T GOSSELIN'S

1

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 Mar?ket 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 motor?pool. 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.

Perlmutter abruptly detoured toward Underhill. Melrose tried to follow and went on his ass, cursing. Perlmutter tapped Underhill on his shoulder, then hoped his mask would at least partially conceal his expression of surprise when the other man turned. Owen Underhill looked as if he had aged ten years since stepping off the Millinocket School Department bus.

Leaning forward, Pearly shouted over the wind: 'Kurtz in fifteen! Don't forget!'

Underhill gave him an impatient wave to say he wouldn't, and turned back to the motor-pool guy. Perlmutter had him placed now; Brodsky, his name was. The men called him Dawg.

Kurtz's command post, a humongous Winnebago (if this were a movie-set, it would be the star's home away from home, or perhaps Jimmy Cameron's), was just ahead. Pearly picked up the pace, facing boldly forward into the flick-flick-flick of the snow. Melrose scurried to catch up, brushing snow off his coverall.

'C'mon, Skipper,' he pleaded. 'Don'tcha have any idea?'

'No,' Perlmutter said. He had no clue as to why Kurtz would want to see a cook's third with everything up and running in high gear. But he thought both of them knew it couldn't be anything good.

2

Owen turned Emil Brodsky's head, placed the bulb of his mask against the man's ear, and said: 'Tell me again. Not all of it, Just about the part you called the mind-fuck.'

Brodsky didn't argue but took ten seconds or so to arrange his thoughts. Owen gave it to him. There was his appointment with Kurtz, and debriefing after that - plenty of crew, reams of paperwork - and God alone knew what gruesome tasks to follow, but he sensed this was important.

Whether or not he would tell Kurtz remained to be seen.

At last Brodsky turned Owen's head, placed the bulb of his own mask against Owen's car, and began to talk. The story was a little more detailed this time, but essentially the same, He had been walking across the field next to the store, talking to Cambry beside him and to an approaching fuel-supply convoy at the same time, when all at once he felt as if his mind had been hijacked. He had been in a cluttery old shed with someone he couldn't quite see. The man wanted to get a snowmobile going, and couldn't. He needed the Dawg to tell him what was wrong with it.

'I asked him to open the cowling!' Brodsky shouted into Owen's ear. 'He did, and then it seemed like I was looking through his eyes . . . but with my mind, do you see?'

Owen nodded.

'I could see right away what was wrong, someone had taken the plugs out. So I told the guy to look around, which he did. Which we both did. And there they were, in a jar of gasoline on the table. My Dad used to do the same thing with the plugs from his Lawnboy and his rototiller when the cold weather came.'

Brodsky paused, clearly embarrassed either by what he was saying or how he imagined it must sound. Owen, who was fascinated, gestured for him to go on.

'There ain't much more. I told him to fish em out, dry em off, and pop em in. It was like a billion times I've helped some guy work on somethin except I wasn't there - I was here. None of it was happening.'

Owen said: 'What next?' Bellowing to be heard over the engines, but the two of them still as private as a priest and his customer in a church confessional.

'Started up first crank. I told him to check the gas while he was at it, and there was a full tank. He said thanks.' Brodsky shook his head wonderingly. 'And I said, No problem, boss. Then I kind of thumped back into my own head and I was just walking along. You think I'm crazy?'

'No. But I want you to keep this to yourself for the time being.'

Under his mask, Brodsky's lips spread in a grin. 'Oh man, no problem there, either. I just . . . well, we're supposed to report anything unusual, that's the directive, and I thought - '

Quickly, not giving Brodsky time to think, Owen rapped: 'What was his name?'

'Jonesy Three,' Dawg replied, and then his eyes widened in surprise. 'Holy shit! I didn't know I knew that.'

'Is that some sort of Indian name, do you think? Like Sonny Sixkiller or Ron Nine Moons?'

'Coulda been, but . . .' Brodsky paused, thinking, then burst out: 'It was awful! Not when it was happening, but later on . . . thinking about it . . . it was like being . . .' He dropped his voice. 'Like being raped, sir.'

'Let it go,' Owen said. 'You must have a few things to do?'

Brodsky smiled. 'Only a few thousand.'

'Then get started.'

'Okay.' Brodsky took a step away, then turned back. Owen was looking toward the corral, which had once held horses and now held men. Most of the detainees were in the barn, and all but one of the two dozen or so out here were huddled up together, as if for comfort. The one who stood apart was a tall, skinny drink of water wearing big glasses that made him look sort of like an owl. Brodsky looked from the doomed owl to Underhill. 'You're not gonna get me in hack over this, are you? Send me to see the shrink?' Unaware, of course, both of them unaware that the skinny guy in the old-fashioned horn-rims was a shrink.

'Not a ch - ' Owen began. Before he could finish, there was a gunshot from Kurtz's Winnebago and someone began to scream.

'Boss?' Brodsky whispered. Owen couldn't hear him over the contending motors; he read the word off Brodsky's lips. And: 'Ohh, fuck.'

'Go on, Dawg,' Owen said. 'Not your business.'

Brodsky looked at him a moment longer, wetting his lips inside his mask. Owen gave him a nod, trying to project an air of confidence, of command, of everything's-under-control. Maybe it worked, because Brodsky returned the nod and started away.

From the Winnebago with the hand-lettered sign on the door (THE BUCK STOPS HERE), the screaming continued. As Owen started that way, the man standing by himself in the compound spoke to him. 'Hey! Hey, you! Stop a minute, I need to talk to you!'

I'll bet, Underhill thought, not slowing his pace. I bet you've got a whale of a tale to tell and a thousand reasons why you should be let out of here right now.

'Overhill? No, Underhill. That's your name, isn't it? Sure it is. I have to talk to you - it's important to both of us!'

Owen stopped in spite of the screaming from the Winnebago, which was breaking up into hurt sobs now. Not good, but at least it seemed that no one had been killed. He took a closer look at the man in the spectacles. Skinny as a rail and shivering in spite of the down parka he was wearing.

'It's important to Rita,' the skinny man called over the con?tending roar of the engines. 'To Katrina, too.' Speaking the names seemed to sap the geeky guy, as if he had drawn them up like stones from some deep well, but in his shock at hearing the names of his wife and daughter from this stranger's lips, Owen barely noticed. The urge to go to the man and ask him how he knew those names was strong, but he was currently out of time . . . he had an appointment. And just because no one had been killed yet didn't mean no one would be killed.

