Dreamcatcher (71 page)

“—but in the meantime,” Kurtz continued, “I think I can make up some ground. Now do you want to put your elderly ass in gear, or what?”

The plowman nodded and went walking back to the cab of his plow. The light was brighter now.
This light very likely belongs to the last day of my life,
Kurtz thought with mild wonder.

Perlmutter began uttering a low sound of pain. It growled along for a bit, then rose to a scream. Perlmutter clutched his stomach again.

“Jesus,” Freddy said. “Lookit his gut, boss. Rising like a loaf of bread.”

“Deep breaths,” Kurtz said, and patted Pearly's shoulder with a benevolent hand. Ahead of them, the plow had begun to move again. “Deep breaths, laddie. Relax. You just relax and think good thoughts.”

10

Forty miles to Derry.
Forty miles between me and Owen,
Kurtz thought.
Not bad at all. I'm coming for you, buck. Need to take you to school. Teach you what you forgot about crossing the Kurtz Line.

Twenty miles later and they were still there—this according to both Freddy and Perlmutter, although Freddy seemed less sure of himself now. Pearly, however, said they were talking to the mother—Owen and the other one were talking to the mother. The mother didn't want to let him go.

“Let who go?” Kurtz asked. He hardly cared. The mother was holding them in Derry, allowing them to close the distance, so God bless the mother no matter who she was or what her motivations might be.

“I don't know,” Pearly said. His guts had been relatively still ever since Kurtz's conversation with the plowman, but he sounded exhausted. “I can't see. There's someone, but it's like there's no mind there to look into.”

“Freddy?”

Freddy shook his head. “Owen's gone for me. I can barely hear the plow guy. It's like . . . I dunno . . . like losing a radio signal.”

Kurtz leaned forward over the seat and took a close look at the Ripley on Freddy's cheek. The stuff in the middle was still bright red-orange, but around the edges it appeared to be turning an ashy white.

It's dying,
Kurtz thought.
Either Freddy's system is
killing it or the environment is. Owen was right. I'll be damned.

Not that it changed anything. The line was still the line, and Owen had stepped over it.

“The plow guy,” Perlmutter said in his tired voice.

“What about the plow guy, buck?”

Only there was no need for Perlmutter to answer. Up ahead, twinkling in the blowing snow, was a sign reading
EXIT
32—
GRANDVIEW/GRANDVIEW STATION.
The plow suddenly sped up, raising its blade as it did so. All at once the Humvee was running in slippery powder again, better than a foot of it. The plowman didn't bother with his blinker, simply took the exit at fifty, yanking up a tall rooster-tail of snow in his wake.

“Follow him?” Freddy asked. “I can run him down, boss!”

Kurtz mastered a strong urge to tell Freddy to go ahead—they'd run the long-eyed Yankee son of a bitch to earth and teach him what happened to folks who crossed the line. Give him a little dose of Owen Underhill's medicine. Except the plow was bigger than the Hummer, a lot bigger, and who knew what might happen if they got into a game of bumper cars?

“Stay on the pike, laddie,” Kurtz said, settling back. “Eyes on the prize.” Still, he watched the plow angling off into the frigid, windy morning with real regret. He couldn't even hope the damn Yankee had caught a hot dose from Freddy and Archie Perlmutter, because the stuff didn't last.

They went on, speed dropping back to twenty in the drifts, but Kurtz guessed conditions would
improve as they got farther south. The storm was almost over.

“And congratulations,” he told Freddy.

“Huh?”

Kurtz patted him on the shoulder. “You appear to be getting better.” He turned to Perlmutter. “I don't know about you, laddie-buck.”

11

A hundred miles north of Kurtz's position and less than two miles from the junction of back roads where Henry had been taken, the new commander of the Imperial Valleys—a woman of severe good looks, in her late forties—stood beside a pine tree in a valley which had been code-named Clean Sweep One. Clean Sweep One was, quite literally, a valley of death. Piled along its length were heaps of tangled bodies, most wearing hunter orange. There were over a hundred in all. If the corpses had ID, it had been taped around their necks. The majority of the dead were wearing their driver's licenses, but there were also Visa and Discover cards, Blue Cross cards, and hunting licenses. One woman with a large black hole in her forehead had been tagged with her Blockbuster Video card.

