN PASS AT OWN RISK. There was more, but at eighty miles an hour, Henry had no time to read it.

“Any chance he’ll park and walk in?” Owen asked.

“Don’t even hope for it,” Henry said. “He’ll drive as far as he can. Maybe he’ll get stuck. That’s what you want to hope for. There’s a good chance it might happen. And he’s weak. He won’t be able to move fast.”

“What about you, Henry? Will you be able to move fast?”

Considering how stiff he was and how badly his legs ached, that was a fair question. “If there’s a chance,” he said, “I’ll go as hard as I can. In any case, there’s Duddits. I don’t think he’s going to be capable of a very strenuous hike.”

Any hike at all, he didn’t add.

“Kurtz and Freddy and Perlmutter, Henry. How far back are they?”

Henry considered this. He could feel Perlmutter clearly enough… and he could touch the ravening cannibal inside him, as well. It was like Mr Gray, only the weasel was living in a world made of bacon. The bacon was Archibald Perlmutter, once a captain in the United States Army. Henry didn’t like to go there. Too much pain. Too much hunger.

“Fifteen miles,” he said. “Maybe only twelve. But it doesn’t matter, Owen. We’re going to beat them. The only question is whether or not we’re going to catch Mr Gray. We’ll need some luck. Or some help.”

“And if we catch him, Henry. Are we still going to be heroes?”

Henry gave him a tired smile. “I guess we’ll have to try.”

Chapter Twenty-One SHAFT 12

Mr Gray drove the Subaru nearly three miles up East Street-muddy, rutted, and now covered with three inches of fresh snow-before crashing into a fault caused by a plugged culvert. The Subaru had fought its way gamely through several mires north of the Goodnough Dike, and had bottomed out in one place hard enough to tear off the muffler and most of the exhaust pipe, but this latest break in the road was too much. The car went forward nose-first into the crack and lodged on the pipe, unmuffled engine blatting stridently. Jonesy’s body was thrown forward and the seatbelt locked. His diaphragm clenched and he vomited helplessly onto the dashboard: nothing solid now, only bilious strings of saliva. For a moment the color ran out of the world and the rackety roar of the engine faded. He fought viciously for consciousness, afraid that if he passed out for even a moment, Jonesy might somehow be able to take control again.

The dog whined. Its eyes were still closed but its rear legs twitched spasmodically and its ears flicked. Its belly was distended, the skin rippling. Its moment was near.

A little at a time, color and reality began to return. Mr Gray took several deep breaths, coaxing this sick and unhappy body back to something resembling calm. How far was there still to go? He didn’t think it could be far now, but if the little car was really stuck, he would have to walk and the dog couldn’t. The dog must remain asleep, and it was already perilously close to waking again.

He caressed the sleep-centers of its rudimentary brain. He wiped at his slimy mouth as he did it. Part of his mind was aware of Jonesy, still in there, blind to the outside world but awaiting any chance to leap forward and sabotage his mission; and, incredibly, another part of his mind craved more food-craved bacon, the very stuff which had poisoned it.

Sleep, little friend. Speaking to the dog; speaking also to the byrum. And both listened. Lad ceased whining. His paws stopped twitching. The ripples running across the dog’s belly slowed… slowed… stopped. This calm wouldn’t last long, but for now all was well. As well as it could be.

Surrender, Dorothy.

“Shut up!” Mr Gray said. “Kiss my bender!” He put the Subaru in reverse and floored the accelerator. The motor howled, scaring birds up from the trees, but it was no good. The front wheels were caught firmly, and the back wheels were up, spinning in the air.

“Fuck!” Mr Gray cried, and slanu-ned Jonesy’s fist down on the steering wheel. “Jesus-Christ-bananas! Fuck me Freddy!”

He felt behind him for his pursuers and got nothing clear, only a sense of approach. Two groups of them, and the one that was closer had Duddits. Mr Gray feared Duddits, sensed that he was the one most responsible for how absurdly, infuriatingly difficult this job had become. If he could stay ahead of Duddits, all would end well. It would help to know how close Duddits was, but they were blocking him-Duddits, Jonesy, and the one called Henry. The three of them together made a force Mr Gray had never encountered before, and he was afraid.

“But I’m still enough ahead,” he told Jonesy, getting out. He slipped, uttered a Beaver-curse, then slammed the door shut. It was snowing again, great white flakes that filled the air like confetti and splashed against Jonesy’s cheeks. Mr Gray slogged around the back of the car, boots sliding and smooching in the mud. He paused for a moment to examine the corrugated silver back of the pipe rising from the bottom of the ditch which had trapped his car (he had also fallen victim in some degree to his host’s mostly useless but infernally sticky curiosity), then went on around to the passenger door. “I’m going to beat your asshole friends quite handily.”

No answer to this goad, but he sensed Jonesy just as he sensed the others, Jonesy silent but still the bone in his throat.

Never mind him. Fuck him. The dog was the problem. The byrum was poised to come out. How to transport the dog?

Back into Jonesy’s storage vault. For a moment there was nothing… and then an image from “Sunday School”, where Jonesy had gone as a child to learn about “God” and “God’s only begotten son”, who appeared to be a byrum, creator of a byrus culture which Jonesy’s mind identified simultaneously as “Christianity” and “bullshit”. The image was very clear, from a book called “the Holy Bible”. It showed “God’s only begotten son” carrying a lamb-wearing it, almost. The lamb’s front legs hung over one side of “begotten son’s” chest, its rear legs over the other.

It would do.

Mr Gray pulled out the sleeping dog and draped it around his neck. It was heavy already-Jonesy’s muscles were stupidly, infuriatingly weak-and it would be much worse by the time he got where he was going… but he would get there.

He set off up East Street through the thickening snow, wearing the sleeping border collie like a fur stole.

The new snow was extremely slippery, and once they were on Route 32, Freddy was forced to drop his speed back to forty. Kurtz felt like howling with frustration. Worse, Perlmutter was slipping away from him, into something like a semi-coma. And this at a time, goddam him, when he had suddenly been able to read the one Owen and his new friends were after, the one they called Mr Gray.

“He’s too busy to hide,” Pearly said. He spoke dreamily, like someone on the edge of sleep. “He’s afraid. I don’t know about Underhill, boss, but Jonesy… Henry… Duddits… he’s afraid of them. And he’s right to be afraid. They killed Richie.”

“Who’s Richie, buck?” Kurtz didn’t give much of a squirt, but he wanted Perlmutter to stay awake. He sensed they were coming to a place where he wouldn’t need Perlmutter anymore, but for now he still did.

“Don’t… know…” The last word became a snore. The Humvee skidded almost sideways. Freddy cursed, fought the wheel, and managed to regain control just before the Hummer hit the ditch. Kurtz took no notice. He leaned over the seat and slapped Perlmutter on the side of the face, hard. As he did so, they passed the store with the sign reading BEST BAIT, WHY WAIT? in the window.

“Owwww! Pearly” s eyes fluttered open. The whites were now yellowish. Kurtz cared about this no more than he cared about Richie. “Dooon’t, boss…

“Where are they now?”

“The water,” Pearly said. His voice was weak, that of a petulant invalid. The belly under his coat was a distended, occasionally twitching mountain. Ma Joad in her ninth month, God bless and keep us, Kurtz thought. “The waaaa…”

His eyes closed again. Kurtz drew his hand back to slap.

“Let him sleep,” Freddy said.

Kurtz looked at him, eyebrows raised.

“It’s got to be the Reservoir he means. And if it is, we don’t need him anymore.” He pointed through the windshield at the tracks of the few cars that had been out this afternoon ahead of them on Route 32. They were black and stark against the fall of fresh white snow. “There won’t be anyone up there today but us, boss. Just us.”

“Praise God.” Kurtz sat back, picked his nine-millimeter up off the seat, looked at it, and put it back in its holster. “Tell me something, Freddy.”

“I will if I can.”

“When this is over, how does Mexico sound to you?”

“Good. As long as we don’t drink the water.”

Kurtz burst out laughing and patted Freddy on the shoulder. Beside Freddy, Archie Perlmutter slipped deeper into coma. Inside his lower intestine, in that rich dump of discarded food and worn-out dead cells, something for the first time opened its black eyes.

Two stone posts marked the entrance to the vast acreage surrounding the Quabbin Reservoir. Beyond them, the road closed down to what was essentially a single lane, and Henry had a sense of having come full circle. It wasn’t Massachusetts, but Maine, and although the sign said Quabbin Access, it was really the Deep Cut Road all over again, He actually found himself looking up at the leaden sky, half-expecting to see the dancing lights. What he saw instead was a bald eagle, soaring almost close enough to touch. It landed on the lower branch of a pine tree and watched them go by.

Duddits raised his head from where it had lain against the cool glass and said, “Isser Ay walkin now. “Henry’s heart leaped. “Owen, did you hear?”

“I heard,” Owen said, and pressed the Humvee a little harder. The wet snow beneath them was as treacherous as ice, and with the state roads behind them, there was now only a single set of tracks leading north toward the Reservoir.

We’ll be leaving our own set, Henry thought. If Kurtz gets this far, he won’t need telepathy.

Duddits groaned, clutched his middle, and shivered all over. “Ennie, I sick. Duddits sick.”

Henry brushed Duddits’s hairless brow, not liking the heat of the skin. What came next? Seizures, probably. A big one might take Duds off in a hurry, given his weakened condition, and God knew that might be a mercy. The best thing. Still, it hurt to think of it. Henry Devlin, the potential suicide. And instead of him, the darkness had swallowed his friends, one by one.

“You hang in there, Duds. Almost done now.” But he had an idea the toughest part might still be ahead.

Duddits’s eyes opened again. “Isser Ay-ot tuck.”

“What?” Owen asked. “I didn’t get that one.”

“He says Mr Gray got stuck,” Henry said, still brushing Duddit’s brow. Wishing there was hair to brush, and remembering when there had been. Duddits’s fine blond hair. His crying had hurt them, had chopped into their heads like a dull blade, but how happy his laughter had made them-you heard Duddits Cavell laugh and for a little while you believed the old lies again: that life was good, that the lives of boys and men, girls and women, had some purpose. That there was light as well as darkness.

“Why doesn’t he just throw the goddam dog into the Reservoir?” Owen asked. His voice cracked with weariness. “Why does he feel he has to go all the way to this Shaft 12? Is it just because the Russian woman did?”

“I don’t think the Reservoir is sure enough for him,” Henry said. “The Standpipe would have been good, but the aqueduct is even better. It’s an intestine sixty-five miles long. And Shaft 12 is the throat. Duddits, can we catch him?”

Duddits looked at him from his exhausted eyes, then shook his head. Owen pounded his own thigh in frustration. Duddits wet his lips. Spoke two words in a hoarse near-whisper. Owen heard them but couldn’t make them out.

“What? What did he say?”

"'Only Jonesy."”

“What does that mean? Only Jonesy what?”

“Only Jonesy can stop him, I guess.”