Owen gave the man behind the wire a final look, marking his face, and then hurried on toward the Winnebago with the sign on the door.

3

Perlmutter had read Heart of Darkness, had seen Apocalypse Now, and had on many occasions thought that the name Kurtz was simply a little too convenient. He would have bet a hundred dollars (a great sum for a non - wagering artistic fellow such as himself) that it wasn't the boss's real name - that the boss's real name was Arthur Holsapple or Dagwood Elgart, maybe even Paddy Maloney. Kurtz? Unlikely. It was almost surely an affectation, as much a prop as George Patton's pearl - handled .45. The men, some of whom had been with Kurtz since Desert Storm (Archie Perlmutter didn't go back nearly that far), thought he was one crazy motherfucker, and so did Perlmutter . . . crazy like Patton had been crazy. Crazy like a fox, in other words. Probably when he was shaving in the morning he looked at his reflection and practiced saying 'The horror, the horror' in just the right Marlon Brando whisper.

So Pearly felt disquiet but no unusual disquiet as he escorted Cook's Third Melrose into the over-warm command trailer. And Kurtz looked pretty much okay. The skipper was sitting in a cane rocking chair in the living-room area. He had removed his coverall - it hung on the door through which Perlmutter and Melrose had entered - and received them in his longjohns. From one post of the rocking chair his pistol hung by its belt, not a pearl-handled .45 but a nine-millimeter automatic.

All the electronic gear was rebounding. On Kurtz's desk the fax hummed constantly, piling up paper. Every fifteen seconds or so, Kurtz's iMac cried 'You've got mail!' in its cheery robot voice. Three radios, all turned low, crackled and hopped with transmissions. Mounted on the fake pine behind the desk were two framed photographs. Like the sign on the door, the photos went with Kurtz everywhere. The one on the left, titled INVESTMENT, showed an angelic young fellow in a Boy Scout uniform, right hand raised in the three-fingered Boy Scout salute. The one on the right, labeled DIVIDEND, was an aerial photograph of Berlin taken in the spring of 1945. Two or three buildings still stood, but mostly what the camera showed was witless brick-strewn rubble.

. Kurtz waved his hand at the desk. 'Don't mind all that, boys - it's just noise. I've got Freddy Johnson to deal with it, but I sent him over to the commissary to grab some chow. Told him to take his time, go through the whole four courses, soup to nuts, poisson to sorbet, because this situation here . . . boys, this situation here is near-bout . . . STABILIZED!' He gave them a ferocious FDR grin and began to rock in his chair. Beside him, the pistol swung in the holster at the end of its belt like a pendulum.

Melrose returned Kurtz's smile tentatively, Perlmutter with less reserve. He had Kurtz's number, all right; the boss was an existential wannabe. . . and you wanted to believe that was a good call. A brilliant call. A liberal arts education didn't have many benefits in the career Military, but there were a few. Phrase-making was one of them.

'My only order to Lieutenant Johnson - whoops, no rank on this one, to my good pal Freddy Johnson is what I meant to say - was that he say grace before chowing in. Do you pray, boys?'

Melrose nodded as tentatively as he had smiled; Perlmutter did so indulgently. He felt sure that, like his name, Kurtz's oft-professed belief in God was plumage.

Kurtz rocked, looking happily at the two men with the snow melting from their footgear and puddling on the floor. 'The best prayers are the child's prayers,' Kurtz said. 'The simplicity, you know. "God is great, God is good, let us thank Him for our food." Isn't that simple? Isn't it beautiful?'

'Yes, b - ' Pearly began.

'Shut the fuck up, you hound,' Kurtz said cheerfully. Still rocking. The gun still swinging back and forth at the end of its belt. He looked from Pearly to Melrose. 'What do you think, laddie-buck? Is that a beautiful little prayer, or is that a beautiful little prayer?'

'Yes, s - '

'Or Allah akhbar, as our Arab friends say; there is no God but God." What could be more simple than that? It cuts the pizza directly down the middle, if you see what I mean.'

They didn't reply. Kurtz was rocking faster now, and the pistol was swinging faster, and Perlmutter began to feel a little antsy, as he had earlier in the day, before Underhill arrived and sort of cooled Kurtz out. This was probably just more plum?age, but -

'Or Moses at the burning bush!' Kurtz cried. His lean and rather horsey face lit with a daffy smile. "'Who'm I talking to?" Moses asks, and God gives him the old "I yam what I yam and that's all that I yam, uck-uck-uck." What a kidder, that God, eh, Mr Melrose, did you really refer to our emissaries from the Great Beyond as "space-niggers"?'

Melrose's mouth dropped open.

'Answer me, buck.'

'Sir, I - '

'Call me sir again while the group is hot, Mr Melrose, and you will celebrate your next two birthdays in the stockade, do you understand that? Catch my old drift-ola?'

'Yes, boss.' Melrose had snapped to attention, his face dead white except for the patches of cold-induced red on his cheeks, patches that were cut neatly in two by the straps of his mask.

'Now did you or did you not refer to our visitors as "space?-niggers"?'

'Sir, I may have just in passing said something - '

Moving with a speed Perlmutter could scarcely credit (it was like a special effect in a James Cameron movie, almost), Kurtz snatched the nine-millimeter from the swinging holster, pointed it without seeming to aim, and fired. The top half of the sneaker on Melrose's left foot exploded. Fragments of canvas flew. Blood and flecks of flesh splattered Perlmutter's pantsleg.

I didn't see that, Pearly thought. 7hat didn't happen.

But Melrose was screaming, looking down at his ruined left foot with agonized disbelief and howling his head off. Perlmutter could see bone in there, and felt his stomach turn over.

Kurtz didn't get himself out of his rocker as quickly as he'd gotten his gun out of his holster - Perlmutter could at least see this happening - but it was still fast. Spookily fast.

He grabbed Melrose by the shoulder and peered into the cook third's contorted face with great intensity. 'Stop that blatting, laddie-buck.'

Melrose carried on blatting. His foot was gushing, and the part with the toes on it looked to Pearly as if it might be severed fi7om the part with the heel on it. Pearly's world went gray and started to lose focus. With all the force of his will, he forced that grayness away. If he passed out now, Christ alone knew what Kurtz might do to him. Perlmutter had heard stories and had dismissed ninety per cent of them out of hand, thinking they were either exaggerations or Kurtz-planted propaganda designed to enhance his loony-crafty image.

