Crawlers (13 page)

She caught a flickering from the corners of her eyes, turned and saw that Mason was flashing the headlights. He was getting seriously antsy. Or scared.

Waylon pointedly ignored him. “There should’ve been reporters all over this thing. But nothing. Just gossip. The Feds have got to be suppressing this shit.” He nodded to himself. “You know what? I’m thinking of calling some media. See, if reporters get onto this, they could shake things up, force NASA and whoever to answer some questions. We might find out what it was all about. They could use, like, the Freedom of Information Act. That’s a law that—”

“I know what it is,” she interrupted snappishly. “I got an A minus in civics, ’kay? But that Ashcroft guy and his pals closed down that Freedom of Information Act thing. They used the terrorist stuff for their excuse.”

He looked at her with a renewed interest. “Huh. That’s right. I forgot that. You keep up on this stuff, huh?”

She was irritated at his surprise, especially after thinking, before, that she’d impressed him. “No, I’m a stupid high school bimbo who doesn’t think about anything but rock stars and getting on the pep squad. Why would I have anything else in my head?”

He blinked. “You mad at me for something?”

She snorted. “No. Forget it. Just forget it. Anyway—anyway, you won’t be able to convince anyone there was a satellite here. Unless you can get Deputy Sprague or somebody to back you up, they won’t believe you.”

“What about your dad? He could testify or whatever.”

“Nope, he’s sworn to secrecy. Me and Cal had to promise, too. I could get him in trouble if I talked to the papers about it. So don’t tell them about him, or he’ll kill me.”

He looked at her. “Kill you?”

“Not really, dumbass. You know what I mean. You’re the one who’s all paranoid.”

He looked back into the water. “Deputy Sprague. Maybe he’d talk to the press if I like outed him on this shit.”

She shrugged. “I’m cold. I’m going back to the van.”

“Shit, this isn’t cold. You whiny California people, man, you little beach bunnies don’t know what cold is.”

“It’s cold to me.” It seemed even colder when the clouds closed over the moon and it got darker. “I’m going.”

The rain went from mist to hiss onto the back of her neck as she hunched toward the van. She glanced at the dock, but Waylon was still just standing there, a silhouette, gazing down into the water.

He wants to play Mulder,
she thought.
Fine. But I don’t feel like
being his Scully.

She stopped halfway to the van, feeling a stab of reluctance to go to it, and not sure why.

The van just sat there, with its headlights off now—hadn’t he had them on before?—like a rectangular block of metal and darkness. Just a box, with some glass on it and a seething kind of quiet.

She was getting one of her feelings again. That’s what it was. She didn’t want to go near the van. Her feelings weren’t visions, and they weren’t all that specific. But they were also usually right.

Then the van’s driver’s side door opened and Mason got out, but it looked all wrong. He was getting out backwards, like he had turned around in his car seat, then had gotten out of the van without turning back around.

Why? Unless there was someone behind the van. Someone he didn’t want to take his eyes off of.

She moved a little to the right, trying to see better, a little closer to the van, and realized his body was facing her after all. Only
his
head
was facing backwards. Completely backwards. As she watched, it rotated on his neck like it was on a turntable. It kept going, all the way around, the other way. Then it stopped moving, back where it had started: facing backwards.

Her stomach lurched as he turned toward her again.

No, the whole thing had to have been a trick of the moonlight. That thought made her pulse slow a little.

“Mason?”

He didn’t answer.

She thought she saw something moving, around his feet. Like, a small animal of some kind. A bunch of small animals. She couldn’t see, in the darkness, what they were. They started coming toward her.

For the second time, Bert offered his coat to Lacey to supplement her own; a second time she refused. He was starting to shiver, even with it on. The occasional car had passed, but neither of them felt comfortable hitchhiking. Not yet anyway.

The moon came and went with rolling clouds. The breeze rose and shook a little rain off, then died away.

He glanced behind him. The sense of being followed came and went like the moon. Now it was gone again.

