Dreamcatcher

Henry looked at the man shivering on the other side of the fence and said, “After that
we’re going to be heroes. Not because we want to, but because there are no other options.”
Out in the snow and the wind, Owen was nodding. Nodding and still smiling. “Why
not?” he said. “Just why the fuck not?”
In his mind, glimmering, Henry saw the image of a little boy with a plate raised over
his head. What the man wanted was for the little boy to put the plate back-that plate that

had haunted him so over the years and would forever stay broken.
5
Dreamless since childhood and thus unsane, Kurtz woke as he always did: at one
moment nowhere, at the next completely awake and cognizant of his surroundings. Alive,
hallelujah, oh yes, still in the big time. He turned his head and looked at the clock, but the
goddam thing had gone off again in spite of its fancy anti-magnetic casing, flashing 12-12-

12, like a stutterer caught on one word. He turned on the lamp beside the bed and picked
up the pocket watch on the bedtable. Four-oh-eight.
Kurtz put it down again, swung his bare feet out on to the floor, and stood up. The
first thing he became aware of was the wind, still howling like a woe-dog. The second was
that the faraway mutter of voices in his head had disappeared entirely. The telepathy was
gone and Kurtz was glad. It had offended him in an elemental, down-deep way, as certain

sexual practices offended him. The idea that someone might be able to come into his very
head,
to be able to visit the upper levels of his mind… that had been horrible. The grayboys deserved to be wiped out for that alone, for bringing that disgustingly peculiar gift. Thank God it had proved ephemeral.
Kurtz shucked his gray workout shorts and stood naked in front of the mirror on the

bedroom door, letting his eyes go up from his feet (where the first snarls of purple veins
were beginning to show) to the crown of his head, where his graying hair stood up in a sleep-tousle. He was sixty, but not looking too bad; those busted veins on the sides of his
feet were the worst of it. Had a bell of a good crank on him, too, although he had never
made much use of it; women were, for the most part, vile creatures incapable of loyalty.

They drained a man. In his secret unsane heart, where even his madness was starched and
pressed and fundamentally not very interesting, Kurtz believed all sex was FUBAR. Even
when it was done for procreation, the result was usually a brain-equipped tumor not much
different from the shit-weasels.
From the crown of his head, Kurtz let his eyes descend again, slowly, looking for the
least patch of red, the tiniest roseola blush. There was nothing. He turned around, looked

at as much as he could see by craning back over his shoulder, and still saw nothing. He spread his buttocks, probed between them, slid a finger two knuckles deep into his anus,
and felt nothing but flesh.
“I’m clean,” he said in a low voice as he washed his hands briskly in the
Winnebago’s little bathroom. “Clean as a whistle.”
He stepped into his shorts again, then sat on his rack to slip into his socks. Clean, praise God, clean. A good word.

Clean.
The unpleasant feel of the telepathy-like sweaty skin pressed against sweaty skin-was gone. He wasn’t supporting a single strand of
Ripley; he had even checked his tongue and gums.
So what had awakened him? Why were there alarm bells clanging in his head?
Because telepathy wasn’t the
only
form of extrasensory perception. Because long before the grayboys knew there was such a place as Earth tucked away in this dusty and

seldom-visited carrel of the great interstellar library, there had been a little thing called instinct, the specialty of uniform-wearing
Homo saps
such as himself.
“The hunch,” Kurtz said. “The good old all-American hunchola.”
He put on his pants. Then, still bare-chested, he picked up the walkie which lay on
the bedtable beside the pocket watch (four-sixteen now, and how the time seemed to be
rushing

, like a brakeless car plunging down a hill toward a busy intersection). The walkie was a special digital job, encrypted and supposedly unjammable… but one look at his supposedly impervious digital clock made him realize none of the gear was un-anything.
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.
Henry shifted to the inside, sending pictures of screaming, milling people. Liquid fire
dripped through holes in the blazing roof and ignited the hay in the lofts. Here was a man

with his hair on fire; there a woman in a burning ski-parka still decorated with lift-tickets
from Sugarloaf and Ragged Mountain.
They were all looking at Henry now-Henry and his linked friends. Only the telepaths
were receiving the images, but perhaps as many as sixty per cent of the people in the barn
were infected, and even those who weren’t caught the sense of panic; a rising tide lifts all
boats.
Clamping Bill’s hand tightly with one of his own and Marsha’s with the other, Henry

switched the images back to the outside perspective again. Fire; encircling soldier; an amplified voice shouting for the soldiers to be sure no one got clear.
The detainees were on their feet now, speaking in a rising babble of frightened voices
(except for the deep telepaths; they only stared at him, haunted eyes in byrus-speckled faces). He showed them the barn burning like a torch in the snow-driven night, the wind

turning an inferno into an explosion, a firestorm, and still the napalm hoses poured it on
and still the amplified voice exhorted: “
THAT’s RIGHT, MEN, GET THEM ALL, DON’T
LET ANY OF THEM GET A WAY, THERRE THE CANCER AND WE’re THE CURE!”