Now I know better, Perlmutter thought. This isn't myth-making; this is the myth.

Kurtz, moving with a finicky, almost surgical precision, placed the barrel of his pistol against the center of Melrose's cheese-white forehead.

'Squelch that womanish bawling, buck, or I'll squelch it for you. These are hollow-points, as I think even a dimly lit American like yourself must now surely know.'

Melrose somehow choked the screams off, turned them into low, in-the-throat sobs. This seemed to satisfy Kurtz.

'Just so you can hear me, buck, You have to hear me, because you have to spread the word. I believe, praise God, that your foot, what's left of it, will articulate the basic concept, but it's your own sacred mouth that must share the details. So are you listening, bucko? Are you listening for the details?'

Still sobbing, his eyes starting from his face like blue glass balls, Melrose managed a nod.

Quick as a striking snake, Kurtz's head turned and Perlmutter clearly saw the man's face. The madness there was stamped into the features as clearly as a warrior's tattoos. At that moment everything Perlmutter had ever believed about his OIC fell down.

'What about you, bucko? Listening? Because you're a messen?ger, too. All of us are messengers.'

Pearly nodded. The door opened and he saw, with unutter?able relief, that the newcomer was Owen Underhill. Kurtz's eyes flew to him.

'Owen! Me foine bucko! Another witness! Another, praise God, another messenger! Are you listening? Will you carry the word hence from this happy place?'

Expressionless as a poker-player in a high-stakes game, Underhill nodded.

'Good! Good!'

Kurtz returned his attention to Melrose.

'I quote from the Manual of Affairs, Cook's Third Melrose, Part 16, Section 4, Paragraph 3 - "Use of inappropriate epithets, whether racial, ethnic, or gender-based, are counterproductive to morale and run counter to armed service protocol. When use is proven, the user will be punished immediately by court-martial or in the field by appropriate command personnel," end quote. Appropriate command personnel, that's me, user of inappropriate epithets, that's you. Do you understand, Melrose? Do you get the drift-ola?'

Melrose, blubbering, tried to speak, but Kurtz cut him off. In the doorway Owen Underhill continued to stand completely still as the snow melted on his shoulders and ran down the transparent bulb of his mask like sweat. His eyes remained fixed on Kurtz.

'Now, Cook's Third Melrose, what I have quoted to you in the presence of these, these praise God witnesses, is called "an order of conduct", and it means no spicktalk, no mockietalk, no krauttalk or redskin talk. It also means as is most applicable in the current situation no space-niggertalk, do you understand that?'

Melrose tried to nod, then reeled, on the verge of passing out. Perlmutter grabbed him by the shoulder and got him straight again, praying that Melrose wouldn't conk before this was over. God only knew what Kurtz might do to Melrose if Melrose had the temerity to turn out the lights before Kurtz was done reading him the riot act.

'We are going to wipe these invading assholes out, my friend, and if they ever come back to Terra Firma, we are going to rip off their collective gray head and shit down their collective gray neck; if they persist we will use their own technology, which we are already well on our way to grasping, against them, returning to their place of origin in their own ships or ships like them built by General Electric and DuPont and praise God Microsoft and once there we will burn their cities or hives or goddam anthills, whatever they live in, we 'II napalm their amber waves of grain and nuke their purple mountains' majesty, praise God, Allah akhbar, we will pour the fiery piss of America into their lakes and oceans . . . but we will do it in a way that is proper and appropriate and without regard to race or gender or ethnicity or religious preference. We're going to do it because they came to the wrong neighborhood and knocked on the wrong fucking door. This is not Germany in 1938 or Oxford Mississippi in 1963. Now, Mr Melrose, do you think you can spread that message?'

Melrose's eyes rolled up to the wet whites and his knees unhinged. Perlmutter once more grabbed his shoulder in an effort to hold him up, but it was a lost cause this time; down Melrose went.

'Pearly,' Kurtz whispered, and when those burning blue eyes fell on him, Perlmutter thought he had never been so fright?ened in his life. His bladder was a hot and heavy bag inside him, wanting only to squirt its contents into his coverall. He felt that if Kurtz saw a dark patch spreading on his adjutant's crotch, Kurtz might shoot him out of hand, in his present mood . . . but that didn't seem to help the situation. In fact, it made it worse.

'Yes, s . . . boss?'

'Will he spread the word? Will he be a good messenger? Do you reckon he took enough in to do that, or was he too concerned with his damned old foot?'

'I . . . I . . .' In the doorway, he saw Underhill nod at him almost imperceptibly, and Pearly took heart. 'Yes, boss - I think he heard you five-by.'

Kurtz seemed first surprised by Perlmutter's vehemence, then gratified. He turned to Underhill. 'What about you, Owen? Do you think he'll spread the word?'

'Uh-huh,' Underhill said. 'If you get him to the infirmary before he bleeds to death on your rug.'

Kurtz's mouth turned up at the comers and he barked, 'See to that, Pearly, will you?'

'Right now,' Perlmutter said, starting toward the door. Once past Kurtz, he gave Underhill a look of fervent gratitude which Underhill either missed or chose not to acknowledge.

'Double-time, Mr Perlmutter. Owen, I want to talk to you mano a mano, as the Irish say.' He stepped over Melrose's body without looking down at it and walked briskly into the kitchenette. 'Coffee? Freddy made it, so I can't swear it's drinkable . . . no, I can't swear, but . . .'

'Coffee would be good,' Owen Underhill said. 'You pour and I'll try to stop this fellow's bleeding.'

Kurtz stood by the Mr Coffee on the counter and gave Underhill a look of darkly brilliant doubt. 'Do you really think that's necessary?' That was where Perlmutter went out. Never before in his life had stepping into a storm felt so much like an escape.

4

Henry stood at the fence (not touching the wire; he had seen what happened when you did that), waiting for Underhill - that was his name, all right - to come back out of what had to be the command post, but when the door opened, one of the other fellows he'd seen go in came hustling out. Once down the steps, the guy started running. The guy was tall, and possessed one of those earnest faces Henry associated with middle management. Now the face looked terrified, and the man almost fell before he got fully into stride. Henry was rooting for that.

