Dreamcatcher

  The byrum's last Jonesy-tinged thought was I should have taken him up on it. I should have gone na--

  24

  Jonesy slashes the jagged end of the TV controller across Mr. Gray's naked wattled neck. Its throat peels open like a mouth and a cloud of reddish-orange matter puffs out, staining the air the color of blood before falling back to the counterpane in a shower of dust and fluff.

  Mr. Gray's body twitches once, galvanically, beneath Jonesy's and Henry's hands. Then it shrivels like the dream it always was and becomes something familiar. For a moment Jonesy can't make the connection and then it comes. Mr. Gray's remains look like one of the condoms they saw on the floor of the deserted office in the Tracker Brothers depot.

  He's--

  --dead! is how Jonesy means to finish, but then a terrible bolt of pain tears through him. Not his hip this time but his head. And his throat. All at once his throat is wearing a necklace of fire. And the whole room is transparent, damned if it isn't. He's looking through the wall and into the shaft house, where the dog stuck in the crack is giving birth to a vile red creature that looks like a weasel crossed with a huge, blood-soaked worm. He knows well enough what it is: one of the byrum.

  Streaked with blood and shit and the remains of its own membranous placenta, its brainless black eyes staring (they're his eyes, Jonesy thinks, Mr. Gray's eyes), it is being born in front of him, stretching its body out, trying to pull free, wanting to drop into the darkness and fall toward the sound of running water.

  Jonesy looks at Henry.

  Henry looks back.

  For just a moment their young and startled eyes meet . . . and then they are disappearing, as well.

  Duddits, Henry says. His voice comes from far away. Duddits is going. Jonesy . . .

  Goodbye. Perhaps Henry means to say goodbye. Before he can, they're both gone.

  25

  There was a moment of vertigo when Jonesy was exactly nowhere, a sense of utter disconnection. He thought it must be death, that he had killed himself as well as Mr. Gray--cut his own throat, as the saying went.

  What brought him back was pain. Not in his throat, that was gone and he could breathe again--he could hear the air going in and out of him in great dry gasps. No, this pain was an old acquaintance. It was in his hip. It caught him and swung him back into the world around its swollen, howling axis, winding him up like a tether-ball on a post. There was concrete under his knees, his hands were full of fur, and he heard an inhuman chittering sound. At least this part is real, he thought. This part is outside the dreamcatcher.

  That godawful chittering sound.

  Jonesy saw the weasel-thing now dangling into the dark, held to the upper world only by its tail, which wasn't yet free of the dog. Jonesy lunged forward and clamped his hands around its slippery, shivering middle just as it did pull free.

  He rocked backward, his bad hip throbbing, holding the writhing, yammering thing above his head like a carny performer with a boa constrictor. It whipped back and forth, teeth gnashing at the air, bending back on itself, trying to get at Jonesy's wrist and snagging the right sleeve of his parka instead, tearing it open and releasing near-weightless tangles of white down filling.

  Jonesy pivoted on his howling hip and saw a man framed in the broken window through which Mr. Gray had wriggled. The newcomer, his face long with surprise, was dressed in a camouflage parka and holding a rifle.

  Jonesy flung the wriggling weasel as hard as he could, which wasn't very hard. It flew perhaps ten feet, landed on the leaf-littered floor with a wet thump, and immediately began slithering back toward the shaft. The dog's body plugged part of it, but not enough. There was plenty of room.

  "Shoot it!" Jonesy screamed at the man with the rifle. "For God's sake shoot it before it can get into the water!"

  But the man in the window did nothing. The world's last hope only stood there with his mouth hanging open.

  26

  Owen simply couldn't believe what he was seeing. Some sort of red thing, a freakish weasel with no legs. To hear about such things was one matter; to actually see one was another. It squirmed toward the hole in the middle of the floor. A dog with its stiffening paws held up as if in surrender was wedged there.

  The man--it had to be Typhoid Jonesy--was screaming at him to shoot the thing, but Owen's arms simply wouldn't come up. They seemed to be coated in lead. The thing was going to get away; after all that had happened, what he had hoped to prevent was going to happen right in front of him. It was like being in hell.

