Crawlers (15 page)

“What is it? I don’t know. There’s so much secretiveness around here. I don’t think it was like that last time I was here. And weird things stolen all over town, and a woman at the café this morning said that someone was torturing animals around here. I asked her what made her think so, and she said she saw a bird with machine parts in it, like someone had shoved these things into its body and let it go.”

“Jesus! What a grotesque—” He broke off, thinking. “Unless, maybe it was some kind of tracking device. Zoologists use them.”

“The way she described it, I don’t think so. I guess I just think . . . there’s a story in this town. There’s something going on. I keep getting the feeling that people are
hiding
something. I’m going to look into it. Either it’s my journalist’s intuition, or I need to see a doctor.”

Bert considered. “I
have
felt as if some people seem—weirdly distant. Like they’re doing something together, and they’re not including me—and I’m glad to be out of it. I mean, beyond my usual alienation. But . . .” He shrugged. “It’s just a feeling. Nothing, really.”

“Maybe it’s more than nothing. But if you see anything—”

Cal dropped back to them. “Hey, I saw that green flash thing! That flash that’s in the sunset sometimes.”

He pointed and they peered at the setting sun, but the flash had passed; no one else saw it. They watched the seabirds, small black coots bobbing on the water; the coots were contrasted by elegant white seabirds vanishing into the surf, to come up half a minute later with small crabs in their beaks. The ever-present gulls rose and dipped.

When the sky darkened enough so they could see the evanescent blue-white streaks of the meteor shower, Bert found himself reciting, “ ‘Who falls for love of God shall rise a star.’ ”

Cal looked around. “Yeah, it’s all pretty and stuff.” Deliberately teenagering it up. “It’s sav CGI.” He grinned at his sister. “It’s
good
graphics
.”

Bert thought,
The kid knows how a guy like me thinks even when I
don’t say it out loud. It’s a mistake to underestimate these kids.

Still, tell them the story. “When I lived back east,” Bert said, “I went to an art museum in Concord where they had a touring exhibition of the greatest impressionists. Some people came down to see it and they videotaped it. And they looked at the van Gogh through the camera lens—never once looked at it with their naked eye. Though they were there in the room with the original.”

Lacey laughed and shook her head. “Yeah. I hear you.”

Cal shrugged and looked annoyed. Sensing he was being lumped in with those clueless tourists.

They walked on, and suddenly Lacey said, “Ben Jonson?”

“What?” Bert said. “Oh, that line I quoted. Yes.
You
get a gold star,” and he patted her head.

“Ha, ha, a gold star,” Cal muttered. “Fonn-ee.”

Lacey took Bert’s arm, then, and for a while, after that, he felt that all was right with the world. So what if she might be a little crazy.

She watched the falling stars. “They say meteors brought life to the earth—amino acids, proteins, or something that life is built up from probably came from some other world, and dropped into the ocean.” She looked out at the sea. “But was it by accident or design?”

“I’ve always wondered. Maybe when you look close enough there’s no difference. There’s that whole ‘intelligent design’ controversy. But who knows.”

Bert watched another blue-white scratch appear on what seemed the dark surface of the sky, another meteor. It seemed to him, for a moment, that the heavens were dramatizing the oneness of things, the above taking part in the below, the sky unifying with the earth. Below among the wet rocks a gull tugged at the decaying remains of a small manta ray, death cycling back into life again; the usual duality, separation of the individual from the whole, seemed removed for a moment.

Was Lacey his last chance, and would she treat him, finally, as Juanita had done? Was he stuck, mired in his work? Had he made one too many fatal missteps in his life?

Those doubts were always with him and had become part of him. Yet for a moment, feeling connected to some immeasurable wholeness glimpsed in the sky and horizon, stars and stone, he was set free.

Lacey looked at him, as if sensing it. Her eyes were shadowed, but he could
feel
her regard.

Then Adair broke the spell. So quietly Bert could barely make it out, she said, “Falling stars can be something else, too. Planes crashing or—satellites.”

“There’s a great mystery about a fallen satellite,” Lacey explained, seeing Bert’s puzzled look.

“Oh?”

“They’re not supposed to talk about it. Something to do with their dad’s salvage work.”

“Everything’s been fucked up since then,” Cal said suddenly, stopping to stare angrily up at the knitting clouds.

