Dreamcatcher(67)

and then something about a New England Tel phone card and . . . chemotherapy? Yes, a big hot radioactive shot. It was the voice, Henry thought, of a lunatic. He had treated enough of them to judge, God knew.

The other voices were the ones which made him question his own sanity. He didn't know all of them, but he knew some: Walter Cronkite, Bugs Bunny, Jack Webb, Jimmy Carter, a woman he thought was Margaret Thatcher. Sometimes the voices spoke in English, sometimes in French.

'II n'y a pas d'infection ici,' Henry said, and then began to weep, He was astounded and exhilarated to find there were still tears in his heart, from which he thought all tears and all laughter  -  true laughter  -  had fled. Tears of horror, tears of pity, tears that opened the stony ground of self-regarding obsession and burst the rock inside. 'There is no infection here, please, oh God stop it, don't, don't, nous sommes sans défense, NOUS SOMMES SANS - '

Then the human thunder began in the west and Henry put his hands to his head, thinking that the screams and the pain in there would tear it apart. The bastards were -

5

The bastards were slaughtering them.

Pete sat by the fire, unmindful of the bellows of pain from his separated knee, unaware that he was now holding the branch from the fire up beside his temple. The screams inside his head could not quite drown out the sound of the machine-guns in the west, big machine-guns, .50s. Now the cries  -  please don't hurt us, we are defenseless, there is no infection  -  began to fade into panic; it wasn't working, nothing could work, the deal was done.

Movement caught Pete's eye and he turned just as the thing that had been on the roof struck at him. He caught a blurred glimpse of a slender, weaselly body that seemed powered by a muscular tail rather than legs, and then its teeth sank into his ankle. He shrieked and yanked his good leg toward him so hard he almost clocked himself in the chin with his own knee. The thing came with it, clinging like ?a leech. Were these the things that were begging for mercy? Fuck them, if they were. Fuck them!

He reached for it with his right hand, the one he'd cut on the Bud bottle, without even thinking about it; the torch he continued to hold up at the side of his head with his uninjured left. He seized something that felt like cool, fur-covered jelly. The thing let go of his ankle at once, and Pete caught just a glimpse of expressionless black eyes  -  shark's eyes, eagle eyes  -  before it sank the needle-nest of its teeth into his clutching hand, tearing it wide open along the perforation of the previous cut.

The agony was like the end of the world. The thing's head ?if it had one  -  was buried in the hand, ripping and tearing, digging deeper. Blood flew in splattery fans as Pete tried to shake it off, stippling the snow and the sawdusty tarp and the dead woman's parka. Droplets flew into the fire and hissed like fat in a hot skillet. Now the thing was making a ferocious chattering sound. Its tail, as thick as a moray eel's body, wrapped around Pete's thrashing arm, endeavoring to keep it still.

Pete made no conscious decision to use the torch, because he'd forgotten he had it; his only thought was to tear the terrible biting thing off his right hand with his left. At first, when it caught fire and flared up, as hot and bright as a roll of newspaper, he didn't understand what was happening. Then he screamed, partly in fresh pain and partly in triumph. He bolted to his feet  -  for the time being, at least, his bulging knee did not hurt at all  -  and swung his burdened right arm at one of the lean-to's support posts in a great sweeping roundhouse. There was a crunch and the chattering sound was replaced by muffled squealing. For one endless moment the knot of teeth planted in his hand burrowed in deeper than ever. Then they loosened and the burning creature fell free and landed on the frozen ground. Pete stamped on it, felt it writhe under his heel, and was filled with one moment of pure and savage triumph before his outraged knee gave way entirely and his leg bent inside out, the tendons torn loose.

He fell heavily on his side, face to face with Becky's lethal hitchhiker, unaware that the lean-to was beginning to shift, the pole he'd struck with his arm bowing slowly outward. For a moment the weasel-thing's rudiment of a face was three inches from Pete's own. Its burning body flapped against his jacket. Its black eyes boiled. It had nothing so sophisticated as a mouth, but when the bulge in the top of its body unhinged, revealing its teeth, Pete screamed at it ?'No! No! No!'  -  and batted it into the fire, where it writhed and made its frantic, monkeylike chattering.

His left foot swung in a short arc as he shoved the thing farther into the fire. The tip of his boot struck the tilting pole, which had just decided to hold the lean-to up a little longer. This was one outrage too many and the pole snapped, dropping half of the tin roof. A second or two later, the other pole snapped as well. The rest of the roof fell into the fire, sending out a whirling squirt of sparks.

For a moment that was all. Then the fallen sheet of rusty tin began to heave itself up and down, as if it were breathing. A moment later, Pete crawled out from under. His eyes were glazed. His skin was pasty with shock. The left cuff of his jacket was on fire. He stared at this for a moment with his legs still under the fallen roof from the knees down, then raised his arm in front of his face, drew in a deep breath, and blew out the flames rising from his jacket like a giant birthday candle.

Approaching from the east was the buzz of a snowmobile engine. Jonesy . . . or whatever was left of him. The cloud. Pete didn't think it would show him any mercy. This was no day for mercy in the Jefferson Tract. He should hide. But the voice advising him of that was distant, unimportant. One thing was good: he had an idea he had finally quit drinking.