The Hummer skidded again and Henry grabbed hold of the seat. A cold hand closed over his, Duddits was looking at him with desperate intensity. He tried to speak and began coughing instead, gruesome wet hacking sounds. Some of the blood that came out of his mouth was markedly lighter, frothy and almost pink. Henry thought it was lung-blood. And even while the coughs shook him, Duddits’s grip on Henry’s hand didn’t loosen.

“Think it to me,” Henry said. “Can you think it to me, Duds?” For a moment there was nothing but Duddits’s cold hand closed over his, Duddits’s eyes locked on his. Then Duddits and the khaki interior of the Humvee, with its faded scent of surreptitiously smoked cigarettes, was gone. In its place Henry sees a pay telephone-the old-fashioned kind with different-sized holes on top, one for quarters, one for dimes, one for nickels. The rumble of men’s voices and a clack-clacking sound, hauntingly familiar. After a moment he realizes it’s the sound of checkers on a checkerboard. He’s looking at the pay phone in Gosselin’s, the one from which they called Duddits after the death of Richie Grenadeau. Jonesy made the actual call, because he was the only one with a phone he could bill it to. The others gathered around, all of them still with their jackets on because it was so cold in the store, even living in the big woods with trees all around him, Old Man Gosselin wouldn’t throw an extra log in the stove, what a fuckin pisser. There are two signs over the phone. One reads PLEASE LIMIT ALL CALLS TO 5 MINS.

The other one-

There was a crunching bang. Duddits was thrown against the back of Henry’s seat and Henry was thrown into the dashboard. Their hands parted. Owen had skidded off the road and into the ditch. Ahead of them, the Subaru’s tracks, fading now under fresh cover, ran off into the thickening snow.

“Henry! You all right?”

“Yeah. Duds? Okay?”

Duddits nodded, but the cheek he had struck was turning black with amazing speed. Your Leukemia at Work for You.

Owen dropped the Humvee’s transmission into low range and began to creep up the ditch. The Humvee was canted at a severe angle-maybe thirty degrees-but it rolled pretty well once Owen got it moving.

“Fasten your seatbelt. First fasten his, though. “'He was trying to tell me s-” “I don’t give a damn what he was trying to tell you. This time we were all right, next time we could roll three-sixty. Fasten his belt, then your own.”

Henry did as he was told, thinking about the other sign over the pay phone. What had it said? Something about Jonesy. Only Jonesy could stop Mr Gray now, that was the Gospel According to Duddits.

What had that other sign said?

Owen was forced to drop his speed to twenty. It made him crazy to creep like this, but the wet snow was falling furiously now and visibility was back to nearly zero.

Just before the Subaru’s tracks disappeared entirely they came to the car itself, nose-down in a water-carved ditch running across the road, passenger door open, rear wheels in the air.

Owen stepped on the emergency brake, drew his Glock, opened his door. “Stay here, Henry,” he said, and got out. He ran to the Subaru, bent low.

Henry unlatched his seatbelt and turned to Duddits, who was now sprawled against the back seat, gasping for breath, held in a sitting position only by the seatbelt. One cheek was a waxy yellow; the other had been engulfed by spreading blood under the skin. His nose was bleeding again, the wads of cotton sticking out of the nostrils soaked and dripping.

“Duds, I’m so sorry,” Henry said. “This is a fuckarow.”

Duddits nodded, then raised his arms. He could only hold them up for a few seconds, but to Henry his meaning seemed obvious enough. Henry opened his door and got out just as Owen came running back, his Glock now stuffed in his belt. The air was so thick with snow, the individual flakes so huge, that breathing had become difficult.

“I thought I told you to stay where you were,” Owen said.

“I only want to get in the back with him.”

“Why?”

Henry spoke clearly enough, although his voice trembled slightly. “Because he’s dying,” he said. “He’s dying, but I think he has one more thing to tell me first.”

Owen looked in the rearview mirror, saw Henry with his arms around Duddits, saw they were both wearing their seatbelts, and fastened his own.

“Hold him good,” he said. “There’s going to be a hell of a jounce.

He reversed a hundred feet, put the Hummer in low, and drove forward, aiming for the spot between the abandoned Subaru and the righthand ditch. The crack in the road looked a little narrower on that side.

There was indeed a hell of a jounce. Owen’s seatbelt locked and he saw Duddits’s body leap in Henry’s arms. Duddits’s bald head bounced against Henry’s chest. Then they were over the crack and once more rolling up East Street. Owen could just make out the last phantom shapes of shoeprints on the now-white ribbon of the road. Mr Gray was on foot and they were still rolling. If they could catch up before the bastard cut into the woods-

But they didn’t.

With a final tremendous effort, Duddits raised his head. Now, Henry saw with dismay and horror, Duddits’s eyes were also filling with blood.

Clack. Clack-clack. The dry chuckles of old men as someone accomplishes the fabled triple jump. The phone began to swim into his field of vision again. And the signs over it.

“No, Duddits,” Henry whispered. “Don’t try. Save your strength.”

But for what? For what if not for this?

The sign on the right: PLEASE LIMIT ALL CALLS TO 5 MINS, Smells of tobacco, smells of woodsmoke, the old brine of pickles. His friend’s arms around him.

And the sign on the left: CALL JONESY NOW.

“Duddits…” His voice floating in the darkness. Darkness, his old friend. “Duddits, I don’t know how.”

Duddits’s voice came to him a final time, very tired but calm: Quick, Henry-I can only hold on a little longer-you need to talk to him.

Henry picks the telephone’s receiver out of its cradle. Thinks absurdly (but isn’t the whole situation absurd?) that he doesn’t have any change not so much as a crying dime. Holds the phone to his ear.

Roberta Cavell’s voice comes, impersonal and businesslike: “Massachusetts General Hospital, how may I direct your call?”

Mr Gray flailed Jonesy’s body along the path which ran up the east side of the Reservoir from the point where East Street ended, slipping, falling, grabbing branches, getting up again. Jonesy’s knees were lacerated, the pants tom open and soaked with blood. His lungs were burning, his heart beating like a steam-hammer. Yet the only thing that concerned him was Jonesy’s hip, the one he’d broken in the accident. It was a hot and throbbing ball, shooting pain all the way down the thigh to the knee, and up to the middle of his back along the road of his spine. The weight of the dog made things worse. It was still asleep, but the thing inside was wide awake, held in place only by Mr Gray’s will. Once, as he was rising to his feet, the hip locked up entirely and Mr Gray had to beat it repeatedly with Jonesy’s gloved fist to make it let go again. How much farther? How much farther through the cursed, stifling, blinding, neverending snow? And what was Jonesy up to? Anything? Mr Gray didn’t dare let go of the byrum’s restless hunger-it had nothing even approaching a mind-long enough to go to the door of the locked room and listen.

A phantom shape appeared ahead in the snow. Mr Gray paused, gasping and peering at it, and then fought his way forward again, holding the dog’s limp paws and dragging Jonesy’s right foot.

Here was a sign nailed to the trunk of a tree: ABSOLUTELY NO FISHING FROM SHAFT HOUSE. Fifty feet beyond it, stone steps rose up from the path. Six of them… no, eight. At the top was a stone building on a stone foundation that jutted out into the snowy gray nothing where the Reservoir lay-Jonesy’s ears could hear water lapping against stone even over the rushing, labored beat of his heart.

He had come to the place. Clutching the dog and using the last of Jonesy’s depleted strength, Mr Gray began to totter up the snow-covered steps.

As they passed between the stone posts marking the entrance to the Reservoir, Kurtz said: “Pull over, Freddy. Side of the road.”

Freddy did as he was asked without question.

“You got your auto, laddie?”

Freddy lifted it. The good old M-16, tried and true. Kurtz nodded.

“Sidearm?”

“.44 Magnum, boss.”

And Kurtz with the nine, which he liked for close work. He wanted this to be close work. He wanted to see the color of Owen Underhill’s brains.

“Freddy?”

“Yes, boss.”

“I just wanted you to know that this is my final mission, and I couldn’t have hoped for a finer companion.” He reached out and gave Freddy’s shoulder a squeeze. Beside Freddy, Perlmutter snored with his Ma Joad face tipped up toward the roof Five minutes or so before reaching the stone pillars he had passed several long, spectacularly odoriferous farts. After that, Pearly’s distended gut had gone down again. Probably for the last time, Kurtz thought.

Freddy’s eyes, meanwhile, had grown gratifyingly bright. Kurtz was delighted. He had not entirely lost his touch even now, it seemed.

“All right, buck,” Kurtz said. “Full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes. Right?”

“Right, sir.” Kurtz guessed sir was okay again now. They could pretty well put the protocols of the mission behind them. They were Quantrill’s boys, now; two final jayhawkers riding the western Massachusetts range.

With an unmistakable little grimace of distaste, Freddy jerked a thumb at Perlmutter. “Want me to try waking him up, sir? He may be too far gone, but-”

“Why bother?” Kurtz asked. Still gripping Freddy’s shoulder, he pointed ahead, where the access road disappeared into a wall of white: the snow. The goddam snow that had chased them all his way, a grim fucking reaper dressed in white instead of black. The tracks of the Subaru were now entirely gone, but those of the Humvee Owen had stolen were still visible. If they moved along briskly, praise God, following these tracks would be a walk in the park. “I don’t think we need him anymore, which I personally find a great relief Go, Freddy. Go.”

The Humvee flirted her tail and then steadied. Kurtz drew his nine and held it against his leg. Coming for you, Owen. Coming for you, buck. And you better get your speech ready for God, because you’re going to be making it just about an hour from now.

The office which he had furnished so beautifully-furnished out of his mind and his memories-was now falling apart.

Jonesy limped restlessly back and forth, looking around the room, lips pressed so tightly together they were white, forehead beaded with sweat even though it had gotten damned cold in here,

This was The Fall of the Office of Jonesy instead of the House of Usher. The furnace was howling and clanking beneath him, making the floor shake. White stuff-frost crystals, maybe-puffed in through the vent and left a powdery triangular shape on the wall. Where it touched it went to work on the wood paneling, simultaneously rotting it and warping it. The pictures fell one by one, tumbling to the floor like suicides. The Eames chair-the one he’d always wanted, the very one-split in two as if it had been hacked by an invisible axe. The mahogany panels on the walls began to split and peel free like dead skin. The drawers juddered out of their places in the desk and clattered one by one to the floor. The shutters Mr Gray had installed to block his view of the outside world were vibrating and shaking, producing a steady metallic squalling that set Jonesy’s teeth on edge.

Crying out to Mr Gray, demanding to know what was going on, would be useless… and besides, Jonesy had all the information he needed. He had slowed Mr Gray down, but Mr Gray had first risen to the challenge and then above it. Viva Mr Gray, who had either reached his goal or almost reached it. As the paneling fell off the walls, he could see the dirty Sheetrock beneath: the walls of the Tracker Brothers office as four boys had seen it in 1978, lined up with their foreheads to the glass, their new chum standing behind them as bidden, waiting for them to be done with whatever it was they were doing, waiting for them to take him home. Now another wood panel tore loose, coming off the wall with a sound like tearing paper, and beneath it was a bulletin board with a single photo, a Polaroid, tacked to it. Not a beauty queen, not Tina Jean Schlossinger, but just some woman with her skirt hiked to the bottom of her panties, pretty stupid. The nice rug on the floor suddenly shrivelled like skin, revealing dirty Tracker Brothers tile beneath, and those white tadpoles, scumbags left by couples who came in here to screw beneath the disinterested gaze of the Polaroid woman who was no one, really, just an artifact of a hollow past.