He shrugged the feeling off and trudged around yet another curve beside Lacey—Bert on the outside, reflexively sheltering her from the road, but wondering if really he should be sheltering her from the sucking darkness of the canyon, the steep slope between the clusters of trees to their right. Fir trees now becoming eucalyptus; peeling, menthol pungent eucalyptus soon replaced by liquidambar and miniature chestnut overawed by tall poplars; some of the trees evergreen, some of them stripped of their leaves. Now and then a gray-bearded palm tree. It was central California’s arboreal polyglut, as he thought of it, and the ecologists hated the way native trees were being crowded out by the interlopers.

He was getting hungry and footsore and cold and the only yellow call box they’d come to had been vandalized. “A really useful piece of technology,” he muttered now, “that call box, and those barbarians had to yank the phone off it. Why do they do things like that?”

She shook her head, chuckling. “I’m sure I can’t imagine.”

“I heard that someone broke into Morgenthal’s electronics shop over at the high school, stole a bunch of stuff. Maybe it was the same people. You can sell electronic parts of certain kinds, and some metals, if you know where to go. I think I’d rather believe that than blind vandalism.”

“You prefer barbarians with a plan?”

“Something like . . .”

Was it that sound again? Rattling the gravel in the darkened slope beside the road’s shoulder?

“. . . like that.”

There was something up ahead now, something small, oozing along close to the ground. A low, slinking four-legged shadow. Two green-gold eyes shining in the moonlight, regarding them coldly.

“Ooh, a kitty cat!” Lacey said, suddenly sounding like a little girl.

It was. A thin black cat, probably feral, padding toward them with its head ducked down. It paused to sniff the air, to look into the gorge; then came on again.

“Maybe that’s what I thought was—” He broke off, rethinking how he wanted to say it. “—what I heard making noise down below us there, sort of pacing us. He must’ve outflanked us. Hiya, cat.”

Lacey squatted down to greet the animal. He was tempted to warn her that it was probably feral, but it rubbed its skinny flanks against her, purring like a toy engine. She scratched it behind the ears. “Oh, look, Bert, it’s got a mark around its neck where it had a collar. Some creepy jerkwad must’ve abandoned it out here. Or her. I think this is a girl cat.”

But then she straightened and stepped back as the cat suddenly arched its spine, hissing, ears laid back. Not at Lacey, as Bert had thought at first, but at something behind them.

Adair hadn’t quite run away, when the little round black things began to roll toward her along the ground, like dark independent yo-yos.

She’d backed away from the van, then turned and trotted up to the dock. But Waylon was gone.

“Waylon!”

She looked back toward the van. Something small—several somethings—were rolling toward her.

She saw a larger movement in the trees, near the path along the shore that led to the marina. Was it Waylon? She hoped so. She ran that way, her heart pounding louder than her running feet.

“Waylon?”

The figure moved off into the trees. She followed, stumbling over a rotting log, falling, her hand sinking into a yeastily redolent cold mush she knew to be a kind of shapeless orange fungus she’d always found repulsive. She made a hissing sound of disgust and wiped her hand on leaves—which turned out to be stinging nettles.

Swearing under her breath, she got up and stumbled onward, her hands burning. Where was Waylon?

“Waylon!” She said it as loud as she dared, her voice hushed but carrying.

Someone whispered back. She couldn’t quite make out what they’d said.
Come here,
maybe?

But she stopped where she was. The voice, whisper or not, hadn’t been Waylon. She was sure of that.

“Hey, cat!” Bert called after it.

But the cat darted past them and shot off into the darkness. There was a feline screech, and a furiously tangled follow-up screech, then silence. Bert looked at Lacey and shrugged. Then the cat trotted triumphantly out of the shadows of the gorge, back into the moonlight, carrying something shiny in its mouth.

Bert stooped for a closer look. It looked like more of that stuff that had hit his windshield. Why would a cat show interest in that? But then he saw the shiny stuff squirm, and the way it moved made him think of a lizard. It writhed, squirmed again—

And burst apart in the cat’s mouth, in a shower of silver parts.

The cat opened its jaws to hiss, and the last of the stuff fell away. It seemed to coalesce, then catch a wind, to roll away into the darkness. But the wind had long since died.

Lacey went to the cat, who permitted herself to be picked up.

