Dreamcatcher by Stephen King
"He--they--are south of Derry. They stopped to eat at a truck stop called Dysart's . . . only Jonesy called it Dry Farts, like when we were kids. I don't think he even knew it. He sounded scared."
"For himself? For us?"
Henry gave Owen a bleak look. "He says he's afraid Mr. Gray means to kill a State Trooper and take his cruiser. I think that was mostly it. Fuck." Henry struck his leg with his fist.
"But he's alive."
"Yeah," Henry said with a marked lack of enthusiasm. "He's immune. Duddits . . . you understand about Duddits now?"
No. I doubt if you do, either, Henry . . . but maybe I understand enough.
Henry lapsed into thoughtspeak--it was easier. Duddits changed us--being with Duddits changed us. When Jonesy got hit by that car in Cambridge, it changed him again. The brainwaves of people who undergo near-death experiences often change, I saw a Lancet article on that just last year. For Jonesy it must mean this Mr. Gray can use him without infecting him or wearing him out. And it's also enabled him to keep from being subsumed, at least so far.
"Subsumed?"
Co-opted. Gobbled up. Then aloud: "Can you get us out of this snowbank?"
I think so.
"That's what I was afraid of," Henry said glumly.
Owen turned to him, face greenish in the glow of the dashboard instruments. "What the fuck is wrong with you?"
Christ, don't you understand? How many ways do I have to tell you this? "He's still in there! Jonesy!"
For the third or fourth time since his and Henry's run had started, Owen was forced to leap over the gap between what his head knew and what his heart knew. "Oh. I see." He paused. "He's alive. Thinking and alive. Making phone calls, even." He paused again. "Christ."
Owen tried the Hummer in low forward and got about six inches before all four wheels began to spin. He geared reverse and drove them backward into the snowbank--crunch. But the Hummer's rear end came up a little on the packed snow, and that was what Owen wanted. When he went back to low, they'd come out of the snowbank like a cork out of a bottle. But he paused a moment with the brake pressed under the sole of his boot. The Hummer had a rough, powerful idle that shook the whole frame. Outside, the wind snarled and howled, sending snow-devils skating down the deserted turnpike.
"You know we have to do it, don't you?" Owen said. "Always assuming we're able to catch him in the first place. Because whatever the specifics might be, the general plan is almost certainly general contamination. And the math--"
"I can do the math," Henry said. "Six billion people on Spaceship Earth, versus one Jonesy."
"Yep, those are the numbers."
"Numbers can lie," Henry said, but he spoke bleakly. Once the numbers got big enough, they didn't, couldn't lie. Six billion was a very big number.
Owen let off the brake and laid on the accelerator. The Humvee rolled forward--a couple of feet, this time--started to spin, then caught hold and came roaring out of the snowbank like a dinosaur. Owen turned it south.
Tell me what happened after you pulled the kid out of the drainpipe.
Before Henry could do so, one of the radios under the dash crackled. The voice that followed came through loud and clear--its owner might have been sitting there in the Hummer with them.
"Owen? You there, buck?"
Kurtz.
16
It took them almost an hour to get the first sixteen miles south of Blue Base (the former Blue Base), but Kurtz wasn't worried. God would take care of them, he was quite sure of that.
Freddy Johnson was driving them (the happy quartet was packed into another snow-equipped Humvee). Perlmutter was in the passenger seat, handcuffed to the doorhandle. Cambry was likewise cuffed in back. Kurtz sat behind Freddy, Cambry behind Pearly. Kurtz wondered if his two press-ganged laddie-bucks were conspiring in telepathic fashion. Much good it would do them, if they were. Kurtz and Freddy both had their windows rolled down, although it rendered the Humvee colder than old Dad's outhouse in January; the heater was on high but simply couldn't keep up. The open windows were a necessity, however. Without them, the atmosphere of the Hummer would quickly become uninhabitable, as sulfurous as a poisoned coalmine. Only the smell on top wasn't sulfur but ether. Most of it seemed to be coming from Perlmutter. The man kept shifting in his seat, sometimes groaning softly under his breath. Cambry was hot with Ripley and growing like a wheat field after a spring rain, and he had that smell--Kurtz was getting it even with his mask on. But Pearly was the chief offender, shifting in his seat, trying to fart noiselessly (the one-cheek sneak, they had called such a maneuver back in the dim days of Kurtz's childhood), trying to pretend that suffocating smell wasn't coming from him. Gene Cambry was growing Ripley; Kurtz had an idea that Pearly, God love him, was growing something else.
