Dreamcatcher (38 page)

He remembered Pete talking about the gossip in Gosselin's—missing hunters, lights in the sky—and how blithely The Great American Psychiatrist had dismissed it, gassing about the Satanism hysteria in Washington State, the abuse hysteria in Delaware. Playing Mr. Smartass Shrink-Boy with his mouth and the front of his mind while the back of his mind went on playing with suicide like a baby who's just discovered his toes in the bathtub. He had sounded entirely plausible, ready for any TV panel show that wanted to spend sixty minutes on the interface between the unconscious and the unknown, but things had changed. Now
he
had become one of the missing hunters. Also, he had seen things you couldn't find on the Internet no matter how big your search engine was.

He sat there, head back, eyes closed, belly full. Jonesy's Garand was propped against one of the Scout's tires. The snow lit on his cheeks and forehead like the light touch of a kitten's paws. “This is it, what all the geeks have been waiting for,” he said. “Close encounters of the third kind. Hell, maybe the fourth or fifth kind. Sorry I made fun of you, Pete. You were right and I was wrong. Hell, it's worse than that.
Old Man Gosselin
was right and I was wrong. So much for a Harvard education.”

And once he'd said that much out loud, things began to make sense. Something had either landed or crashed. There had been an armed response from the United States government. Were they telling the outside world what had happened? Probably not, that wasn't their style, but Henry had an idea they would have to before much longer. You couldn't put the entire Jefferson Tract in Hangar 57.

Did he know anything else? Maybe, and maybe it was a little more than the men in charge of the helicopters and the firing parties knew. They clearly believed they were dealing with a contagion, but Henry didn't think it was as dangerous as they seemed to. The stuff caught, bloomed . . . but then it died. Even the parasite that had been inside the woman had died. This was a bad time of year and a bad place to culture interstellar athlete's foot, if that was what it was. All that argued strongly for the possibility of a crash landing . . . but what about the lights in the sky? What about the implants? For years people who claimed they'd been abducted by ETs had also claimed they had been stripped . . . examined . . . forced to undergo implants . . . all ideas so Freudian they were almost laughable . . .

Henry realized he was drifting and snapped awake so strongly that the unwrapped package of hot dogs tumbled off his lap and into the snow. No, not just drifting; dozing. A good deal more light had seeped out of the day, and the world had gone a dull slate
color. His pants were speckled with the fresh snow. If he'd gone any deeper, he'd've been snoring.

He brushed himself off and stood up, wincing as his muscles screamed in protest. He regarded the hot dogs lying there in the snow with something like revulsion, then bent down, rewrapped them, and tucked them into one of his coat pockets. They might start looking good to him again later on. He sincerely hoped not, but you never knew.

“Jonesy's in the hospital,” he said abruptly. No idea what he meant. “Jonesy's in the hospital with Mr. Gray. Got to stay there. ICU.”

Madness. Prattling madness. He clamped the skis to his boots again, praying that his back wouldn't lock up while he was bent over, and then pushed off along the track once more, the snow starting to thicken around him now, the day darkening.

By the time he realized that he had remembered the hot dogs but forgotten Jonesy's rifle (not to mention his own), he'd gone too far to turn around.

12

He stopped what might have been three quarters of an hour later, peering stupidly down at the Arctic Cat's print. There was little more than a glimmer of light left in the day now, but enough to see that the track—what was left of it—veered abruptly to the right and went into the woods.

Into the fucking
woods.
Why had Jonesy (and Pete, if Pete was with him) gone into the woods? What
sense did that make when the Deep Cut ran straight and clear, a white lane between the darkening trees?

“Deep Cut goes northwest,” he said, standing there with his skis toeing in toward each other and the loosely wrapped package of hot dogs poking out of his coat pocket. “The road to Gosselin's—the blacktop—can't be more than three miles from here. Jonesy knows that.
Pete
knows that. Still . . . snowmobile goes . . .” He held up his arms like the hands of a clock, estimating. “Snowmobile goes almost dead
north.
Why?”