The middle manager managed to keep his balance after the first ship, but halfway to a couple of semi trailers that had been pushed together, his feet flew out from beneath him and he went on his ass. The clipboard he'd been carrying went sliding like a toboggan for leprechauns.

Henry held his hands out and clapped as loudly as he could. Probably not loud enough to be heard over all the motors, so he cupped them around his mouth and yelled: 'Way to go shitheels! Let's look at the videotape!'

The middle manager got up without looking at him, retrieved his clipboard, and ran on toward the two semi trailers.

There was a group of eight or nine guys standing by the fence about twenty yards from Henry. Now one of them, a portly fellow in an orange down-filled parka that made him look like the Pillsbury Dough Boy, walked over.

'I don't think you should do that, fella.' He paused, then lowered his voice. 'They shot my brother-in-law.'

Yes. Henry saw it in the man's head. The portly man's brother-?in-law, also portly, talking about his lawyer, his rights, his job with some investment company in Boston. The soldiers nodding, telling him it was just temporary, the situation was normalizing and would be straightened out by dawn, all the time hustling the two overweight mighty hunters toward the barn, which already held a pretty good trawl, and all at once the brother-in-law had broken away, running toward the motor-pool, and boom-boom, out go the lights.

The portly man was telling Henry some of this, his pale face earnest in the newly erected lights, and Henry interrupted him.

'What do you think they're going to do to the rest of us?' The portly man looked at Henry, shocked, then backed off a step, as if he thought Henry might have something contagious. Quite funny, when you thought about it, because they all had something contagious, or at least this team of government-funded cleaners thought they did, and in the end it would come to the same.

'You can't be serious,' the portly man said. Then, almost indulgently: 'This is America, you know.'

'Is it? You seeing a lot of due process, are you?'

'They're just . . . I'm sure they're just . . .' Henry waited, interested, but there was no more, at least not in this vein. 'That was a gunshot, wasn't it?' the portly man asked, 'And I think I heard some screaming.'

From the two pushed-together trailers there emerged two hurrying men with a stretcher between them. Following them with marked reluctance came the middle manager, his clipboard once more tucked firmly beneath his arm.

'I'd say you got that right.' Henry and the portly man watched as the stretcher-bearers burned up the steps of the Winnebago. As Mr Middle Management made his closest approach to the fence, Henry called out to him, 'How's it going, shitheels? Having any fun yet?' The portly man winced. The guy with the clipboard gave Henry a single dour look and then trudged on toward the Winnebago.

'This is just . . . it's just some sort of emergency situation,' the portly man said. 'It'll be straightened out by tomorrow morning, I'm sure.'

'Not for your brother-in-law,' Henry said.

The portly man looked at him, mouth tucked in and trembling slightly. Then he returned to the other men, whose views no doubt more closely corresponded to his own. Henry turned back to the Winnebago and resumed waiting for Underhill to come out. He had an idea that Underhill was his only hope . . . but whatever Underhill's doubts about this operation might be, the hope was a thin one. And Henry had only one card to play. The card was Jonesy. They didn't know about Jonesy.

The question was whether or not he should tell Underhill. Henry was terribly afraid that telling the man would do no good.

5

About five minutes after Mr Middle Management followed the stretcher-bearers into the 'Bago, the three of them came out again, this time with a fourth on the stretcher. Under the brilliant overhead lights, the wounded man's face was so pale it looked purple. Henry was relieved to see that it wasn't Underhill, because Underhill was different from the rest of these maniacs.

Ten minutes passed. Underhill still hadn't come out of the command post. Henry waited in the thickening snow. There were soldiers watching the inmates (that was what they were, inmates, and it was best not to gild the lily), and eventually one of them strolled over. The men who had been stationed at the T-junction of the Deep Cut and Swanny Pond Roads had pretty well blinded Henry with their lights, and he didn't recognize this man by his face. Henry was both delighted and deeply unsettled to realize that minds also had features, every bit as distinctive as a pretty mouth, a broken nose, or a crooked eye. This was one of the guys who had been out there, the one who had hit him in the ass with the stock of his rifle when he decided Henry wasn't moving toward the truck fast enough. Whatever had happened to Henry's mind was skitzy; he couldn't pick out this guy's name, but he knew that the man's brother's name was Frankie, and that in high school Frankie had been tried and acquitted on a rape charge. There was more, as well - unconnected jumbles of stuff, like the contents of a wastebasket. Henry realized that he was looking at an actual river of consciousness, and at the flotsam and jetsam the river was carrying along. The humbling thing was how prosaic most of it was.

'Hey there,' the soldier said, amiably enough. 'It's the smartass. Want a hot dog, smartass?' He laughed.

'Already got one,' Henry said, smiling himself And Beaver popped out of his mouth, as Beaver had a way of doing. 'Fuck off Freddy.'

The soldier stopped laughing. 'Let's see how smart your ass is twelve hours from now,' he said. The image that went floating by, home on the river between this man's ears, was of a truck filled with bodies, white limbs all tangled together. 'You growing the Ripley yet, smartass?'

Henry thought: the byrus. 7lat's what he means. The byrus is what it's really called. Jonesy knows.

Henry didn't reply and the soldier started away, wearing the comfortable look of a man who has won on points. Curious, Henry summoned all his concentration and visualized a rifle - ?Jonesy's Garand, as a matter of fact. He thought: I have a gun. I'm going to kill you with it the second you turn your back on me, asshole.

The soldier swung around again, the comfortable look going the way of the grin and the laughter. What replaced it was a look of doubt and suspicion. 'What'd you say, smartass? You say something?'

'Just wondering if you got your share of that girl - you know, the one Frankie broke in. Did he give you sloppy seconds?'

For a moment, the soldier's face was idiotic with surprise. Then it filled in with black Italian rage. He raised his rifle. To Henry, its muzzle looked like a smile. He unzipped his jacket and held it open in the thickening snow. 'Go on,' he said, and laughed. 'Go on, Rambo, do your thing.'

Frankie's brother held the gun on Henry a moment longer, and then Henry felt the man's rage pass. It had been close - he had seen the soldier trying to think of what he would say, some plausible story - but he had taken a moment too long and his forebrain had pulled the red beast back to heel. It was all so familiar. The Richie Grenadeaus never died, not really. They were the world's dragon's teeth.

'Tomorrow,' the soldier said. 'Tomorrow's time enough for you, smartass.'

