Dreamcatcher

some sort of hemorrhage, but it was just a trickle from one nostril and a fine spray of blood from Duddits’s mouth when he coughed. Owen had probably thought poor old Duds
was coughing up his lungs, when in fact he’d probably strained something in his throat.

Not that this wasn’t potentially serious. In Duddits’s increasingly fragile condition, anything was potentially serious; a random cold-germ could kill him. From the moment he’d seen him, Henry had known Duds was coming out of the last turn and heading for home.
“Duds!” he called sharply. Something different. Something different in him, Henry.
What? No time to think about it now. “Duddits, breathe in through your nose! Your
nose,

Duds! Like this!”
Henry demonstrated, taking big breaths through flared nostrils… and when he
exhaled, little threads of white flew from his nostrils. Like the fluff in milkweed pods, or dandelions gone to seed.
Byrus,
Henry thought.
It was growing up my nose, but now it’s
dead. I’m sloughing it off, literally breath by breath.

And then he understood the difference: the itching had stopped, in his leg and in his mouth and in the thatch of his groin. His mouth still tasted as if it had been lined with someone’s old carpet, but it didn’t
itch.
Duddits began to imitate him, breathing deep through his nose, and his coughing
began to ease as soon as it did. Henry took his paper bag, found a bottle of harmless no-

alcohol cough medicine, and poured Duddits a capful. “This’ll take care of you,” Henry said. Confidence in the thought as well as the words; with Duddits, how you sounded was
only part of it.
Duddits drank the capful of Robitussin, grimaced, then smiled at Henry. The
coughing had stopped, but blood was still trickling from one nostril… and from the corner
of one eye as well, Henry saw. Not good. Nor was Duddits’s extreme pallor, much more

noticeable than it had been at the house back in Derry. The cold… his lost night’s sleep all
this untoward excitement in someone who was an invalid… not good. He was getting sick,
and in a late-stage ALL patient, even a nasal infection could be fatal.
“He all right?” Owen asked.
“Duds? Duds is iron. Right, Duddits?”
“I ion,” Duddits agreed, and flexed one woefully skinny arm. The sight of his face-

thin and tired but still trying to smile-made Henry feel like screaming. Life was unfair; that was something he supposed he’d known for years. But this went far beyond unfair.
This was monstrous.
“Let’s see what she put in here for good boys to drink.” Henry took the yellow
lunchbox.
“Oooby-Doo,” Duddits said. He was smiling, but his voice sounded thin and
exhausted.

“Yep, got some work to do now,” Henry agreed, and opened the Thermos. He gave
Duds his morning Prednisone tablet, although it hadn’t yet gone eight, and then asked Duddits if he wanted a Percocet, as well. Duddits thought about it, then held up two fingers. Henry’s heart sank.

“Pretty bad, huh?” he asked, passing Duddits a couple of Percocet tablets over the seat between them. He hardly needed an answer-people like Duddits didn’t ask for the extra pill so they could get high.
Duddits made a seesawing gesture with his hand-
comme ci, comme ca.
Henry
remembered it well, that seesawing hand as much a part of Pete as the chewed pencils and
toothpicks were of Beaver.

Roberta had filled Duddits’s Thermos with chocolate milk, his favorite. Henry poured
him a cup, held it a moment as the Humvee skidded on a slick patch, then handed it over.
Duddits took his pills.
“Where does it hurt, Duds?”
“Here.” Hand to the throat. “More here.” Hand to the chest. Hesitating, coloring a little, then a hand to his crotch. “Here, ooo.”
A urinary-tract infection,
Henry thought.
Oh, goody.
“Ills ake ee etter?”

Henry nodded. “Pills’ll make you better. Just give em a chance to work. Are we still
on the line, Duddits?”
Duddits nodded emphatically and pointed through the windshield. Henry wondered
(not for the first time) just what he saw. Once he’d asked Pete, who told him it was something like a thread, often faint and hard to see.
It’s best when it’s yellow,
Pete had said.
Yellow’s always easier to pick up. I don’t know why.

And if Pete saw a yellow thread, perhaps Duddits saw something like a broad yellow stripe, perhaps even Dorothy’s yellow
brick road.
“If it goes off on another road, you tell us, okay?”
“I tell.”
“Not going to go to sleep, are you?”
Duddits shook his head. In fact he had never looked more alive and awake, his eyes
glowing in his exhausted face. Henry thought of how lightbulbs would sometimes go
mysteriously bright before burning out for good.

