"Yes, honey, I'm sure he's in heaven. Now go to sleep."
For another long moment those green eyes had looked into hers, and she had thought he would start crying again--indeed, one tear, large and perfect, did roll down his stubbly cheek. It was so hard for him to shave now, sometimes even the Norelco started little cuts that dribbled for hours. Then his eyes had closed again and she had tiptoed out.
After dark, while she was making him oatmeal (all but the blandest foods were now apt to set off vomiting, another sign that the end was nearing), the whole nightmare started again. Terrified already by the increasingly strange news coming out of the Jefferson Tract, she had raced back to his room with her heart hammering. Duddits was sitting upright again, whipping his head from side to side in a child's gesture of negation. The nosebleed had re-started, and at each jerk of his head, scarlet drops flew. They spattered his pillowcase, his signed photograph of Austin Powers ("Groovy, baby!" was written across the bottom), and the bottles on the table: mouthwash, Compazine, Percocet, the multi-vitamins that seemed to do absolutely no good, the tall jar of lemon swabs.
This time it was Pete he claimed was dead, sweet (and not terribly bright) Peter Moore. Dear God, could it be true? Any of it? All of it?
The second bout of hysterical grief hadn't gone on as long, probably because Duddits was already exhausted from the first. She had gotten the nosebleed stanched again--lucky her--and had changed his bed, first helping him to his chair by the window. There he'd sat, looking out into the renewing storm, occasionally sobbing, sometimes heaving great, watery sighs that hurt her inside. Just looking at him hurt her: how thin he was, how pale he was, how bald he was. She gave him his Red Sox hat, signed across the visor by the great Pedro Martinez (you get so many nice things when you're dying, she sometimes mused), thinking his head would be cold there, so close to the glass, but for once Duddits wouldn't put it on. He only held it on his lap and looked out into the dark, his eyes big and unhappy.
At last she had gotten him back into bed, where once again her son's green eyes looked up at her with all their terrible dying brilliance.
"Eeet in hen, ooo?"
"I'm sure he is." She hadn't wanted to cry, desperately hadn't wanted to--it might set him off again--but she could feel the tears brimming. Her head was pregnant with them, and the inside of her nose tasted of the sea each time she pulled in breath.
"In hen wif Eeeyer?"
"Yes, honey."
"I eee Eeeyer n Eeet in hen?"
"Yes, you will. Of course you will. But not for a long while."
His eyes had closed. Roberta had sat beside him on the bed, looking down at her hands, feeling sadder than sad, more alone than lonely.
Now she hurried downstairs and yes, it was singing, all right. Because she spoke such fluent Duddits (and why not? it had been her second language for over thirty years), she translated the rolling syllables without even thinking much about them: Scooby-Dooby-Doo, where are you? We got some work to do now. I've been telling you, Scooby-Doo, we need a helping hand, now.
She went into his room, not knowing what to expect. Certainly not what she found: every light blazing, Duddits fully dressed for the first time since his last (and very likely final, according to Dr. Briscoe) remission. He had put on his favorite corduroy pants, his down vest over his Grinch tee-shirt, and his Red Sox hat. He was sitting in his chair by the window and looking out into the night. No frown now; no tears, either. He looked out into the storm with a bright-eyed eagerness that took her back to long before the disease, which had announced itself with such stealthy, easy-to-overlook symptoms: how tired and out of breath he got after just a short game of Frisbee in the backyard, how big the bruises were from even little thumps and bumps, and how slowly they faded. This was the way he used to look when . . .
But she couldn't think. She was too flustered to think.
"Duddits! Duddie, what--"
"Umma! Ere I unnox?"
Mumma! Where's my lunchbox?
"In the kitchen, but Duddie, it's the middle of the night. It's snowing! You aren't . . ."
Going anywhere was the way that one ended, of course, but the words wouldn't cross her tongue. His eyes were so brilliant, so alive. Perhaps she should have been glad to see that light so strongly in his eyes, that energy, but instead she was terrified.
"I eed I unnox! I eed I unch!"
