"What is it down there, Owen? What is it shuffling around that ship? What is it forgot to put on their pants and their shoes before they left the house this morning?"
"Cancer, boss."
"That's right. Now you give the order and in we go. Sing it out, Owen." And, with great deliberation, knowing that the men in the gunships would be watching him (never had he given such a sermon, never, and not a word of it preplanned, unless in his dreams), he turned his own hat around backward.
7
Owen watched Tony Edwards turn his Mets cap around so that the bill pointed down the nape of his neck, heard Bryson and Bertinelli racking the .50s, and understood this was really happening. They were going hot. He could get in the car and ride or stand in the road and get run down. Those were the only choices Kurtz had left him.
And there was something more, something bad he remembered from long ago, when he had been--what? Eight? Seven? Maybe even younger. He had been out on the lawn of his house, the one in Paducah, his father still at work, his mother off somewhere, probably at the Grace Baptist, getting ready for one of her endless bake sales (unlike Kurtz, when Randi Underhill said praise Jesus, she meant it), and an ambulance had pulled up next door, at the Rapeloews'. No siren, but lots of flashing lights. Two men in jumpsuits very much like the coverall Owen now wore had gone running up the Rapeloews' walk, unfolding a gleaming stretcher. Never even breaking stride. It was like a magic trick.
Less than ten minutes later they were back out with Mrs. Rapeloew on the stretcher. Her eyes had been closed. Mr. Rapeloew came along behind her, not even bothering to close the door. Mr. Rapeloew, who was Owen's Daddy's age, looked suddenly as old as a grampy. It was another magic trick. Mr. Rapeloew glanced to his right as the men loaded his wife into the ambulance and saw Owen kneeling on his lawn in his short pants and playing with his ball. They say it was a stroke! Mr. Rapeloew called. St. Mary's Memorial! Tell your mother, Owen! And then he climbed into the back of the ambulance and the ambulance drove away. For the next five minutes or so Owen continued to play with his ball, throwing it up and catching it, but in between throws and catches he kept looking at the door Mr. Rapeloew had left open and thinking he ought to close it. That closing it would be what his mother called a Christian Act of Charity.
Finally he got up and crossed to the Rapeloews' lawn. The Rapeloews had been good to him. Nothing really special ("Nothing to get up in the night and write home about," his mother would have said), but Mrs. Rapeloew made lots of cookies and always remembered to save him some; many were the bowls of frosting and cookie-dough he had scraped clean in chubby, cheery Mrs. Rapeloew's kitchen. And Mr. Rapeloew had shown him how to make paper airplanes that really flew. Three different kinds. So the Rapeloews deserved charity, Christian charity, but when he stepped through the open door of the Rapeloews' house, he had known perfectly well that Christian charity wasn't the reason he was there. Doing Christian charity did not make your dingus hard.
For five minutes--or maybe it was fifteen minutes or half an hour, the time passed like time in a dream--Owen had just walked around in the Rapeloews' house, doing nothing, but all the time his dingus had been just as hard as a rock, so hard it throbbed like a second heartbeat, and you would think something like that would hurt, but it hadn't, it had felt good, and all these years later he recognized that silent wandering for what it had been: foreplay. The fact that he had nothing against the Rapeloews, that he in fact liked the Rapeloews, somehow made it even better. If he was caught (he never was), he could say I dunno if asked why he did it, and be telling the God's honest.
