Dreamcatcher(89)

The important thing was that he was finally full. Even more important, all the disconnected thoughts and fragmented images had drained out of his mind. Also the song. He hoped none of that crap would come back. Ever, please God.

He swallowed more milk, belched, then leaned his head against the side of the Scout and closed his eyes. No going to sleep, though; these woods were lovely, dark and deep, and he had twelve-point-seven miles to go before he could sleep.

He remembered Pete talking about the gossip in Gosselin's ?missing hunters, lights in the sky  -  and how blithely The Great American Psychiatrist had dismissed it, gassing about the Satanism hysteria in Washington State, the abuse hysteria in Delaware. Playing Mr Smartass Shrink - Boy with his mouth and the front of his mind while the back of his mind went on playing with suicide like a baby who's just discovered his toes in the bathtub. He had sounded entirely plausible, ready for any TV panel show that wanted to spend sixty minutes on the interface between the unconscious and the unknown, but things had changed. Now he had become one of the missing hunters. Also, he had seen things you couldn't find on the Internet no matter how big your search engine was.

He sat there, head back, eyes closed, belly full. Jonesy's Garand was propped against one of the Scout's tires. The snow lit on his cheeks and forehead like the light touch of a kitten's paws. 'This is it, what all the geeks have been waiting for,' he said. 'Close encounters of the third kind. Hell, maybe the fourth or fifth kind. Sorry I made fun of you, Pete. You were right and I was wrong. Hell, it's worse than that. Old Man Gosselin was right and I was wrong, So much for a Harvard education.'

And once he'd said that much out loud, things began to make sense. Something had either landed or crashed. There had been an armed response from the United States government. Were they telling the outside world what had happened? Probably not, that wasn't their style, but Henry had an idea they would have to before much longer. You couldn't put the entire Jefferson Tract in Hangar 57.

Did he know anything else? Maybe, and maybe it was a little more than the men in charge of the helicopters and the firing parties knew. They clearly believed they were dealing with a contagion, but Henry didn't think it was as dangerous as they seemed to. The stuff caught, bloomed . . . but then it died. Even the parasite that had been inside the woman had died. This was a bad time of year and a bad place to culture interstellar athlete's foot, if that was what it was. All that argued strongly for the possibility of a crash landing . . . but what about the lights in the sky? What about the implants? For years people who claimed they'd been abducted bv ETs had also claimed they had been stripped . . . examined . . . forced to undergo implants. All ideas so Freudian they were almost laughable . . .

Henry realized he was drifting and snapped awake so strongly that the unwrapped package of hot dogs tumbled off his lap and into the snow. No, not just drifting; dozing. A good deal more light had seeped out of the day, and the world had gone a dull slate color. His pants were speckled with the fresh snow. If he'd gone any deeper, he'd've been snoring.

He brushed himself off and stood up, wincing as his muscles screamed in protest. He regarded the hot dogs lying there in the snow with something like revulsion, then bent down, rewrapped them, and tucked them into one of his coat pockets. They might start looking good to him again later on. He sincerely hoped not, but you never knew.

'Jonesy's in the hospital,' he said abruptly. No idea what he meant. 'Jonesy's in the hospital with Mr Gray. Got to stay there. ICU.'

Madness. Prattling madness. He clamped the skis to his boots again, praying that his back wouldn't lock up while he was bent over, and then pushed off along the track once more, the snow starting to thicken around him now, the day darkening.

By the time he realized that he had remembered the hot dogs but forgotten Jonesy's rifle (not to mention his own), he'd gone too far to turn around.

12

He stopped what might have been three quarters of an hour later, peering stupidly down at the Arctic Cat's print. There was little more than a glimmer of light left in the day now, but enough to see that the track  -  what was left of it  -  veered abruptly to the right and went into the woods.

Into the f**king woods. Why had Jonesy (and Pete, if Pete was with him) gone into the woods? What sense did that make when the Deep Cut ran straight and clear, a white lane between the darkening trees?

'Deep Cut goes northwest,' he said, standing there with his skis toeing in toward each other and the loosely wrapped package of hot dogs poking out of his coat pocket. 'The road to Gosselin's  -  the blacktop  -  can't be more than three miles from here. Jonesy knows that. Pete knows that. Still . . . snowmobile goes . . .' He held up his arms like the hands of a clock, estimating. 'Snowmobile goes almost dead north. Why?'

Maybe he knew. The sky was brighter in the direction of Gosselin's, as if banks of lights had been set up there. He could hear the chatter of helicopters, waxing and waning but always tending in that same direction. As he drew closer, he expected to hear other heavy machinery as well: supply vehicles, maybe generators. To the east there was still the isolated crackle of gunfire, but the big action was clearly in the direction he was going.

'They've set up a base camp at Gosselin's,' Henry said. 'And Jonesy didn't want any part of it.'

That felt like a bingo to Henry. Only . . . there was no more Jonesy, was there? just the redblack cloud.