I need my lunchbox, I need my lunch.
"No, Duddits." Trying to be firm. "You need to take off your clothes and get back into bed. That's what you need and all you need. Here. I'll help you."
But when she approached, he raised his arms and crossed them over his narrow chest, the palm of his right hand pressed against his left cheek, the palm of his left against the right cheek. From earliest childhood, it was all he could muster in the way of defiance. It was usually enough, and it was now. She didn't want to upset him again, perhaps start another nosebleed. But she wasn't going to put up a lunch for him in his Scooby lunchbox at one-fifteen in the morning. Absolutely not.
She retreated to the side of his bed and sat down on it. The room was warm, but she was cold, even in her heavy flannel nightgown. Duddits slowly lowered his arms, watching her warily.
"You can sit up if you want," she said, "but why? Did you have a dream, Duddie? A bad dream?"
Maybe a dream but not a bad one. Not with that eager look on his face, and now she recognized it well enough: it was the way he had looked so often back in the eighties, in the good years before Henry, Pete, Beaver, and Jonesy had all gone their separate ways, calling less frequently and coming by to see him less frequently still as they raced toward their grownup lives and forgot the one who had to stay behind.
It was the look he got when his special sense told him that his friends were coming by to play. Sometimes they'd all go off together to Strawford Park or the Barrens (they weren't supposed to go there but they did, both she and Alfie had known that they did, and one of their trips there had gotten them all on the front page of the newspaper). Sometimes Alfie or one of their moms or dads would take them to Airport Minigolf or to Fun Town in Newport, and on those days she would always pack Duddits sandwiches and cookies and a Thermos of milk in his Scooby-Doo lunchbox.
He thinks his friends are coming. It must be Henry and Jonesy he's thinking of, because he says Pete and Beav--
Suddenly a terrible image came to her as she sat on Duddits's bed with her hands folded in her lap. She saw herself opening the door to a knock that came at the empty hour of three in the morning, not wanting to open it but helpless to stop herself. And the dead ones were there instead of the living ones. Beaver and Pete were there, returned to the childhood in which they had been living on the day she had first met them, the day they had saved Duddie from God knew what nasty trick and then brought him home safe. In her mind's eye Beaver was wearing his many-zippered motorcycle jacket and Pete was wearing the crewneck sweater of which he had been so proud, the one with NASA on the left breast. She saw them cold and pale, their eyes the lusterless grape-black glaze of corpses. She saw Beaver step forward--no smile for her now, no recognition of her now; when Joe "Beaver" Clarendon put out his pallid starfish hands, he was all business. We've come for Duddits, Missus Cavell. We're dead, and now he is, too.
She clasped her hands tighter as a shudder twisted through her body. Duddits didn't see; he was looking out the window again, his face eager and expectant. And very softly, he began to sing again.
"Ooby-Ooby-Ooo, eh ah ooo? Eee aht-sum urk-ooo ooo ow . . ."
10
"Mr. Gray?"
No answer. Jonesy stood at the door of what was now most definitely his office, not a trace of Tracker Brothers left except for the dirt on the windows (the matter-of-fact pornography of the girl with her skirt raised had been replaced by Van Gogh's Marigolds), feeling more and more uneasy. What was the bastard looking for?
"Mr. Gray, where are you?"
No answer this time either, but there was a sense of Mr. Gray retur
ning . . . and he was happy. The son of a bitch was happy.
Jonesy didn't like that at all.
"Listen," Jonesy said. Hands still pressed to the door of his sanctuary; forehead now pressed to it, as well. "I've got a proposal for you, my friend--you're halfway human already; why not just go native? We can coexist, I guess, and I'll show you around. Ice cream's good, beer's even better. What do you say?"
He suspected Mr. Gray was tempted, as only an essentially formless creature could be tempted when offered form--a trade right out of a fairy-tale.
Not tempted enough, however.
There was the spin of the starter, the roar of the truck's motor.
"Where are we going, chum? Always assuming we can get off Standpipe Hill, that is?"
No answer, only that disquieting sense that Mr. Gray had been looking for something . . . and found it.
