"Okay, I'm lying," Kurtz said, never missing a beat. He gave Owen a quick gleaming look before dropping his gaze to his cigarette again. "But the facts are true and verifiable. Some of them do explode and turn into red dandelion fluff. The fluff is Ripley. You inhale enough of it and in a period of time we can't yet predict--it could be an hour or two days--your lungs and brain are Ripley salad. You look like a walking patch of poison sumac. And then you die.
"There will be no mention of our little venture earlier today. According to the President's version, the ship, which had apparently been badly damaged in the crash, was either blown up by its crew or blew up on its own. All the grayboys were killed. The Ripley, after some initial spread, is also dying, apparently because it does very poorly in the cold. The Russians corroborate that, by the way. There has been a fairly large kill-off of animals, which also carry the infection."
"And the human population of Jefferson Tract?"
"POTUS is going to say that about three hundred people--seventy or so locals and about two hundred and thirty hunters--are currently being monitored for the Ripley fungus. He will say that while some appear to have been infected, they also appear to be beating the infection with the help of such standard antibiotics as Ceftin and Augmentin."
"And now this word from our sponsor," Owen said. Kurtz laughed, delighted.
"At a later time, it's going to be announced that the Ripley seems a little more antibiotic-resistant than was first believed, and that a number of patients have died. The names we give out will be those of people who have in fact already died, either as a result of the Ripley or those gruesome fucking implants. Do you know what the men are calling the implants?"
"Yeah, shit-weasels. Will the President mention them?"
"No way. The guys in charge believe the shit-weasels are just a little too upsetting for John Q. Public. As would be, of course, the facts concerning our solution to the problem here at Gosselin's Store, that rustic beauty-spot."
"The final solution, you could call it," Owen said. He had smoked his cigarette all the way down to the filter, and now crushed it out on the rim of his empty coffee cup.
Kurtz's eyes rose to Owen's and met them unflinchingly. "Yes, you could call it that. We're going to wipe out approximately three hundred and fifty people--mostly men, there's that, but I can't say the cleansing won't include at least a few women and children. The upside, of course, is that we will be insuring the human race against a pandemic and, very possibly, subjugation. Not an inconsiderable upside."
Owen's thought--I'm sure Hitler would like the spin--was unstoppable, but he covered it as well as he could and got no sense that Kurtz had heard it or sensed it. Impossible to tell for sure, of course; Kurtz was sly.
"How many are we holding now?" Kurtz asked.
"About seventy. And twice that number on the way from Kineo; they'll be here around nine, if the weather doesn't get any worse." It was supposed to, but not until after midnight.
Kurtz was nodding. "Uh-huh. Plus I'm going to say fifty more from up north, seventy or so from St. Cap's and those little places down south . . . and our guys. Don't forget them. The masks seem to work, but we've already picked up four cases of Ripley in the medical debriefings. The men, of course, don't know."
"Don't they?"
"Let me rephrase that," Kurtz said. "Based on their behavior, I have no reason to believe the men know. All right?"
Owen shrugged.
"The story," Kurtz resumed, "will be that the detainees are being flown to a top-secret medical installation, a kind of Area 51, where they will undergo further examination, and, if necessary, long-term treatment. There will never be another official statement concerning them--not if all goes according to plan--but there will be time-release leaks over the next two years: encroaching infection despite best medical efforts to stop it . . . madness . . . grotesque physical changes better left undescribed . . . and finally, death comes as a mercy. Far from being outraged, the public will be relieved."
"While in reality . . . ?"
He wanted to hear Kurtz say it, but he should have known better. There were no bugs here (except, maybe, for the ones hiding between Kurtz's ears), but the boss's caution was ingrained. He raised one hand, made a gun of his thumb and forefinger, and dropped his thumb three times. His eyes never left Owen's as he did this. Crocodile's eyes, Owen thought.
"All of them?" Owen asked. "The ones who aren't showing Ripley-Positive as well as those who are? And where does that leave us? The soldiers who also show Negative?"