Lacey looked at him but said nothing, and after a long, pensive moment they walked back to the car. Bert wondered what wasn’t being talked about; what hung in the air like a meteorite, refusing to fall where it should.

They drove back to the Pinecrest area without talking much, slowing now and then to look at the Christmas lights shining in strings of blinking charismatic colors against the houses. Car culture was big in Quiebra, and at one house a classic 1940s Plymouth was outlined in Christmas lights; just the car, not the house. And here was the O’Haras’ house, Adair said. It was like a starburst of lights—and as they stared, Bert realized it wasn’t just overdone, it was
strangely
done. The Christmas lights seemed randomly strung, or like the scruffy webs of black widows, lacking beautiful spiral symmetry but with their own arcane design. And the same strings of lights looped from the O’Haras’ to the house next door, which was completely dark, the blinking light-chains crisscrossing like scribbles. Yet almost in a recognizable pattern, a cryptic message of some kind, like the mutterings of a lunatic.

Bert felt increasingly uneasy, looking at the patterns in the strings of lights. It was just as if a message was written there, in some language he couldn’t quite read.

“Better get you kids home,” Bert said.

He drove them right there, without any more delays.

December 6

Half an hour after school, Waylon found Mr. Morgenthal at his workbench in the electronics shop tinkering with some kind of radio receiver, it looked like.

Waylon stepped in close to look at what Mr. Morgenthal was working on—curious about what he’d managed to salvage after the vandalism and theft. And then stepped back again. It was the smell. Mr. Morgenthal had a harsh smell about him, which wasn’t usual. It was like he hadn’t bathed. There was also a burning smell, like a toy train transformer that’d been left on too long. But maybe that was from the project—looked like he’d done some soldering.

Waylon realized that Mr. Morgenthal was staring at him. But smiling. What was that look, like, all ironic? Had he forgotten some assignment?

“So,” Waylon began, “you got a new project going after all, there?”

“After all? It’s a satellite dish. It’s modified.”

Waylon saw that it was one of the smaller satellite dishes that people put up, but Mr. Morgenthal had changed it, had soldered a lot of little parts to it in a mesh of wires.
Hella sketchy,
he thought.

Mr. Morgenthal went on. “Modifying a satellite dish for greater power. There was a diagram in
Popular Science
.”

He said it with that smile and that stare, as if testing to see what Waylon would think of the explanation.

Waylon just nodded.

“Was there something you needed, Waylon?”

It really was like the guy was mad at him or something but had made up his mind not to say so. “No, I didn’t need anything special. Um, I guess you got some of your stuff back?”

“My stuff ?”

“That was stolen?”

“Stolen?”

“Uh, yeah? You know, the vandals and the stuff that was stolen?”

“Nothing was stolen.” Mr. Morgenthal turned back to his tools. “That was just . . . a misunderstanding. I had given permission for the materials to be used and forgot about it. I have everything I need. However, class is going to be suspended for a while.”

“Suspended? This one? Where do I go when I used to go to shop?”

“Wherever you like.”

“Yeah, well—” Waylon laughed. “—the principal might have some different ideas.”

“Oh, you’ll find that Mr. Hernandez is completely in agreement. Now if you will excuse me.”

“Sure.”

No one would care where he went? That was cool. But then again, it sucked.

Every kid he knew had picked up some sense of what you needed, to grow up healthy. How could you not get that, when they talked about it all the time in sitcoms and shows like
Boston Public
and TV movies and HBO specials and all that shit?
“Yo, man, I got
no role models, my uncle is all I got and he’s always fucking up and at
home we’re all stayin up till three in the morning and shit, knamean?
What? I’m sorry, I mean he’s always screwing up.”

But, whatever. No electronics class, that was one more hour a day he could use for his investigation. Maybe it was all, destiny and shit.

But still, it was fucked up.

Waylon turned and walked slowly to the door of the classroom. Looking around as he went. Almost nothing was left in the room except the workbenches. All the students’ tools were gone along with the electronics.

He looked at Mr. Morgenthal—and he got a feeling. Just a sad feeling.

He went into the hall. Yes, definitely feeling sad and not knowing why. Like somebody had died but he didn’t know who.

