Dreamcatcher (58 page)

She went into his room, not knowing what to expect. Certainly not what she found: every light blazing, Duddits fully dressed for the first time since his last (and very likely final, according to Dr. Briscoe) remission. He had put on his favorite corduroy pants, his down vest over his Grinch tee-shirt, and his Red Sox hat. He was sitting in his chair by the window and looking out into the night. No frown now; no tears, either. He looked out into the storm with a bright-eyed eagerness that took her back to long before the disease, which had announced itself with such stealthy, easy-to-overlook symptoms: how tired and out of breath he got after just a short game of Frisbee in the backyard, how big the bruises were from even little thumps and bumps, and how slowly they faded. This was the way he used to look when . . .

But she couldn't think. She was too flustered to think.

“Duddits! Duddie, what—”

“Umma! Ere I unnox?”

Mumma! Where's my lunchbox?

“In the kitchen, but Duddie, it's the middle of the night. It's snowing! You aren't . . .”

Going anywhere
was the way that one ended, of
course, but the words wouldn't cross her tongue. His eyes were so brilliant, so alive. Perhaps she should have been glad to see that light so strongly in his eyes, that energy, but instead she was terrified.

“I eed I unnox! I eed I unch!”

I need my lunchbox, I need my lunch.

“No, Duddits.” Trying to be firm. “You need to take off your clothes and get back into bed. That's what you need and
all
you need. Here. I'll help you.”

But when she approached, he raised his arms and crossed them over his narrow chest, the palm of his right hand pressed against his left cheek, the palm of his left against the right cheek. From earliest childhood, it was all he could muster in the way of defiance. It was usually enough, and it was now. She didn't want to upset him again, perhaps start another nosebleed. But she wasn't going to put up a lunch for him in his Scooby lunchbox at one-fifteen in the morning. Absolutely not.

She retreated to the side of his bed and sat down on it. The room was warm, but she was cold, even in her heavy flannel nightgown. Duddits slowly lowered his arms, watching her warily.

“You can sit up if you want,” she said, “but why? Did you have a dream, Duddie? A bad dream?”

Maybe a dream but not a bad one. Not with that eager look on his face, and
now
she recognized it well enough: it was the way he had looked so often back in the eighties, in the good years before Henry, Pete, Beaver, and Jonesy had all gone their separate ways, calling less frequently and coming by to see him less frequently
still as they raced toward their grownup lives and forgot the one who had to stay behind.

It was the look he got when his special sense told him that his friends were coming by to play. Sometimes they'd all go off together to Strawford Park or the Barrens (they weren't supposed to go there but they did, both she and Alfie had known that they did, and one of their trips there had gotten them all on the front page of the newspaper). Sometimes Alfie or one of their moms or dads would take them to Airport Minigolf or to Fun Town in Newport, and on those days she would always pack Duddits sandwiches and cookies and a Thermos of milk in his Scooby-Doo lunchbox.

He thinks his friends are coming. It must be Henry and Jonesy he's thinking of, because he says Pete and Beav
—

Suddenly a terrible image came to her as she sat on Duddits's bed with her hands folded in her lap. She saw herself opening the door to a knock that came at the empty hour of three in the morning, not wanting to open it but helpless to stop herself. And the dead ones were there instead of the living ones. Beaver and Pete were there, returned to the childhood in which they had been living on the day she had first met them, the day they had saved Duddie from God knew what nasty trick and then brought him home safe. In her mind's eye Beaver was wearing his many-zippered motorcycle jacket and Pete was wearing the crewneck sweater of which he had been so proud, the one with NASA on the left breast. She saw them cold and pale, their eyes the lusterless grape-black glaze of corpses. She saw Beaver
step forward—no smile for her now, no recognition of her now; when Joe “Beaver” Clarendon put out his pallid starfish hands, he was all business.
We've come for Duddits, Missus Cavell. We're dead, and now he is, too.

She clasped her hands tighter as a shudder twisted through her body. Duddits didn't see; he was looking out the window again, his face eager and expectant. And very softly, he began to sing again.

