He clicked the SEND/SQUEAL button twice. Freddy Johnson came back quickly and not sounding too sleepy… oh, but now that crunch time was here, how Kurtz (who had been born Robert Coonts, name, name, what’s in a name) longed for Underhill. Owen, Owen, he thought, why did you have to skid just when I needed you the most, son?
“Boss?”
“I’m moving Imperial Valley up to six. That’s Imperial Valley at oh-six-hundred, come back and acknowledge me.”
He had to listen to why it was impossible, crap Owen would not have spouted in his weakest dream. He gave Freddy roughly forty seconds to vent before saying, “Close your clam, you son of a bitch.”
Shocked silence from Freddy’s end.
“We’ve got something brewing here. I don’t know what, but it woke me up out of a sound sleep with the alarm bells ringing. Now I put all you fellows and girls together for a reason, and if you expect to be still drawing breath come suppertime, you want to get them moving. Tell Gallagher she may wind up on point. Acknowledge me, Freddy.”
“Boss, I acknowledge. One thing you should know-we’ve had four suicides that I know of There may have been more. “Kurtz was neither surprised nor displeased. Under certain circumstances, suicide wasn’t just acceptable, but noble-the true gentleman’s final act.
“From the choppers?”
“Affirmative.”
“No Imperial Valleys.”
“No, boss, no Valleys.”
“All right. Floor it, buck. We got trouble. I don’t know what it is, but I know it’s coming. Big thunder.”
Kurtz tossed the walkie back on the table and continued dressing. He wanted another cigarette, but they were all gone.
6
A pretty good herd of milkers had once been stabled in Old Man Gosselin’s barn, and while the interior might not have passed USDA standards as it now stood, the building was still in okay shape. The soldiers had strung some high-wattage bulbs that cast a brilliant glare over the stalls, the milking stations in the parlor, and the upper and lower lofts. They had also put in a number of heaters, and the barn glowed with a pulsing, almost feverish warmth. Henry unzipped his coat as soon as he stepped in, but still felt the sweat break out on his face. He supposed Owen’s pills had something to do with that-he’d taken another outside the barn.
His first thought as he looked around was how similar the barn was to the various refugee camps he had seen: Bosnian Serbs in Macedonia, Haitian rebels after Uncle Sugar’s Marines had landed in Port-au-Prince, the African exiles who had left their home countries because of disease, famine, civil war, or a combination of all three. You got used to seeing such things on the TV news, but the pictures always came from far away; the horror with which one viewed them was almost clinical. But this wasn’t a place you needed a passport to visit. This was a cowbarn in New England. The people packed into it weren’t wearing rags and dirty dashikis but parkas from Bean’s, cargo pants (so perfect for those extra shotgun shells) from Banana Republic, underwear from Fruit of the Loom. The look was the same, though. The only difference he could discern was how surprised they all still seemed. This wasn’t supposed to be happening in the land of Sprint Nickel Nights.
The internees pretty well covered the main floor, where hay had been spread (jackets on top of that). They were sleeping in little clumps or family groups. There were more of them in the lofts, and three or four to each of the forty stalls. The room was full of snores and gurgles and the groans of people dreaming badly. Somewhere a child was weeping. And there was piped-in Muzak: to Henry, this was the final bizarre touch. Right now the dozing doomed in Old Man Gosselin’s barn were listening to the Fred Waring Orchestra float through a violin-heavy version of “Some Enchanted Evening”.
Hyped as he was, everything stood out with brilliant, exclamatory clarity. All the orange jackets and hats! he thought. Man! It’s Halloween in hell!
There was also a fair amount of the red-gold stuff. Henry saw patches growing on cheeks, in ears, between fingers; he also saw patches growing on beams and on the electrical cords of several dangling lights. The predominant smell in here was hay, but Henry had no trouble picking up the smell of sulfur-tinged ethyl alcohol under it. As well as the snores, there was a lot of farting going on-it sounded like six or seven seriously untalented musicians tootling away on tubas and saxophones. Under other circumstances it would have been funny… or perhaps even in these, to a person who hadn’t seen that weasel-thing wriggling and snarling on Jonesy’s bloody bed.
