Dreamcatcher (60 page)

Hyped as he was, everything stood out with brilliant, exclamatory clarity.
All the orange jackets and hats!
he thought.
Man! It's Halloween in hell!

There was also a fair amount of the red-gold stuff. Henry saw patches growing on cheeks, in ears, between fingers; he also saw patches growing on beams and on the electrical cords of several dangling lights. The predominant smell in here was hay, but Henry had no trouble picking up the smell of sulfur-tinged ethyl alcohol under it. As well as the snores, there was a lot of farting going on—it sounded like six or seven seriously untalented musicians tootling away on tubas and saxophones. Under other circumstances it would have been funny . . . or perhaps even in these, to a person who hadn't seen that weasel-thing wriggling and snarling on Jonesy's bloody bed.

How many of them are incubating those things?
Henry wondered. The answer didn't matter, he supposed, because the weasels were ultimately harmless. They might be able to live outside their hosts in this barn, but outside in the storm, where the wind was blowing
a gale and the chill-factor was below zero, they wouldn't have a chance.

He needed to talk to these people—

No, that wasn't right. What he needed to do was scare the living hell out of them. Had to get them moving in spite of the warmth in here and the cold outside. There had been cows in here before; there were cows here again. He had to change them back into people—scared, pissed-off people. He could do it, but not alone. And the clock was ticking. Owen Underhill had given him half an hour. Henry estimated that a third of that was already gone.

Got to have a megaphone,
he thought.
That's step one.

He looked around, spotted a burly, balding man sleeping on his side to the left of the door leading to the milking parlor, and walked over to take a closer look. He
thought
it was one of the guys he'd kicked out of the shed, but he wasn't sure. When it came to hunters, burly, balding men were a dime a peck.

But it was Charles, and the byrus was re-thatching what old Charlie no doubt referred to as his “solar sex-panel.”
Who needs Rogaine when you've got this shit going for you?
Henry thought, then grinned.

Charles was good; better yet, Marsha was sleeping nearby, holding hands with Darren, Mr. Bomber-Joint-from-Newton. Byrus was now growing down one of Marsha's smooth cheeks. Her husband was still clean, but his brother-in-law—Bill, had that been his name?—was lousy with the stuff.
Best-in-show,
Henry thought.

He knelt by Bill, took his byrus-speckled hand, and
spoke down into the tangled jungle of his bad dreams.
Wake up, Bill. Wakey-wakey. We have to get out of here. And if you help me, we can. Wake up, Bill.

Wake up and be a hero.

7

It happened with a speed that was exhilarating.

Henry felt Bill's mind rising toward his, floundering out of the nightmares that had entangled it, reaching for Henry the way a drowning man will reach for the lifeguard who has swum out to save him. Their minds connected like couplers on a pair of freight-cars.

Don't talk, don't try to talk,
Henry told him.
Just hold on. We need Marsha and Charles. The four of us should be enough.

What
—

No time, Billy. Let's go.

Bill took his sister-in-law's hand. Marsha's eyes flashed open at once, almost as if she had been waiting for this, and Henry felt all the dials inside his head turn up another notch. She wasn't supporting as much growth as Bill, but perhaps had more natural talent. She took Charles's hand without a single question. Henry had an idea she had already grasped what was going on here, and what needed to be done. Thankfully, she also grasped the necessity of speed. They were going to bomb these people, then swing them like a club.

Charles sat with a jerk, eyes wide and bulging from their fatty sockets. He got up as if someone had
goosed him. Now all four of them were on their feet, hands joined like participants in a séance . . . which, Henry reflected, this almost was.

Give it to me,
he told them, and they did. The feeling was like having a magic wand placed in his hand.

Listen to me,
he called.

Heads rose; some people sat up out of sound sleeps as if they had been electrified.

Listen to me and boost me . . . boost me up! Do you understand? Boost me up! This is your only chance, so BOOST ME UP!

They did it as instinctively as people whistling a tune or clapping to a beat. If he'd given them time to think about it, it probably would have been harder, perhaps even impossible, but he didn't. Most of them had been sleeping, and he caught the infected ones, the telepaths, with their minds wide open.