To the best of his ability, Kurtz concealed these thoughts behind a mantra of his own: Davis and Roberts, Davis and Roberts, Davis and Roberts.
"Would you please stop that?" Cambry asked from Kurtz's right. "You're driving me crazy."
"Me too," Perlmutter said. He shifted in his seat and a low pffft sound escaped him. The sound of a deflating rubber toy, perhaps.
"Oh, man, Pearly!" Freddy cried. He unrolled his window further, letting in a swirl of snow and cold air. The Humvee skated and Kurtz braced himself, but then it steadied again. "Would you please quit with the fuckin anal perfume?"
"I beg your pardon," Perlmutter said stiffly. "If you're insinuating that I broke wind, then I have to tell you--"
"I'm not insinuatin anything," Freddy said. "I'm telling you to quit stinkin the place up or--"
Since there was no satisfactory way in which Freddy could complete this threat--for the time being they needed two telepaths, a primary and a backup--Kurtz broke in smoothly. "The story of Edward Davis and Franklin Roberts is an instructive one, because it shows there's really nothing new under the sun. This was in Kansas, back when Kansas really was Kansas . . ."
Kurtz, a pretty decent storyteller, took them back to Kansas during the Korean conflict. Ed Davis and Franklin Roberts had owned similar smallhold farms not far from Emporia, and not far from the farm owned by Kurtz's family (which had not quite been named Kurtz). Davis, never bolted together tightly in the first place, grew increasingly certain that his neighbor, the offensive Roberts, was out to steal his farm. Roberts was spreading tales about him in town, Ed Davis claimed. Roberts was poisoning his crops, Roberts was putting pressure on the Bank of Emporia to foreclose the Davis farm.
What Ed Davis had done, Kurtz said, was to catch him a rabid raccoon and put it in the henhouse--his own henhouse. The coon had slaughtered those chickens right and left, and when he was plumb wore out with killing, praise God, Farmer Davis had blown Mr. Coon's black-and-gray-striped head off.
They were silent in the rolling, chilly Humvee, listening.
Ed Davis had loaded all those dead chickens--and the dead raccoon--into the back of his International Harvester and had driven over onto his neighbor's property with them and by the dark of the moon had chucked his truckload of corpses down both of Franklin Roberts's wells--the stock-well and the house-well. Then, the next night, high on whiskey and laughing like hell, Davis had called his enemy on the phone and told him what he had done. Been pretty hot today, ain't it? the lunatic had inquired, laughing so hard Franklin Roberts could barely make him out. Which did you and them girls of yours get, Roberts? The coon-water or the chicken-water? I can't tell you, because I don't remember which ones I chucked down which well! Ain't that a shame?
Gene Cambry's mouth was trembling at the left corner, like the mouth of a man who has suffered a serious stroke. The Ripley growing along the crease of his brow was now so advanced that Mr. Cambry looked like a man whose forehead had been split open.
"What are you saying?" he asked. "Are you saying me and Pearly are no better than a couple of rabid chickens?"
"Watch how you talk to the boss, Cambry," Freddy said. His mask bobbed up and down on his face.
"He
Freddy raised a hand as if to swat Cambry over the back of the seat. Cambry jutted his truculent, frightened face forward to shorten the range. "Go on, Bubba. Or maybe you want to check your hand first, make sure there aren't no cuts on it. Cause one little cut is all it takes."
Freddy's hand wavered in the air for a moment, then returned to the wheel.
"And while you're at it, Freddy, you want to watch your back. You think the boss is going to leave witnesses, you're crazy."
"Crazy, yes." Kurtz said warmly, and chuckled. "Lots of farmers go crazy, or they did then before Willie Nelson and Farm Aid, God bless his heart. Stress of the life, I suppose. Poor old Ed Davis wound up in the VA--he was in Big Two, you know--and not long after the thing with the wells, Frank Roberts sold out, moved to Wichita, got work as a rep for Allis-Chalmers. And neither well was actually polluted, either. He had a state water inspector out to do some tests, and the inspector said the water was good. Rabies doesn't spread like that, anyway, he said. I wonder if the Ripley does?"