How many of them are incubating those things? Henry wondered. The answer didn’t matter, he supposed, because the weasels were ultimately harmless. They might be able to live outside their hosts in this barn, but outside in the storm, where the wind was blowing a gale and the chill-factor was below zero, they wouldn’t have a chance.
He needed to talk to these people
No, that wasn’t right. What he needed to do was scare the living hell out of them. Had to get them moving in spite of the warmth in here and the cold outside. There had been cows in here before; there were cows here again. He had to change them back into people scared, pissed-off people. He could do it, but not alone. And the clock was ticking, Owen Underhill had given him half an hour. Henry estimated that a third of that was already gone.
Got to have a megaphone, he thought. That’s step one.
He looked around, spotted a burly, balding man sleeping on his side to the left of the door leading to the milking parlor, and walked over to take a closer look. He thought it was one of the guys he’d kicked out of the shed, but he wasn’t sure. When it came to hunters, burly, balding men were a dime a peck.
But it was Charles, and the byrus was re-thatching what old Charlie no doubt referred to as his “solar sex-panel”. Who needs Rogaine when you’ve got this shit going for you? Henry thought, then grinned.
Charles was good; better yet, Marsha was sleeping nearby, holding hands with Darren, Mr Bomber-joint-from-Newton. Byrus was now growing down one of Marsha’s smooth cheeks. Her husband was still clean, but his brother-in-law-Bill, had that been his name?-was lousy with the stuff. Best-in-show, Henry thought.
He knelt by Bill, took his byrus-speckled hand, and spoke down into the tangled jungle of his bad dreams. Wake up, Bill. Wakey-wakey, We have to get out of here. And if you help me, we can. Wake up, Bill.
Wake up and be a hero.
7
It happened with a speed that was exhilarating.
Henry felt Bill’s mind rising toward his, floundering out of the nightmares that had entangled it, reaching for Henry the way a drowning man will reach for the lifeguard who has swum out to save him. Their minds connected like couplers on a pair of freight-cars.
Don’t talk, don’t try to talk, Henry told him. Just hoId on. We need Marsha and Charles. The four of us should be enough.
What-
No time, Billy. Let’s go.
Bill took his sister-in-law’s hand. Marsha’s eyes flashed open at once, almost as if she had been waiting for this, and Henry felt all the dials inside his head turn up another notch. She wasn’t supporting as much growth as Bill, but perhaps had more natural talent. She took Charles’s hand without a single question. Henry had an idea she had already grasped what was going on here, and what needed to be done. Thankfully, she also grasped the necessity of speed. They were going to bomb these people, then swing them like a club.
Charles sat with a jerk, eyes wide and bulging from their fatty sockets. He got up as if someone had goosed him. Now all four of them were on their feet, hands joined like participants in a s6xance… which, Henry reflected, this almost was.
Give it to me, he told them, and they did. The feeling was like having a magic wand placed in his hand.
Listen to me, he called.
Heads rose; some people sat up out of sound sleeps as if they had been electrified.
Listen to me and boost me…boost me up! Do you understand? Boost me up! This is your only chance, so BOOST ME UP!
They did it as instinctively as people whistling a tune or clapping to a beat. If he’d given them time to think about it, it probably would have been harder, perhaps even impossible, but he didn’t. Most of them had been sleeping, and he caught the infected ones, the telepaths, with their minds wide open.
Operating on instinct himself, Henry sent a series of images: soldiers wearing masks surrounding the barn, most with guns, some with backpacks connected to long wands. He made the faces of the soldiers into editorial-page caricatures of cruelty. At an amplified order, the wands unleashed streams of liquid fire: napalm. The sides of the barn and roof caught at once.