Dreamcatcher(87)

He heard himself signing it again  -  But what's puzzling you is the nature of my game  -  and made himself stop it. What, then? Something really Undress. Mindless and pointless and tasty, something just oozing Kulture Amerika. How about that one by the Pointer Sisters? That was a good one.

Looking down at his shuffling skis and the horizontal crimps left by the snowmobile treads, he began to sing it. Soon he was droning it over and over in a whispery, tuneless monotone while the sweat soaked through his shirts and clear mucus ran from his nose to freeze on his upper lip: 'I know we can make it, I know we can, we can work it out, yes we can-can yes we can yes we can . . .'

Better. Much better. All those yes we can-cans were as Amerikan Kulture as a Ford pickup in a bowling alley parking lot, a lingerie sale at JC Penney, or a dead rock star in a bathtub.

9

And so he eventually returned to the shelter where he had left Pete and the woman. Pete was gone. No sign of him at all.

The rusty tin roof of the lean-to had fallen, and Henry lifted it, peeking under it like a metal bedsheet to make sure Pete wasn't there. He wasn't, but the woman was. She had crawled or been moved from where she'd been when Henry set out for Hole in the Wall, and somewhere along the line she'd come down with a bad case of dead. Her clothes and face were covered with the rust-colored mold that had choked the cabin, but Henry noticed an interesting thing: while the growth on her was doing pretty well (especially in her nostrils and her visible eye, which had sprouted a jungle), the stuff which had spread out from her, outlining her body in a ragged sunburst, was in trouble. The fungus behind her, on the side blocked from the fire, had turned gray and stopped spreading. The stuff in front of her was doing a little better  -  it had had warmth, and ground to grow on which had been melted clear of snow  -  but the tips of the tendrils were turning the powdery gray of volcanic ash.

Henry was pretty sure it was dying.

So was the daylight  -  no question of that now. Henry dropped the rusty piece of corrugated tin back on the body of Becky Shue and on the embery remains of the fire. Then he looked at the track of the Cat again, wishing as he had back at the cabin that he had Natty Bumppo with him to explain what he was seeing. Or maybe Jonesy's good friend Hercule Poirot, he of the little gray cells.

The track swerved in toward the collapsed roof of the lean - to before continuing on northwest toward Gosselin's. There was a pressed - down area in the snow that almost made the shape of a human body. To either side, there were round divots in the snow.

'What do you say, Hercule?' Henry asked. 'What means this, mon ami?' But Hercule said nothing.

Henry began to sing under his breath again and leaned closer to one of the round divots, unaware that he had left the Pointer Sisters behind and switched back to the Rolling Stones.

There was enough light for him to see a pattern in the three dimples to the left of the body shape, and he recalled the patch on the right elbow of Pete's duffel coat. Pete had told him with an odd sort of pride that his girlfriend had sewed that on there, declaring he had no business going off hunting with a ripped jacket. Henry remembered thinking it was sad and funny at the same time, how Pete had built up a wistful fantasy of a happy future from that single act of kindness . . . an act which probably had more to do, in the end, with how the lady in question had been raised than with any feelings she might have for her beer-soaked boyfriend.

Not that it mattered. What mattered was that Henry felt he could draw a bona fide deduction at last. Pete had crawled out from under the collapsed roof Jonesy  -  or whatever was now running Jonesy, the cloud  -  had come along, swerved over to the remains of the lean-to, and picked Pete up.

Why?

Henry didn't know.

Not all of the splotches in the flattened shape of his thrashing friend, who had crawled out from under the piece of tin by hooking himself along on his elbows, were that mold stuff. Some of it was dried blood. Pete had been hurt. Cut when the roof fell in? Was that all?

Henry spotted a wavering trail leading away from the depression which had held Pete's body. At the end of it was what he first took to be a fire-charred stick. Closer examination changed his mind. It was another of the weasel things, this one burned and dead, now turning gray where it wasn't seared. Henry flipped it aside with the toe of his boot. Beneath it was a small frozen mass. More eggs. It must have been laying them even as it died.

Henry kicked snow over both the eggs and the little monster's corpse, shuddering. He unwrapped the makeshift bandage for another look at the wound on his leg, and as he did it he realized what song was coming out of his mouth. He quit singing. New snow, just a scattering of light flakes, began to skirt down.

'Why do I keep singing that?' he asked. 'Why does that f**king song keep coming back?'

He expected no answer; these were questions uttered aloud mostly for the comfort of hearing his own voice (this was a death place, perhaps even a haunted place), but one came anyway.

'Because it's our song. It's the Squad Anthem, the one we play when we go in hot. We're Cruise's boys.' Cruise? Was that right? As in Tom Cruise? Maybe not quite.

The gunfire from the east was much lighter now. The slaughter of the animals was almost done. But there were men, a long skirmish line of hunters who were wearing green or black instead of orange, and they were listening to that song over and over again as they did their work, adding up the numbers of an incredible butcher's bill: I rode a tank, held a general's rank, when the blitzkrieg raged and the bodies stank . . . Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name.