He paced, lurching on his bad hip, which hadn’t hurt this badly since just after the accident, and he understood all of this, oh yes indeed, you had better believe it. His hip was full of splinters and ground glass; his shoulders and neck ached with a fierce tiredness. Mr Gray was beating his body to death as he made his final charge and there was nothing Jonesy could do about it.

The dreamcatcher was still okay. Swaying back and forth in great looping arcs, but still okay. Jonesy fixed his eyes on it. He had thought himself ready to die, but he didn’t want to go like this, not in this stinking office. Outside of it, they had once done something good, something almost noble. To die in here, beneath the dusty, indifferent gaze of the woman pinned to the bulletin board… that didn’t seem fair. Never mind the rest of the world; he, Gary Jones of Brookline, Massachusetts, once of Derry, Maine, lately of the Jefferson Tract, deserved better.

“Please, I deserve better than this!” he cried to the swaying cobweb shape in the air, and on the disintegrating desk behind him, the telephone rang.

Jonesy wheeled around, groaning at the fiery, complicated pain in his hip. The phone on which he’d called Henry earlier had been his office phone, the blue Trimline. The one on the cracked surface of the desk now was black and clunky, with a dial instead of buttons and a sticker on it reading MAY THE FORCE BE WITH YOU. It was the phone he’d had in his childhood room, the one his parents had given him for his birthday. 949-7784, the number to which he had charged the call to Duddits all those years ago.

He sprang for it, ignoring his hip, praying the line wouldn’t disintegrate and disconnect before he could answer. “Hello? Hello!” Swaying back and forth on the shaking, vibrating floor. The whole office now going up and down like a ship on a heavy sea.Of all the voices he might have expected, Roberta’s was the last. “Yes, Doctor, hold on for your call.” There was a click so loud it hurt his head, then silence. Jonesy groaned and was about to put

the phone down when there was another click.

“Jonesy?” It was Henry. Faint, but undoubtedly Henry.

“Where are you?” Jonesy shouted. “Christ, Henry, the place is falling apart! I’m falling apart!”

“I’m in Gosselin’s,” Henry said, “only I’m not. Wherever you are, you’re not. We’re in the hospital where they took you after you got hit…” A crackle on the line, a buzz, and then Henry came back, sounding closer and stronger. Sounding like a lifeline in all this disintegration. not there, either!”

“What?”

“We’re in the dreamcatcher, Jonesy! We’re in the dreamcatcher and we always were! Ever since ’78! Duddits is the dreamcatcher, but he’s dying! He’s holding on, but I don’t know how long… “Another click followed by another buzz, bitter and electric.

“Henry! Henry!”

“… come out!” Faint again now. Henry sounded desperate. “You have to come out, Jonesy! Meet me! Run along the dreamcatcher and meet me! There’s still time! We can take this son of a bitch! Do you hear me? We can-”

There was another click and the phone went dead. The body of his childhood phone cracked, split open, and vomited out a senseless tangle of wires. All of them were red-orange; all of them were contaminated with the byrus.

Jonesy dropped the phone and looked up at the swaying dreamcatcher, that ephemeral cobweb. He remembered a line they’d been fond of as kids, pulled out of some comedian’s routine: Wherever you are, there you are. That had been right up there with Same shit, different day, had perhaps even taken over first place as they grew older and began to consider themselves sophisticated. Wherever you are, there you are. Only according to Henry’s call just now, that wasn’t true. Wherever they thought they were, they weren’t.

They were in the dreamcatcher.

He noted that the one swaying in the air above the ruins of his desk had four central spokes radiating out from the center. Many connecting threads were held together by those spokes, but what held the spokes together was the center-the core where they merged.

Run along the dreamcatcher and meet me! There’s still time!

Jonesy turned and sprinted for the door.

Mr Gray was also at a door-the one into the shaft house. It was locked. Considering what had happened with the Russian woman, this didn’t surprise him much. Locking the barn door after the horse had been stolen was Jonesy’s phrase for it. If he’d had one of the kim, this would have been easy. As it was, he wasn’t too perturbed. One of the interesting side effects of having emotions, he had discovered, was that they caused you to think ahead, plan ahead, so that you wouldn’t trigger an all-out emotional attack if things went wrong.

It might be one reason these creatures had survived as long as they had.

Jonesy’s suggestion that he give in to all this-go native had been his phrase for it, one that struck Mr Gray as both mysterious and exotic-wouldn’t quite leave his mind, but Mr Gray pushed it aside. He would accomplish his mission here, satisfy the imperative. After that, who knew? Bacon sandwiches, perhaps. And what Jonesy’s mind identified as a “cocktail”. This was a cool and refreshing drink, slightly intoxicating-

A gust of wind rolled off the Reservoir, slapping wet snow into his face, momentarily blinding him. It was like the snap of a. wet towel, returning him to the here and now, where he had a job to finish.

He sidled to the left on the rectangular granite stoop, slipped, then dropped to his knees, ignoring the howl from Jonesy’s hip. He hadn’t come all this way-black light-years and white miles-either to fall back down the steps and break his neck or to tumble into the Quabbin and die of hypothermia in that chilly water.

The stoop had been placed atop a mound of crushed stone. Leaning over the left side of the stoop, he brushed snow away and began feeling for a loose chunk. There were windows flanking the locked door, narrow but not too narrow.

Sound was tamped down and flattened by the heavy fall of wet snow, but he could hear the sound of an approaching motor. There had been another, as well, but that one had already stopped, probably at the end of East Street. They were coming, but they were too late. It was a mile along the path, which was densely overgrown and slippery underfoot. By the time they got here the dog would be down the shaft, drowning and delivering the byrum into the aqueduct at the same time.

He found a loose rock and pulled it free, working carefully so as not to dislodge the pulsing body of the dog around his shoulders. He backed away from the edge on his knees, then tried to get to his feet. At first he couldn’t. The ball of Jonesy’s hip had swelled tight again. He finally lurched upright, although the pain was incredible, seeming to go all the way up to his teeth and his temples.

He stood for a moment, holding Jonesy’s bad right leg a little off the ground like a horse with a stone in its hoof, bracing himself against the locked shaft-house door. When the pain had abated somewhat, he used the rock to beat the glass out of the window to the left of the door. He cut Jonesy’s hand in several places, once deeply, and several cracked panes in the upper half of the window hung over the lower half like a cut-rate guillotine, but he paid no attention to these things. Nor did he sense that Jonesy had finally left his bolt-hole,

Mr Gray squirmed in through the window, landed on the cold concrete floor, and looked around.

He was in a rectangular room about thirty feet long. At the far end, a window which no doubt would have given a spectacular view of the Reservoir on a clear day showed only white, as if a sheet had been tacked over it. To one side of it was what looked like a gigantic steel pail, its sides speckled with red-not byrus, but an oxide Jonesy identified as “rust”. Mr Gray didn’t know for sure but guessed that men could be lowered down the shaft in the bucket, should some emergency require it.

The iron cover, four feet across, was in place, seated dead center in the middle of the floor. He could see the square notch on one side of it and looked around. A few tools leaned against the wall. One of them, in a scatter of glass from the broken window, was a crowbar. Quite possibly the same one the Russian woman had used as she prepared for her suicide.

Way I heard it, Mr Gray thought, the folks in Boston’ll be drinking that last byrum in their morning coffee right around Valentine’s Day.

He seized the crowbar, limped painfully to the center of the room with his breath puffing cold and white before him, then seated the spatulate end of the tool in the slot of the cover. The fit was perfect.

Henry racks the telephone, takes in a deep breath, holds it… and then runs for the door which is marked both OFFICE and PRIVATE.

“Hey!” old Reenie Gosselin squawks from her place at the cash-register. “Come back here, kid! You can’t go in there!”

Henry doesn’t stop, doesn’t even slow, but as he goes through the door he realizes that yeah, he is a kid, at least a foot shy of his final height, and although he’s wearing specs, they’re nowhere near as heavy as they will be later on. He’s a kid, but under all that flopping hair (which will have thinned a bit by the time he hits his thirties) there is an adult’s brain. I’m two, two, two mints in one, he thinks, and as he bursts into Old Man Gosselin’s office he is cackling madly-laughing like they did in the old days, when the strands of the dreamcatcher were all close to the center and Duddits was running their pegs. I almost busted a gut, they used to say; I almost busted a gut, what a fuckin pisser.

Into the office he goes, but it’s not Old Man Gosselin’s office where a man named Owen Underhill once played a man whose name was not Abraham Kurtz a tape of the grayboys talking in famous voices; it is a corridor, a hospital corridor, and Henry is not in the least surprised. It’s Mass General. He’s made it.

The place is dank, colder than any hospital corridor should be, and the walls are splotched with byrus. Somewhere a voice is groaning I don’t want you, I don’t want a shot, I want Jonesy. Jonesy knew Duddits, Jonesy died, died in the ambulance, Jonesy’s the only one who will do. Stay away, kiss my bender, I want Jonesy.

But he will not stay away. He is crafty old Mr Death and he will not stay away. He has business here.

He walks unseen down the corridor, where it’s cold enough for him to see his breath puffing out in front of him, a boy in an orange coat he will soon outgrow. He wishes he had his rifle, the one Pete’s Dad loaned him, but that rifle is gone, left behind, buried in the years along with Jonesy’s phone with the Star Wars sticker on it (how they had all envied that phone), and Beaver’s jacket of many zippers, and Pete’s sweater with the NASA logo on the breast. Buried in the years. Some dreams die and fall free, that is another of the world’s bitter truths. How many bitter truths there are.

He walks past a pair of laughing, talking nurses-one of them is Josie Rinkenhauer, all grown up, and the other is the woman in the Polaroid photograph they saw that day through the Tracker Brothers office window. They don’t see him because he’s not here for them; he is in the dreamcatcher now, running back along his strand, running toward the center. I am the eggman, he thinks. Time slowed, reality bent, on and on the eggman went.

Henry went on up the corridor toward the sound of Mr Gray’s voice.

Kurtz heard it clearly enough through the shattered window: the broken stutter of automatic-rifle fire. It provoked an old sense of unease and impatience in him: anger that the shooting had started without him, and fear that it would be over before he got there, nothing left but the wounded yelling medic-medic-medic.

“Push it harder, Freddy.” Directly in front of Kurtz, Perlmutter was snoring ever deeper into his coma.

“Pretty greasy underfoot, boss.”

“Push it anyway. I’ve got a feeling we’re almost-”

He saw a pink stain on the clean white curtain of the snow, as diffuse as blood from a facial cut seeping up through shaving cream, and then the ditched Subaru was right in front of them, nose down and tail up. In the following moments Kurtz took back every unkind thought he’d had about Freddy’s driving. His second in command simply twisted the steering wheel to the right and punched the gas when the Humvee started to skid. The big vehicle took hold and leaped at the break in the road. It hit with a tremendous jouncing crash. Kurtz flew upward, hitting the ceiling hard enough to produce a shower of stars in his field of vision. Perlmutter’s arms flailed like those of a corpse; his head snapped backward and then forward. The Humvee passed close enough to the Subaru to tear the doorhandle off the car’s passenger side. Then it was bucketing onward, now chasing a single pair of relatively fresh tire tracks.

