Dreamcatcher (28 page)

Maybe, but she made no response. Just lay there staring. He could still see only one of her eyes, although whether it was the same one or the other he didn't know. Didn't seem so creepy now, but maybe that was because he had other things to worry about. Like the fire. It was guttering, but there was a good bed of coals and he thought he was in time. Get some wood on that sweetheart, really build her up, then lie here with his gal Becky (but upwind, please God—those bangers were
bad
). Wait for Henry to show up. Wouldn't be the first time Henry had pulled his nuts out of the fire.

Pete crawled toward the woman and the little stockpile of wood beyond her, and as he got close—close enough to start picking up that ethery chemical smell again—he understood why her gaze no longer bothered him. That creepy jackalope look had gone out of it. Everything had. She'd crawled halfway around the fire and died. The crusting of snow around her waist and hips had gone a dark red.

Pete stopped for a moment, up on his aching arms and peering at her, but his interest in her, dead or alive, was not much more than the passing interest he'd felt in his back-turning watch. What he wanted
to do was get some wood on the fire and get
warm.
He would consider the problem of the woman later. Next month, maybe, when he was sitting in his own living room with a cast on his knee and a cup of hot coffee in his hand.

He finally made it to the wood. Only four pieces were left, but they were
big
pieces. Henry might be back before they burned down, and Henry would pick up some more before going on to get help. Good old Henry. Still wearing his dorky horn-rims, even in this age of soft contacts and laser surgery, but you could count on him.

Pete's mind tried to return to the Scout, crawling into the Scout and smelling the cologne Henry had not, in fact, been wearing, and he wouldn't let it.
Let's not go there,
as the kids said. As if memory was a destination. No more ghost-cologne, no more memories of Duddits. No more no bounce, no more no play. He had enough on his plate already.

He threw the wood onto the fire one branch at a time, sidearming the pieces awkwardly, wincing at the pain in his knee but enjoying the way the sparks rose in a cloud, whirling beneath the lean-to's canted tin ceiling like crazy fireflies before winking out.

Henry would be back soon. That was the thing to hold onto. Just watch the fire blaze up and hold that thought.

No, he won't. Because things have gone wrong back at Hole in the Wall. Something to do with—

“Rick,” he said, watching the flames taste the new wood. Soon they would feed and grow tall.

He stripped off his gloves, using his teeth, and held his hands up to the warmth of the fire. The cut on the pad of his right hand, where the busted bottle had gotten him, was long and deep. Was going to leave a scar, but so what? What was a scar or two between friends? And they
were
friends, weren't they? Yeah. The old Kansas Street Gang, the Crimson Pirates with their plastic swords and battery-powered
Star Wars
ray-guns. Once they had done something heroic—twice, if you counted the Rinkenhauer girl. They had even gotten their pictures in the paper that time, and so what if he had a few scars? And so what if they had once maybe—just maybe—killed a guy? Because if ever there was a guy who deserved killing—

But he wasn't going to go there, either. No way, baby.

He saw the line, though. Like it or not, he saw the line, more clearly than he'd seen it in years. Primarily he saw Beaver . . . and heard him, too. Right in the center of his head.

Jonesy? You there, man?

“Don't get up, Beav,” Pete said, watching the flames crackle and climb. The fire was hot now, beating warmth against his face, making him feel sleepy. “You stay right where you are. Just . . . you know, just sit tight.”

What, exactly, was all this about?
What's all this jobba-nobba?
as the Beav himself had sometimes said when they were kids, a phrase that meant nothing but still cracked them up. Pete sensed he could know if he wanted to, the line was that bright. He got a glimpse
of blue tiles, a filmy blue shower curtain, a bright orange cap—Rick's cap, McCarthy's cap, old Mr. I-Stand-at-the-Door's cap—and sensed he could have all the rest if he wanted it. He didn't know if this was the future, the past, or what was happening right this minute, but he could have it if he wanted it, if he—

“I don't,” he said, and pushed the whole thing away.

