ETE AND BECKY

1

Pete lay screaming in the snow-covered rut where he had landed until he could scream no more and then just lay there for awhile, trying to cope with the pain, to find some way to compromise with it. He couldn't. This was no-compromise pain, blitzkrieg agony. He'd had no idea the world had such pain - had he known, surely he would have stayed with the woman. With Marcy, although Marcy wasn't her name. He almost knew her name, but what did it matter? He was the one who was in trouble here, the pain coming up from his knee in baked spasms, hot and terrible.

He lay shivering in the road with the plastic bag beside him.

THANKS FOR SHOPPING AT OUR PLACE! on the side. Pete reached for it, wanting to see if there was a bottle or two in there that wasn't broken, and when his leg shifted, a bolt of agony flew up from the knee. It made the others feel like twinges. Pete screamed again, and passed out.

2

He didn't know how long he'd been out when he came to - the light suggested it hadn't been long, but his feet were numb and his hands were going as well, in spite of the gloves.

Pete lay partially turned on his side, the beer-bag lying beside him in a puddle of freezing amber slush. The pain in his knee had receded a little - probably that was numbing up, too - and he found he could think again. That was good, because this was a fuckin pisser he'd gotten himself into here. He had to get back to the lean-to and the fire, and he had to do it on his own. If he simply lay here waiting for Henry and the snowmobile, he was apt to be a Petesicle when Henry arrived - a Petesicle with a bag of busted beer - bottles beside him, thank you for shopping at our place, you fucking alcoholic, thanks a lot. And there was the woman to think of She might die, too, and all because Pete Moore had to have his brewskis.

He looked at the bag with distaste. Couldn't throw it into the woods; couldn't risk waking his knee up again. So he covered it with snow, like a dog covering its own scat, and then he began to crawl.

The knee wasn't that numb after all, it seemed. Pete crawled on his elbows and pushed with his good foot, teeth clenched, hair hanging in his eyes. No animals now; the stampede had stopped and there was only him - the gaspy sound of his breathing and the stifled moans of pain each time his knee bumped. He could feel sweat running down his arms and back, but his feet remained numb and so did his hands.

He might have given up, but halfway along the straight stretch he caught sight of the fire he and Henry had made. It had burned down considerably, but it was there. Pete began to crawl toward it, and each time he bumped his leg and the bolts of agony came, he tried to project them into the orange spark of the fire. He wanted to get there. It hurt like pluperfect hell to move, but oh how he wanted to get there. He didn't want to die freezing to death in the snow.

'I'll make it, Becky,' he muttered. 'I'll make it, Becky.' He spoke her name half a dozen times before he heard himself using it.

As he approached the fire he paused to glance at his watch and frowned. It said eleven-forty or thereabouts, and that was nuts - he remembered checking it before starting back to the Scout, and it had said twenty past twelve then. A slightly longer look revealed the source of the confusion. His watch was running backward, the second hand moving counterclockwise in irregular, spasmodic jerks. He looked at this without much surprise. His ability to appreciate anything so fine as mere peculiarity had passed. Even his leg was no longer his chief concern. He was very cold, and big shudders began to course his body as he elbowed his way and pushed with his rapidly tiring good leg, covering the last fifty yards to the dying fire.

The woman was no longer on the tarp. She now lay on the far side of the fire, as if she had crawled toward the remaining wood and then collapsed.

'Hi, honey, I'm home,' he panted. 'Had a little trouble with my knee, but now I'm back. Goddam knee's your fault anyway, Becky, so don't complain, all right? Becky, is that your name?'

Maybe, but she made no response. Just lay there staring. He could still see only one of her eyes, although whether it was the same one or the other he didn't know. Didn't seem so creepy now, but maybe that was because he had other things to worry about. Like the fire. It was guttering, but there was a good bed of coals and he thought he was in time. Get some wood on that sweetheart, really build her up, then lie here with his gal Becky (but upwind, please God - those hangers were bad). Wait for Henry to show up. Wouldn't be the first time Henry had pulled his nuts out of the fire.

