Crawlers (27 page)

The mechanism looked jury-rigged, slung together from various parts taken from here and there, and not like something that came from a medical lab. And it gave off a buzzing sound, as if muttering to itself.

Waylon took a step closer to the tiled entrance, leaned to peer into the clean bright starkly geometrical spaces of the showers. Mr. Sorenson was kneeling beside the pale chunky kid, Ronald, holding him down on the tiled floor. Ronald was on his back. The vice principal seemed to hold the boy down without much effort though Ronald was a big sort of kid and he was struggling as the tanned, muscular, burr-headed PE teacher, Mr. Waxbury, gripped the boy’s jaws, forcing them apart with his two hands.

Mr. Waxbury was leaning over Ronald as if he was going to give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. The boy tried to scream, but could make only choking sounds because the metal stalk extending from Mr. Waxbury’s own throat was jamming down into the boy’s mouth. And something pulsed along the cable, from Mr. Waxbury to Ronald, like millions of tiny stainless steel aphids. Little things crawled into the deepest insides of the writhing boy. Then Mr. Sorenson brought a small box close and pulled the boy’s shirt up. Something extended itself from a gash in Mr. Sorenson’s right palm, and there was a flashing, scissoring, a spattering of skin and blood the way sawdust flies from a buzz saw, and the boy was filleted open. Mr. Sorenson inserted something in the surgical wound, something Waylon couldn’t see. Then Sorenson shifted, his body blocking Waylon’s view.

But he could see Ronald’s legs; they gave a final shudder and went limp.

“Oh, fuck,” Waylon breathed, without even knowing he was saying it right out loud.

Mr. Waxbury and Mr. Sorenson—the Mr. Waxbury thing, the Mr. Sorenson thing—both snapped their heads up at once. Locked their eyes on his.

They stood, turning toward Waylon. Sorenson glanced at Ronald. “It’ll finish the first phase on its own now.”

Waylon took a step back. A moment of mutual uncertainty—if he ran, then they’d come after him; and if they came after him, he’d run.

Mr. Waxbury tensed.

Ronald sat up with a snap and looked at Waylon with the same expression the adults had. Bland but alert, predatory eyes. His belly was still filleted, flayed open. Things clicked and revolved within him behind a curtain of blood and mucus.

“Cuz! Check it out,” Ronald said, tugging his shirt down to cover his wound, grinning. “Turns out it’s all okay, after all. I feel way so much better now.” He clambered to his feet in one smooth motion. “I feel like I got mad skills, bro. Let ’em test your blood. Let ’em do it to you. It’s like when I got broadband, cuz, but it’s way better.”

“It’ll be better yet,” the Waxbury thing said. “After the enhancements, the supplements, the modifications. It goes in stages. But it’s fast, now, you see? Isn’t it, Ronald?”

“Yeah, I hardly felt a thing, dog!” He paused, thoughtful, and then went on, “See, the young ones, some of them—that’s just some of them, see—they don’t convert so easily to the All of Us. Something in the blood. There’s chemicals that are, what, like, produced when people are a little more aware of themselves and stuff around them. See, what the All of Us is telling me is, if you’re not ‘the type to join us’ easy, well, dog, the blood test can find that out because some chemicals they know about are, like, produced as a side effect of being, you know,
that
kind of guy. But see, dude, if you’re already like I was, halfway there anyway, and you’re, like, into just being entertained and getting hooked up to shit, then you can convert fast to one of them and you won’t, like, fight it afterwards. Otherwise they got to reset you, they got to kill you and, like, take you apart. Some of us can go to the highest interface right away and, well, fuck,
we
like it that way. You see? For the All of Us, cuz?”

Ronald took a step toward him, his eyes shining with an almost enviable joy in his rightness.

Waylon said, “I . . . don’t know.”

Then he heard a door open. He turned and saw the open door to the sports gear room. Racks were filled with basketballs, and tennis rackets, and football padding, each marked QUIEBRA HIGH SCHOOL PROPERTY. And a body was lying on the floor back there. He couldn’t see who it was; he could just see the legs sticking out. But then the legs twitched. Whoever it was, was still alive.