Breathing down your neck now, Owen, Kurtz thought. Right down your everloving neck, God rot your blue eyes.

The only thing that worried him was that single burst of fire. What was that about? Whatever it was, it wasn’t repeated.

Then, up ahead, another of those blotches in the snow. This one was olive-green. This one was the other Hummer. They were gone, probably gone, but-

“Lock and load,” Kurtz said to Freddy. His voice was just a trifle shrill. “It’s time for someone to pay the piper.”

By the time Owen got to the place where East Street ended (or turned into the northeast-meandering Fitzpatrick Road, depending on your interpretation), he could hear Kurtz behind him and guessed that Kurtz could probably hear him, as well-the Humvees weren’t as loud as Harleys, but they were a long way from quiet.

Jonesy’s footprints were entirely gone now, but Owen could see the path which led down from the road and along the shore of the Reservoir. He killed the engine. “Henry, it looks like we’re walking from h-”

Owen stopped. He had been concentrating too hard on his driving to look behind him or even check the rearview mirror, and he was unprepared for what he now saw. Unprepared and appalled.

Henry and Duddits were wrapped in what Owen first believed was a terminal embrace, their stubbly cheeks pressed together, their eyes closed, their faces and coats smeared with blood. He could see neither of them breathing and thought they had actually died together-Duddits of his leukemia, Henry perhaps of a heart attack brought on by exhaustion and the constant unrelieved stress of the last thirty hours or so-and then he saw the minute twitch of the eyelids. Both sets.

Embracing. Splattered with blood. But not dead. Sleeping.

Dreaming.

Owen started to call Henry’s name again and then reconsidered. Henry had refused to leave the compound back in Jefferson Tract without freeing the detainees, and although they’d gotten away with that once, it had only been through the sheerest luck… or providence, if you believed that was any more than a TV show. Nevertheless, they bad gotten Kurtz on their tail, Kurtz had hung on like a booger, and now he was a lot closer than he would have been had Owen and Henry simply crept away into the storm.

Well, I wouldn’t change that, Owen thought, opening the driver’s door and getting out. From somewhere north, away in the white blank of the storm, came the scream of an eagle bitching about the weather. From behind, south, came the approaching racket of Kurtz, that annoying madman. It was impossible to tell how close because of the fucking snow. Coming down this fast and hard, it was like a sound-baffle. He could be two miles back; he could be a lot closer. Freddy would be with him, fucking Freddy, the perfect soldier, Dolph Lundgren from hell.

Owen went around to the back of the car, slipping and sliding in the snow, cursing it, and popped the Humvee’s back gate, expecting automatic weapons, hoping for a portable rocket-launcher. No rocket-launcher, no grenades, either, but there were four MP5 auto-fire rifles, and a carton containing long banana-clips, the ones that held a hundred and twenty rounds.

He had played it Henry’s way back at the compound, and Owen guessed that they had saved at least some lives, but he would not play it Henry’s way this time-if he hadn’t paid enough for the Rapeloews” goddam serving platter, he would simply have to live with the debt. Not for long, either, if Kurtz had his way.

Henry was either sleeping, unconscious, or joined to his dying childhood friend in some weird mind-meld. Let it be, then. Awake and by his side, Henry might balk at what needed to be done, especially if Henry was right in believing his other friend was still alive, hiding out in the mind the alien now controlled. Owen would not balk… and with the telepathy gone, he wouldn’t hear Jonesy pleading for his life if he was still in there. The Glock was a good weapon, but not sure enough.

The MP5 would rip the body of Gary Jones apart.

Owen grabbed one, plus three extra clips which he stuffed into his coat pockets. Kurtz close now-close, close, close. He looked back at East Street, almost expecting to see the second Humvee materializing like a green-brown ghost, but as yet there was nothing. Praise Jesus, as Kurtz would say.

The Hummer’s windows were already glazing over with snow, but he could see the dim shapes of the two men in the rear seat as he passed back along the body of the vehicle, trotting now. Still locked in each other’s arms. “Goodbye, boys,” he said. “Sleep well.” And with any luck they would still be sleeping when Kurtz and Freddy arrived, putting an end to their lives before moving on after their main quarry.

Owen stopped suddenly, skidding in the snow and grabbing the Humvee’s long hood to keep from falling. Duddits was clearly a lost cause, but he might be able to save Henry Devlin. It was just possible.

No! part of his mind screamed as he started back for the rear door. No, there’s no time!

But Owen decided to gamble that there was-to gamble the whole world. Maybe to pay a little more on what he owed for the Rapeloews” plate; maybe for what he had done yesterday (those naked gray figures standing around their downed ship with their arms held up, as if in surrender); probably just for Henry, who had told him they would be heroes and who had tried splendidly to fulfill that promise.

No sympathy for the devil, he thought, wrenching open the rear door. No sir, zero sympathy for that motherfucker.

Duddits was closer. Owen seized him by the collar of his big blue duffel coat and yanked. Duddits toppled sideways onto the seat. His hat fell off, revealing his shining bald skull. Henry, with his arms still around Duddits’s shoulders, came with him, landing on top. His eyes didn’t open but he groaned softly. Owen leaned forward and whispered fiercely into Henry’s ear.

, Don’t sit up. For the love of God, Henry, don’t you sit up!”

Owen withdrew, slammed the door, backed off three steps, placed the butt of the rifle against his hip, and fired a burst. The Humvee’s windows turned to milk, then fell in. Casings clinked around Owen’s feet. He stepped forward again and looked through the shattered window into the rear seat. Henry and Duddits still lay there, now covered with crumbles of Saf-T-Glas as well as Duddits’s blood, and to Owen they looked like the two deadest people he had ever seen. Owen hoped Kurtz would be in too much of a hurry for a close examination. In any case, he had done the best he could.

He heard a hard metallic jouncing sound and grinned. That placed Kurtz, by God-they’d reached the washout where the Subaru had finished up. He wished mightily that Kurtz and Freddy had rear-ended the fucking thing, but the sound had not, unfortunately, been that loud. Still, it placed them. A mile back, a mile back at least. Not as bad as he’d thought.

“Plenty of time,” he muttered, and that might be true of Kurtz, but what about the other end? Where was Mr Gray now?Holding the MP5 by the strap, Owen started down the path that led to Shaft 12.

Mr Gray had discovered another unlovely human emotion: panic. He had come all this way-light-years through space, miles through the snow-to be balked by Jonesy’s muscles, which were weak and out of shape, and the iron shaft cover, which was much heavier than he had expected. He yanked down on the crowbar until Jonesy’s back-muscles screamed in agonized protest… and was finally rewarded by a brief wink of darkness from beneath the edge of the rusty iron. And a grinding sound as it moved a bit-perhaps no more than an inch or two-on the concrete. Then Jonesy’s lower back muscles locked up and Mr Gray staggered away from the shaft, crying out through clenched teeth (thanks to his immunity, Jonesy still had a full set of them) and pressing his hands to the base of Jonesy’s spine, as if to keep it from exploding.

Lad let out a series of yipping whines. Mr Gray looked at him and saw that things had now reached the critical juncture. Although he was still asleep, Lad’s abdomen was now so grotesquely swelled that one of his legs stuck stiffly up in the air. The skin of his lower belly had stretched to the point of splitting, and the veins there pulsed with clocklike rapidity. A trickle of bright blood spilled out from beneath his tall.

Mr Gray looked balefully at the crowbar jutting from the slot in the iron cover. In Jonesy’s imagination, the Russian woman had been a slim beauty with dark hair and dark tragic eyes. In reality, Mr Gray thought, she must have been broad-shouldered and muscular. How else could she have-

There was a blast of gunfire, alarmingly close. Mr Gray gasped and looked around. Thanks to Jonesy, the human corrosion of doubt was also part of his makeup now, and for the first time he realized that he might be balked-yes, even here, so close to his goal that he could hear it, the sound of rushing water starting on its sixty-mile underground journey. And all that stood between the byrum and this whole world was a circular iron plate weighing a hundred and twenty pounds.

Screaming a thin and desperate litany of Beaver-curses, Mr Gray rushed forward, Jonesy’s failing body jerking back and forth on the defective pivot-point of its right hip. One of them was coming, the one called Owen, and Mr Gray dared not believe he could make this Owen turn his weapon on himself Given time, given the element of surprise, maybe. Now he had neither. And this man who was coming had been trained to kill; it was his career.

Mr Gray leaped into the air. There was a snap, quite audible, as Jonesy’s overstressed hip broke free of the swollen socket which had held it. Mr Gray landed on the crowbar with Jonesy’s full weight. The edge lifted again, and this time the cover slid almost a foot across the concrete. The black crescent through which the Russian woman had slipped appeared again. Not much of a crescent, really no more than a delicate capital C drawn with a calligrapher’s pen but enough for the dog.

Jonesy’s leg would no longer support Jonesy’s weight (and where was Jonesy, anyway? Still not a murmur from his troublesome host), but that was all right. Crawling would do now. Mr Gray worked his way in such fashion across the cold cement floor to where the sleeping border collie lay, seized Lad by his collar, and began to drag him back to Shaft 12.

The Hall of Memories-that vast repository of boxes-is also on the verge of shaking itself apart. The floor shudders as if in the grip of an endless slow earthquake. Overhead, the fluorescents flicker on and off, giving the place a stuttery, hallucinatory look. In places tall stacks of cartons have fallen over, blocking some of the corridors.

Jonesy runs as best he can, He moves from corridor to corridor, threading his way through this maze purely on instinct. He tells himself repeatedly to ignore the goddam hip, he is nothing but mind now, anyway, but he might as well be an amputee trying to convince his missing limb to stop throbbing.

He runs past boxes marked AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN WAR and DEPARTMENTAL POLITICS and CHILDREN’s STORIES and CONTENTS OF UPSTAIRS CLOSET. He hurdles a pile of tumbled boxes marked CARLA, Comes down on his bad leg, and screams at the pain.

He clutches more boxes (these marked GETTYSBURG) in order to keep from falling, and at last sees the far side of the storage room. Thank God; it seems to him that he has run miles.

The door is marked ICU and QUIET PLEASE and NO VISITORS W/O PASS. And that is right; this is where they took him; this is where he had awakened and heard crafty old Mr Death pretending to call for Marcy.

Jonesy bangs through the door and into another world, one he recognizes: the blue-over-white ICU corridor where he took his first painful, tentative steps four days after his surgery. He stumbles a dozen feet down the tiled corridor, sees the splotches of byrus growing on the walls, hears the Muzak, which is decidedly un-hospital-like; although it’s turned low, it appears to be the Rolling Stones singing “Sympathy for the Devil”.