Jonesy hurried across to the window and looked out in time to see the truck's headlights sweep across the pillar erected to memorialize the lost. The plaque had drifted in again, which meant they must have been here awhile.
Slowly, carefully, now pushing its way through bumper-high drifts, the Dodge Ram started back down the hill.
Twenty minutes later they were on the turnpike again, once more headed south.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
HEROES
1
Owen couldn't raise Henry by calling out loud, the man was too deep in exhausted sleep, and so he called with his mind. He found this was easier as the byrus continued to spread. It was growing on three of the fingers on his right hand now, and had all but plugged the cup of his left ear with its spongy, itching growth. He had also lost a couple of teeth, although nothing seemed to be growing in the sockets, at least not yet.
Kurtz and Freddy had stayed clean, thanks to Kurtz's finely honed instincts, but the crews of the two surviving Blue Boy gunships, Owen's and Joe Blakey's, were lousy with byrus. Ever since talking to Henry in the shed, Owen had heard the voices of his compatriots, calling to each other across a previously unsuspected void. They were covering up the infection for now, as he himself was; lots of heavy winter clothing helped. But that wouldn't be possible for much longer, and they didn't know what to do.
In that regard, Owen supposed he was lucky. He at least had a wheel to which he could put his shoulder.
Standing outside the back of the shed and beyond the electrified wire, smoking another cigarette he didn't want, Owen went in search of Henry and found him working his way down a steep, brushy slope. Above him was the sound of kids playing baseball or softball. Henry was a boy, a teenager, and he was calling someone's name--Janey? Jolie? It didn't matter. He was dreaming, and Owen needed him in the real world. He had let Henry sleep as long as he could (almost an hour longer than he had really wanted to), but if they were going to get this show on the road, now was the time.
Henry, he called.
The teenager looked around, startled. There were other boys with him; three--no four of them, one peering into some kind of pipe. They were indistinct, hard to see, and Owen didn't care about them, anyway. Henry was the one he wanted, and not this pimply, startled version of him, either. Owen wanted the man.
Henry, wake up.
No, she's in there. We have to get her out. We--
I don't give a rat's ass about her, whoever she is. Wake up.
No, I--
It's time, Henry, wake up. Wake up. Wake
2
the fuck up!
Henry sat up with a gasp, not sure who or where he was. That was bad, but there was worse: he didn't know when he was. Was he eighteen or almost thirty-eight or somewhere in between? He could smell grass, hear the crack of a bat on a ball (a softball bat; it had been girls playing, girls in yellow shirts), and he could still hear Pete screaming She's in here! Guys, I think she's in here!
"Pete saw it, he saw the line," Henry murmured. He didn't know exactly what he was talking about. The dream was already fading, its bright images being replaced by something dark. Something he had to do, or try to do. He smelled hay and, more faintly, the sweet-sour aroma of pot.
Mister, can you help us?
Big doe eyes. Marsha, her name had been. Things coming into focus now. Probably not, he'd answered her, then added but maybe.
Wake up, Henry! It's quarter of four, time to drop your cock and grab your socks.
That voice was stronger and more immediate than the others, overwhelming them and damping them out; it was like a voice from a Walkman when the batteries were fresh and the volume was turned all the way up to ten. Owen Underhill's voice. He was Henry Devlin. And if they were going to try this, the time was now.
Henry got up, wincing at the pain in his legs, his back, his shoulders, his neck. Where his muscles weren't screaming, the advancing byrus was itching abominably. He felt a hundred years old until he took his first step toward the dirty window, then decided it was more like a hundred and ten.
3
Owen saw the man's shape come into view inside the window and nodded, relieved. Henry was moving like Methuselah on a bad day, but Owen had something that would fix that, at least temporarily. He had stolen it from the brand-new infirmary, which was so busy no one had noticed him coming or going. And all the time he had protected the front of his mind with the two blocking mantras Henry had taught him: Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross and Yes we can-can, yes we can, yes we can-can, great gosh a'mighty. So far they seemed to be working--he'd gotten a few strange looks but no questions. Even the weather continued in their favor, the storm roaring on unabated.
