Dreamcatcher

USAF Retired, serial number 241771699, and I am leading this charge, I’m the Lieutenant
Calley in charge of this particular Alice’s Restaurant Massacree.”
He took a deep breath, eyes fixed on the hovering helicopters.
“But fellows, I’m here to tell you that the grayboys have been messing with us since
the late nineteen-forties, and I have been messing with them since the late nineteen-seventies, and I can tell you that just because a fellow comes walking toward you with his

hands raised saying I surrender, that doesn’t mean, praise Jesus, that he doesn’t have a pint
of nitroglycerine shoved up his ass. Now the big old smart goldfish who go swimming around in the think-tanks, most of those guys say the grayboys came when we started lighting off atomic and hydrogen bombs, that they came to that the way bugs come to a

buglight. I don’t know about that, I am not a thinker, I leave the thinking to others, leave it to the cabbage, cabbage got the head on him, as the saying goes, but there’s nothing wrong
with my eyes, fellows, and I tell you those grayboy sons of bitches are as harmless as a wolf in a henhouse. We have taken a good many of them over the years, but not one has

lived. When they die, their corpses decompose rapidly and turn into exactly the sort of stuff you see down there, what you lads call Plpley fungus. Sometimes they explode. Got
that? They
explode
. The fungus they carry-or maybe it’s the fungus that’s in charge, some of the think-tank goldfish believe that might be the case-dies easily enough unless it gets
on a living host, I say again
living host

, and the host it seems to like the best, fellows, praise Jesus, is good old
homo sap
. Once you’ve got it so much as under the nail of your little finger, it’s Katie bar the door and Homer run for home.”
This was not precisely the truth-not precisely anywhere near the truth, as a matter of
fact-but nobody fought for you as ferociously as a scared soldier. This Kurtz knew from experience.
“Boys, our little gray buddies are telepathic, and they seem to pass this ability on to

us through the air. We catch it even when we don’t catch the fungus, and while you might
think a little mind-reading could be fun, the sort of thing that would make you the life of
the party, I can tell you what lies a little farther down that road:
schizophrenia, paranoia
, separation from
reality
, and total I say again
TOTAL FUCKING INSANITY

. The think-tank boys, God bless em, believe that this telepathy is relatively short-acting right now, but I don’t have to tell you what could happen in that regard if the grayboys are allowed to settle in and be comfortable. I want you fellows to listen to what I’m going to say now very carefully want you to listen as if your lives depended on it, all right? When
they
take
us
, boys-say again, when
they
take
us-

and you all know there have been abductions, most people who claim to have been abducted by aliens are lying through their asshole neurotic
teeth, but not all-those who are let go have often undergone implants. Some are nothing but instruments-transmitters, perhaps, or monitors of some sort-but some are living things
which eat their hosts, grow fat, and then tear them apart.
These implants have been put in place by the very creatures you see down there,

milling around all naked and innocent. They claim there’s no infection among them even
though we know they are infected right up the ying-yang and the old wazoo and
everywhere else. I have seen these things at work for twenty-five years or more, and I tell
you this is
it
, this is the invasion, this is the Super Bowl of Super Bowls, and you fellows are on defense. They are
not

helpless little ETs, boys, waiting around for someone to give them a New England TEL phone card so they can phone home, they are a
disease
. They
are cancer, praise Jesus, and boys, we’re one big hot radioactive shot of chemotherapy. Do
you hear me, boys?” No affirmatives this time. No rogers, no I-copy-thats. Raw cheers, nervous and neurotic, jigging with eagerness. The comlink bulged with them.
“
Cancer
, boys.
They are cancer

. That’s the best I can put it, although as you know, I’m no talker. Owen, do you copy?”
“Copy, boss.” Flat. Flat and calm, damn him. Well, let him be cool. Let him be cool
while he still could. Owen Underhill was all finished. Kurtz raised the paper hat and looked at it admiringly. Owen Underhill was
over
.
“What is it down there, Owen? What is it shuffling around that ship? What is it forgot
to put on their pants and their shoes before they left the house this morning?”

