Crawlers (24 page)

Slow down,
he told it.
Get a compress over it,
he told himself.

But he couldn’t think of how to do that. His mind was molasses.

He heard the little dark crazy woman speaking to someone he couldn’t see. As if in response, there was a scraping sound, like a weight being dragged, and then a soft
whoosh
, then
clunk
as something was heaved—or jumped—to hit the top of his car. He could feel the impact as it shivered through the cruiser’s frame; he felt it in his shoulder blades, up against the fender.

Then something was slithering along, moving nearer, over the top of the vehicle. He could just glimpse the big sliding movement out of the corner of his eye when he half turned his head.

Whatever it was, it was coming—crawling toward him, literally crawling over the car.

Then it leapt over his head.

And dropped to the ground in front of him, scuttling around crabwise to face him. The way the thing looked penetrated his growing fogginess.

Not exactly a thing—a
he
, maybe, a man, of sorts, on all fours, knees and elbows tucked in close to the body, clothes all torn up, face muddy and gouged, ribbons of flesh hanging on one side, the side missing an eye.

Even so, Sprague could just make out the guy’s face. He put it together with the tatters of the uniform: Yeah, it was one of those young marine guards from the crash site.

The jarhead’s hair was all overgrown, his face bearded and the beard all matted. His left eye was the one missing, its socket glinting a restless silver. A metal tongue licked from his mouth as he came toward Sprague in little twitchy fits and starts, literally crawling over the asphalt.

Sprague said, “Oh, no.”

He raised his gun—but it felt so heavy in his hand now, it was hard to aim. He didn’t think he had the strength to pull the trigger. He tried. It was like pulling a metal staple from a wall with one finger. The thing was poised to jump at him.

Fire the gun, goddamn it.

The gun fired, and a piece of the crawling thing’s upper left shoulder exploded. The thing twitched and recoiled—slightly. Sprague knew that wasn’t going to be enough.

Fire again, you bastard, shoot him!
But the gun was too heavy. It sagged into his lap.

The crawling marine’s head seemed to give a twist, and there was a sound like a tooth coming out of its socket, and the head extruded from his shoulders on a kind of jointed silvery-wet stalk, the mouth opening, opening wider, wider, jaws distending, visibly unhinging like an anaconda’s.

The head whipped out to snap shut over Sprague’s hand, ripping the gun away, and three, no, four fingers, too, tearing them away as easily as soft candy in its yellow teeth.

Sprague hadn’t quite the strength to scream. He only moaned and looked at the dripping bony slivers where the upper right part of his hand had been.

Then the crawling thing’s body crept up, still on all fours, moving just like a lizard to poise over Sprague. Its hand—something wrong with his wrist, something gray and wet there—grabbed Sprague’s left ankle and jerked him toward it so he slammed onto his back. He knew he’d cracked his head on the asphalt, but it was a distant sensation, a doughy kind of pain.

Then Sprague felt himself gripped—by what, he wasn’t sure, something bristly on the underside of the crawling guy’s body. Gripped and then dragged, leaving a red trail behind him. The marine was dragging him around the car, and it hurt to move that much, real pain breaking through the blanket of numbness. The pain and the shock was making it hard to care where he was going.

He was vaguely aware, as a darkness closed gradually but inexorably in on him, that he was dragged on his back, off the road, into mud, into the wet, overhanging brush.

The darkness was almost complete, but he could see the black cross of a turkey vulture soaring over, through the tree leaves. He was almost grateful when the crawling thing began its methodical tearing and rending.

The darkness filling more and more of his vision, like some kid with a black crayon scribbling his idea of
night
over the scene.

There was a final decisive rending and a sensation of arctic cold searing deep in his vitals. Then the darkness was complete.

16

December 13, noon

Adair was starting to feel like she could move again. The rubbery feeling in her limbs was receding; the dizziness was a bit less. She could draw her legs up and turn a little.

Then she saw the silhouette of Ms. Santavo on the edge of the road above her. The quick movement of Ms. Santavo’s head, peering down at her.

