“Henry, is he all right?”
“I don’t know.”
“Run out your tongue.”
“Don’t you think you better keep your eyes on-”
–I’m fine, so don’t sass me. Run out your tongue.” Henry did. Owen looked at it and grimaced. “Looks worse, but it’s probably better. All that crap has turned white.”
“Same with the gash on my leg. Same with your face and eyebrows. We’re just lucky we didn’t get it in the lungs or the brain or the gut.” He paused. “Perlmutter got it in the gut. He’s growing one of those things.”
“How far back are they, Henry?”I’d say twenty miles. Maybe a little less. So if you could goose it… even if just a little…” Owen did, knowing that Kurtz would, as soon as he realized he was now part of a general exodus and much less likely to become a target of either the civilian or the military police.
“You’re still in touch with Pearly,” Owen said. “Even though the byrus is dying on you, you’re still hooked up. Is it…” He lifted a thumb to the back seat, where Duddits was leaning back. His shakes had eased, at least for the time being.
“Sure,” Henry said. “I had stuff from Duddits long before all this happened. Jonesy, Pete, and Beaver did, too. We hardly noticed. It was just a part of our lives.” Sure, that’s tight. Like all those thoughts about plastic bags and bridge abutments, and shotguns. just apart of my life.
“Now it’s stronger. Maybe in time it’ll drop back, but for now… He shrugged. “For now I hear
voices.” “Pearly.” “For one,” Henry agreed. “Others with the byrus in its active stage, too. Mostly behind us.” “Jonesy? Your friend Jonesy? Or Gray?” Henry shook his head. “But Pearly hears something.” “Pearly? How can he-”He’s got more mental range than I do right now, because of the byrum-” “The what?”The thing that’s up his ass,” Henry said. “The shit-weasel. “’Oh.” Owen felt momentarily sick to his stomach.
“What he hears doesn’t seem to be human. I don’t think it’s Mr Gray, but I suppose it might be. Whatever it is, he’s homing on it.”
They drove in silence for awhile. The traffic was moderately heavy and some of the drivers were wild (they passed the Explorer just south of Augusta, ditched and apparently abandoned with its load of luggage spread around it), but Owen counted himself lucky. The storm had kept plenty of folks off the road, he guessed. They might decide to flee now that the storm had stopped, but he and Owen had gotten ahead of the worst of the wave. In many ways, the storm had been their friend.
“I want you to know something,” Owen said finally. “You don’t need to say it. You’re sitting right next to me short range-and I’m still getting some of your thoughts.”
What Owen was thinking was that he would pull the Humvee over and get out, if he thought the pursuit would end once Kurtz had him. Owen did not, in fact, believe that. Owen Underhill was Kurtz’s prime objective, but he understood that Owen wouldn’t have committed such a monstrous act of treason had he not been coerced into it. No, he’d put a bullet in Owen’s head, and then continue on. With Owen, Henry had at least some chance. Without him, he’d likely be a dead duck. And Duddits too.
“We stay together,” Henry said. “Friends to the end, as the saying goes.”
And, from the back seat: “Otsum urk ooo do now.”
“That’s right, Duds,” Henry reached back and briefly squeezed
Duddits’s cold hand. “Got some work to do now.”
4
Ten minutes later, Duddits came fully to life, pointing them into the first turnpike rest area below Augusta. They were almost to Lewiston now, in fact. “Ine! Ine!” he shouted, then began to cough again.
“Take it easy, Duddits,” Henry said.
“They probably stopped for coffee and a Danish,” Owen said. “Or maybe a bacon sandwich.”
But Duddits directed them around back, to the employees” parking lot. Here they stopped, and Duddits got out. He stood quiet and muttering for a moment or so, looking frail under the cloudy sky and seemingly buffeted by every gust of wind.
“Henry,” Owen said, “I don’t know what bee he’s got in his bonnet, but if Kurtz is really close-”
But then Duddits nodded, got back in the Hummer, and pointed toward the exit sign. He looked more tired than ever, but he also looked satisfied.