But then again, he did know: Mr. Morgenthal had died.

12

December 6

Adair was almost home from school on that same clammy, overcast afternoon, with the sun seeming crabby and ungenerous behind chimney smoke and mist, when she saw old Mr. Garraty pull himself up onto the roof of his house.

She stopped and stared, watching him dangle from the metal gutter along the edge of the roof, and thought his ladder must’ve fallen, somewhere, though she couldn’t see one. A cat poised on the roof, a tabby cat, as startled as Adair was. Maybe he was trying to get to the cat, and then the ladder went down.

But there was no ladder.

And the old man was doing a brisk pull-up, grabbing the corner of an eave to draw himself up onto the roof in a second, as easily as a cartoon superhero.

“Mr. Garraty?”
she blurted.

He stood up and turned to look at her, his head turning remarkably far around on his shoulders. “Adair, isn’t it?” His body turned toward her, to match his head—or that’s how it seemed to her. It reminded her of Mason—that same illusion. His tool belt clacked as he turned, screwdrivers bumping into wrenches.

He seemed to be leaning toward the ground a bit and should have pitched headlong to the grass, but he didn’t. He just stood there a little crookedly, smiling at her. A peculiar look in his eyes— though there wasn’t anything definitely wrong with that look.

She cleared her throat. “You okay, Mr. Garraty?” She was dimly aware that there wasn’t much sense in asking if he was okay. In fact, he seemed unusually okay. He had just done something more suited for an Olympic gymnast than an old pensioner in Quiebra. “I mean, is your cat okay? Are you up there after your cat? Do you need . . . a ladder? Or anything?”

He turned to look at the cat, and the instant he looked at it, the cat backed away hissing and vanished over the crown of the roof.

“No, that particular parasite—that cat—is not my property. That’s a stray or a neighbor’s cat who’s been acting like he owns my roof. No. Not my cat. No.” He turned to look at her, and his expression was exactly the same as it had been. The same smile. The same appraising eyes that seemed to be weighing her up. “You’ve grown,” he said. “In the last few weeks.”

She blinked. “I have?”

“Yes. About an eighth inch.” Then he turned to look at his wife, Mrs. Garraty, who was clambering up the roof from the back of the house, something in her hand. She came to stand with the confidence of a circus performer on the peak of the roof. Just stood there, with a sort of satellite dish thing in her hands, a contrivance about the size of a garbage can lid. The comparison to a lid seemed natural because it looked to Adair like it
had
maybe been made partly from a metal garbage can lid, but with a lot of wires spread over its surface, radiating from the center.

Then it registered: Mrs. Garraty hadn’t been out of her wheelchair for a couple of years at least. And now she was standing up on the roof of a house.

Mrs. Garraty looked at Adair balefully, and then it was as if she remembered to smile, but the look stayed in her eyes.

What a look it was—she had to be forty or so feet away and way above her on the roof, Adair decided, yet somehow that look came down at Adair like someone throwing a lawn dart at her head. Adair felt like sidestepping.

“We’re putting up a satellite dish,” Mrs. Garraty said. “My husband found it in
Popular Mechanics
. Do-it-yourself. Homemade. They’re quite popular. You’ll be seeing quite a few of these. Save a lot of money. Free satellite TV, young lady. And you can’t beat free, can you?”

The whole conversation was taking place between the people on the roof and Adair on the ground, and Adair was getting a crick in her neck, but she couldn’t turn away, couldn’t help staring up at them. She felt someone else nearby, and turned to see Mr. Than, that nice old Vietnamese guy who lived next to the Garratys, standing in his yard with his rake in his hand, staring up at Mrs. Garraty, too. His mouth was open. He was as surprised as Adair.

Mr. Than and Adair exchanged a look of mutual confusion: neither understood it, but neither one felt quite right about asking.

“Chinese medicine,” Mr. Garraty said. “You should appreciate that, Than. We went to a Chinese doctor. He’s given us a marvelous . . .”

He looked at his wife. She stared back at him.

Then he nodded and turned back to Mr. Than.

“. . . ginseng,”
Mr. Garraty said. “He gave us a marvelous ginseng.”

“Oh!” Mr. Than said. “This ginseng I must try! I take some, too, but nothing that—my goodness, do you think she is safe up there?”