Pete crawled toward the woman and the little stockpile of wood beyond her, and as he got close - close enough to start picking up that ethery chemical smell again - he understood why her gaze no longer bothered him. That creepy jackalope look had gone out of it. Everything had. She'd crawled halfway around the fire and died. The crusting of snow around her waist and hips had gone a dark red.

Pete stopped for a moment, up on his aching arms and peering at her, but his interest in her, dead or alive, was not much more than the passing interest he'd felt in his back-turning watch. What he wanted to do was get some wood on the fire and get warm. He would consider the problem of the woman later. Next month, maybe, when he was sitting in his own living room with a cast on his knee and a cup of hot coffee in his hand.

He finally made it to the wood. Only four pieces were left, but they were big pieces. Henry might be back before they burned down, and Henry would pick up some more before going on to get help. Good old Henry. Still wearing his dorky horn-rims, even in this age of soft contacts and laser surgery, but you could count on him.

Pete's mind tried to return to the Scout, crawling into the Scout and smelling the cologne Henry had not, in fact, been wearing, and he wouldn't let it. Let's not go there, as the kids said. As if memory was a destination. No more ghost-cologne, no more memories of Duddits. No more no bounce, no more no play. He had enough on his plate already.

He threw the wood onto the fire one branch at a time, sidearming the pieces awkwardly, wincing at the pain in his knee but enjoying the way the sparks rose in a cloud, whirling beneath the lean-to's canted tin ceiling like crazy fireflies before winking out.

Henry would be back soon. That was the thing to hold onto. Just watch the fire blaze up and hold that thought.

No, he won't. Because things have gone wrong back at Hole in the Wall. Something to do with -

'Rick,' he said, watching the flames taste the new wood. Soon they would feed and grow tall.

He stripped off his gloves, using his teeth, and held his hands up to the warmth of the fire. The cut on the pad of his right hand, where the busted bottle had gotten him, was long and deep. Was going to leave a scar, but so what? What was a scar or two between friends? And they were friends, weren't they? Yeah. The old Kansas Street Gang, the Crimson Pirates with their plastic swords and battery-powered Star Wars ray-guns. Once they had done something heroic - twice, if you counted the Rinkenhauer girl. They had even gotten their pictures in the paper that time, and so what if he had a few scars? And so what if they had once maybe - just maybe - killed a guy? Because if ever there was a guy who deserved killing -

But he wasn't going to go there, either. No way, baby.

He saw the line, though. Like it or not, he saw the line, more clearly than he'd seen it in years. Primarily he saw Beaver . . . and heard him, too. Right in the center of his head.

Jonesy? You there, man?

'Don't get up, Beav,' Pete said, watching the flames crackle and climb. The fire was hot now, beating warmth against his face, making him feel sleepy. 'You stay right where you are. Just . . . you know, just sit tight.'

What, exactly, was all this about? What's all this jobba-nobba? as the Beav himself had sometimes said when they were kids, a phrase that meant nothing but still cracked them up. Pete sensed he could know if he wanted to, the line was that bright. He got a glimpse of blue tiles, a filmy blue shower curtain, a bright orange cap - Rick's cap, McCarthy's cap, old Mr I-Stand-at-the-Door's cap - and sensed he could have all the rest if he wanted it. He didn't know if this was the future, the past, or what was happening right this minute, but he could have it if he wanted it, if he -

'I don't,' he said, and pushed the whole thing away.

There were a few sticks and twigs left on the ground. Pete fed them to the fire, then looked at the woman. Her open eye had no menace in it now. It was dusty, the way a deer's eyes got dusty after you shot it. All that blood around her . . . he supposed she'd hemorrhaged. Something inside had gone bust. Hell of a tough break. He supposed maybe she'd known it was coming and had sat down in the road because she wanted to be sure of being seen if someone came along. Someone had, but look how it had turned out. Poor bitch. Poor unlucky bitch.