Not that he did so much. In the downstairs bathroom he found a toothbrush with DICK printed on it. Dick was Mr. Rapeloew's name. Owen tried to piss on the bristles of Mr. Rapeloew's toothbrush, that was what he wanted to do, but his dingus was too hard and no piss would come out, not a single drop. So he spat on the bristles instead, then rubbed the spit in and put the brush back in the toothbrush holder. In the kitchen, he poured a glass of water over the electric stove-burners. Then he took a large china serving platter from the sideboard. "They said it was the stork," Owen said, holding the platter over his head. "It must be a baby, because he said it was a stork." And then he heaved the platter into the corner, where it shattered into a thousand pieces. Once that was done he had fled from the house. Whatever had been inside him, the thing that had made his dingus hard and his eyeballs feel too big for their sockets, the shattering sound of the plate had broken it, popped it like a pimple, and if his parents hadn't been so worried about Mrs. Rapeloew, they almost certainly would have seen something wrong with him. As it was, they probably just assumed that he was worried about Mrs. R., too. For the next week he had slept little, and what sleep he did get had been haunted by bad dreams. In one of these, Mrs. Rapeloew came home from the hospital with the baby the stork had brought her, only the baby was black and dead. Owen had been all but consumed with guilt and shame (never to the point of confessing, however; what in God's name would he have said when his Baptist mother asked him what had possessed him), and yet he never forgot the blind pleasure of standing in the bathroom with his shorts down around his knees, trying to piss on Mr. Rapeloew's toothbrush, or the thrill that had gusted through him when the serving platter shattered. If he had been older, he would have come in his pants, he supposed. The purity was in the senselessness; the joy was in the sound of the shatter; the afterglow was the slow and pleasurable wallow in remorse for having done it and the fear of being caught. Mr. Rapeloew had said it was a stork, but when Owen's father came in that night, he told him it was a stroke. That a blood-vessel in Mrs. Rapeloew's brain had sprung a leak and that was a stroke.
And now here it was again, all of that.
Maybe this time I will come, he thought. It'll certainly be a lot goddam grander than trying to piss on Mr. Rapeloew's toothbrush. And then, as he turned his own hat around: Same basic concept, though.
"Owen?" Kurtz's voice, "Are you there, son? If you don't roger me right now, I'm going to assume you either can't or won't--"
"Boss, I'm here." Voice steady. In his mind's eye he saw a sweaty little boy holding a china serving platter over his head. "Boys, are you ready to kick a little interstellar ass?"
A roar of affirmation that included one goddam right and one let's tear em up.
"What do you want first, boys?"
Squad Anthem and Anthem and Fucking Stones, right now!
"Anyone want out, sing out."
Radio silence. On some other frequency where Owen would never go again, the grayboys were pleading in famous voices. Starboard and below was the little Kiowa OH-58. Owen didn't need binoculars to see Kurtz with his own hat now turned around, Kurtz watching him. The newspaper was still on his lap, now for some reason folded into a triangle. For six years Owen Underhill had needed no second chances, which was good because Kurtz didn't give them--in his heart Owen supposed he had always known that. He would think about that later, however. If he had to. One final coherent thought flared in his mind--You're the cancer, Kurtz, you--and then died. Here was a fine and perfect darkness in its place.
"Blue Group, this is Blue Boy Leader. Come in on me. Commence firing at two hundred yards. Avoid hitting the Blue Boy if possible, but we are going to sweep those motherfuckers clean. Conk, play the Anthem."
Gene Conklin flicked a switch and racked a CD in the Discman sitting on the floor of Blue Boy Two. Owen, no longer inside himself, leaned forward in Blue Boy Leader and cranked the volume.
Mick Jagger, the voice of the Rolling Stones, filled his earphones. Owen raised his hand, saw Kurtz snap him a salute--whether sarcastic or sincere Owen neither knew nor cared--and then Owen brought his arm down. As Jagger sang it out, sang the Anthem, the one they always played when they went in hot, the helicopters dropped, tightened, and flew to target.
8
The grayboys--the ones that were left--stood beneath the shadow of their ship which lay in turn at the end of the shattered aisle of trees it had destroyed i
n its final descent. They made no initial effort to run or hide; in fact half of them actually stepped forward on their naked toeless feet, squelching in the melted snow, the muck, and the scattered fuzz of reddish-gold moss. These faced the oncoming line of gunships, long-fingered hands raised, showing that they were empty. Their huge black eyes gleamed in the dull daylight.
The gunships did not slow, although all of them heard the final transmissions briefly in their heads: Please don't hurt us, we are helpless, we are dying. With that, twining through it like a pigtail, came the voice of Mick Jagger: "Please allow me to introduce myself, I'm a man of wealth and taste; I've been around for many a long year, stolen many man's soul and faith . . ."