Adair bit the scream down into a whimpering sound, as gravel and clods of dirt and pieces of stick clattered down around her, dislodged by Ms. Santavo’s feet as she skidded down the slope.

No. She wasn’t going to be buried out here with Roy. She knew they’d killed Roy. She could feel it. Roy was dead.

She got a sudden, jarring mental image of Cal, talking to people on-line, not thinking about what he was saying.

And Waylon—the way he went on about conspiracies. They monitored the town’s kids on-line somehow. Were they going after Cal now? And Waylon?

Ms. Santavo paused. Something was in her hand, maybe a heavy stick, like a club. She came on again, sliding carefully down to poise herself over Adair.

Adair got her feet under her, waited till Ms. Santavo was almost on top of her—and launched herself upward, propelling her head into Ms. Santavo’s midriff. Which was a lot harder than she expected.

But Ms. Santavo tilted, fell full length backwards against the steeply angled slope, grunting, dropping a long black shape of some kind; losing her footing, sliding down so her feet became lodged under a curve of the stump.

Riding the energy of a sudden surge of triumph, Adair vaulted over the log and skidded further down the slope to the gully’s bottom—and saw what it was that Ms. Santavo had dropped.

Not a club. It was a shotgun. A police shotgun.

She had a vague sense of having heard gunshots. What if she’d been wrong about Deputy Sprague? He must’ve been shooting at them.

Oh, god. Poor ol’ Deputy Dawg.

She sobbed—but she bent, grabbed the shotgun, and almost fell over: It was heavier than she expected.

She heard Ms. Santavo getting up behind her, hissing—then she stopped, as if seeming to remember. “Adair! Wait, you’re confused, you were hurt, we have to go to the hospital, Adair, come back with me!”

Adair ran parallel with the embankment, then angled toward the creek, jumped onto a low, lichen-painted boulder. Panting, she looked around.

Gray crags and round lumps of granite lined the creek here; most were little boulders, waist high and smaller, but there were bigger ones down toward Quiebra, and deeper brush, maybe places to hide.

Quiebra was a few miles that way—the way the creek ran. That much she was sure of. Looked like rain clouds gathering, too.

She jumped from one little boulder to the next, carrying the shotgun in her right hand, her left throbbing with pain at each impact, every time she landed on her feet. She almost lost her balance, carrying the shotgun. It took practice to get used to moving with it.

She ran on, darting between big boulders, jumping along the tops of small ones, through slanting beams of sunlight flashingly alternating with wells of shadow. She ran through clouds of gnats, and she slapped away bluebottle flies.

When she got to the cluster of big boulders, some of them ten feet high, it occurred to her that she’d gone the wrong way. The things like Ms. Santavo were mostly in Quiebra, weren’t they?

So what. She had to get to Waylon and Cal. She had to warn people.

Stupid girl,
she thought.

But she kept going, weaving in between big boulders, leaping along the smaller ones. The creek, smelling of frogs and minerals, seemed alive, seemed to rush along with her, as if it was encouraging her.

Her breath was coming in short gasps; her feet and knees were aching. She had to rest, get her wind back.

She paused on a low oval boulder, sticking partway out into the rushing water, and knelt, splashed water in her face, thinking,
Maybe
this is a nightmare, and if I feel the cold water, I’ll wake up.

This was real. Ms. Santavo was homicidally crazy. And didn’t seem like she was Ms. Santavo anymore. So maybe the same thing had happened to Mom. Maybe what she’d seemed to see through the basement window . . .

Adair shook her head. She couldn’t think about that. Not now. She turned her mind away, like stopping a downhill run, fighting the momentum of that thought.

She had to focus on surviving, right now.

The water felt good and she was thirsty, but she knew not to drink it. Like most California creeks, it was contaminated with some kind of parasite. Some amoeba that gave you cramps and dysentery for months. She glanced back along the gully.

Parasites, she thought. That’s what it felt like. There were parasites in Ms. Santavo.