Shaking her head, Lacey looked into the shadows. “What was that thing? It looked alive. Sort of.”

“Yeah. It did look like that. Like it was alive. But I don’t see how it could’ve been. It was metal, I think. Or maybe it wasn’t. Actually, I don’t know what the hell it was.”

More movement, then, in the darkness below. He looked over the edge, toward the creek, as a wash of moonlight fell. Was that someone? A man, a young man in a tattered military uniform, climbing up the hillside toward him? Moving like a lizard, too, in fits and starts, up the side of the slope.

Then the clouds moved over the moon again and darkness drew over the scene.

Maybe someone down there needed help. Or maybe there hadn’t been anyone there at all. He’d been feeling spooked for a while, now.

Once, while hiking in Northern California, after hearing the local people telling Sasquatch stories, he’d seen a bigfoot among the trees, just beyond a clearing; saw it as evening darkness came onto the woods. But as he had moved closer to the thing, the bigfoot had resolved into a shadowy, wind-swayed bush.

He shrugged. Maybe he hadn’t seen the guy down in the gorge. “Lacey? Did you see anyone down there?”

She came to stand beside him and look into the shadows. The moon broke through the clouds again, and the slope was empty. “Nope. You saw somebody?”

“I guess not.” He turned to look at her. “You going to adopt that cat?”

“Have to. Can’t leave her out here, can I? Only, only, I’m staying at a hotel till I get a place. I can’t impose a stray cat on my sister. She’s already making me feel like—well, I’m looking for living quarters big-time. But meanwhile . . .”

He said resignedly, “You’re not the take-the-cat-to-the-shelter type, are you.”

“No.” She looked at him steadily. “No, Bert, I’m not.”

“So it’s me, isn’t it?”

“You could always tell me your condo doesn’t allow cats.”

“I just hope the gulls don’t eat her.”

She pointed. “Is that a car coming?”

Headlights were racing toward them. Lacey was looking at the oncoming lights as if she were considering hitchhiking, after all. “Yeah,” he said.

Bert turned for a last look down the hillside; could see nothing in the darkness. But . . .

Something
was
there. He could feel it, watching. He could almost feel it thinking about them.

The cat in Lacey’s arms looked down there, too. Its tail swished sharply.

The headlights drew close—and slowed. It was a sheriff ’s cruiser, and as it pulled up, Bert bent over to get a better look at the driver.

He knew this guy, a black deputy who interfaced with the local PD a lot. He thought the deputy’s name was maybe Sprague.

“Deputy, we’re awfully glad to see you,” Lacey said.

Sprague rolled down the passenger’s side window. “Truck driver called, said he thought you mighta gone off the road. He wasn’t sure, and he felt bad he didn’t stop to look, so he called us . . . and here you are, by gosh. Well, climb in.” Glancing at Lacey, he added, “You going to bring that flea-bitten old cat with you in my cruiser?”

She smiled at him and stroked the cat.

The deputy sighed. “The things I allow women to do. Come on, I’ve already called for a tow truck. We’ll get your car to town.”

Adair couldn’t stay where she was any longer. But she didn’t know where to go.

The van just sat there, about sixty yards off, on the gravel area across from the dock.

Something was rustling in the darkness. She couldn’t tell where it was exactly. Or what. Maybe just a deer or a skunk.

Great, her hands burned from nettles, she stank from fungus, and now she was going to get skunked.

Was there someone crawling, in the shadows, under that old, broken-down redwood?

I’ve been imagining things all night,
she thought. First Mason with his head like it was on a turntable. Then those little balls of shadow.

She took a step toward it; and there was renewed rustling; a glint of metal. An angry trilling.

She stepped back, and the motion stopped; it fell silent. She stepped toward it once more, tentatively—and again the angry bristling, the sense of an unseen hornet’s nest, about to swarm at her.

She drew back again.
It’s like it’s guarding some border,
Adair thought.
It’s warning me to stay on the other side.

Or maybe to stay inside.

She tried calling Waylon again, shouting this time. “Waylon!”

“Yeah! Adair!”

She heard him coming noisily through the underbrush.

“Where’d the hell you go!” she shouted.