Dreamcatcher (59 page)

Got mail for you, Henry. Coming through.

He tossed the steel box through the hole where the glass had been.

4

It bounced across the shed floor. Henry picked the box up and undid the clasp. Inside were four foil-wrapped packets.

What are these?

Pocket rockets,
Owen returned.
How's your heart?

Okay, as far as I know.

Good, because that shit makes cocaine feel like Valium. There are two in each pack. Take three. Save the rest.

I don't have any water.

Owen sent a clear picture—south end of a northbound horse.
Chew them, beautiful—you've got a few teeth left, don't you?
There was real anger in this, and at first Henry didn't understand it, but then of course he did. If there was anything he should be able to understand this early morning, it was the sudden loss of friends.

The pills were white, unmarked by the name of any pharmaceutical company, and terribly bitter in his mouth as they crumbled. Even his throat tried to pucker as he swallowed.

The effect was almost instantaneous. By the time he had tucked Owen's USMC box into his pants pocket, Henry's heartbeat had doubled. By the time he stepped back to the window, it had tripled. His eyes seemed to pulse from their sockets with each quick rap in his chest. This wasn't distressing, however; he actually found it quite pleasant. No more sleepiness, and his aches seemed to have flown away.

“Yow!” he called. “Popeye should try a few cans of
this
shit!” And laughed, both because speaking now seemed so odd—archaic, almost—and because he felt so fine.

Keep it down, what do you say?

Okay! OKAY!

Even his
thoughts
seemed to have acquired a new, crystalline force, and Henry didn't think this was just his imagination. Although the light behind the old feed shed was a little less than in the rest of the compound, it was still strong enough for him to see Owen wince and raise a hand to the side of his head, as if someone had shouted directly into his ear.

Sorry,
he sent.

It's all right. It's just that you're so strong. You must be
covered
with that shit.

Actually, I'm not,
Henry returned. A wink of his dream came back to him: the four of them on that grassy slope. No, the
five
of them, because Duddits had been there, too.

Henry—do you remember where I said I'd be?

Southwest corner of the compound. All the way across from the barn, on the diagonal. But—

No buts. That's where I'll be. If you want a ride out of here, it's where you better be, too. It's
 . . . A pause as Owen checked his watch. If it was still working, it must be the kind you wind up, Henry thought . . .
two minutes to four. I'll give you half an hour, then if the folks in the barn haven't started to move, I'm going to short the fence.

Half an hour may not be long enough,
Henry protested. Although he was standing still, looking out at Owen's form in the blowing snow, he was breathing fast, like a man in a race. His heart felt as if it
was
in a race.

It'll have to be,
Owen sent.
The fence is alarmed. There'll be sirens. Even more lights. A general alert. I'll give
you five minutes after the shit starts hitting the fan—that's a three hundred count—and if you haven't shown up, I'm on my merry way.

You'll never find Jonesy without me.

That doesn't mean I have to stay here and
die
with you, Henry.
Patient. As if talking to a small child.
If you don't make it to where I am in five minutes, there'll be no chance for either of us, anyway.

Those two men who just committed suicide . . . they're not the only ones who are fucked up.

I know.

Henry caught a brief mental glimpse of a yellow school bus with
MILLINOCKET SCHOOL DEPT
. printed up the side. Looking out the windows were two score of grinning skulls. They were Owen Underhill's mates, Henry realized. The ones he'd arrived with yesterday morning. Men who were now either dying or already dead.

Never mind them,
Owen replied.
It's Kurtz's ground support we have to worry about now. Especially the Imperial Valleys. If they exist, you better believe they'll follow orders and that they're well-trained. And training wins out over confusion every time—that's what training is for. If you stick around, they'll roast you and toast you. Five minutes is what you have once the alarms go. A three hundred count.

Owen's logic was hard to like and impossible to refute.

All right,
Henry said.
Five minutes.

