Dreamcatcher (54 page)

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 dropped 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.

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 world, 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
mère et père,
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—

He straightens up a little. “Ringing,” he says to his friends, and immediately wishes he'd kept his mouth shut, because they lean in closer than ever. Pete's breath is fuckin
awful,
and Jonesy thinks,
What do you do, Petesky? Brush em once a year, whether they need it or not?

The phone is picked up on the third ring. “Yes, hello?” It's Roberta, but sounding distracted and upset rather than cheery, as she usually does. Not that it's very hard to figure out why; in the background he can hear Duddits bawling. Jonesy knows that Alfie and Roberta don't feel that crying the way Jonesy and his friends do—they are grownups. But they are also his parents, they feel
some
of it, and he doubts if this has exactly been Mrs. Cavell's favorite morning.