The Sleepwalkers Part 13

"Maybe we should get you to a doctor."

"No, listen," the kid says, "he's lost down there. They took him away. There was nothing but blood in the water, then I found the flashlight. I looked and looked and he was gone. We have to go back. We have to find him."

"Wait," Ron says, "somebody kidnapped your friend?"

The kid nods, his eyes wild and haunted. He looks back over his shoulder.

"The door is back there. We have to go find him."

"Wait, slow down now. Who was it? Who kidnapped your friend?"

The kid is staring at the yellow line of the road, curving away at his feet. He has dark circles under his eyes. Ron wonders how long he's been wandering around like this.

"It was them," says the kid, as still as stone now. "It was the sleepwalkers."

Wasn't as far of a walk to the gas station as Ron had thought, praise G.o.d. He left the kid in the car, walked maybe half a mile down the road, and returned with two gas cans. One he emptied into the tank, the other he put in the trunk for the next time the fuel gauge c.r.a.pped out on him.

The kid was pretty wet and pretty dirty, so Ron had pulled an old towel out of the trunk and covered the car seat. Now they're rolling. The kid sits on the towel, still gripping his flashlights, not moving. Ron glances over, hoping the kid won't notice the scrutiny. No worries there. The beleaguered youth leans back against the headrest, staring up at the treetops as they pa.s.s, his eyes looking gla.s.sy. Something about that kid's eyes . . .

Wide boy's eyes, narrowed to slits.

Ron hasn't seen eyes like that in a long time. Not since-

June, 1969. Huge drops of rain fall from the thick, green canopy above, tapping on his helmet, slipping down his face and away. n.o.body's talking in the jungle today. There's nothing to say. They've been marching for a lot of days now. Everyone else keeps track of days, dates, holidays, birthdays, but not Private First Cla.s.s Ron Bent. He'd rather not, thanks very much. He measures time in incidents. Today is three days since Pvt. James McPhereson, a handsome, quiet, probably secretly gay kid, was walking point and tripped a b.o.o.by trap, lost his legs, and took six hours to bleed to death waiting for a lift that never came. Three weeks since they left Lai Khe for Dodge City. Maybe four days since their squad of fifteen guys broke off from the rest of the company. Two days since they encountered heavy resistance trying to rejoin the platoon and realized they'd been cut off, with the G.o.dd.a.m.n radio crackling and hissing, some kind of malfunction, and no way to call a taxi for a ride out. One day since they ran out of food.

Now, there's just the dripping of rain, the slos.h.i.+ng of mud-the mud isn't just at their feet, it's everywhere, under his fingernails, in his hair, caked in the moving parts of his M16, in his mouth, gritty and nauseating, even between the cheeks of his a.s.s, G.o.d knows how. In the distance: the rumble of a mortar going off and the dry snap of gunfire.

Somebody stepped in s.h.i.+t. Maybe the rest of their long-lost platoon.

The man on point (it's hard to tell from the back, but he thinks it's Dirty) raises a fist and the men all stop, crouch, and listen, scanning the foliage around them for any sign of Charlie-as if that'll do any good; there could be a whole regiment of North Vietnamese regulars on the other side of the next leaf, and the only way to know would be to smell 'em, since they're so G.o.dd.a.m.n supernaturally quiet and vision is so limited.

"Charlie's so quiet," for some reason, makes him think of playing hide-and-seek as a kid. He would cover his eyes and Paul would hide and Ronnie Bent would count his little a.s.s to one hundred as fast as his lips could move, and then he'd look around for his big brother, only Paul was gone. Impossibly, completely gone-not under the dining room table, not in the pantry-so impossibly gone that little Ronnie would look for him for hours and start to think maybe goblins s.n.a.t.c.hed him away. (Paul would really make use of his vanis.h.i.+ng abilities ten years later, when the draft came around. Then he vanished so completely that even his loving family never heard from him again.) Little Ronnie finally surmised that his brother probably snuck up the stairs, out his bedroom window onto the roof of the porch, climbed down the sycamore tree, and walked to the drug store for a soda. Or a root beer float. Probably laughing his smug a.s.s off the whole way.

Private First Cla.s.s Ronald Bent was still thinking about root beer floats when the first tracer round whistled past, maybe two inches in front of his face. He felt it more than anything, a puff of wind on his cheek. Then the guns were rattling off rounds, littering all that mud with piles of spent bra.s.s as the leaves around them danced a strange, flicking, bullet-induced jig.