“Cancer, boss.”
“That’s right. Now you give the order and in we go. Sing it out, Owen.” And, with
great deliberation, knowing that the men in the gunships would be watching him (never had he given such a sermon, never, and not a word of it preplanned, unless in his dreams),
he turned his own hat around backward.
7
Owen watched Tony Edwards turn his Mets cap around so that the bill pointed down the nape of his neck, heard Bryson and Bertinelli racking the.50s, and understood this was

really happening. They were going hot. He could get in the car and ride or stand in the road and get run down. Those were the only choices Kurtz had left him.
And there was something more, something bad he remembered from long ago, when
he had been-what? Eight? Seven? Maybe even younger. He had been out on the lawn of
his house, the one in Paducah, his father still at work, his mother off somewhere, probably

at the Grace Baptist, getting ready for one of her endless bake sales (unlike Kurtz, when
Randi Underhill said praise Jesus, she meant it), and an ambulance had pulled up next door, at the Rapeloews”. No siren, but lots of flashing lights. Two men in jumpsuits very
much like the coverall Owen now wore had gone running up the Rapeloews” walk,
unfolding a gleaming stretcher. Never even breaking stride. It was like a magic trick.

Less than ten minutes later they were back out with Mrs Rapeloew on the stretcher.
Her eyes had been closed. Mr Rapeloew came along behind her, not even bothering to close the door. Mr Rapeloew, who was Owen’s Daddy’s age, looked suddenly as old as a
grampy. It was another magic trick. Mr Rapeloew glanced to his right as the men loaded
his wife into the ambulance and saw Owen kneeling on his lawn in his short pants and playing with his ball.

They say it was a stroke!
Mr Rapeloew called.
St Mary’s Memorial!
Tell your mother, Owen!
And then he climbed into the back of the ambulance and the ambulance drove away. For the next five minutes or so Owen continued to play with his
hall, throwing it up and catching it, but in between throws and catches he kept looking at

the door Mr Rapeloew had left open and thinking he ought to close it. That closing it would be what his mother called a Christian Act of Charity.
Finally he got up and crossed to the Rapeloews” lawn. The Rapeloews had been good
to him. Nothing really special (“Nothing to get up in the night and write home about,” his
mother would have said), but Mrs Rapeloew made lots of cookies and always remembered

to save him some; many were the bowls of frosting and cookie-dough he had scraped clean in chubby, cheery Mrs Rapeloew’s kitchen. And Mr Rapeloew had shown him how
to make paper airplanes that really flew. Three different kinds. So the Rapeloews deserved
charity, Christian charity, but when he stepped through the open door of the Rapeloews”
house, he had known perfectly well that Christian charity wasn’t the reason he was there.

Doing Christian charity did not make your dingus hard.
For five minutes-or maybe it was fifteen minutes or half an hour, the time passed like
time in a dream-Owen had just walked around in the Rapeloews” house, doing nothing, but all the time his dingus had been just as hard as a rock, so hard it throbbed like a second

heartbeat, and you would think something like that would hurt, but it hadn’t, it had felt good, and all these years later he recognized that silent wandering for what it had been: foreplay, The fact that he had nothing against the Rapeloews, that he in fact
liked
the Rapeloews, somehow made it even better. If he was caught (he never was), he could say I
dunno
if asked why he did it, and be telling the God’s honest.

Not that he did so much. In the downstairs bathroom he found a toothbrush with Dick
printed on it. Dick was Mr Rapeloew’s name. Owen tried to piss on the bristles of Mr
Rapeloew’s toothbrush, that was what he wanted to do, but his dingus was too hard and no piss would come out, not a single drop. So he spat on the bristles instead, then rubbed the,pit in and put the brush back in the toothbrush holder. In the kitchen, he poured a glass

of water over the electric stove-burners. Then he took a large china serving platter from the sideboard. “They said it was the stork,” Owen said, holding the platter over his head.
“It must be a baby, because he said it was a stork.” And then he heaved the platter into the
comer, where it shattered into a thousand pieces. Once that was done he had fled from the

house. Whatever had been inside him, the thing that had made his dingus hard and his eyeballs feel too big for their sockets, the shattering sound of the plate had broken it, popped it like a pimple, and if his parents hadn’t been so worried about Mrs Rapeloew, they almost certainly would have seen something wrong with him. As it was, they
probably just assumed that he was worried about Mrs R… too. For the next week he had

slept little, and what sleep he did get had been haunted by bad dreams. In one of these, Mrs Rapeloew came home from the hospital with the baby the stork had brought her, only
the baby was black and dead. Owen had been all but consumed with guilt and shame (never to the point of confessing, however; what in God’s name would he have said when
his Baptist mother asked him what had possessed him), and yet he never forgot the blind