There were a few sticks and twigs left on the ground. Pete fed them to the fire, then looked at the woman. Her open eye had no menace in it now. It was dusty, the way a deer's eyes got dusty after you shot it. All that blood around her . . . he supposed she'd hemorrhaged. Something inside had gone bust. Hell of a tough break. He supposed maybe she'd known it was coming and had sat down in the road because she wanted to be sure of being seen if someone came along. Someone had, but look how it had turned out. Poor bitch. Poor unlucky bitch.

Pete shifted to the left, slowly, until he could snag the tarp, then began to move forward again. It had been her makeshift sled; now it could be her makeshift shroud. “I'm sorry,” he said. “Becky or whatever your name is, I'm really sorry. But I couldn't have helped you by staying, you know; I'm not a doctor, I'm a fucking car salesman. You were—”

—
fucked from the start
was how he'd meant to finish, but the words dried up in his throat as he saw the back of her. That part hadn't been visible until he got close, because she had died facing the fire. The seat of her jeans was blown out, as if she'd finally finished
farting fumes and had gotten down to the dynamite. Torn rags of denim fluttered in the breeze. Also fluttering were fragments of the garments she had been wearing beneath, at least two pairs of longjohns—one heavy white cotton, the other pink silk. And something was growing on both the legs of the jeans and the back of her parka. It looked like mildew or some kind of fungus. Red-gold, or maybe that was just reflected firelight.

Something had come out of her. Something—

Yes. Something. And it's watching me right now.

Pete looked into the woods. Nothing. The flood of animals had dried up. He was alone.

Except I'm not.

No, he wasn't. Something was out there, something that didn't do well in the cold, something that preferred warm, wet places. Except—

Except it got too big. And it ran out of food.

“Are you out there?”

Pete thought that calling out like that would make him feel foolish, but it didn't. What it made him feel was more frightened than ever.

His eye fastened on a sketchy track of that mildewy stuff. It stretched away from Becky—yeah, she was a Becky, all right, as Becky as Becky could be—and around the corner of the lean-to. A moment later Pete heard a scaly scraping sound as something slithered on the tin roof. He craned up, following the sound with his eyes.

“Go away,” he whispered. “Go away and leave me alone. I . . . I'm fucked up.”

There was another brief slither as the thing moved farther up the tin. Yes, he was fucked up. Unfortunately, he was also food. The thing up there slithered again. Pete didn't think it would wait long, maybe
couldn't
wait long, not up there; it would be like a gecko in a refrigerator. What it was going to do was drop on him. And now he realized a terrible thing: he had gotten so fixated on the beer that he had forgotten the fucking guns.

His first impulse was to crawl deeper into the lean-to, but that might be a mistake, like running into a blind alley. He grabbed the jutting end of one of the fresh branches he'd just put on the fire instead. He didn't take it out, not yet, just made a loose fist around it. The other end was burning briskly. “Come on,” he said to the tin roof. “You like it hot? I've got something hot for you. Come on and get it. Yum-fuckin-yum.”

Nothing. Not from the roof, anyway. There was a soft
flump
of snow falling from one of the pines behind him as the lower branches shed their burden. Pete's hand tightened on his makeshift torch, half-lifting it from the fire. Then he let it settle back in a little swirl of sparks. “Come on, motherfucker. I'm hot, I'm tasty, and I'm waiting.”

Nothing. But it was up there. It couldn't wait long, he was sure of it. Soon it would come.

3

Time passed. Pete wasn't sure how much; his watch had given up entirely. Sometimes his thoughts seemed to
intensify, as they sometimes had when he and the others were hanging with Duddits (although as they grew older and Duddits stayed the same, there had been less of that—it was as though their changing brains and bodies had lost the knack of picking up Duddits's strange signals). This was like that, but not
exactly
like that. Something new, maybe. Maybe even something to do with the lights in the sky. He was aware that Beaver was dead and that something terrible might have happened to Jonesy, but he didn't know what.

Whatever had happened, Pete thought Henry knew about it, too, although not clearly; Henry was deep inside his own head and he thought
Banbury Cross, Banbury Cross, ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross.