He has no more than identified this song when his hip suddenly goes nuclear. Jonesy utters a surprised scream and falls to the black-and-red ICU tiles, clutching at himself This is how it was Just after he was hit: an explosion of red agony. He rolls over and over, looking up at the glowing light-panels, at the circular speakers from which the music (“Anastasia screamed in vain”) is coming, music from another world, when the pain is this bad everything is in another world, pain makes a shadow of substance and a mockery even of love, that is something he learned in March and must learn again now. He rolls and he rolls, hands clutching at his swollen hip, eyes bulging, mouth pulled back in a vast rictus, and he knows what has happened, all right: Mr Gray. That son of a bitch Mr Gray has re-broken his hip.

Then, from far away in that other world, he hears a voice he knows, a kid’s voice.

Jonesy!

Echoing, distorted… but not that far away. Not this corridor, but one of the adjacent ones. Whose voice? One of his own kids? John, maybe? No-

Jonesy, you have to hurry! He’s coming to kill you! Owen is coming to kill you!

He doesn’t know who Owen is, but he knows who that voice belongs to: Henry Devlin. But not as it is now, or as it was when he last saw Henry, going off to Gosselin’s Market with Pete; this is the voice of the Henry he grew up with, the one who told Richie Grenadeau that they’d tell on him if he didn’t stop, that Richie and his friends would never catch Pete because Pete ran like the fucking wind.

I can’t! he calls back, still rolling on the floor. He is aware that something has changed, is still changing, but not what, I can’t, he broke my hip again, the son of a bitch broke-

And then he realizes what is happening to him: the pain is running backward. It’s like watching a videotape as it rewinds-the milk flows up from the glass to the carton, the flower which should be blooming through the miracle of time-lapse photography closes up, instead.

The reason is obvious when he looks down at himself and sees the bright orange jacket he’s wearing. It’s the one his mother bought him in Sears for his first hunting trip to Hole in the Wall, the trip when Henry got his deer and they all killed Richie Grenadeau and his friends-killed them with a dream, maybe not meaning to but doing it just the same.

He has become a child again, a kid of fourteen, and there is no pain. Why would there be? His hip will not be broken for another twenty-three years. And then it all comes together with a crash in his mind: there was never any Mr Gray, not really; Mr Gray lives in the dreamcatcher and nowhere else. He is no more real than the pain in his hip. I was immune, he thinks, getting up. I never got so much as a speck of the byrus. What’s in my head isn’t quite a memory, not that, but a true ghost in the machine. He’s me. Dear God, Mr Gray is me.

Jonesy scrambles to his feet and begins to run, almost losing his feet as he swerves around a corner. He stays up, though; he is agile and quick as only a fourteen-year-old can be, and there is no pain, no pain.

The next corridor is one he knows. There is a parked gurney with a bedpan on it. Walking past it, moving delicately on tiny feet, is the deer he saw that day in Cambridge just before he was struck. There is a collar around its velvety neck and swinging from it like an oversized amulet is his Magic 8-Ball. Jonesy sprints past the deer, which looks at him with mild, surprised eyes.

Jonesy!

Close now. Very close.

Jonesy, hurry!

Jonesy redoubles his speed, feet flying, young lungs breathing easily, there is no byrus because he is immune, there is no Mr Gray, not in him, at least, Mr Gray is in the hospital and always was, Mr Gray is the phantom limb you still feel, the one you could swear is still there, Mr Gray is the ghost in the machine, the ghost on life support, and the life support is him.

He turns another comer. Here are three doors which are standing open. Beyond them, by the fourth door, the only one that is closed, Henry is standing. Henry is fourteen, as Jonesy is; Henry is wearing an orange coat, as Jonesy is. His glasses have slid down on his nose just as they always did, and he is beckoning urgently.

Hurry up! Hurry up, Jonesy! Duddits can’t hold on much longer! If he dies before we kill Mr Gray-

Jonesy joins Henry at the door. He wants to throw his arms around him, embrace him, but there’s no time.

This is all my fault, he tells Henry, and his voice is higher in pitch than it has been in years.

Not true, Henry says. He’s looking at Jonesy with the old impatience that awed Jonesy and Pete and Beaver as children Henry always seemed farther ahead, always on the verge of sprinting into the future and leaving the rest of them behind. They always seemed to be holding him back.

But-

You might as well say that Duddits murdered Richie Grenadeau and that we were his accomplices. He was what he was, Jonesy, and he made us what we are…but not on purpose. It was all he could do to tie his shoes on purpose, don’t you know that?

And Jonesy thinks: Fit wha? Fit neek?

Henry…is Duddits-

He’s holding on for us, Jonesy, I told you. Holding us together.

In the dreamcatcher.

That’s tight. So are we going to stand out here arguing in the hall while the world goes down the chute, or are we going to-

We’re going to kill the son of a bitch, Jonesy says, and reaches for the doorknob. Above it is a sign reading THERE IS NO INFECTION HERE, IL N'Y A PAS D'INFECTION ICI, and suddenly he sees both of that sign’s bitter edges. It’s like one of those Escher optical illusions. Look at it from one angle and it’s true. Look at it from another and it’s the most monstrous lie in the universe.

Dreamcatcher, Jonesy thinks, and turns the knob.

The room beyond the door is a byrus madhouse, a nightmare jungle overgrown with creepers and vines and lianas twisted together in blood-colored plaits. The air reeks of sulfur and chilly ethyl alcohol, the smell of starter fluid sprayed into a balky carb on a subzero January morning. At least they don’t have the shit-weasel to worry about, not in here; that’s on another strand of the dreamcatcher, in another place and time. The byrum is Lad’s problem now; he’s a border collie with a very dim future.

The television is on, and although the screen is overgrown with byrus, a ghostly black-and-white image comes straining through. A man is dragging the corpse of a dog across a concrete floor. Dusty and strewn with dead autumn leaves, it’s like a tomb in one of the fifties horror flicks Jonesy still likes to watch on his VCR. But this isn’t a tomb; it is filled with the hollow sound of rushing water.

In the center of the floor there is a rusty circular cover with MWRA stamped on it: Massachusetts Water Resources Authority. Even through the reddish serum on the TV screen, these letters stand out. Of course they do. To Mr Gray-who died as a physical being all the way back at Hole in the Wall-they mean everything.

They mean, quite literally, the world.

The shaft-lid has been partly pushed aside, revealing a crescent shape of absolute darkness. The man dragging the dog is himself, Jonesy realizes, and the dog isn’t quite dead. It is leaving a trail of frothy pink blood behind on the concrete, and its back legs are twitching. Almost paddling.

Never mind the movie, Henry almost snarls, and Jonesy turns his attention to the figure in the bed, the gray thing with the byrus-speckled sheet pulled up to its chest, which is a plain gray expanse of poreless, hairless, nippleless flesh. Although he can’t see now because of the sheet, Jonesy knows there is no navel, either, because this thing was never born. It is a child’s rendering of an alien, trolled directly from the subconscious minds of those who first came in contact with the byrum. They never existed as actual creatures, aliens, ETs. The grays as physical beings were always created out of the human imagination, out of the dreamcatcher, and knowing this affords Jonesy a measure of relief. He wasn’t the only one who got fooled. At least there is that.

Something else pleases him: the look in those horrid black eyes.

It’s fear.

“I’m locked and loaded,” Freddy said quietly, drawing to a stop behind the Humvee they had chased all these miles.

“Outstanding,” Kurtz said. “Recon that HMW. I’ll cover you.” “Right.” Freddy looked at Perlmutter, whose belly was swelling again, then at Owen’s Hummer. The reason for the rifle-fire they’d heard earlier was clear now: the Hummer had been shot up pretty good. The only question left to be answered was who had been on the giving end and who on the receiving. Tracks led away from the Hummer, growing indistinct under the rapid snowfall, but for now clear enough to read. A single set. Boots. Probably Owen.

“Go on now, Freddy!”

Freddy got out into the snow. Kurtz slid out behind him and Freddy heard him rack the slide of his personal. Depending on the nine-millimeter. Well, maybe that was all right; he was good with it, no question of that.

Freddy felt a momentary coldness down his spine, as if Kurtz had the nine leveled there. Right there. But that was ridiculous, wasn’t it? Owen, yes, but Owen was different. Owen had crossed the line.

Freddy hurried to the Hummer, bent low, carbine held at chest level. He didn’t like having Kurtz behind him, that was undeniable. No, he didn’t like that at all.

As the two boys advance on the overgrown bed, Mr Gray begins to push the CALL button repeatedly, but nothing happens. I think the works must be choked with byrus, Jonesy thinks. Too bad, Mr Gray-too bad for you. He glances up at the TV and sees that his film self has gotten the dog to the edge of the shaft. Maybe they’re too late after all; maybe not. There’s no way to tell. The wheel is still spinning.

Hello, Mr Gray, I’ve so much wanted to meet you, Henry says. As he speaks, he removes the byrus-splotched pillow from beneath Mr Gray’s narrow, earless head. Mr Gray tries to wriggle toward the other side of the bed, but Jonesy holds him in place, grasping the alien’s child-thin arms. The skin in his hands is neither hot nor cold. It doesn’t feel like skin at all, not really. It feels like-

Like nothing, he thinks. Like a dream.

Mr Gray? Henry asks. 7his is how we say welcome to Planet Earth. And he puts the pillow over Mr Gray’s face.

Beneath Jonesy’s hands, Mr Gray be ins to struggle and thrash.

Somewhere a monitor begins to beep frantically, as if this creature actually has a heart, and that it has now stopped beating.

Jonesy looks down at the dying monster and wishes only for this to be over.

Mr Gray got the dog to the side of the shaft he had partially uncovered. Coming up through the narrow black semicircle was the steady hollow rush of running water and a waft of dank, cold air.

If it were done when “tis done, then “twere well it were done quickly-that from a box marked SHAKESPEARE. The dog’s rear legs were bicycling rapidly, and Mr Gray could hear the wet sound of tearing flesh as the byrum thrust with one end and chewed with the other, forcing itself out. Beneath the dog’s tail, the chattering had started, a sound like an angry monkey. He had to get it into the shaft before it could emerge; it did not absolutely have to be born the water, but its odds of survival would be much higher if it was.

Mr Gray tried to shove the dog’s head into the gap between the cover and the concrete and couldn’t get it through. The neck bent and the dog’s senselessly grinning snout twisted upward. Although still sleeping (or perhaps it was now unconscious) it began to utter a series of low, choked barks.

And it wouldn’t go through the gap.

“Fuck me Freddy!” Mr Gray screamed. He was barely aware of the snarling ache in Jonesy’s hip now, certainly not aware that Jonesy’s face was strained and pale, the hazel eyes wet with tears of effort and frustration. He was aware-terribly aware-that something was going on. Going on behind my back, Jonesy would have said. And who else could it be? Who else but Jonesy, his reluctant host?

“Fuck YOU!” he screamed at the damned, hateful, stubborn, just-a-little-too-big dog. “You’re going down, do you hear me? DO YOU-”

The words stopped in his throat. All at once he couldn’t yell anymore, although he dearly wanted to; how he loved to yell, and pound his fists on things (even a dying pregnant dog)! All at once he couldn’t breathe, let alone yell. What was Jonesy doing to him?