  He watched it wriggle forward, making a godawful monkey-sound that he seemed to hear in the center of his head; he watched Jonesy lunging with desperate awkwardness, hoping to catch it or at least head it off. It wasn't going to work. The dog was in the way.

  Owen again commanded his arms to raise the gun and point it, but nothing happened. The MP5 might as well have been in another universe. He was going to let it get away. He was going to stand here like a post and let it get away. God help him.

  God help them all.

  27

  Henry sat up in the back seat of the Humvee, dazed. There was stuff in his hair. He brushed at it, still feeling caught in the dream of the hospital (except that was no dream, he thought), and then a sharp prick of pain restored him to something like reality. It was glass. His hair was filled with glass. More of it, Saf-T-Glas crumbles of it, covered the seat. And Duddits.

  "Dud?"

  Useless, of course. Duddits was dead. Must be dead. He had expended the last of his failing energy to bring Jonesy and Henry together in that hospital room.

  But Duddits groaned. His eyes opened, and looking into them brought Henry all the way back to this snowy dead-end road. Duddits's eyes were red and bloody zeroes, the eyes of a sibyl.

  "Ooby!" Duddits cried. His hands rose and made a weak aiming gesture, as if he held a rifle. "Ooby-Doo! Ot-sum urk-ooo do now!"

  From somewhere up ahead in the woods, two rifle shots came in answer. A pause, then a third one.

  "Dud?" Henry whispered. "Duddits?"

  Duddits saw him. Even through his bloody eyes, Duddits saw him. Henry more than felt this; for a moment he actually saw himself through Duddits's eyes. It was like looking into a magic mirror. He saw the Henry who had been: a kid looking out at the world through hornrimmed glasses that were too big for his face and always sliding down to the end of his nose. He felt Duddits's love for him, a simple and uncomplicated emotion untinctured by doubt or selfishness or even gratitude. Henry took Duddits in his arms, and when he felt the lightness of his old friend's body, Henry began to cry.

  "You were the lucky one, buddy," he said, and wished Beaver were here. Beaver could have done what Henry could not; Beav could have sung Duddits to sleep. "You were always the lucky one, that's what I think."

  "Ennie," Duddits said, and touched Henry's cheek with one hand. He was smiling, and his final words were perfectly clear. "I love you, Ennie."

  28

  Two shots rang out up ahead--carbine whipcracks. Not far up ahead, either. Kurtz stopped. Freddy was about twenty feet ahead of him, standing by a sign Kurtz could just make out: ABSOLUTELY NO FISHING FROM SHAFT HOUSE.

  A third shot, then silence.

  "Boss?" Freddy murmured. "Some kind of building up ahead."

  "Can you see anyone?"

  Freddy shook his head.

  Kurtz joined him, amused even at this point at the slight jump Freddy gave when Kurtz put his hand on Freddy's shoulder. And he was right to jump. If Abe Kurtz survived the next fifteen or twenty minutes, he intended to go forward alone into whatever brave new world there might be. No one to slow him down; no witnesses to this final guerrilla action. And while he might suspect, Freddy couldn't know for sure. Too bad the telepathy was gone. Too bad for Freddy.

  "Sounds like Owen found someone else to kill." Kurtz spoke low into Freddy's ear, which still sported a few curls of the Ripley, now white and dead.

  "Do we go get him?"

  "Goodness, no," Kurtz
replied. "Perish the thought. I believe the time has come--regrettably, it comes in almost every life--when we must step off the path, buck. Mingle with the trees. See who stays and who comes back. If anyone does. We'll give it ten minutes, shall we? I think ten minutes should be more than enough."

  29

  The words which filled Owen Underhill's mind were nonsensical but unmistakable: Scooby! Scooby-Doo! Got some work to do now!

  The carbine came up. He wasn't the one who did it, but when the force lifting the rifle left him, Owen was able to take over smoothly. He flicked the auto's selector-switch to single-shot fire, sighted, and squeezed the trigger twice. The first round missed, hitting the concrete in front of the weasel and ricocheting. Chips of concrete flew. The thing pulled back, turned, saw him, and bared its mouthful of needle teeth.

  "That's right, beautiful," Owen said. "Smile for the camera."