And someone else came out of that room, from the side the body was on. It was Cleo, that girl from school. Donny’s girlfriend. Or ex.

She was naked. Stark naked. Tan lines around her pale breasts, tan marking out pale skin in a bikini shape around her blond crotch. She looked alert and happy. Something white dribbled from the corner of her mouth. Waylon at first thought it was spittle, but then he realized it was semen.

“You can have sex with me,” she said. “Gary did. I gave him incredible sex. You can have sex and drugs and party and then be one of us if you want to do it that way. It makes conversion easier, if your mind is occupied that way.” Her tone was so casual, so reasonable.

She came toward him and opened her arms.

Waylon stared at her breasts. The pink seashell of her labia.

Then he turned to run—

And his mom was there. Waylon’s mom stopped him: she slapped him hard, across the face, so that he was flung backwards against the frame of the shower entrance and shouted in pain. Sank down against the wall. He felt stunned, dizzy.

“You’ve disobeyed me, you little shit,” his mom said. “Everything was coming together, finally. I’m finally part of something good, and you’re trying to ruin it. I’m not going to let you do that, you parasitical little bastard. They’re even offering you sex and you turn it down and God knows you used to masturbate till your hands were raw.”

“Hold him for us,” Mr. Sorenson said, and Waylon heard them coming from inside the showers.

But Waylon gathered his consciousness together within him.

And gathered his feet under him, as they spoke.

And he lunged, propelled himself at his mom headfirst, slammed his head into her gut, expecting to feel metal but instead feeling a web of hardness under the skin, strong but flexible.

She went
whoof
and tipped over backwards, and he shot through the doorway of the showers, knocking the tripod machine down behind him to slow the others as he went scrambling past her, leaping up to get by so that her hand sliced through the air just under his ankle, and his tennis shoe came down hard right on her face; he could feel the crunch of her nose breaking right through the sole of his shoe.

He was stomping his own mother’s face to get going.

But it
wasn’t
his mother.
It’s not her.
And the implication of that threatened to make the whole world go gray and spongy.

Then he heard something he’d heard many times before—and had never before realized how poignant, how sweet it was: his mother’s own, real, ordinary voice.

“Run, baby! Run!”
She was fighting it, managed to shout once more.
“Run!”

And he was running already, but as he went he half turned like a football player hoping to catch a pass on the run, to see if maybe Mom was okay now, if she was coming with him. But she was gripping Mr. Waxbury’s legs as he came after Waylon, making him stumble into Sorenson—and Waxbury and Sorenson bent down to rend and tear at her neck so that blood splashed the lockers.

He was almost relieved to see her die—to see that thing die.

And then he had reached the doors, and the switch panel that controlled the lights for the gymnasium. Hearing running footsteps behind him, he slapped all the switches down. But it didn’t affect the locker room—only the gym.

The nearest door was closed with a thick chrome chain that wrapped the handles, with a big Yale padlock on one end. But the chain wasn’t locking the door; it was hanging there loose for when they needed it later. Waylon pulled it rattlingly loose and swung it around, hard, smack into Ronald’s face, cracking him on the side of the head. Metal feelers emerged from the pale round face, to writhe spastically as he fell sideways. Completing the turn, riding an empowering surge of adrenaline, shouting wordless defiance at the boy but inwardly sobbing—Mama! My Mom! My— Waylon swung the heavy Yale lock hard into the light control switches, smashing them. Then, flailing the chain, he slammed his shoulder into the door, banging it open, bursting through into the pitch-dark shouting confusion of the gymnasium. He paused, panting.

Darkness, but in the light from the locker room, he could see the two ghostly nurse’s uniforms, like clothes on invisible women, coming at him, a glint of metal above the necklines. There were adults— adult things—at the exits. They were coming toward him. The only way out was high up on the walls. The open windows.

To the right of the door was a switch; he’d seen the custodian use it. He slapped down at it, and the automatic bleachers groaned and creakingly began extending from the wall, crenellated shadows in this dimness, knocking people down, pushing them along the floor.

Waylon whipped the chain hard into the darkness where the nearest nurse’s face would be. The chain connected; he heard her yell and stumble back into the other nurse.