Imagination fully pumped up now, feeding on itself in a kind of frenzy, Henry sent images of the few people who managed to find the exits or to wriggle out through the windows. Many of these were in flames. One was a woman with a child cradled in her arms. The soldiers machine-gunned all of them but the woman and the child, who were turned into napalm candles as they ran.
“
No!”

several women screamed in unison, and Henry realized with a species of sick
wonder that all of them, even those without children, had put their own faces on the burning woman. They were up now, milling around like cattle in a thunderstorm. He had
to move them before
they had a chance to think once, let alone twice.
Gathering the force of the minds linked to his, Henry sent them an image of the store.
THERE!
he called to them.
IT’s YOUR ONLY CHANCE! THROUGH THE STORE IF

YOU CAN, BREAK DOWN THE FENCE IF THE DOOR’s BLOCKED! DON’T STOP,
DON’T HESITATE! GET INTO THE WOODS! HIDE IN THE WOODS! THEY’re
COMING TO BURN THIS PLACE DOWN, THE BARN AND EVERYONE IN IT, AND
THE WOODS ARE YOUR ONLY CHANCE! NOW, NOW!
Deep in the well of his own imagination, flying on the pills Owen had given him and
sending with all his strength-images of possible safety there, of certain death here, images

as simple as those in a child’s picture-book-he was only distantly aware that he had begun
chanting aloud: “
Now, now, now.”
Marsha Chiles picked it up, then her brother-in-law, then Charles, the man with the
overgrown solar sex-panel.
“
Now! Now! Now!”
Although immune to the byrus and thus no more telepathic than the average bear,
Darren was not immune to the growing vibe, and he also joined in.
“
Now! Now! Now!”

It “umped from person to person and group to group, a panic-induced infection more
catching than the byrus: “
Now! Now! Now!”
The barn shook with it. Fists were pumping
in unison, like fists at a rock concert.
“
NOW! NOW! NOW!”
Henry let them take it over and build it, pumping his own fist without even realizing it, flinging his hand into the air to the farthest reach of his aching arm even as he reminded

himself not to be caught up in the cyclone of the mass mind he had created: when
they
went north, he was going south. He was waiting for some point of no return to be reached-the point of ignition and spontaneous combustion.
It came.
“Now,” he whispered.
He gathered Marsha’s mind, Bill’s, Charlie’s… and then the others that were close
and particularly locked in. He merged them, compressed them, and then flung that single

word like a silver bullet into the heads of the three hundred and seventeen people in Old
Man Gosselin’s barn:
NOW.
There was a moment of utter silence before hell’s door flew open.
8
Just before dusk, a dozen two-man sentry huts (they were actually Porta-Potties with
the urinals and toilet-seats yanked out) had been set up at intervals along the security fence. These came equipped with heaters that threw a stuporous glow in the small spaces,

and the guards had no interest in going outside them. Every now and then one of them would open a door to allow in a snowy swirl of fresh air, but that was the extent of the guards” exposure to the outside world. Most of them were peacetime soldiers with no gut
understanding of how high the current stakes were, and so they swapped stories about sex
cars, postings, sex, their families, their future, sex, drinking and drugging expeditions, and

sex. They had missed Owen Underhill’s two visits to the shed (he would have been clearly
visible from both Post 9 and Post 10) and they were the last to be aware that they had a
full-scale revolt on their hands.
Seven other soldiers, boys who had been with Kurtz a little longer and thus had a little more salt on their skins, were in the back of the store near the woodstove, playing five-card stud in the same office where Owen had played Kurtz the

ne nous blessez pas
tapes roughly two centuries ago. Six of the card-players were sentries. The seventh was Dawg Brodsky’s colleague Gene Cambry. Cambry hadn’t been able to sleep. The reason
was concealed by a stretchy cotton wristlet. He didn’t know how long the wristlet would
serve, however, because the red stuff under it was spreading. If he wasn’t careful, someone
would see it… and then, instead of playing cards in the office, he might be out there in the

barn with the John Q’s.
And would he be the only one? Ray Parsons had a big wad of cotton in one ear. He
said it was an earache, but who knew for sure? Ted Trezewski had a bandage on one meaty forearm and claimed he’d gouged himself stringing compound barbed wire much
earlier in the day. Maybe it was true. George Udall, the Dawg’s immediate superior in more normal times, was wearing a knitted cap over his bald head; damn thing made him

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