Standing beside the largest pile of bodies, Kate Gallagher was finishing a rough tally before writing her second report. In one hand she held a PalmPilot computer, a tool that Adolf Eichmann, that famous accountant of the dead, would certainly have envied. The Pilots hadn't worked earlier, but now most of the
cool electronics gear seemed to be back on-line.

Kate wore earphones and a mike suspended in front of her mouth-and-nose mask. Occasionally she would ask someone for clarification or give an order. Kurtz had chosen a successor who was both enthusiastic and efficient. Totting up the bodies here and elsewhere, Gallagher estimated that they had bagged at least sixty percent of the escapees. The John Q's had fought, which was certainly a surprise, but in the long run, most of them just weren't survivors. It was as simple as that.

“Yo, Katie-Kate.”

Jocelyn McAvoy appeared through the trees at the south end of the valley, her hood pushed back, her short hair covered by a scarf of green silk, her burp-gun slung over her shoulder. There was a splash of blood across the front of her parka.

“Scared you, didn't I?” she asked the new OIC.

“You might have raised my blood pressure a point or two.”

“Well, Quadrant Four is clear, maybe that'll lower it a little.” McAvoy's eyes sparkled. “We got over forty. Jackson has got hard numbers for you, and speaking of hard, right about now I could really use a hard—”

“Excuse me? Ladies?”

They turned. Emerging from the snow-covered brush at the north end of the valley was a group of half a dozen men and two women. Most were wearing orange, but their leader was a squat tugboat of a man wearing a regulation Blue Group coverall under his parka. He was also still wearing his transparent face-mask, although below his mouth there was a Ripley
soul-patch which was definitely non-reg. All of the newcomers had automatic weapons.

Gallagher and McAvoy had time to exchange a single wide-eyed, caught-with-our-pants-down look. Then Jocelyn McAvoy went for her burp-gun and Kate Gallagher went for the Browning she had propped against the tree. Neither of them made it. The thunder of the guns was deafening. McAvoy was thrown nearly twenty feet through the air. One of her boots came off.

“That's for Larry!”
one of the orange-clad women was screaming.
“That's for Larry, you bitches, that's for Larry!”

12

When the shooting was over, the squat man with the Ripley goatee assembled his group near the facedown corpse of Kate Gallagher, who had graduated ninth in her class at West Point before running afoul of the disease that was Kurtz. The squat man had appropriated her gun, which was better than his own.

“I'm a firm believer in democracy,” he said, “and you folks can do what you want, but I'm heading north now. I don't know how long it'll take me to learn the words to ‘O Canada,' but I'm going to find out.”

“I'm going with you,” one of the men said, and it quickly became apparent that they were all going with him. Before they left the clearing the leader bent down and plucked the PalmPilot out of a snowdrift.

“Always wanted one of these,” said Emil “Dawg”
Brodsky. “I'm a sucker for the new technology.”

They left the valley of death from the direction they'd entered it, heading north. From around them came isolated pops and bursts of gunfire, but for all practical purposes, Operation Clean Sweep was also over.

13

Mr. Gray had committed another murder and stolen another vehicle, this time a DPW plow. Jonesy didn't see it happen. Mr. Gray, having apparently decided he couldn't get Jonesy out of his office (not, at least, until he could devote all his time and energy to the problem), had decided to do the next best thing, which was to wall him off from the outside world. Jonesy now thought he knew how Fortunato must have felt when Montressor bricked him up in the wine-cellar.

It happened not long after Mr. Gray put the State Trooper's car back in the turnpike's southbound lane (there was just the one, at least for the time being, and that was treacherous). Jonesy was in a closet at the time, following up what seemed to him to be an absolutely brilliant idea.