And there she was, about sixty feet back, clinging to the side of one of the big boulders, her feet higher than her head, angled downward. Her feet were bare, and her hands were splayed: she was exactly like a gecko on a stone wall. Defying gravity—gripping, maybe, with those metal bristles Adair could just make out on one side of her torso, on her hands. Her blouse was torn open, her skirt was hiked up around her hips; the lines of muscles in the backs of her legs looked wrong somehow.

Adair felt sick, looking at her.

Then Ms. Santavo looked up, with a sudden exact motion of her head, staring right at Adair.

“Fuck you, whatever you are!” Adair shouted. It didn’t help the situation—but it made her feel a little better.

She turned and started up again, jumping from boulder to boulder, going as fast as she could, headlong. The creek was wider here, and she had to splash through some shallows. Running crazily to get away.

At least she hoped it seemed that way. Around a bend in the creek, she picked a rock and jumped behind it: a big gray house-shaped rock. She waited, panting, her feet in an eddying pool of cold water that felt sort of good.

She told herself to get calm. To quiet down. To wait.

She pressed her back against the boulder and hefted the gun in both her hands, looking it over. She had fired rifles before, with her dad. Not shotguns. Probably it had a shell in the chamber. Ms. Santavo would have had it ready to fire. That red dot meant the safety was off, didn’t it? She couldn’t remember how to check.

Something rattled along the embankment to her left.

Her left wrist and the lower part of her hand hurt; it was swollen, blue in spots. The Santavo thing had cracked the bone. But her left hand only had to steady the shotgun; her right would pull the trigger.

She got as good a grip as she could with her left and put the index finger of her other hand gingerly into the trigger guard, just a little pressure on the trigger.

The creek hushed and chuckled—and then seemed to seethe more loudly, in warning.

And there was another sound. From directly overhead.

Heart percussing, Adair looked up—and saw the Santavo thing’s face upside down. Her mouth opened, exposing a glimmering wriggle in there—as she tensed to jump.

Adair let out an involuntary squeak—but flipped the gun in her hands so it pointed upward, the barrel right along her own nose, and the motion pulled the trigger for her. The shotgun roared, and the barrel recoiled, to crack against Adair’s forehead at the hairline, just hard enough to cut her scalp, and the
boom
made her ears ring.

Then blood dripped down, and it wasn’t Adair’s.

She looked up to see that the upper half of Ms. Santavo’s head was missing—but she was still clinging to the rock, seeming frozen. She was dripping silver fluid and blood, all mixed together, and in the gaping concave place, like a broken-open melon, where the upper part of her head had been, was a nest of silvery things that writhed like maggots.

“Reset,” Ms. Santavo muttered, her mouth dripping red and silver. After a moment, almost inaudibly, it added, “not applic—not applic—able—not—” Lips dripping fluid as they moved. Then the mouth quivered once more—and stopped moving for good.

Adair tried to scream, but her throat seemed closed up—and instead she ran, hugging the gun to her, toward Quiebra, her own blood pumping from the scalp wound, streaming into her eyes.

The world seemed to rush all wobbly, jerkily around her, past her: it wasn’t like she was doing the running at all. The sunlight drained away into the sky, seeming to flow upward into the closing clouds and rain loosed itself, slithered down to paste her hair to her head. Sometimes she ran partway up the hillside toward the road, then she’d lose her footing and slide down and change direction, run along the creek boulders, but blindly, hardly watching where she went.

Adair fell again and again, slipping on wet moss, bashing both knees, cutting her elbows on rocky surfaces.

At last, she lay with her left leg in water, the rest of her sprawled on a wet gravelly bank. The shotgun—she hadn’t dropped it till now, she realized with genuine surprise—lay near her. She was heaving there in a soft rain, letting the panic ebb a little.

She couldn’t get up. Her heart and limbs were aching. Her breath seemed to cut its way out of her, it hurt so much. She lay listening to the creek. She heard the sound of cars and trucks. Now and then, she could just make them out, only a hundred yards away, up the embankment on the highway that paralleled the creek. Maybe someone up there would glance down and see her, if they looked between the trees.

