"And you know all this because you have one living inside you?" There was no revulsion in Underhill's voice, but Henry felt it clearly in the man's mind, pulsing like a tentacle. "One of the quote-unquote normal weasels?"
"No." At least, he thought, I don't think so.
"Then how do you know what you know? Or are you maybe just making it up as you go along? Trying to write yourself a pass out of here?"
"How I know is the least important thing of all, Owen--but you know I'm not lying. You can read me."
"I know you think you're not lying. How much more of this mind-reading shit can I expect to get?"
"I don't know. More if the byrus spreads, probably, but not in my league."
"Because you're different." Skepticism, both in Underhill's voice and in Underhill's thoughts.
"Pal, I didn't know how different until today. But never mind that for a minute. For now, I just want you to understand that the grays are in a shitpull here. For maybe the first time in their history, they're in an actual battle for control. First, because when they get inside people, the weasels aren't saprophytic but violently parasitic. They don't stop eating and they don't stop growing. They're cancer, Underhill.
"Second, the byrus. It grows well on other worlds but poorly on ours, at least so far. The scientists and the medical experts who are running this rodeo think the cold is slowing it down, but I don't think that's it, or not all of it. I can't be positive because they don't know, but--"
"Whoa, whoa." There was a brief cupped flame as Underhill lit another cigarette for the wind to smoke. "You're not talking about the medical guys, are you?"
"No."
"You think you're in touch with the grayboys. Telepathically in touch."
"I think . . . with one of them. Through a link."
"This Jonesy you spoke of?"
"Owen, I don't know. Not for sure. The point is, they're losing. Me, you, the men who went out there to the Blue Boy with you today, we might not be around to celebrate Christmas. I won't kid you about that. We got high, concentrated doses. But--"
"I've got it, all right," Underhill said. "Edwards, too--it showed up on him like magic."
"But even if it really takes hold on you, I don't think you can spread it very far. It's not just that catchable. There are people in that barn who'll never get it, no matter how many byrus-infected people they mingle with. And the people who do catch it like a cold come down with Byrus Secondary . . . or Ripley, if you like that better."
"Let's stick to byrus."
"Okay. They might be able to pass it on to a few people, who would have a very weak version we could call Byrus Three. It might even be communicable beyond that, but I think once you got to Byrus Four you'd need a microscope or a blood-test to pick it up. Then it's gone.
"Here's the instant replay, so pay attention.
"Point one. The grays--probably no more than delivery-systems for the byrus--are gone already. The ones the environment didn't kill, like the microbes finally killed the Martians in War of the Worlds, were wiped out by your gunships. All but one, that is, the one--yeah, must be--that I got my information from. And in a physical sense, he's gone, too.
"Point two. The weasels don't work. Like all cancers, they ultimately eat themselves to death. The weasels that escape from the lower intestine or the bowel quickly die in an environment they find hostile.
"Point three. The byrus doesn't work, either, not very well, but given a chance, given time to hide and grow, it could mutate. Learn to fit in. Maybe to rule."
"We're going to wipe it out," Underhill said. "We're going to turn the entire Jefferson Tract into a burn-scar."
Henry could have screamed with frustration, and some of that must have gotten through. There was a thud as Underhill jerked, striking the flimsy shed wall with his back.
"What you do up here doesn't matter," Henry said. "The people you've got interned can't spread it, the weasels can't spread it, and the byrus can't spread itself. If your guys folded their tents and just walked away right now, the environment would take care of itself and erase all this nonsense like a bad equation. I think the grays showed up the way they did because they just can't fucking believe it. I think it was a suicide mission with some gray version of your Mistuh Kurtz in charge. They simply cannot conceptualize failure. 'We always win,' they think."
"How do you--"
"Then, at the last minute, Underhill--maybe at the last second--one of them found a man who was remarkably different from all the others with whom the grays, the weasels, and the byrus had come in contact. He's your Typhoid Mary. And he's already out of the q-zone, rendering anything you do here meaningless."
