Deke backed away from the door, moving slowly, as if underwater. The grayness of the day seemed to invade the store, dimming the lights. He felt his legs come unhinged, and before the dirty board floor tilted up to meet him, gray had gone to black.
21
When Deke came to, it was later-just how much later he couldn’t tell, because the Budweiser digital clock over the beer cooler was flashing 88:88. Three of his teeth lay on the floor, knocked out when he fell down, he assumed. The blood around his nose and on his chin had dried to a spongy cake. He tried to get up, but his legs wouldn’t support him. He crawled to the door instead, with his hair hanging in his face, praying.
His prayer was answered. The little red shitbox car was gone. Where it had been were four bacon packages, all empty, the mayonnaise jar, three-quarters empty, and half a loaf of Holsum white bread. Several crows-there were some almighty big ones around the Reservoir-had found the bread and were pecking slices out of the torn wrapper. At a distance-almost back to Route 32 two or three more were at work on a congealed mess of bacon and matted chunks of bread. Monsieur’s gourmet lunch had not agreed with him, it seemed.
God,Deke thought.I hope you puked so hard you tore your plumbing loose, you-
But then his own guts took a fantastical, skipping leap and he clapped his hand over his mouth, He had a hideously clear image of the man’s teeth closing on the raw, fatty meat hanging out between the pieces of bread, gray flesh veined with brown like the severed tongue of a dead horse. Deke began to make muffled yurking sounds behind his hand.
A car turned in-just what he needed, a customer while he was on the verge of tossing his cookies. Not really a car at all, on second glance, nor a truck, either. Not even an SUV. It was one of those godawful Humvees, painted in smeary camouflage blobs of black and green. Two people in front and-Deke was almost sure of it-another in back.
He reached out, flipped the OPEN sign hanging in the door over to CLOSED, then backed away. He had gotten to his feet, had managed at least that much, but now he felt perilously close to collapsing again. They saw me in here, just as sure as shit, he thought. They’ll come in and ask where the other one went, because they’re after him. They want him, they want the bacon sandwich man. And I’ll tell. They’ll make me tell. And then I’ll-
His hand rose in front of his eyes. The first two fingers, coated with dried blood up to the second knuckles, were poked out and hooked. They were trembling. To Deke, they almost looked like they were waving. Hello eyes, how you doing? Enjoy looking while you can, because we’ll be coming for you soon.
The person in the back of the Humvee leaned forward, seemed to say something to the driver, and the vehicle leaped backward, one rear wheel splashing through the puddle of vomit left by the store’s last customer. It wheeled around on the road, paused for just a moment, then set off in the direction of Ware and the Quabbin.
When they disappeared over the first hill, Deke McCaskell began to weep. As he walked back toward the counter (staggering and weaving but still on his feet), his gaze fell on the teeth lying on the floor. Three teeth. His. A small price to pay. Oh yes, teeny dues. Then he stopped, gazing at the three dollar bills which still lay on the counter. They had grown a coating of pale red-orange fuzz.
22
“Oht ear! Eep owen!” Owen, that’s me, Owen thought wearily, but he understood Duddits well enough (it wasn’t that hard, once your ear had become attuned): Not here! Keep going! Owen reversed the Humvee to Route 32 as Duddits sat back-collapsed back-and began
to cough again.
“Look,” Henry said, and pointed. “See that?”
Owen saw. A bunch of wrappers soaking into the ground under the force of the pelting downpour. And a jar of mayonnaise. He threw the Hummer back into drive and headed north. The rain hitting the windshield had a particularly fat quality that he recognized: soon it would turn back to sleet, and then-very likely-to snow. Close to exhausted now, and queerly sad in the wake of the telepathy’s withdrawing wave, Owen found that his chief regret was having to die on such a dirty day.
“How far ahead is he now?” Owen asked, not daring to ask the real question, the only one that mattered: Are we already too late? He assumed that Henry would tell him, were that the case.
“He’s there,” Henry said absently. He had turned around in the seat and was wiping Duddits’s face with a damp cloth. Duddits looked at him gratefully and tried to smile. His ashy cheeks were sweaty now, and the black patches under his eyes had spread, turning them into raccoon s eyes.
“If he’s there, why did we have to come here?” Owen asked. He had the Hummer up to seventy, very dangerous on this slick stretch of two-lane blacktop, but now there was no choice.
“I didn’t want to risk Duddits losing the line,” Henry said. “If that happens…”
Duddits uttered a vast groan, wrapped his arms around his midsection, and doubled over them. Henry, still kneeling on the seat, stroked the slender column of his neck.
“Take it easy, Duds,” Henry said. “You’re all right.”
But he wasn’t. Owen knew it and so did Henry. Feverish, crampy in spite of a second Prednisone pill and two more Percocets, now spraying blood every time he coughed, Duddits Cavell was several country miles from all right. The consolation prize was that the Jonesy-Gray combination was also a very long way from all right.
It was the bacon. All they’d hoped to do was to make Mr Gray stop for awhile; none of them had guessed how prodigious his gluttony would turn out to be. The effect on Jonesy’s digestion had been fairly predictable. Mr Gray had vomited once in the parking lot of the little store, and had had to pull over twice more on the road to Ware, leaning out the window and offloading several pounds of raw bacon with almost convulsive force.
Diarrhea came next. He had stopped at the Mobil on Route 9, southeast of Ware, and had barely made it into the men’s room. The sign outside the station read CHEAP GAS CLEAN TOILETS, but the CLEAN TOILETS part was certainly out of date by the time Mr Gray left. He didn’t kill anyone at the Mobil, which Henry counted as a plus.
Before turning onto the Quabbin access road, Mr Gray had needed to stop twice more and dash into the sopping woods, where he tried to evacuate Jonesy’s groaning bowels. By then the rain had changed over to huge flakes of wet snow. Jonesy’s body had weakened considerably, and Henry was hoping for a faint. So far it hadn’t happened.
Mr Gray was furious with Jonesy, railing at him continuously by the time he slipped back behind the wheel of the car after his second trip into the woods. This was all Jonesy’s fault, Jonesy had trapped him. He chose to ignore his own hunger and the compulsive greed with which he had eaten, pausing between bites only to lick the grease from his fingers. Henry had seen such selective arrangements of the facts-emphasizing some, ignoring others completely-many times before, in his patients. In some ways, Mr Gray was Barry Newman all over again.How human he’s becoming, he thought. How curiously human. “When you say he’s there,” Owen asked, “just how there do you mean?” “I don’t know. He’s closed down again, at least pretty much. Duddits, do you hear Jonesy?”
Duddits looked at Henry wearily, then shook his head. “Isser Ay ookar cards,” he said-Mr Gray took our cards-but that was like a literal translation of a slang phrase. Duddits hadn’t the vocabulary to express what had actually happened, but Henry could read it in his mind. Mr Gray was unable to enter Jonesy’s office stronghold and take the playing cards, but he had somehow turned them all blank.
“Duddits, how are you making out?” Owen said, looking into the rearview mirror.
“I o-ay,” Duddits said, and immediately began to shiver. On his lap was his yellow lunchbox and the brown bag with his medicines in it… his medicines and that odd little string thing. Surrounding him was the voluminous blue duffel coat, yet inside it, he still shivered.
He’s going fast, Owen thought, as Henry began to swab his old friend’s face again.
The Humvee skidded on a slick patch, danced on the edge of disaster-a crash at seventy miles an hour would probably kill them all, and even if it didn’t, it would put paid to any final thin chance they might have of stopping Mr Gray-and then came back under control again.