Dreamcatcher (16 page)

“What if—”

WHUP! WHUP! WHUP!
And from behind the door there came more of those wrenching, liquid sounds, followed by another cry from McCarthy.

“Get out there!” Jonesy shouted. “Flag those fuckers down! I don't care if you have to drop trou and dance the hootchie-koo,
just get them to land
!”

“Okay—” Beaver had started to turn away. Now he jerked and screamed.

A number of things Jonesy had been quite successfully not thinking about suddenly leaped out of the closet and came running into the light, capering and leering. When he wheeled around, however, all he saw was a doe standing in the kitchen with its head extended over the counter, examining them with its mild brown eyes. Jonesy took a deep, gasping breath and slumped back against the wall.

“Eat snot and rot,” Beaver breathed. Then he advanced on the doe, clapping his hands. “Bug out, Mabel! Don't you know what time of year this is? Go on! Put an egg in your shoe and beat it! Make like an amoeba and split!”

The deer stayed where she was for a moment, eyes widening in an expression of alarm that was almost human. Then she whirled around, her head skimming the line of pots and ladles and tongs hanging over the stove. They clanged together and some fell from their hooks, adding to the clangor.
Then she was out the door, little white tail flipping.

Beaver followed, pausing long enough to look at the cluster of droppings on the linoleum with a jaundiced eye.

4

The mixed migration of animals had pretty well dried up to stragglers. The doe Beav had scared out of their kitchen leaped over a limping fox that had apparently lost one paw to a trap, and then disappeared into the woods. Then, from above the low-hanging clouds just beyond the snowmobile shed, a lumbering helicopter the size of a city bus appeared. It was brown, with the letters
ANG
printed on the side in white.

Ang? Beaver thought.
What the hell is Ang?
Then he realized: Air National Guard, probably out of Bangor.

It dipped, nose-heavy. Beaver stepped into the backyard, waving his arms over his head. “Hey!” he shouted. “Hey, little help here! Little help, guys!”

The helicopter descended until it was no more than seventy-five feet off the ground, close enough to raise the fresh snow in a cyclone. Then it moved toward him, carrying the snow-cyclone with it.

“Hey! We got a hurt guy here! Hurt guy!” Jumping up and down now like one of those numbass bootscooters on The Nashville Network, feeling like a jerk but doing it anyway. The chopper drifted toward him, low but not coming any lower, not showing any sign of actually landing, and a horrid idea filled him. Beav
didn't know if it was something he was getting from the guys in the chopper or just paranoia. All he could be sure of was that he suddenly felt like something pinned to the center ring of a target in a shooting gallery: hit the Beaver and win a clock-radio.

The chopper's side door slid back. A man holding a bullhorn and wearing the bulkiest parka Beaver had ever seen came tilting out toward him. The parka and the bullhorn didn't bother the Beav. What bothered him was the oxygen mask the guy was wearing over his mouth and nose. He'd never heard of fliers needing to wear oxygen masks at an altitude of seventy-five feet. Not, that was, if the air they were breathing was okay.

The man in the parka spoke into the bullhorn, the words coming out loud and clear over the
whup-whup-whup
of the helicopter's rotors but sounding strange anyway, partly because of the amplification but mostly, Beaver thought, because of the mask. It was like being addressed by some strange robot god.

“HOW MANY ARE YOU?” the god-voice called down. “SHOW ME ON YOUR FINGERS.”

Beaver, confused and frightened, at first thought only of himself and Jonesy; Henry and Pete weren't back from the store, after all. He raised two fingers like a guy giving the peace sign.

“STAY WHERE YOU ARE!” the man leaning out of the helicopter boomed in his robot god's voice. “THIS AREA IS UNDER TEMPORARY QUARANTINE! SAY AGAIN, THIS AREA IS UNDER TEMPORARY QUARANTINE! YOU MUST NOT LEAVE!”