Pete shifted to the left, slowly, until he could snag the tarp, then began to move forward again. It had been her makeshift sled; now it could be her makeshift shroud. 'I'm sorry,' he said. 'Becky or whatever your name is, I'm really sorry. But I couldn't have helped you by staying, you know; I'm not a doctor, I'm a fucking car salesman. You were - '

- fucked from the start was how he'd meant to finish, but the words dried up in his throat as he saw the back of her. That part hadn't been visible until he got close, because she had died facing the fire. The seat of her jeans was blown out, as if she'd finally finished farting fumes and had gotten down to the dynamite. Tom rags of denim fluttered in the breeze. Also fluttering were fragments of the garments she had been wearing beneath, at least two pairs of longjohns - one heavy white cotton, the other pink silk. And something was growing on both the legs of the jeans and the back of her parka. It looked like mildew or some kind of fungus. Red - gold, or maybe that was just reflected firelight.

Something had come out of her. Something? -

Yes. Something. And it's watching me right now.

Pete looked into the woods. Nothing. The flood of animals had dried up. He was alone.

Except I'm not.

No, he wasn't. Something was out there, something that didn't do well in the cold, something that preferred warm, wet places. Except -

Except it got too big. And it ran out of food.

'Are you out there?'

Pete thought that calling out like that would make him feel foolish, but it didn't. What it made him feel was more frightened than ever.

His eye fastened on a sketchy track of that mildewy stuff. It stretched away from Becky - yeah, she was a Becky, all right, as Becky as Becky could be - and around the comer of the lean-to. A moment later Pete heard a scaly scraping sound as something slithered on the tin roof He craned up, following the sound with his eyes.

'Go away,' he whispered. 'Go away and leave me alone. I . . . I'm fucked up.'

There was another brief slither as the thing moved farther up the tin. Yes, he was fucked up. Unfortunately, he was also food. The thing up there slithered again. Pete didn't think it would wait long, maybe couldn't wait long, not up there; it would be like a gecko in a refrigerator. What it was going to do was drop on him. And now he realized a terrible thing: he had gotten so fixated on the beer that he had forgotten the fucking guns.

His first impulse was to crawl deeper into the lean-to, but that might be a mistake, like running into a blind alley. He grabbed the jutting end of one of the fresh branches he'd just put on the fire instead. He didn't take it out, not yet, just made a loose fist around it. The other end was burning briskly. 'Come on,' he said to the tin roof ' You like it hot? I've got something hot for you. Come on and get it. Yum-fuckin-yum.'

Nothing. Not from the roof, anyway. There was a soft flump of snow falling from one of the pines behind him as the lower branches shed their burden. Pete's hand tightened on his makeshift torch, half-lifting it from the fire. Then he let it settle back in a little swirl of sparks. 'Come on, motherfucker. I'm hot, I'm tasty, and I'm waiting.' Nothing. But it was up there. It couldn't wait long, he was sure of it. Soon it would come.

3

Time passed. Pete wasn't sure how much; his watch had given up entirely. Sometimes his thoughts seemed to intensify, as they sometimes had when he and the others were hanging with Duddits (although as they grew older and Duddits stayed the same, there had been less of that - it was as though their changing brains and bodies had lost the knack of picking up Duddits's strange signals). This was like that, but not exactly like that. Something new, maybe. Maybe even something to do with the lights in the sky. He was aware that Beaver was dead and that something terrible might have happened to Jonesy, but he didn't know what.

Whatever had happened, Pete thought Henry knew about it, too, although not clearly; Henry was deep inside his own head and he thought Banbury Cross, Banbury Cross, ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross.

The stick burned down further, closer to his hand, and Pete wondered what he'd do if it burned down too far to be of use, if the thing up there could outwait him after all. And then a new thought came to him, bright as day and red with panic. It filled his head and he began to cry it aloud, masking the sound of the thing on the roof as it slithered quickly down the slope of the tin.

