Dreamcatcher (45 page)

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

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

“Yes, s . . . boss?”

“Will he spread the word? Will he be a good messenger? Do you reckon he took enough in to do that, or was he too concerned with his damned old
foot
?”

“I . . . I . . .” In the doorway, he saw Underhill nod at him almost imperceptibly, and Pearly took heart. “Yes, boss—I think he heard you five-by.”

Kurtz seemed first surprised by Perlmutter's vehemence, then gratified. He turned to Underhill. “What about you, Owen? Do you think he'll spread the word?”

“Uh-huh,” Underhill said. “If you get him to the infirmary before he bleeds to death on your rug.”

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

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

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

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

Kurtz stood by the Mr. Coffee on the counter and gave Underhill a look of darkly brilliant doubt. “Do you really think that's necessary?”

That was where Perlmutter went out. Never before in his life had stepping into a storm felt so much like an escape.

4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What do you think they're going to do to the rest of us?”

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

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

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

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

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

“I'd say you got that right.” Henry and the portly man watched as the stretcher-bearers hurried up the steps of the Winnebago. As Mr. Middle Management made his closest approach to the fence, Henry called out to him, “How's it going, shitheels? Having any fun yet?”

The portly man winced. The guy with the clipboard gave Henry a single dour look and then trudged on toward the Winnebago.

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

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

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

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

5

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

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

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

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

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

Henry thought:
the byrus. That's what he means. The byrus is what it's really called. Jonesy knows.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Henry thought they were wrong.

6

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

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

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

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

Kurtz nodded, pleased. “You try sending one to me.”

Owen visualized a speed limit sign: 60
MPH
.

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

“Close enough, boss.”

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

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

“Sir . . .” Oh, fuck. “Boss . . .”

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

Owen looked for it and caught just a glimpse, like a glimpse of slip under a woman's dress. “Paul?”

“Patrick, actually . . . but close. Anderson believes it's a wave, and it's expending its force now. A telepathic wave. Do you find that an awesome concept, Owen?”

“Yes.”

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

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

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