He expected no answer, but one came-a stranger’s voice, full of cold rage: This is how we say welcome to Planet Earth.

The flailing, three-fingered hands of the gray thing in the hospital bed come up and actually push the pillow aside for a moment. The black eyes starting from the otherwise featureless face are frantic with fear and rage. It gasps for breath. Considering that it doesn’t really exist at all-not even in Jonesy’s brain, at least as a physical artifact-it is fighting furiously for its life. Henry cannot sympathize, but he understands. It wants what Jonesy wants, what Duddits wants… what even Henry himself wants, for in spite of all his black thoughts, has his heart not gone on beating? Has his liver not gone on washing his blood? Has his body not gone on fighting its unseen wars against everything from the common cold to cancer to the byrus itself? The body is either stupid or infinitely wise, but in either case it is spared the terrible witchery of thought; it only knows how to stand its ground and fight until it can fight no more. If Mr Gray was ever any different, he is different no longer. He wants to live.

But I don’t think you will, Henry says in a voice that is calm, almost soothing. I don’t think so, my friend. And once more puts the pillow over Mr Gray’s face.

Mr Gray’s airway opened. He got one breath of the cold shaft-house air… two… and then the airway closed up again. They were smothering him, stifling him, killing him.

No!! Kiss my bender! Kiss my fucking bender! YOU CAN’T DO THIS!

He yanked the dog back and turned it sideways; it was almost like watching a man already late for his plane trying to make one last bulky article fit into his suitcase.

It'li go through this way, he thought.

Yes. It would. Even if he had to collapse the dog’s bulging middle with Jonesy’s hands and allow the byrum to squirt free. One way or another, the damned thing would go through.

Face swelling, eyes bulging, breath stopped, a single fat vein swelling in the middle of Jonesy’s forehead, Mr Gray shoved Lad deeper into the crack and then began to thump the dog’s chest with Jonesy’s fists.

Go through, damn you, go through.

Freddy Johnson pointed his carbine inside the abandoned Hummer while Kurtz, stationed shrewdly behind him (in that way it was like the attack on the grayboy ship all over again), waited to see what would develop.

“Two guys, boss. Looks like Owen decided to put out the trash before moving on.”

“Dead?”

“They look pretty dead to me. Got to be Devlin and the other one, the one they stopped for.”

Kurtz joined Freddy, took a brief glance in through the shattered window, and nodded. They looked pretty dead to him, too, a pair of white moles lying entwined in the back seat, covered with blood and shattered glass. He raised his nine-millimeter to make sure of them one each in the head couldn’t hurt-then lowered it again. Owen might not have heard their engine. The snow was amazingly heavy and wet, an acoustical blanket, and that was very possible. But he would hear gunshots. He turned toward the path instead.

“Lead the way, buck, and mind the footing-looks slippery. And we may still have the element of surprise. I think we should bear that in mind, don’t you?” Freddy nodded.Kurtz smiled. It turned his face into a skull’s face. “With any luck, buck, Owen Underhill will be in hell before he even knows he’s dead.”

The TV remote, a rectangle of black plastic covered with byrus, is lying on Mr Gray’s bedtable. Jonesy grabs it. In a voice that sounds eerily like Beaver’s, he says “Fuck this shit” and slams it down as hard as he can on the table’s edge, like a man cracking the shell of a hardboiled egg. The controller shatters, spilling its batteries and leaving a jagged plastic wand in Jonesy’s hand. He reaches below the pillow Henry is holding over the thrashing thing’s face. He hesitates for just a moment, remembering his first meeting with Mr Gray his only meeting. The bathroom knob coming free in his hand as the rod snapped. The sense of darkness which was the creature’s shadow falling over him. It had been real enough then, real as roses, real as raindrops. Jonesy had turned and seen him… it… whatever Mr Gray had been before he was Mr Gray… standing there in the big central room. The stuff of a hundred movies and “unexplained mysteries” documentaries, only old. Old and sick. Ready even then for this hospital bed in the Intensive Care Unit. Marcy, it had said, plucking the word straight out of Jonesy’s brain. Pulling it like a cork. Making the hole through which it could enter. Then it had exploded like a noisemaker on New Year’s Eve, spraying byrus instead of confetti, and…

… and I imagined the rest. That was it, wasn’t it? Just another case of intergalactic schizophrenia. Basically, that was it.

Jonesy! Henry shouts. If you’re goina do it, then do it!

Here it comes, Mr Gray, Jonesy thinks. Get ready for it. Because payback’s-

Mr Gray had gotten Lad’s body halfway into the gap when Jonesy’s voice filled his head.

Here it comes, Mr Gray. Get ready for it. Because payback’s a bitch.

There was a ripping pain across the middle of Jonesy’s throat.

Mr Gray raised Jonesy’s hands, making a series of gagging grunts that would not quite attain the status of screams. He didn’t feel the beard-stubbled, unbroken skin of Jonesy’s throat but his own ragged flesh. What he felt most strongly was shocked disbelief: it was the last of Jonesy’s emotions upon which he drew. 7his could not be happening. They always came in the ships of the old ones, those artifacts; they always raised their hands in surrender; they always won. This could not be happening.

And yet somehow it was.

The byrum’s consciousness did not so much fade as disintegrate. Dying, the entity once known as Mr Gray reverted to its former state. As he became it (and just before it could become nothing), Mr Gray gave the dog’s body a final vicious shove. It sank into the gap yet still not quite far enough to go through.

The byrum’s last Jonesy-tinged thought was I should have taken him up on it. I should have gone na-

Jonesy slashes the jagged end of the TV controller across Mr Gray’s naked wattled neck. Its throat peels open like a mouth and a cloud of reddish-orange matter puffs out, staining the air the color of blood before falling back to the counterpane in a shower of dust and fluff.

Mr Gray s body twitches once, galvanically, beneath Jonesy’s and Henry’s hands. Then it shrivels like the dream it always was and becomes something familiar. For a moment Jonesy can’t make the connection and then it comes. Mr Gray’s remains look like one of the condoms they saw on the floor of the deserted office in the Tracker Brothers depot.

He’s-

-dead! is how Jonesy means to finish, but then a terrible bolt of pain tears through him. Not his hip this time but his head. And his throat. All at once his throat is wearing a necklace of fire. And the whole room is transparent, damned if it isn’t. He’s looking through the wall and into the shaft house, where the dog stuck in the crack is giving birth to a vile red creature that looks like a weasel crossed with a huge, blood-soaked worm. He knows well enough what it is: one of the byrum.

Streaked with blood and shit and the remains of its own membranous placenta, its brainless black eyes staring (they’re his eyes, Jonesy thinks, Mr Gray’s eyes), it is being born in front of him, stretching its body out, trying to pull free, wanting to drop into the darkness and fall toward the sound of running water. Jonesy looks at Henry.

Henry looks back.

For just a moment their young and startled eyes meet… and then they are disappearing, as well.

Duddits, Henry says. His voice comes from far away. Duddits is going. Jonesy…

Goodbye. Perhaps Henry means to say goodbye. Before he can, they’re both gone.

There was a moment of vertigo when Jonesy was exactly nowhere, a sense of utter disconnection. He thought it must be death, that he had killed himself as well as Mr Gray-cut his own throat, as the saying went.

What brought him back was pain. Not in his throat, that was gone and he could breathe again-he could hear the air going in and out of him in great dry gasps. No, this pain was an old acquaintance. It was in his hip. It caught him and swung him back into the world around its swollen, howling axis, winding him up like a tether-ball on a post. There was concrete under his knees, his hands were full of fur, and he heard an inhuman chattering sound. At least this part is real, he thought. This part is outside the dreamcatcher.

That godawful chattering sound.

Jonesy saw the weasel-thing now dangling into the dark, held to the upper world only by its tail, which wasn’t yet free of the dog. Jonesy lunged forward and clamped his hands around its slippery, shivering middle just as it did pull free.

He rocked backward, his bad hip throbbing, holding the writhing, yammering thing above his head like a carny performer with a boa constrictor. It whipped back and forth, teeth gnashing at the air, bending back on itself, trying to get at Jonesy’s wrist and snagging the right sleeve of his parka instead, tearing it open and releasing near-weightless tangles of white down filling.

Jonesy pivoted on his howling hip and saw a man framed in the broken window through which Mr Gray had wriggled. The newcomer, his face long with surprise, was dressed in a camouflage parka and holding a rifle.

Jonesy flung the wriggling weasel as hard as he could, which wasn’t very hard. It flew perhaps ten feet, landed on the leaf-littered floor with a wet thump, and immediately began slithering back toward the shaft. The dog’s body plugged part of it, but not enough. There was plenty of room.

“Shoot it!” Jonesy screamed at the man with the rifle. “For God’s sake shoot it before it can get into the water!”

But the man in the window did nothing. The world’s last hope only stood there with his mouth hanging open.

Owen simply couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Some sort of red thing, a freakish weasel with no legs. To hear about such things was one matter; to actually see one was another. It squirmed toward the hole in the middle of the floor. A dog with its stiffening paws held up as if in surrender was wedged there.

The man-it had to be Typhoid Jonesy-was screaming at him to shoot the thing, but Owen’s arms simply wouldn’t come up. They seemed to be coated in lead. The thing was going to get away; after all that had happened, what he had hoped to prevent was going to happen right in front of him. It was like being in hell.

He watched it wriggle forward, making a godawful monkey-sound that he seemed to hear in the center of his head; he watched Jonesy lunging with desperate awkwardness, hoping to catch it or at least head it off. It wasn’t going to work. The dog was in the way.

Owen again commanded his arms to raise the gun and point it, but nothing happened. The MP5 might as well have been in another universe. He was going to let it get away. He was going to stand here like a post and let it get away. God help him.

God help them all.

Henry sat up in the back seat of the Humvee, dazed. There was stuff in his hair. He brushed at it, still feeling caught in the dream of the hospital (except that was no dream, he thought, and then a sharp prick of pain restored him to something like reality. It was glass. His hair was filled with glass. More of it, Saf-T-Glas crumbles of it, covered the seat. And Duddits.

“Dud?” Useless, of course. Duddits was dead. Must be dead. He had expended the last of his failing energy to bring Jonesy and Henry together in that hospital room. But Duddits groaned. His eyes opened, and looking into them brought Henry all the way back to this snowy dead-end road. Duddits’s eyes were red and bloody zeroes, the eyes of a sibyl.

“Ooby!” Duddits cried. His hands rose and made a weak aiming gesture, as if he held a rifle. “Ooby-Doo! Ot-sum urk-ooo do now!” From somewhere up ahead in the woods, two rifle shots came in answer. A pause, then a third one.

“Dud?” Henry whispered. “Duddits?”

Duddits saw him. Even through his bloody eyes, Duddits saw him. Henry more than felt this; for a moment he actually saw himself through Duddits’s eyes. It was like looking into a magic mirror. He saw the Henry who had been: a kid looking out at the world through horn-rimmed glasses that were too big for his face and always sliding down to the end of his nose. He felt Duddits’s love for him, a simple and uncomplicated emotion untinctured by doubt or selfishness or even gratitude, Henry took Duddits in his arms, and when he felt the lightness of his old friend’s body, Henry began to cry.

