Something had come out of her. Something-
Yes. Something. And it’s watching me right now.
Pete looked into the woods. Nothing. The flood of animals had dried up. He was alone.
Except I’m not.
No, he wasn’t. Something was out there, something that didn’t do well in the cold, something that preferred warm, wet places. Except-
Except it got too big. And it ran out of food.
“Are you out there?”
Pete thought that calling out like that would make him feel foolish, but it didn’t. What it made him feel was more frightened than ever.
His eye fastened on a sketchy track of that mildewy stuff. It stretched away from Becky-yeah, she was a Becky, all right, as Becky as Becky could be-and around the comer of the lean-to. A moment later Pete heard a scaly scraping sound as something slithered on the tin roof He craned up, following the sound with his eyes.
“Go away,” he whispered. “Go away and leave me alone. I… I’m fucked up.”
There was another brief slither as the thing moved farther up the tin. Yes, he was fucked up. Unfortunately, he was also food. The thing up there slithered again. Pete didn’t think it would wait long, maybe couldn’t wait long, not up there; it would be like a gecko in a refrigerator. What it was going to do was drop on him. And now he realized a terrible thing: he had gotten so fixated on the beer that he had forgotten the fucking guns.
His first impulse was to crawl deeper into the lean-to, but that might be a mistake, like running into a blind alley. He grabbed the jutting end of one of the fresh branches he’d just put on the fire instead. He didn’t take it out, not yet, just made a loose fist around it. The other end was burning briskly. “Come on,” he said to the tin roof “You like it hot? I’ve got something hot for you. Come on and get it. Yum-fuckin-yum.”
Nothing. Not from the roof, anyway. There was a soft flump of snow falling from one of the pines behind him as the lower branches shed their burden. Pete’s hand tightened on his makeshift torch, half-lifting it from the fire. Then he let it settle back in a little swirl of sparks. “Come on, motherfucker. I’m hot, I’m tasty, and I’m waiting.” Nothing. But it was up there. It couldn’t wait long, he was sure of it. Soon it would come.
3
Time passed. Pete wasn’t sure how much; his watch had given up entirely. Sometimes his thoughts seemed to intensify, as they sometimes had when he and the others were hanging with Duddits (although as they grew older and Duddits stayed the same, there had been less of that-it was as though their changing brains and bodies had lost the knack of picking up Duddits’s strange signals). This was like that, but not exactly like that. Something new, maybe. Maybe even something to do with the lights in the sky. He was aware that Beaver was dead and that something terrible might have happened to Jonesy, but he didn’t know what.
Whatever had happened, Pete thought Henry knew about it, too, although not clearly; Henry was deep inside his own head and he thought Banbury Cross, Banbury Cross, ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross.
The stick burned down further, closer to his hand, and Pete wondered what he’d do if it burned down too far to be of use, if the thing up there could outwait him after all. And then a new thought came to him, bright as day and red with panic. It filled his head and he began to cry it aloud, masking the sound of the thing on the roof as it slithered quickly down the slope of the tin.
“Please don’t hurt us! Ne nous blessez pas!”
But they would, they would, because… what?
Because they are not helpless little ETs, boys, waiting around for someone to give them a New England Tel phone card so they can phone home, they are a disease. They are cancer, praise Jesus, and boys, we’re one big hot radioactive shot of chemotherapy. Do you hear me, boys?
Pete didn’t know if they did, the boys to whom the voice spoke, but he did. They were coming, the boys were coming, the Crimson Pirates were coming and not all the begging in the world would stop them. And still they begged, and Pete begged with them.
“Please don’t hurt us! Please! S’il vous plait! Ne nous blessez pas! Ne nous faites pas mal nous sommes sans defense! “Weeping now. “Please! For the love of God, we’re helpless!”
In his mind he saw the hand, the dog-turd, the weeping nearly naked boy. And all the time the thing on the roof was slithering, dying but not helpless, stupid but not entirely stupid, getting behind Pete while he screamed, while he lay on his side by the dead woman, listening as some apocalyptic slaughter began.
Cancer, said the man with the white eyelashes.
“Please!” he screamed. “Please, we’re helpless!”
But, lie or the truth, it was too late.
4
The snowmobile had passed Henry’s hiding place without slowing, and the sound of it was now receding to the west. It was safe to come out, but Henry didn’t come out. Couldn’t come out. The intelligence which had replaced Jonesy hadn’t sensed him, either because it was distracted or because Jonesy had somehow-might somehow still be
But no. The idea that there could be any of Jonesy left inside that terrible cloud was so much dreamwork.
And now that the thing was gone-receding, at least there were the voices. They filled Henry’s head, making him feel half-mad with their babble, as Duddits’s crying had always made him feel half-mad, at least until puberty had ended most of that crap. One of the voices belonged to a man who said something about a fungus
(dies easily unless it gets on a living host)
and then something about a New England Tel phone card and… chemotherapy? Yes, a big hot radioactive shot. It was the voice, Henry thought, of a lunatic. He had treated enough of them to judge, God knew.
The other voices were the ones which made him question his own sanity. He didn’t know all of them, but he knew some: Walter Cronkite, Bugs Bunny, Jack Webb, Jimmy Carter, a woman he thought was Margaret Thatcher. Sometimes the voices spoke in English, sometimes in French.
“II n’y a pas d’infection ici,” Henry said, and then began to weep, He was astounded and exhilarated to find there were still tears in his heart, from which he thought all tears and all laughter-true laughter-had fled. Tears of horror, tears of pity, tears that opened the stony ground of self-regarding obsession and burst the rock inside. “There is no infection here, please, oh God stop it, don’t, don’t, nous sommes sans defense, NOUS SOMMES SANS-”
Then the human thunder began in the west and Henry put his hands to his head, thinking that the screams and the pain in there would tear it apart. The bastards were-
5
The bastards were slaughtering them.
Pete sat by the fire, unmindful of the bellows of pain from his separated knee, unaware that he was now holding the branch from the fire up beside his temple. The screams inside his head could not quite drown out the sound of the machine-guns in the west, big machine-guns,.50s. Now the cries-please don’t hurt us, we are defenseless, there is no infection-began to fade into panic; it wasn’t working, nothing could work, the deal was done.
Movement caught Pete’s eye and he turned just as the thing that had been on the roof struck at him. He caught a blurred glimpse of a slender, weaselly body that seemed powered by a muscular tail rather than legs, and then its teeth sank into his ankle. He shrieked and yanked his good leg toward him so hard he almost clocked himself in the chin with his own knee. The thing came with it, clinging like a leech. Were these the things that were begging for mercy? Fuck them, if they were. Fuck them!
He reached for it with his right hand, the one he’d cut on the Bud bottle, without even thinking about it; the torch he continued to hold up at the side of his head with his uninjured left. He seized something that felt like cool, fur-covered jelly. The thing let go of his ankle at once, and Pete caught just a glimpse of expressionless black eyes-shark’s eyes, eagle eyes-before it sank the needle-nest of its teeth into his clutching hand, tearing it wide open along the perforation of the previous cut.
The agony was like the end of the world. The thing’s head if it had one-was buried in the hand, ripping and tearing, digging deeper. Blood flew in splattery fans as Pete tried to shake it off, stippling the snow and the sawdusty tarp and the dead woman’s parka. Droplets flew into the fire and hissed like fat in a hot skillet. Now the thing was making a ferocious chattering sound. Its tail, as thick as a moray eel’s body, wrapped around Pete’s thrashing arm, endeavoring to keep it still.