Dreamcatcher

  The fist fell again, booming, rattling the pictures on the walls. One of them was a framed front page of the Derry News, the photo showing Duddits, his friends, and Josie Rinkenhauer, all of them with their arms around each other, all of them grinning like mad (how well Duddits had looked in that picture, how strong and normal) below a headline reading HIGH-SCHOOL CHUMS PLAY DETECTIVE, FIND MISSING GIRL.

  Wham! Wham! Wham!

  No, she thought, I'll just sit here and eventually they'll go away, they'll have to go away, because with dead people you have to invite them in and if I just sit tight--

  But then Duddits was running past her rocker--running, when these days just walking wore him out, and his eyes were full of their old blazing brightness, such good boys they had been and such happiness they had brought him, but now they were dead, they had come to him through the storm and they were dead--

  "Duddie, no!" she screamed, but he paid her no attention. He rushed past that old framed picture--Duddits Cavell on the front page, Duddits Cavell a hero, would wonders never cease--and she heard what he was shouting just as he opened the door on the dying storm:

  "Ennie! Ennie! ENNIE!"

  8

  Henry opened his mouth--to say what he never knew, because nothing came out. He was thunderstruck, dumbstruck. This wasn't Duddits, couldn't be--it was some sickly uncle or older brother, pale and apparently bald beneath his pushed-back Red Sox cap. There was stubble on his cheeks, crusts of blood around his nostrils, and deep dark circles beneath his eyes. And yet--

  "Ennie! Ennie! Ennie!"

  The tall, pale stranger in the doorway threw himself into Henry's arms with all of Duddie's old extravagance, knocking him backward on the snowy step not by force of his weight--he was as light as milkweed fluff--but simply because Henry was unprepared for the assault. If Owen hadn't steadied him, he and Duddits would have gone tumbling into the snow.

  "Ennie! Ennie!"

  Laughing. Crying. Covering him with those big old Duddits smackeroos. Deep in the storehouse of his memory, Beaver Clarendon whispered, If you guys tell anybody he did that . . . And Jonesy: Yeah, yeah, you'll never chum with us again, ya fuckin wank. It was Duddits, all right, kissing Henry's byrus-speckled cheeks . . . but the pallor on Duddits's cheeks, what was that? He was so thin--no, beyond thin, gaunt--and what was that? The blood in his nostrils, the smell drifting off his skin . . . not the smell that had been coming from Becky Shue, not the smell of the overgrown cabin, but a deathly smell just the same.

  And here was Roberta, standing in the hall beside a photograph of Duddits and Alfie at the Derry Days carnival, riding the carousel, dwarfing their wild-eyed plastic horses and laughing.

  Didn't go to Alfie's funeral, but sent a card, Henry thought, and loathed himself.

  She was wringing her hands together, her eyes full of tears, and although she had put on weight at breast and hip, although her hair was now almost entirely gray, it was her, she was still she, but Duddits . . . oh boy, Duddits . . .

  Henry looked at her, his arms wrapped around the old friend who was still crying his name. He patted at Duddits's shoulder blade. It felt insubstantial beneath his palm, as fragile as the bone in a bird's wing.

  "Roberta," he said. "Roberta, my God! What's wrong with him?"

  "ALL," she said, and managed a wan smile. "Sounds like a laundry detergent, doesn't it? It stands for acute lymphocytic leukemia. He was diagnosed nine months ago, and by then curing him was no longer an option. All we've been doing since then is fighting the clock."

  "Ennie!" Duddits exclaimed. The old goofy smile illuminated his gray and tired face. "Ay ih, iffun-nay!"

  "That's right," Henry said, and began to cry. "Same shit, different day."

  "I know why you're here," she said, "but don't. Please, Henry. I'm begging you. Don't take my boy away from me. He's dying."

  9

  Kurtz was about to ask Perlmutter for an update on Underhill and his new friend--Henry was the new friend's name, Henry Devlin--when Pearly let out a long, ululating scream, his face turned up to the roof of the Humvee. Kurtz had helped a woman have a baby in Nicaragua (and they always call us the bad guys, he thought sentimentally), and this scream reminded him of hers, heard on the shores of the beautiful La Juvena River.

  "Hold on, Pearly!" Kurtz cried. "Hold on, buck! Deep breaths, now!"

  "Fuck you!" Pearly screamed. "Look what you got me into, you dirty cunt! FUCK YOU!"

