Dreamcatcher

  Keep it down, what do you say?

  Okay! OKAY!

  Even his thoughts seemed to have acquired a new, crystalline force, and Henry didn't think this was just his imagination. Although the light behind the old feed shed was a little less than in the rest of the compound, it was still strong enough for him to see Owen wince and raise a hand to the side of his head, as if someone had shouted directly into his ear.

  Sorry, he sent.

  It's all right. It's just that you're so strong. You must be covered with that shit.

  Actually, I'm not, Henry returned. A wink of his dream came back to him: the four of them on that grassy slope. No, the five of them, because Duddits had been there, too.

  Henry--do you remember where I said I'd be?

  Southwest corner of the compound. All the way across from the barn, on the diagonal. But--

  No buts. That's where I'll be. If you want a ride out of here, it's where you better be, too. It's . . . A pause as Owen checked his watch. If it was still working, it must be the kind you wind up, Henry thought . . . two minutes to four. I'll give you half an hour, then if the folks in the barn haven't started to move, I'm going to short the fence.

  Half an hour may not be long enough, Henry protested. Although he was standing still, looking out at Owen's form in the blowing snow, he was breathing fast, like a man in a race. His heart felt as if it was in a race.

  It'll have to be, Owen sent. The fence is alarmed. There'll be sirens. Even more lights. A general alert. I'll give you five minutes after the shit starts hitting the fan--that's a three hundred count--and if you haven't shown up, I'm on my merry way.

  You'll never find Jonesy without me.

  That doesn't mean I have to stay here and die with you, Henry. Patient. As if talking to a small child. If you don't make it to where I am in five minutes, there'll be no chance for either of us, anyway.

  Those two men who just committed suicide . . . they're not the only ones who are fucked up.

  I know.

  Henry caught a brief mental glimpse of a yellow school bus with MILLINOCKET SCHOOL DEPT. printed up the side. Looking out the windows were two score of grinning skulls. They were Owen Underhill's mates, Henry realized. The ones he'd arrived with yesterday morning. Men who were now either dying or already dead.

  Never mind them, Owen replied. It's Kurtz's ground support we have to worry about now. Especially the Imperial Valleys. If they exist, you better believe they'll follow orders and that they're well-trained. And training wins out over confusion every time--that's what training is for. If you stick around, they'll roast you and toast you. Five minutes is what you have once the alarms go. A three hundred count.

  Owen's logic was hard to like and impossible to refute.

  All right, Henry said. Five minutes.

  You have no business doing this in the first place, Owen told him. The thought came to Henry encrusted with a complex filigree of emotion: frustration, guilt, the inevitable fear--in Owen Underhill's case, not of dying but of failure. If what you say is true, everything depends on whether or not we get out of here clean. For you to maybe put the entire world at risk because of a few hundred schmoes in a barn . . .

  It's not the way your boss would do it, right?

  Owen reacted with surprise--no words, but a kind of comic-book ! in Henry's mind. Then, even over the ceaseless howl and hoot of the wind, he heard Owen laugh.

  You got me there, beautiful.

  Anyway, I'll get them moving. I'm a motivational master.

  I know you'll try. Henry couldn't see Owen's face, but felt him smiling. Then Owen spoke aloud. "And after that? Tell me again."

  Why?

  "Maybe because soldiers need motivation, too, especially when they're derailing. And belay the telepathy--I want you to say it out loud. I want to hear the word."

  Henry looked at the man shivering on the other side of the fence and said, "After that we're going to be heroes. Not because we want to, but because there are no other options."

  Out in the snow and the wind, Owen was nodding. Nodding and still smiling. "Why not?" he said. "Just why the fuck not?"

  In his mind, glimmering, Henry saw the image of a little boy with a plate raised over his head. What the man wanted was for the little boy to put the plate back--that plate that had haunted him so over the years and would forever stay broken.

  5

  Dreamless since childhood and thus unsane, Kurtz woke as he always did: at one moment nowhere, at the next completely awake and cognizant of his surroundings. Alive, hallelujah, oh yes, still in the big time. He turned his head and looked at the clock, but the goddam thing had gone off again in spite of its fancy anti-magnetic casing, flashing 12-12-12, like a stutterer caught on one word. He turned on the lamp beside the bed and picked up the pocket-watch on the bedtable. Four-oh-eight.