Operating on instinct himself, Henry sent a series of images: soldiers wearing masks surrounding the barn, most with guns, some with backpacks connected to long wands. He made the faces of the soldiers into editorial-page caricatures of cruelty. At an amplified order, the wands unleashed streams of liquid fire: napalm. The sides of the barn and roof caught at once.

Henry shifted to the inside, sending pictures of screaming, milling people. Liquid fire dripped through holes in the blazing roof and ignited the hay in the lofts. Here was a man with his hair on fire; there a woman in a burning ski-parka still decorated with lift-tickets from Sugarloaf and Ragged Mountain.

They were all looking at Henry now—Henry and his linked friends. Only the telepaths were receiving the images, but perhaps as many as sixty percent of the people in the barn were infected, and even those who weren't caught the sense of panic; a rising tide lifts all boats.

Clamping Bill's hand tightly with one of his own and Marsha's with the other, Henry switched the images back to the outside perspective again. Fire; encircling soldiers; an amplified voice shouting for the soldiers to be sure no one got clear.

The detainees were on their feet now, speaking in a rising babble of frightened voices (except for the deep telepaths; they only stared at him, haunted eyes in byrus-speckled faces). He showed them the barn burning like a torch in the snow-driven night, the wind turning an inferno into an explosion, a firestorm, and still the napalm hoses poured it on and still the amplified voice exhorted:
“THAT'S RIGHT, MEN, GET THEM ALL, DON'T LET ANY OF THEM GET AWAY, THEY'RE THE CANCER AND WE'RE THE CURE!”

Imagination fully pumped up now, feeding on itself in a kind of frenzy, Henry sent images of the few people who managed to find the exits or to wriggle out through the windows. Many of these were in flames. One was a woman with a child cradled in her arms. The soldiers machine-gunned all of them but the woman and the child, who were turned into napalm candles as they ran.

“No!”
several women screamed in unison, and
Henry realized with a species of sick wonder that all of them, even those without children, had put their own faces on the burning woman.

They were up now, milling around like cattle in a thunderstorm. He had to move them before they had a chance to think once, let alone twice.

Gathering the force of the minds linked to his, Henry sent them an image of the store.

THERE!
he called to them.
IT'S YOUR ONLY CHANCE! THROUGH THE STORE IF YOU CAN, BREAK DOWN THE FENCE IF THE DOOR'S BLOCKED! DON'T STOP, DON'T HESITATE! GET INTO THE WOODS! HIDE IN THE WOODS! THEY'RE COMING TO BURN THIS PLACE DOWN, THE BARN AND EVERYONE IN IT, AND THE WOODS ARE YOUR ONLY CHANCE! NOW, NOW!

Deep in the well of his own imagination, flying on the pills Owen had given him and sending with all his strength—images of possible safety there, of certain death here, images as simple as those in a child's picture-book—he was only distantly aware that he had begun chanting aloud:
“Now, now, now.”

Marsha Chiles picked it up, then her brother-in-law, then Charles, the man with the overgrown solar sex-panel.

“Now! Now! Now!”

Although immune to the byrus and thus no more telepathic than the average bear, Darren was not immune to the growing vibe, and he also joined in.

“Now! Now! Now!”

It jumped from person to person and group to group, a panic-induced infection more catching than the byrus:
“Now! Now! Now!”

The barn shook with it. Fists were pumping in unison, like fists at a rock concert.

“NOW! NOW! NOW!”

Henry let them take it over and build it, pumping his own fist without even realizing it, flinging his hand into the air to the farthest reach of his aching arm even as he reminded himself not to be caught up in the cyclone of the mass mind he had created: when
they
went north, he was going south. He was waiting for some point of no return to be reached—the point of ignition and spontaneous combustion.

It came.

“Now,” he whispered.

He gathered Marsha's mind, Bill's, Charlie's . . . and then the others that were close and particularly locked in. He merged them, compressed them, and then flung that single word like a silver bullet into the heads of the three hundred and seventeen people in Old Man Gosselin's barn:

NOW.

There was a moment of utter silence before hell's door flew open.

