Dreamcatcher(207)

That godawful chattering sound.

Jonesy saw the weasel-thing now dangling into the dark, held to the upper world only by its tail, which wasn't yet free of the dog. Jonesy lunged forward and clamped his hands around its slippery, shivering middle just as it did pull free.

He rocked backward, his bad hip throbbing, holding the writh?ing, yammering thing above his head like a carny performer with a boa constrictor. It whipped back and forth, teeth gnashing at the air, bending back on itself, trying to get at Jonesy's wrist and snagging the right sleeve of his parka instead, tearing it open and releasing near-weightless tangles of white down filling.

Jonesy pivoted on his howling hip and saw a man framed in the broken window through which Mr Gray had wriggled. The newcomer, his face long with surprise, was dressed in a camouflage parka and holding a rifle.

Jonesy flung the wriggling weasel as hard as he could, which wasn't very hard. It flew perhaps ten feet, landed on the leaf-littered floor with a wet thump, and immediately began slithering back toward the shaft. The dog's body plugged part of it, but not enough. There was plenty of room.

'Shoot it!' Jonesy screamed at the man with the rifle. 'For God's sake shoot it before it can get into the water!'

But the man in the window did nothing. The world's last hope only stood there with his mouth hanging open.

26

Owen simply couldn't believe what he was seeing. Some sort of red thing, a freakish weasel with no legs. To hear about such things was one matter; to actually see one was another. It squirmed toward the hole in the middle of the floor. A dog with its stiffening paws held up as if in surrender was wedged there.

The man  -  it had to be Typhoid Jonesy  -  was screaming at him to shoot the thing, but Owen's arms simply wouldn't come up. They seemed to be coated in lead. The thing was going to get away; after all that had happened, what he had hoped to prevent was going to happen right in front of him. It was like being in hell.

He watched it wriggle forward, making a godawful monkey?-sound that he seemed to hear in the center of his head; he watched Jonesy lunging with desperate awkwardness, hoping to catch it or at least head it off. It wasn't going to work. The dog was in the way.

Owen again commanded his arms to raise the gun and point it, but nothing happened. The MP5 might as well have been in another universe. He was going to let it get away. He was going to stand here like a post and let it get away. God help him.

God help them all.

27

Henry sat up in the back seat of the Humvee, dazed. There was stuff in his hair. He brushed at it, still feeling caught in the dream of the hospital (except that was no dream, he thought, and then a sharp prick of pain restored him to something like reality. It was glass. His hair was filled with glass. More of it, Saf-T-Glas crumbles of it, covered the seat. And Duddits.

'Dud?'

Useless, of course. Duddits was dead. Must be dead. He had expended the last of his failing energy to bring Jonesy and Henry together in that hospital room.

But Duddits groaned. His eyes opened, and looking into them brought Henry all the way back to this snowy dead-end road. Duddits's eyes were red and bloody zeroes, the eyes of a sibyl.

'Ooby!' Duddits cried. His hands rose and made a weak aiming gesture, as if he held a rifle. 'Ooby-Doo! Ot-sum urk-ooo do now!' From somewhere up ahead in the woods, two rifle shots came in answer. A pause, then a third one.

'Dud?' Henry whispered. 'Duddits?'

Duddits saw him. Even through his bloody eyes, Duddits saw him. Henry more than felt this; for a moment he actually saw himself through Duddits's eyes. It was like looking into a magic mirror. He saw the Henry who had been: a kid looking out at the world through horn-rimmed glasses that were too big for his face and always sliding down to the end of his nose. He felt Duddits's love for him, a simple and uncomplicated emotion untinctured by doubt or selfishness or even gratitude, Henry took Duddits in his arms, and when he felt the lightness of his old friend's body, Henry began to cry.

'You were the lucky one, buddy,' he said, and wished Beaver were here. Beaver could have done what Henry could not; Beav could have sung Duddits to sleep. 'You were always the lucky one, that's what I think.'

'Ennie,' Duddits said, and touched Henry's cheek with one hand. He was smiling, and his final words were perfectly clear. 'I love you, Ennie.'

28

Two shots rang out up ahead  -  carbine whipcracks. Not far up ahead, either. Kurtz stopped. Freddy was about twenty feet ahead of him, standing by a sign Kurtz could just make Out: ABSOLUTELY NO FISHING FROM SHAFT HOUSE.

A third shot, then silence.

'Boss?' Freddy murmured. 'Some kind of building up ahead.' 'Can you see anyone?'

Freddy shook his head.

Kurtz joined him, amused even at this point at the slight jump Freddy gave when Kurtz put his hand on Freddy's shoulder. And he was right to jump. If Abe Kurtz survived the next fifteen or twenty minutes, he intended to go forward alone into whatever brave new world there might be. No one to slow him down; no witnesses to this final guerrilla action. And while he might suspect, Freddy couldn't know for sure. Too bad the telepathy was gone. Too bad for Freddy.

'Sounds like Owen found someone else to kill.' Kurtz spoke low into Freddy's ear, which still sported a few curls of the Ripley, now white and dead.

'Do we go get him?'