This time Henry let him go - no more teasing the red beast, although God knew it would have been easy enough. He had learned something, too . . . or confirmed what he'd already suspected. The soldier had heard his thought, but not clearly. If he'd heard it clearly he would have turned around a lot faster. Nor had he asked Henry how Henry knew about his brother Frankie. Because on some level the soldier knew what Henry did: they had been infected with telepathy, the whole walking bunch of them - they had caught it like an annoying low-grade virus.

'Only I got it worse,' he said, zipping his coat back up again. So had Pete and Beaver and Jonesy. But Pete and the Beav were both dead now, and Jonesy . . . Jonesy . . .

'Jonesy got it worst of all,' Henry said. And where was Jonesy now?

South. Jonesy had hooked back south. These guys' precious quarantine had been breached. Henry guessed they had foreseen that that might happen. It didn't worry them. They thought one or two breaches wouldn't matter.

Henry thought they were wrong.

6

Owen stood with a mug of coffee in his hand, waiting until the guys from the infirmary were gone with their burden, Melrose's sobs mercifully reduced to mutters and moans by a shot of morphine. Pearly followed them out and then Owen was alone with Kurtz.

Kurtz sat in his rocker, looking up at Owen Underhill with curious, head-cocked amusement. The raving crazyman was gone again, put away like a Halloween mask.

'I'm thinking of a number,' Kurtz said. 'What is it?'

'Seventeen,' Owen said. 'You see it in red. Like on the side of a fire engine.'

Kurtz nodded, pleased. 'You try sending one to me.' Owen visualized a speed limit sign: 60 MPH.

'Six,' Kurtz said after a moment. 'Black on white.'

'Close enough, boss.'

Kurtz drank some coffee. His was in a mug with I LUV MY GRANDPA printed on the side. Owen sipped with honest pleasure. It was a dirty night and a dirty job, and Freddy's coffee wasn't bad.

Kurtz had found time to put on his coverall. Now he reached into the inner pocket and brought out a large bandanna. He regarded it for a moment, then got to his knees with a grimace (it was no secret that the old man had arthritis) and began to wipe up the splatters of Melrose's blood. Owen, who thought himself surely unshockable at this point, was shocked.

'Sir . . . Oh, fuck. 'Boss . . .'

'Stow it,' Kurtz said without looking up. He moved from spot to spot, as assiduous as any washerwoman. 'My father always said that you should clean up your own messes. Might make you stop and think a little bit the next time. What was my father's name, buck?'

Owen looked for it and caught just a glimpse, like a glimpse of slip under a woman's dress. 'Paul?'

'Patrick, actually . . . but close. Anderson believes it's a wave, and it's expending its force now, A telepathic wave. Do you find that an awesome concept, Owen?'

'Yes.'

Kurtz nodded without looking up, wiping and cleaning. 'More awesome in concept than in fact, however - do you also find that?'

Owen laughed. The old man had lost none of his capacity to surprise. Not playing with a full deck, people sometimes said of unstable individuals. The trouble with Kurtz, Owen reckoned, was that he was playing with more than a full deck. A few extra aces in there. Also a few extra deuces, and everyone knew that deuces were wild.

'Sit down, Owen. Drink your coffee on your ass like a normal person and let me do this, I need to.'

Owen thought maybe he did. He sat down and drank the coffee. Five minutes passed in this fashion, then Kurtz got painfully back to his feet. Holding the bandanna fastidiously by one comer, he carried it to the kitchen, dropped it into the trash, and returned to his rocker. He took a sip of his coffee, grimaced, and put it aside. 'Cold.'

Owen rose. 'I'D get you a fresh - '

'No. Sit down. We need to talk.' Owen sat.

'We had a little confrontation out there at the ship, you and I, didn't we?'

'I wouldn't say - '

'No, I know you wouldn't, but I know what went on and so do you. When the situation's hot, tempers also get hot. But we're past that now. We have to be past it because I'm the OIC and you're my second and we've still got this job to finish. Can we work together to do that?'

'Yes, sir.' Fuck, there it was again. 'Boss, I mean.'

Kurtz favored him with a wintry smile.

'I lost control just now.' Charming, frank, open-eyed and honest. This had fooled Owen for a lot of years. It did not fool him now. 'I was going along, drawing the usual caricature - two parts Patton, one part Rasputin, add water, stir and serve - and I just . . . whew! I just lost it. You think I'm crazy, don't you?'

Careful, careful. There was telepathy in this room, honest-to-?God telepathy, and Owen had no idea how deeply Kurtz might be able to see into him.

'Yes, sir. A little, sir.'

Kurtz nodded matter-of-factly. 'Yes. A little. That pretty well describes it. I've been doing this for a long time - men like me are necessary but hard to find, and you have to be a little crazy to do the job and not just high-side it completely. It's a thin line, that famous thin line the armchair psychologists love to talk about, and never in the history of the world has there been a cleanup job like this one . . . assuming, that is, the story of Hercules neatening up the Augean Stables is just a myth. I am not asking for your sympathy but for your understanding. If we understand each other, we'll get through this, the hardest job we've ever had, all right. If we don't. . .' Kurtz shrugged. 'If we don't, I'll have to get through it without you. Are you following me?'

Owen doubted if he was, but he saw where Kurtz wanted him to go and nodded. He had read that there was a certain kind of bird that lived in the crocodile's mouth, at the croc's sufferance. He supposed that now he must be that kind of bird. Kurtz wanted him to believe he was forgiven for putting the alien broadcast on the common channel - heat of the moment, just as Kurtz had blown off Melrose's foot in the heat of the moment. And what had happened six years ago in Bosnia? Not a factor now. Maybe it was true. And maybe the crocodile had tired of the bird's tiresome pecking and was preparing to close its jaws. Owen got no sense of the truth from Kurtz's mind, and either way it behooved him to be very careful. Careful and ready to fly.

Kurtz reached into his coverall again and brought out a tarnished pocket watch. 'This was my grandfather's and it works just fine,' he said. 'Because it winds up, I think - no electricity. My wristwatch, on the other hand, is still FUBAR.'

'Mine too.'

Kurtz's lips twitched in a smile. 'See Perlmutter when you have a chance, and feel you have the stomach for him. Among his many other chores and activities, he found time to take delivery of three hundred wind-up Timexes this afternoon. just before the snow shut down our air-ops, this was. Pearly's damned efficient. I just wish to Christ he'd get over the idea that he's living in a movie.'