“What in God’s name was that all about?” Owen asked, mystified.
“I think he switched cars,” Henry said. “Is that what he did, Duddits? Did he switch cars?”
Duddits nodded emphatically. “Tole! Tole a car!”
“He’ll be moving faster now,” Henry said. “You’ve got to step it up, Owen. Never mind Kurtz-we’ve got to catch Mr Gray.”
Owen looked over at Henry… then looked again. “What’s wrong with you? You’ve come over all pale.”
“I’ve been very stupid-I should have known what the bastard was up to from the first. My only excuses are being tired and scared, and none of that will matter if… Owen, you have to catch him. He’s headed for western Massachusetts, and you have to catch him before he can get there.”
Now they were running in slush, and the going was messy but far less dangerous. Owen walked the Hummer up to sixty-five, all he dared for now.
“I’ll try,” he said. “But unless he has an accident or a breakdown… Owen shook his head slowly back and forth. “I don’t think so, pal. I really don’t.”
5
This was a dream he’d had often as a child (when his name had been Coonts), but only once or twice since the squirts and sweats of adolescence. In it, he was running through a field under a
harvest moon and afraid to look behind him because it was after him, it. He ran as hard as he could but of course that wasn’t good enough, in dreams your best never is. Then it was close enough for him to hear its dry breathing, and to smell its peculiar dry smell.
He came to the shore of a great still lake, although there had never been any lakes in the dry and miserable Kansas town of his childhood, and although it was very beautiful (the moon burned in its depths like a lamp), it terrified him because it blocked his way and he could not swim.
He fell on his knees at the shore of the lake-in that way this dream was exactly like those childhood dreams-but instead of seeing the reflection of it in the still water, the terrible scarecrow man with his stuffed burlap head and pudgy blue-gloved hands, this time he saw Owen Underhill, his face covered with splotches. In the moonlight, the byrus looked like great black moles, spongy and shapeless.
As a child he had always wakened at this point (often with his stiff wang wagging, although why such an awful dream would give a kid a stilly God alone knew), but this time the it-Owen-actually touched him, the reflected eyes in the water reproachful. Maybe questioning. Because you disobeyed orders, buck! Because you crossed the line!
He raised his hand to ward Owen off, to remove that hand… and saw his own hand in the moonglow. It was gray.
No, he told himself, that’s just the moonlight.
Only three fingers, though-was that the moonlight?
Owen’s hand on him, touching him, passing on his filthy disease… and still daring to call him
6
boss. Wake up, boss!”
Kurtz opened his eyes and sat up with a grunt, simultaneously pushing Freddy’s hand away. On his knee instead of his shoulder, Freddy reaching back from his place behind the wheel and shaking his knee, but still intolerable.
“I’m awake, I’m awake.” He held his own hands up in front of his face to prove it. Not baby-pink, they were a long way from that, but they weren’t gray and each had the requisite five fingers.
“What time is it, Freddy?”
“Don’t know, boss-still morning’s all I can say for sure.”
Of course. Clocks all tucked up. Even his pocket watch had run down. As much a victim of modem times as anyone else, he had forgotten to wind it. To Kurtz, whose time sense had always been at least fairly sharp, it felt like about nine, which would mean he’d gotten about two hours of shuteye. Not much, but he didn’t need much. He felt better. Well enough, certainly, to hear the concern in Freddy’s voice.
“What’s up, bucko?”
“Pearly says he’s lost contact with all of them now, He says Owen was the last, and now he’s gone, too. He says Owen must have beat back the Ripley fungus, sir.”
Kurtz caught sight of Perlmutter’s sunken, I-fooled-you grin in the wide rearview mirror.
“What’s the deal, Archie?”
“No deal,” Pearly said, sounding considerably more lucid than before Kurtz’s nap. “I… boss, I could use a drink of water. I’m not hungry, but-”