  Kurtz did not hold this against him. Women said terrible things in childbirth, and while Pearly was definitely one of the fellas, Kurtz had an idea that he was going through something as close to childbirth as any man had ever experienced. He knew it might be wise to put Perlmutter out of his misery--

  "You better not," Pearly groaned. Tears of pain were rolling down his red-bearded cheeks. "You better not, you lizard-skin old fuck."

  "Don't you worry, laddie," Kurtz soothed, and patted Perlmutter's shivering shoulder. From ahead of them came the steady clanking rumble of the plow Kurtz had persuaded to break trail for them (as gray light began to creep back into the world, their speed had risen to a giddy thirty-five miles an hour). The plow's taillights glowed like dirty red stars.

  Kurtz leaned forward, looking at Perlmutter with bright-eyed interest. It was very cold in the back seat of the Humvee because of the broken window, but for the moment Kurtz didn't notice this. The front of Pearly's coat was swelling outward like a balloon, and Kurtz once more drew his nine-millimeter.

  "Boss, if he pops--"

  Before Freddy could finish, Perlmutter produced a deafening fart. The stench was immediate and enormous, but Pearly appeared not to notice. His head lolled back against the seat, his eyes half-lidded, his expression one of sublime relief.

  "Oh my fuckin GRANDMOTHER!" Freddy cried, and cranked his window all the way down despite the draft already coursing through the vehicle.

  Fascinated, Kurtz watched Perlmutter's distended belly deflate. Not yet, then. Not yet and probably just as well. It was possible that the thing growing inside Perlmutter's works might come in handy. Not likely, but possible. All things served the Lord, said the Scripture, and that might include the shit-weasels.

  "Hold on, soldier," Kurtz said, patting Pearly's shoulder with one hand and putting the nine on the seat beside him with the other. "You just hold on and think about the Lord."

  "Fuck the Lord," Perlmutter said sullenly, and Kurtz was mildly amazed. He never would have dreamed Perlmutter could have so much profanity in him.

  Ahead of them, the plow's taillights flashed bright and pulled over to the right side of the road.

  "Oh-oh," Kurtz said.

  "What should I do, boss?"

  "Pull right in behind him," Kurtz said. He spoke cheerfully, but picked the nine-millimeter up off the seat again. "We'll see what our new friend wants." Although he believed he knew. "Freddy, what do you hear from our old friends? Are you picking them up?"

  Very reluctantly, Freddy said, "Only Owen. Not the guy with him or the guys they're chasing. Owen's off the road. In a house. Talking with someone."

  "A house in Derry?"

  "Yeah."

  And here came the plow's driver, striding through the snow in great green gumrubber boots and a hooded parka fit for an Eskimo. Wrapped around the lower part of his face was a vast woolen muffler, its ends flying out behind him in the wind, and Kurtz didn't have to be telepathic to know the man's wife or mother had made it for him.

  The plowman leaned in the window and wrinkled his nose at the lingering aroma of sulfur and ethyl alcohol. He looked doubtfully at Freddy, at the only-half-conscious Perlmutter, then at Kurtz in the back seat, who was leaning forward and looking at him with bright-eyed interest. Kurtz thought it prudent to hold his weapon beneath his left knee, at least for the time being.

  "Yes, Cap'n?" Kurtz asked.

  "I've had a radio message from a fella says his name is Randall." The plowman raised his voice to be heard over the wind. His accent was pure downeast Yankee. "G
en'rul Randall. Claimed to be talkin to me by satellite relay straight from Cheyenne Mountain in Wyomin."

  "Name means nothing to me, Cap," Kurtz said in the same bright tone--absolutely ignoring Perlmutter, who groaned "You lie, you lie, you lie."

  The plow driver's eyes flicked to him, then returned to Kurtz. "Fella gave me a code phrase. Blue exit. Mean anything to you?"

  " 'The name is Bond, James Bond,' " Kurtz said, and laughed. "Someone's pulling your leg, Cap."

  "Said to tell you that your part of the mission's over and your country thanks you."

  "Did they mention anything about a gold watch, laddie-buck?" Kurtz asked, eyes sparkling.

  The plowman licked his lips. It was interesting, Kurtz thought. He could see the exact moment the plowman decided he was dealing with a lunatic. The exact moment.

  "Don't know nawthin bout no gold watch. Just wanted to tell you I can't take you any further. Not without authorization, that is."

