because this thing was never born. It is a child’s rendering of an alien, trolled directly from the subconscious minds of those who first came in contact with the byrum. They never existed as actual creatures, aliens, ETs. The grays as physical beings were always created out of the human imagination, out of the dreamcatcher, and knowing this affords Jonesy a measure of relief. He wasn’t the only one who got fooled. At least there is that.
Something else pleases him: the look in those horrid black eyes.
It’s fear.
“I’m locked and loaded,” Freddy said quietly, drawing to a stop behind the Humvee they had chased all these miles.
“Outstanding,” Kurtz said. “Recon that HMW. I’ll cover you.” “Right.” Freddy looked at Perlmutter, whose belly was swelling again, then at Owen’s Hummer. The reason for the rifle-fire they’d heard earlier was clear now: the Hummer had been shot up pretty good. The only question left to be answered was who had been on the giving end and who on the receiving. Tracks led away from the Hummer, growing indistinct under the rapid snowfall, but for now clear enough to read. A single set. Boots. Probably Owen.
“Go on now, Freddy!”
Freddy got out into the snow. Kurtz slid out behind him and Freddy heard him rack the slide of his personal. Depending on the nine-millimeter. Well, maybe that was all right; he was good with it, no question of that.
Freddy felt a momentary coldness down his spine, as if Kurtz had the nine leveled there. Right there. But that was ridiculous, wasn’t it? Owen, yes, but Owen was different. Owen had crossed the line.
Freddy hurried to the Hummer, bent low, carbine held at chest level. He didn’t like having Kurtz behind him, that was undeniable. No, he didn’t like that at all.
As the two boys advance on the overgrown bed, Mr Gray begins to push the CALL button repeatedly, but nothing happens. I
Like nothing, he thinks.
Beneath Jonesy’s hands, Mr Gray be ins to struggle and thrash.
Somewhere a monitor begins to beep frantically, as if this creature actually has a heart, and that it has now stopped beating.
Jonesy looks down at the dying monster and wishes only for this to be over.
Mr Gray got the dog to the side of the shaft he had partially uncovered. Coming up through the narrow black semicircle was the steady hollow rush of running water and a waft of dank, cold air.
If it were done when “tis done, then “twere well it were done quickly-that from a box marked SHAKESPEARE. The dog’s rear legs were bicycling rapidly, and Mr Gray could hear the wet sound of tearing flesh as the byrum thrust with one end and chewed with the other, forcing itself out. Beneath the dog’s tail, the chattering had started, a sound like an angry monkey. He had to get it into the shaft before it could emerge; it did not absolutely have to be born the water, but its odds of survival would be much higher if it was.
Mr Gray tried to shove the dog’s head into the gap between the cover and the concrete and couldn’t get it through. The neck bent and the dog’s senselessly grinning snout twisted upward. Although still sleeping (or perhaps it was now unconscious) it began to utter a series of low, choked barks.
And it wouldn’t go through the gap.
“
“
The words stopped in his throat. All at once he couldn’t yell anymore, although he dearly wanted to; how he loved to yell, and pound his fists on things (even a dying pregnant dog)! All at once he couldn’t
He expected no answer, but one came-a stranger’s voice, full of cold rage:
The flailing, three-fingered hands of the gray thing in the hospital bed come up and actually push the pillow aside for a moment. The black eyes starting from the otherwise featureless face are frantic with fear and rage. It gasps for breath. Considering that it doesn’t really exist at all-not even in Jonesy’s brain, at least as a physical artifact-it is fighting furiously for its life. Henry cannot sympathize, but he understands. It wants what Jonesy wants, what Duddits wants… what even Henry himself wants, for in spite of all his black thoughts, has his heart not gone on beating? Has his liver not gone on washing his blood? Has his body not gone on fighting its unseen wars against everything from the common cold to cancer to the byrus itself? The body is either stupid or infinitely wise, but in either case it is spared the terrible witchery of thought; it only knows how to stand its ground and fight until it can fight no more. If Mr Gray was ever any different, he is different no longer. He wants to live.
Mr Gray’s airway opened. He got one breath of the cold shaft-house air… two… and then the airway closed up again. They were smothering him, stifling him, killing him.
He yanked the dog back and turned it sideways; it was almost like watching a man already late for his plane trying to make one last bulky article fit into his suitcase.
Yes. It would. Even if he had to collapse the dog’s bulging middle with Jonesy’s hands and allow the byrum to squirt free. One way or another, the damned thing
Face swelling, eyes bulging, breath stopped, a single fat vein swelling in the middle of Jonesy’s forehead, Mr Gray shoved Lad deeper into the crack and then began to thump the dog’s chest with Jonesy’s fists.
Freddy Johnson pointed his carbine inside the abandoned Hummer while Kurtz, stationed shrewdly behind him (in that way it was like the attack on the grayboy ship all over again), waited to see what would develop.
“Two guys, boss. Looks like Owen decided to put out the trash before moving on.”
“Dead?”
“They look pretty dead to me. Got to be Devlin and the other one, the one they stopped for.”
Kurtz joined Freddy, took a brief glance in through the shattered window, and nodded. They looked pretty dead to him, too, a pair of white moles lying entwined in the back seat, covered with blood and shattered glass. He raised his nine-millimeter to make sure of them one each in the head couldn’t hurt-then lowered it again. Owen might not have heard their engine. The snow was amazingly heavy and wet, an acoustical blanket, and that was very possible. But he would hear gunshots. He turned toward the path instead.
“Lead the way, buck, and mind the footing-looks slippery. And we may still have the element of surprise. I think we should bear that in mind, don’t you?” Freddy nodded.Kurtz smiled. It turned his face into a skull’s face. “With any luck, buck, Owen Underhill will be in hell before he even knows he’s dead.”
The TV remote, a rectangle of black plastic covered with byrus, is lying on Mr Gray’s bedtable. Jonesy grabs it. In a voice that sounds eerily like Beaver’s, he says “Fuck this shit” and slams it down as hard as he can on the table’s edge, like a man cracking the shell of a hardboiled egg. The controller shatters, spilling its batteries and leaving a jagged plastic wand in Jonesy’s hand. He reaches below the pillow Henry is holding over the thrashing thing’s face. He hesitates for just a moment, remembering his first meeting with Mr Gray his
