side was a picture of a woman spraying a cloud of gas at a man wearing a slouch hat and a Beagle Boys-type eye-mask. On the other was a single word in bright red capital letters:
BODYGUARD.
"What is this?" he asked, shocked in spite of himself. "Mace?"
"No," Gretchen said. "Mace is a risky proposition in Maine, legally speaking. This stuff is much milder... but if you give somebody a faceful, they won't even think of hassling you for at least a couple of minutes. It numbs the skin, irritates the eyes, and causes nausea."
Ralph took the cap off the can, looked at the red aerosol nozzle beneath, then replaced the cap. "Good Christ, woman, why would I want to lug around a can of this stuff?"
"Because you've been officially designated a Centurion," Gretchen said.
"A what?" Ralph asked.
"A Centurion," Helen repeated. Nat was fast asleep in her arms, and Ralph realized the auras were gone again. "It's what The Friends of Life call their major enemies-the ringleaders of the opposition."
"Okay," Ralph said, "I've got it now. Ed talked about people he called Centurions on the day he... assaulted you. He talked about a lot of things that day, though, and all of them were crazy-"
"Yes, Ed's at the bottom of it, and he is crazy," Helen said. "We don't think he's mentioned this Centurion business except to a small inner circle-people who are almost as gonzo as he is. The rest of The Friends of Life... I don't think they have any idea. I mean, did you? Until last month, did you have any idea that he was crazy?"
Ralph shook his head.
"Hawking Labs finally fired him," Helen said. "Yesterday. They held onto him as long as they could-he's great at what he does, and they had a lot invested in him-but in the end they had to let him go.
Three months' severance pay in lieu of notice... not bad for a guy who beats up his wife and throws dolls loaded with fake blood at the windows of the local women's clinic." She tapped the newspaper.
"This last demonstration was the final straw. It's the third or fourth time he's been arrested since he got involved with The Friends of Life."
"You have someone inside, don't you?" Ralph said. "That's how you know all this."
Gretchen smiled. "We're not the only ones who've got someone at least partway inside; we have a running joke that there really are no Friends of Life, just a bunch of double agents. Derry P.D."s got someone; the State Police do, too. And those are just the ones our... our person... knows about. Hell, the FBI could be monitoring them, as well. The Friends of Life are eminently infiltratable, Ralph, because they're convinced that, deep down, everyone is on their side.
But we believe that our person is the only one who's gotten in toward the middle, and this person says that Dan Dalton is just the tail Ed Deepneau wags."
"I guessed that the first time I saw them together on the TV news," Ralph said, Gretchen got up, gathered the coffee cups, took them over to the sink, and began to rinse them. "I've been active in the women's movement for thirteen years now, and I've seen a lot of crazy shit, but I've never seen anything like this. He's got these dopes believing that women in Derry are undergoing involuntary abortions, that half of them haven't even realized they're pregnant before the Centurions come in the night and take their babies."
"Has he told them about the incinerator over in Newport?" Ralph asked. "The one that's really a baby crematorium?"
Gretchen turned from the sink, her eyes wide. "How did -I,o I know about that?"
"Oh, I got the lowdown from Ed himself, up close and in person.
Starting in July of '92." He hesitated for just a moment, then gave them an account of the day he had met Ed out by the airport, and how Ed had accused the man in the pickup of hauling dead babies in the barrels marked WEED-co. Helen listened silently, her eyes growing steadily wider and rounder. "He was going on about the same stuff on the day he beat you up," Ralph finished, "but he'd embellished it considerably by then."
"That probably explains why he's fixated on you," Gretchen said, "but in a very real sense, the why doesn't matter. The fact is, he's given his nuttier friends a list of these so-called Centurions. We don't know everyone who's on it, but I am, and