Dreamcatcher

He managed to get a breath, and although the exhale was more blood than air, he was
able to get up on his elbows. He saw two figures emerge from the tangle of birches and
pines, bent low, very much in combat-advance mode. One was squat and broad-
shouldered, the other slim and gray-haired and positively perky. Johnson and Kurtz. The
bulldog and the greyhound. His luck had run out after all. In the end, luck always did.

Kurtz knelt beside him, eyes sparkling. In one hand he held a triangle of newspaper.
It was battered and slightly curved from its long trip in Kurtz’s rear pocket, but still recognizable. It was a cocked hat. A fool’s hat. “Tough luck, buck,” Kurtz said.
Owen nodded. It was. Very tough luck. “I see you found time to make me a little something. “‘I did. Did you achieve your prime objective, at least?” Kurtz lifted his chin

in the direction of the shaft house. “Got him,” Owen managed, His mouth was full of blood. He spat it out, tried to pull in another breath, and heard the good part of it wheeze
out of some new hole instead.
“Well, then,” Kurtz said benevolently, “all’s well that ends well, wouldn’t you say?”
He put the newspaper hat tenderly on Owen’s head. Blood soaked it immediately,
spreading upward, turning the UFO story red.

There was another scream from somewhere out over the Reservoir, perhaps from one
of the islands that were actually hills poking up from a purposely drowned landscape.
“That’s an eagle,” Kurtz said, and patted Owen’s shoulder. “Count yourself lucky, laddie.
God sent you a warbird to sing you to-‘Kurtz’s head exploded in a spray of blood and brains and bone.
Owen saw one final expression in the man’s blue, white-lashed eyes: amazed

disbelief. For a moment Kurtz remained on his knees, then toppled forward on what
remained of his face. Behind him, Freddy Johnson stood with his carbine still raised and
smoke drifting from the muzzle.
Freddy,
Owen tried to say. No sound came out, but Freddy must have read his lips.
He nodded. “didn’t want to, but the bastard was going to do it to me. Didn’t have to read
his mind to know that. Not after all these years.”
Finish it,

Owen tried to say. Freddy nodded again. Perhaps there was a vestige of that goddam telepathy left inside Freddy, after all.
Owen was fading. Tired and fading. Goodnight, sweet ladies, goodnight, David, goodnight, Chet. Goodnight, sweet prince. He lay back on the snow and it was like falling
back into a bed stuffed with the softest down. From somewhere, faint and far, he heard the
eagle scream again. They had invaded its territory, disturbed its snowy autumn peace, but

soon they would be gone. The eagle would have the reservoir to itself again.
We were heroes,
Owen thought.
Damned if we weren’t. Fuck your hat, Kurtz, we were
h
-
He never heard the final shot.
30
There had been more firing; now there was silence. Henry sat in the back seat of the
Humvee beside his dead friend, trying to decide what to do next. The chances that they had all killed each other seemed slim. The chances that the good guys-correction, the good
guy

had taken out the bad ones seemed slimmer still.
His first impulse following this conclusion was to vacate the Hummer posthaste and
hide in the woods. Then he looked at the snow
(If I ever see snow again,
he thought,
it’ll
be too soon)
and rejected the idea. If Kurtz or whoever was with him came back in the next half hour, Henry’s tracks would still be there. They would follow his trail, and at the
end of it they’d shoot him like a rabid dog. Or a weasel.

Get a gun, then. Shoot them before they can shoot you.
A better idea. He was no Wyatt Earp, but he could shoot straight. Shooting men was a
lot different from shooting deer, you didn’t have to be a headshrinker to know that, but he
believed, given a clear line of fire, he could shoot these guys with very little hesitation.
He was reaching for the doorhandle when he heard a surprised curse, a thump, yet
another gunshot. This one was
very

close. Henry thought someone had lost his footing and gone down in the snow, discharging his weapon when he landed on his ass. Perhaps the son of a bitch had just shot himself? Was that too much to hope for? Wouldn’t that just-But no. No joy. Henry heard a low grunt as the person who’d fallen got up and came
on again. There was only one option, and Henry took it. He lay back down on the seat, put

Duddits’s arms around him again (as best he could), and played dead. He didn’t think there was much chance this hugger-mugger would work, The bad guys had passed by on
their way in-obviously, as he was still alive-but on their way in they must have been in a
pants-ripping hurry. Now they would be a lot less likely to be fooled by a few bullet holes,
some broken glass, and the blood of poor old Duddits’s final hemorrhages.

