“Hey there,” the soldier said, amiably enough. “It’s the smartass. Want a hot dog, smartass?” He laughed.
“Already got one,” Henry said, smiling himself And Beaver popped out of his mouth, as Beaver had a way of doing. “Fuck off Freddy.”
The soldier stopped laughing. “Let’s see how smart your ass is twelve hours from now,” he said. The image that went floating by, home on the river between this man’s ears, was of a truck filled with bodies, white limbs all tangled together. “You growing the Ripley yet, smartass?”
Henry thought: the byrus. 7lat’s what he means. The byrus is what it’s really called. Jonesy knows.
Henry didn’t reply and the soldier started away, wearing the comfortable look of a man who has won on points. Curious, Henry summoned all his concentration and visualized a rifle-Jonesy’s Garand, as a matter of fact. He thought: I have a gun. I’m going to kill you with it the second you turn your back on me, asshole.
The soldier swung around again, the comfortable look going the way of the grin and the laughter. What replaced it was a look of doubt and suspicion. “What’d you say, smartass? You say something?”
“Just wondering if you got your share of that girl-you know, the one Frankie broke in. Did he give you sloppy seconds?”
For a moment, the soldier’s face was idiotic with surprise. Then it filled in with black Italian rage. He raised his rifle. To Henry, its muzzle looked like a smile. He unzipped his jacket and held it open in the thickening snow. “Go on,” he said, and laughed. “Go on, Rambo, do your thing.”
Frankie’s brother held the gun on Henry a moment longer, and then Henry felt the man’s rage pass. It had been close-he had seen the soldier trying to think of what he would say, some plausible story-but he had taken a moment too long and his forebrain had pulled the red beast back to heel. It was all so familiar. The Richie Grenadeaus never died, not really. They were the world’s dragon’s teeth.
“Tomorrow,” the soldier said. “Tomorrow’s time enough for you, smartass.”
This time Henry let him go-no more teasing the red beast, although God knew it would have been easy enough. He had learned something, too… or confirmed what he’d already suspected. The soldier had heard his thought, but not clearly. If he’d heard it clearly he would have turned around a lot faster. Nor had he asked Henry how Henry knew about his brother Frankie. Because on some level the soldier knew what Henry did: they had been infected with telepathy, the whole walking bunch of them-they had caught it like an annoying low-grade virus.
“Only I got it worse,” he said, zipping his coat back up again. So had Pete and Beaver and Jonesy. But Pete and the Beav were both dead now, and Jonesy… Jonesy…
“Jonesy got it worst of all,” Henry said. And where was Jonesy now?
South. Jonesy had hooked back south. These guys” precious quarantine had been breached. Henry guessed they had foreseen that that might happen. It didn’t worry them. They thought one or two breaches wouldn’t matter.
Henry thought they were wrong.
6
Owen stood with a mug of coffee in his hand, waiting until the guys from the infirmary were gone with their burden, Melrose’s sobs mercifully reduced to mutters and moans by a shot of morphine. Pearly followed them out and then Owen was alone with Kurtz.
Kurtz sat in his rocker, looking up at Owen Underhill with curious, head-cocked amusement. The raving crazyman was gone again, put away like a Halloween mask.
“I’m thinking of a number,” Kurtz said. “What is it?”
“Seventeen,” Owen said. “You see it in red. Like on the side of a fire engine.”
Kurtz nodded, pleased. “You try sending one to me.” Owen visualized a speed limit sign: 60 MPH.
“Six,” Kurtz said after a moment. “Black on white.”
“Close enough, boss.”
Kurtz drank some coffee. His was in a mug with I LUV MY GRANDPA printed on the side. Owen sipped with honest pleasure. It was a dirty night and a dirty job, and Freddy’s coffee wasn’t bad.