"Gary Jones."
"Jonesy, right."
"What makes him different?"
Little as he wanted to go into this part of it, Henry realized he had to give Underhill something.
"He and I and our two other friends--the ones who are dead--once knew someone who was very different. A natural telepath, no byrus needed. He did something to us. If we'd gotten to know him when we were a little older, I don't think that would have been possible, but we met him when we were particularly . . . vulnerable, I suppose you'd say . . . to what he had. And then, years later, something else happened to Jonesy, something that had nothing to do with . . . with this remarkable boy."
But that wasn't the truth, Henry suspected; although Jonesy had been hit and almost killed in Cambridge and Duddits had never to Henry's knowledge been south of Derry in his life, Duds had somehow been a part of Jonesy's final, crucial change. A part of that, too. He knew it.
"And I'm supposed to . . . what? Just believe all this? Swallow it like cough-syrup?"
In the sweet-smelling darkness of the shed, Henry's lips spread in a humorless grin. "Owen," he said, "you do believe it. I'm a telepath, remember? The baddest one in the jungle. The question, though . . . the question is . . ."
Henry asked the question with his mind.
7
Standing outside the compound fence by the back wall of the old storage shed, freezing his balls off, filter-mask pulled down around his neck so he could smoke a series of cigarettes he did not want (he'd gotten a fresh pack in the PX), Owen would have said he never felt less like laughing in his life . . . but when the man in the shed responded to his eminently reasonable question with such impatient directness--you do believe it . . . I'm a telepath, remember?--a laugh was surprised out of him, nevertheless. Kurtz had said that if the telepathy became permanent and were to spread, society as they knew it would fall down. Owen had grasped the concept, but now he understood it on a gut level, too.
"The question, though . . . the question is . . ."
What are we going to do about it?
Tired as he was, Owen could see only one answer to that question. "We have to go after Jones, I suppose. Will it do any good? Do we have time?"
"I think we might. Just."
Owen tried to read what was behind Henry's response with his own lesser powers and could not. Yet he was positive that most of what the man had told him was true. Either that or he believes it's true, Owen thought. God knows I want to believe it's true. Any excuse to get out of here before the butchery starts.
"No," Henry said, and for the first time Owen thought he sounded upset, not entirely sure of himself. "No butchery. Kurtz isn't going to kill somewhere between two hundred and eight hundred people. People who ultimately can't influence this business one way or the other. They're just--Christ, they're just innocent bystanders!"
Owen wasn't entirely surprised to find himself rather enjoying his new friend's discomfort; God knew Henry had discomfited him. "What do you suggest? Bearing in mind that you yourself said that only your pal Jonesy matters."
"Yes, but . . ."
Floundering. Henry's mental voice was a little surer, but only a little. I didn't mean we'd walk away and let them die.
"We won't be walking anywhere," Owen said. "We'll be running like a couple of rats in a corncrib." He dropp
ed his third cigarette after a final token puff and watched the wind carry it away. Beyond the shed, curtains of snow rippled across the empty corral, building up huge drifts against the side of the barn. Trying to go anywhere in this would be madness. It'll have to be a Sno-Cat, at least to start with, Owen thought. By midnight, even a four-wheel drive might not be much good. Not in this.
"Kill Kurtz," Henry said. "That's the answer. It'll make it easier for us to get away with no one to give orders, and it'll put the . . . the biological cleansing on hold."
Owen laughed dryly. "You make it sound so easy," he said. "Double-oh-Underhill, license to kill."
He lit a fourth cigarette, cupping his hands around the lighter and the end of the smoke. In spite of his gloves, his fingers were numb. We better come to some conclusions pretty quick, he thought. Before I freeze to death.
"What's the big deal about it?" Henry asked, but he knew what the big deal was, all right; Owen could sense (and half-hear) him trying not to see it, not wanting things to be worse than they already were. "Just walk in there and pop him."
