Dreamcatcher (86 page)

“Outstanding,” Kurtz said. “Recon that HMW. I'll cover you.”

“Right.” Freddy looked at Perlmutter, whose belly
was swelling again, then at Owen's Hummer. The reason for the rifle-fire they'd heard earlier was clear now: the Hummer had been shot up pretty good. The only question left to be answered was who had been on the giving end and who on the receiving. Tracks led away from the Hummer, growing indistinct under the rapid snowfall, but for now clear enough to read. A single set. Boots. Probably Owen.

“Go on now, Freddy!”

Freddy got out into the snow. Kurtz slid out behind him and Freddy heard him rack the slide of his personal. Depending on the nine-millimeter. Well, maybe that was all right; he was good with it, no question of that.

Freddy felt a momentary coldness down his spine, as if Kurtz had the nine leveled there. Right there. But that was ridiculous, wasn't it? Owen, yes, but Owen was different. Owen had crossed the line.

Freddy hurried to the Hummer, bent low, carbine held at chest level. He didn't like having Kurtz behind him, that was undeniable. No, he didn't like that at all.

17

As the two boys advance on the overgrown bed, Mr. Gray begins to push the
CALL
button repeatedly, but nothing happens.
I think the works must be choked with byrus,
Jonesy thinks.
Too bad, Mr. Gray—too bad for you.
He glances up at the TV and sees that his film self has gotten the dog to the edge of the shaft.
Maybe they're too late after all; maybe not. There's no way to tell. The wheel is still spinning.

Hello, Mr. Gray, I've so much wanted to meet you,
Henry says. As he speaks, he removes the byrussplotched pillow from beneath Mr. Gray's narrow, earless head. Mr. Gray tries to wriggle toward the other side of the bed, but Jonesy holds him in place, grasping the alien's child-thin arms. The skin in his hands is neither hot nor cold. It doesn't feel like skin at all, not really. It feels like—

Like nothing,
he thinks.
Like a dream.

Mr. Gray?
Henry asks.
This is how we say welcome to Planet Earth.
And he puts the pillow over Mr. Gray's face.

Beneath Jonesy's hands, Mr. Gray begins to struggle and thrash. Somewhere a monitor begins to beep frantically, as if this creature actually has a heart, and that it has now stopped beating.

Jonesy looks down at the dying monster and wishes only for this to be over.

18

Mr. Gray got the dog to the side of the shaft he had partially uncovered. Coming up through the narrow black semicircle was the steady hollow rush of running water and a waft of dank, cold air.

If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done quickly—that from a box marked
SHAKESPEARE
. The dog's rear legs were bicycling rapidly, and Mr. Gray could hear the wet sound of tearing
flesh as the byrum thrust with one end and chewed with the other, forcing itself out. Beneath the dog's tail, the chittering had started, a sound like an angry monkey. He had to get it into the shaft before it could emerge; it did not absolutely have to be born in the water, but its odds of survival would be much higher if it was.

Mr. Gray tried to shove the dog's head into the gap between the cover and the concrete and couldn't get it through. The neck bent and the dog's senselessly grinning snout twisted upward. Although still sleeping (or perhaps it was now unconscious) it began to utter a series of low, choked barks.

And it wouldn't go through the gap.

“Fuck me Freddy!”
Mr. Gray screamed. He was barely aware of the snarling ache in Jonesy's hip now, certainly not aware that Jonesy's face was strained and pale, the hazel eyes wet with tears of effort and frustration. He
was
aware—terribly aware—that something was going on.
Going on behind my back,
Jonesy would have said. And who else could it be? Who else but Jonesy, his reluctant host?

“Fuck YOU!”
he screamed at the damned, hateful, stubborn, just-a-little-too-big dog.
“You're going down, do you hear me? DO YOU—”

The words stopped in his throat. All at once he couldn't yell anymore, although he dearly wanted to; how he loved to yell, and pound his fists on things (even a dying pregnant dog)! All at once he couldn't
breathe,
let alone yell. What was Jonesy doing to him?