You have no business doing this in the first place,
Owen told him. The thought came to Henry encrusted with a complex filigree of emotion: frustration, guilt, the
inevitable fear—in Owen Underhill's case, not of dying but of failure.
If what you say is true, everything depends on whether or not we get out of here clean. For you to maybe put the entire world at risk because of a few hundred schmoes in a barn . . .

It's not the way your boss would do it, right?

Owen reacted with surprise—no words, but a kind of comic-book
!
in Henry's mind. Then, even over the ceaseless howl and hoot of the wind, he heard Owen laugh.

You got me there, beautiful.

Anyway, I'll get them moving. I'm a motivational master.

I know you'll try.
Henry couldn't see Owen's face, but felt him smiling. Then Owen spoke aloud. “And after that? Tell me again.”

Why?

“Maybe because soldiers need motivation, too, especially when they're derailing. And belay the telepathy—I want you to say it out loud. I want to hear the word.”

Henry looked at the man shivering on the other side of the fence and said, “After that we're going to be heroes. Not because we want to, but because there are no other options.”

Out in the snow and the wind, Owen was nodding. Nodding and still smiling. “Why not?” he said. “Just why the fuck not?”

In his mind, glimmering, Henry saw the image of a little boy with a plate raised over his head. What the man wanted was for the little boy to put the plate
back—that plate that had haunted him so over the years and would forever stay broken.

5

Dreamless since childhood and thus unsane, Kurtz woke as he always did: at one moment nowhere, at the next completely awake and cognizant of his surroundings. Alive, hallelujah, oh yes, still in the big time. He turned his head and looked at the clock, but the goddam thing had gone off again in spite of its fancy anti-magnetic casing, flashing 12-12-12, like a stutterer caught on one word. He turned on the lamp beside the bed and picked up the pocket-watch on the bedtable. Four-oh-eight.

Kurtz put it down again, swung his bare feet out onto the floor, and stood up. The first thing he became aware of was the wind, still howling like a woe-dog. The second was that the faraway mutter of voices in his head had disappeared entirely. The telepathy was gone and Kurtz was glad. It had offended him in an elemental, down-deep way, as certain sexual practices offended him. The idea that someone might be able to come into his very
head,
to be able to visit the upper levels of his mind . . . that had been horrible. The grayboys deserved to be wiped out for that alone, for bringing that disgustingly peculiar gift. Thank God it had proved ephemeral.

Kurtz shucked his gray workout shorts and stood naked in front of the mirror on the bedroom door, letting his eyes go up from his feet (where the first snarls
of purple veins were beginning to show) to the crown of his head, where his graying hair stood up in a sleep-tousle. He was sixty, but not looking too bad; those busted veins on the sides of his feet were the worst of it. Had a hell of a good crank on him, too, although he had never made much use of it; women were, for the most part, vile creatures incapable of loyalty. They drained a man. In his secret unsane heart, where even his madness was starched and pressed and fundamentally not very interesting, Kurtz believed all sex was FUBAR. Even when it was done for procreation, the result was usually a brain-equipped tumor not much different from the shit-weasels.

From the crown of his head, Kurtz let his eyes descend again, slowly, looking for the least patch of red, the tiniest roseola blush. There was nothing. He turned around, looked at as much as he could see by craning back over his shoulder, and still saw nothing. He spread his buttocks, probed between them, slid a finger two knuckles deep into his anus, and felt nothing but flesh.

“I'm clean,” he said in a low voice as he washed his hands briskly in the Winnebago's little bathroom. “Clean as a whistle.”

He stepped into his shorts again, then sat on his rack to slip into his socks. Clean, praise God, clean. A good word
Clean.
The unpleasant feel of the telepathy—like sweaty skin pressed against sweaty skin—was gone. He wasn't supporting a single strand of Ripley; he had even checked his tongue and gums.

So what had awakened him? Why were there alarm bells clanging in his head?

Because telepathy wasn't the
only
form of extrasensory perception. Because long before the grayboys knew there was such a place as Earth tucked away in this dusty and seldom-visited carrel of the great interstellar library, there had been a little thing called instinct, the specialty of uniform-wearing
Homo saps
such as himself.

