Dreamcatcher

was Kansas…”

Kurtz, a pretty decent storyteller, took them back to Kansas during the Korean conflict. Ed Davis and Franklin Roberts had owned similar smallhold farms not far from Emporia, and not far from the farm owned by Kurtz’s family (which had not quite been named Kurtz). Davis, never bolted together tightly in the first place, grew increasingly certain that his neighbor, the offensive Roberts, was out to steal his farm. Roberts was spreading tales about him in town, Ed Davis claimed. Roberts was poisoning his crops, Roberts was putting pressure on the Bank of Emporia to foreclose the Davis farm.

What Ed Davis had done, Kurtz said, was to catch him a rabid raccoon and put it in the henhouse-his own henhouse. The coon had slaughtered those chickens right and left, and when he was plumb wore out with killing, praise God, Farmer Davis had blown Mr Coon’s black-and-gray-striped head off.

They were silent in the rolling, chilly Humvee, listening.

Ed Davis had loaded all those dead chickens-and the dead raccoon-into the back of his International Harvester and had driven over onto his neighbor’s property with them and by the dark of the moon had chucked his truckload of corpses down both of Franklin Roberts’s wells-the stock-well and the house-well. Then, the next night, high on whiskey and laughing like hell, Davis had called his enemy on the phone and told him what he had done. Been pretty hot today, ain’t it? the lunatic had inquired, laughing so hard Franklin Roberts could barely make him out. Which did you and them girls of yours get, Roberts? The coon-water or the chicken-water? I can’t tell you, because I don’t remember which ones I chucked down which well! Ain’t that a shame?

Gene Cambry’s mouth was trembling at the left corner, like the mouth of a man who has suffered a serious stroke. The Ripley growing along the crease of his brow was now so advanced that Mr Cambry looked like a man whose forehead had been split open.

“What are you saying?” he asked. “Are you saying me and Pearly are no better than a couple of rabid chickens?''Watch how you talk to the boss, Cambry,” Freddy said. His mask bobbed up and down on his face.

“Hey man, fuck the boss. This mission is over'

Freddy raised a hand as if to swat Cambry over the back of the seat. Cambry jutted his truculent, frightened face forward to shorten the range. “Go on, Bubba. Or maybe you want to check your hand first, make sure there aren’t no cuts on it. Cause one little cut is all it takes.”

Freddy’s hand wavered in the air for a moment, then returned to the wheel.

“And while you’re at it, Freddy, you want to watch your back. You think the boss is going to leave witnesses, you’re crazy.”

“Crazy, yes,” Kurtz said warmly, and chuckled. “Lots of farmers go crazy, or they did then before Willie Nelson and Farm Aid, God bless his heart. Stress of the life, I suppose. Poor old Ed Davis wound up in the VA-he was in Big Two, you know-and not long after the thing with the wells, Frank Roberts sold out, moved to Wichita, got work as a rep for Allis-Chalmers. And neither well was actually polluted, either. He had a state water inspector out to do some tests, and the inspector said the water was good. Rabies doesn’t spread like that, anyway, he said. I wonder if the Ripley does?”

“At least call it by its right name,” Cambry nearly spat. “It’s byrus.” “Byrus or Ripley, it’s all the same,” Kurtz said. “These fellows are trying to poison our wells. To pollute our precious fluids, as somebody or other once said.”

“You don’t care a damn about any of that!” Pearly spat-Freddy actually jumped at the venom in Perlmutter’s voice. “All you care about is catching Underhill.” He paused, then added in a mournful voice: “You are crazy, boss.”

“Owen!” Kurtz cried, chipper as a chipmunk. “Almost forgot about him! Where is he, fellows?”

“Up ahead,” Cambry said sullenly. “Stuck in a fucking snowbanks”

“Outstanding!” Kurtz shouted. “Closing in!”

“Don’t get your face fixed. He’s pulling it out. Got a Hummer, just like us. You can drive one of those things straight through downtown hell if you know what you’re doing. And he seems to.”

“Shame. Did we make up any ground?”

“Not much,” Pearly said, then shifted, grimaced, and passed more gas.

“Fuuck,” Freddy said, low.

“Give me the mike, Freddy. Common channel. Our friend Owen likes the common channel.”

Freddy handed the mike back on its kinked cord, made an adjustment to the transmitter bolted to the dash, then said, “Give it a try, boss. “Kurtz depressed the button on the side of the mike. “Owen.” You there, buck?”

Silence, static, and the monotonous howl of the wind. Kurtz was about to depress the SEND button and try again when Owen came back-clear and crisp, moderate static but no distortion. Kurtz’s face didn’t change-it held the same look of pleasant interest-but his heartbeat kicked up several notches.

“I’m here.”

“Lovely to hear you, bucko! Lovely! I estimate you are our location plus about fifty. We just passed Exit 39, so I’d say that’s about right, wouldn’t you?” They had actually just passed Exit 36, and Kurtz thought they were quite a bit closer than fifty miles. Half that, maybe.

Silence from the other end.