Maybe he knew. The sky was brighter in the direction of Gosselin's, as if banks of lights had been set up there. He could hear the chatter of helicopters, waxing and waning but always tending in that same direction. As he drew closer, he expected to hear other heavy machinery as well: supply vehicles, maybe generators. To the east there was still the isolated crackle of gunfire, but the big action was clearly in the direction he was going.

“They've set up a base camp at Gosselin's,” Henry said. “And Jonesy didn't want any part of it.”

That felt like a bingo to Henry. Only . . . there
was
no more Jonesy, was there? Just the redblack cloud.

“Not true,” he said. “Jonesy's still there. Jonesy's in the hospital with Mr. Gray. That's what the cloud is—Mr. Gray.” And then, apropos of nothing (at least that he could tell): “Fit wha? Fit neek?”

Henry looked up into the sifting snow (it was much less urgent than the earlier snowfall, at least so far, but it was starting to accumulate) as if he
believed there was a God above it somewhere, studying him with all the genuine if detached interest of a scientist looking at a wriggling paramecium. “What the fuck am I talking about? Any idea?”

No answer, but an odd memory came. He, Pete, Beaver, and Jonesy's wife had kept a secret among them last March. Carla had felt Jonesy could do without knowing that his heart had stopped twice, once just after the EMTs put him in the back of their ambulance, and again shortly after he had arrived at Mass General. Jonesy knew he'd come close to stepping out, but not (at least as far as Henry knew) just
how
close. And if Jonesy had had any Kübler-Ross step-into-the-light experiences, he had either kept them to himself or forgotten thanks to repeated doses of anesthetic and lots of pain-killers.

A roar built out of the south with terrifying speed and Henry ducked, putting his hands to his ears as what sounded like a full squadron of jet fighters passed in the clouds overhead. He saw nothing, but when the roar of the jets faded as fast as it had come, he straightened with his heart beating hard and fast. Yow! Christ! It occurred to him that this was what the airbases surrounding Iraq must have sounded like during the days leading up to Operation Desert Storm.

That big boom. Did it mean the United States of America had just gone to war against beings from another world? Was he now living in an H. G. Wells novel? Henry felt a hard, squeezing flutter under his breastbone. If so, this enemy might have more than a
few hundred rusty Soviet Scuds to throw back at Uncle Sammy.

Let it go. You can't do anything about any of that. What's next for you, that's the question. What's next for you?

The rave of the jets had already faded to a mutter. He guessed that they would be back, though. Maybe with friends.

“Two paths diverged in a snowy wood, is that how it goes? Something like that, anyway.”

But following the snowmobile's track any farther was really not an option. He'd lose it in the dark half an hour from now, and this new snowfall would wipe it out in any case. He would end up wandering and lost . . . as Jonesy very likely was now.

Sighing, Henry turned away from the snowmobile track and continued along the road.

13

By the time he neared the place where the Deep Cut joined up with the two-lane blacktop known as the Swanny Pond Road, Henry was almost too tired to stand, let alone ski. The muscles in his thighs felt like old wet teabags. Not even the lights on the northwestern horizon, now much brighter, or the sound of the motors and helicopters could offer him much comfort. Ahead of him was a final long, steep hill. On the other side, Deep Cut ended and Swanny Pond began. There he might actually encounter traffic, especially if there were troops being moved in.

“Come on,” he said. “Come on, come on, come on.” Yet he stood where he was awhile longer. He didn't want to go over that hill. “Better underhill than over-hill,” he said. That seemed to mean something but it was probably just another idiotic
non sequitur.
Besides, there was nowhere else to go.

He bent, scooped up more snow—in the dark the double handful looked like a small pillowcase. He nibbled some, not because he wanted it but because he really
didn't
want to start moving again. The lights coming from Gosselin's were more understandable than the lights he and Pete had seen playing in the sky (
They're back!
Becky had screamed, like the little girl sitting in front of the TV in that old Steven Spielberg movie), but Henry liked them even less, somehow. All those motors and generators sounded somehow . . . hungry.

“That's right, rabbit,” he said. And then, because there really
were
no other options, he started up the last hill between him and a real road.