'He may have made strides in that direction tonight, boss.'

'Perhaps he has at that.'

Kurtz meditated. Underhill waited.

'Laddie-buck, we should be drinking the whiskey. It's a bit of an Irish deathwatch we're having tonight.'

'Is it?'

'Aye. Me beloved phooka is about to keel over dead.'

Owen raised his eyebrows.

'Yes. At which point its magical cloak of invisibility Will be whisked away. Then it will become just another dead horse for folks to beat. Primarily politicians, who are best at that sort of thing.'

'I don't follow you.'

Kurtz took another look at the tarnished pocket watch, which he'd probably picked up in a pawnshop . . . or looted off a corpse. Underhill wouldn't have doubted either.

'It's seven o'clock. In just about forty hours, the President is going to speak before the UN General Assembly. More people are going to see and hear that speech than any previous speech in the history of the human race. It's going to be part of the biggest story in the history of the human race . . . and the biggest spin-job since God the Father Almighty created the cosmos and set the planets going round and round with the tip of his finger.'

'What's the spin?'

'It's a beautiful tale, Owen. Like the best ties, it incorporates large swatches of the truth. The President will tell a fascinated world, a world hanging on every word with its breath caught in its throat, praise Jesus, that a ship crewed by beings from another world crashed in northern Maine on either November sixth or November seventh of this year. That's true. He Will say that we were not completely surprised, as we and the heads of the other countries which constitute the UN Security Council have known for at least ten years that ET has been scoping us out. Also true, only some of us here in America have known about our pals from the void since the late nineteen-forties. We also know that Russian fighters destroyed a grayboy ship over Siberia in 1974 . . . although to this day the Russkies don't know we know. That one was probably a drone, a test-shot. There have been a lot of those. The grays have handled their early contacts with a care which strongly suggests that we scare them quite a lot.'

Owen listened with a sick fascination he hoped didn't show on his face or at the top level of his thoughts, where Kurtz might still have access.

From his inner pocket, Kurtz now brought out a dented box of Marlboro cigarettes. He offered the pack to Owen, who first shook his head, then took one of the remaining four fags. Kurtz took another, then lit them up.

'I'm getting the truth and the spin mixed in together,' Kurtz said after he'd taken a deep drag and exhaled. 'That may not be the most profitable way to get on. Let's stick to the spin, shall we?'

Owen said nothing. He smoked rarely these days and the first drag made him feel light-headed, but the taste was wonderful.

'The President will say that the United States government quarantined the crash site and the area around it for three reasons. The first was purely logistical: because of the Jefferson Tract's remote location and low population, we could quarantine it. If the grayboys had come down in Brooklyn, or even on Long Island, that would not have been the case. The second reason is that we are not clear on the aliens' intentions. The third reason, and ultimately the most persuasive, is that the aliens carry with them an infectious substance which the on - scene personnel calls "Ripley fungus". While the alien visitors have assured us passionately that they are not infectious, they have brought a highly infectious substance with them. The President will also tell a horrified world that the fungus may in fact be the controlling intelligence, the grayboys just a growth medium. He will show videotape of a grayboy literally exploding into the Ripley fungus. The footage has been slightly doctored to improve visibility, but is basically true.'

You're lying, Owen thought. The footage is entirely fake from be inning to end, as fake as that Alien Autopsy shit. And why are you lying? Because you can. It's as simple as that, isn't it? Because to you, a lie comes more naturally than the truth.

'Okay, I'm lying,' Kurtz said, never missing a beat. He gave Owen a quick gleaming look before dropping his gaze to his cigarette again. 'But the facts are true and verifiable. Some of them do explode and turn into red dandelion fluff. The fluff is Ripley. You inhale enough of it and in a period of time we can't yet predict - it could be an hour or two days - your lungs and brain are Ripley salad. You look like a walking patch of poison sumac. And then you die.

'There will be no mention of our little venture earlier today. According to the President's version, the ship, which had apparently been badly damaged in the crash, was either blown up by its crew or blew up on its own. All the grayboys were killed. The Ripley, after some initial spread, is also dying, apparently because it does very poorly in the cold. The Russians corroborate that, by the way. There has been a fairly large kill-off of animals, which also carry the infection.'

'And the human population of Jefferson Tract?'

'POTUS is going to say that about three hundred people - seventy or so locals and about two hundred and thirty hunters ?are currently being monitored for the Ripley fungus. He will say that while some appear to have been infected, they also appear to be beating the infection with the help of such standard antibiotics as Ceftin and Augmentin.'

'And now this word from our sponsor,' Owen said. Kurtz laughed, delighted.

'At a later time, it's going to be announced that the Ripley seems a little more antibiotic - resistant than was first believed, and that a number of patients have died. The names we give out will be those of people who have in fact already died, either as a result of the Ripley or those gruesome fucking implants, Do you know what the men are calling the implants?'

'Yeah, shit-weasels. Will the President mention them?'

'No way. The guys in charge believe the shit-weasels are just a little too upsetting for John Q. Public. As would be, of course, the facts concerning our solution to the problem here at Gosselin's Store, that rustic beauty-spot.'

'The final solution, you could call it,' Owen said. He had smoked his cigarette all the way down to the filter, and now crushed it out on the rim of his empty coffee cup.

Kurtz's eyes rose to Owen's and met them unflinchingly. 'Yes, you could call it that. We're going to wipe out approximately three hundred and fifty people - mostly men, there's that, but I can't say the cleansing won't include at least a few women and children. The upside, of course, is that we will be insuring the human race against a pandemic and, very possibly, subjugation. Not an inconsiderable upside.'

Owen's thought - I'm sure Hitler would like the spin - was unstoppable, but he covered it as well as he could and got no sense that Kurtz had heard it or sensed it. Impossible to tell for sure, of course; Kurtz was sly.

'How many are we holding now?' Kurtz as ed.

'About seventy. And twice that number on the way from Kineo; they'll be here around nine, if the weather doesn't get any worse.' It was supposed to, but not until after midnight.

Kurtz was nodding. 'Uh-huh. Plus I'm going to say fifty more from up north, seventy or so from St Cap's and those little places down south . . . and our guys. Don't forget them. The masks seem to work, but we've already picked up four cases of Ripley in the medical debriefings. The men, of course, don't know.'

'Don't they?'