'Please don't hurt us! Ne nous blessez pas!'

But they would, they would, because . . . what?

Because 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?

Pete didn't know if they did, the boys to whom the voice spoke, but he did. They were coming, the boys were coming, the Crimson Pirates were coming and not all the begging in the world would stop them. And still they begged, and Pete begged with them.

'Please don't hurt us! Please! S'il vous pla?t! Ne nous blessez pas! Ne nous faites pas mal nous sommes sans d��fense! 'Weeping now. 'Please! For the love of God, we're helpless!'

In his mind he saw the hand, the dog-turd, the weeping nearly naked boy. And all the time the thing on the roof was slithering, dying but not helpless, stupid but not entirely stupid, getting behind Pete while he screamed, while he lay on his side by the dead woman, listening as some apocalyptic slaughter began.

Cancer, said the man with the white eyelashes.

'Please!' he screamed. 'Please, we're helpless!'

But, lie or the truth, it was too late.

4

The snowmobile had passed Henry's hiding place without slowing, and the sound of it was now receding to the west. It was safe to come out, but Henry didn't come out. Couldn't come out. The intelligence which had replaced Jonesy hadn't sensed him, either because it was distracted or because Jonesy had somehow - might somehow still be

But no. The idea that there could be any of Jonesy left inside that terrible cloud was so much dreamwork.

And now that the thing was gone - receding, at least ?there were the voices. They filled Henry's head, making him feel half - mad with their babble, as Duddits's crying had always made him feel half - mad, at least until puberty had ended most of that crap. One of the voices belonged to a man who said something about a fungus

(dies easily unless it gets on a living host)

and then something about a New England Tel phone card and . . . chemotherapy? Yes, a big hot radioactive shot. It was the voice, Henry thought, of a lunatic. He had treated enough of them to judge, God knew.

The other voices were the ones which made him question his own sanity. He didn't know all of them, but he knew some: Walter Cronkite, Bugs Bunny, Jack Webb, Jimmy Carter, a woman he thought was Margaret Thatcher. Sometimes the voices spoke in English, sometimes in French.

'II n'y a pas d'infection ici,' Henry said, and then began to weep, He was astounded and exhilarated to find there were still tears in his heart, from which he thought all tears and all laughter - true laughter - had fled. Tears of horror, tears of pity, tears that opened the stony ground of self-regarding obsession and burst the rock inside. 'There is no infection here, please, oh God stop it, don't, don't, nous sommes sans d��fense, NOUS SOMMES SANS - '

Then the human thunder began in the west and Henry put his hands to his head, thinking that the screams and the pain in there would tear it apart. The bastards were -

5

The bastards were slaughtering them.

Pete sat by the fire, unmindful of the bellows of pain from his separated knee, unaware that he was now holding the branch from the fire up beside his temple. The screams inside his head could not quite drown out the sound of the machine-guns in the west, big machine-guns, .50s. Now the cries - please don't hurt us, we are defenseless, there is no infection - began to fade into panic; it wasn't working, nothing could work, the deal was done.

Movement caught Pete's eye and he turned just as the thing that had been on the roof struck at him. He caught a blurred glimpse of a slender, weaselly body that seemed powered by a muscular tail rather than legs, and then its teeth sank into his ankle. He shrieked and yanked his good leg toward him so hard he almost clocked himself in the chin with his own knee. The thing came with it, clinging like ?a leech. Were these the things that were begging for mercy? Fuck them, if they were. Fuck them!

He reached for it with his right hand, the one he'd cut on the Bud bottle, without even thinking about it; the torch he continued to hold up at the side of his head with his uninjured left. He seized something that felt like cool, fur-covered jelly. The thing let go of his ankle at once, and Pete caught just a glimpse of expressionless black eyes - shark's eyes, eagle eyes - before it sank the needle-nest of its teeth into his clutching hand, tearing it wide open along the perforation of the previous cut.