Ron's gun was jammed. He tried to clear the round out of the chamber, but it was the mud, the G.o.dd.a.m.ned drying, cracking mud that wound its way into everything and strangled his M16. He crouched lower. It was raining bullets now.

He heard "Corpsman up!" behind him, to the right, and there was Pvt. Jack Spagnoli, facedown in the mud.

Ashes to ashes, mud to mud.

Jack was funny and mad about cards. Texas hold'em and blackjack.

Red Jack was his game now, as blood from the gaping exit wound wicked into his fatigues, dark as Rorschach ink.

Jack was dead.

Ronnie pulled the M16 out of the already-stiffening hand that would never hold an ace again and turned it on the enemy. Spitting lead. Somebody was. .h.i.t off to the left and was moaning. Somebody else kept telling the wounded guy to shut up. Finally, Ron saw Dirty (Dan Dawson, Dirty Danny) up ahead, frantically waving the men on.

They hightailed it out, those of them who could, through the slas.h.i.+ng leaves of the jungle. They all knew they were running blind, but they followed Dan all the same, because to sit still when badly outnumbered meant death, just as running might mean death-you could run into a b.o.o.by trap or a machine gun nest or worse. As fast as they ran, the machine gun fire still didn't abate; tracers kept whizzing past on either side, heavy pops of hand grenades burst not too far behind. Several times, he heard cries of pain behind him, or cursing, but he didn't look back. He had become like a jungle cat now. It was a primal thing: death was behind him and death was the enemy. He ran until his breath was a loud wheeze and his heart filled his head with throbbing, always staying a few steps behind Dan, Dirty Dan, who wound up to be from a town right near Ron's, a football rival, in fact.

When, at last, the rattle of gunfire had fallen off and the only sound was the slap and swish of leaves, Dan slowed and finally stopped, his hands on his knees. He looked at Ron and past him, then stood up straight.

It was then that Ron noticed it. Dan's eyes had changed. They were drawn into a tight squint, implacable as burnished steel. n.o.body in northern Ohio had eyes like that, Ron thought, and Dan's hadn't been like that either-not before the war, not before today. Now they had changed-and it was frightening.

Ron followed Dan's gaze back over his shoulder, and he saw what Dan was looking at: nothing.

There was n.o.body behind them. None of their comrades had made it. There was only the rain.

All this flashes before Ron in an instant. The memory fills him up to the point of spilling over. He glances at the boy in the seat next to him, wanting to share the memory with him, wanting him to know that he isn't alone, that the feelings consuming him right now aren't insurmountable. They can be conquered. Ron wants to say a thousand things, but as so often happens, the words just won't come. Finally, he says: "I lost my daughter. She was kidnapped too. I'll help you however I can, I promise."

The kid doesn't answer him.

Ron turns on the radio, an oldies station, and sighs.

In the sick-clean smell of Hudsonville's only doctor's office, Caleb sits staring at a children's toy. It has a flat board as a base and stiff metal wires protruding upward from it, four or five of them, each painted a different color. The wires twist and loop around each other like roller-coaster tracks. On them are brightly painted beads. There are yellow beads on the blue wire, blue beads on the green wire, red beads on the blue wire, purple beads on the orange wire . . . Caleb remembers these things from his childhood. They were always touted as a "game" or a "toy." And with the festive, eye-catching colors and the complex shapes, it looked pretty exciting; until you started playing with it and realized all you could do is push the beads to one side and back, and back again, and back again. It wasn't a game. It wasn't fun. It was something else. A distraction. It makes Caleb so angry he could smash it into the bland-papered wall of the waiting room, watch the beads explode and scatter . . .

And he wonders how many other things in his life have been nothing but distractions. Maybe everything.

"Caleb," a heavyset nurse in a white smock says.

Caleb rises, glancing at the old fella sitting next to him (Ron? Was that his name?) The guy nods back. "I'll wait for you," he says.

"That's okay," Caleb says. "Thanks for the ride."

The old guy doesn't respond, and Caleb doesn't wait for him to. He follows the woman through the door and back down a long narrow hall.

The exam room is like all exam rooms. The nurse takes Caleb's temperature, takes his blood pressure, and looks at his arm.

She leaves.

He sits, as uncomfortable on that crinkly paper as a fish in the bottom of a boat.

But all doctor's visits are like that.

He waits for maybe ten minutes, his arm aching like h.e.l.l, until finally the doctor shows up.

In the sterile light of the exam room the memory of the catacombs, the witch, the sleepwalkers, Bean's disappearance, all seem like the stuff of B horror films, so unbelievable as to be laughable. Here, there are no shadows, no eerie feelings, not even the ticking of a clock. Maybe that's why he doesn't see it coming.