  Kurtz produced the nine from where it had been hiding under his knee and pointed it into the plowman's face. "Here's your authorization, buck, all signed and filed in triplicate. Will it suit?"

  The plowman looked at the gun with his long Yankee eyes. He did not look particularly afraid. "Ayuh, that looks to be in order."

  Kurtz laughed. "Good man! Very good man! Now let's get going. And you want to speed it up a little, God love you. There's someone in Derry I have to" Kurtz searched for le mot juste, and found it. "To debrief."

  Perlmutter half-groaned, half-laughed. The plowman glanced at him.

  "Don't mind him, he's pregnant," Kurtz said in a confiding tone. "Next thing you know, he'll be yelling for oysters and dill pickles."

  "Pregnant," the plowman echoed. His voice was perfectly flat.

  "Yes, but never mind that. Not your problem. The thing is, buck--" Kurtz leaned forward, speaking warmly and confidentially over the barrel of his nine-millimeter--"this fellow I have to catch is in Derry now. I expect he'll be back on the road again before too long, I'd guess he must know I'm coming for his ass--"

  "He knows, all right," Freddy Johnson said. He scratched the side of his neck, then dropped his hand into his crotch and scratched there.

  "--but in the meantime," Kurtz continued, "I think I can make up some ground. Now do you want to put your elderly ass in gear, or what?"

  The plowman nodded and went walking back to the cab of his plow. The light was brighter now. This light very likely belongs to the last day of my life, Kurtz thought with mild wonder.

  Perlmutter began uttering a low sound of pain. It growled along for a bit, then rose to a scream. Perlmutter clutched his stomach again.

  "Jesus," Freddy said. "Lookit his gut, boss. Rising like a loaf of bread."

  "Deep breaths," Kurtz said, and patted Pearly's shoulder with a benevolent hand. Ahead of them, the plow had begun to move again. "Deep breaths, laddie. Relax. You just relax and think good thoughts."

  10

  Forty miles to Derry. Forty miles between me and Owen, Kurtz thought. Not bad at all. I'm coming for you, buck. Need to take you to school. Teach you what you forgot about crossing the Kurtz Line.

  Twenty miles later and they were still there--this according to both Freddy and Perlmutter, although Freddy seemed less sure of himself now. Pearly, however, said they were talking to the mother--Owen and the other one were talking to the mother. The mother didn't want to let him go.

  "Let who go?" Kurtz asked. He hardly cared. The mother was holding them in Derry, allowing them to close the distance, so God bless the mother no matter who she was or what her motivations might be.

  "I don't know," Pearly said. His guts had been relatively still ever since Kurtz's conversation with the plowman, but he sounded exhausted. "I can't see. There's someone, but it's like there's no mind there to look into."

  "Freddy?"

  Freddy shook his head. "Owen's gone for me. I can barely hear the plow guy. It's like . . . I dunno . . . like losing a radio signal."

  Kurtz leaned forward over the seat and took a close look at the Ripley on Freddy's cheek. The stuff in the middle was still bright red-orange, but around the edges it appeared to be turning an ashy white.

  It's dying, Kurtz thought. Either Freddy's system is killing it or the environment is. Owen was right. I'll be damned.

  Not that it changed anything. The line was still the line, and Owen had stepped over it.

  "The plow guy," Perlmutter said in his tired voice.

  "What about the plow guy, buck?"

  Only there was no need for Perlmutter to answer. Up ahead, twinkling in the blowing snow, was a sign reading EXIT 32--GRANDVIEW/GRANDVIEW STATION. The plow suddenly sped up, raising its blade as it did so. All at once the Humvee was running in slippery powder again, better than a foot of it. The plowman didn't bother with his blinker, simply took the exit at fifty, yanking up a tall rooster-tail of snow in his wake.

  "Follow him?" Freddy asked. "I can run him down, boss!"

  Kurtz mastered a strong urge to tell Freddy to go ahead--they'd run the long-eyed Yankee son of a bitch to earth and teach him what happened to folks who crossed the line. Give him a little dose of Owen Underhill's medicine. Except the plow was bigger than the Hummer, a lot bigger, and who knew what might happen if they got into a game of bumper cars?

  "Stay on the pike, laddie," Kurtz said, settling back. "Eyes on the prize." Still, he watched the plow angling off into the frigid, windy morning with real regret. He couldn't even hope the damn Yankee had caught a hot dose from Freddy and Archie Perlmutter, because the stuff didn't last.