8

Just before dusk, a dozen two-man sentry huts (they were actually Porta-Potties with the urinals and toilet-seats yanked out) had been set up at intervals along the
security fence. These came equipped with heaters that threw a stuporous glow in the small spaces, and the guards had no interest in going outside them. Every now and then one of them would open a door to allow in a snowy swirl of fresh air, but that was the extent of the guards' exposure to the outside world. Most of them were peacetime soldiers with no gut understanding of how high the current stakes were, and so they swapped stories about sex, cars, postings, sex, their families, their future, sex, drinking and drugging expeditions, and sex. They had missed Owen Underhill's two visits to the shed (he would have been clearly visible from both Post 9 and Post 10) and they were the last to be aware that they had a full-scale revolt on their hands.

Seven other soldiers, boys who had been with Kurtz a little longer and thus had a little more salt on their skins, were in the back of the store near the woodstove, playing five-card stud in the same office where Owen had played Kurtz the
ne nous blessez pas
tapes roughly two centuries ago. Six of the card-players were sentries. The seventh was Dawg Brodsky's colleague Gene Cambry. Cambry hadn't been able to sleep. The reason was concealed by a stretchy cotton wristlet. He didn't know how long the wristlet would serve, however, because the red stuff under it was spreading. If he wasn't careful, someone would see it . . . and then, instead of playing cards in the office, he might be out there in the barn with the John Q's.

And would he be the only one? Ray Parsons had a big wad of cotton in one ear. He said it was an earache, but
who knew for sure? Ted Trezewski had a bandage on one meaty forearm and claimed he'd gouged himself stringing compound barbed wire much earlier in the day. Maybe it was true. George Udall, the Dawg's immediate superior in more normal times, was wearing a knitted cap over his bald head; damn thing made him look like some kind of elderly white rapper. Maybe there was nothing under there but skin, but it was warm in here for a cap, wasn't it? Especially a knitted one.

“Kick a buck,” Howie Everett said.

“Call,” said Danny O'Brian.

Parsons called; so did Udall. Cambry barely heard. In his mind there rose an image of a woman with a child cradled in her arms. As she struggled across the drifted-in paddock, a soldier turned her into a napalm road-flare. Cambry winced, horrified, thinking this image had been served up by his own guilty conscience.

“Gene?” Al Coleman asked. “Are you going to call, or—”

“What's that?” Howie asked, frowning.

“What's what?” Ted Trezewski said.

“If you listen, you'll hear it,” Howie replied.
Dumb Polack:
Cambry heard this unspoken corollary in his head, but paid it no mind. Once it had been called to their attention, the chant was clear enough, rising above the wind, quickly taking on strength and urgency.

“Now! Now! Now! Now! NOW!”

It was coming from the barn, directly behind them.

“What in the blue
hell
?” Udall asked in a musing
voice, blinking over the folding table with its scatter of cards, ashtrays, chips, and money. Gene Cambry suddenly understood that there was nothing under the stupid woolen cap but skin, after all. Udall was nominally in charge of this little group, but he didn't have a clue. He couldn't see the pumping fists, couldn't hear the strong thought-voice that was leading the chant.

Cambry saw alarm on Parsons's face, on Everett's, on Coleman's. They were seeing it, too. Understanding leaped among them while the uninfected ones only looked puzzled.

“Fuckers're gonna break out,” Cambry said.

“Don't be stupid, Gene,” George Udall said. “They don't know what's coming down. Besides, they're
civilians.
They're just letting off a little st—”

Cambry lost the rest as a single word—
NOW
—ripped through his brain like a buzzsaw. Ray Parsons and Al Coleman winced. Howie Everett cried out in pain, his hands going to his temples, his knees connecting with the underside of the table and sending chips and cards everywhere. A dollar bill landed atop the hot stove and began to burn.

“Aw, fuck a duck, look what you d—” Ted began.

“They're coming,” Cambry said. “They're coming at
us.
”

Parsons, Everett, and Coleman lunged for the M-4 carbines leaning beside Old Man Gosselin's coatrack. The others looked at them, surprised, still three steps behind . . . and then there was a vast thud as sixty or more of the internees struck the barn doors. Those
doors had been locked from the outside—big steel locks, Army issue. They held, but the old wood gave with a splintering crack.