“Oh, I’m fine, Mr. Than.” Mrs. Garraty laughed. “As you can see, I’m more than fine. Glad to be out of that chair. Feeling much better now. Ever so much better. Here you go, dear.”

She handed her husband the homemade satellite dish, as if she were handing him a box of tissue.

Then she turned and walked confidently down the far side of the roof. She was out of Adair’s line of sight.

And Adair heard a thump. It sounded exactly like Mrs. Garraty had fallen! “Oh, Mr. Garraty, was that—”

Mr. Than had heard it, too. “Your wife—she is all right? I hear maybe something fall? Hey, Garraty, she okay?”

Garraty was ignoring Mr. Than. He was stationing the satellite dish on the peak of the roof, turning it just exactly so. It didn’t point at the sky, but across the rooftops.

Then Mrs. Garraty, safely down on the ground, stepped around the side of the house into the front yard and looked first at Adair and then at Mr. Than. “Why, I’m just fine, thank you.”

Adair looked at Mrs. Garraty’s feet. Grass was stuck to the tops of her little white tennis shoes. Adair had the irrational suspicion that Mrs. Garraty had jumped down from the roof and landed on her feet in the backyard, sinking in the dirt to the tops of her shoes. That wasn’t possible, of course.

Mr. Garraty was focused on screwing the plate at the base of the support for the homemade satellite dish onto the rooftop with vigorous motions of his wrist.

“Now, if you’ll excuse us,” Mrs. Garraty said, “I don’t want my husband distracted up there. He might—”

“—might fall,” her husband said at the same time she did. Exactly the same time.

As he spoke, barely audible, he was looking at the screws he was turning to fasten the satellite plate into the roof.

“My goodness, awfully heck of good ginseng,” Mr. Than said, shaking his head in admiration as he went into his garage.

Adair nodded and said, “ ’Kay, you guys have fun. Bye,” and turned away, began walking home. Walking quickly.

She glanced back to see Mr. Garraty—having finished screwing the plate down in a remarkably short time—taking the wire from the homemade satellite dish in his hand and directing it through his fingers along the down-sloping rear side of the roof as he walked out of sight toward the backyard. Then there was another
thump
sound. A few moments later, the yowl of a cat. A furious yowl.

Adair stared at the Garratys’ house for a long moment. But in her mind’s eye she was seeing her mom and her dad. There was some kind of continuity between her parents and the Garratys, as if an icy stream had overflowed first through her own house and then through theirs. There was a wrongness, badly disguised but not something she could challenge without seeming like she was all bipolar or something.

Mom and Dad. The Garratys.

Adair turned shivering away from the Garratys’ house and went home as quick as she could.

But getting there, seeing her mom go into the garage—and lock the garage door from the inside . . .

She didn’t feel much better at home. She turned up the heat. It just seemed so cold all of a sudden.

December 6, night

Henri Stanner felt a strange kind of relief, being here, away from Quiebra, and a strange kind of vulnerability, too. He always felt watched, anytime he came to the Biointerface division. Even after they’d run his cornea print and let him in. He wasn’t sure they watched everyone, or not closely. But he was sure they watched
him
. Because of his ties to the Facility. A camera partway down the corridor tracked him whirringly as he strode by.

This wing of the Stanford Research Institute’s B.I. division was quite ordinary looking. An ordinary institutional corridor—white walls, strips of white lights, locked white-painted metal doors that masked startling experimentation. The click of his heels echoed as he reached the intersection of two corridors. Here were more cameras. He paused to watch as a young, pale, narrow-shouldered technician in a white coat walked by, muttering to himself, glancing at an electronic clipboard, looking up ahead, back at the clipboard, muttering some more. The technician walked by the camera; it didn’t turn to follow him.

Stanner waited a few moments, then walked by the camera.

It swiveled to keep him in view.

He nodded to himself, and just kept going till he found room 2323. He pressed the button in the intercom fixture, spoke his name. The door buzzed.

Inside was a plain blond-wood desk, behind which stood a pearly-white metal column about six feet high and two in diameter. Its camera lens swiveled and took him in.

“State your name again, please,” the computer-generated voice said from the column.

“Major Henri Stanner.”

“That name checks with appointments and voice-print records.”

