Dreamcatcher (84 page)

The stoop had been placed atop a mound of crushed stone. Leaning over the left side of the stoop, he brushed snow away and began feeling for a loose chunk. There were windows flanking the locked door, narrow but not
too
narrow.

Sound was tamped down and flattened by the heavy fall of wet snow, but he could hear the sound of an approaching motor. There had been another, as well, but that one had already stopped, probably at the end
of East Street. They were coming, but they were too late. It was a mile along the path, which was densely overgrown and slippery underfoot. By the time they got here the dog would be down the shaft, drowning and delivering the byrum into the aqueduct at the same time.

He found a loose rock and pulled it free, working carefully so as not to dislodge the pulsing body of the dog around his shoulders. He backed away from the edge on his knees, then tried to get to his feet. At first he couldn't. The ball of Jonesy's hip had swelled tight again. He finally lurched upright, although the pain was incredible, seeming to go all the way up to his teeth and his temples.

He stood for a moment, holding Jonesy's bad right leg a little off the ground like a horse with a stone in its hoof, bracing himself against the locked shaft-house door. When the pain had abated somewhat, he used the rock to beat the glass out of the window to the left of the door. He cut Jonesy's hand in several places, once deeply, and several cracked panes in the upper half of the window hung over the lower half like a cut-rate guillotine, but he paid no attention to these things. Nor did he sense that Jonesy had finally left his bolt-hole.

Mr. Gray squirmed in through the window, landed on the cold concrete floor, and looked around.

He was in a rectangular room about thirty feet long. At the far end, a window which no doubt would have given a spectacular view of the Reservoir on a clear day showed only white, as if a sheet had
been tacked over it. To one side of it was what looked like a gigantic steel pail, its sides speckled with red—not byrus, but an oxide Jonesy identified as “rust.” Mr. Gray didn't know for sure but guessed that men could be lowered down the shaft in the bucket, should some emergency require it.

The iron cover, four feet across, was in place, seated dead center in the middle of the floor. He could see the square notch on one side of it and looked around. A few tools leaned against the wall. One of them, in a scatter of glass from the broken window, was a crowbar. Quite possibly the same one the Russian woman had used as she prepared for her suicide.

Way I heard it,
Mr. Gray thought,
the folks in Boston'll be drinking that last byrum in their morning coffee right around Valentine's Day.

He seized the crowbar, limped painfully to the center of the room with his breath puffing cold and white before him, then seated the spatulate end of the tool in the slot of the cover.

The fit was perfect.

11

Henry racks the telephone, takes in a deep breath, holds it . . . and then runs for the door which is marked both
OFFICE
and
PRIVATE
.

“Hey!” old Reenie Gosselin squawks from her place at the cash-register. “Come back here, kid! You can't go in there!”

Henry doesn't stop, doesn't even slow, but as he goes through the door he realizes that yeah, he
is
a kid, at least a foot shy of his final height, and although he's wearing specs, they're nowhere near as heavy as they will be later on. He's a kid, but under all that flopping hair (which will have thinned a bit by the time he hits his thirties) there is an adult's brain.
I'm two, two, two mints in one,
he thinks, and as he bursts into Old Man Gosselin's office he is cackling madly—laughing like they did in the old days, when the strands of the dream-catcher were all close to the center and Duddits was running their pegs.
I almost busted a gut,
they used to say;
I almost busted a gut, what a fuckin pisser.

Into the office he goes, but it's not Old Man Gosselin's office where a man named Owen Underhill once played a man whose name was not Abraham Kurtz a tape of the grayboys talking in famous voices; it is a corridor, a hospital corridor, and Henry is not in the least surprised. It's Mass General. He's made it.

The place is dank, colder than any hospital corridor should be, and the walls are splotched with byrus. Somewhere a voice is groaning
I don't want you, I don't want a shot, I want Jonesy. Jonesy knew Duddits, Jonesy died, died in the ambulance, Jonesy's the only one who will do. Stay away, kiss my bender, I want Jonesy.

But he will not stay away. He is crafty old Mr. Death, and he will not stay away. He has business here.