Kurtz had found time to put on his coverall. Now he reached into the inner pocket and brought out a large bandanna. He regarded it for a moment, then got to his knees with a grimace (it was no secret that the old man had arthritis) and began to wipe up the splatters of Melrose’s blood. Owen, who thought himself surely unshockable at this point, was shocked.
“Sir… Oh, fuck. “Boss…”
“Stow it,” Kurtz said without looking up. He moved from spot to spot, as assiduous as any washerwoman. “My father always said that you should clean up your own messes. Might make you stop and think a little bit the next time. What was my father’s name, buck?”
Owen looked for it and caught just a glimpse, like a glimpse of slip under a woman’s dress. “Paul?” “Patrick, actually… but close. Anderson believes it’s a wave, and it’s expending its force now,
A telepathic wave. Do you find that an awesome concept, Owen?”
“Yes.”
Kurtz nodded without looking up, wiping and cleaning. “More awesome in concept than in fact, however-do you also find that?”
Owen laughed. The old man had lost none of his capacity to surprise. Not playing with a full deck, people sometimes said of unstable individuals. The trouble with Kurtz, Owen reckoned, was that he was playing with more than a full deck. A few extra aces in there. Also a few extra deuces, and everyone knew that deuces were wild.
“Sit down, Owen. Drink your coffee on your ass like a normal person and let me do this, I need to.”
Owen thought maybe he did. He sat down and drank the coffee. Five minutes passed in this fashion, then Kurtz got painfully back to his feet. Holding the bandanna fastidiously by one comer, he carried it to the kitchen, dropped it into the trash, and returned to his rocker. He took a sip of his coffee, grimaced, and put it aside. “Cold.”
Owen rose. “I’d get you a fresh-”
“No. Sit down. We need to talk.” Owen sat.
“We had a little confrontation out there at the ship, you and I, didn’t we?”
“I wouldn’t say-”
“No, I know you wouldn’t, but I know what went on and so do you. When the situation’s hot, tempers also get hot. But we’re past that now. We have to be past it because I’m the OIC and you’re my second and we’ve still got this job to finish. Can we work together to do that?”
“Yes, sir.” Fuck, there it was again. “Boss, I mean.”
Kurtz favored him with a wintry smile.
“I lost control just now.” Charming, frank, open-eyed and honest. This had fooled Owen for a lot of years. It did not fool him now. “I was going along, drawing the usual caricature-two parts Patton, one part Rasputin, add water, stir and serve-and I just… whew! I just lost it. You think I’m crazy, don’t you?”
Careful, careful. There was telepathy in this room, honest-to-God telepathy, and Owen had no idea how deeply Kurtz might be able to see into him. “Yes, sir. A little, sir.”
Kurtz nodded matter-of-factly. “Yes. A little. That pretty well describes it. I’ve been doing this for a long time-men like me are necessary but hard to find, and you have to be a little crazy to do the job and not just high-side it completely. It’s a thin line, that famous thin line the armchair psychologists love to talk about, and never in the history of the world has there been a cleanup job like this one… assuming, that is, the story of Hercules neatening up the Augean Stables is just a myth. I am not asking for your sympathy but for your understanding. If we understand each other, we’ll get through this, the hardest job we’ve ever had, all right. If we don’t…” Kurtz shrugged. “If we don’t, I’ll have to get through it without you. Are you following me?”
Owen doubted if he was, but he saw where Kurtz wanted him to go and nodded. He had read that there was a certain kind of bird that lived in the crocodile’s mouth, at the croc’s sufferance. He supposed that now he must be that kind of bird. Kurtz wanted him to believe he was forgiven for putting the alien broadcast on the common channel-heat of the moment, just as Kurtz had blown off Melrose’s foot in the heat of the moment. And what had happened six years ago in Bosnia? Not a factor now. Maybe it was true. And maybe the crocodile had tired of the bird’s tiresome pecking and was preparing to close its jaws. Owen got no sense of the truth from Kurtz’s mind, and either way it behooved him to be very careful. Careful and ready to fly.