  Kurtz put it down again, swung his bare feet out onto the floor, and stood up. The first thing he became aware of was the wind, still howling like a woe-dog. The second was that the faraway mutter of voices in his head had disappeared entirely. The telepathy was gone and Kurtz was glad. It had offended him in an elemental, down-deep way, as certain sexual practices offended him. The idea that someone might be able to come into his very head, to be able to visit the upper levels of his mind . . . that had been horrible. The grayboys deserved to be wiped out for that alone, for bringing that disgustingly peculiar gift. Thank God it had proved ephemeral.

  Kurtz shucked his gray workout shorts and stood naked in front of the mirror on the bedroom door, letting his eyes go up from his feet (where the first snarls of purple veins were beginning to show) to the crown of his head, where his graying hair stood up in a sleep-tousle. He was sixty, but not looking too bad; those busted veins on the sides of his feet were the worst of it. Had a hell of a good crank on him, too, although he had never made much use of it; women were, for the most part, vile creatures incapable of loyalty. They drained a man. In his secret unsane heart, where even his madness was starched and pressed and fundamentally not very interesting, Kurtz believed all sex was FUBAR. Even when it was done for procreation, the result was usually a brain-equipped tumor not much different from the shit-weasels.

  From the crown of his head, Kurtz let his eyes descend again, slowly, looking for the least patch of red, the tiniest roseola blush. There was nothing. He turned around, looked at as much as he could see by craning back over his shoulder, and still saw nothing. He spread his buttocks, probed between them, slid a finger two knuckles deep into his anus, and felt nothing but flesh.

  "I'm clean," he said in a low voice as he washed his hands briskly in the Winnebago's little bathroom. "Clean as a whistle."

  He stepped into his shorts again, then sat on his rack to slip into his socks. Clean, praise God, clean. A good word Clean. The unpleasant feel of the telepathy--like sweaty skin pressed against sweaty skin--was gone. He wasn't supporting a single strand of Ripley; he had even checked his tongue and gums.

  So what had awakened him? Why were there alarm bells clanging in his head?

  Because telepathy wasn't the only form of extrasensory perception. Because long before the grayboys knew there was such a place as Earth tucked away in this dusty and seldom-visited carrel of the great interstellar library, there had been a little thing called instinct, the specialty of uniform-wearing Homo saps such as himself.

  "The hunch," Kurtz said. "The good old all-American hunch-ola."

  He put on his pants. Then, still bare-chested, he picked up the walkie which lay on the bedtable beside the pocket-watch (four-sixteen now, and how the time seemed to be rushing, like a brakeless car plunging down a hill toward a busy intersection). The walkie was a special digital job, encrypted and supposedly unjammable . . . but one look at his supposedly impervious digital clock made him realize none of the gear was un-anything.

  He clicked the SEND/SQUEAL button twice. Freddy Johnson came back quickly and not sounding too sleepy . . . oh, but now that crunch time was here, how Kurt
z (who had been born Robert Coonts, name, name, what's in a name) longed for Underhill. Owen, Owen, he thought, why did you have to skid just when I needed you the most, son?

  "Boss?"

  "I'm moving Imperial Valley up to six. That's Imperial Valley at oh-six hundred, come back and acknowledge me."

  He had to listen to why it was impossible, crap Owen would not have spouted in his weakest dream. He gave Freddy roughly forty seconds to vent before saying, "Close your clam, you son of a bitch."

  Shocked silence from Freddy's end.

  "We've got something brewing here. I don't know what, but it woke me up out of a sound sleep with the alarm bells ringing. Now I put all you fellows and girls together for a reason, and if you expect to be still drawing breath come suppertime, you want to get them moving. Tell Gallagher she may wind up on point. Acknowledge me, Freddy."

  "Boss, I acknowledge. One thing you should know--we've had four suicides that I know of. There may have been more."

  Kurtz was neither surprised nor displeased. Under certain circumstances, suicide wasn't just acceptable, but noble--the true gentleman's final act.