The agony was like the end of the world. The thing's head ?if it had one - was buried in the hand, ripping and tearing, digging deeper. Blood flew in splattery fans as Pete tried to shake it off, stippling the snow and the sawdusty tarp and the dead woman's parka. Droplets flew into the fire and hissed like fat in a hot skillet. Now the thing was making a ferocious chattering sound. Its tail, as thick as a moray eel's body, wrapped around Pete's thrashing arm, endeavoring to keep it still.

Pete made no conscious decision to use the torch, because he'd forgotten he had it; his only thought was to tear the terrible biting thing off his right hand with his left. At first, when it caught fire and flared up, as hot and bright as a roll of newspaper, he didn't understand what was happening. Then he screamed, partly in fresh pain and partly in triumph. He bolted to his feet - for the time being, at least, his bulging knee did not hurt at all - and swung his burdened right arm at one of the lean-to's support posts in a great sweeping roundhouse. There was a crunch and the chattering sound was replaced by muffled squealing. For one endless moment the knot of teeth planted in his hand burrowed in deeper than ever. Then they loosened and the burning creature fell free and landed on the frozen ground. Pete stamped on it, felt it writhe under his heel, and was filled with one moment of pure and savage triumph before his outraged knee gave way entirely and his leg bent inside out, the tendons torn loose.

He fell heavily on his side, face to face with Becky's lethal hitchhiker, unaware that the lean-to was beginning to shift, the pole he'd struck with his arm bowing slowly outward. For a moment the weasel-thing's rudiment of a face was three inches from Pete's own. Its burning body flapped against his jacket. Its black eyes boiled. It had nothing so sophisticated as a mouth, but when the bulge in the top of its body unhinged, revealing its teeth, Pete screamed at it ?'No! No! No!' - and batted it into the fire, where it writhed and made its frantic, monkeylike chattering.

His left foot swung in a short arc as he shoved the thing farther into the fire. The tip of his boot struck the tilting pole, which had just decided to hold the lean-to up a little longer. This was one outrage too many and the pole snapped, dropping half of the tin roof. A second or two later, the other pole snapped as well. The rest of the roof fell into the fire, sending out a whirling squirt of sparks.

For a moment that was all. Then the fallen sheet of rusty tin began to heave itself up and down, as if it were breathing. A moment later, Pete crawled out from under. His eyes were glazed. His skin was pasty with shock. The left cuff of his jacket was on fire. He stared at this for a moment with his legs still under the fallen roof from the knees down, then raised his arm in front of his face, drew in a deep breath, and blew out the flames rising from his jacket like a giant birthday candle.

Approaching from the east was the buzz of a snowmobile engine. Jonesy . . . or whatever was left of him. The cloud. Pete didn't think it would show him any mercy. This was no day for mercy in the Jefferson Tract. He should hide. But the voice advising him of that was distant, unimportant. One thing was good: he had an idea he had finally quit drinking.

He raised his savaged right hand in front of his face. One finger was gone, presumably down the thing's gullet. Two others lay in a swoon of severed tendons. He saw that reddish-gold stuff already growing along the deepest slashes - the ones the monster had inflicted and the one he'd done himself, crawling back into the Scout after the beer. He could feel a kind of fizzy sensation as whatever that stuff was fed on his flesh and blood.

Pete suddenly felt that he couldn't die soon enough.

The sound of the machine-guns in the west had stopped, but it wasn't over, not by a long shot. And as if the thought had summoned it, a huge explosion hammered the day, blotting out the wasp-whine of the oncoming snowmobile and everything else. Everything but the busy fizz in his hand, that was. In his hand, the crud was dining on him the way the cancer that had killed his father had dined on the old man's stomach and lungs.

Pete ran his tongue over his teeth, felt gaps where some of them had fallen out.

He closed his eyes and waited.