'Let me rephrase that,' Kurtz said. 'Based on their behavior, I have no reason to believe the men know. All right?'

Owen shrugged.

'The story,' Kurtz resumed, 'will be that the detainees are being flown to a top-secret medical installation, a kind of Area 51, where they will undergo further examination, and, if necessary, long - term treatment. There will never be another official statement concerning them - not if all goes according to plan - but there will be time-release leaks over the next two years: encroaching infection despite best medical efforts to stop it . . . madness . . . grotesque physical changes better left undescribed . . . and finally, death comes as a mercy. Far from being outraged, the public will be relieved.'

'While in reality . . . ?'

He wanted to hear Kurtz say it, but he should have known better. There were no bugs here (except, maybe, for the ones hiding between Kurtz's ears), but the boss's caution was ingrained. He raised one hand, made a gun of his thumb and forefinger, and dropped his thumb three times. His eyes never left Owen's as he did this. Crocodile's eyes, Owen thought.

'All of them?' Owen asked. 'The ones who aren't showing Ripley-Positive as well as those who are? And where does that leave us? The soldiers who also show Negative?'

'The laddies who are okay now are going to stay okay,' Kurtz said. 'Those showing Ripley were all careless. One of them . . . well, there's a little girl out there, about four years old, cute as the devil. You almost expect her to start tap-dancing across the barn floor and singing "On the Good Ship Lollipop."'

Kurtz obviously thought he was being witty, and Owen sup?posed that in a way he was, but Owen himself was overcome by a wave of intense horror. There's a four-year-old out there, he thought. Just four years old, how about that.

'She's cute, and she's hot,' Kurtz was saying. 'Visible Ripley on the inside of one wrist, growing at her hairline, growing in the corner of one eye. Classic spots. Anyway, this soldier gave her a candybar, just like she was some starving Kosovar rug-muncher, and she gave him a kiss. Sweet as pie, a real Kodak moment, only now he's got a lipstick print that ain't lipstick growing on his cheek.' Kurtz grimaced. 'He had himself a little tiny shaving cut, barely visible, but there goes your ballgame. Similar stuff with the others. The rules don't change, Owen; carelessness gets you killed. You may go along lucky for awhile, but in the end it never fails. Carelessness gets you killed. Most of our guys, I'm delighted to say, will walk away from this. We're going to face scheduled medical exams for the rest of our lives, not to mention the occasional surprise exam, but look at the upside - they're gonna catch your ass-cancer wicked early.'

'The civilians who appear clean? What about them?'

Kurtz leaned forward, now at his most charming, his most persuasively sane. You were supposed to be flattered by this, to feel yourself one of the fortunate few to see Kurtz with his mask ('two parts Patton, one part Rasputin, add water, stir and serve') laid aside. It had worked on Owen before, but not now. Rasputin wasn't the mask; this was the mask.

Yet even now - here was the hell of it - he wasn't completely sure.

'Owen, Owen, Owen! Use your brain - that good brain God gave you! We can monitor our own without raising suspicions or opening the door to a worldwide panic - and there's going to be enough panic anyway, after our narrowly elected President slays the phooka horse. We couldn't do that with three hundred civilians. And if we really flew them out to New Mexico, put them up in some model village for fifty or seventy years at the taxpayers' expense? What if one or more of them escaped? Or what if - and I think this is what the smart boys are really afraid of - given time, the Ripley mutates? That instead of dying off, it turns into something a lot more infectious and a lot less vulnerable to the environmental factors that are killing it here in Maine? If the Ripley's intelligent, it's dangerous. Even if it isn't, what if it serves the grayboys as a kind of beacon, an interstellar road-flare marking our world out - yum-yum, come and get it, these guys are tasty . . . and there's plenty of them?'

'You're saying better safe than sorry.'

Kurtz leaned back in his chair and beamed. 'That's it. That's it in a nutshell.'

Well, Owen thought, it might be the nut, but the shell is something we're not talking about. We watch out for our own. We're merciless if we have to be, but even Kurtz watches out for his laddie-bucks. Civilians, on the other hand, are just civilians. If you need to burn em, they go up pretty easy.

'If you doubt there's a God and that He spends at least some of His time looking out for good old Homo sap, you might look at the way we re coming out of this,' Kurtz said. 'The flashlights arrived early and were reported - one of the reports came from the store owner, Reginald Gosselin, himself Then the grayboys arrive at the only time of year when there are actually people in these godforsaken Woods, and two of them saw the ship go down.'

'That was lucky.'

'God's grace is what it was. Their ship crashes, their presence is known, the cold kills both them and the galactic dandruff they brought along.' He ticked the points off rapidly on his long fingers, his white eyelashes blinking. 'But that's not all. They do some implants and the goddam things don't work - far from establishing a harmonious relationship with their hosts, they turn cannibal and kill them.

'The animal kill-off went well - we've censused something like a hundred thousand critters, and there's already one hell of a barbecue going on over by the Castle County line. In the spring or summer we would've needed to worry about bugs carrying the Ripley out of the zone, but not now. Not in November.'

'Some animals must have gotten through.'

'Animals and people both, likely. But the Ripley spreads slowly. We're going to be all right on this because we netted the vast majority of infected hosts, because the ship has been destroyed, and because what they brought us smolders rather than blazes. We've sent them a simple message: come in peace or come with your rayguns blazing, but don't try it this way again, because it doesn't work. We don't think they will come again, or at least not for awhile. They played fiddly-fuck for half a century before getting this far. Our only regret is that we didn't secure the ship for the science-boffins but it might've been too Ripley-infected, anyway. Do you know what our great fear has been? That either the grayboys or the Ripley would find a Typhoid Mary, someone who could carry it and spread it without catching it him - or herself'.'

'Are you sure there isn't such a person?'

'Almost sure. If there is . . . well, that's what the cordon's for.' Kurtz smiled. 'We lucked out, soldier. The odds are against a Typhoid Mary, the grayboys are dead, and all the Ripley is confined to the Jefferson Tract. Luck or God. Take your choice.'

Kurtz lowered his head and pinched the bridge of his nose high up, like a man suffering a sinus infection. When he looked up again, his eyes were swimming. Crocodile tears, Owen thought, but in truth he wasn't sure. And he had no access to Kurtz's mind. Either the telepathic wave had receded too far for that, or Kurtz had found a way to slam the door. Yet when Kurtz spoke again, Owen was almost positive he was hearing the real Kurtz, a human being and not Tick-Tock the Croc.