Henry heard soft, crunching footsteps in the snow. Only one set, by the sound.
Probably the infamous Kurtz. Last man standing. Darkness approaching. Death in the
afternoon. No longer his old friend-now he was only
playing
dead-but approaching, just the same.
Henry closed his eyes… waited…
The footsteps passed the Humvee without slowing.
31
Freddy Johnson’s strategic goal was, for the time being, both extremely practical and

extremely short-term: he wanted to get the goddam Hummer turned around without
getting stuck. If he managed that, he wanted to get past the break in East Street (where the
Subaru Owen had been chasing had come to grief) without getting ditched himself If he
made it back to the access road, he might widen his horizons a trifle. The idea of the Mass

Pike surfaced briefly in his mind as he swung open the door of the boss’s Hummer and slid behind the wheel. There was a lot of western America down 1-90. A lot of places to
hide.
The stench of stale farts and chilly ethyl alcohol struck him like a slap as he swung
the door closed. Pearly! Goddam Pearly! In the excitement, he had forgotten all about
that
little motherfucker.
Freddy turned, raising the carbine but Pearly was still out cold. No need to use

another bullet. He could just tip Perlmutter out into the snow. If he was lucky, Pearly would freeze to death without ever waking up. Him, and his little sideki-Pearly wasn’t sleeping, though. Nor out cold. Nor in a coma, not even that. Pearly was dead. And he was…
shrunken,
somehow. Almost mummified. His cheeks were drawn
in, hollow, wrinkled. The sockets of his eyes were deep divots, as if behind the thin veils

of his closed lids the eyeballs had fallen into what was now a hollow bucket. And he was
tilted strangely against the passenger door, one leg raised, almost crossed over the other. It
was as if he had died trying to perform the ever-popular one-cheek-sneak. His fatigue pants were now dark, the muted colors turned to mud, and the seat under him was wet.
The fingers of the stain spreading toward Freddy were red.
“What the f-”

From the back seat there arose an ear-splitting yammering; it was like listening to a
powerful stereo turned rapidly up to full volume. Freddy caught movement from the
comer of his right eye. A creature beyond belief appeared in the rearview mirror. It tore off

Freddy’s ear and then struck at his cheek, punched through into his mouth, and latched onto his jaw at the inner gumline. And then Archie Perlmutter’s shit-weasel tore off the side of Freddy’s face as a hungry man might tear a drumstick off a chicken.
Freddy shrieked and discharged his weapon into the passenger door of the Hummer.
He got an arm up and tried to shove the thing off, his fingers slipped on its slick, newborn

skin. The weasel withdrew, tossed its head back, and swallowed what it had tom off like a
parrot with a piece of raw steak. Freddy flailed for the driver’s-side doorhandle and found
it, but before he could yank it up the thing struck again, this time burying its mouth in the
muscular flesh where Freddy’s neck and shoulder merged. There was a vast jet of blood as his jugular opened; it spurted up to the Humvee’s roof, then began to drip back like red rain.

Freddy’s feet jittered, bopping the Humvee’s wide brake in a rapid tapdance. The
creature in the back seat drew back again, seemed to consider, then slithered snakelike over Freddy’s shoulder. It dropped into his lap.
Freddy screamed once as the weasel tore off his plumbing… and then he screamed no
more.
32
Henry sat twisted around in the back seat of the other Humvee, watching as the figure

in the vehicle parked behind him jerked back and forth behind the wheel. Henry was glad
of the thickly falling snow, equally glad of the blood that sprayed up, striking the windshield of the other Humvee, partially obscuring the view.
He could see all too well as it was.
At last the figure behind the wheel stopped moving and fell sideways. A bulky
shadow rose over it, seeming to hulk in triumph. Henry knew what it was; he’d seen one

on Jonesy’s bed, back at Hole in the Wall. One thing he
could
see was that there was a broken window in the Humvee which had been chasing them. He doubted if the thing had
much in the way of intelligence, but how much would it need to register fresh air?
They don’t like the cold. It kills them.

