“Yo, Katie-Kate.”
Jocelyn McAvoy appeared through the trees at the south end of the valley, her hood pushed back, her short hair covered by a scarf of green silk, her burp-gun slung over her shoulder. There was a splash of blood across the front of her parka.
“Scared you, didn’t I?” she asked the new OIC.
“You might have raised my blood pressure a point or two.”
“Well, Quadrant Four is clear, maybe that’ll lower it a little.” McAvoy’s eyes sparkled. “We got over forty. Jackson has got hard numbers for you, and speaking of hard, right about now I could really use a hard-”
“Excuse me? Ladies?”
They turned. Emerging from the snow-covered brush at the north end of the valley was a group of half a dozen men and two women. Most were wearing orange, but their leader was a squat tugboat of a man wearing a regulation Blue Group coverall under his parka. He was also still wearing his transparent face-mask, although below his mouth there was a Ripley soul-patch which was definitely non-reg. All of the newcomers had automatic weapons.
Gallagher and McAvoy had time to exchange a single wide-eyed, caught-with-our-pants-down look. Then Jocelyn McAvoy went for her burp-gun and Kate Gallagher went for the Browning she had propped against the tree. Neither of them made it. The thunder of the guns was deafening. McAvoy was thrown nearly twenty feet through the air. One of her boots came off.
“That’s for Larry!” one of the orange-clad women was screaming. “That’s for Larry, you bitches, that’s for Larry!”
12
When the shooting was over, the squat man with the Ripley goatee assembled his group near the facedown corpse of Kate Gallagher, who had graduated ninth in her class at West Point before running afoul of the disease that was Kurtz. The squat man had appropriated her gun, which was better than his own.
“I’m a firm believer in democracy,” he said, “and you folks can do what you want, but I’m heading north now. I don’t know how long it’ll take me to learn the words to “O Canada”, but I’m going to find out.”
“I’m going with you,” one of the men said, and it quickly became apparent that they were all going with him. Before they left the clearing the leader bent down and plucked the Palm Pilot out of a snowdrift.
“Always wanted one of these,” said Emil “Dawg” Brodsky. “I’m a sucker for the new technology.”
They left the valley of death from the direction they’d entered it, heading north. From around them came isolated pops and bursts of gunfire, but for all practical purposes, Operation Clean Sweep was also over.
13
Mr Gray had committed another murder and stolen another vehicle, this time a DPW plow. Jonesy didn’t see it happen. Mr Gray, having apparently decided he couldn’t get Jonesy out of his office (not, at least, until he could devote all his time and energy to the problem), had decided to do the next best thing, which was to wall him off from the outside world. Jonesy now thought he knew how Fortunato must have felt when Montresor bricked him up in the wine-cellar.
It happened not long after Mr Gray put the State Trooper’s car back in the turnpike’s southbound lane (there was just the one, at least for the time being, and that was treacherous). Jonesy was in a closet at the time, following up what seemed to him to be an absolutely brilliant idea.
Mr Gray had cut off his telephone service? Okay, he would simply create a new form of communication, as he had created a thermostat to cool the place down when Mr Gray tried to force him out by overloading him with heat. A fax machine would be just the thing, he decided. And why not? All the gadgets were symbolic, only visualizations to help him first focus and then exercise powers that had been in him for over twenty years. Mr Gray had sensed those powers, and after his initial dismay had moved very efficiently to keep Jonesy from using them. The trick was to keep finding ways around Mr Gray’s roadblocks, just as Mr Gray himself kept finding ways to move south.
Jonesy closed his eyes and visualized a fax like the one in the History Department office, only he put it in the closet of his new office. Then, feeling like Aladdin rubbing the magic lamp (only the number of wishes he was granted seemed infinite, as long as he didn’t get carried away), he also visualized a stack of paper and a Berol Black Beauty pencil lying beside it. Then he went into the closet to see how he’d done.
Pretty well, it appeared at first glance… although the pencil was a tad eerie, brand-new and sharpened to a virgin point, but still gnawed all along the barrel. Yet that was as it should be, wasn’t it? Beaver was the one who had used Black Beauty pencils, even way back in Witcham Street Grammar. The rest of them had carried the more standard yellow Eberhard Fabers.
The fax looked perfect, sitting there on the floor beneath a dangle of empty coathangers and one jacket (the bright orange parka his mother had bought him for his first hunting trip, then made him promise-with his hand over his heart-to wear every single moment he was out of doors), and it was humming in an encouraging way.
Disappointment set in when he knelt in front of it and read the message in the lighted window: GIVE UP JONESY COME OUT.
He picked up the phone on the side of the machine and heard Mr Gray’s recorded voice: “Give up, Jonesy, come out. Give up, Jonesy, come o-”
A series of violent bangs, almost as loud as thunderclaps, made him cry out and jump to his feet. His first thought was that Mr Gray was using one of those SWAT squad door-busters, battering his way in.
It wasn’t the door, though. It was the window, and in some ways that was even worse. Mr Gray had put industrial gray shutters steel, they looked like-across his window. Now he wasn’t just imprisoned; he was blind, as well.
Written across the inside, easily readable through the glass: GIVE UP COME OUT. Jonesy had a brief memory of The Wizard of Oz-SURRENDER DOROTHY Written across the sky
–and wanted to laugh. He couldn’t. Nothing was funny, nothing was ironic. This was horrible. “No!” he shouted. “Take them down! Take them down, damn you!”
No answer. Jonesy raised his hands, meaning to shatter the glass and beat on the steel shutters beyond, then thought, Are you crazy? That’s what he wants! The minute you break the glass, those shutters disappear and Mr Gray is in here. And you’re gone, buddy.
He was aware of movement-the heavy rumble of the plow.
Where were they by now? Waterville? Augusta? Even farther south? Into the zone where the precip had fallen as rain? No, probably not, Mr Gray would have switched the plow for something faster if they had gotten clear of the snow. But they would be clear of it, and soon. Because they were going south.
Going where?
I might as well be dead already, Jonesy thought, looking disconsolately at the closed shutter with its taunt of a message. I might as well be dead right now.
14
In the end it was Owen who took Roberta Cavell by the arms and-with one eye on the racing clock, all too aware that every minute and a half brought Kurtz a mile closer-told her why they had to take Duddits, no matter how ill he was. Even in these circumstances, Henry didn’t know if he could have uttered the phrase fate of the world may depend on it with a straight face. Underhill, who had spent his life carrying a gun for his country, could and did.
Duddits stood with his arm around Henry, staring raptly down at him with his brilliant green eyes. Those eyes, at least, had not changed. Nor had the feeling they’d always had when around Duddits-that things were either perfectly all right or soon would be.
Roberta looked at Owen, her face seeming to grow older with every sentence he spoke. It was as if some malign time-lapse photography were at work. “Yes,” she said, “yes, I understand you want to find Jonesy-to catch him-but what does he want to do? And if he came here, why didn’t he do it here?” “Ma’am, I can’t answer those questions-”
“War,” Duddits said suddenly. “Onesy ont war.”
War? Owen’s mind asked Henry, alarmed. What war?
Never mind, Henry responded, and all at once the voice in Owen’s head was faint, hard to hear.
We have to go.
“Ma’am. Mrs Cavell.” Owen took her arms again, very gently. Henry loved this woman a lot, although he had ignored her quite cruelly over the last dozen years or so, and Owen knew why he’d loved her. It came off her like a sweet smoke. “We have to go.”