Dreamcatcher (73 page)

He knew.

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

17

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 milling 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 right. 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 His Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card had been revoked.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-nearly-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 spuming 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, 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.

18

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, coming 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 call
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.