Interesting that I never gave a voice print knowingly,
Stanner thought.
But it seems one was taken anyway.

The door to one side of the desk clicked and swung inward, and Stanner walked through to find Bentwaters and Jim Gaitland sitting at a conference table.

Captain Gaitland was a stocky man with an easy, sleepy-eyed look to his face, ears that stuck out like a cartoon making fun of listening too hard; he wore his Marine Corps uniform.

“Look there, Gaitland’s in uniform,” Stanner said. “Is that supposed to be a message? Add some kind of official glamor to this meeting? I’ve seen you in uniform maybe one other time in fifteen years.”

“No reason to go undercover today, Major,” Gaitland said, with his easy Tennessee drawl. “Have a seat.” He tapped a digital tape recorder built into the tabletop. “You want to give a report, I’ll have it transcribed later.”

“I don’t know as I should give a report to a guy I outrank,” Stanner said, sitting. “What, no refreshments?”

Bentwaters, wearing lab white, nodded abstractedly. “We’ll have three coffees with cream and sugar on the side,” he said—to the air, which meant someone or something was listening from outside the room.

“Rank isn’t really of the essence here, it’s more about seniority,” Gaitland said, adding, “Sir.”

Bentwaters looked at Stanner speculatively. “I do sense some hostility here, Stanner.”

A young black woman came in carrying a tray; she wore a tight green dress, nothing lablike about it. As she bent over to put the tray of coffee mugs, creamer, and sugar on the table, Stanner couldn’t help admiring the taut expression of her figure through the fabric.

I’ve been way too long without getting laid,
he thought. She smiled at him and left without a word.

He took a deep breath, took a cup of coffee, and turned to Gaitland. “I’ll tell you what, Captain. I keep getting this funny feeling in Quiebra—that probably the Facility knows as well as I do how far it’s gone. And it bothers me. That town should be subjected to a quarantine, to evacuation pending individual evaluation of each person there. I don’t care what cover story the Pentagon uses. Hell, any number of terrorist scenarios will do. But—” He took a sip of the coffee, which tasted burnt, and put the cup down. “—but don’t wait. Tell them to do it now.
Now.
”

Bentwaters hunched back in his chair and then looked fixedly into his coffee; he wasn’t as good as Gaitland in hiding his feelings. And clearly Bentwaters was scared.

Gaitland’s body language was the opposite of Bentwaters’s. He leaned back, as if relaxing on his porch, and his eyes went hooded. “Well,” he said musingly, “I don’t think they’re going to go for that without some kind of physical evidence of real contamination. Serious contamination.”

Stanner stared at him. “You weren’t there at Lab 23, Gaitland. But you had to see the videotape before we burned the place out. Any contamination that leads to
that
—”

Gaitland used a pen from his inside coat pocket to stir sugar into his coffee. “You don’t know there’s any contamination, not for sure.”

“I saw breakouts on a fucking grotesque level of biointerface, there in the woods around that town.”

“Where’s your proof ? Where are your samples?”

“I’m not going near them without some sort of contaminationproofing. But I know what I saw, Gaitland.”

“In broad daylight?”

“It was at night. And there are two missing marines out there. What the hell you think happened to those boys, Gaitland?”

“I heard something about that. When a couple of enlisted men don’t show up for roll call, it’s something called AWOL.”

Stanner grunted. “Both of them? From that site? Then there’s equipment stolen all over town. Some of it I don’t know what they’d use it for. But some of the parts are perfect for biointerface backup. Micromodify the silicon and—”

“Now hold on there, Major,” Bentwaters said, “you’re jumping the gun. We don’t know they can modify components to that extent.”

“Their whole imperative is to experiment and find new ways to proliferate,” Stanner replied sharply, struggling to keep his temper. “You got any sources tell you about a bank robbery?”

Bentwaters seemed shaken at that. “Bank robbery?”

“The Bank of Quiebra was looted top to bottom and there’s been no FBI in there. Which says to me that someone stopped them from investigating. I mean, a robbery that big and it’s only local cops? So I figure that the Facility has a handle on this thing already.”

“You’re presuming a hell of a lot, there, Major,” Gaitland said coolly.

Stanner pushed on relentlessly. “I heard a story that a whole crew of
local people
were involved in the robbery.”