But if they did, maybe they’d be the wrong people. Maybe it’d be better if they didn’t see her. It wouldn’t be wise to go up to that road. She had to find people she could trust.

And she felt a twisting in her heart as she admitted to herself that who she could trust probably didn’t include her own mom and dad.

Finally, her breath coming more normally, strength returning, Adair got to her knees.

She grabbed the stock of the shotgun and pulled it toward her. She cleaned the mud off it, as best she could with the hem of her blouse, and then she hugged the shotgun again, almost lovingly.

She heard something moving in the brush, some distance behind her. She looked—but saw no one. Then a quick movement caught her attention, and way back there she saw a hairy face with an empty eye socket.

It wasn’t looking toward her, but it was hunting her, slithering along in the leaf-crackling dirt at the base of the embankment. It was after her, for sure.

She watched it with a sickened fascination. The way it moved made her stomach twist. It was like it was pulling itself along the ground the way a climber would pull himself up a cliff. It mixed up horizontal and vertical. It moved on all fours, zigzagging up the steep embankment on the other side of the creek, maybe thirty-five yards back.

And she saw that its hands were stretched out from its wrists on metal extensions that pulled it along with pistonlike movements; its feet were on pistons, too.

She was afraid to move; afraid that if she did, it would see her. It would be wary of her now. It would have found the Santavo thing. It would be careful.

The thing zagged down the slope, and she vaguely remembered having run up that same part of the embankment, blindly, partway back. It was following her trail somehow.

Soon it would trace her to this side of the creek.

It went behind a boulder—so that she was out of its line of sight for a moment. She got up, slowly, each movement bringing a new ache.

She made up her mind. That fucking thing was going to have to work at it, if it wanted her.

Then she moved at an angle, into a patch of died-back blackberry brambles, and up the hillside, into thickening shadow.

December 13, late afternoon

The guard was a black-bereted, dress-uniformed man getting soft around the jowls in middle age. Hispanic guy, name tag said RODRIGUEZ. He knew Stanner by sight, from scores of visits here, to the big black cube that was the West Coast NSA headquarters.

“What the hell do you mean I don’t have any clearance?”

The guard looked back at Stanner with an expert combination of blankness and crystal-clear rebuff. “That’s right, sir.”

They were standing on either side of a metal desk; cameras were mounted near the ceiling; a steel door was closed behind the guard; several screens were built into the desktop, which also held a computer monitor.

The guard glanced at it, in a way that said to Stanner that he was waiting for someone.

When he looked up again, he had an even more neutral expression. “If you’d like to wait, we’ll see if we can get this cleared up, sir.”

“Tell you what, Corporal Rodriguez, how about if you get me Captain Gaitland on the line.”

“I’m afraid that won’t be possible, sir, he’s . . . in the field.”

Stanner had a watery feeling in his gut—and the last time he’d had that, in Yemen, he’d been arrested by the Yemeni secret police. Someone was coming, all right. There would be clarification; all the wrong kinds of clarity.

“Okay,” Stanner said evenly, “I’ll go get my DIA pass from my car. That should clear it up.”

“I don’t think that’ll be necessary, sir. If you’d just wait here . . .”

Stanner very conspicuously dropped his leather satchel onto the desk, so it looked as if he was coming back.

“I don’t want any more goddamned misunderstandings,” Stanner said in a flat tone of official displeasure. “I’ll go get my full credentials.”

He turned and strode through the door before the guard could hit the emergency lock-shut. He’d decided not to say, “Be right back,” because that would only make the guy wonder if it were true, satchel or not.

And he wasn’t coming back. They were going to take him into custody, if he let them do it. He could end up in Leavenworth, or worse, on some trumped-up beef, if they wanted to keep him out of the way.

Why, though? Why the loss of his clearance? He’d been acting under orders, with clear permission to investigate the “repercussions” in Quiebra. He’d handled the satellite recovery according to orders.

But he knew what it was: Gaitland had tried to warn him. And Bentwaters. And since he’d outranked Gaitland he hadn’t waited for his orders in writing.