  "From the choppers?"

  "Affirmative."

  "No Imperial Valleys."

  "No, boss, no Valleys."

  "All right. Floor it, buck. We got trouble. I don't know what it is, but I know it's coming. Big thunder."

  Kurtz tossed the walkie back on the table and continued dressing. He wanted another cigarette, but they were all gone.

  6

  A pretty good herd of milkers had once been stabled in Old Man Gosselin's barn, and while the interior might not have passed USDA standards as it now stood, the building was still in okay shape. The soldiers had strung some high-wattage bulbs that cast a brilliant glare over the stalls, the milking stations in the parlor, and the upper and lower lofts. They had also put in a number of heaters, and the barn glowed with a pulsing, almost feverish warmth. Henry unzipped his coat as soon as he stepped in, but still felt the sweat break out on his face. He supposed Owen's pills had something to do with that--he'd taken another outside the barn.

  His first thought as he looked around was how similar the barn was to the various refugee camps he had seen: Bosnian Serbs in Macedonia, Haitian rebels after Uncle Sugar's Marines had landed in Port-au-Prince, the African exiles who had left their home countries because of disease, famine, civil war, or a combination of all three. You got used to seeing such things on the TV news, but the pictures always came from far away; the horror with which one viewed them was almost clinical. But this wasn't a place you needed a passport to visit. This was a cowbarn in New England. The people packed into it weren't wearing rags and dirty dashikis but parkas from Bean's, cargo pants (so perfect for those extra shotgun shells) from Banana Republic, underwear from Fruit of the Loom. The look was the same, though. The only difference he could discern was how surprised they all still seemed. This wasn't supposed to be happening in the land of Sprint Nickel Nights.

  The internees pretty well covered the main floor, where hay had been spread (jackets on top of that). They were sleeping in little clumps or family groups. There were more of them in the lofts, and three or four to each of the forty stalls. The room was full of snores and gurgles and the groans of people dreaming badly. Somewhere a child was weeping. And there was piped-in Muzak: to Henry, this was the final bizarre touch. Right now the dozing doomed in Old Man Gosselin's barn were listening to the Fred Waring Orchestra float through a violin-heavy version of "Some Enchanted Evening."

  Hyped as he was, everything stood out with brilliant, exclamatory clarity. All the orange jackets and hats! he thought. Man! It's Halloween in hell!

  There was also a fair amount of the red-gold stuff. Henry saw patches growing on cheeks, in ears, between fingers; he also saw patches growing on beams and on the electrical cords of several dangling lights. The predominant smell in here was hay, but Henry had no trouble picking up the smell of sulfur-tinged ethyl alcohol under it. As well as the snores, there was a lot of farting going on--it sounded like six or seven seriously untalented musicians tootling away on tubas and saxophones. Under other circumstances it would have been funny . . . or perhaps even in these, to a person who hadn't seen that weasel-thing wriggling and snarling on Jonesy's bloody bed.

  How many of them are incubating those things? Henry wondered. The answer didn't matter, he supposed, because the weasels were ultimately harmless. They might be able to live outside their hosts in this barn, but outside in the storm, where the wind was blowing a gale and the chill-factor was below zero, they wouldn't have a chance.

  He needed to talk to these people--

  No, that wasn't right. What he needed to do was scare the living hell out of them. Had to get them moving in spite of the warmth in here and the cold outside. There had been cows in here before; there were cows here again. He had to change them back into people--scared, pissed-off people. He could do it, but not alone. And the clock was ticking. Owen Underhill had given him half an hour. Henry estimated that a third of that was already gone.

  Got to have a megaphone, he thought. That's step one.

  He looked around, spotted a burly, balding man sleeping on his side to the left of the door leading to the milking parlor, and walked over to take a closer look. He thought it was one of the guys he'd kicked out of the shed, but he wasn't sure. When it came to hunters, burly, balding men were a dime a peck.

  But it was Charles, and the byrus was re-thatching what old Charlie no doubt referred to as his "solar sex-panel." Who needs Rogaine when you've got this shit going for you? Henry thought, then grinned.