14

He paused at the top, gasping for breath and bent over his ski-poles. The wind was stronger up here, and it seemed to go right through his clothing. His left leg throbbed where it had been gored by the turnsignal stalk, and he wondered again if he was incubating a little red-gold colony under the makeshift bandage. Too dark to see, and when the only possible good news would be no news, maybe that was just as well.

“Time slowed, reality bent, on and on the eggman went.” No yuks left in that one, so he started down the hill toward the T-junction where the Deep Cut Road ended.

This side of the hill was steeper and soon he was skiing rather than walking. He picked up speed, not knowing if what he felt was terror, exhilaration, or some unhealthy mix of the two. Certainly he was going too fast for the visibility, which was almost nil, and his abilities, which were as rusty as the clamps holding the skis to his boots. The trees blurred past on either side, and it suddenly occurred to him that all his problems might be solved at a stroke. Not the Hemingway Solution after all. Call this way out the Bono Solution.

His hat blew off his head. He reached for it automatically, one of his poles flailing out ahead of him, half-seen in the dark, and all at once his balance was gone. He was going to take a tumble. And maybe that was good, as long as he didn't break his goddam leg. Falling would stop him, at least. He would just pick himself up, and—

Lights blazed out, big truck-mounted spotlights, and before his vision disappeared into dazzle, Henry glimpsed what might have been a flatbed pulp-truck pulled across the end of the Deep Cut Road. The lights were undoubtedly motion-sensitive, and there was a line of men standing in front of them.

“HALT!” a terrifying, amplified voice commanded. It could have been the voice of God. “HALT OR WE'LL FIRE!”

Henry went down hard and awkwardly. His skis
shot off his feet. One ankle bent painfully enough to make him cry out. He lost one ski-pole; the other snapped off halfway up its shaft. The wind was knocked out of him in a large frosty whoop of breath. He slid, snowplowing with his wide-open crotch, then came to rest, bent limbs forming a shape something like a swastika.

His vision began to come back, and he heard feet crunching in the snow. He flailed and managed to sit up, not able to tell if anything was broken or not.

Six men were standing about ten feet down the hill from him, their shadows impossibly long and crisp on the diamond-dusted new snow. They were all wearing parkas. They all had clear plastic masks over their mouths and noses—these looked more efficient than the painters' masks Henry had found in the snowmobile shed, but Henry had an idea that the basic purpose was the same.

The men also had automatic weapons, all of them pointed at him. It now seemed rather lucky to Henry that he had left Jonesy's Garand and his own Winchester back at the Scout. If he'd had a gun, he might have a dozen or more holes in him by now.

“I don't think I've got it,” he croaked. “Whatever it is you're worried about, I don't think—”

“ON YOUR FEET!” God's voice again. Coming from the truck. The men standing in front of him blocked out at least some of the glare and Henry could see more men at the foot of the hill where the roads met. All of them had weapons, too, except for the one holding the bullhorn.

“I don't know if I can g—”

“ON YOUR FEET
NOW!
” God commanded, and one of the men in front of him made an expressive little jerking motion with the barrel of his gun.

Henry got shakily to his feet. His legs were trembling and the ankle he'd bent was outraged, but everything was holding together, at least for the time being.
Thus ends the eggman's journey,
he thought, and began to laugh. The men in front of him looked at each other uneasily, and although they pointed their rifles at him again, he was comforted to see even that small demonstration of human emotion.

In the brilliant glow of the lights mounted on the pulper's flatbed, Henry saw something lying in the snow—it had fallen from his pocket when he wiped out. Slowly, knowing they might shoot him anyway, he bent down.

“DON'T TOUCH THAT!” God cried from His loudspeaker atop the cab of the pulp-truck, and now the men down there also raised their weapons, a little hello darkness my old friend peeping from the muzzle of each.

“Bite shit and die,” Henry said—one of the Beav's better efforts—and picked up the package. He held it out to the armed and masked men in front of him, smiling. “I come in peace for all mankind,” he said. “Who wants a hot dog?”