"Wouldn't work." Owen sent Henry a brief image: Freddy Johnson (and other members of the so-called Imperial Valley cadre) keeping an eye on Kurtz's Winnebago. "Also, he's got the place wired for sound. If anything happens, the hard boys come running. Maybe I could get him. Probably not, because he covers himself as thoroughly as any Colombian cocaine jefe, especially when he's on active duty, but maybe. I like to think I'm not bad myself. But it would be a suicide mission. If he's recruited Freddy Johnson, then he's probably got Kate Gallagher and Marvell Richardson . . . Carl Friedman . . . Jocelyn McAvoy. Tough boys and tough girls, Henry. I kill Kurtz, they kill me, the brass running this show from under Cheyenne Mountain send out a new cleaner, some Kurtz clone that'll pick up where Kurtz left off. Or maybe they just elect Kate to the job. God knows she's crazy enough. The people in the barn might get twelve additional hours to stew in their own juice, but in the end they'll still burn. The only difference is that, instead of getting a chance to go charging gaily through the snowstorm with me, handsome, you'll burn with the rest of them. Your pal, meanwhile--this guy Jonesy--he'll be off to . . . to where?"
"That's something it might be prudent for me to keep to myself, for the time being."
Owen nonetheless probed for it with such telepathy as he possessed. For a moment he caught a blurred and perplexing vision--a tall white building in the snow, cylindrical, like a barn silo--and then it was gone, replaced by the image of a white horse that looked almost like a unicorn running past a sign. On the sign were red letters reading BANBURY CROSS under a pointing arrow.
He grunted in amusement and exasperation. "You're jamming me."
"You can think of it that way. Or you can think of it as teaching you a technique you better learn if you'd like to keep our conversation a secret."
"Uh-huh." Owen wasn't entirely displeased with what had just happened. For one thing, a jamming technique would be a very good thing to have. For another, Henry did know where his infected friend--call him Typhoid Jonesy--was going. Owen had seen a brief picture of it in Henry's head.
"Henry, I want you to listen to me now."
"All right."
"Here's the simplest, safest thing we can do, you and I. First, if time isn't an utterly crucial factor, we both need to get some sleep."
"I can buy that. I'm next door to dead."
"Then, around three o'clock, I can start to move and shake. This installation is going to be on high alert till the time when there isn't an installation here any longer, but if Big Brother's eyeball ever glazes over a little, it's apt to be between four and six A.M. I'll make a diversion, and I can short out the fence--that's the easiest part, actually. I can be here with a Sno-Cat five minutes after the shit hits the fan--"
Telepathy had certain shorthand advantages to verbal communication, Owen was discovering. He sent Henry the image of a burning MH-6 Little Bird helicopter and soldiers running toward it even as he continued to speak.
"--and off we go."
"Leaving Kurtz with a barnful of innocent civilians he plans to turn into crispy critters. Not to mention Blue Group. What's that, a couple-three hundred more?"
Owen, who had been full-time military since the age of nineteen and one of Kurtz's eraserheads for the last eight years, sent two hard words along the mental conduit the two of them had established: Acceptable losses.
Behind the dirty glass, the vague shape that was Henry Devlin stirred, then stood.
No, he sent back.
8
No? What do you mean, no?
No. That's what I mean.
Do you have a better idea?
And Owen realized, to his extreme horror, that Henry thought he did. Fragments of that idea--it would be far too generous to call it a plan--shot through Owen's mind like the brightly fragmented tail of a comet. It took his breath away. The cigarette dropped unnoticed from between his fingers and zipped away on the wind.
You're nuts.
No, I'm not. We need a diversion in order to get away, you already know that. This is a diversion.
They'll be killed anyway!
Some will. Maybe even most of them. But it's a chance. What chance will they have in a burning barn?
Out loud, Henry said: "And there's Kurtz. If he's got a couple of hundred escapees to worry about--most of whom who'd be happy to tell the first reporters they came across that the panic-stricken U.S. government had sanctioned a My Lai massacre right here on American soil--he's going to be a lot less concerned about us."
