Dreamcatcher (29 page)

He reached for it with his right hand, the one he'd cut on the Bud bottle, without even thinking about it; the torch he continued to hold up at the side of his head with his uninjured left. He seized something that felt like cool, fur-covered jelly. The thing let go of his ankle at once, and Pete caught just a glimpse of expressionless black eyes—shark's eyes, eagle eyes—before it sank the needle-nest of its teeth into his clutching hand, tearing it
wide open along the perforation of the previous cut.

The agony was like the end of the world. The thing's head—if it had one—was buried in the hand, ripping and tearing, digging deeper. Blood flew in splattery fans as Pete tried to shake it off, stippling the snow and the sawdusty tarp and the dead woman's parka. Droplets flew into the fire and hissed like fat in a hot skillet. Now the thing was making a ferocious chittering sound. Its tail, as thick as a moray eel's body, wrapped around Pete's thrashing arm, endeavoring to keep it still.

Pete made no conscious decision to use the torch, because he'd forgotten he had it; his only thought was to tear the terrible biting thing off his right hand with his left. At first, when it caught fire and flared up, as hot and bright as a roll of newspaper, he didn't understand what was happening. Then he screamed, partly in fresh pain and partly in triumph. He bolted to his feet—for the time being, at least, his bulging knee did not hurt at all—and swung his burdened right arm at one of the lean-to's support posts in a great sweeping roundhouse. There was a crunch and the chittering sound was replaced by muffled squealing. For one endless moment the knot of teeth planted in his hand burrowed in deeper than ever. Then they loosened and the burning creature fell free and landed on the frozen ground. Pete stamped on it, felt it writhe under his heel, and was filled with one moment of pure and savage triumph before his outraged knee gave way entirely and his leg bent inside out, the tendons torn loose.

He fell heavily on his side, face to face with Becky's lethal hitchhiker, unaware that the lean-to was beginning to shift, the pole he'd struck with his arm bowing slowly outward. For a moment the weasel-thing's rudiment of a face was three inches from Pete's own. Its burning body flapped against his jacket. Its black eyes boiled. It had nothing so sophisticated as a mouth, but when the bulge in the top of its body unhinged, revealing its teeth, Pete screamed at it—
“No! No! No!”
—and batted it into the fire, where it writhed and made its frantic, monkeylike chittering.

His left foot swung in a short arc as he shoved the thing farther into the fire. The tip of his boot struck the tilting pole, which had just decided to hold the lean-to up a little longer. This was one outrage too many and the pole snapped, dropping half of the tin roof. A second or two later, the other pole snapped as well. The rest of the roof fell into the fire, sending out a whirling squirt of sparks.

For a moment that was all. Then the fallen sheet of rusty tin began to heave itself up and down, as if it were breathing. A moment later, Pete crawled out from under. His eyes were glazed. His skin was pasty with shock. The left cuff of his jacket was on fire. He stared at this for a moment with his legs still under the fallen roof from the knees down, then raised his arm in front of his face, drew in a deep breath, and blew out the flames rising from his jacket like a giant birthday candle.

Approaching from the east was the buzz of a snowmobile engine. Jonesy . . . or whatever was left of
him. The cloud. Pete didn't think it would show him any mercy. This was no day for mercy in the Jefferson Tract. He should hide. But the voice advising him of that was distant, unimportant. One thing was good: he had an idea he had finally quit drinking.

He raised his savaged right hand in front of his face. One finger was gone, presumably down the thing's gullet. Two others lay in a swoon of severed tendons. He saw that reddish-gold stuff already growing along the deepest slashes—the ones the monster had inflicted and the one he'd done himself, crawling back into the Scout after the beer. He could feel a kind of fizzy sensation as whatever that stuff was fed on his flesh and blood.

Pete suddenly felt that he couldn't die soon enough.

The sound of the machine-guns in the west had stopped, but it wasn't over there, not by a long shot. And as if the thought had summoned it, a huge explosion hammered the day, blotting out the wasp-whine of the oncoming snowmobile and everything else. Everything but the busy fizz in his hand, that was. In his hand, the crud was dining on him the way the cancer that had killed his father had dined on the old man's stomach and lungs.