Yes, indeed it did. But Henry had no intention of leaving it at that, and not just because the Reservoir was so close he could hear the water lapping on the rocks.
Something had run up an extremely high debt, and only he was left to present the bill.
Payback’s a bitch, as Jonesy had so often observed, and payback time had arrived.
He leaned over the seat. No weapons there. He leaned over further and thumbed open

the glove compartment. Nothing in there but a litter of invoices, gasoline receipts, and a
tattered paperback titled
How to Be Your Own Best Friend.
Henry opened the door, got out into the snow… and his feet immediately flew out
from under him. He went on his butt with a thump and scraped his back on the Hummer’s
high splashboard. Fuck me Freddy. He got up, slipped again, grabbed the top of the open

door, and managed to stay afoot this time. He shuffled his feet around to the back of the
vehicle he’d come in, never taking his eyes from its twin, parked behind. He could still see
the thing inside, thrashing and shuffling, dining on the driver.
“Stay where you are, beautiful,” Henry said, and began to laugh. The laughter
sounded crazy as bell, but that didn’t stop him. “Lay a few eggs. I am the eggman, after

all. Your friendly neighborhood eggman. Or how about a copy of
How to Be Your Own
Best Friend?
I got one.”
Laughing so hard now he could barely speak. Sliding in the wet and treacherous
snow like a kid let out of school and on his way to the nearest sledding hill. Holding onto

the flank of the Hummer as best he could, except there was really nothing to hold onto once you were south of the doors. Watching the thing shift and move… and then he couldn’t see it anymore. Oh-oh. Where the hell had it gotten to?
In one of Jonesy’s dopey
movies, this is where the scary music would start,
Henry thought.
Attack of the Killer Shit-Weasels.
That got him laughing again.

He was around to the back of the vehicle now. There was a button you could push to
unlatch the rear window… unless, of course, it was locked. Probably wasn’t, though.
Hadn’t Owen gotten into the back this way? Henry couldn’t remember. Couldn’t for the life of him. He was clearly not being his own best friend.
Still cackling, fresh tears gushing out of his eyes, he thumbed the button and the back

window popped open. Henry yanked it wider and looked in. Guns, thank God. Army
carbines like the kind that Owen had taken on his last patrol. Henry grabbed one and examined it. Safety, check. Fire-selection switch, check. Clip marked U.S. ARMY 5.56
CAL 120 RNDS, check.
“So simple even a byrum can do it,” Henry said, and laughed some more. He bent
over, holding his stomach and slipping around in the slop, trying not to fall again. His legs

ached, his back ached, his heart ached most of all… and still he laughed. He was the eggman, he was the eggman, he was the laughing hyena.
He walked around to the driver’s side of Kurtz’s Humvee, gun raised (safety in what
he devoutly hoped was the OFF position), spooky music playing in his head, but still laughing. There was the gasoline hatch; no mistaking that. But where was Gamera, The Terror from Beyond Space?

As if it had heard his thought-and, Henry realized, that was perfectly likely-the
weasel smashed headfirst against the rear window. The one that was, thankfully, unbroken.
Its head was smeared with blood, hair, and bits of flesh. Its dreadful sea-grape eyes stared
into Henry’s. Did it know it had a way out, an escape hatch? Perhaps. And perhaps it understood that using it would likely mean a quick death.
It bared its teeth.

Henry Devlin, who had once won the American Psychiatric Association’s
Compassionate Caring Award for a
New York Times
op-ed piece called “The End of Hate”,
bared his own in return. It felt good. Then he gave it the finger. For Beaver. And for Pete.
That felt good, too.
When he raised the carbine, the weasel-stupid, perhaps, but not
utterly
stupid-dove out of sight. That was cool; Henry had never had the slightest intention of trying to shoot
it through the window. He

did
like the idea of it down there on the floor, though.
Close to
the gas as you want to get, darling,
he thought. He thumbed the carbine’s selector-switch to full auto and fired a long burst into the gas tank.
The sound of the gun was deafening. A huge ragged hole appeared where the
gasoline port had been, but for a moment there was nothing else.
So much for the
Hollywood version of how shit like this works,

Henry thought, and then heard a hoarse whisper of sound, rising to a throaty hiss. He took two steps backward and his feet shot
out from under him again. This time falling quite likely saved his eyesight and perhaps his

life. The back of Kurtz’s Humvee exploded only a second later, fire lashing out from underneath in big yellow petals. The rear tires jumped out of the snow. Glass sprayed through the snowy air, all of it going over Henry’s head. Then the heat began to bake him
and he crawled away rapidly, dragging the carbine by its strap and laughing wildly. There
was a second explosion and the air was filled with whirling hooks of shrapnel.