Waylon jumped onto the nearest extending stairway of bleachers and ran along the moving aluminum benchtops at an upward angle, balancing on the unfolding, rumbling bleachers as if he were surfing on a mechanical wave. But it was hard to see in the darkened room, only a little light angling from the high windows by the ceiling, and Waylon stumbled, fell, losing the chain as he flailed, smacked his knee on a metal edge, shouted, “Shit!” and got to his feet again, though the bleachers were still opening like an accordion under him.

The kids were yelling, and Waylon shouted,
“They’re monsters,
they’re turning us into things, they’re not fucking human, you got to
run!”
His voice echoed, booming above the others, as he stumbled onward.

Then he heard murmurs, many voices repeating a kind of litany—something about
night protocols, night protocols
—and suddenly dozens of pairs of small-sourced, long-beam lights switched on in the room. They were tightly defined narrow-beam lights like miniature headlights, the light sources shaped like . . .

Like eyes. The eyes of the adults in the gym were spearing light. Their eyes shone but not the way a cat’s eyes shone. Like headlights or doubled laser pens, the beams were red-shading-to-green, and they extended, each pair of light beams, all the way across the gymnasium, spearing doubly straight, swinging to take in the screaming children—light piercing this way, turning that way—seeking Waylon, he knew, searching him out in the darkness of the big room.

Children screaming—

Children seeing their parents’ eyes light up in the dark with red-green beams, seeing those remorseless beams flicker over them in stripy illumination, seeing their parents get down on all fours, their hands extending on metal stalks from their wrists, to pull themselves up the bleachers with fingers that rippled with far too many joints. Parents propelling themselves along the ground pantherishly, leaping ten yards to come down on all fours; the mothers and fathers becoming hissing crawling human hound-things that smacked the children aside and turned to rend them, slashing with unnatural sideways movements of their jaws as the teenagers and children screamed and ran for the doors.

Many of the kids escaped out those doors, Waylon saw with some relief. Their erstwhile parents were distracted from him, trying to stop the kids.

But others came after Waylon. Crawling things in darkness split only by the reflective glow of their double-beamed flashlight eyes and by eye beams from one another; creeping things in house dresses and postal uniforms and suit jackets that came up the now-static bleachers after Waylon, who was frantically scrambling back, away from them, forced upward now toward the wall, the ceiling.

He paused, panting, on the top bleacher and looked down at them.

In the lights from their eyes, their gazes crisscrossing like clashing rapiers, he saw them coming. He saw Mr. Sorenson climbing toward him then; and the chunky pale kid Ronald, his face a ruin; and Mr. Waxbury with his PE whistle dangling from his neck; and Mrs. Simmons the English teacher, who’d ripped away her long dress to make it easier to climb, her fat legs like pistons now; and the beer-gutted balding guy in the unseasonal Hawaiian shirt who managed the apartment building where he’d lived with his mom, the guy he suspected of boffing his mother, now grinning at him as he bounded up the bleachers toward him, leaping on all fours, five bleachers at a time.

Waylon shouted, “No, you fuckers, no fucking way!” and he ran along the top bleacher, barely able to make it out, in slicing occasional probings of their eye beams and the glow from the high windows. He was near the ceiling, coming to the end of the bleachers, a fall of two stories to the floor. And he leapt off the end.

Caught the tilted-up support pole for a backboard, then swung up parallel to the rafters; the hoop board for PE practice so the girls could shoot baskets, too, that stayed up during games, close beside the end of the bleachers.

He hung there, knowing they could leap even better than him— and then swung himself, caught another support pole, looped a leg over it.

But one of them had hit a switch and the hoop’s backboard began lowering itself from the wall, to dangle closer to the floor, and Waylon almost lost his grip as it moved, like it was a machine angrily trying to shake him off.

Waylon caught a reinforcing wire with one hand, shifted his grip, climbed up the support poles as the backboard lowered, finding his way in the light from the window he was making his way toward. An open window.

He crawled across the struts between the support poles, almost falling off as it jerked to a stop, slightly slanted downward, got within reach of a metal rafter, pulled himself up it, heard them bounding onto the metal support poles behind him.