The stick burned down further, closer to his hand, and Pete wondered what he'd do if it burned down too far to be of use, if the thing up there could out-wait him after all. And then a new thought came to him, bright as day and red with panic. It filled his head and he began to cry it aloud, masking the sound of the thing on the roof as it slithered quickly down the slope of the tin.

“Please don't hurt us!
Ne nous blessez pas!
”

But they would, they would, because . . . what?

Because they are not helpless little ETs, boys, waiting around for someone to give them a New England Tel-phone card so they can phone home, they are a
disease.
They are cancer, praise Jesus, and boys, we're one big hot radioactive shot of chemotherapy. Do you hear me, boys?

Pete didn't know if
they
did, the boys to whom
the voice spoke, but
he
did. They were coming, the boys were coming, the Crimson Pirates were coming and not all the begging in the world would stop them. And still they begged, and Pete begged with them.

“Please don't hurt us! Please!
S'il vous plaît! Ne nous blessez pas! Ne nous faites pas mal, nous sommes sans défense!
” Weeping now. “Please!
For the love of God, we're helpless!
”

In his mind he saw the hand, the dog-turd, the weeping nearly naked boy. And all the time the thing on the roof was slithering, dying but not helpless, stupid but not
entirely
stupid, getting behind Pete while he screamed, while he lay on his side by the dead woman, listening as some apocalyptic slaughter began.

Cancer,
said the man with the white eyelashes.

“Please!”
he screamed.
“Please, we're helpless!”

But, lie or the truth, it was too late.

4

The snowmobile had passed Henry's hiding place without slowing, and the sound of it was now receding to the west. It was safe to come out, but Henry didn't come out. Couldn't come out. The intelligence which had replaced Jonesy hadn't sensed him, either because it was distracted or because Jonesy had some-how—might somehow still be—

But no. The idea that there could be
any
of Jonesy left inside that terrible cloud was so much dream-work.

And now that the thing was gone—receding, at least—there were the voices. They filled Henry's head, making him feel half-mad with their babble, as Duddits's crying had always made him feel half-mad, at least until puberty had ended most of that crap. One of the voices belonged to a man who said something about a fungus

(dies easily unless it gets on a living host)

and then something about a New England Tel phone card and . . . chemotherapy? Yes, a big hot radioactive shot. It was the voice, Henry thought, of a lunatic. He had treated enough of them to judge, God knew.

The other voices were the ones which made him question his own sanity. He didn't know all of them, but he knew some: Walter Cronkite, Bugs Bunny, Jack Webb, Jimmy Carter, a woman he thought was Margaret Thatcher. Sometimes the voices spoke in English, sometimes in French.

“Il n'y a pas d'infection ici,”
Henry said, and then began to weep. He was astounded and exhilarated to find there were still tears in his heart, from which he thought all tears and all laughter—true laughter—had fled. Tears of horror, tears of pity, tears that opened the stony ground of self-regarding obsession and burst the rock inside. “There is no infection here, please, oh God
stop
it, don't, don't,
nous sommes sans défense, NOUS SOMMES SANS
—”

Then the human thunder began in the west and Henry put his hands to his head, thinking that the screams and the pain in there would tear it apart. The bastards were—

5

The bastards were slaughtering them.

Pete sat by the fire, unmindful of the bellows of pain from his separated knee, unaware that he was now holding the branch from the fire up beside his temple. The screams inside his head could not quite drown out the sound of the machine-guns in the west, big machine-guns, .50s. Now the cries—please don't hurt us, we are defenseless, there is no infection—began to fade into panic; it wasn't working, nothing
could
work, the deal was done.

Movement caught Pete's eye and he turned just as the thing that had been on the roof struck at him. He caught a blurred glimpse of a slender, weaselly body that seemed powered by a muscular tail rather than legs, and then its teeth sank into his ankle. He shrieked and yanked his good leg toward him so hard he almost clocked himself in the chin with his own knee. The thing came with it, clinging like a leech. Were these the things that were begging for mercy? Fuck them, if they were. Fuck them!