He expected no answer, but one came—a stranger's voice, full of cold rage:
This is how we say welcome to Planet Earth.

19

The flailing, three-fingered hands of the gray thing in the hospital bed come up and actually push the pillow aside for a moment. The black eyes starting from the otherwise featureless face are frantic with fear and rage. It gasps for breath. Considering that it doesn't really exist at all—not even in Jonesy's brain, at least as a physical artifact—it is fighting furiously for its life. Henry cannot sympathize, but he understands. It wants what Jonesy wants, what Duddits wants . . . what even Henry himself wants, for in spite of all his black thoughts, has his heart not gone on beating? Has his liver not gone on washing his blood? Has his body not gone on fighting its unseen wars against everything from the common cold to cancer to the byrus itself? The body is either stupid or infinitely wise, but in either case it is spared the terrible witchery of thought; it only knows how to stand its ground and fight until it can fight no more. If Mr. Gray was ever any different, he is different no longer. He wants to live.

But I don't think you will,
Henry says in a voice that is calm, almost soothing.
I don't think so, my friend.
And once more puts the pillow over Mr. Gray's face.

20

Mr. Gray's airway opened. He got one breath of the cold shaft-house air . . . two . . . and then the airway closed up again. They were smothering him, stifling him, killing him.

No!! Kiss my bender! Kiss my fucking bender! YOU CAN'T DO THIS!

He yanked the dog back and turned it sideways; it was almost like watching a man already late for his plane trying to make one last bulky article fit into his suitcase.

It'll go through this way,
he thought.

Yes. It would. Even if he had to collapse the dog's bulging middle with Jonesy's hands and allow the byrum to squirt free. One way or another, the damned thing
would
go through.

Face swelling, eyes bulging, breath stopped, a single fat vein swelling in the middle of Jonesy's forehead, Mr. Gray shoved Lad deeper into the crack and then began to thump the dog's chest with Jonesy's fists.

Go through, damn you, go through.

GO THROUGH!

21

Freddy Johnson pointed his carbine inside the abandoned Hummer while Kurtz, stationed shrewdly behind him (in that way it was like the attack on the
grayboy ship all over again), waited to see what would develop.

“Two guys, boss. Looks like Owen decided to put out the trash before moving on.”

“Dead?”

“They look pretty dead to me. Got to be Devlin and the other one, the one they stopped for.”

Kurtz joined Freddy, took a brief glance in through the shattered window, and nodded. They looked pretty dead to him, too, a pair of white moles lying entwined in the back seat, covered with blood and shattered glass. He raised his nine-millimeter to make sure of them—one each in the head couldn't hurt—then lowered it again. Owen might not have heard their engine. The snow was amazingly heavy and wet, an acoustical blanket, and that was very possible. But he would hear gunshots. He turned toward the path instead.

“Lead the way, buck, and mind the footing—looks slippery. And we may still have the element of surprise. I think we should bear that in mind, don't you?”

Freddy nodded.

Kurtz smiled. It turned his face into a skull's face. “With any luck, buck, Owen Underhill will be in hell before he even knows he's dead.”

22

The TV remote, a rectangle of black plastic covered with byrus, is lying on Mr. Gray's bedtable. Jonesy grabs it. In a voice that sounds eerily like Beaver's, he says “Fuck this shit” and slams it down as hard as he can on
the table's edge, like a man cracking the shell of a hard-boiled egg. The controller shatters, spilling its batteries and leaving a jagged plastic wand in Jonesy's hand. He reaches below the pillow Henry is holding over the thrashing thing's face. He hesitates for just a moment, remembering his first meeting with Mr. Gray—his
only
meeting. The bathroom knob coming free in his hand as the rod snapped. The sense of darkness which was the creature's shadow falling over him. It had been real enough then, real as roses, real as raindrops. Jonesy had turned and seen him . . . it . . . whatever Mr. Gray had been before he was Mr. Gray . . . standing there in the big central room. The stuff of a hundred movies and “unexplained mysteries” documentaries, only old. Old and sick. Ready even then for this hospital bed in the Intensive Care Unit.
Marcy,
it had said, plucking the word straight out of Jonesy's brain. Pulling it like a cork. Making the hole through which it could enter. Then it had exploded like a noisemaker on New Year's Eve, spraying byrus instead of confetti, and . . .