You don't know Abe Kurtz, Owen thought. You don't know about the Kurtz Line. Of course, neither had he. Not really. Not until today.
Yet Henry's proposal made a lunatic kind of sense. And it contained at least a measure of atonement. As this endless November fourteenth marched toward midnight and as odds of living until the end of the week grew longer, Owen was not surprised to find that the idea of atonement had its attractions.
"Henry."
"Yes, Owen. I'm here."
"I've always felt badly about what I did in the Rapeloews' house that day."
"I know."
"And yet I've done it again and again. How fucked up is that?"
Henry, an excellent psychiatrist even after his thoughts had turned to suicide, said nothing. Fucked up was normal human behavior. Sad but true.
"All right," Owen said at last. "You can buy the house, but I'm going to furnish it. Deal?"
"Deal," Henry replied at once.
"Can you really teach me that jamming technique? Because I think I may need it."
"I'm pretty sure I can."
"All right. Listen." Owen talked for the next three minutes, sometimes out loud, sometimes mind to mind. The two men had reached a point where they no longer differentiated between the modes of communication; thoughts and words had become one.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
DERRY
1
It's hot in Gosselin's--it's so hot! The sweat pops out on Jonesy's face almost immediately, and by the time the four of them get to the pay phone (which is near the woodstove, wouldn't you know it), it's rolling down his cheeks, and his armpits feel like jungle growth after a heavy rain . . . not that he has all that much growth there yet, not at fourteen. Don't you wish, as Pete likes to say.
So it's hot, and he's still partly in the grip of the dream, which hasn't faded the way bad dreams usually do (he can still smell gasoline and burning rubber, can still see Henry holding that moccasin . . . and the head, he can still see Richie Grenadeau's awful severed head), and then the operator makes things worse by being a bitch. When Jonesy gives her the Cavells' number, which they call frequently to ask if they can come over (Roberta and Alfie always say yes, but it is only polite to ask permission, they have all been taught that at home), the operator asks: "Do your parents know you're calling long-distance?" The words come out not in a Yankee drawl but in the slightly Frenchified tones of someone who grew up in this part of the wo
rld, where Letourneau and Bissonette are more common than Smith or Jones. The tightwad French, Pete's Dad calls them. And now he's got one on the telephone, God help him.
"They let me make toll calls if I pay the charges," Jonesy says. And boy, he should have known that he would end up being the one to actually make it. He takes down the zipper of his jacket. God, but it's boiling in here! How those old geezers can sit around the stove like they're doing is more than Jonesy can understand. His own friends are pressing in close around him, which is probably understandable--they want to know how things go--but still, Jonesy wishes they would step back a little. Having them so close makes him feel even hotter.
"And if I were to call them, mon fils, your mere et pere, d'ey say the same?"
"Sure," Jonesy says. Sweat runs into one of his eyes, stinging, and he wipes it away like a tear. "My father's at work, but my Mom should be home. Nine-four-nine, six-six-five-eight. Only I wish you'd make it quick, because--"
"I'll jus' ring on your party," she says, sounding disappointed. Jonesy slips out of his coat, switching the phone from one ear to the other in order to accomplish this, and lets it puddle around his feet. The others are still wearing theirs; Beav, in fact, hasn't even unzipped his Fonzie jacket. How they can stand it is beyond Jonesy. Even the smells are getting to him: Musterole and beans and floor-oil and coffee and brine from the pickle-barrel. Usually he likes the smells in Gosselin's, but today they make Jonesy feel like blowing chunks.
Connections click in his ear. So slow. His friends pushing in too close to the pay phone on the back wall, crowding him. Two or three aisles over, Lamar is looking fixedly at the cereal shelf and rubbing his forehead like a man with a severe headache. Considering how much beer he put away last night, Jonesy thinks, a headache would be natural. He's coming down with a headache himself, one that beer has nothing to do with, it's just so gosh-damn hot in h--