The snowfall was thinning, but now the wind kicked up and blew a sheet of the snow which had been sucked up by the copter's rotors into Beaver's face. He slitted his eyes against it and waved his arms. He sucked in freezing snow, spat out his toothpick to keep from yanking
that
down his throat, too (it was how he would die, his mother constantly predicted, by pulling a toothpick down his throat and choking on it), and then screamed: “What do you
mean,
quarantine? We got a sick guy down here, you got to come and get him!”

Knowing they couldn't hear him under the big
whup-whup-whup
of the rotor blades,
he
didn't have any fucking bullhorn to boost his voice, but yelling anyway. And as the words
sick guy
passed through his lips, he realized he'd given the guy in the chopper the wrong number of fingers—they were three, not two. He started to raise that number of fingers, then thought of Henry and Pete. They weren't here yet but unless something had happened to them, they
would
be—so how many
were
they? Two was the wrong answer, but was three the right one? Or was it five? As he usually did in such situations, Beaver went into mental dog-lock. When it happened in school, there'd been Henry sitting beside him or Jonesy behind him to give him the answers. Out here there was no one to help, only that big
whup-whup-whup
smacking into his ears and all that swirling snow going down his throat and into his lungs, making him cough.

“STAY WHERE YOU ARE! THIS SITUATION WILL BE RESOLVED IN TWENTY-FOUR TO FORTY-EIGHT HOURS! IF YOU NEED FOOD,
CROSS YOUR ARMS OVER YOUR HEAD!”

“There are more of us!”
Beaver screamed at the man leaning out of the helicopter. He screamed so loudly red dots danced in front of his eyes.
“We got a hurt guy here! We . . . have got . . . A HURT GUY!”

The idiot in the helicopter tossed his bullhorn back into the cabin behind him, then made a thumb-and-forefinger circle down at Beaver, as if to say,
Okay! Gotcha!
Beaver felt like dancing in frustration. Instead, he raised one open hand above his head—a finger each for him and his friends, plus the thumb for McCarthy. The man in the helicopter took this in, then grinned. For one truly wonderful moment, Beaver thought he had gotten through to the mask-wearing fuckwad. Then the fuckwad returned what he thought was Beaver's wave, said something to the pilot behind him, and the ANG helicopter began to rise. Beaver Clarendon was still standing there, frosted with swirling snow and screaming.
“There's five of us and we need help! There's five of us and we need some fucking HELP!”

The copter vanished back into the clouds.

5

Jonesy heard some of this—certainly he heard the amplified voice from the Thunderbolt helicopter—but registered very little. He was too concerned with McCarthy, who had given a number of small and breathless screams, then fallen silent. The stench coming under the door continued to thicken.

“McCarthy!” he yelled as Beaver came back in.
“Open this door or we'll break it down!”

“Get away from me!” McCarthy screamed back in a thin, distracted voice. “I have to shit, that's all,
I HAVE TO SHIT!
If I can shit I'll be all right!”

Such straight talk, coming from a man who seemed to consider
oh gosh
and
oh dear
strong language, frightened Jonesy even more than the bloody sheet and underwear. He turned to Beaver, barely noticing that the Beav was powdered with snow and looking like Frosty. “Come on, help me break it down. We've got to try and help him.”

Beaver looked scared and worried. Snow was melting on his cheeks. “I dunno. The guy in the helicopter said something about quarantine—what if he's infected or something? What if that red thing on his face—”

In spite of his own ungenerous feelings about McCarthy, Jonesy felt like striking his old friend. This previous March he himself had lain bleeding in a street in Cambridge. Suppose people had refused to touch him because he might have AIDS? Refused to help him? Just left him there to bleed because there were no rubber gloves handy?

“Beav, we were right down in his face—if he's got something really infectious, we've probably caught it already. Now what do you say?”

For a moment what Beaver said was nothing. Then Jonesy felt that click in his head. For just a moment he saw the Beaver he'd grown up with, a kid in an old beat-up motorcycle jacket who had cried
Hey, you guys, quit it! Just fucking QUIT it!
and knew it was going to be all right.

Beaver stepped forward. “Hey, Rick, how about opening up? We just want to help.”

Nothing from behind the door. Not a cry, not a breath, not so much as the sound of shifting cloth. The only sounds were the steady rumble of the genny and the fading
whup
of the helicopter.

