Dreamcatcher(115)

When he had first looked out at this enormous storeroom, all the boxes had been plain and unmarked. Now he saw that those at the head of the row closest to him were labeled in black grease-pencil: DUDDITS. Was that surprising? Fortuitous? Not at all. They were his memories, after all, stored flat and neatly folded in each of the trillions of boxes, and when it came to memory, the healthy mind was able to access them pretty much at will.  

Need something to move them with, Jonesy thought, and when he looked around he was not exactly amazed to see a bright red hand-dolly. This was a magic place, a make-it-up-as-you-go-along place, and the most marvelous thing about it, Jonesy supposed, was that everybody had one.

Moving quickly, he stacked some of the boxes marked DUDDITS on the dolly and ran them into the Tracker Brothers office at a trot. He dumped them by tipping the dolly forward, spilling them across the floor. Untidy, but he could worry about the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval later.  

He ran back out, feeling for Mr Gray, but Mr Gray was still with the truck-driver . . . Janas, his name was. There was the cloud, but the cloud didn't sense him. It was as dumb as . . . well, as dumb as fungus.

Jonesy got the rest of the DUDDITS boxes, and saw that the next stack had also acquired scribbled grease-pencil labels. These latter said DERRY, and there were too many to take. The question was whether or not he needed to take any of them.

He pondered this as he pushed the second load of memory-?boxes into the office. Of course the Derry boxes would be stacked near the Duddits boxes; memory was both the act and the art of association. The question remained whether or not his Derry memories mattered. How was he supposed to know that when he didn't know what Mr Gray wanted?

But he did know.

Mr Gray wanna go south.

Derry was south.

Jonesy sprinted back into the memory storehouse, pushing the dolly ahead of him. He'd take as many of the boxes marked DERRY as he could, and hope they were the right ones. He would also hope that he sensed Mr Gray's return in time. Because if he was caught out here, he would be swatted like a fly.

4

Janas watched, horrified, as his left hand reached out and opened the driver's-side door of his truck, letting in the cold, the snow, and the relentless wind. 'Don't hurt me anymore, mister, please don't, you can have a ride if you want a ride, just don't hurt me anymore, my head - '

Something suddenly rushed through Andy Janas's mind. It was like a whirlwind with eyes. He felt it prying into his current orders, his expected arrival time at Blue Base . . . and what he knew of Derry, which was nothing. His orders had taken him through Bangor, he'd never been to Derry in his life.

He felt the whirlwind pull back and had one moment of delirious relief  -  I don't have what it needs, it's going to let me go ? -  and then understood that the thing in his mind had no intention of letting him go. It needed the truck, for one thing. It needed to shut his mouth, for another.

Janas put up a brief but bitterly energetic struggle. It was this unexpected resistance that allowed Jonesy time to remove at least one stack of the boxes marked DERRY. Then Mr Gray once more resumed his place at Janas's motor controls.

Janas saw his hand shoot out and up to the driver's-side visor. His hand gripped the ballpoint pen and yanked it free, snapping the rubber band which held it.  

No! Janas shouted, but it was too late. He caught a shiny zipping glitter as his hand, which was gripping the ballpoint like a dagger, plunged the pen into his staring eye. There was a popping sound and he jittered back and forth behind the wheel like a badly managed puppet, his fist digging the pen in deeper and deeper, up to the halfway mark, then to the three-quarter mark, his split eyeball now running down the side of his face like a freakish tear. The tip struck something that felt like thin gristle, bound up for a moment, then passed through into the meat of his brain.

You bastard, he thought, what are you, you bas -

There was a final brilliant flash of light inside his head and then everything went dark. Janas slumped forward over the wheel. The pickup's horn began to blow.

5
Mr Gray hadn't gotten much from Janas  -  mostly that unexpected struggle for control at the end  -  but one thing which came through clearly was that Janas wasn't on his own. The transport column of which he had been a part had strung out because of the storm, but they were all headed to the same place, which Janas had identified in his mind as both Blue Base and Gosselin's. There was a man there that Janas had been afraid of, the man in charge, but Mr Gray could not have cared less about Creepy Kurtz/the boss/Crazy Abe. Nor did he have to care, since he had no intention of going anywhere near Gosselin's store. This place was different and this species, although only semi-sentient, composed mostly of emotions, was different, too. They fought. Mr Gray had no idea why, but they did.

Best to finish it quickly. And to that end, he had discovered an excellent delivery system.

Using Jonesy's hands, Mr Gray pulled Janas from behind the wheel and carried him to the guardrails. He threw the body over the side, not bothering to watch as it tumbled down the slope to the frozen streambed. He went back to the truck, looked fixedly at the two plastic-wrapped bundles in the back, and nodded. The animal corpses were good for nothing. The other, though . . . that would be useful. It was rich with what he needed.

He looked up suddenly, Jonesy's eyes widening in the blowing snow. The owner of this body was out of its hiding place. Vulnerable. Good, because that consciousness was starting to annoy him, a constant muttering (sometimes rising to a panicky squeal) on the lower level of his thought-process.