  They went on, speed dropping back to twenty in the drifts, but Kurtz guessed conditions would improve as they got farther south. The storm was almost over.

  "And congratulations," he told Freddy.

  "Huh?"

  Kurtz patted him on the shoulder. "You appear to be getting better." He turned to Perlmutter. "I don't know about you, laddie-buck."

  11

  A hundred miles north of Kurtz's position and less than two miles from the junction of back roads where Henry had been taken, the new commander of the Imperial Valleys--a woman of severe good looks, in her late forties--stood beside a pine tree in a valley which had been code-named Clean Sweep One. Clean Sweep One was, quite literally, a valley of death. Piled along its length were heaps of tangled bodies, most wearing hunter orange. There were over a hundred in all. If the corpses had ID, it had been taped around their necks. The majority of the dead were wearing their driver's licenses, but there were also Visa and Discover cards, Blue Cross cards, and hunting licenses. One woman with a large black hole in her forehead had been tagged with her Blockbuster Video card.

  Standing beside the largest pile of bodies, Kate Gallagher was finishing a rough tally before writing her second report. In one hand she held a PalmPilot computer, a tool that Adolf Eichmann, that famous accountant of the dead, would certainly have envied. The Pilots hadn't worked earlier, but now most of the cool electronics gear seemed to be back on-line.

  Kate wore earphones and a mike suspended in front of her mouth-and-nose mask. Occasionally she would ask someone for clarification or give an order. Kurtz had chosen a successor who was both enthusiastic and efficient. Totting up the bodies here and elsewhere, Gallagher estimated that they had bagged at least sixty percent of the escapees. The John Q's had fought, which was certainly a surprise, but in the long run, most of them just weren't survivors. It was as simple as that.

  "Yo, Katie-Kate."

  Jocelyn McAvoy appeared through the trees at the south end of the valley, her hood pushed back, her short hair covered by a scarf of green silk, her burp-gun slung over her shoulder. There was a splash of blood across the front of her parka.

  "Scared you, didn't I?" she asked the new OIC.

  "You might have raised my blood pressure a point or two."

  "Well, Quadrant Four is clear, maybe that'll lower it a little." McAvoy's eyes sparkled. "We got over forty. Jackson has got hard numbers for you,
and speaking of hard, right about now I could really use a hard--"

  "Excuse me? Ladies?"

  They turned. Emerging from the snow-covered brush at the north end of the valley was a group of half a dozen men and two women. Most were wearing orange, but their leader was a squat tugboat of a man wearing a regulation Blue Group coverall under his parka. He was also still wearing his transparent face-mask, although below his mouth there was a Ripley soul-patch which was definitely non-reg. All of the newcomers had automatic weapons.

  Gallagher and McAvoy had time to exchange a single wide-eyed, caught-with-our-pants-down look. Then Jocelyn McAvoy went for her burp-gun and Kate Gallagher went for the Browning she had propped against the tree. Neither of them made it. The thunder of the guns was deafening. McAvoy was thrown nearly twenty feet through the air. One of her boots came off.

  "That's for Larry!" one of the orange-clad women was screaming. "That's for Larry, you bitches, that's for Larry!"

  12

  When the shooting was over, the squat man with the Ripley goatee assembled his group near the facedown corpse of Kate Gallagher, who had graduated ninth in her class at West Point before running afoul of the disease that was Kurtz. The squat man had appropriated her gun, which was better than his own.

  "I'm a firm believer in democracy," he said, "and you folks can do what you want, but I'm heading north now. I don't know how long it'll take me to learn the words to 'O Canada,' but I'm going to find out."

  "I'm going with you," one of the men said, and it quickly became apparent that they were all going with him. Before they left the clearing the leader bent down and plucked the PalmPilot out of a snowdrift.

  "Always wanted one of these," said Emil "Dawg" Brodsky. "I'm a sucker for the new technology."

  They left the valley of death from the direction they'd entered it, heading north. From around them came isolated pops and bursts of gunfire, but for all practical purposes, Operation Clean Sweep was also over.

  13

  Mr. Gray had committed another murder and stolen another vehicle, this time a DPW plow. Jonesy didn't see it happen. Mr. Gray, having apparently decided he couldn't get Jonesy out of his office (not, at least, until he could devote all his time and energy to the problem), had decided to do the next best thing, which was to wall him off from the outside world. Jonesy now thought he knew how Fortunato must have felt when Montressor bricked him up in the wine-cellar.