pleasure of standing in the bathroom with his shorts down around his knees, trying to piss
on Mr Rapeloew’s toothbrush, or the thrill that had gusted through him when the serving
platter shattered. If he had been older, he would have come in his pants, he supposed. The
purity was in the senselessness; the joy was in the sound of the shatter; the afterglow was

the slow and pleasurable wallow in remorse for having done it and the fear of being caught. Mr Rapeloew had said it was a stork, but when Owen’s father came in that night,
he told him it was a stroke. That a blood-vessel in Mrs Rapeloew’s brain had sprung a leak
and that was a stroke.
And now here it was again, all of that.
Maybe this time I will come
, he thought.
It’ll certainly be a lot goddam grander than
trying to piss on Mr Rapeloew’s toothbrush

. And then, as he turned his own hat around:
Same basic concept, though.
“Owen?” Kurtz’s voice. “Are you there, son? If you don’t roger me right now, I’m
going to assume you either can’t or won’t-”
“Boss, I’m here.” Voice steady. In his mind’s eye he saw a sweaty little boy holding a
china serving platter over his head. “Boys, are you ready to kick a little interstellar ass?”
A roar of affirmation that included one
goddam right
and one
let’s tear em up
.

“What do you want first, boys?”
Squad Anthem
and
Anthem
and
Fucking Stones, right now!
“Anyone want out, sing out.”
Radio silence. On some other frequency where Owen would never go again, the
grayboys were pleading in famous voices. Starboard and below was the little Kiowa OH-
58. Owen didn’t need binoculars to see Kurtz with his own hat now turned around, Kurtz

watching him. The newspaper was still on his lap, now for some reason folded into a triangle. For six years Owen Underhill had needed no second chances, which was good
because Kurtz didn’t give them-in his heart Owen supposed he had always known that. He would think about that later, however. If he had to. One final coherent thought flared in his
mind-You’re
the cancer, Kurtz
, you-and then died. Here was a fine and perfect darkness in its place.

“Blue Group, this is Blue Boy Leader. Come in on me. Commence firing at two
hundred yards. Avoid hitting the Blue Boy if possible, but we are going to sweep those motherfuckers clean. Conk, play the Anthem.”
Gene Conklin flicked a switch and racked a CD in the Discman sitting on the floor of
Blue Boy Two. Owen, no longer inside himself, leaned forward in Blue Boy Leader and
cranked the volume.

Mick Jagger, the voice of the Rolling Stones, filled his earphones. Owen raised his hand, saw Kurtz snap him a salute-whether sarcastic or sincere Owen neither knew nor cared-and then Owen brought his arm down. As Jagger sang it out, sang the Anthem, the
one they always played when they went in hot, the helicopters dropped, tightened, and flew to target.
8
The grayboys-the ones that were left-stood beneath the shadow of their ship which

lay in turn at the end of the shattered aisle of trees it had destroyed in its final descent.
They made no initial effort to run or hide; in fact half of them actually stepped forward on
their naked toeless feet, squelching in the melted snow, the muck, and the scattered fuzz of
reddish-gold moss. These faced the oncoming line of gunships, long-fingered hands
raised, showing that they were empty. Their huge black eyes gleamed in the dull daylight.

The gunships did not slow, although all of them heard the final transmissions briefly
in their heads:
Please don’t hurt us, we are helpless, we are dying
. With that, twining through it like a pigtail, came the voice of Mick Jagger: “
Please allow me to introduce
myself, I’m a man Of wealth and taste; I’ve been around for many a long year, stolen
many man’s soul and faith…”

The gunships heeled around as briskly as a marching band doing a square turn on the
fifty-yard line of the Pose Bowl, and the.50s opened up. The bullets plowed into the snow,
struck dead branches from already wounded trees, struck pallid little sparks from the edge
of the great ship. They ripped into the bunched grayboys standing with their arms upraised
and tore them apart. Arms spun free of rudimentary bodies, spouting a kind of pink sap.

