Crawlers (18 page)

“I don’t know.”

“I could test it. We might just be able to save the rest of the town before they go to the next phase. They seem to be able to convert some people easier than others, and if they just make people disappear, it causes too much of a stir. So they’re doing it bit by bit. It gives us a little time, Bentwaters.”

“Why some people and not others?”

“I don’t know. But I found a house where I was sure of the parents; they’re building a transmitter only the All of Us would use. But I’m pretty sure the kids aren’t converted yet. Parents are often converted but the kids left alone—at least at first. It depends on the kid, seems like. For one thing, young people seem to be generally resistant—maybe neurological, maybe psychological, maybe, maybe growth hormones, who knows? I mean, there are some neurological systems that don’t work. We knew that about cats, for example, but we’re not sure why. This resistance principle could be extended, too. We could work up some kind of injection to give people. But in the meantime we have to stop this before it gets—”

“Hi, Dad.”

Stanner almost dropped the cell phone into the bay when Shannon walked up and leaned on the rail beside him. “Bentwaters, I have to go. I’ll . . . think about being in touch.” He hung up and turned the cell phone off.

His daughter wore a pinstriped suit dress and coat. She was petite, like her mom. Half Japanese.

“Stop what before it gets where, Dad? That sounded like one of your more sinister phone calls.”

“Oh, stop what? Stop women from becoming high-ranking officers.”

“Dad!”

“Kidding, I’m kidding. No, stop my having to do any more paperwork. So, hi. You know what, I think those are probably sea lions and not seals.”

“Hi,” she said, still looking at the sea lions. “Yeah, sea lions.”

She barely looked at him as she spoke. He could tell it was going to be one of those meetings. She was brooding about her mom’s suicide again, maybe.

“So what brought you through town?” he asked.

“What brought
you
through?” she countered. “Or are you not allowed to say, double-oh-ten-thousand?”

When she’d been a teenager, she’d found out he was Air Force intelligence. He was a spook, and she related that jokingly to James Bond, who was some kind of naval commander as well as a spy, and he’d said, “Well, I’m not double-oh-seven, I’m more like double-oh-ten-thousand, way down the pecking order and I sure don’t have a license to kill. I don’t think I even have a license to punch in the nose.”

Of course, he’d killed quite a number of men. But he liked to pretend that was someone else. And it had never been like James Bond. The men who were killed in James Bond rarely begged for their lives.

He’d tried to stay away from field work, after one too many “on-site liquidations.” Tried to stay in the technical side of things. But sometimes the technical side of things took a little walk out into the field and started hunting around.

“What am I doing? Oh, some orbital mapping stuff over at the NSA. Technical gobbledygook. I pretend I understand it and they let me stay on the job a few more years.”

“You sound like you’re already thinking of retirement.” She looked at him with renewed interest, her short glossy black hair bobbing with the quick motion.

“Oh, I think about retirement every day. I’m not old enough to get full benefits though. So I keep putting it off. But it’s what I’d like to do.”

He gazed at her. Just taking her in. She was petite and intense like Kyoko had been. The same deep black eyes. You didn’t often see truly black eyes; usually “black” eyes were really dark brown, but Kyoko’s had been black and fathomless.

If I’d fathomed her,
he thought,
if I’d asked more often how she was
feeling, she might’ve finally told me the truth.

He felt his eyes burning and looked away from Shannon. “Look at those big lugs out there,” he said, nodding toward the sea lions. “People throwing them fish. Big lugs just lying back sunning and eating. Man, that’s the life. Smelly but easy.”

“They do smell, don’t they? But I don’t mind. Once when I went snorkeling in Mexico—”

“You went to Mexico? You never told me that.”

“I sent you a card, Dad.”

“It didn’t get to me.”

“Because you move around too much.” She glanced at him, and there was some satisfaction in that glance. Like she’d found a way to underline the instability his rootlessness had brought to her life. Or his being rooted, anyway, in the Air Force. And how could you have roots in the air? “Anyway, the sea lions swam right to my snorkel mask, and one of them bumped on it with his nose, just to be playful.”

She smiled at the memory, and Stanner smiled, too, thinking of his daughter enjoying that little encounter with a sea creature.

He nodded appreciatively. “So, how’s work, Shannon?”