Henry got to his feet like a man climbing a ladder, using the lower branches of a handy tree as rungs. He stood, panting and laughing, legs aching, back aching, neck with
an odd
sprung feeling.
The entire back half of Kurtz’s Humvee was engulfed in flames. He could hear the thing inside, chattering furiously as it burned.
He made a wide circle to the passenger side of the blazing Humvee and aimed the

carbine at the broken window. He stood there for a moment, frowning, then realized why
this seemed so stupid. All the windows in the Humvee were broken now; all the glass but
the windshield. He began to laugh again. What a dork he was! What a total dork!
Through the hell of flames in the Humvee’s cabin, he could still see the weasel
lurching back and forth like a drunk. How many rounds did he have left in the clip if the
fucking thing
did

come out? Fifty? Twenty? Five? However many rounds there were, it would have to be enough. He wouldn’t risk retreating to Owen’s Humvee for another clip.
But the thing never came out.

Henry stood guard for five minutes, then stretched it to ten. The snow fell and the Humvee burned, pouring black smoke into the white sky. Henry stood there thinking of the Derry Days Parade, Gary U.S. Bonds singing “New Orleans”, and here comes a tall man on stilts, here comes the legendary cowboy, and how excited Duddits had been,
jumping right up and down. Thinking of Pete, standing outside DJHS, hands cupped,

pretending to smoke, waiting for the rest of them. Pete, whose plan had been to captain NASA’s first manned Mars expedition. Thinking of Beaver and his Fonzie jacket, Beav and his toothpicks, Beav singing to Duddits, Baby’s boat’s a silver dream. Beav hugging
Jonesy at Jonesy’s wedding and saying Jonesy had to be happy, he had to be happy for all
of them.
Jonesy.
When Henry was absolutely sure the weasel was dead-incinerated-he started up the

path to see if Jonesy was still alive. He didn’t hold out much hope of that… but he discovered he hadn’t given up hope, either.
33
Only pain pinned Jonesy to the world, and at first he thought the haggard, sooty-
cheeked man kneeling beside him had to be a dream, or a final figment of his imagination.
Because the man appeared to be Henry.
“Jonesy? Hey, Jonesy, are you there?” Henry snapped his fingers in front of Jonesy’s
eyes. “Earth to Jonesy.”

“Henry, is it you? Is it really?”
“It’s me,” Henry said. He glanced at the dog still partly stuck into the crack at the top
of Shaft 12, then back at Jonesy. He brushed Jonesy’s sweat-soaked hair off his forehead
with infinite tenderness.
“Man, it took you…” Jonesy began, and then the world wavered. He closed his eyes,
concentrated hard, then opened them again. “… took you long enough to get back from the store. Did you remember the bread””
“Yeah, but I lost the hot dogs.”

“What a fuckin pisser.” Jonesy took a long and wavering breath.
“I’ll go myself, next time.”
“Kiss my bender, pal,” Henry said, and Jonesy slipped into darkness smiling.
Epilogue
LABOR DAY
The universe, she is a bitch.
–Norman Maclean
Another summer down the tubes,
Henry thought.
There was nothing sad about the thought, though; summer had been good, and fall
would be good, too. No hunting this year, and there would undoubtedly be the occasional

visit from his new military friends (his new military friends wanted to be sure above all things that he wasn’t growing any red foliage on his skin), but fall would be good just the
same. Cool air, bright days, long nights.
Sometimes, in the post-midnight hours of his nights, Henry’s old friend still came to
visit, but when it did, he simply sat up in his study with a book in his lap and waited for it

to go again. Eventually it always did. Eventually the sun always came up. The sleep you
didn’t get one night sometimes came to you on the next, and then it came like a lover. This
was something he’d learned since last November.
He was drinking a beer on the porch of Jonesy and Carla’s cottage in Ware, the one
on the shore of Pepper Pond. The south end of the Quabbin Reservoir was about four miles northwest of where he sat. And East Street, of course.

The hand holding the can of Coors only had three fingers. He’d lost the two on the
end to frostbite, perhaps while skiing out the Deep Cut Road from Hole in the Wall, perhaps while dragging Jonesy back to the remaining Humvee on a lashed-together
travois. Last fall had been his season to drag people through the snow, it seemed, and with
mixed results.
Near the little scrape of beach, Carla Jones was tending a barbecue. Noel, the baby,

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