  His second shot went right through the weasel's humorless grin. It tumbled backward, struck the wall of the shaft house, then fell to the concrete. Yet even with its rudiment of a head blown off, its instincts remained. It began to crawl slowly forward again. Owen aimed, and as he centered the sight, he thought of the Rapeloews, Dick and Irene. Nice people. Good neighbors. If you needed a cup of sugar or a pint of milk (or a shoulder to cry on, for that matter), you could always go next door and get fixed up. They said it was a stroke! Mr. Rapeloew had called, only Owen had thought he was saying stork. Kids got everything wrong.

  So this was for the Rapeloews. And for the kid who had kept getting it wrong.

  Owen fired a third time. This slug caught the byrum amidships and tore it in two. The ragged pieces twitched . . . twitched . . . lay still.

  With that done, Owen swung his carbine in a short arc. This time he settled the sight on the middle of Gary Jones's forehead.

  Jonesy looked unblinkingly back at him. Owen was tired--almost to death, that was what it felt like--but this guy looked far past even that point. Jonesy raised his empty hands.

  "You have no reason to believe this," he said, "but Mr. Gray is dead. I cut his throat while Henry held a pillow over his face--it was right out of The Godfather."

  "Really," Owen said. There was no inflection in his voice whatsoever. "And where, exactly, did you perform this execution?"

  "In a Massachusetts General Hospital of the mind," Jonesy said. He then uttered the most joyless laugh Owen had ever heard in his life. "One where deer roam the halls and the only TV program is an old movie called Sympathy for the Devil."

  Owen jerked a little at that.

  "Shoot me if you have to, soldier. I saved the world--with a little ninth-inning relief help from you, I freely admit. You might as well pay me for the service in the traditional manner. Also, the bastard broke my hip again. A little going-away present from the little man who wasn't there. The pain is . . ." Jonesy bared his teeth. "It's very large."

  Owen held the gun where it was a moment longer, then lowered it. "You can live with it," he said.

  Jonesy fell backward on the points of his elbows, groaned, turned his weight as well as he could onto his unhurt side. "Duddits is dead. He was worth both of us put together--more--and he's dead." He covered his eyes for a moment, then dropped his arm. "Man, what a fuckarow this is. That's what Beaver would have called it, a total fuckarow. That is opposed to a fuckaree, you understand, which in Beaver-ese means a particularly fine time, possibly but not necessarily of a sexual nature."

  Owen had no idea what the man was talking about; likely he was delirious. "Duddits may be dead, but Henry's not. There are some people after us, Jonesy. Bad people. Do you hear them? Know where they are?"

  Lying on the cold, leaf-littered floor, Jonesy shook his head. "I'm back to the standard five senses, I'm afraid. ESP's all gone. The Greeks may come bearing gifts, but they're Indian givers." He laughed. "Jesus, I could lose my job for a crack like that. Sure you don't want to just shoot me?"

  Owen paid no more attention to this than he had to the semantical differences between fuckarow and fuckaree. Kurtz was coming, that was the problem he had to deal with now. He hadn't heard him arrive, but he might not have done. The snow was falling heavily enough to damp all but loud sounds. Gunshots, for instance.

  "I have to go back to the road," he said. "You hang in there."

  "What choice?" Jonesy asked, and closed his eyes. "Man, I wish I could go back to my nice warm office. I never thought I'd say that, but there it is."

  Owen turned and went back down the steps, slipping and sliding but managing to keep his feet. He scanned the woods to either side of the path, but not closely. If Kurtz and Freddy were laid up, waiting someplace between here and the Hummer, he doubted he would see them in time to do anything. He might see tracks, but by then he'd be so close to them they'd likely be the last things he saw. He had to hope he was still ahead, that was all. Had to trust to plain old baldass luck, and why not? He'd been in plenty of tight places, and baldass luck had always pulled him through. Maybe it would do so ag--

  The first bullet took him in the belly, knocking him backward and blowing the back of his coat out in a bell-shape. He pumped his feet, trying to stay upright, also trying to hang onto the MP5. There was no pain, just a feeling of having been sucker-punched by a large boxing glove on the fist of a mean opponent. The second round shaved the side of his head, producing a burn-and-sting like rubbing alcohol poured into an open wound. The third shot hit him high up on the right side of the chest and that was Katie bar the door; he lost both his feet and the carbine.