"The laddies who are okay now are going to stay okay," Kurtz said. "Those showing Ripley were all careless. One of them . . . well, there's a little girl out there, about four years old, cute as the devil. You almost expect her to start tap-dancing across the barn floor and singing 'On the Good Ship Lollipop.'"
Kurtz obviously thought he was being witty, and Owen supposed that in a way he was, but Owen himself was overcome by a wave of intense horror. There's a four-year-old out there, he thought. Just four years old, how about that.
"She's cute, and she's hot," Kurtz was saying. "Visible Ripley on the inside of one wrist, growing at her hairline, growing in the corner of one eye. Classic spots. Anyway, this soldier gave her a candybar, just like she was some starving Kosovar rug-muncher, and she gave him a kiss. Sweet as pie, a real Kodak moment, only now he's got a lipstick print that ain't lipstick growing on his cheek." Kurtz grimaced. "He had himself a little tiny shaving cut, barely visible, but there goes your ballgame. Similar stuff with the others. The rules don't change, Owen; carelessness gets you killed. You may go along lucky for awhile, but in the end it never fails. Carelessness gets you killed. Most of our guys, I'm delighted to say, will walk away from this. We're going to face scheduled medical exams for the rest of our lives, not to mention the occasional surprise exam, but look at the upside--they're gonna catch your ass-cancer wicked early."
"The civilians who appear clean? What about them?"
Kurtz leaned forward, now at his most charming, his most persuasively sane. You were supposed to be flattered by this, to feel yourself one of the fortunate few to see Kurtz with his mask ("two parts Patton, one part Rasputin, add water, stir and serve") laid aside. It had worked on Owen before, but not now. Rasputin wasn't the mask; this was the mask.
Yet even now--here was the hell of it--he wasn't completely sure.
"Owen, Owen, Owen! Use your brain--that good brain God gave you! We can monitor our own without raising suspicions or opening the door to a worldwide panic--and there's going to be enough panic anyway, after our narrowly elected President slays the phooka horse. We couldn't do that with three hundred civilians. And if we really flew them out to New Mexico, put them up in some model village for fifty or seventy years at the taxpayers' expense? What if one or more of them escaped? Or what if--and I think this is what the smart boys are really afraid of--given time, the Ripley mutates? That instead of dying off, it turns into something a lot more infectious and a lot less vulnerable to the environmental factors that are killing it here in Maine? If the Ripley's intelligent, it's dangerous. Even if it isn't, what if it serves the grayboys as a kind of beacon, an interstellar road-flare marking our world out--yum-yum, come and get it, these guys are tasty . . . and there's plenty of them?"
"You're saying better safe than sorry."
Kurtz leaned back in his chair and beamed. "That's it. That's it in a nutshell."
Well, Owen thought, it might be the nut, but the shell is something we're not talking about. We watch out for our own. We're merciless if we have to be, but even Kurtz watches out for his laddie-bucks. Civilians, on the other hand, are just civilians. If you need to burn em, they go up pretty easy.
"If you doubt there's a God and that He spends at least some of His time looking out for good old Homo sap, you might look at the way we're coming out of this," Kurtz said. "The flashlights arrived early and were reported--one of the reports came from the store owner, Reginald Gosselin, himself. Then the graybo
ys arrive at the only time of year when there are actually people in these godforsaken woods, and two of them saw the ship go down."
"That was lucky."
"God's grace is what it was. Their ship crashes, their presence is known, the cold kills both them and the galactic dandruff they brought along." He ticked the points off rapidly on his long fingers, his white eyelashes blinking. "But that's not all. They do some implants and the goddam things don't work--far from establishing a harmonious relationship with their hosts, they turn cannibal and kill them.
"The animal kill-off went well--we've censused something like a hundred thousand critters, and there's already one hell of a barbecue going on over by the Castle County line. In the spring or summer we would've needed to worry about bugs carrying the Ripley out of the zone, but not now. Not in November."
"Some animals must have gotten through."