“Okay,” Beaver said, then crossed himself. “Let's break the fucker down.”

They stepped back together and turned their shoulders toward the door, half-consciously miming cops in half a hundred movies.

“On three,” Jonesy said.

“Your leg up to this, man?”

In fact, Jonesy's leg and hip hurt badly, although he hadn't precisely realized this until Beaver brought it up. “I'm fine,” he said.

“Yeah, and my ass is king of the world.”

“On three. Ready?” And when Beaver nodded: “One . . . two . . . three.”

They rushed forward together and hit the door together, almost four hundred pounds behind two dropped shoulders. It gave way with an absurd ease that spilled them, stumbling and grabbing at each other, into the bathroom. Their feet skidded in the blood on the tiles.

“Ah,
fuck,
” Beaver said. His right hand crept to his mouth, which was for once without a toothpick, and covered it. Above his hand, his eyes were wide and wet. “Ah,
fuck,
man—
fuck.
”

Jonesy found he could say nothing at all.

1

“Lady,” Pete said.

The woman in the duffel coat said nothing. Lay on the sawdusty piece of tarp and said nothing. Pete could see one eye, staring at him, or through him, or at the jellyroll center of the fucking universe, who knew. Creepy. The fire crackled between them, really starting to take hold and throw some heat now. Henry had been gone about fifteen minutes. It would be three hours before he made it back, Pete calculated, three hours at the very least, and that was a long time to spend under this lady's creepy jackalope eye.

“Lady,” he said again. “You hear me?”

Nothing. But once she had yawned, and he'd seen that half her goddam teeth were gone. What the fuck was up with that? And did he really want to know?
The answer, Pete had discovered, was yes and no. He was curious—he supposed a man couldn't help being curious—but at the same time he didn't want to know. Not who she was, not who Rick was or what had happened to him, and not who “they” were.
They're back!
the woman had screamed when she saw the lights in the sky,
They're back!

“Lady,” he said for the third time.

Nothing.

She'd said that Rick was the only one left, and then she'd said
They're back,
presumably meaning the lights in the sky, and since then there had been nothing but those unpleasant burps and farts . . . the one yawn, exposing all those missing teeth . . . and the eye. The creepy jackalope eye. Henry had only been gone fifteen minutes—he'd left at five past twelve and it was now twelve-twenty by Pete's watch—and it felt like an hour and a half. This was going to be one long fucking day, and if he was going to get through it without cracking up (he kept thinking of some story they'd had to read in the eighth grade, he couldn't remember who wrote it, only that the guy in the story had killed this old man because he couldn't stand the old man's eye, and at the time Pete hadn't understood that but now he did, yessir), he needed something.

“Lady, do you hear me?”

Nada.
Just the creepy jackalope eye.

“I have to go back to the car because I kind of forgot something. But you'll be all right. Won't you?”

No answer—and then she let loose with another of those long buzz-saw farts, her face wrinkling up as
she let go, as if it hurt her . . . and probably it did, something that sounded like that just about
had
to hurt. And even though Pete had been careful to get upwind, some of the smell came to him—hot and rank but somehow not
human.
Nor did it smell like cow-farts. He had worked for Lionel Sylvester as a kid, he'd milked more than his share of cows, and sometimes they blew gas at you while you were on the stool, sure—a heavy green smell, a
marshy
smell. This wasn't like that, not a bit. This was like . . . well, like when you were a kid and got your first chemistry set, and after awhile you got tired of the faggy little experiments in the booklet and just went hogwild and mixed all that shit together, just to see if it would explode. And, he realized, that was part of what was troubling him, part of what was making him nervous. Except that was stupid. People didn't just
explode,
did they? Still, he had to get him a little help here. Because she was giving him the willies, bigtime.

He got two of the pieces of wood Henry had scrounged, added them to the fire, debated, and added a third. Sparks rose, whirling, and winked out against the sloping piece of corrugated tin. “I'll be back before that-all burns down, but if you want to add on another, be my guest. Okay?”