“The hunch,” Kurtz said. “The good old all-American hunch-ola.”

He put on his pants. Then, still bare-chested, he picked up the walkie which lay on the bedtable beside the pocket-watch (four-sixteen now, and how the time seemed to be
rushing,
like a brakeless car plunging down a hill toward a busy intersection). The walkie was a special digital job, encrypted and supposedly unjammable . . . but one look at his supposedly impervious digital clock made him realize none of the gear was un-anything.

He clicked the
SEND/SQUEAL
button twice. Freddy Johnson came back quickly and not sounding
too
sleepy . . . oh, but now that crunch time was here, how Kurtz (who had been born Robert Coonts, name, name, what's in a name) longed for Underhill.
Owen, Owen,
he thought,
why did you have to skid just when I needed you the most, son?

“Boss?”

“I'm moving Imperial Valley up to six. That's Imperial Valley at oh-six hundred, come back and acknowledge me.”

He had to listen to why it was impossible, crap Owen would not have spouted in his weakest dream.
He gave Freddy roughly forty seconds to vent before saying, “Close your clam, you son of a bitch.”

Shocked silence from Freddy's end.

“We've got something brewing here. I don't know what, but it woke me up out of a sound sleep with the alarm bells ringing. Now I put all you fellows and girls together for a reason, and if you expect to be still drawing breath come suppertime, you want to get them moving. Tell Gallagher she may wind up on point. Acknowledge me, Freddy.”

“Boss, I acknowledge. One thing you should know—we've had four suicides that I know of. There may have been more.”

Kurtz was neither surprised nor displeased. Under certain circumstances, suicide wasn't just acceptable, but noble—the true gentleman's final act.

“From the choppers?”

“Affirmative.”

“No Imperial Valleys.”

“No, boss, no Valleys.”

“All right. Floor it, buck. We got trouble. I don't know what it is, but I know it's coming. Big thunder.”

Kurtz tossed the walkie back on the table and continued dressing. He wanted another cigarette, but they were all gone.

6

A pretty good herd of milkers had once been stabled in Old Man Gosselin's barn, and while the interior might
not have passed USDA standards as it now stood, the building was still in okay shape. The soldiers had strung some high-wattage bulbs that cast a brilliant glare over the stalls, the milking stations in the parlor, and the upper and lower lofts. They had also put in a number of heaters, and the barn glowed with a pulsing, almost feverish warmth. Henry unzipped his coat as soon as he stepped in, but still felt the sweat break out on his face. He supposed Owen's pills had something to do with that—he'd taken another outside the barn.

His first thought as he looked around was how similar the barn was to the various refugee camps he had seen: Bosnian Serbs in Macedonia, Haitian rebels after Uncle Sugar's Marines had landed in Port-au-Prince, the African exiles who had left their home countries because of disease, famine, civil war, or a combination of all three. You got used to seeing such things on the TV news, but the pictures always came from far away; the horror with which one viewed them was almost clinical. But this wasn't a place you needed a passport to visit. This was a cowbarn in New England. The people packed into it weren't wearing rags and dirty dashikis but parkas from Bean's, cargo pants (so perfect for those extra shotgun shells) from Banana Republic, underwear from Fruit of the Loom. The look was the same, though. The only difference he could discern was how surprised they all still seemed. This wasn't supposed to be happening in the land of Sprint Nickel Nights.

The internees pretty well covered the main floor, where hay had been spread (jackets on top of that).
They were sleeping in little clumps or family groups. There were more of them in the lofts, and three or four to each of the forty stalls. The room was full of snores and gurgles and the groans of people dreaming badly. Somewhere a child was weeping. And there was piped-in Muzak: to Henry, this was the final bizarre touch. Right now the dozing doomed in Old Man Gosselin's barn were listening to the Fred Waring Orchestra float through a violin-heavy version of “Some Enchanted Evening.”