“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 s. 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.
“Hey man, fuck the boss. This mission is over”
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.”