Now he could see Henry's face at the window, a pale oval blur looking out at him.
I don't know about this, Henry sent. Man, I can hardly walk.
I can help with that. Stand clear of the window.
Henry moved back with no questions.
In one pocket of his parka, Owen had the small metal box (USMC stamped on the steel top) in which he kept his various IDs when he was on active duty-- the box had been a present from Kurtz himself after the Santo Domingo mission last year, a fine irony. In his other pocket were three rocks which he had picked up from beneath his own helicopter, where the fall of snow was thin.
He took one of them--a good-sized chunk of Maine granite--then paused, appalled, as a bright image filled his mind. Mac Cavanaugh, the fellow from Blue Boy Leader who had lost two of his fingers on the op, was sitting inside one of the semi trailer-boxes in the compound. With him was Frank Bellson from Blakey's Blue Boy Three, the other gunship that had made it back to base. One of them had turned on a powerful eight-cell flashlight and set it on its base like an electric candle. Its bright glow sprayed up into the gloom. This was happening right now, not five hundred feet from where Owen stood with a rock in one hand and his steel box in the other. Cavanaugh and Bellson sat side by side on the floor of the trailer. Both wore what looked like heavy red beards. Luxuriant growth had burst apart the bandages over the stumps of Cavanaugh's fingers. They had service automatics, the muzzles in their mouths. Their eyes were linked. So were their minds. Bellson was counting down: Five . . . four . . . three . . .
"Boys, no!" Owen cried, but got no sense they heard him; their link was too strong, forged with the resolve of men who have made up their minds. They would be the first of Kurtz's command to do this tonight; Owen did not think they would be the last.
Owen? That was Henry. Owen, what's--
Then he tapped into what Owen was seeing and fell silent, horrified.
. . . two . . . one.
Two pistol-shots, muffled by the roar of the wind and four Zimmer electrical generators. Two fans of blood and brain-tissue appearing like magic over the heads of Cavanaugh and Bellson in the dim light. Owen and Henry saw Bellson's right foot give a final dying jump. It struck the barrel of the flashlight, and for a moment they could see Cavanaugh's and Bellson's distorted, byrus-speckled faces. Then, as the flashlight went rolling across the bed of the box, casting cartwheels of light on the aluminum side, the picture
went dark, like the picture on a TV when the plug has been pulled.
"Christ," Owen whispered. "Good Christ."
Henry had appeared behind the window again. Owen motioned him back, then threw the rock. The range was short, but his first shot missed anyway, bouncing harmlessly off the weathered boards to the left of the target. He took the second, pulled in a deep, settling breath, and threw. This one shattered the glass.
Got mail for you, Henry. Coming through.
He tossed the steel box through the hole where the glass had been.
4
It bounced across the shed floor. Henry picked the box up and undid the clasp. Inside were four foil-wrapped packets.
What are these?
Pocket rockets, Owen returned. How's your heart?
Okay, as far as I know.
Good, because that shit makes cocaine feel like Valium. There are two in each pack. Take three. Save the rest.
I don't have any water.
Owen sent a clear picture--south end of a northbound horse. Chew them, beautiful--you've got a few teeth left, don't you? There was real anger in this, and at first Henry didn't understand it, but then of course he did. If there was anything he should be able to understand this early morning, it was the sudden loss of friends.
The pills were white, unmarked by the name of any pharmaceutical company, and terribly bitter in his mouth as they crumbled. Even his throat tried to pucker as he swallowed.
The effect was almost instantaneous. By the time he had tucked Owen's USMC box into his pants pocket, Henry's heartbeat had doubled. By the time he stepped back to the window, it had tripled. His eyes seemed to pulse from their sockets with each quick rap in his chest. This wasn't distressing, however; he actually found it quite pleasant. No more sleepiness, and his aches seemed to have flown away.
"Yow!" he called. "Popeye should try a few cans of this shit!" And laughed, both because speaking now seemed so odd--archaic, almost--and because he felt so fine.