Pete ran his tongue over his teeth, felt gaps where some of them had fallen out.

He closed his eyes and waited.

A ghost comes out of the unconscious mind

To grope my sill: It moans to be reborn!

The figure at my back is not my friend;

The hand upon my shoulder turns to horn.

T
HEODORE
R
OETHKE

1

The only thing in the ops area was a little beer n deer store called Gosselin's Country Market. Kurtz's cleaners began arriving there shortly after the snow began to fall. By the time Kurtz himself got there, at ten-thirty, support was starting to appear. They were getting a grip on the situation.

The store was designated Blue Base. The barn, the adjacent stable (dilapidated but still standing), and the corral had been designated Blue Holding. The first detainees had already been deposited there.

Archie Perlmutter, Kurtz's new aide-de-camp (his old one, Calvert, had died of a heart attack not two weeks before—goddam bad timing), had a clipboard with a dozen names on it. Perlmutter had arrived with both a laptop computer and a PalmPilot only to
discover that electronic gear was currently FUBAR in the Jefferson Tract: fucked up beyond recognition. The top two names on the clipboard were Gosselins: the old man who ran the store and his wife.

“More on the way,” Perlmutter said.

Kurtz gave the names on Pearly's clipboard a cursory look, then handed it back. Big recreational vehicles were being parked behind them; semi trailers were being jacked and leveled; light poles were going up. When night came, this place would be as well-lighted as Yankee Stadium at World Series time.

“We missed two guys by this much,” Perlmutter said, and held up his right hand with the thumb and forefinger a quarter of an inch apart. “They came in for supplies. Principally beer and hot dogs.” Perlmutter's face was pale, with a wild pink rose blooming in each cheek. He had to raise his voice against the steadily increasing noise level. Helicopters were coming in two by two and landing on the blacktop lane that eventually made its way out to Interstate 95, where you could go north toward one dull town (Presque Isle) or south toward any number of other dull towns (Bangor and Derry, for starters). The helicopters were fine, as long as their pilots didn't have to depend on all the sophisticated navigational equipment, which was also FUBAR.

“Did those fellows go in or out?” Kurtz asked.

“Back in,” Perlmutter said. He could not quite bring himself to meet Kurtz's eyes; he looked everywhere but. “There's a woods road, Gosselin says it's called the Deep Cut Road. It's not on the standard
maps, but I have a Diamond International Paper survey map that shows—”

“That's fine. Either they'll come back out or stay in. Either way, it's fine.”

More helicopters, some unshipping their .50s now that they were safely away from the wrong eyes. This could end up being as big as Desert Storm. Maybe bigger.

“You understand your mission here, Pearly, don't you?”

Perlmutter most definitely did. He was new, he wanted to make an impression, he was almost jumping up and down.
Like a spaniel that smells lunch,
Kurtz thought. And he did it all without making eye contact. “Sir, my job is triune in nature.”

Triune,
Kurtz thought.
Triune, how about that?

“I am to a, intercept, b, turn intercepted persons over to medical, and c, contain and segregate pending further orders.”

“Exactly. That's—”

“But sir, beg your pardon, sir, but we don't have any doctors here yet, only a few corpsmen, and—”

“Shut up,” Kurtz said. He didn't speak loudly, but half a dozen men in unmarked green coveralls (they were all wearing unmarked green coveralls, including Kurtz himself) hesitated as they went double-timing on their various errands. They glanced toward where Kurtz and Perlmutter were standing, then got moving again. Triple-time. As for Perlmutter, the roses in his cheeks died at once. He stepped back, putting another foot between himself and Kurtz.

“If you ever interrupt me again, Pearly, I'll knock you down. Interrupt me a second time and I'll put you in the hospital. Do you understand?”

With what was clearly a tremendous effort, Perlmutter brought his gaze up to Kurtz's face. To Kurtz's eyes. He snapped off a salute so crisp it almost crackled with static electricity. “Sir, yes sir!”

“You can quit that too, you know better.” And when Perlmutter's gaze began to drop: “Look at me when I'm talking to you, laddie.”