'This is it for me, Owen. Once this job is finished, I'm going to punch my time. There'll be work here for another four days, I'd guess - maybe a week, if this storm's as bad as they say - and it'll be nasty, but the real nightmare's tomorrow morning. I can hold up my end, I guess, but after that . . . well, I'm eligible for full retirement, and I'm going to give them their choice: pay me or kill me. I think they'll pay, because I know where too many of the bodies are buried - that's a lesson I learned from J. Edgar Hoover - but I've almost reached the point of not caring. This won't be the worst one I've ever been involved in, in Haiti we did eight hundred in a single hour - 1989, that was, and I still dream about it - but this is worse. By far. Because those poor schmucks out there in the barn and the paddock and the corral . . . they're Americans. Folks who drive Chevvies, shop at Kmart, and never miss ER. The thought of shooting Americans, massacring Americans . . . that turns my stomach. I'll do it only because it needs to be done in order to bring closure to this business, and because most of them would die anyway, and much more horribly. Capish?'

Owen Underhill said nothing. He thought he was keeping his face properly expressionless, but anything he said would likely give away his sinking horror. He had known this was cormng, but to actually hear it . . .

In his mind's eye he saw the soldiers drifting toward the fence through the snow, heard the loudspeakers summoning the detainees in the barn. He had never been part of an operation like this, he'd missed Haiti, but he knew how it was supposed to go. How it would go.

Kurtz was watching him closely.

'I won't say all is forgiven for that foolish stunt you pulled this afternoon, that water's under the bridge, but you owe me one, buck. I don't need ESP to know how you feel about what I'm telling you, and I'm not going to waste my breath telling you to grow up and face reality. All I can tell you is that I need you. You have to help me this one time.'

The swimming eyes. The infirm twitch, barely perceptible, at the corner of his mouth. It was easy to forget that Kurtz had blown a man's foot off not ten minutes ago.

Owen thought: If I help him do this, it doesn't matter if I actually pull a trigger or not, I'm as damned as the men who herded the Jews into the showers at Bergen-Belsen.

'If we start at eleven, we can be done at eleven-thirty,' Kurtz said. 'Noon at the very worst. Then it's behind us.'

'Except for the dreams.'

'Yes. Except for them. Will you help me, Owen?'

Owen nodded. He had come this far, and wouldn't let go of the rope now, damned or not. At the very least he could help make it merciful . . . as merciful as any mass murder could be. Later he would be struck by the lethal absurdity of this idea, but when you were with Kurtz, up close and with his eyes holding yours, perspective was a joke. His madness was probably much more infectious than the Ripley, in the end.

'Good.' Kurtz slumped back in his rocker, looking relieved and drained. He took out his cigarettes again, peered in, then held the pack out. 'Two left. Join me?'

Owen shook his head. 'Not this time, boss.'

'Then get on out of here. If necessary, shag ass over to the infirmary and get some Sonata.'

'I don't think I'll need that,' Owen said. He would, of course ?he needed it already - but he wouldn't take it. Better to be awake.

'All right, then. Off you go.' Kurtz let him get as far as the door. 'And Owen?'

Owen turned back, zipping his parka. He could hear the wind out there now. Building, starting to blow seriously, as it had not during the relatively harmless Alberta Clipper that had come through that morning.

'Thanks,' Kurtz said. One large and absurd tear overspilled his left eye and ran down his cheek. Kurtz seemed unaware. In that moment Owen loved and pitied him. In spite of everything, which included knowing better. 'Thank you, buck.'

7

Henry stood in the thickening snow, turned away from the worst of the wind and looking over his left shoulder at the Winnebago, waiting for Underhill to come back out. He was alone now - the storm had driven the rest of them back into the barn, where there was a heater. Rumors would already be growing tall in the warmth, Henry supposed. Better the rumors than the truth that was right in front of them.

He scratched at his leg, realized what he was doing, and looked around, turning in a complete circle. No prisoners; no guards. Even in the thickening snow the compound was almost as bright as noonday, and he could see well in every direction. For the time being, at least, he was alone.

Henry bent and untied the shirt knotted around the place where the turnsignal stalk had cut his skin. He then spread the slit in his bluejeans. The men who had taken him into custody had made this same examination in the back of the truck where they had already stored five other refugees (on the way back to Gosselin's they had picked up three more). At that point he had been clean.

He wasn't clean now. A delicate thread of red lace grew down the scabbed center of the wound. If he hadn't known what he was looking for, he might have mistaken it for a fresh seep of blood.

Byrus, he thought. Ah, fuck. Goodnight, Mrs Calabash, wher?ever you are.

A flash of light winked at the top of his vision. Henry straight?ened and saw Underhill just pulling the door of the Winnebago shut. Quickly, Henry retied the shirt around the hole in his jeans and then approached the fence. A voice in his head asked what he'd do if he called to Underhill and the man just kept on going. That voice also wanted to know if Henry really intended to give Jonesy up.

He watched Underhill trudge toward him in the glare of the security lights, his head bent against the snow and the intensify?ing wind.

8

The door closed. Kurtz sat looking at it, smoking and slowly rocking. How much of his pitch had Owen bought? Owen was bright, Owen was a survivor, Owen was not without idealism . . . and Kurtz thought Owen had bought it all, with hardly a single dicker. Because in the end most people believed what they wanted to believe. John Dillinger had also been a survivor, the wiliest of the thirties desperadoes, but he had gone to the Biograph Theater with Anna Sage just the same. Manhattan Melodrama had been the show, and when it was over, the feds had shot Dillinger down in the alley beside the theater like the dog he was. Anna Sage had also believed what she wanted to believe, but they deported her ass back to Poland just the same.

No one was going to leave Gosselin's Market tomorrow except for his picked cadre - the twelve men and two women who made up Imperial Valley. Owen Underhill would not be among them, although he could have been. Until Owen had put the grayboys on the common channel, Kurtz had been sure he would be. But things changed. So Buddha had said, and on that one, at least, the old chink heathen had spoken true.

'You let me down, buck,' Kurtz said. He had lowered his mask to smoke, and it bobbed against his grizzled throat as he spoke. 'You let me down.' Kurtz had let Owen Underhill get away with letting him down once. But twice?

'Never,' Kurtz said. 'Never in life.'