. . . 
and I imagined the rest. That was it, wasn't it? Just another case of intergalactic schizophrenia. Basically, that was it.

Jonesy!
Henry shouts.
If you're gonna do it, then do it!

Here it comes, Mr. Gray,
Jonesy thinks.
Get ready for it. Because payback's—

23

Mr. Gray had gotten Lad's body halfway into the gap when Jonesy's voice filled his head.

Here it comes, Mr. Gray. Get ready for it. Because payback's a bitch.

There was a ripping pain across the middle of Jonesy's throat. Mr. Gray raised Jonesy's hands, making a series of gagging grunts that would not quite attain the status of screams. He didn't feel the beard-stubbled, unbroken skin of Jonesy's throat but his own ragged flesh. What he felt most strongly was shocked disbelief: it was the last of Jonesy's emotions upon which he drew.
This could not be happening.
They always came in the ships of the old ones, those artifacts; they always raised their hands in surrender;
they always won.
This could not be happening.

And yet somehow it was.

The byrum's consciousness did not so much fade as disintegrate. Dying, the entity once known as Mr. Gray reverted to its former state. As
he
became
it
(and just before
it
could become
nothing
), Mr. Gray gave the dog's body a final vicious shove. It sank into the gap . . . yet still not quite far enough to go through.

The byrum's last Jonesy-tinged thought was
I should have taken him up on it. I should have gone na—

24

Jonesy slashes the jagged end of the TV controller across Mr. Gray's naked wattled neck. Its throat peels open like a mouth and a cloud of reddish-orange matter puffs out, staining the air the color of blood before falling back to the counterpane in a shower of dust and fluff.

Mr. Gray's body twitches once, galvanically, beneath Jonesy's and Henry's hands. Then it shrivels like the dream it always was and becomes something familiar. For a moment Jonesy can't make the connection and then it comes. Mr. Gray's remains look like one of the condoms they saw on the floor of the deserted office in the Tracker Brothers depot.

He's
—

—
dead!
is how Jonesy means to finish, but then a terrible bolt of pain tears through him. Not his hip this time but his head. And his throat. All at once his throat is wearing a necklace of fire. And the whole room is transparent, damned if it isn't. He's looking through the wall and into the shaft house, where the dog stuck in the crack is giving birth to a vile red creature that looks like a weasel crossed with a huge, blood-soaked worm. He knows well enough what it is: one of the byrum.

Streaked with blood and shit and the remains of its own membranous placenta, its brainless black eyes staring (
they're
his
eyes,
Jonesy thinks,
Mr. Gray's eyes
), it is being born in front of him, stretching its body out, trying to pull free, wanting to drop into the darkness and fall toward the sound of running water.

Jonesy looks at Henry.

Henry looks back.

For just a moment their young and startled eyes meet . . . and then
they
are disappearing, as well.

Duddits,
Henry says. His voice comes from far away.
Duddits is going. Jonesy . . .

Goodbye. Perhaps Henry means to say goodbye. Before he can, they're both gone.

25

There was a moment of vertigo when Jonesy was exactly nowhere, a sense of utter disconnection. He thought it must be death, that he had killed himself as well as Mr. Gray—cut his own throat, as the saying went.

What brought him back was pain. Not in his throat, that was gone and he could breathe again—he could hear the air going in and out of him in great dry gasps. No, this pain was an old acquaintance. It was in his hip. It caught him and swung him back into the world around its swollen, howling axis, winding him up like a tether-ball on a post. There was concrete under his knees, his hands were full of fur, and he heard an inhuman chittering sound.
At least this part is real,
he thought.
This part is outside the dreamcatcher.

That godawful chittering sound.

Jonesy saw the weasel-thing now dangling into the dark, held to the upper world only by its tail, which wasn't yet free of the dog. Jonesy lunged forward and clamped his hands around its slippery, shivering middle just as it did pull free.