The gunships heeled around as briskly as a marching band doing a square turn on the fifty-yard line of the Rose Bowl, and the .50s opened up. The bullets plowed into the snow, struck dead branches from already wounded trees, struck pallid little sparks from the edge of the great ship. They ripped into the bunched grayboys standing with their arms upraised and tore them apart. Arms spun free of rudimentary bodies, spouting a kind of pink sap. Heads exploded like gourds, raining a reddish backsplash on their ship and their shipmates--not blood but that mossy stuff, as if their heads were full of it, not really heads at all but grisly produce baskets. Several of them were cut in two at the mid-section and went down with their hands still raised in surrender. As they fell, the gray bodies went a dirty white and seemed to boil.
Mick Jagger confided: "I was around when Jesus Christ had His moment of doubt and pain . . ."
A few grays, still standing under the lip of the ship, turned as if to run, but there was nowhere to go. Most of them were shot down immediately. The last few survivors--maybe four in all--retreated into the scant shadows. They seemed to be doing something, fiddling with something, and Owen had a horrible premonition.
"I can get them!" came crackling over the radio. That was Deforest in Blue Boy Four, almost panting with eagerness. And, anticipating Owen's order to go for it, the Chinook dropped almost to ground-level, its rotors kicking up snow and muddy water in a filthy blizzard, battering the underbrush flat.
"No, negative, belay that, back off, resume station plus fifty!" Owen shouted, and whacked Tony's shoulder. Tony, looking only slightly odd in the transparent mask over his mouth and nose, yanked back on the yoke and Blue Boy Leader rose in the unsteady air. Even over the music--the mad bongos, the chorus going Hoo-hoo, "Sympathy for the Devil" hadn't played through to its conclusion even a single time, at least not yet--Owen could hear his crew grumbling. The Kiowa, he saw, was already small with distance. Whatever his mental peculiarities might be, Kurtz was no fool. And his instincts were exquisite.
"Ah, boss--" Deforest, sounding not just disappointed but on fire.
"Say again, say again, return to station, Blue Group, return--"
The explosion hammered him back in his seat and tossed the Chinook upward like a toy. Beneath the roar, he heard Tony Edwards cursing and wrestling with the yoke. There were screams from behind them, but while most of the crew was injured, they lost only Pinky Bryson, who had been leaning out the bay for a better look and fell when the shockwave hit.
"Got it, got it, got it," Tony yammered, but Owen thought it was at least thirty seconds before Tony actually did, seconds that felt like hours. On the sound systems, the Anthem had cut off, a fact that did not bode well for Conk and the boys in Blue Boy Two.
Tony swung Blue Boy Leader around, and Owen saw the windscreen Perspex was cracked in two places. Behind them someone was still screaming--Mac Cavanaugh, it turned out, had somehow managed to lose two fingers.
"Holy shit," Tony muttered, and then: "You saved our bacon, boss. Thanks."
Owen barely heard him. He was looking back at the remains of the ship, which now lay in at least three pieces. It was hard to tell because the shit was flying and the air had turned a hazy reddish-orange. It was a little easier to see the remains of Deforest's gunship. It lay canted on its side in the muck with bubbles bursting all around it. On its port side, a long piece of busted rotor floated in the water like a giant's canoe-paddle. About fifty yards away, more rotors protruded, black and crooked, from a furious ball of yellow-white fire. That was Conklin and Blue Boy Two.
Graggle and bleep from the radio. Blakey in Blue Boy Three. "Boss, hey boss, I see--"
"Three, this is Leader. I want you to--"
"Leader, this is Three, I see survivors, repeat, I see Blue Boy Four survivors, at least three . . . no, four . . . I am going down to--"
"Negative, Blue Boy Three, not at all. Resume station plus fifty--belay that, station plus one-fifty, one-five-oh, and do it now!"
"Ah, but sir . . . boss, I mean . . . I can see Friedman, he's on fucking fire--"
"Joe Blakey, listen up."
No mistaking Kurtz's rasp, Kurtz who had gotten clear of the red crap in plenty of time. Almost, Owen thought, as if he knew what was going to happen.
"Get your ass out of there now, or I guarantee that by next week you'll be shovelling camel-shit in a hot climate where booze is illegal. Out."
Nothing more from Blue Boy Three. The two surviving gunships pulled back to their original rally-point plus a hundred and fifty yards. Owen sat watching the furious upward spiral of the Ripley fungus, wondering if Kurtz had known or just intuited, wondering if he and Blakey had cleared the area in time. Because they were infectious, of course; whatever the grayboys said, they were infectious. Owen didn't know if that justified what they had just done, but he thought the survivors of Ray Deforest's Blue Boy Four were most likely dead men walking. Or worse: live men changing. Turning into God knew what.
