This world was inimical to the byrus, and this world’s inhabitants fought with a surprising vigor which arose from deep wells of emotion. Bad luck. But now the last surviving grayboy had had an unbroken chain of good luck;
Suddenly it was all clear. The strength ran out of his legs and he collapsed to the carpeted floor, ignoring the flare of pain in his hip.
The dog. Lad. Did he still have the dog? “Of course he does,” Jonesy whispered. “Of course the son of a bitch does, I can smell him even in here. Farting just like McCarthy.”
This world was inimical to the byrus, and this world’s inhabitants fought with a surprising vigor which arose from deep wells of emotion. Bad luck. But now the last surviving grayboy had had an unbroken chain of good luck; he was like some daffy in-the-zone Vegas crapshooter rolling a string of sevens: four, six, eight, oh goddam, a dozen in a row. He had found Jonesy, his Typhoid Mary, had invaded him and conquered him. He had found Pete, who had gotten him where he wanted to go after the flashlight—the kim—had given out. Next, Andy Janas, the Minnesota boy. He had been hauling the corpses of two deer killed by the Ripley. The deer had been useless to Mr. Gray . . . but Janas had also been hauling the decomposing body of one of the aliens.
Fruiting bodies, Jonesy thought randomly. Fruiting bodies, what’s that from?
No matter. Because Mr. Gray’s next seven had been the Dodge Ram, old Mr. I ♥ MY BORDER COLLIE. What had Gray done? Fed some of the gray’s dead body to the dog? Put the dog’s nose to the corpse and forced him to inhale of that fruiting body? No, eating was much more likely; c’mon, boy, chow time. Whatever process started the weasels, it began in the gut, not the lungs. Jonesy had a momentary image of McCarthy lost in the woods. Beaver had asked What the hell have you been eating? Woodchuck turds? And what had McCarthy replied? Bushes . . . and things . . . I don’t know just what . . . I was just so hungry, you know . . .
Sure. Hungry. Lost, scared, and hungry. Not noticing the red splotches of byrus on the leaves of some of the bushes, the red speckles on the green moss he crammed into his mouth, gagging it down because somewhere back there in his tame oh-gosh oh-dear lawyer’s life, he had read that you could eat moss if you were lost in the woods, that moss wouldn’t hurt you. Did everyone who swallowed some of the byrus (grains of it, almost too small to be seen, floating in the air) incubate one of the vicious little monsters that had torn McCarthy apart and then killed the Beav? Probably not, no more than every woman who had unprotected sex got pregnant. But McCarthy had caught . . . and so had Lad.