  What had Jonesy said? Something about having saved the world and getting paid off in the traditional manner. And this wasn't so bad, really; it had taken Jesus six hours, they'd put a joke sign over His head, and come cocktail hour they'd given Him a stiff vine-gar-and-water.

  He lay half on and half off the snow-covered path, vaguely aware that something was screaming and it wasn't him. It sounded like an enormous pissed-off blue jay.

  That's an eagle, Owen thought.

  He managed to get a breath, and although the exhale was more blood than air, he was able to get up on his elbows. He saw two figures emerge from the tangle of birches and pines, bent low, very much in combat-advance mode. One was squat and broad-shouldered, the other slim and gray-haired and positively perky. Johnson and Kurtz. The bulldog and the greyhound. His luck had run out after all. In the end, luck always did.

  Kurtz knelt beside him, eyes sparkling. In one hand he held a triangle of newspaper. It was battered and slightly curved from its long trip in Kurtz's rear pocket, but still recognizable. It was a cocked hat. A fool's hat. "Tough luck, buck," Kurtz said.

  Owen nodded. It was. Very tough luck. "I see you found time to make me a little something."

  "I did. Did you achieve your prime objective, at least?" Kurtz lifted his chin in the direction of the shaft house.

  "Got him," Owen managed. His mouth was full of blood. He spat it out, tried to pull in another breath, and heard the good part of it wheeze out of some new hole instead.

  "Well, then," Kurtz said benevolently, "all's well that ends well, wouldn't you say?" He put the newspaper hat tenderly on Owen's head. Blood soaked it immediately, spreading upward, turning the UFO story red.

  There was another scream from somewhere out over the Reservoir, perhaps from one of the islands that were actually hills poking up from a purposely drowned landscape.

  "That's an eagle," Kurtz said, and patted Owen's shoulder. "Count yourself lucky, laddie. God sent you a warbird to sing you to--"

  Kurtz's head exploded in a spray of blood and brains and bone. Owen saw one final expression in the man's blue, white-lashed eyes: amazed disbelief. For a moment Kurtz remained on his knees, then toppled forward on what remained of his face. Behind him, Freddy Johnson stood with his carbine still raised and smoke drifting from the muzzle.

  Freddy, Owen tried to say. No sound came out, but Freddy must have read his lips. He nodded.

  "Didn't want to, but the bastard was going to do
it to me. Didn't have to read his mind to know that. Not after all these years."

  Finish it, Owen tried to say. Freddy nodded again. Perhaps there was a vestige of that goddam telepathy left inside Freddy, after all.

  Owen was fading. Tired and fading. Goodnight, sweet ladies, goodnight, David, goodnight, Chet. Goodnight, sweet prince. He lay back on the snow and it was like falling back into a bed stuffed with the softest down. From somewhere, faint and far, he heard the eagle scream again. They had invaded its territory, disturbed its snowy autumn peace, but soon they would be gone. The eagle would have the Reservoir to itself again.

  We were heroes, Owen thought. Damned if we weren't. Fuck your hat, Kurtz, we were h--

  He never heard the final shot.

  30

  There had been more firing; now there was silence. Henry sat in the back seat of the Humvee beside his dead friend, trying to decide what to do next. The chances that they had all killed each other seemed slim. The chances that the good guys--correction, the good guy--had taken out the bad ones seemed slimmer still.

  His first impulse following this conclusion was to vacate the Hummer posthaste and hide in the woods. Then he looked at the snow (If I ever see snow again, he thought, it'll be too soon) and rejected the idea. If Kurtz or whoever was with him came back in the next half hour, Henry's tracks would still be there. They would follow his trail, and at the end of it they'd shoot him like a rabid dog. Or a weasel.

  Get a gun, then. Shoot them before they can shoot you.

  A better idea. He was no Wyatt Earp, but he could shoot straight. Shooting men was a lot different from shooting deer, you didn't have to be a headshrinker to know that, but he believed, given a clear line of fire, he could shoot these guys with very little hesitation.

  He was reaching for the doorhandle when he heard a surprised curse, a thump, yet another gunshot. This one was very close. Henry thought someone had lost his footing and gone down in the snow, discharging his weapon when he landed on his ass. Perhaps the son of a bitch had just shot himself? Was that too much to hope for? Wouldn't that just--