An hour later they stopped on another rise and Pete fell off the Cat again, this time tumbling to the side. He raised his face, but most of his face was gone, buried under a beard of vegetation. He tried to speak aloud and couldn’t; his mouth was stuffed, his tongue buried under a lush mat of byrus.

I can’t, man. I can’t, no more, please, let me be.

“Yes,” Mr Gray said. “I think you’ve served your purpose.”

Pete! Jonesy cried. Then, to Mr Gray: No, no, don’t!

Mr Gray paid no attention, of course. For a moment Jonesy saw silent understanding in Pete’s remaining eye. And relief For that moment he was still able to touch Pete’s mind-his boyhood friend, the one who always stood outside the gate at DJHS, one hand cupped over his mouth, hiding a cigarette that wasn’t really there, the one who was going to be an astronaut and see the world entire from earth orbit, one of the four who had helped save Duddits from the big boys.

For one moment. Then he felt something leap from Mr Gray’s mind and the stuff growing on Pete did not just twitch but clenched. There was a tenebrous creaking sound as Pete’s skull cracked in a dozen places. His face-what remained of it-pulled inward in a kind of yank, making him old at a stroke. Then he fell forward and snow began to fleck the back of his parka.

You bastard.

Mr Gray, indifferent to Jonesy’s curse and Jonesy’s anger, made no reply. He faced forward again. The building wind dropped momentarily when he did, and a hole opened in the curtain of snow. About five miles northwest of their current position, Jonesy saw moving lights-not flashlights but headlights. Lots of them. Trucks moving in convoy along the turnpike. Trucks and nothing else, he supposed. This part of Maine belonged to the military now.

And they’re all looking for you, asshole, he spat as the snowmobile began to roll again. The snow closed back around them, cutting off their momentary view of the trucks, but Jonesy knew that Mr Gray would have no trouble finding the turnpike. Pete had gotten him this far, to a part of the quarantine zone where Jonesy supposed little trouble was expected. He was counting on Jonesy to take him the rest of the way, because Jonesy was different. For one thing, he was clear of the byrus. The byrus didn’t like him for some reason.

You’ll never get out of here, Jonesy said.

I will, Mr Gray said. We always die and we always live. We always lose and we always win, Like it or not, Jonesy, we’re the future.

If that’s true, it’s the best reason I ever heard for living in the past, Jonesy replied, but from Mr Gray there was no answer, Mr Gray as an entity, a consciousness, was gone, merged back into the cloud. There was only enough of him left to run Jonesy’s motor skills and keep the snowmobile pointed toward the turnpike. And Jonesy, carried helplessly forward on whatever mission this thing had, took slender comfort from two things. One was that Mr Gray didn’t know how to get at the last piece of him, the tiny part that existed in his memory of the Tracker Brothers office. The other was that Mr Gray didn’t know about Duddits-about no bounce, no play.

Jonesy intended to make sure Mr Gray didn’t find out.

At least not yet.

Chapter Thirteen

AT GOSSELIN’S

To Archie Perlmutter, high-school valedictorian (speech topic: “The Joys and the Responsibilities of Democracy”), onetime Eagle Scout, faithful Presbyterian, and West Point grad, Gosselin’s Country Market no longer looked real. Now spotlighted by enough candlepower to illuminate a small city, it looked like a set in a movie. Not just any movie, either, but the sort of James Cameron extravaganza where the catering costs alone would amount to enough to feed the people of Haiti for two years. Even the steadily increasing snow did not cut into the glare of the lights very much, or change the illusion that the whole works, from the crappy siding to the pair of tin woodstove stacks sticking acrooked out of the roof to the single rusty gas-pump out front, was simply set-dressing.

This would be Act One, Pearly thought as he strode briskly along with his clipboard tucked under his arm (Archie Perlmutter had always felt he was a man of considerable artistic nature… commercial, too). We fade in on an isolated country store. The oldtimers are sitting around the woodstove-not the little one in Gosselin’s office but the big one in the store itself-while the snow pelts down outside. They’re talking about lights in the sky… missing hunters… sightings of little gray men skulking around in the woods. The store owner-call him Old Man Rossiter-scoffs. “Oh gosh fishes, you’re all a buncha old wimmin!” he says, and just then the whole place is bathed in these brilliant lights (think Close Encounters of the Third Kind) as a UFO settles down to the ground! Bloodthirsty aliens come piling out, firing their deathrays! It’s like Independence Day, only, here’s the hook, in the woods!

Beside him, Melrose, the cook’s third (which was about as close as anyone got to an official rating on this little adventure), struggled to keep up. He was wearing sneakers on his feet instead of shoes or boots-Perlmutter had dragged him out of Spago’s, which was what the men called the cook-tent-and he kept slipping. Men (and a few women) passed everywhere around them, mostly at the double. Many were talking into lavalier mikes or walkie-talkies. The sense that this was a movie-set instead of a real place was enhanced by the trailers, the semis, the idling helicopters (the worsening weather had brought them all back in), and the endless conflicting roar of motors and generators.

“Why does he want to see me?” Melrose asked again. Out of breath and whinier than ever. They were passing the paddock and corral to one side of Gosselin’s barn, now. The old and dilapidated fence (it had been ten years or more since there’d been an actual horse in the corral or exercised in the paddock) had been reinforced by alternating strands of barbwire and smoothwire. There was an electrical charge running through the smoothwire, probably not lethal but high enough to lay you out on the ground, convulsing… and the charge could be jacked up to lethal levels if the natives became restless. Behind this wire, watching them, were twenty or thirty men, Old Man Gosselin among them (in the James Cameron version, Gosselin would be played by some craggy oldtimer like Bruce Dern). Earlier, the men behind the wire would have called out, issuing threats and angry demands, but since they’d seen what happened to that banker from Massachusetts who tried to run, their peckers had wilted considerably, poor fellows. Seeing someone shot in the head took a lot of the fuck-you out of a man. And then there was the fact that all the cps guys were now wearing nose-and-mouth masks. That had to take whatever fuck-you was left.

“Boss?” Almost whining had given way to actual whining. The sight of American citizens standing behind barbed wire had apparently added to Melrose’s unease. “Boss, come on-why does the big boy want to see me? Big boy shouldn’t know a cook’s third even exists.”

“I don’t know,” Pearly replied. It was the truth.

Up ahead, standing at the head of what had been dubbed Eggbeater Alley, was Owen Underhill and some guy from the motorpool. The motor-pool guy was almost shouting into Underhill’s ear in order to make himself heard over the racket of the idling helicopters. Surely, Perlmutter thought, they’d shut the choppers down soon; nothing was going to fly in this shit, an early-season blizzard that Kurtz called “our gift from God”. When he said stuff like that, you couldn’t tell if Kurtz really meant it or was just being ironic. He always sounded like he meant it… but then sometimes he would laugh. The kind of laugh that made Archie Perlmutter nervous. In the movie, Kurtz would be played by James Woods. Or maybe Christopher Walken. Neither one of them looked like Kurtz, but had George C. Scott looked like Patton? Case closed.