“Ooby-Ooby-Ooo, eh ah ooo? Eee aht-sum urk-ooo ooo ow . . .”

10

“Mr. Gray?”

No answer. Jonesy stood at the door of what was now most definitely
his
office, not a trace of Tracker Brothers left except for the dirt on the windows (the matter-of-fact pornography of the girl with her skirt raised had been replaced by Van Gogh's
Marigolds
), feeling more and more uneasy. What was the bastard looking for?

“Mr. Gray, where are you?”

No answer this time either, but there was a sense of Mr. Gray returning . . . and he was happy. The son of a bitch was
happy.

Jonesy didn't like that at all.

“Listen,” Jonesy said. Hands still pressed to the door of his sanctuary; forehead now pressed to it, as well. “I've got a proposal for you, my friend—you're halfway human already; why not just go native? We can coexist, I guess, and I'll show you around. Ice
cream's good, beer's even better. What do you say?”

He suspected Mr. Gray was tempted, as only an essentially formless creature could be tempted when offered form—a trade right out of a fairy-tale.

Not tempted enough, however.

There was the spin of the starter, the roar of the truck's motor.

“Where are we going, chum? Always assuming we can get off Standpipe Hill, that is?”

No answer, only that disquieting sense that Mr. Gray had been looking for something . . . and found it.

Jonesy hurried across to the window and looked out in time to see the truck's headlights sweep across the pillar erected to memorialize the lost. The plaque had drifted in again, which meant they must have been here awhile.

Slowly, carefully, now pushing its way through bumper-high drifts, the Dodge Ram started back down the hill.

Twenty minutes later they were on the turnpike again, once more headed south.

1

Owen couldn't raise Henry by calling out loud, the man was too deep in exhausted sleep, and so he called with his mind. He found this was easier as the byrus continued to spread. It was growing on three of the fingers on his right hand now, and had all but plugged the cup of his left ear with its spongy, itching growth. He had also lost a couple of teeth, although nothing seemed to be growing in the sockets, at least not yet.

Kurtz and Freddy had stayed clean, thanks to Kurtz's finely honed instincts, but the crews of the two surviving Blue Boy gunships, Owen's and Joe Blakey's, were lousy with byrus. Ever since talking to Henry in the shed, Owen had heard the voices of his compatriots, calling to each other across a previously unsuspected void. They were covering up the infection for now, as he himself was; lots of heavy winter clothing
helped. But that wouldn't be possible for much longer, and they didn't know what to do.

In that regard, Owen supposed he was lucky. He at least had a wheel to which he could put his shoulder.

Standing outside the back of the shed and beyond the electrified wire, smoking another cigarette he didn't want, Owen went in search of Henry and found him working his way down a steep, brushy slope. Above him was the sound of kids playing baseball or softball. Henry was a boy, a teenager, and he was calling someone's name—Janey? Jolie? It didn't matter. He was dreaming, and Owen needed him in the real world. He had let Henry sleep as long as he could (almost an hour longer than he had really wanted to), but if they were going to get this show on the road, now was the time.

Henry,
he called.

The teenager looked around, startled. There were other boys with him; three—no four of them, one peering into some kind of pipe. They were indistinct, hard to see, and Owen didn't care about them, anyway. Henry was the one he wanted, and not this pimply, startled version of him, either. Owen wanted the man.

Henry, wake up.

No, she's in there. We have to get her out. We
—

I don't give a rat's ass about her, whoever she is. Wake up.

No, I
—

It's time, Henry, wake up. Wake up. Wake

2

the fuck up!

Henry sat up with a gasp, not sure who or where he was. That was bad, but there was worse: he didn't know
when
he was. Was he eighteen or almost thirty-eight or somewhere in between? He could smell grass, hear the crack of a bat on a ball (a softball bat; it had been girls playing, girls in yellow shirts), and he could still hear Pete screaming
She's in here! Guys, I think she's in here!

“Pete saw it, he saw the line,” Henry murmured. He didn't know exactly what he was talking about. The dream was already fading, its bright images being replaced by something dark. Something he had to do, or try to do. He smelled hay and, more faintly, the sweet-sour aroma of pot.