  Charles was good; better yet, Marsha was sleeping nearby, holding hands with Darren, Mr. Bomber-Joint-from-Newton. Byrus was now growing down one of Marsha's smooth cheeks. Her husband was still clean, but his brother-in-law--Bill, had that been his name?--was lousy with the stuff. Best-in-show, Henry thought.

  He knelt by Bill, took his byrus-speckled hand, and spoke down into the tangled jungle of his bad dreams. Wake up, Bill. Wakey-wakey. We have to get out of here. And if you help me, we can. Wake up, Bill.

  Wake up and be a hero.

  7

  It happened with a speed that was exhilarating.

  Henry felt Bill's mind rising toward his, floundering out of the nightmares that had entangled it, reaching for Henry the way a drowning man will reach for the lifeguard who has swum out to save him. Their minds connected like couplers on a pair of freight-cars.

  Don't talk, don't try to talk, Henry told him. Just hold on. We need Marsha and Charles. The four of us should be enough.

  What--

  No time, Billy. Let's go.

  Bill took his sister-in-law's hand. Marsha's eyes flashed open at once, almost as if she had been waiting for this, and Henry felt all the dials inside his head turn up another notch. She wasn't supporting as much growth as Bill, but perhaps had more natural talent. She took Charles's hand without a single question. Henry had an idea she had already grasped what was going on here, and what needed to be done. Thankfully, she also grasped the necessity of speed. They were going to bomb these people, then swing them like a club.

  Charles sat with a jerk, eyes wide and bulging from their fatty sockets. He got up as if someone had goosed him. Now all four of them were on their feet, hands joined like participants in a seance . . . which, Henry reflected, this almost was.

  Give it to me, he told them, and they did. The feeling was like having a magic wand placed in his hand.

  Listen to me, he called.

  Heads rose; some people sat up out of sound sleeps as if they had been electrified.

  Listen to me and boost me . . . boost me up! Do you understand? Boost me up! This is your only chance, so BOOST ME UP!

  They did it as instinctively as people whistling a tune or clapping to a beat. If he'd given them time to think about it, it probably would have been harder, perhaps even impossible, but he didn't. Most of them had been sleeping, and he caught the infected ones
, the telepaths, with their minds wide open.

  Operating on instinct himself, Henry sent a series of images: soldiers wearing masks surrounding the barn, most with guns, some with backpacks connected to long wands. He made the faces of the soldiers into editorial-page caricatures of cruelty. At an amplified order, the wands unleashed streams of liquid fire: napalm. The sides of the barn and roof caught at once.

  Henry shifted to the inside, sending pictures of screaming, milling people. Liquid fire dripped through holes in the blazing roof and ignited the hay in the lofts. Here was a man with his hair on fire; there a woman in a burning ski-parka still decorated with lift-tickets from Sugarloaf and Ragged Mountain.

  They were all looking at Henry now--Henry and his linked friends. Only the telepaths were receiving the images, but perhaps as many as sixty percent of the people in the barn were infected, and even those who weren't caught the sense of panic; a rising tide lifts all boats.

  Clamping Bill's hand tightly with one of his own and Marsha's with the other, Henry switched the images back to the outside perspective again. Fire; encircling soldiers; an amplified voice shouting for the soldiers to be sure no one got clear.

  The detainees were on their feet now, speaking in a rising babble of frightened voices (except for the deep telepaths; they only stared at him, haunted eyes in byrus-speckled faces). He showed them the barn burning like a torch in the snow-driven night, the wind turning an inferno into an explosion, a firestorm, and still the napalm hoses poured it on and still the amplified voice exhorted: "THAT'S RIGHT, MEN, GET THEM ALL, DON'T LET ANY OF THEM GET AWAY, THEY'RE THE CANCER AND WE'RE THE CURE!"

  Imagination fully pumped up now, feeding on itself in a kind of frenzy, Henry sent images of the few people who managed to find the exits or to wriggle out through the windows. Many of these were in flames. One was a woman with a child cradled in her arms. The soldiers machine-gunned all of them but the woman and the child, who were turned into napalm candles as they ran.

  "No!" several women screamed in unison, and Henry realized with a species of sick wonder that all of them, even those without children, had put their own faces on the burning woman.