“If you do start to get sleepy, you tell me and we’ll pull over. Get you some coffee.
We need you awake. “‘O-ay.” Henry started to turn around, moving his aching body with
as much care as he could muster,
when Duddits said something else.
“Isser Ay ont aykin.”
“Does he, now?” Henry said thoughtfully.
“What?” Owen asked. “I didn’t get that one.”
“He says Mr Gray wants bacon.”
“Is that important?”
“I don’t know. Is there a regular radio in this heap, Owen? I’d like to get some news.”

The regular radio was hanging under the dash, and looked freshly installed. Not part
of the original equipment. Owen reached for it, then hit the brakes as a Pontiac sedan-two-
wheel drive and no snow-tires-cut in front of them, The Pontiac slued from side to side,
finally decided to stay on the road a little longer, and squirted ahead. Soon it was doing at
least sixty, Henry estimated, and was pulling away. Owen was frowning after it.

“You driver, me passenger,” Henry said, “but if that guy can do it with no snows, why can’t we? It might be a good idea to make up some ground.”
“Hummers are better in mud than snow. Take my word for it.
“Still-”
“Also, we’re going to pass that guy in the next ten minutes. I’ll bet you a quart of good Scotch. He’ll either be through the guardrails and down the embankment or spun out

on the median. If he’s lucky, he’ll be right-side-up. Plus-this is just a technicality-we’re fugitives running from duly constituted authority, and we can’t save the world if we’re locked up in some County…
Jesus!”
A Ford Explorer-four-wheel drive but moving far too fast for the conditions, maybe
seventy miles an hour-roared past them, pulling a rooster-tail of snow. The roof-rack had
been piled

high and covered with a blue tarp. This had been indifferently lashed down, and
Henry could see what was beneath: luggage. He guessed that much of it would soon be in
the road.
With Duddits seen to, Henry took a clear-eyed look at the highway. What he saw did
not exactly surprise him. Although the turnpike’s northern barrel was still all but deserted,
the southbound lanes were now filling up fast… and yes, there were cars off it
everywhere.

Owen turned on the radio as a Mercedes hurried past him, throwing up fans of slush.
He hit SEEK, found classical music, hit it again, found Kenny G tootling away, hit it a third time… and happened on a voice.
“… great big fucking bomber joint,” the voice said, and Henry exchanged a glance
with Owen. “He say uck onna rayo,” Duddits observed from the back seat. “That’s right,”
Henry said, and, as the owner of the voice inhaled audibly into the mike: “Also, I’d say

he’s smoking a fatty.”
“I doubt if the FCC’d be in favor,” the deejay said after a long and noisy exhale, “but
if half of what I’m hearin is true, the FCC is the least of my worries. Interstellar plague on
the loose, brothers and sisters, that’s the word. Call it the Hot Zone, the Dead Zone, or the
Twilight Zone, you want to cancel your trip up north.”
Another long and noisy inhale.
“Marvin the Martian’s on the march, brothers and sisters, that’s the word from

Somerset County and Castle County. Plague, deathrays, the living will envy the dead. I got
a spot here for Century Tire, but fuck that shit.” Sound of something breaking. Plastic, from the sound. Henry listened, fascinated. Here it was once more, here was darkness his
old friend, not in his head but on the goddam
radio. “
Brethren and sistern, if you’re north of Augusta right now, here’s a little tip from your pal Lonesome Dave at E: relocate south.
Like,
immediately.

And here’s a little relocation music.”
Lonesome Dave at E spun The Doors, of course. Jim Morrison droning “The End”.
Owen switched to the AM band.
Eventually he found a newscast. The fellow giving it didn’t sound wrecked, which
was a step forward, and he said there was no need to panic, which was another step forward. He then played sound-bites from both the President and Maine’s Governor, both

saying essentially the same thing: take it easy, people, chill. It’s all under control. Nice soothing stuff, Robitussin for the body politic. The President was scheduled to make a complete report to the American people at eleven A.M… EST.
“It’ll be the speech Kurtz told me about,” Owen said. “Just moved up a day or so.”
“What speech is-”
“Shhh.” Owen pointed to the radio.
Having soothed, the newscaster next proceeded to stir his listeners up again by

repeating many of the rumors they had already heard from the stoned FM jock, only in politer language: plague, non-human invaders from space, deathrays. Then the weather: snow showers, followed by rain and gusty winds as a warm front (not to mention the killer
Martians) moved in. There was a
meee-eep,
and then the newscast they’d just heard began playing again.
“Ook!” Duddits said. “Ey ent eye us, ember?” He was pointing through the dirty

window. The pointing finger, like Duddits’s voice, wouldn’t hold steady. He was shivering
now, his teeth clattering together.
Owen glanced briefly at the Pontiac-it had indeed ended up on the snowy median
strip between the northbound and southbound barrels, and although it hadn’t rolled all the