Mister, can you help us?

Big doe eyes. Marsha, her name had been. Things coming into focus now.
Probably not,
he'd answered her, then added
but maybe.

Wake up, Henry! It's quarter of four, time to drop your cock and grab your socks.

That voice was stronger and more immediate than the others, overwhelming them and damping them out; it was like a voice from a Walkman when the batteries were fresh and the volume was turned all the way up to ten. Owen Underhill's voice. He was Henry Devlin. And if they were going to try this, the time was now.

Henry got up, wincing at the pain in his legs, his back, his shoulders, his neck. Where his muscles weren't screaming, the advancing byrus was itching abominably. He felt a hundred years old until he took his first step toward the dirty window, then decided it was more like a hundred and ten.

3

Owen saw the man's shape come into view inside the window and nodded, relieved. Henry was moving like Methuselah on a bad day, but Owen had something that would fix that, at least temporarily. He had stolen it from the brand-new infirmary, which was so busy no one had noticed him coming or going. And all the time he had protected the front of his mind with the two blocking mantras Henry had taught him:
Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross
and
Yes we can-can, yes we can, yes we can-can, great gosh a'mighty.
So far they seemed to be working—he'd gotten a few strange looks but no questions. Even the weather continued in their favor, the storm roaring on unabated.

Now he could see Henry's face at the window, a pale oval blur looking out at him.

I don't know about this,
Henry sent.
Man, I can hardly walk.

I can help with that. Stand clear of the window.

Henry moved back with no questions.

In one pocket of his parka, Owen had the small metal box (
USMC
stamped on the steel top) in which he kept his various IDs when he was on active duty—
the box had been a present from Kurtz himself after the Santo Domingo mission last year, a fine irony. In his other pocket were three rocks which he had picked up from beneath his own helicopter, where the fall of snow was thin.

He took one of them—a good-sized chunk of Maine granite—then paused, appalled, as a bright image filled his mind. Mac Cavanaugh, the fellow from Blue Boy Leader who had lost two of his fingers on the op, was sitting inside one of the semi trailer–boxes in the compound. With him was Frank Bellson from Blakey's Blue Boy Three, the other gun-ship that had made it back to base. One of them had turned on a powerful eight-cell flashlight and set it on its base like an electric candle. Its bright glow sprayed up into the gloom. This was happening right now, not five hundred feet from where Owen stood with a rock in one hand and his steel box in the other. Cavanaugh and Bellson sat side by side on the floor of the trailer. Both wore what looked like heavy red beards. Luxuriant growth had burst apart the bandages over the stumps of Cavanaugh's fingers. They had service automatics, the muzzles in their mouths. Their eyes were linked. So were their minds. Bellson was counting down:
Five . . . four . . . three . . .

“Boys, no!” Owen cried, but got no sense they heard him; their link was too strong, forged with the resolve of men who have made up their minds. They would be the first of Kurtz's command to do this tonight; Owen did not think they would be the last.

Owen?
That was Henry.
Owen, what's
—

Then he tapped into what Owen was seeing and fell silent, horrified.

. . . two . . . one.

Two pistol-shots, muffled by the roar of the wind and four Zimmer electrical generators. Two fans of blood and brain-tissue appearing like magic over the heads of Cavanaugh and Bellson in the dim light. Owen and Henry saw Bellson's right foot give a final dying jump. It struck the barrel of the flashlight, and for a moment they could see Cavanaugh's and Bell-son's distorted, byrus-speckled faces. Then, as the flashlight went rolling across the bed of the box, casting cartwheels of light on the aluminum side, the picture went dark, like the picture on a TV when the plug has been pulled.

“Christ,” Owen whispered. “Good Christ.”

Henry had appeared behind the window again. Owen motioned him back, then threw the rock. The range was short, but his first shot missed anyway, bouncing harmlessly off the weathered boards to the left of the target. He took the second, pulled in a deep, settling breath, and threw. This one shattered the glass.