Heads exploded like gourds, raining a reddish backsplash on their ship and their
shipmates-not blood but that mossy stuff, as if their heads were full of it, not really heads
at all but grisly produce baskets. Several of them were cut in two at the midsection and went down with their hands still raised in surrender. As they fell, the gray bodies went a
dirty white and seemed to boil.
Mick Jagger confided: “

I was around when Jesus Christ had His moment of doubt
and pain…”
A few grays, still standing under the lip of the ship, turned as if to run, but there was
nowhere to go. Most of them were shot down immediately. The last few survivors-maybe
four in all-retreated into the scant shadows. They seemed to be doing something, fiddling
with something, and Owen had a horrible premonition.
“I can get them!” came crackling over the radio. That was Deforest in Blue Boy Four,

almost panting with eagerness. And, anticipating Owen’s order to go for it, the Chinook dropped almost to ground-level, its rotors kicking up snow and muddy water in a filthy blizzard, battering the underbrush flat.
“No, negative, belay that, back off, resume station plus fifty!” Owen shouted, and
whacked Tony’s shoulder. Tony, looking only slightly odd in the transparent mask over his

mouth and nose, yanked back on the yoke and Blue Boy Leader rose in the unsteady air.
Even over the music-the mad bongos, the chorus going
Hoo-hoo
, “Sympathy for the Devil” hadn’t played through to its conclusion even a single time, at least not yet-Owen could hear his crew grumbling. The Kiowa, he saw, was already small with distance.
Whatever his mental peculiarities might be, Kurtz was no fool-And his instincts were exquisite.

“Ah, boss “Deforest, sounding not just disappointed but on fire.
“Say again, say again, return to station, Blue Group,
return
-”
The explosion hanmered him back in his seat and tossed the Chinook upward like a
toy. Beneath the roar, he heard Tony Edwards cursing and wrestling with the yoke. There

were screams from behind them, but while most of the crew was injured, they lost only Pinky Bryson, who had been leaning out the bay for a better look and fen when the shockwave hit.
“Got it, got it, got it,” Tony yammered, but Owen thought it was at least thirty seconds before Tony actually did, seconds that felt like hours. On the sound systems, the
Anthem had cut off, a fact that did not bode well for Conk and the boys in Blue Boy Two.

Tony swung Blue Boy Leader around, and Owen saw the windscreen Perspex was
cracked in two places. Behind them someone was still screaming-Mac Cavanaugh, it
turned out, had somehow managed to lose two fingers.
“Holy shit,” Tony muttered, and then: “You saved our bacon, boss. Thanks.”
Owen barely heard him. He was looking back at the remains of the ship, which now
lay in at least three pieces. It was hard to tell because the shit was flying and the air had

turned a hazy reddish-orange. It was a little easier to see the remains of Deforest’s gunship. It lay canted on its side “in the muck with bubbles bursting all around it. On its
port side, a long piece of busted rotor floated in the water like a “ant’s canoe-paddle.
About fifty yards away, more rotors protruded, black and crooked, from a furious ball of
yellow-white fire. That was Conklin and Blue Boy Two.

Graggle and bleep from the radio. Blakey in Blue Boy Three. “Boss, hey boss, I see”
“Three, this is Leader. I want you to-”
“Leader, this is Three, I see survivors, repeat,
I see Blue Boy Four
survivors, at least three no, four I am going down to-”
“Negative, Blue Boy Three, not at all. Resume station plus fifty-belay that, station plus
one
-fifty, one-five-oh, and do it now!”
“Ah, but sir boss, I mean… I can see Friedman, he’s on fucking
fire
”
“Joe Blakey, listen up.”

No mistaking Kurtz’s rasp, Kurtz who had gotten clear of the red crap in plenty of time.
Almost
, Owen thought,
as if he knew what was going to happen
.
“Get your ass out of there now, or I guarantee that by next week you’ll be shovelling
camel-shit in a hot climate where booze is illegal. Out.”
Nothing more from Blue Boy Three. The two surviving gunships pulled back to their
original rally-point plus a hundred and fifty yards. Owen sat watching the furious upward

spiral of the Ripley fungus, wondering if Kurtz
had
known or just intuited, wondering if he and Blakey had cleared the area in time. Because they
were
infectious, of course; whatever the grayboys said, they
were
infectious. Owen didn’t know if that justified what they had just done, but he thought the survivors of Pay Deforest’s Blue Boy Four were most likely dead men walking. Or worse: live men changing. Turning into God knew
what.

“Owen.” The radio.
Tony looked at him, eyebrows raised.
“Owen.”
Sighing, Owen flicked the toggle over to Kurtz’s closed channel with his chin. “I’m
here, boss.”
9
Kurtz sat in the Kiowa with the newspaper hat still in his lap. He and Freddy were wearing their masks; so were the rest of boys in the attack group. Likely even the poor fellows now on the ground were still wearing them. The masks were probably

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