"Owen." The radio.
Tony looked at him, eyebrows raised.
"Owen."
Sighing, Owen flicked the toggle over to Kurtz's closed channel with his chin. "I'm here, boss."
9
Kurtz sat in the Kiowa with the newspaper hat still in his lap. He and Freddy were wearing their masks; so were the rest of boys in the attack group. Likely even the poor fellows now on the ground were still wearing them. The masks were probably unnecessary, but Kurtz, who had no intention of contracting Ripley if he could avoid it, was the big cheese. Among other things, he was supposed to set an example. Besides, he played the odds. As for Freddy Johnson . . . well, he had plans for Freddy.
"I'm here, boss," Underhill said in his phones.
"That was good shooting, better flying, and superlative thinking. You saved some lives. You and I are back where we were. Right back to Square One. Got that?"
"I do, boss. Got it and appreciate it."
And if you believe it, Kurtz thought, you're even stupider than you look.
10
Behind Owen, Cavanaugh was still making noises, but the volume was decreasing now. Nothing from Joe Blakey, who was maybe coming to understand the implications of that gauzy red-gold whirlwind, which they might or might not have managed to avoid.
"Everything okay, buck?" Kurtz asked.
"We have some injuries," Owen replied, "but basically five-by. Work for the sweepers, though; it's a mess back there."
Kurtz's crowlike laughter came back, loud in Owen's headphones.
11
"Freddy."
"Yes, boss."
"We need to keep an eye on Owen Underhill."
"Okay."
"If we need to leave suddenly--Imperial Valley--Underhill stays here."
Freddy Johnson said nothing, just nodded and flew the helicopter. Good lad. Knew which side of the line he belonged on, unlike some.
Kurtz again turned to him.
"Freddy, get us back to that godforsaken little store and don't spare the horses. I want to be there at least fifteen minutes before Owen and Joe Blakey. Twenty, if possible."
"Yes, boss."
"And I want a secure satellite uplink to Cheyenne Mountain."
"You got it. Take about five."
"Make it three, buck. Make it three."
Kurtz sett
led back and watched the pine forest flow under them. So much forest, so much wildlife, and not a few human beings--most of them at this time of year wearing orange. And a week from now--maybe in seventy-two hours--it would all be as dead as the mountains of the moon. A shame, but if there was one thing of which there was no shortage in Maine, it was woods.
Kurtz spun the cocked hat on the end of his finger. If possible, he intended to see Owen Underhill wearing it after he had ceased breathing.
"He just wanted to hear if any of it had changed," Kurtz said softly.
Freddy Johnson, who knew which side his bread was buttered on, said nothing.
12
Halfway back to Gosselin's and Kurtz's speedy little Kiowa already a speck that might or might not still be there, Owen's eyes fixed on Tony Edwards's right hand, which was gripping one branch of the Chinook's Y-shaped steering yoke. At the base of the right thumbnail, fine as a spill of sand, was a curving line of reddish-gold. Owen looked down at his own hands, inspecting them as closely as Mrs. Jankowski had during Personal Hygiene, back in those long-ago days when the Rapeloews had been their neighbors. He could see nothing yet, not on his, but Tony had his mark, and Owen guessed his own would come in time.
Baptists the Underhills had been, and Owen was familiar with the story of Cain and Abel. The voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground, God had said, and he had sent Cain out to live in the land of Nod, to the east of Eden. With the low men, according to his mother. But before Cain was set loose to wander, God had put a mark upon him, so even the low men of Nod would know him for what he was. And now, seeing that red-gold thread on the nail of Eddie's thumb and looking for it on his own hands and wrists, Owen guessed he knew what color Cain's mark had been.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE EGGMAN'S JOURNEY
1
Suicide, Henry had discovered, had a voice. It wanted to explain itself. The problem was that it didn't speak much English; mostly it lapsed into its own fractured pidgin. But it didn't matter; just the talking seemed to be enough. Once Henry allowed suicide its voice, his life had improved enormously. He even had nights when he slept again (not a lot of them, but enough), and he had never had a really bad day.