“Pull over, buck,” Kurtz advised Owen in his kindliest, sanest voice. “It’s not too late to save something out of this mess. Our careers are shot, no question about that, I guess-dead chickens down a poisoned well-but if you’ve got a mission, let me share it. I’m an old man, son, and all I want is to salvage something a little decent from-”

“Cut the shit, Kurtz.” Loud and clear from all six of the Hummer’s speakers, and Cambry actually had the nerve to laugh. Kurtz marked him with a vile look. Under other circumstances that look would have turned Cambry’s black skin gray with terror, but this was not other circumstances, other circumstances had been cancelled, and Kurtz felt an uncharacteristic bolt of fear. It was one thing to know intellectually that things had gone tits-up; it was another when the truth landed in your gut like a heavy sack of meal.

“Owen… laddie-buck-”

“Listen to me, Kurtz. I don’t know if there’s a sane brain-cell left in your head, but if there is, I hope it’s paying attention. I’m with a man named Henry Devlin. Ahead of us-probably a hundred ahead of us now-is a friend of his named Gary Jones. Only it’s not really him anymore. He’s been taken over by an alien intelligence he calls Mr Gray.”

Gary… Gray, Kurtz thought. By their anagrams shall ye know em

“Nothing that happened in the Jefferson Tract matters,” came the voice from the speakers. “The slaughter you planned is redundant, Kurtz-kill em or let em die on their own, they’re not a threat.”

“You hear that?” Perlmutter asked hysterically. “No threat! No-”

“Shut up,” Freddy said, and backhanded him. Kurtz hardly noticed. He was sitting bolt-upright in the back seat, eyes glaring. Redundant? Was Owen Underhill telling him that the most important mission of his life had been redundant?

“-environment, do you understand? They can’t live in this ecosystem. Except for Gray. Because he happened to find a host who is fundamentally different. So here it is. If you ever stood for anything, Kurtz-if you can stand for anything now-you’ll stop chasing us and let us take care of business. Let us take care of Mr Jones and Mr Gray. You may be able to catch us, but it’s extremely doubtful that you can catch them. They’re too far south. And we think Gray has a plan. Something that will work.”

“Owen, you’re overwrought,” Kurtz said. “Pull over. Whatever needs to be done, we’ll do it together. We’ll-” “If you care, you’ll quit,” Owen said. His voice was flat. “That’s it. Bottom line. I’m over and out.” “Don’t do that, buck!” Kurtz shouted. “Don’t do that, I forbid you to do that!'There was a click, very loud, and then hissy silence from the speaker. “He’s gone,” Perlmutter said. “Pulled the mike out. Turned off the receiver. Gone.” “But you heard him, didn’t you?” Cambry asked. “There’s no sense in this. Call it off. “A pulse beat in the center of Kurtz’s forehead. “As though I’d take his word for anything, after what he participated in back there.”

“But he was telling the truth!” Cambry brayed. He turned fully to Kurtz for the first time, his eyes wide, the corners clogged with dabs of the Ripley, or the byrus, or whatever you wanted to call it. His spittle sprayed Kurtz’s cheeks, his forehead, the surface of his breathing mask. “I heard his thoughts! So did Pearly! HE WAS TELLING THE STONE TRUTH! HE-”

Once again moving with a speed that was eerie, Kurtz drew the nine-millimeter from the holster on his belt and fired. The report inside the Humvee was deafening. Freddy shouted in surprise and jerked the wheel again, sending the Humvee into a diagonal skid through the snow. Perlmutter screamed, turning his horrified, red-speckled face to look into the back seat. For Cambry it was merciful-his brains were out the back of his head, through the broken window, and blowing in the storm in the time it might have taken him to raise a protesting hand.

Didn’t see that coming at all, did you buck? Kurtz thought. Telepathy didn’t help you one damn bit there, did it?

“No,” Pearly said dolorously. “You can’t do much with someone who doesn’t know what he’s going to do until it’s done. You can’t do much with a crazyman.” The skid was back under control. Freddy was a superior motorman, even when he had been startled out of his wits. Kurtz pointed the nine at Perlmutter. “Call me crazy again. Let me hear you.”

“Crazy,” Pearly said immediately. His lips stretched in a smile, opening over a line of teeth in which there were now several vacancies. “Crazy-crazy-crazy. But you won’t shoot me for it. You shot your backup, and that’s all you can afford.” His voice was rising dangerously. Cambry’s corpse lolled back against the door, tufts of hair blowing around his misshapen head in the cold wind coming through the window.

“Hush, Pearly,” Kurtz said. He felt better now, back in control again. Cambry had been worth that much, at least. “Get a grip on your clipboard and just hush. Freddy?”

“Yes, boss.”

“Are you still with me?”

“All the way, boss.”

“Owen Underhill is a traitor, Freddy, can you give me a big praise God on that?”

“Praise God.” Freddy sat ramrod-straight behind the wheel, staring into the snow and the cones of the Humvee’s headlights.

“Owen Underhill has betrayed his country and his fellow-men. He-”

“He betrayed you,” Perlmutter said, almost in a whisper.

“That’s right, Pearly, and you don’t want to overestimate your own importance, son, that’s one thing you don’t want to do, because you never know what a crazyman is going to do next, you said so yourself”

Kurtz looked at the back of Freddy’s broad neck. “We’re going to take Owen Underhill down-him and this Devlin fellow, too, if Devlin’s still with him. Understood?” “Understood, boss.”

“Meanwhile, let’s lighten the load, shall we?” Kurtz produced the handcuff key from his pocket. He reached behind Cambry, wriggled his hand into the cooling goo that hadn’t exited through the window, and at last found the doorhandle. He unlocked the cuff and five seconds or so later Mr Cambry, praise God, rejoined the food-chain.