"At least call it by its right name," Cambry nearly spat. "It's byrus."
"Byrus or Ripley, it's all the same," Kurtz said. "These fellows are trying to poison our wells. To pollute our precious fluids, as somebody or other once said."
"You don't care a damn about any of that!" Pearly spat--Freddy actually jumped at the venom in Perlmutter's voice. "All you care about is catching Underhill." He paused, then added in a mournful voice: "You are crazy, boss."
"Owen!" Kurtz cried, chipper as a chipmunk. "Almost forgot about him! Where is he, fellows?"
"Up ahead," Cambry said sullenly. "Stuck in a fucking snowbank."
"Outstanding!" Kurtz shouted. "Closing in!"
"Don't get your face fixed. He's pulling it out. Got a Hummer, just like us. You can drive one of those things straight through downtown hell if you know what you're doing. And he seems to."
"Shame. Did we make up any ground?"
"Not much," Pearly said, then shifted, grimaced, and passed more gas.
"Fuuck," Freddy said, low.
"Give me the mike, Freddy. Common channel. Our friend Owen likes the common channel."
Freddy handed the mike back on its kinked cord, made an adjustment to the transmitter bolted to the dash, then said, "Give it a try, boss."
Kurtz depressed the button on the side of the mike. "Owen? You there, buck?"
Silence, static, and the monotonous howl of the wind. Kurtz was about to depress the SEND button and try again when Owen came back--clear and crisp, moderate static but no distortion. Kurtz's face didn't change--it held the same look of pleasant interest--but his heartbeat kicked up several notches.
"I'm here."
"Lovely to hear you, bucko! Lovely! I estimate you are our location plus about fifty. We just passed Exit 39, so I'd say that's about right, wouldn't you?" They had actually just passed Exit 36, and Kurtz thought they were quite a bit closer than fifty miles. Half that, maybe.
Silence from the other end.
"Pull over, buck," Kurtz advised Owen in his kindliest, sanest voice. "It's not too late to save something out of this mess. Our careers are shot, no question about that, I guess--dead chickens down a poisoned well--but if you've got a mission, let me share it. I'm an old man, son, and all I want is to salvage something a little decent from--"
"Cut the shit, Kurtz." Loud and clear from all six of the Hummer's speakers, and Cambry actually had the nerve to laugh. Kurtz marked him with a vile look. Under other circumstances that look would have turned Cambry's black skin gray with terror, but this was not other circumstances, other circumstances had been cancelled, and Kurtz felt an uncharacteristic bolt of fear. It was one thing to know intellectually that things had gone tits-up; it was another when the truth landed in your gut like a heavy sack of meal.
"Owen . . . laddie-buck--"
"Listen to me, Kurtz. I don't know if there's a sane brain-cell left in your head, but if there is, I hope it's paying attention. I'm with a man named Henry Devlin. Ahead of us--probably a hundred miles ahead of us now--is a friend of his named Gary Jones. Only it's not really him anymore. He's been taken over by an alien intelligence he calls Mr. Gray."
Gary . . . Gray, Kurtz thought. By their anagrams shall ye know em.
"Nothing that happened in the Jefferson Tract matters," came the voice from the speakers. "The slaughter you planned is redundant, Kurtz--kill em or let em die on their own, they're not a threat."
"You hear that?" Perlmutter asked hysterically. "No threat! No--"
"Shut up," Freddy said, and backhanded him. Kurtz hardly noticed. He was sitting bolt-upright in the back seat, eyes glaring. Redundant? Was Owen Underhill telling him that the most important mission of his life had been redundant?
"--environment, do you understand? They can't live in this ecosystem. Except for Gray. Because he happened to find a host who is fundamentally different. So here it is. If you ever stood for anything, Kurtz--if you can stand for anything now--you'll stop chasing us and let us take care of business. Let us take care of Mr. Jones and Mr. Gray. You may be able to catch us, but it's extremely doubtful that you can catch them. They're too far south. And we think Gray has a plan. Something that will work."
"Owen, you're overwrought," Kurtz said. "Pull over. Whatever needs to be done, we'll do it together. We'll--"
"If you care, you'll quit," Owen said. His voice was flat. "That's it. Bottom line. I'm over and out."