way over, it was on its side with its disconsolate passengers standing around it-and then looked back at Duddits. Paler than ever now, shivering, a blood-streaked fluff of cotton protruding from one nostril.
“Henry, is he all right?”
“I don’t know.”
“Run out your tongue.”
“Don’t you think you better keep your eyes on-”
–I’m fine, so don’t sass me. Run out your tongue.” Henry did. Owen looked at it and

grimaced. “Looks worse, but it’s probably better. All that crap has turned white.”
“Same with the gash on my leg. Same with your face and eyebrows. We’re just lucky
we didn’t get it in the lungs or the brain or the gut.” He paused. “Perlmutter got it in the
gut. He’s growing one of those things.”
“How far back are they, Henry?”I’d say twenty miles. Maybe a little less. So if you
could goose it… even if just a little…” Owen did, knowing that Kurtz would, as soon as

he realized he was now part of a general exodus and much less likely to become a target of
either the civilian or the military police.
“You’re still in touch with Pearly,” Owen said. “Even though the byrus is dying on you, you’re still hooked up. Is it…” He lifted a thumb to the back seat, where Duddits was
leaning back. His shakes had eased, at least for the time being.
“Sure,” Henry said. “I had stuff from Duddits long before all this happened. Jonesy,

Pete, and Beaver did, too. We hardly noticed. It was just a part of our lives.”
Sure, that’s
tight. Like all those thoughts about plastic bags and bridge abutments, and shotguns. just
apart of my life.
“
Now it’s stronger. Maybe in time it’ll drop back, but for now… He shrugged. “For
now I hear
voices.” “Pearly.” “For one,” Henry agreed. “Others with the byrus in its active stage, too. Mostly behind us.” “Jonesy? Your friend Jonesy? Or Gray?” Henry shook his head.
“But
Pearly

hears something.” “Pearly? How can
he-‘
‘He’s got more mental range than I do right now, because of the byrum-” “The what?”The thing that’s up his ass,” Henry said.
“The shit-weasel. “‘Oh.” Owen felt momentarily sick to his stomach.
“What he hears doesn’t seem to be human. I don’t think it’s Mr Gray, but I suppose it
might be. Whatever it is, he’s homing on it.”
They drove in silence for awhile. The traffic was moderately heavy and some of the

drivers were wild (they passed the Explorer just south of Augusta, ditched and apparently
abandoned with its load of luggage spread around it), but Owen counted himself lucky.
The storm had kept plenty of folks off the road, he guessed. They might decide to flee now
that the storm had stopped, but he and Owen had gotten ahead of the worst of the wave. In
many ways, the storm had been their friend.
“I want you to know something,” Owen said finally. “You don’t need to say it. You’re

sitting right next to me short range-and I’m still getting some of your thoughts.”
What Owen was thinking was that he would pull the Humvee over and get out, if he
thought the pursuit would end once Kurtz had him. Owen did not, in fact, believe that.
Owen Underhill was Kurtz’s prime objective, but he understood that Owen wouldn’t have
committed such a monstrous act of treason had he not been coerced into it. No, he’d put a

bullet in Owen’s head, and then continue on. With Owen, Henry had at least some chance.
Without him, he’d likely be a dead duck. And Duddits too.
“We stay together,” Henry said. “Friends to the end, as the saying goes.”
And, from the back seat: “Otsum urk ooo do now.”
“That’s right, Duds,” Henry reached back and briefly squeezed
Duddits’s cold hand. “Got some work to do now.”
4
Ten minutes later, Duddits came fully to life, pointing them into the first turnpike rest

area below Augusta. They were almost to Lewiston now, in fact. “Ine!
Ine!”
he shouted, then began to cough again.
“Take it easy, Duddits,” Henry said.
“They probably stopped for coffee and a Danish,” Owen said. “Or maybe a bacon
sandwich.”
But Duddits directed them around back, to the employees” parking lot. Here they
stopped, and Duddits got out. He stood quiet and muttering for a moment or so, looking

frail under the cloudy sky and seemingly buffeted by every gust of wind.
“Henry,” Owen said, “I don’t know what bee he’s got in his bonnet, but if Kurtz is really close-”
But then Duddits nodded, got back in the Hummer, and pointed toward the exit sign.
He looked more tired than ever, but he also looked satisfied.
“What in God’s name was
that
all about?” Owen asked, mystified.
“I think he switched cars,” Henry said. “Is that what he did, Duddits? Did he switch
cars?”