She shrugged. “I’m not getting a promotion. I swear they have a glass ceiling. I’m the best PR person they have.”

“
Those
people have a glass ceiling? I thought their whole trip was being liberal, some kind of ‘green’ investment firm, right? You’d think they’d be pro-women to a fault.”

Then he realized she was glaring at him. Just like Kyoko, she hated it when she wanted to bitch about something and he was “oh, such a Mr. Reasonable Male” as Kyoko had put it.

How could he explain? He couldn’t tell them that he’d seen things that’d break your mind if you didn’t convince yourself, at every last chance you had, that the world was a reasonable place after all. That enough of it was, anyway. That it wasn’t all shadows within shadows and unquestionable directives to do the unspeakable.

He couldn’t tell her about the dreams he’d been having, seeing that Burgess kid smashed into jelly, and in the dream Burgess yelling at him to push the table harder, get it over with,
for god’s sake,
kill me!,
and him trying to say,
no, no, it isn’t me, I’m not doing it, fella,
I’m not, I swear, it isn’t me.

All he could do now was get a sheepish look and add lamely, “But then I wouldn’t know about glass ceilings.”

“Being a white establishment middle-class male, you haven’t experienced glass ceilings? Who’d of thunkit. You got that right, Dad. Come on, let’s get something to eat.”

At least she was calling him Dad. They walked along the pier, up to the street. “You didn’t say what brought you out here, Shannon. I’d like to think it was to see your old pop.”

“I’m pushing a line of cruelty-free cosmetics, perfume, that sort of thing. The company’s here; the investors want me to meet them. Give ’em a boost.”

Shannon picked a restaurant redolent of seafood, sharp with the smoke that rose from blackened fish. New Orleans–type cooking, Stanner supposed, which he disliked. It didn’t matter. He just wanted to look at his daughter and remember when she was little, building sand castles with him in Florida, back when he’d had the NASA posting, Kyoko smiling as she watched them from her beach towel, from behind her dark glasses.

They got a table too near the jazz band. He didn’t like jazz either, and they were remarkably loud for three guys with a stand-up bass, a hollow-body electric guitar, and a trap set. He ordered some bouillabaisse and she got the salmon. She seemed glad the music made it hard for them to talk much.

Afterwards, his daughter let him kiss her cheek good-bye, and was noncommittal when he invited her to spend some vacation time with him in the spring. He watched her get into a cab to go to her hotel.

Then he went to find his rented SUV, that big pain-in-the-ass glossy black thing, thinking about Kyoko and Shannon, so that he almost didn’t notice the guy who was tailing him.

But over the years he’d developed a lively feel for being followed. There was no doubt about it: Someone was following him, a stocky blond guy in a cheap blue suit, no tie, walking down the street about half a block behind, acting real casual, remembering to yawn with boredom and to stare witlessly into store windows.

Had the agency stopped trusting him so much they had him followed? Could it be the other side of the tracks at the DIA? Or someone else?

Stanner ducked into a doorway and waited to take the bull by the horns. Must’ve waited maybe ten minutes, but the guy had realized he’d been made. He dropped back, stayed clear.

Even so, the tail probably wasn’t far away. Stanner waited; waited till it got cold in the doorway, and he decided the hell with it for now.

He went to the SUV and drove back to Quiebra, thinking he’d have to change where he was staying and his car, too.

Because he realized, as he hit the Bay Bridge, that he had been picked up again. He was being followed by a whole team in three cars; one ahead, the other two strung back through the traffic. Not real good at it, but fairly professional.

He figured it was Gaitland’s people. And he figured that Bentwaters had told them he was an official loose cannon now. He had crossed over.

December 9, night

It was a fog-sticky dawn in eastern Quiebra Valley, and Evan Metzger didn’t want to be up and about, trudging across the overgrown old ranch from the truck to the barn, having to step around horseshit and dogshit. He was paying that fucking greaser to clean up out here, and still there was crap everywhere. Probably hadn’t cleaned out the kennels while the dogs were gone like he was told, neither. Someone was going to get his ass kicked and his pay docked.

He lit a cigarette and blew a weary stream of blue smoke as he walked up to the barn. Look at that, fucking Jeff or Carlos had left the barn door open; it was supposed to be locked up.
Sheri f come
through here, he could look right in there and see the dogfight setup, get the
animal-control people all over our asses.