Very reluctantly, Perlmutter did so. His complexion was now leaden. Although the noise of the helicopters lined up along the road was cacophonous, it somehow seemed very quiet right here, as if Kurtz traveled in his own weird air-pocket. Perlmutter was convinced that everyone was watching them and that they could all see how terrified he was. Some of it was his new boss's eyes—the cataclysmic absence in those eyes, as if there were really no brain behind them at all. Perlmutter had heard of the thousand-yard stare, but Kurtz's seemed to go on for a
million
yards, maybe light-years.

Yet somehow Perlmutter held Kurtz's gaze. Looked into the absence. He was not off to a good start here. It was important—it was
imperative
—that the slide be stopped before it could become an avalanche.

“All right, good. Better, anyway.” Kurtz's voice was low but Perlmutter had no problem hearing him despite the overlapping chunter of the helicopters. “I'm going to say this to you just once, and only because you're new to my service and you clearly
don't know your asshole from your piehole. I have been asked to run a phooka operation here. Do you know what a phooka is?”

“No,” Perlmutter said. It caused him almost physical pain not to be able to say
No sir.

“According to the Irish, who as a race have never entirely crawled from the bath of superstition in which their mothers gat them, a phooka is a phantom horse that kidnaps travelers and carries them away on its back. I use it to mean an operation which is both covert and wide open. A paradox, Perlmutter! The good news is that we've been developing contingency plans for just this sort of clusterfuck since 1947, when the Air Force first recovered the sort of extraterrestrial artifact now known as a flashlight. The bad news is that the future is now and I have to face it with guys like you in support. Do you understand me, buck?”

“Yes, s . . . yes.”

“I hope so. What we've got to do here, Perlmutter, is go in fast and hard and utterly phooka. We're going to do as much dirtywork as we have to and come out as clean as we can . . . clean . . . yes, Lord, and
smilin
 . . .”

Kurtz bared his teeth in a brief smile of such brutally satiric intensity that Perlmutter felt a little like screaming. Tall and stoop-shouldered, Kurtz had the build of a bureaucrat. Yet something about him was terrible. You saw some of it in his eyes, sensed some of it in the still, prim way he held his hands in front of him . . . but those weren't the things that made him scary, that made the men call him Old Creepy Kurtz. Perlmutter didn't
know exactly what the really scary thing was, and didn't want to know. What he wanted right now—the
only
thing he wanted—was to get out of this conversation with his ass on straight. Who needed to go twenty or thirty miles west to make contact with an alien species? Perlmutter had one standing right here in front of him.

Kurtz's lips snapped shut over his teeth. “On the same page, are we?”

“Yes.”

“Saluting the same flag? Pissing in the same latrine?”

“Yes.”

“How are we going to come out of this, Pearly?”

“Clean?”

“Boffo! And how else?”

For one horrible second he didn't know. Then it came to him. “
Smiling,
sir.”

“Call me sir again and I'll knock you down.”

“I'm sorry,” Perlmutter whispered. He was, too.

Here came a school bus rolling slowly up the road with its offside wheels in the ditch and canted almost to the tipover point so it could get past the helicopters.
MILLINOCKET SCHOOL DEPT.
was written up the side, big black letters against a yellow background. Commandeered bus. Owen Underhill and his men inside. The A-team. Perlmutter saw it and felt better. At different times both men had worked with Underhill.

“You'll have doctors by nightfall,” Kurtz said. “All the doctors you need. Check?”

“Check.”

As he walked toward the bus, which stopped in front of Gosselin's single gasoline pump, Kurtz looked at his pocket-watch. Almost eleven. Gosh, how the time flew when you were having fun. Perlmutter walked with him, but all the cocker spaniel spring had gone out of Perlmutter's step.

“For now, Archie, eyeball em, smell em, listen to their tall tales, and document any Ripley you see. You know about the Ripley, I assume?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Don't touch it.”

“God, no!” Perlmutter exclaimed, then flushed.

Kurtz smiled thinly. This one was no more real than his shark's grin. “Excellent idea, Perlmutter! You have breathing masks?”