"Animals and people both, likely. But the Ripley spreads slowly. We're going to be all right on this because we netted the vast majority of infected hosts, because the ship has been destroyed, and because what they brought us smolders rather than blazes. We've sent them a simple message: come in peace or come with your rayguns blazing, but don't try it this way again, because it doesn't work. We don't think they will come again, or at least not for awhile. They played fiddly-fuck for half a century before getting this far. Our only regret is that we didn't secure the ship for the science-boffins . . . but it might've been too Ripley-infected, anyway. Do you know what our great fear has been? That either the grayboys or the Ripley would find a Typhoid Mary, someone who could carry it and spread it without catching it him-or herself."
"Are you sure there isn't such a person?"
"Almost sure. If there is . . . well, that's what the cordon's for." Kurtz smiled. "We lucked out, soldier. The odds are against a Typhoid Mary, the grayboys are dead, and all the Ripley is confined to the Jefferson Tract. Luck or God. Take your choice."
Kurtz lowered his head and pinched the bridge of his nose high up, like a man suffering a sinus infection. When he looked up again, his eyes were swimming. Crocodile tears, Owen thought, but in truth he wasn't sure. And he had no access to Kurtz's mind. Either the telepathic wave had receded too far for that, or Kurtz had found a way to slam the door. Yet when Kurtz spoke again, Owen was almost positive he was hearing the real Kurtz, a human being and not Tick-Tock the Croc.
"This is it for me, Owen. Once this job is finished, I'm going to punch my time. There'll be work here for another four days, I'd guess--maybe a week, if this storm's as bad as they say--and it'll be nasty, but the real nightmare's tomorrow morning. I can hold up my end, I guess, but after that . . . well, I'm eligible for full retirement, and I'm going to give them their choice: pay me or kill me. I think they'll pay, because I know where too many of the bodies are buried--that's a lesson I learned from J. Edgar Hoover--but I've almost reached the point of not caring. This won't be the worst one I've ever been involved in, in Haiti we did eight hundred in a single hour--1989, that was, and I still dream about it--but this is worse. By far. Because those poor schmucks out there in the barn and the paddock and the corral . . . they're Americans. Folks who drive Chevvies, shop at Kmart, and never miss ER. The thought of shooting Americans, massacring Americans . . . that turns my stomach. I'll do it only because it needs to be done in order to bring closure to this business, and because most of them would die anyway, and much more horribly. Capish?"
Owen Underhill said nothing. He thought he was keeping his face properly expressionless, but anything he said would likely give away his sinking horror. He had known this was coming, but to actually hear it . . .
In his mind's eye he saw the soldiers drifting toward the fence through the snow, heard the loudspeakers summoning the detainees in the barn. He had never been part of an operation like this, he'd missed Haiti, but he knew how it was supposed to go. How it would go.
Kurtz was watching him closely.
"I won't say all is forgiven for that foolish stunt you pulled this afternoon, that water's under the bridge, but you owe me one, buck. I don't need ESP to know how you feel about what I'm telling you, and I'm not going to waste my breath telling you to grow up and face reality. All I can tell you is that I need you. You have to help me this one time."
The swimming eyes. The infirm twitch, barely perceptible, at the corner of his mouth. It was easy to forget that Kurtz had blown a man's foot off not ten minutes ago.
Owen thought: If I help him do this, it doesn't matter if I actually pull a trigger or not, I'm as damned as the men who herded the Jews into the showers at Bergen-Belsen.
"If we start at eleven, we can be done at eleven-thirty," Kurtz said. "Noon at the very worst. Then it's behind us."
"Except for the dreams."
"Yes. Except for them. Will you help me, Owen?"
Owen nodded. He had come this far, and wouldn't let go of the rope now, damned or not. At the very least he could help make it merciful . . . as merciful as any mass murder could be. Later he would be struck by the lethal absurdity of this idea, but when you were with Kurtz, up close and with his eyes holding yours, perspective was a joke. His madness was probably much more infectious than the Ripley, in the end.
"Good." Kurtz slumped back in his rocker, looking relieved and drained. He took out his cigarettes again, peered in, then held the pack out. "Two left. Join me?"
Owen shook his head. "Not this time, boss."
"Then get on out of here. If necessary, shag ass over to the infirmary and get some Sonata."