Tired, tired as a son of a bitch. He’d been fighting his dogs against some pretty well trained bulls, fighting ’em half the night over in Alameda County, and despite winning most of the fights, one of his best dogs had died and his bait dog—a small scared-looking redbone mutt that’d refused to fight, making it good only for baiting—had been torn to pieces the first night out, which was bad luck since it was better if they lived a few fights. That way you didn’t have to keep replacing bait dogs.

Then some of those nigger cocksuckers had given him a lot of shit about paying off on bets, which had meant having to wave his .45 around and shout the signal word to Donkey, who’d come in on his flank with the shotgun right on time. And what with the two guns and Metzger being a weight lifter with his head shaved and a Special Forces T-shirt—not that he was ever in the Special Forces, having been kicked out of the army for going AWOL from boot camp—the fucking jigs had backed down and paid up on their bets, but Donkey’d had to watch his back while he loaded his dogs into the truck. The whole thing, along with the bourbon and the crystal meth, had made him edgy, so when one of the dogs had been slow about getting into the truck he’d stoved in its ribs with a kick—one of his best pit bulls—and he’d end up selling it to a nigger for twenty bucks so it could be used as a bait dog before it died—if it lived that long.

Metzger was bone tired and he could smell his own stink. He was glad that grinning bastard Donkey’d gone home. He just wanted to take a bath and swallow a handful of Valium and hit the sack. But best make sure the barn was wired like it was supposed to be for his first big home dogfight, tonight.

Distantly aware of the dogs barking in the back of the truck. Maybe he’d just leave ’em in their cages for the day, that’d make ’em nice and mean an’ lean for the fight. Treat ’em hard puts an edge on ’em, his old man had always said. The last letter from prison had been a lot of babble about being born again, but he knew his dogs all right.

His half brother Jeff had supposedly spent all day wiring the barn with the miniature stadium lights, but Jeff was pretty spun on the crystal and he’d forget what he was doing and end up carving his name in a post five hundred times or something.

Metzger went into the barn and thought it looked okay. The barn’s stalls had been pulled out—he’d done that himself—and the homemade bleachers were set up around the fighting pit. Looked like Jeff had the lights up all right. Metzger found the switch and threw it just to make sure the spots were properly setup.

Two things at once, then:

The dogs setting up a big barking, yelping at the truck—

And the spots shining on Jeff ’s bloody, naked, gutted body in the center of the dogfighting pit.

It was like the dogs were reacting for him; he couldn’t believe it enough to react himself. Jeff was cut open from sternum to groin, an empty shell. His organs were there, on a tarp to one side, stacked like a produce pyramid with someone else’s—because there were at least three human hearts, there, lots of other body parts.

“Oh, fuck . . . oh, mother fuck . . . Ohhhh, fuck fuck fuck!” was all that came out of Metzger.

He backed away from the body, fumbling for his .45, then realizing he’d left it in his jacket, in the truck. He turned and bolted through the door—and stopped, seeing Carlos, the skinny, big-nosed greaser who worked for him, standing there in his boxer shorts and guinea-T, crying like a baby. Just standing there crying with the morning mist swirling around him over the dirty ground between the barn and the truck, and those little hopping things around his legs.

Carlos babbled something in Spanish and pointed at the hopping things.

They were made of feathers and fur and pieces of metal all tricked together and spastic with activity. That one was about as big as a small cat, and its twitchy head was a rooster’s, its quivering legs metal jointed pins; its shivering body was like the middle part of a rattlesnake; at its butt end was another head—a drooling skunk’s head, looked like. Both heads snapped at Carlos, beak and snout snipping, drawing blood as the thing jumped in.

But
that
one, now, was more like a ball, rolling along, its head that of a rat tucked up between its stunted legs, its body sort of rolled up, all kinds of little living wires extending from it all spiny, as it rolled up to connect, in some way that was hard to see, with that other thing that had a blue jay’s head, a squirrel’s tail, its middle parts all sort of wired together with lengths of exposed muscle tissue and pumping organs under plastic coatings, and wires that seemed to twist within themselves like they were made up of thousands of tiny restless little things. It seemed to connect with a round critter that was all feathers and beaks and nothing else, and with another thing that seemed made of fishhooks and eyes and fur.