Dreamcatcher(144)

'What in the blue hell?' Udall asked in a musing voice, blinking over the folding table with its scatter of cards, ashtrays, chips, and money. Gene Cambry suddenly understood that there was nothing under the stupid woolen cap but skin, after all. Udall was nominally in charge of this little group, but he didn't have a clue. He couldn't see the pumping fists, couldn't hear the strong thought-voice that was leading the chant.

Cambry saw alarm on Parsons's face, on Everett's, on Coleman's. They were seeing it, too. Understanding leaped among them while the uninfected ones only looked puzzled.

'Fuckers're gonna break out,' Cambry said.

'Don't be stupid, Gene,' George Udall said. 'They don't know what's coming down. Besides, they're civilians. They're just letting off a little st - '

Cambry lost the rest as a single word  -  NOW  -  ripped through his brain like a buzzsaw. Ray Parsons and Al Coleman winced. Howie Everett cried out in pain, his hands going to his temples, his knees connecting with the underside of the table and sending chips and cards everywhere. A dollar bin landed atop the hot stove and began to bum.

'Aw, f**k a duck, look what you d - ' Ted began.

'They're coming,' Cambry said. 'They're coming at us.'

Parsons, Everett, and Coleman lunged for the M-4 carbines leaning beside Old Man Gosselin's coatrack. The others looked at them, surprised, still three steps behind . . . and then there was a vast thud as sixty or more of the internees struck the barn doors. Those doors had been locked from the outside  -  big steel locks, Army issue. They held, but the old wood gave with a splintering crack.

The prisoners charged through the gap, yelling 'Now! Now!' into the snowy mouth of the wind and trampling several of their number underfoot.

Cambry also lunged, got one of the compact assault rifles, then had it snatched out of his hands. 'That's mine, muhfuh,' Ted Trezewski snarled.

There was less than twenty yards between the shattered barn doors and the back of the store. The mob swept across the gap, shouting NOW! NOW! NOW!

The poker-table went over with a crash, spilling crap every?where. The perimeter alarm went off as the first internees struck the double-strung fence and were either fried or hooked like fish on the oversized bundles of barbs. Moments later the alarm's honking, pulsing bray was joined by a whooping siren, the General Quarters alert which was sometimes referred to as Situation Triple Six, the end of the world. In the plastic Porta-Potty sentry huts, surprised and frightened faces peered out dazedly.

'The barn!' someone shouted. 'Collapse in on the barn! It's an escape!'

The sentries trotted out into the snow, many of them bootless, moving along the outside of the fence, unaware that it had been shorted out by the weight of more than eighty kamikaze deer?hunters, all screaming NOW at the top of their lungs, even as they jittered and fried and died.

No one noticed the single man  -  tall, skinny, wearing a pair of old-fashioned horn-rim specs  -  who left from the back of the barn and set out diagonally across the drifts filling the paddock. Although Henry could neither see nor sense anyone paying attention to him, he began to run. He felt horribly exposed under the brilliant lights, and the cacophony of the siren and the perimeter alarm made him feel panicky and half-crazy . . . made him feel the way Duddits's crying had, that day behind Tracker Brothers.

He hoped to God Underhill was waiting for him. He couldn't tell, the snow was too thick to see the far end of the paddock, but he would be there soon enough and then he would know.

9

Kurtz had everything on but one boot when the alarm went off and the emergency lights went on, flooding this godforsaken piece of ground with even more glare. He felt no surprise, no dismay, only a mixture of relief and chagrin. Relief that whatever had been chewing on his nerve-endings was now out in the open. Chagrin that this f**king mess hadn't held off for another two hours. Another two hours and he could have balanced the books on the whole deal.

He jerked open the door of the Winnebago with his right hand, still holding his other boot in his left. A savage roaring came from the barn, the sort of warrior's cry to which his heart responded in spite of everything. The gale-force wind thinned it a little, but not much; they were all in it together, it seemed. From somewhere in their well-fed, timorous, it-can't-happen-here ranks, a Spartacus had arisen  -  who would have thunk it?

It's the goddam telepathy, he thought. His instincts, always superb, told him this was serious trouble, that he was watching an operation go tits-up on a truly grand scale, but he was smiling in spite of that. Got to be the goddam telepathy. They smelled out what was coming . . . and someone decided to do something about it.

As he watched, a motley mob of men, most in parkas and orange hats, came moiling through the sagging, shattered barn doors. One fell on a splintered board and was impaled like a vampire. Some stumbled in the snow and were trampled under. AR the lights were on now. Kurtz felt like a man with a ringside seat at a prizefight. He could see everything.

Wings of escapees, fifty or sixty in each complement, peeled off as neatly as squads in a drill-team and charged at the fence on either side of the ratty little store. Either they didn't know there was a lethal dose of electricity coursing through the smoothwire or they didn't care. The rest of them, the main body, charged directly at the back of the store. That was the weakest point in the perimeter, but it didn't matter. Kurtz thought it was all going to go.