Mr. Gray had cut off his telephone service? Okay, he would simply create a new form of communication, as he had created a thermostat to cool the place down when Mr. Gray tried to force him out by overloading him with heat. A fax machine would be just the thing, he decided. And why not? All the gadgets were symbolic, only visualizations to help him first focus and then
exercise powers that had been in him for over twenty years. Mr. Gray had sensed those powers, and after his initial dismay had moved very efficiently to keep Jonesy from using them. The trick was to keep finding ways around Mr. Gray's roadblocks, just as Mr. Gray himself kept finding ways to move south.

Jonesy closed his eyes and visualized a fax like the one in the History Department office, only he put it in the closet of his new office. Then, feeling like Aladdin rubbing the magic lamp (only the number of wishes he was granted seemed infinite, as long as he didn't get carried away), he also visualized a stack of paper and a Berol Black Beauty pencil lying beside it. Then he went into the closet to see how he'd done.

Pretty well, it appeared at first glance . . . although the pencil was a tad eerie, brand-new and sharpened to a virgin point, but still gnawed all along the barrel. Yet that was as it should be, wasn't it? Beaver was the one who had used Black Beauty pencils, even way back in Witcham Street Grammar. The rest of them had carried the more standard yellow Eberhard Fabers.

The fax looked perfect, sitting there on the floor beneath a dangle of empty coathangers and one jacket (the bright orange parka his mother had bought him for his first hunting trip, then made him promise—with his hand over his heart—to wear
every single moment he was out of doors
), and it was humming in an encouraging way.

Disappointment set in when he knelt in front of it and read the message in the lighted window:
GIVE UP JONESY COME OUT.

He picked up the phone on the side of the machine and heard Mr. Gray's recorded voice: “Give up, Jonesy, come out. Give up, Jonesy, come o—”

A series of violent bangs, almost as loud as thunderclaps, made him cry out and jump to his feet. His first thought was that Mr. Gray was using one of those SWAT squad door-busters, battering his way in.

It wasn't the door, though. It was the window, and in some ways that was even worse. Mr. Gray had put industrial gray shutters—steel, they looked like—across his window. Now he wasn't just imprisoned; he was blind, as well.

Written across the inside, easily readable through the glass:
GIVE UP COME OUT.
Jonesy had a brief memory of
The Wizard of Oz
—
SURRENDER DOROTHY
written across the sky—and wanted to laugh. He couldn't. Nothing was funny, nothing was ironic. This was horrible.

“No!” he shouted. “Take them down! Take them down, damn you!”

No answer. Jonesy raised his hands, meaning to shatter the glass and beat on the steel shutters beyond, then thought,
Are you crazy? That's what he wants! The minute you break the glass, those shutters disappear and Mr. Gray is in here. And you're gone, buddy.

He was aware of movement—the heavy rumble of the plow. Where were they by now? Waterville? Augusta? Even farther south? Into the zone where the precip had fallen as rain? No, probably not, Mr. Gray would have switched the plow for something faster if
they had gotten clear of the snow. But they
would
be clear of it, and soon. Because they were going south.

Going
where
?

I might as well be dead already,
Jonesy thought, looking disconsolately at the closed shutter with its taunt of a message.
I might as well be dead right now.

14

In the end it was Owen who took Roberta Cavell by the arms and—with one eye on the racing clock, all too aware that every minute and a half brought Kurtz a mile closer—told her why they had to take Duddits, no matter how ill he was. Even in these circumstances, Henry didn't know if he could have uttered the phrase
fate of the world may depend on it
with a straight face. Underhill, who had spent his life carrying a gun for his country, could and did.

Duddits stood with his arm around Henry, staring raptly down at him with his brilliant green eyes. Those eyes, at least, had not changed. Nor had the feeling they'd always had when around Duddits—that things were either perfectly all right or soon would be.

Roberta looked at Owen, her face seeming to grow older with every sentence he spoke. It was as if some malign time-lapse photography were at work.

“Yes,” she said, “yes, I understand you want to find Jonesy—to catch him—but what does he want to do? And if he
came
here, why didn't he
do
it here?”

“Ma'am, I can't answer those questions—”

“War,” Duddits said suddenly. “Onesy ont war.”

War?
Owen's mind asked Henry, alarmed.
What war?