Ron sets down his National Geographic. The "Lost Incan Cities" article was interesting enough, but when he started checking out the naked aborigine chicks, the shame just got to be too much.

Guess I'm a little hard up, he thinks.

Jesus and his Pops ain't gonna like that one. Course, that's why he isn't behind the pulpit anymore, isn't it? The place for him is out there, wherever "there" is. Not cooped up in some hallowed church but on the streets, on the hallowed highways.

Searching for Keisha, that's where he belongs. But he's beginning to think that reunion won't happen until he reaches the white gates. Even if he can just glimpse her through the bars before he heads down to his place in the spiritual fires, that'd be enough.

But this, today, almost gives him hope. It's something worth looking into, the fact that this kid's friend got abducted. And even though the kid is rattled, he was an eyewitness. He thinks he saw the abductor. Together, maybe they could find out what's going on and who's behind it all, and put a stop to it.

But all that's pie in the sky.

If there's one thing Ron Bent knows, it's when he's not wanted. His "no thanks" detector has been fine-tuned through years of rejection, G.o.d knows (of course he does-G.o.d knows everything). And this kid doesn't want his help. This kid wants to be left alone. And Ron can take a hint. So he gets up, adjusts his belt, and- "Sir?"

The lilt of a woman's voice is coming from behind the counter. Ron steps over and sees the haggard face of a young girl, perhaps twenty-five years old.

"Yes?" says Ron.

"Is that young man your son?"

"No," says Ron.

"Do you know who his parents are? If they're looking for him, we should let them know."

"I dunno," Ron says with a shrug. "I just picked him up on the side of the road and figured he should have that arm looked at."

The girl nods and makes a note on her clipboard.

"So you don't have any idea if anyone's looking for him, who his parents are, anything?"

Ron shrugs. "No."

She makes another jot.

"And has he been showing any signs of mental instability? Combativeness, depression, anxiety?"

"Well, yeah," Ron says. "But he said he lost his friend, and I'm pretty sure that arm is busted, so I figure he deserves to be a little cranky."

The girl nods to herself. "Good," she says. "Good. And have you noticed any sleep disturbances, nightmares, insomnia?"

Ron looks at her. "In me, or in him?"

"In him," she says.

"Well I ain't sleepin' with him," says Ron. "What part of 'picked him up on the side of the road' don't you get? If you're askin' me, I'd say he doesn't look like he's had a good night's sleep in a while, but what do I know?"

"So you can't rule out sleep disturbances?" she persists.

"Well, no," says Ron. He sees her check a box marked 'yes.' She nods to herself.

Ron looks at the door. Something about this place is making him uneasy. Claustrophobic. Panic biting at its heels. Boy, just when you think you got something beat. He's craving a drink too. That thirst is whispering in his ear. He has to get out of here.

"That it?" he asks.

"That's it, thanks," the girl says to the clipboard.

Ron heads to the door, grabs the handle, and stops. He walks back to the counter.

"You know what?" he says. "I'm going to leave my cell number with you, just in case he needs it." he says.

She hands him a sc.r.a.p of paper. He writes on it, then pushes it back to her.

"You'll make sure he gets this?" he asks.

She smiles, for the first time. "Of course," she says.

As Ron walks out to his car he has a strange feeling, like just after an argument when you remember everything you should've said. Only there's no argument, no "should've said," and no reason to have a strange feeling.

Please, Lord, don't let me get any stranger in my old age.

Ron digs out his keys and drives away, without any idea of the terrible danger Caleb is in.

Chapter Nine.

TRANSCRIPT-Patient #62, SESSION #85 (In this session, the doctor introduces "The Dream Viewer Machine.") DIRECTOR: Well, Patient Sixty-two, you've been making excellent progress, don't you agree?

(The patient nods.) DIRECTOR: Have you been enjoying the radio we put in your room for you?

(The patient nods.) DIRECTOR: Good. Let's get started then. We're beginning a new mode of therapy today. Put on the helmet.

PATIENT #62: I don't want to.

DIRECTOR: And lie on the table.

PATIENT #62: It's cold . . . Something's poking me inside the helmet.

DIRECTOR: Those are cathodes. With this machine I will be able to watch your dreams, just like a film or television show. That's pretty exciting, isn't it?

PATIENT #62: It looks like a metal dish attached to an old TV by some wires.

DIRECTOR: You don't think it will work?

(The patient doesn't answer.) DIRECTOR: Well?