“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.

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

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, was toddling around the picnic table to her left, diaper sagging. He was waving a charred hot dog cheerily in one hand. The other three Jones kids, ranging in ages from eleven to three, were in the water, splashing around and yelling at each other. Henry supposed there might be some value to that Biblical imperative about being fruitful and multiplying, but it seemed to him that Jonesy and Carla had taken it to absurd lengths.