Dreamcatcher(101)

Yes, I see it. Mr Gray turned forward and put the snowmobile back into gear, Jonesy wondered fleetingly how much gas was left in the tank.

'Can I get off now?' Meaning, of course, could he die now.

No.

And they were off again, with Pete clinging weakly to Jonesy's coat.

They skirted the rock-face, climbed to the top of the highest hill beyond it, and here Mr Gray paused again so his substitute flashlight could rehead them. Pete did so and they continued on, now moving on a path that was a little bit west of true north. Daylight continued to fade. Once they heard helicopters  -  at least two, maybe as many as four  -  coming toward them. Mr Gray hulled the snowmobile into a thick stand of underbrush, heedless of the branches that slapped at Jonesy's face, drawing blood from his cheeks and brow. Pete tumbled off the back again. Mr Gray killed the Cat's engine, then dragged Pete, who was moaning and semi-conscious, under the thickest growth of bushes. There they waited until the helicopters passed over. Jonesy felt Mr Gray reach up to one of the crew and quickly scan him, perhaps cross-checking what the man knew with what Pete had been telling him. When the choppers had passed off to the southeast, apparently heading back to their base, Mr Gray re-started the snowmobile and they went on. It had begun to snow again.

An hour later they stopped on another rise and Pete fell off the Cat again, this time tumbling to the side. He raised his face, but most of his face was gone, buried under a beard of vegetation. He tried to speak aloud and couldn't; his mouth was stuffed, his tongue buried under a lush mat of byrus.

I can't, man. I can't, no more, please, let me be.

'Yes,' Mr Gray said. 'I think you've served your purpose.'

Pete! Jonesy cried. Then, to Mr Gray: No, no, don't!

Mr Gray paid no attention, of course. For a moment Jonesy saw silent understanding in Pete's remaining eye. And relief For that moment he was still able to touch Pete's mind  -  his boyhood friend, the one who always stood outside the gate at DJHS, one hand cupped over his mouth, hiding a cigarette that wasn't really there, the one who was going to be an astronaut and see the world entire from earth orbit, one of the four who had helped save Duddits from the big boys.

For one moment. Then he felt something leap from Mr Gray's mind and the stuff growing on Pete did not just twitch but clenched. There was a tenebrous creaking sound as Pete's skull cracked in a dozen places. His face  -  what remained of it  -  pulled inward in a kind of yank, making him old at a stroke. Then he fell forward and snow began to fleck the back of his parka.

You bastard.

Mr Gray, indifferent to Jonesy's curse and Jonesy's anger, made no reply. He faced forward again. The building wind dropped momentarily when he did, and a hole opened in the curtain of snow. About five miles northwest of their current position, Jonesy saw moving lights  -  not flashlights but headlights. Lots of them. Trucks moving in convoy along the turnpike. Trucks and nothing else, he supposed. This part of Maine belonged to the military now.

And they're all looking for you, ass**le, he spat as the snowmobile began to roll again. The snow closed back around them, cutting off their momentary view of the trucks, but Jonesy knew that Mr Gray would have no trouble finding the turnpike. Pete had gotten him this far, to a part of the quarantine zone where Jonesy supposed little trouble was expected. He was counting on Jonesy to take him the rest of the way, because Jonesy was different. For one thing, he was clear of the byrus. The byrus didn't like him for some reason.

You'll never get out of here, Jonesy said.

I will, Mr Gray said. We always die and we always live. We always lose and we always win, Like it or not, Jonesy, we're the future.

If  that's true, it's the best reason I ever heard for living in the past, Jonesy replied, but from Mr Gray there was no answer, Mr Gray as an entity, a consciousness, was gone, merged back into the cloud. There was only enough of him left to run Jonesy's motor skills and keep the snowmobile pointed toward the turnpike. And Jonesy, carried helplessly forward on whatever mission this thing had, took slender comfort from two things. One was that Mr Gray didn't know how to get at the last piece of him, the tiny part that existed in his memory of the Tracker Brothers office. The other was that Mr Gray didn't know about Duddits  -  about no bounce, no play.

Jonesy intended to make sure Mr Gray didn't find out.

At least not yet.

PART TWO GRAYBOYS CHAPTER THIRTEEN

AT GOSSELIN'S

1

To Archie Perlmutter, high-school valedictorian (speech topic: 'The Joys and the Responsibilities of Democracy'), onetime Eagle Scout, faithful Presbyterian, and West Point grad, Gosselin's Country Mar?ket no longer looked real. Now spotlighted by enough candlepower to illuminate a small city, it looked like a set in a movie. Not just any movie, either, but the sort of James Cameron extravaganza where the catering costs alone would amount to enough to feed the people of Haiti for two years. Even the steadily increasing snow did not cut into the glare of the lights very much, or change the illusion that the whole works, from the crappy siding to the pair of tin woodstove stacks sticking acrooked out of the roof to the single rusty gas-pump out front, was simply set-dressing.

This would be Act One, Pearly thought as he strode briskly along with his clipboard tucked under his arm (Archie Perlmutter had always felt he was a man of considerable artistic nature . . . commercial, too). We fade in on an isolated country store. The oldtimers are sitting around the woodstove  -  not the little one in Gosselin's office but the big one in the store itself  -  while the snow pelts down outside. They're talking about lights in the sky . . . missing hunters . . . sightings of little gray men skulking around in the woods. The store owner  -  call him Old Man Rossiter  -  scoffs. 'Oh gosh fishes, you're all a buncha old wimmin!' he says, and just then the whole place is bathed in these brilliant lights (think Close Encounters of the Third Kind) as a UFO settles down to the ground! Bloodthirsty aliens come piling out, firing their deathrays! It's like Independence Day, only, here's the hook, in the woods!