Duddits nodded emphatically. “
Tole!
Tole a car!”
“He’ll be moving faster now,” Henry said. “You’ve got to step it up, Owen. Never
mind Kurtz-we’ve got to catch Mr Gray.”
Owen looked over at Henry… then looked again. “What’s wrong with you? You’ve
come over all pale.”
“I’ve been very stupid-I should have known what the bastard was up to from the first.
My only excuses are being tired and scared, and none of that will matter if… Owen, you
have

to catch him. He’s headed for western Massachusetts, and you have to catch him before he can get there.”
Now they were running in slush, and the going was messy but far less dangerous.
Owen walked the Hummer up to sixty-five, all he dared for now.
“I’ll try,” he said. “But unless he has an accident or a breakdown… Owen shook his
head slowly back and forth. “I don’t think so, pal. I really don’t.”
5

This was a dream he’d had often as a child (when his name had been Coonts), but only once or twice since the squirts and sweats of adolescence. In it, he was running through a field under a
harvest moon and afraid to look behind him because it was after him, it. He ran as hard as he could but of course that wasn’t good enough, in dreams your best never is.

Then it was close enough for him to hear its dry breathing, and to smell its peculiar dry
smell.
He came to the shore of a great still lake, although there had never been any lakes in
the dry and miserable Kansas town of his childhood, and although it was very beautiful (the moon burned in its depths like a lamp), it terrified him because it blocked his way and
he could not swim.
He fell on his knees at the shore of the lake-in that way this dream was exactly like

those childhood dreams-but instead of seeing the reflection of
it
in the still water, the terrible scarecrow man with his stuffed burlap head and pudgy blue-gloved hands, this
time he saw Owen Underhill, his face covered with splotches. In the moonlight, the byrus looked like great black moles, spongy and shapeless.
As a child he had always wakened at this point (often with his stiff wang wagging,

although why such an awful dream would give a kid a stilly God alone knew), but this time the
it-
Owen-actually
touched
him, the reflected eyes in the water reproachful. Maybe questioning.
Because you disobeyed orders, buck! Because you crossed the line!
He raised his hand to ward Owen off, to remove that hand… and saw his own hand in
the moonglow. It was
gray.
No,
he told himself,
that’s just the moonlight.
Only three fingers, though-was
that
the moonlight?

Owen’s hand on him, touching him, passing on his filthy disease… and still daring to
call him
6
boss. Wake up, boss!”
Kurtz opened his eyes and sat up with a grunt, simultaneously pushing Freddy’s hand
away. On his knee instead of his shoulder, Freddy reaching back from his place behind the
wheel and shaking his knee, but still intolerable.
“I’m awake, I’m awake.” He held his own hands up in front of his face to prove it.

Not baby-pink, they were a long way from that, but they weren’t gray and each had the requisite five fingers.
“What time is it, Freddy?”
“Don’t know, boss-still morning’s all I can say for sure.”
Of course. Clocks all tucked up. Even his pocket watch had run down. As much a
victim of modem times as anyone else, he had forgotten to wind it. To Kurtz, whose time
sense had always been at least fairly sharp, it felt like about nine, which would mean he’d

gotten about two hours of shuteye. Not much, but he didn’t need much. He felt better. Well
enough, certainly, to hear the concern in Freddy’s voice.
“What’s up, bucko?”
“Pearly says he’s lost contact with all of them now, He says Owen was the last, and
now he’s gone, too. He says Owen must have beat back the Ripley fungus, sir.”
Kurtz caught sight of Perlmutter’s sunken, I-fooled-you grin in the wide rearview
mirror.
“What’s the deal, Archie?”

“No deal,” Pearly said, sounding considerably more lucid than before Kurtz’s nap.
“I… boss,
I could
use a drink of water. I’m not hungry, but-”
“We could stop for water, I guess,” Kurtz allowed. “If we had a contact, that is. But if
we’ve lost
all
of them-this guy Jones as well as Owen and Devlin-well, you know how I
am, buck. I’ll bite when I die, and it’ll take two surgeons and a shotgun to get me to let go

even then. You’re going to have a long and thirsty day sitting there while Freddy and I course the southbound roads, looking for a trace of them… unless you can help out. You
do that, Archie, and I’ll order Freddy to pull off at the next exit. I will personally trot into the Stop n Go or Seven-Eleven and buy you the biggest bottle of Poland Spring water in
the cooler. How does that sound?”

It sounded good, Kurtz could tell that just by the way Perlmutter first smacked his lips and then ran his tongue out to wet them (on Perlmutter’s lips and cheeks the Ripley
was still full and rich, most patches the color of strawberries, some as dark as burgundy
wine), but that sly look had come back. His eyes, rimmed with crusts of Ripley, darted from side to side. And all at once Kurtz understood the picture he was looking at. Pearly

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