"Don't do that, buck!" Kurtz shouted. "Don't do that, I forbid you to do that!"
There was a click, very loud, and then hissy silence from the speaker. "He's gone," Perlmutter said. "Pulled the mike out. Turned off the receiver. Gone."
"But you heard him, didn't you?" Cambry asked. "There's no sense in this. Call it off."
A pulse beat in the center of Kurtz's forehead. "As though I'd take his word for anything, after what he participated in back there."
"But he was telling the truth!" Cambry brayed. He turned fully to Kurtz for the first time, his eyes wide, the corners clogged with dabs of the Ripley, or the byrus, or whatever you wanted to call it. His spittle sprayed Kurtz's cheeks, his forehead, the surface of his breathing mask. "I heard his thoughts! So did Pearly! HE WAS TELLING THE STONE TRUTH! HE--"
Once again moving with a speed that was eerie, Kurtz drew the nine-millimeter from the holster on his belt and fired. The report inside the Humvee was deafening. Freddy shouted in surprise and jerked the wheel again, sending the Humvee into a diagonal skid through the snow. Perlmutter screamed, turning his horrified, red-speckled face to look into the back seat. For Cambry it was merciful--his brains were out the back of his head, through the broken window, and blowing in the storm in the time it might have taken him to raise a protesting hand.
Didn't see that coming at all, did you, buck? Kurtz thought. Telepathy didn't help you one damn bit there, did it?
"No," Pearly said dolorously. "You can't do much with someone who doesn't know what he's going to do until it's done. You can't do much with a crazyman."
The skid was back under control. Freddy was a superior motorman, even when he had been startled out of his wits.
Kurtz pointed the nine at Perlmutter. "Call me crazy again. Let me hear you."
"Crazy," Pearly said immediately. His lips stretched in a smile, opening over a line of teeth in which there were now several vacancies. "Crazy-crazy-crazy. But you won't shoot me for it. You shot your backup, and that's all you can afford." His voice was rising dangerously, Cambry's corpse lolled back against the door, tufts of hair blowing around his misshapen head in the cold wind coming through the window.
"Hush, Pearly," Kurtz said. He felt better now, back in control again. Cambry had been worth that much, at least. "Get a grip on your clipboard and just hush. Freddy?"
"Yes, boss."
"Are you still with me?"
"All the way, boss."
"Owen Underhill is a traitor, Freddy, can you give me a bi
"Praise God." Freddy sat ramrod-straight behind the wheel, staring into the snow and the cones of the Humvee's headlights.
"Owen Underhill has betrayed his country and his fellow-men. He--"
"He betrayed you," Perlmutter said, almost in a whisper.
"That's right, Pearly, and you don't want to overestimate your own importance, son, that's one thing you don't want to do, because you never know what a crazyman is going to do next, you said so yourself."
Kurtz looked at the back of Freddy's broad neck.
We're going to take Owen Underhill down--him and this Devlin fellow, too, if Devlin's still with him. Understood?"
"Understood, boss."
"Meanwhile, let's lighten the load, shall we?" Kurtz produced the handcuff key from his pocket. He reached behind Cambry, wriggled his hand into the cooling goo that hadn't exited through the window, and at last found the doorhandle. He unlocked the cuff and five seconds or so later Mr. Cambry, praise God, rejoined the food-chain.
Freddy, meanwhile, had dropped one hand into his crotch, which itched like hell. His armpits, too, actually, and--
He turned his head slightly and saw Perlmutter staring at him--big dark eyes in a pallid, red-spotted face.
"What are you looking at?" Freddy asked.
Perlmutter turned away without saying anything more. He looked out into the night.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
THE CHASE CONTINUES
1
Mr. Gray enjoyed bingeing on human emotions, Mr. Gray enjoyed human food, but Mr. Gray most definitely did not enjoy evacuating Jonesy's bowels. He refused to look at what he'd produced, simply snatched up his pants and buttoned them with hands that trembled slightly.
Jesus, aren't you going to wipe? Jonesy asked. At least flush the damned toilet!
But Mr. Gray only wanted to get out of the stall. He paused long enough to run his hands beneath the water in one of the basins then turned toward the exit.
Jonesy was not exactly surprised to see the State Trooper push in through the door.
"Forgot to zip your fly, my friend," the Trooper said.