He walks unseen down the corridor, where it's cold enough for him to see his breath puffing out in front
of him, a boy in an orange coat he will soon outgrow. He wishes he had his rifle, the one Pete's Dad loaned him, but that rifle is gone, left behind, buried in the years along with Jonesy's phone with the
Star Wars
sticker on it (how they had all envied that phone), and Beaver's jacket of many zippers, and Pete's sweater with the NASA logo on the breast. Buried in the years. Some dreams die and fall free, that is another of the world's bitter truths. How many bitter truths there are.

He walks past a pair of laughing, talking nurses—one of them is Josie Rinkenhauer, all grown up, and the other is the woman in the Polaroid photograph they saw that day through the Tracker Brothers office window. They don't see him because he's not here for them; he is in the dreamcatcher now, running back along his strand, running toward the center.
I am the eggman,
he thinks.
Time slowed, reality bent, on and on the eggman went.

Henry went on up the corridor toward the sound of Mr. Gray's voice.

12

Kurtz heard it clearly enough through the shattered window: the broken stutter of automatic-rifle fire. It provoked an old sense of unease and impatience in him: anger that the shooting had started without him, and fear that it would be over before he got there, nothing left but the wounded yelling
medic-medic-medic.

“Push it harder, Freddy.” Directly in front of Kurtz, Perlmutter was snoring ever deeper into his coma.

“Pretty greasy underfoot, boss.”

“Push it anyway. I've got a feeling we're almost—”

He saw a pink stain on the clean white curtain of the snow, as diffuse as blood from a facial cut seeping up through shaving cream, and then the ditched Subaru was right in front of them, nose-down and tail up. In the following moments Kurtz took back every unkind thought he'd had about Freddy's driving. His second in command simply twisted the steering wheel to the right and punched the gas when the Humvee started to skid. The big vehicle took hold and leaped at the break in the road. It hit with a tremendous jouncing crash. Kurtz flew upward, hitting the ceiling hard enough to produce a shower of stars in his field of vision. Perlmutter's arms flailed like those of a corpse; his head snapped backward and then forward. The Humvee passed close enough to the Subaru to tear the doorhandle off the car's passenger side. Then it was bucketing onward, now chasing a single pair of relatively fresh tire tracks.

Breathing down your neck now, Owen,
Kurtz thought.
Right down your everloving neck, God rot your blue eyes.

The only thing that worried him was that single burst of fire. What was that about? Whatever it was, it wasn't repeated.

Then, up ahead, another of those blotches in the snow. This one was olive-green. This one was the other Hummer. They were gone, probably gone, but—

“Lock and load,” Kurtz said to Freddy. His voice
was just a trifle shrill. “It's time for someone to pay the piper.”

13

By the time Owen got to the place where East Street ended (or turned into the northeast-meandering Fitzpatrick Road, depending on your interpretation), he could hear Kurtz behind him and guessed that Kurtz could probably hear him, as well—the Humvees weren't as loud as Harleys, but they were a long way from quiet.

Jonesy's footprints were entirely gone now, but Owen could see the path which led down from the road and along the shore of the Reservoir.

He killed the engine. “Henry, it looks like we're walking from h—”

Owen stopped. He had been concentrating too hard on his driving to look behind him or even check the rearview mirror, and he was unprepared for what he now saw. Unprepared and appalled.

Henry and Duddits were wrapped in what Owen first believed was a terminal embrace, their stubbly cheeks pressed together, their eyes closed, their faces and coats smeared with blood. He could see neither of them breathing and thought they had actually died together—Duddits of his leukemia, Henry perhaps of a heart attack brought on by exhaustion and the constant unrelieved stress of the last thirty hours or so—and then he saw the minute twitch of the eyelids. Both sets.

Embracing. Splattered with blood. But not dead. Sleeping.

Dreaming.

Owen started to call Henry's name again and then reconsidered. Henry had refused to leave the compound back in Jefferson Tract without freeing the detainees, and although they'd gotten away with that once, it had only been through the sheerest luck . . . or providence, if you believed that was any more than a TV show. Nevertheless, they had gotten Kurtz on their tail, Kurtz had hung on like a booger, and now he was a lot closer than he would have been had Owen and Henry simply crept away into the storm.

