Dreamcatcher(81)

Henry inhaled and exhaled rapidly several times, hyperventilating his lungs clean, then pressed his gloved hand tight over his mouth and nose and stepped in. He stood still for a moment, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dim. He didn't want to be surprised by anything if he could help it.

When he could see well again, Henry stepped across the empty place where the snowmobile had been. There was nothing on the floor now but an overlaid pattern of oil stains, but there were more patches of that reddish-gold crud growing on the green tarp which had covered the Cat and was now cast aside in the comer.

The worktable was a mess  -  a jar of nails and one of screws overturned so that what had been kept carefully separate was now mixed together, an old pipe-holder that had belonged to Lamar Clarendon knocked to the floor and broken, all the drawers built into the table's thickness yanked open and left that way. One of them, Beaver or Jonesy, had gone through this place like a whirlwind, looking for something.

It was Jonesy.

Yeah. Henry might never know what it was, but it had been Jonesy, he knew that, and it had clearly been almighty important to him or to both of them. Henry wondered if Jonesy had found it. He would probably never know that, either. Meanwhile, what he wanted was clearly visible in the far comer of the room, hung on a nail above a pile of paint-cans and sprayguns.

Still holding his hand over his mouth and nose, breath held, Henry crossed the interior of the shed. There were at least four of the little nose-and-mouth painters' masks hanging from elastics which had lost most of their snap. He took them all and turned in time to see something move behind the door. He kept himself from gasping, but his heartbeat jumped, and all at once the double lungful of air that had gotten him this far seemed too hot and heavy. Nothing there, either, it had just been his imagination. Then he saw that yeah, there was something. Light came in through the open door; a little more came in through the single dirty window over the table, and Henry had literally jumped at his own shadow.

He left the shed in four big steps, the painters' masks swinging from his right hand. He held onto his lungfill of decayed air until he'd made four more steps along the packed track of the snowmobile, then let it out in an explosive rush. He bent over, hands planted on his thighs above his knees, small black dots flocking before his eyes and then dissolving.

From the east came a distant crackle of gunfire. Not rifles; it was too loud and fast for that. Those were automatic weapons. In Henry's mind there came a vision as clear as the memory of milk running down his father's chin or Barry Newman fleeing his office with rockets on his heels. He saw the deer and the coons and the chucks and the feral dogs and the rabbits being cut down in their dozens and their hundreds as they tried to escape what was now pretty clearly a plague zone; he could see the snow turning red with their innocent (but possibly contaminated) blood. This vision hurt him in a way he had not expected, piercing through to a place that wasn't dead but only dozing. It was the place that had resonated so strongly to Duddits's weeping, setting up a harmonic tone that made you feel as if your head were going to explode.

Henry straightened up, saw fresh blood on the palm of his left glove, and cried 'Ah, shit!' at the sky in a voice that was both furious and amused. He had covered his mouth and nose, he had gotten the masks and was planning on wearing at least two when he went inside Hole in the Wall, but he had completely forgotten the gash in his thigh, the one he'd gotten when the Scout rolled over. If there had been a contaminant out there in the shed, something given off by the fungus, the chances were excellent that it was in him now. Not that the precautions he had taken were any such of a much. Henry imagined a sign, big red letters reading BIOHAZARD AREA!  PLEASE HOLD BREATH AND COVER ANY SCRATCHES YOU MAY HAVE WITH YOUR HAND!

He grunted laughter and started back toward the cabin. Well, good God, Maude, it wasn't as if he had planned to live forever, anyway -

Off to the east, the gunfire crackled on and on.

3

Once again standing outside Hole in the Wall's open door, Henry felt in his back pocket for a handkerchief without much hope of finding one . . . and didn't. Two of the unadvertised attractions of spending time in the woods were urinating where you wanted and just leaning over and giving a honk when your nose felt in need of a blow. There was something primally satisfying about letting the piss and the snot fly . . . to men, at least. When you thought about it, it was sort of a blue-eyed wonder that women could love the best of them, let alone the rest of them.

He took off his coat, the shirt under it, and the thermal undershirt beneath that. The final layer was a faded Boston Red Sox tee-shirt with GARCIAPARRA 5 on the back. Henry took this off, spun it into a bandage, and wrapped it around the blood-caked tear in the left leg of his jeans, thinking again that he was locking the barn door after the horse had been stolen. Still, you filled in the blanks, didn't you? Yes, you filled in the blanks and you printed neatly and legibly. These were the concepts upon which life ran. Even when life was running out, it seemed.

He put the rest of his outerwear back on over his goosepimply top half, then donned two of the teardrop-shaped painters' masks. He considered fixing two of the others over his ears, imagined those narrow bands of elastic crisscrossing the back of his head like the straps of a shoulder holster, and burst out laughing. What else? Use the last mask to cover one eye?

'If it gets me, it gets me,' he said, at the same time reminding himself that it wouldn't hurt to be careful; a little dose of careful never hurt a man, old Lamar used to say.