"I don't think I'll need that," Owen said. He would, of course--he needed it already--but he wouldn't take it. Better to lie awake.
"All right, then. Off you go." Kurtz let him get as far as the door. "And Owen?"
Owen turned back, zipping his parka. He could hear the wind out there now. Building, starting to blow seriously, as it had not during the relatively harmless Alberta Clipper that had come through that morning.
"Thanks," Kurtz said. One large and absurd tear overspilled his left eye and ran down his cheek. Kurtz seemed unaware. In that moment Owen loved and pitied him. In spite of everything, which included knowing better. "Thank you, buck."
7
Henry stood in the thickening snow, turned away from the worst of the wind and looking over his left shoulder at the Winnebago, waiting for Underhill to come back out. He was alone now--the storm had driven the rest of them back into the barn, where there was a heater. Rumors would already be growing tall in the warmth, Henry supposed. Better the rumors than the truth that was right in front of them.
He scratched at his leg, realized what he was doing, and looked around, turning in a complete circle. No prisoners; no guards. Even in the thickening snow the compound was almost as bright as noonday, and he could see well in every direction. For the time being, at least, he was alone.
Henry bent and untied the shirt knotted around the place where the turnsignal stalk had cut his skin. He then spread the slit in his bluejeans. The men who had taken him into custody had made this same examination in the back of the truck where they had already stored five other refugees (on the way back to Gosselin's they had picked up three more). At that point he had been clean.
He wasn't clean now. A delicate thread of red lace grew down the scabbed center of the wound. If he hadn't known what he was looking for, he might have mistaken it for a fresh seep of blood.
Byrus, he thought. Ah, fuck. Goodnight, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are.
A flash of light winked at the top of his vision. Henry straightened and saw Underhill just pulling the door of the Winnebago shut. Quickly, Henry retied the shirt around the hole in his jeans and then approached the fence. A voice in his head asked what he'd do if he called to Underhill and the man just kept on going. That voice also wanted to know if Henry really intended to give Jonesy up.
He watched Underhill trudge toward him in the glare of the security lights, his head bent against the snow and the intensifying wind.
8
The door closed. Kurtz sat looking at it, smoking and slowly rocking. How much of his pitch had Owen bought? Owen was bright, Owen was a survivor, Owen was not without idealism . . . and Kurtz thought Owen had bought it all, with hardly a single dicker. Because in the end most people believed what they wanted to believe. John Dillinger had also been a survivor, the wiliest of the thirties desperadoes, but he had gone to the Biograph Theater with Anna Sage just the same. Manhattan Melodrama had been the show, and when it was over, the feds had shot Dillinger down in the alley beside the theater like the dog he was. Anna Sage had also believed what she wanted to believe, but they deported her ass back to Poland just the same.
No one was going to leave Gosselin's Market tomorrow except for his picked cadre--the twelve men and two women who made up Imperial Valley. Owen Underhill would not be among them, although he could have been. Until Owen had put the grayboys on the common channel, Kurtz had been sure he would be. But things changed. So Buddha had said, and on that one, at least, the old chink heathen had spoken true.
"You let me down, buck," Kurtz said. He had lowered his mask to smoke, and it bobbed against his grizzled throat as he spoke. "You let me down." Kurtz had let Owen Underhill get away with letting him down once. But twice?
"Never," Kurtz said. "Never in life."
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
GOING SOUTH
1
Mr. Gray ran the snowmobile down into a ravine which held a small frozen creek. He drove north along this for the remaining mile to I-95. Two or three hundred yards from the lights of the army vehicles (there were only a few now, moving slowly in the thickening snow), he stopped long enough to consult the part of Jonesy's mind that he--it--could get at. There were files and files of stuff that wouldn't fit into Jonesy's little office stronghold, and Mr. Gray found what he was looking for easily enough. There was no switch to turn off the Arctic Cat's headlight. Mr. Gray swung Jonesy's legs off the snowmobile, looked for a rock, picked it up with Jonesy's right hand, and smashed the headlight dark. Then he remounted and drove on. The Cat's fuel was almost gone, but that was all right; the vehicle had served its purpose.