Dreamcatcher(140)

It'll have to be, Owen sent. The fence is alarmed. 7here'll be sirens. Even more lights. A general alert. I'll give you five minutes after the shit starts hitting the fan  -  that's a three hundred count  -  and if you haven't shown up, I'm on my merry way.

You'll never find Jonesy without me

That doesn't mean I have to stay here and die with you, Henry. Patient. As if talking to a small child. If you don't make it to where I am in five minutes, there'll be no chance for either of us, anyway.

Those two men who just committed suicide . . . they're not the only ones who are f**ked up.

I know.

Henry caught a brief mental glimpse of a yellow school bus with MILLINOCKET SCHOOL DEPT. printed up the side. Looking out the windows were two score of grinning skulls. They were Owen Underhill's mates, Henry realized. The ones he'd arrived with yesterday morning. Men who were now either dying or already dead.

Never mind them, Owen replied. It's Kurtz's ground support we have to worry about now. Especially the Imperial Valleys. If they exist, you better believe they'll follow orders and that they're well-trained. And training wins out over confusion every time  -  that's what training is for. If you stick around, they'll roast you and toast you. Five minutes is what you have once the alarms go. A three hundred count.

Owen's logic was hard to like and impossible to refute.

All right, Henry said. Five minutes.

You have no business doing this in the first place, Owen told him. The thought came to Henry encrusted with a complex filigree of emotion: frustration, guilt, the inevitable fear  -  in Owen Underhill's case, not of dying but of failure. If what you say is true, everything depends on whether or not we get out of here clean. For you to maybe put the entire world at risk because of a few hundred schmoes in a barn . . .

It's not the way your boss would do it, right?

Owen reacted with surprise  -  no words, but a kind of comic?book ! in Henry's mind. Then, even over the ceaseless howl and hoot of the wind, he heard Owen laugh.

You got me there, beautiful.

Anyway, I'll get them moving. I'm a motivational master.

I know you'll try. Henry couldn't see Owen's face, but felt him smiling. Then Owen spoke aloud. 'And after that? Tell me again.'

'Why?'

'Maybe because soldiers need motivation, too, especially when they're derailing. And belay the telepathy  -  I want you to say it out loud. I want to hear the word.'

Henry looked at the man shivering on the other side of the fence and said, 'After that we're going to be heroes. Not because we want to, but because there are no other options.'

Out in the snow and the wind, Owen was nodding. Nodding and still smiling. 'Why not?' he said. 'Just why the f**k not?'

In his mind, glimmering, Henry saw the image of a little boy with a plate raised over his head. What the man wanted was for the little boy to put the plate back  -  that plate that had haunted him so over the years and would forever stay broken.

5

Dreamless since childhood and thus unsane, Kurtz woke as he always did: at one moment nowhere, at the next completely awake and cognizant of his surroundings. Alive, hallelujah, oh yes, still in the big time. He turned his head and looked at the clock, but the goddam thing had gone off again in spite of its fancy anti-magnetic casing, flashing 12-12-12, like a stutterer caught on one word. He turned on the lamp beside the bed and picked up the pocket watch on the bedtable. Four-oh-eight.

Kurtz put it down again, swung his bare feet out on to the floor, and stood up. The first thing he became aware of was the wind, still howling like a woe-dog. The second was that the faraway mutter of voices in his head had disappeared entirely. The telepathy was gone and Kurtz was glad. It had offended him in an elemental, down-deep way, as certain sexual practices offended him. The idea that someone might be able to come into his very head, to be able to visit the upper levels of his mind . . . that had been horrible. The grayboys deserved to be wiped out for that alone, for bringing that disgustingly peculiar gift. Thank God it had proved ephemeral.

Kurtz shucked his gray workout shorts and stood naked in front of the mirror on the bedroom door, letting his eyes go up from his feet (where the first snarls of purple veins were beginning to show) to the crown of his head, where his graying hair stood up in a sleep-tousle. He was sixty, but not looking too bad; those busted veins on the sides of his feet were the worst of it. Had a bell of a good crank on him, too, although he had never made much use of it; women were, for the most part, vile creatures incapable of loyalty. They drained a man. In his secret unsane heart, where even his madness was starched and pressed and fundamentally not very interesting, Kurtz believed all sex was FUBAR. Even when it was done for procreation, the result was usually a brain-equipped tumor not much different from the shit-weasels.

From the crown of his head, Kurtz let his eyes descend again, slowly, looking for the least patch of red, the tiniest roseola blush. There was nothing. He turned around, looked at as much as he could see by craning back over his shoulder, and still saw nothing. He spread his bu**ocks, probed between them, slid a finger two knuckles deep into his anus, and felt nothing but flesh.

'I'm clean,' he said in a low voice as he washed his hands briskly in the Winnebago's little bathroom. 'Clean as a whistle.'

He stepped into his shorts again, then sat on his rack to slip into his socks. Clean, praise God, clean. A good word. Clean. The unpleasant feel of the telepathy  -  like sweaty skin pressed against sweaty skin  -  was gone. He wasn't supporting a single strand of Ripley; he had even checked his tongue and gums.