Henry saw it didn’t. Kurtz must never have told Underhill about the operation that would wipe out most of Blue Group. Imperial Valley meant exactly squat to Owen Underhill, and now, in addition to the stitch, Henry had what felt like an iron band around his chest, squeezing and squeezing.
“Stop… Jesus, Underhill… can’t you…?”
Underhill just kept striding along. Underhill wanted to keep his last few illusions. Who could blame him?
Johnson… a few others… at least one’s a woman… could have been you too if you hadn’t tucked up… you crossed the line, that’s what he thinks… not the first time, either… you did it before, at some place like Bossa Nova…”
That earned Henry a sudden sharp look. Progress? Maybe.
“In the end I think even Johnson goes… only Kurtz leaves here alive… the rest nothing but a pile of ashes and bones… your fucking telepathy doesn’t… tell you that, does it… your little parlor-trick mind-reading… won’t even… fucking touch… that…”
The stitch in his side deepened and sank into his right armpit like a claw. At the same time his feet slipped and he went flailing headfirst into a snowdrift. His lungs tore furiously for air and instead got a great gasp of powdery snow.
Henry flailed to his knees, coughing and choking, and saw Underhill’s back just disappearing into the wall of blowing snow. Not knowing what he was going to say, knowing only that it was his last chance, he screamed: “You tried to piss on Mr Rapeloew’s toothbrush and when you couldn’t do that you broke their plate! Broke their plate and ran away! Just like you’re running away now, you fucking coward!”
Ahead of him, barely visible in the snow, Owen Underhill stopped.
4
For a moment he only stood there, his back to Henry, who knelt panting like a dog in the snow with melting, icy water running down his burning face. Henry was aware in a way that was both distant and immediate that the scratch on his leg where the byrus was growing had begun to itch.
At last Underhill turned around and came back. “How do you know about the Rapeloews? The telepathy is fading. You shouldn’t be able to get that deep.”
“I know a lot,” Henry said. He got to his feet and then stood there, gasping and coughing. “Because it runs deep in me. I’m different. My friends and I, we were all different. There were four of us. Two are dead. I’m in here. The fourth one… Mr Underhill, the fourth one is your problem. Not me, not the people you’ve got in the barn or the ones you’re still bringing in, not your Blue Group or Kurtz’s Imperial Valley cadre. Only him.” He struggled, not wanting to say the name-Jonesy was the one to whom he had been the closest, Beaver and Pete were great, but only Jonesy could run with him mind for mind, book for book, idea for idea; only Jonesy also had the knack of dreaming outside the lines as well as seeing the line. But Jonesy was gone, wasn’t he? Henry was quite sure of that. He had been there, a tiny bit of him had been there when the redblack cloud passed Henry, but by now his old friend would have been eaten alive. His heart might still beat and his eyes might still see, but the essential Jonesy was as dead as Pete and the Beav.
“Jonesy’s your problem, Mr Underhill. Gary Jones, of Brookline, Massachusetts. “’Kurtz is a problem, too.” Underhill spoke too softly to be heard over the howling wind, but Henry heard him, anyway-heard him in his mind.
Underhill looked around. Henry followed the shift of his head and saw a few men running down the makeshift avenue between the campers and trailer boxes-no one close. Yet the entire area around the store and the barn was mercilessly bright, and even with the wind he could hear revving engines, the stuttery roar of generators, and men yelling. Someone was giving orders through a bullhorn. The overall effect was eerie, as if the two of them had been trapped by the storm in a place filled with ghosts. The running men even looked like ghosts as they faded into the dancing sheets of snow.
“We can’t talk here,” Underhill said. “Listen to me, and don’t make me repeat a single word, buck.”
And in Henry’s head, where there was now so much input that most of it was tangled into an incomprehensible stew, a thought from Owen Underhill’s mind suddenly rose clear and plain: Buck. His word. I can’t believe I used his word.
“I’m listening,” Henry said.
5
The shed was on the far side of the compound, as far from the barn as it was possible to get, and although the outside was as brilliantly lit as the rest of this hellish concentration camp, the inside was dark and smelled sweetly of old hay. And something else, something a little more acrid.
There were four men and a woman sitting with their backs against the shed’s far wall. They were all dressed in orange hunting togs, and they were passing a joint. There were only two windows in the shed, one facing in toward the corral, the other facing out toward the perimeter fence and the woods beyond. The glass was dirty, and cut the merciless white glare of the sodium lights a little. In the dimness, the faces of the pot-smoking prisoners looked gray, dead already.
“You want a hit?” the one with the Joint asked. He spoke in a strained, miserly voice, holding the smoke in, but he held the joint out willingly enough. It was a bomber, Henry saw, big as a panatela.
“No. I want you all to get out of here.” They looked at him, uncomprehending. The woman was married to the man currently holding the joint. The guy on her left was her brother-in-law. The other two were just along for the ride.
“Go back to the barn,” Henry said.
“No way,” one of the other men said. “Too crowded in there. We prefer to be more exclusive. And since we were here first, I suggest that if you don’t want to be sociable, you should be the one to-”
“I’ve got it,” Henry said. He put a hand on the tee-shirt knotted around his leg. “Byrus. What they call Ripley. Some of you may have it… I think you do, Charles-” He pointed at the fifth man, burly in his parka and balding.
“No!” Charles cried, but the others were already scrambling away from him, the one with the Cambodian cigar (his name was Darren Chiles and he was from Newton, Massachusetts) being careful to hold onto his smoke.
“Yeah, you do,” Henry said. “Major league. So do you, Mona. Mona? No, Marsha. It’s Marsha.”
“I don’t!” she said. She got up, pressing her back against the shed wall and looking at Henry with large, terrified eyes. Doe’s eyes. Soon all the does up here would be dead, and Marsha would be dead, as well. Henry hoped she could not see that thought in his mind. “I’m clean, mister, we’re all clean in here except you!”
She looked at her husband, who was not big, but bigger than Henry. They all were, actually. Not taller, maybe, but bigger. “Throw him out, Dare.”
“There are two types of Ripley,” Henry said, stating as fact what he only believed but the more he thought about it, the more sense it made. “Call them Ripley Prime and Ripley Secondary. I’m pretty sure that if you didn’t get a hot dose-in something you ate or inhaled or something that went live into an open wound-you can get better. You can beat it.”
Now they were all looking at him with those big doe eyes, and Henry felt a moment of surpassing despair. Why couldn’t he just have had a nice quiet suicide?
“I’ve got Ripley Prime,” he said. He unknotted the tee-shirt. None of them would do more than glance at the rip in Henry’s snow-powdered jeans, but Henry took a good big look for all of them. The wound made by the turnsignal stalk had now filled up with byrus. Some of the strands were three inches long, their tips wavering like kelp in a tidal current. He could feel the roots of the stuff working in steadily, deeper and deeper, itching and foaming and fizzing. Trying to think. That was the worst of it-it was trying to think.
Now they were moving toward the shed door, and Henry expected them to bolt as soon as they caught a clear whiff of the cold air. Instead they paused. “mister, can you help us?” Marsha asked in a trembling child’s voice. Darren, her husband, put his arm around her. “I don’t know,” Henry said. “Probably not… but maybe. Go on, now. I’ll be out of here in half an hour, maybe less, but probably it’s best if you stay in the barn with the others. “’Why?” asked Darren Chiles from Newton. And Henry, who had only a ghost of an idea-nothing resembling a plan-said, “I don’t know. I just think it is.” They went out, leaving Henry in possession of the shed.