Well, I wouldn't change that,
Owen thought, opening the driver's door and getting out. From somewhere north, away in the white blank of the storm, came the scream of an eagle bitching about the weather. From behind, south, came the approaching racket of Kurtz, that annoying madman. It was impossible to tell how close because of the fucking snow. Coming down this fast and hard, it was like a sound-baffle. He could be two miles back; he could be a lot closer. Freddy would be with him, fucking Freddy, the perfect soldier, Dolph Lundgren from hell.

Owen went around to the back of the car, slipping and sliding in the snow, cursing it, and popped the Humvee's back gate, expecting automatic weapons, hoping for a portable rocket-launcher. No rocket-launcher, no grenades, either, but there were four MP5 auto-fire rifles, and a carton containing long bananaclips,
the ones that held a hundred and twenty rounds.

He had played it Henry's way back at the compound, and Owen guessed that they had saved at least some lives, but he would not play it Henry's way this time—if he hadn't paid enough for the Rapeloews' goddam serving platter, he would simply have to live with the debt. Not for long, either, if Kurtz had his way.

Henry was either sleeping, unconscious, or joined to his dying childhood friend in some weird mind-meld. Let it be, then. Awake and by his side, Henry might balk at what needed to be done, especially if Henry was right in believing his other friend was still alive, hiding out in the mind the alien now controlled. Owen would not balk . . . and with the telepathy gone, he wouldn't hear Jonesy pleading for his life if he was still in there. The Glock was a good weapon, but not sure enough.

The MP5 would rip the body of Gary Jones apart.

Owen grabbed one, plus three extra clips which he stuffed into his coat pockets. Kurtz close now—close, close, close. He looked back at East Street, almost expecting to see the second Humvee materializing like a green-brown ghost, but as yet there was nothing. Praise Jesus, as Kurtz would say.

The Hummer's windows were already glazing over with snow, but he could see the dim shapes of the two men in the rear seat as he passed back along the body of the vehicle, trotting now. Still locked in each other's arms. “Goodbye, boys,” he said. “Sleep well.” And with any luck they would still be sleeping when Kurtz
and Freddy arrived, putting an end to their lives before moving on after their main quarry.

Owen stopped suddenly, skidding in the snow and grabbing the Humvee's long hood to keep from falling. Duddits was clearly a lost cause, but he might be able to save Henry Devlin. It was just possible.

No!
part of his mind screamed as he started back for the rear door.
No, there's no time!

But Owen decided to gamble that there was—to gamble the whole world. Maybe to pay a little more on what he owed for the Rapeloews' plate; maybe for what he had done yesterday (those naked gray figures standing around their downed ship with their arms held up, as if in surrender); probably just for Henry, who had told him they would be heroes and who had tried splendidly to fulfill that promise.

No sympathy for the devil,
he thought, wrenching open the rear door.
No sir, zero sympathy for that motherfucker.

Duddits was closer. Owen seized him by the collar of his big blue duffel coat and yanked. Duddits toppled sideways onto the seat. His hat fell off, revealing his shining bald skull. Henry, with his arms still around Duddits's shoulders, came with him, landing on top. His eyes didn't open but he groaned softly. Owen leaned forward and whispered fiercely into Henry's ear.

“Don't sit up. For the love of God, Henry, don't you sit up!”

Owen withdrew, slammed the door, backed off three steps, placed the butt of the rifle against his hip,
and fired a burst. The Humvee's windows turned to milk, then fell in. Casings clinked around Owen's feet. He stepped forward again and looked through the shattered window into the rear seat. Henry and Duddits still lay there, now covered with crumbles of Saf-T-Glas as well as Duddits's blood, and to Owen they looked like the two deadest people he had ever seen. Owen hoped Kurtz would be in too much of a hurry for a close examination. In any case, he had done the best he could.

He heard a hard metallic jouncing sound and grinned. That placed Kurtz, by God—they'd reached the washout where the Subaru had finished up. He wished mightily that Kurtz and Freddy had rear-ended the fucking thing, but the sound had not, unfortunately, been that loud. Still, it placed them. A mile back, a mile back at least. Not as bad as he'd thought.