Dreamcatcher(202)

Owen stopped suddenly, skidding in the snow and grabbing the Humvee's long hood to keep from falling. Duddits was clearly a lost cause, but he might be able to save Henry Devlin. It was just possible.

No! part of his mind screamed as he started back for the rear door. No, there's no time!

But Owen decided to gamble that there was  -  to gamble the whole world. Maybe to pay a little more on what he owed for the Rapeloews' plate; maybe for what he had done yesterday (those naked gray figures standing around their downed ship with their arms held up, as if in surrender); probably just for Henry, who had told him they would be heroes and who had tried splendidly to fulfill that promise.

No sympathy for the devil, he thought, wrenching open the rear door. No sir, zero sympathy for that motherf*cker.

Duddits was closer. Owen seized him by the collar of his big blue duffel coat and yanked. Duddits toppled sideways onto the seat. His hat fell off, revealing his shining bald skull. Henry, with his arms still around Duddits's shoulders, came with him, landing on top. His eyes didn't open but he groaned softly. Owen leaned forward and whispered fiercely into Henry's ear.

, Don't sit up. For the love of God, Henry, don't you sit up!'

Owen withdrew, slammed the door, backed off three steps, placed the butt of the rifle against his hip, and fired a burst. The Humvee's windows turned to milk, then fell in. Casings clinked around Owen's feet. He stepped forward again and looked through the shattered window into the rear seat. Henry and Duddits still lay there, now covered with crumbles of Saf-T-Glas as well as Duddits's blood, and to Owen they looked like the two deadest people he had ever seen. Owen hoped Kurtz would be in too much of a hurry for a close examination. In any case, he had done the best he could.

He heard a hard metallic jouncing sound and grinned. That placed Kurtz, by God  -  they'd reached the washout where the Subaru had finished up. He wished mightily that Kurtz and Freddy had rear-ended the f**king thing, but the sound had not, unfortunately, been that loud. Still, it placed them. A mile back, a mile back at least. Not as bad as he'd thought.

'Plenty of time,' he muttered, and that might be true of Kurtz, but what about the other end? Where was Mr Gray now?

Holding the MP5 by the strap, Owen started down the path that led to Shaft 12.

14

Mr Gray had discovered another unlovely human emotion: panic. He had come all this way  -  light-years through space, miles through the snow  -  to be balked by Jonesy's muscles, which were weak and out of shape, and the iron shaft cover, which was much heavier than he had expected. He yanked down on the crowbar until Jonesy's back-muscles screamed in agonized protest . . . and was finally rewarded by a brief wink of darkness from beneath the edge of the rusty iron. And a grinding sound as it moved a bit  -  perhaps no more than an inch or two  -  on the concrete. Then Jonesy's lower back muscles locked up and Mr Gray staggered away from the shaft, crying out through clenched teeth (thanks to his immunity, Jonesy still had a full set of them) and pressing his hands to the base of Jonesy's spine, as if to keep it from exploding.

Lad let out a series of yipping whines. Mr Gray looked at him and saw that things had now reached the critical juncture. Although he was still asleep, Lad's abdomen was now so grotesquely swelled that one of his legs stuck stiffly up in the air. The skin of his lower belly had stretched to the point of splitting, and the veins there pulsed with clocklike rapidity. A trickle of bright blood spilled out from beneath his tall.

Mr Gray looked balefully at the crowbar jutting from the slot in the iron cover. In Jonesy's imagination, the Russian woman had been a slim beauty with dark hair and dark tragic eyes. In reality, Mr Gray thought, she must have been broad-shouldered and muscular. How else could she have -

There was a blast of gunfire, alarmingly close. Mr Gray gasped and looked around. Thanks to Jonesy, the human corrosion of doubt was also part of his makeup now, and for the first time he realized that he might be balked  -  yes, even here, so close to his goal that he could hear it, the sound of rushing water starting on its sixty-mile underground journey. And all that stood between the byrum and this whole world was a circular iron plate weighing a hundred and twenty pounds.

Screaming a thin and desperate litany of Beaver-curses, Mr Gray rushed forward, Jonesy's failing body jerking back and forth on the defective pivot-point of its right hip. One of them was coming, the one called Owen, and Mr Gray dared not believe he could make this Owen turn his weapon on himself Given time, given the element of surprise, maybe. Now he had neither. And this man who was coming had been trained to kill; it was his career.

Mr Gray leaped into the air. There was a snap, quite audible, as Jonesy's overstressed hip broke free of the swollen socket which had held it. Mr Gray landed on the crowbar with Jonesy's full weight. The edge lifted again, and this time the cover slid almost a foot across the concrete. The black crescent through which the Russian woman had slipped appeared again. Not much of a crescent, really no more than a delicate capital C drawn with a calligrapher's pen but enough for the dog.

Jonesy's leg would no longer support Jonesy's weight (and where was Jonesy, anyway? Still not a murmur from his troublesome host), but that was all right. Crawling would do now.

Mr Gray worked his way in such fashion across the cold cement floor to where the sleeping border collie lay, seized Lad by his collar, and began to drag him back to Shaft 12.