“You were the lucky one, buddy,” he said, and wished Beaver were here. Beaver could have done what Henry could not; Beav could have sung Duddits to sleep. “You were always the lucky one, that’s what I think.”

“Ennie,” Duddits said, and touched Henry’s cheek with one hand. He was smiling, and his final words were perfectly clear. “I love you, Ennie.”

Two shots rang out up ahead-carbine whipcracks. Not far up ahead, either. Kurtz stopped. Freddy was about twenty feet ahead of him, standing by a sign Kurtz could just make Out: ABSOLUTELY NO FISHING FROM SHAFT HOUSE.

A third shot, then silence.

“Boss?” Freddy murmured. “Some kind of building up ahead.” “Can you see anyone?”

Freddy shook his head.

Kurtz joined him, amused even at this point at the slight jump Freddy gave when Kurtz put his hand on Freddy’s shoulder. And he was right to jump. If Abe Kurtz survived the next fifteen or twenty minutes, he intended to go forward alone into whatever brave new world there might be. No one to slow him down; no witnesses to this final guerrilla action. And while he might suspect, Freddy couldn’t know for sure. Too bad the telepathy was gone. Too bad for Freddy.

“Sounds like Owen found someone else to kill.” Kurtz spoke low into Freddy’s ear, which still sported a few curls of the Ripley, now white and dead.

“Do we go get him?”

“Goodness, no,” Kurtz replied. “Perish the thought. I believe the time has come-regrettably, it comes in almost every life-when we must step off the path, buck. Mingle with the trees. See who stays and who comes back. If anyone does. We’ll give it ten minutes, shall we? I think ten minutes should be more than enough.”

The words which filled Owen Underhill’s mind were nonsensical but unmistakable: Scooby! Scooby-Doo! Got some work to do now!

The carbine came up. He wasn’t the one who did it, but when the force lifting the rifle left him, Owen was able to take over smoothly. He flicked the auto’s selector-switch to single-shot fire, sighted, and squeezed the trigger twice. The first round missed, hitting the concrete in front of the weasel and ricocheting. Chips of concrete flew. The thing pulled back, turned, saw him, and bared its mouthful of needle teeth.

“That’s right, beautiful,” Owen said. “Smile for the camera.”

His second shot went right through the weasel’s humorless grin. It tumbled backward, struck the wall of the shaft house, then fell to the concrete. Yet even with its rudiment of a head blown off, its instincts remained. It began to crawl slowly forward again. Owen aimed, and as he centered the sight, he thought of the Rapeloews, Dick and Irene. Nice people. Good neighbors. If you needed a cup of sugar or a pint of milk (or a shoulder to cry on, for that matter), you could always go next door and get fixed up. 7hey said it was a stroke! Mr Rapeloew had called, only Owen had thought he was saying stork. Kids got everything wrong.

So this was for the Rapeloews. And for the kid who had kept getting it wrong. Owen fired a third time. This slug caught the byrum amidships and tore it in two. The ragged pieces twitched… twitched… lay still.With that done, Owen swung his carbine in a short arc. This time he settled the sight on the middle of Gary Jones’s forehead. Jonesy looked unblinkingly back at him. Owen was tired almost to death, that was what it felt like-but this guy looked far past even that point. Jonesy raised his empty hands. “You have no reason to believe this,” he said, “but Mr Gray is dead. I cut his throat while Henry held a pillow over his face-it was right out of The Godfather.” “really,” Owen said. There was no inflection in his voice whatsoever. “And where, exactly, did you perform this execution?”

“In a Massachusetts General Hospital of the mind,” Jonesy said. He then uttered the most joyless laugh Owen had ever heard in his life. “One where deer roam the halls and the only TV program is an old movie called Sympathy for the Devil.”

Owen jerked a little at that.

“Shoot me if you have to, soldier. I saved the world-with a little ninth-inning relief help from you, I freely admit. You might as well pay me for the service in the traditional manner. Also, the bastard broke my hip again. A little going-away present from the little man who wasn’t there. The pain is… “Jonesy bared his teeth. “It’s very large.”

Owen held the gun where it was a moment longer, then lowered it. “You can live with it,” he said.

Jonesy fell backward on the points of his elbows, groaned, turned his weight as well as he could on to his unhurt side. “Duddits is dead. He was worth both of us put together-more-and he’s dead.” He covered his eyes for a moment, then dropped his arm. “Man, what a fuckarow this is. That’s what Beaver would have called it, a total fuckarow. That is opposed to a fuckaree, you understand, which in Beaver-ese means a particularly fine time, possibly but not necessarily of a sexual nature.”

Owen had no idea what the man was talking about; likely he was delirious. “Duddits may be dead, but Henry’s not. There are some people after us, Jonesy. Bad people. Do you hear them? Know where they are?”

Lying on the cold, leaf-littered floor, Jonesy shook his head. “I’m back to the standard five senses, I’m afraid. ESP’s all gone. The Greeks may come bearing gifts, but they’re Indian givers.” He laughed.” Jesus, I could lose my job for a crack like that. Sure you don’t want to just shoot me?”

Owen paid no more attention to this than he had to the semantical differences between fuckarow and fuckaree. Kurtz was coming, that was the problem he had to deal with now. He hadn’t heard him arrive, but he might not have done. The snow was falling heavily enough to damp all but loud sounds. Gunshots, for instance.

“I have to go back to the road,” he said. “You hang in there.” “What choice?” Jonesy asked, and closed his eyes. “Man, I wish I could go back to my nice warm office. I never thought I’d say that, but there it is.”

Owen turned and went back down the steps, slipping and sliding but managing to keep his feet. He scanned the woods to either side of the path, but not closely. If Kurtz and Freddy were laid up, waiting someplace between here and the Hummer, he doubted be would see them in time to do anything. He might see tracks, but by then he’d be so close to them they’d likely be the last things he saw. He had to hope he was still ahead, that was all. Had to trust to plain old baldass luck, and why not? He’d been in plenty of tight places, and baldass luck had always pulled him through. Maybe it would do so ag-

The first bullet took him in the belly, knocking him backward and blowing the back of his coat out in a bee-shape. He pumped his feet, trying to stay upright, also trying to hang onto the MP5. There was no pain, just a feeling of having been sucker-punched by a large boxing glove on the fist of a mean opponent. The second round shaved the side of his head, producing a bum-and-sting like rubbing alcohol poured into an open wound. The third shot hit him high up on the right side of the chest and that was Katie bar the door; he lost both his feet and the carbine.

What had Jonesy said? Something about having saved the world and getting paid off in the traditional manner. And this wasn’t so bad, really; it had taken Jesus six hours, they’d put a joke sign over His head, and come cocktail hour they’d given Him a stiff vinegar-and-water.

He lay half on and half off the snow-covered path, vaguely aware that something was screaming and it wasn’t him. It sounded like an enormous pissed-off blue jay.

That’s an eagle, Owen thought.

He managed to get a breath, and although the exhale was more blood than air, he was able to get up on his elbows. He saw two figures emerge from the tangle of birches and pines, bent low, very much in combat-advance mode. One was squat and broad-shouldered, the other slim and gray-haired and positively perky. Johnson and Kurtz. The bulldog and the greyhound. His luck had run out after all. In the end, luck always did.

Kurtz knelt beside him, eyes sparkling. In one hand he held a triangle of newspaper. It was battered and slightly curved from its long trip in Kurtz’s rear pocket, but still recognizable. It was a cocked hat. A fool’s hat. “Tough luck, buck,” Kurtz said.

Owen nodded. It was. Very tough luck. “I see you found time to make me a little something. “'I did. Did you achieve your prime objective, at least?” Kurtz lifted his chin in the direction of the shaft house. “Got him,” Owen managed, His mouth was full of blood. He spat it out, tried to pull in another breath, and heard the good part of it wheeze out of some new hole instead.

“Well, then,” Kurtz said benevolently, “all’s well that ends well, wouldn’t you say?” He put the newspaper hat tenderly on Owen’s head. Blood soaked it immediately, spreading upward, turning the UFO story red.

There was another scream from somewhere out over the Reservoir, perhaps from one of the islands that were actually hills poking up from a purposely drowned landscape. “That’s an eagle,” Kurtz said, and patted Owen’s shoulder. “Count yourself lucky, laddie. God sent you a warbird to sing you to-'Kurtz’s head exploded in a spray of blood and brains and bone.

Owen saw one final expression in the man’s blue, white-lashed eyes: amazed disbelief. For a moment Kurtz remained on his knees, then toppled forward on what remained of his face. Behind him, Freddy Johnson stood with his carbine still raised and smoke drifting from the muzzle.

Freddy, Owen tried to say. No sound came out, but Freddy must have read his lips. He nodded. “didn’t want to, but the bastard was going to do it to me. Didn’t have to read his mind to know that. Not after all these years.” Finish it, Owen tried to say. Freddy nodded again. Perhaps there was a vestige of that goddam telepathy left inside Freddy, after all.

Owen was fading. Tired and fading. Goodnight, sweet ladies, goodnight, David, goodnight, Chet. Goodnight, sweet prince. He lay back on the snow and it was like falling back into a bed stuffed with the softest down. From somewhere, faint and far, he heard the eagle scream again. They had invaded its territory, disturbed its snowy autumn peace, but soon they would be gone. The eagle would have the reservoir to itself again.

We were heroes, Owen thought. Damned if we weren’t. Fuck your hat, Kurtz, we were h-

He never heard the final shot.

There had been more firing; now there was silence. Henry sat in the back seat of the Humvee beside his dead friend, trying to decide what to do next. The chances that they had all killed each other seemed slim. The chances that the good guys-correction, the good guy had taken out the bad ones seemed slimmer still.

His first impulse following this conclusion was to vacate the Hummer posthaste and hide in the woods. Then he looked at the snow (If I ever see snow again, he thought, it’ll be too soon) and rejected the idea. If Kurtz or whoever was with him came back in the next half hour, Henry’s tracks would still be there. They would follow his trail, and at the end of it they’d shoot him like a rabid dog. Or a weasel.

Get a gun, then. Shoot them before they can shoot you.

A better idea. He was no Wyatt Earp, but he could shoot straight. Shooting men was a lot different from shooting deer, you didn’t have to be a headshrinker to know that, but he believed, given a clear line of fire, he could shoot these guys with very little hesitation.

He was reaching for the doorhandle when he heard a surprised curse, a thump, yet another gunshot. This one was very close. Henry thought someone had lost his footing and gone down in the snow, discharging his weapon when he landed on his ass. Perhaps the son of a bitch had just shot himself? Was that too much to hope for? Wouldn’t that just-

But no. No joy. Henry heard a low grunt as the person who’d fallen got up and came on again. There was only one option, and Henry took it. He lay back down on the seat, put Duddits’s arms around him again (as best he could), and played dead. He didn’t think there was much chance this hugger-mugger would work, The bad guys had passed by on their way in-obviously, as he was still alive-but on their way in they must have been in a pants-ripping hurry. Now they would be a lot less likely to be fooled by a few bullet holes, some broken glass, and the blood of poor old Duddits’s final hemorrhages.

Henry heard soft, crunching footsteps in the snow. Only one set, by the sound. Probably the infamous Kurtz. Last man standing. Darkness approaching. Death in the afternoon. No longer his old friend-now he was only playing dead-but approaching, just the same.

Henry closed his eyes… waited…

The footsteps passed the Humvee without slowing.

Freddy Johnson’s strategic goal was, for the time being, both extremely practical and extremely short-term: he wanted to get the goddam Hummer turned around without getting stuck. If he managed that, he wanted to get past the break in East Street (where the Subaru Owen had been chasing had come to grief) without getting ditched himself If he made it back to the access road, he might widen his horizons a trifle. The idea of the Mass Pike surfaced briefly in his mind as he swung open the door of the boss’s Hummer and slid behind the wheel. There was a lot of western America down 1-90. A lot of places to hide.

The stench of stale farts and chilly ethyl alcohol struck him like a slap as he swung the door closed. Pearly! Goddam Pearly! In the excitement, he had forgotten all about that little motherfucker.

Freddy turned, raising the carbine but Pearly was still out cold. No need to use another bullet. He could just tip Perlmutter out into the snow. If he was lucky, Pearly would freeze to death without ever waking up. Him, and his little sideki-

Pearly wasn’t sleeping, though. Nor out cold. Nor in a coma, not even that. Pearly was dead. And he was… shrunken, somehow. Almost mummified. His cheeks were drawn in, hollow, wrinkled. The sockets of his eyes were deep divots, as if behind the thin veils of his closed lids the eyeballs had fallen into what was now a hollow bucket. And he was tilted strangely against the passenger door, one leg raised, almost crossed over the other. It was as if he had died trying to perform the ever-popular one-cheek-sneak. His fatigue pants were now dark, the muted colors turned to mud, and the seat under him was wet. The fingers of the stain spreading toward Freddy were red.

“What the f-”

From the back seat there arose an ear-splitting yammering; it was like listening to a powerful stereo turned rapidly up to full volume. Freddy caught movement from the comer of his right eye. A creature beyond belief appeared in the rearview mirror. It tore off Freddy’s ear and then struck at his cheek, punched through into his mouth, and latched onto his jaw at the inner gumline. And then Archie Perlmutter’s shit-weasel tore off the side of Freddy’s face as a hungry man might tear a drumstick off a chicken.

Freddy shrieked and discharged his weapon into the passenger door of the Hummer. He got an arm up and tried to shove the thing off, his fingers slipped on its slick, newborn skin. The weasel withdrew, tossed its head back, and swallowed what it had tom off like a parrot with a piece of raw steak. Freddy flailed for the driver’s-side doorhandle and found it, but before he could yank it up the thing struck again, this time burying its mouth in the muscular flesh where Freddy’s neck and shoulder merged. There was a vast jet of blood as his jugular opened; it spurted up to the Humvee’s roof, then began to drip back like red rain.

Freddy’s feet jittered, bopping the Humvee’s wide brake in a rapid tapdance. The creature in the back seat drew back again, seemed to consider, then slithered snakelike over Freddy’s shoulder. It dropped into his lap.

Freddy screamed once as the weasel tore off his plumbing… and then he screamed no more.

Henry sat twisted around in the back seat of the other Humvee, watching as the figure in the vehicle parked behind him jerked back and forth behind the wheel. Henry was glad of the thickly falling snow, equally glad of the blood that sprayed up, striking the windshield of the other Humvee, partially obscuring the view.

He could see all too well as it was.

At last the figure behind the wheel stopped moving and fell sideways. A bulky shadow rose over it, seeming to hulk in triumph. Henry knew what it was; he’d seen one on Jonesy’s bed, back at Hole in the Wall. One thing he could see was that there was a broken window in the Humvee which had been chasing them. He doubted if the thing had much in the way of intelligence, but how much would it need to register fresh air?

They don’t like the cold. It kills them.

Yes, indeed it did. But Henry had no intention of leaving it at that, and not just because the Reservoir was so close he could hear the water lapping on the rocks. Something had run up an extremely high debt, and only he was left to present the bill. Payback’s a bitch, as Jonesy had so often observed, and payback time had arrived.

He leaned over the seat. No weapons there. He leaned over further and thumbed open the glove compartment. Nothing in there but a litter of invoices, gasoline receipts, and a tattered paperback titled How to Be Your Own Best Friend.

Henry opened the door, got out into the snow… and his feet immediately flew out from under him. He went on his butt with a thump and scraped his back on the Hummer’s high splashboard. Fuck me Freddy. He got up, slipped again, grabbed the top of the open door, and managed to stay afoot this time. He shuffled his feet around to the back of the vehicle he’d come in, never taking his eyes from its twin, parked behind. He could still see the thing inside, thrashing and shuffling, dining on the driver.

“Stay where you are, beautiful,” Henry said, and began to laugh. The laughter sounded crazy as bell, but that didn’t stop him. “Lay a few eggs. I am the eggman, after all. Your friendly neighborhood eggman. Or how about a copy of How to Be Your Own Best Friend? I got one.”

Laughing so hard now he could barely speak. Sliding in the wet and treacherous snow like a kid let out of school and on his way to the nearest sledding hill. Holding onto the flank of the Hummer as best he could, except there was really nothing to hold onto once you were south of the doors. Watching the thing shift and move… and then he couldn’t see it anymore. Oh-oh. Where the hell had it gotten to? In one of Jonesy’s dopey movies, this is where the scary music would start, Henry thought. Attack of the Killer Shit-Weasels. That got him laughing again.

He was around to the back of the vehicle now. There was a button you could push to unlatch the rear window… unless, of course, it was locked. Probably wasn’t, though. Hadn’t Owen gotten into the back this way? Henry couldn’t remember. Couldn’t for the life of him. He was clearly not being his own best friend.

Still cackling, fresh tears gushing out of his eyes, he thumbed the button and the back window popped open. Henry yanked it wider and looked in. Guns, thank God. Army carbines like the kind that Owen had taken on his last patrol. Henry grabbed one and examined it. Safety, check. Fire-selection switch, check. Clip marked U.S. ARMY 5.56 CAL 120 RNDS, check.

“So simple even a byrum can do it,” Henry said, and laughed some more. He bent over, holding his stomach and slipping around in the slop, trying not to fall again. His legs ached, his back ached, his heart ached most of all… and still he laughed. He was the eggman, he was the eggman, he was the laughing hyena.

He walked around to the driver’s side of Kurtz’s Humvee, gun raised (safety in what he devoutly hoped was the OFF position), spooky music playing in his head, but still laughing. There was the gasoline hatch; no mistaking that. But where was Gamera, The Terror from Beyond Space?

As if it had heard his thought-and, Henry realized, that was perfectly likely-the weasel smashed headfirst against the rear window. The one that was, thankfully, unbroken. Its head was smeared with blood, hair, and bits of flesh. Its dreadful sea-grape eyes stared into Henry’s. Did it know it had a way out, an escape hatch? Perhaps. And perhaps it understood that using it would likely mean a quick death.

It bared its teeth.

Henry Devlin, who had once won the American Psychiatric Association’s Compassionate Caring Award for a New York Times op-ed piece called “The End of Hate”, bared his own in return. It felt good. Then he gave it the finger. For Beaver. And for Pete. That felt good, too.

When he raised the carbine, the weasel-stupid, perhaps, but not utterly stupid-dove out of sight. That was cool; Henry had never had the slightest intention of trying to shoot it through the window. He did like the idea of it down there on the floor, though. Close to the gas as you want to get, darling, he thought. He thumbed the carbine’s selector-switch to full auto and fired a long burst into the gas tank.

The sound of the gun was deafening. A huge ragged hole appeared where the gasoline port had been, but for a moment there was nothing else. So much for the Hollywood version of how shit like this works, Henry thought, and then heard a hoarse whisper of sound, rising to a throaty hiss. He took two steps backward and his feet shot out from under him again. This time falling quite likely saved his eyesight and perhaps his life. The back of Kurtz’s Humvee exploded only a second later, fire lashing out from underneath in big yellow petals. The rear tires jumped out of the snow. Glass sprayed through the snowy air, all of it going over Henry’s head. Then the heat began to bake him and he crawled away rapidly, dragging the carbine by its strap and laughing wildly. There was a second explosion and the air was filled with whirling hooks of shrapnel.

Henry got to his feet like a man climbing a ladder, using the lower branches of a handy tree as rungs. He stood, panting and laughing, legs aching, back aching, neck with an odd sprung feeling. The entire back half of Kurtz’s Humvee was engulfed in flames. He could hear the thing inside, chattering furiously as it burned.

He made a wide circle to the passenger side of the blazing Humvee and aimed the carbine at the broken window. He stood there for a moment, frowning, then realized why this seemed so stupid. All the windows in the Humvee were broken now; all the glass but the windshield. He began to laugh again. What a dork he was! What a total dork!

Through the hell of flames in the Humvee’s cabin, he could still see the weasel lurching back and forth like a drunk. How many rounds did he have left in the clip if the fucking thing did come out? Fifty? Twenty? Five? However many rounds there were, it would have to be enough. He wouldn’t risk retreating to Owen’s Humvee for another clip.

But the thing never came out.

Henry stood guard for five minutes, then stretched it to ten. The snow fell and the Humvee burned, pouring black smoke into the white sky. Henry stood there thinking of the Derry Days Parade, Gary U.S. Bonds singing “New Orleans”, and here comes a tall man on stilts, here comes the legendary cowboy, and how excited Duddits had been, jumping right up and down. Thinking of Pete, standing outside DJHS, hands cupped, pretending to smoke, waiting for the rest of them. Pete, whose plan had been to captain NASA’s first manned Mars expedition. Thinking of Beaver and his Fonzie jacket, Beav and his toothpicks, Beav singing to Duddits, Baby’s boat’s a silver dream. Beav hugging Jonesy at Jonesy’s wedding and saying Jonesy had to be happy, he had to be happy for all of them.

Jonesy.

When Henry was absolutely sure the weasel was dead-incinerated-he started up the path to see if Jonesy was still alive. He didn’t hold out much hope of that… but he discovered he hadn’t given up hope, either.

Only pain pinned Jonesy to the world, and at first he thought the haggard, sooty-cheeked man kneeling beside him had to be a dream, or a final figment of his imagination. Because the man appeared to be Henry.

“Jonesy? Hey, Jonesy, are you there?” Henry snapped his fingers in front of Jonesy’s eyes. “Earth to Jonesy.”

“Henry, is it you? Is it really?”

“It’s me,” Henry said. He glanced at the dog still partly stuck into the crack at the top of Shaft 12, then back at Jonesy. He brushed Jonesy’s sweat-soaked hair off his forehead with infinite tenderness.

“Man, it took you…” Jonesy began, and then the world wavered. He closed his eyes, concentrated hard, then opened them again. “… took you long enough to get back from the store. Did you remember the bread””

“Yeah, but I lost the hot dogs.”

“What a fuckin pisser.” Jonesy took a long and wavering breath.

“I’ll go myself, next time.”

“Kiss my bender, pal,” Henry said, and Jonesy slipped into darkness smiling.