Crawlers (29 page)

Leonard Sprague.

They hadn’t taken so much from him as they’d thought. So he remembered that he had been Sprague.

He wished achingly that he couldn’t remember. He hoped the All of Us would make him forget who he had been.

It would, when it had time. It had priorities, specific time-critical actions to carry out first. The All of Us was busy.

December 13, night

Vinnie was walking along near the Albertsons supermarket on Quiebra Valley Road, at 9:53 P.M., when he started to feel it.

He knew he had to be alone somewhere and had better make it quick. He had no vinegar and he had no medicine and this was going to hit him hard, he could feel it. It was a form of epilepsy, hit him only a few, maybe four times a year; was connected to his condition in some way that even the doctor didn’t understand: it was either epilepsy-related autism or autism-related epilepsy with episodes of OCD or something. And he usually avoided taking his medication because it made him a zombie.

They
would like it if he was a zombie, he supposed, but there had always been zombies, even before
they
had come, and he’d always been afraid of them, and he knew that people thought he was like one, too, and, as he said aloud, passing some kids on scooters, people thinking he was a zombie, “Well, hey now, that’s just another way to prove that when life plays a joke on you it’s laughing
at
you and not
with
you.” And of course, as if the kids were playing the part of Life Itself, they laughed at him.

Their laughter had a shape that hung in the air like wind chimes made of teeth.

And that thought, that image, told him it was already too late to get somewhere alone because now it was hitting him. He just made it to a bus bench and sat down on it, clenching the wooden back, trying to ignore the face painted on the bench next to the slogan “LLOYD MCKENZIE” MEANS “SELL YOUR HOUSE E-Z” and Lloyd’s jolly round winking face on the bus bench turned with hallucinatory ease to leer right at him just as that high tuneless note started that meant the mixing-up fit was coming on full.

He was so scared. It was frightening when things switched places, when the sound of two passing police cars blaring their sirens on the way to the high school became a sickening red taste in his mouth, the taste of a very bad cherry-flavored cough syrup, the kind of cough syrup that was the color of cherries but lied about its taste; when the three older men in the car in front of him pulling over, for a moment, to let the cop cars pass, turned blue like their car while the car turned flesh color and their heads pulsed with a thrumming sound, and it looked just like their heads were part of the car, like those toy cars with the head of a little driver but if you look close the head is attached to a painted-on seat without a body. When the birds flying over were tactile sensations in his eyes, he could feel their shapes pressing in painful stabbing edges to his eyeballs and . . .

Then he started to hear the moths talking again.

There weren’t any moths that he could see, but it was the same voices he’d heard before when those moths had dived at him and hovered in front of his eyes. He thought of these voices as the moth voices. And he knew somehow that his altered state, the electrical overstimulation that his brain was going through when he had a seizure, was helping him pick up these voices that were in the air all the time. Some of it was just numbers, a voice saying, “010110100-1011001,” and some of it was words that didn’t fit together, “Protocol Beach Embrace Makeover Collection Shortfall of Marathon Zone Oh-Seventeen Green Metareception Umbrella Rebuke Until Further Notice.” And some of it almost made sense, in a sort of way, “Harold Potts, bear with me, we’ve got no clear reception.”

“I’m modeling at high efficiency, will stay at this cover modality until otherwise instructed.”

“Umbrella, the All of This estimated in thirty-three hours, preparing insemination receptacles for expansion, see that the junior high is tested for maximization.”

“Unlocalized youth are still in a state of disorganization and recurrent antipath. We must include them before the Social Organism extends its antibodies to spherical attention recognition in the south-eastern radius.”

Vinnie tried plugging his ears, but it was no use.

And meanwhile a child passing with her mother lost her helium balloon, which soared and bobbled away in the growing darkness; it was the purple of the taste of oranges and it was the shape of the sound of low pipe-organ notes.

And a truck passed with its shape pressing on Vinnie’s forebrain; that’s what he saw in his mind, a truck shape pressed into the soft stuff of his brain like a mold of a toy truck pressed into Play-Doh. And the truck made a sound that smelled like licorice. And a seagull gave a cry that tasted like overripe bananas.

And all that time the voices went on.

“Will need help at 754 Pinecrest and 658 Owlswoop; there is someone resisting . . . Is anyone monitoring the government investigative body? . . . Five thousand Pink Metaimperative sandwheels Beach Road . . .”

They were talking, he knew, those who had changed some of the animals and some of the moths and many of the people. They were talking on their own frequency, and they were completely rational, so rational that only a weeping man having a seizure could hear it.

And then he heard them mention his mother. “We have a conscious resistance, Elizabeth Munson . . .”

And then it said his address. And said, “A definite reset, very stubborn. Not much material of value, but if we need parts . . .”

The seizure was ebbing. It wasn’t the same as a grand mal seizure; it wasn’t so terribly obvious, though he couldn’t walk when it was happening, and no one had called an ambulance. He was there on the sidewalk alone, watching traffic pass. Seeing the moths circling the light over the Albertsons parking lot ENTER HERE sign with unnatural precision.

He was standing, now, though his legs were rubbery. He swayed where he stood. “Don’t fall,” he said aloud, “don’t let the police or the ambulances take you, it’ll be a trip to South Calaboom, most of them have become one of
them
.”

Oh, but it was so hard to walk right now. He was walking through jelly. He had to get home to help Mother. If only he could turn into a Starbot, transform into a perfectly symmetrical gorgeous flying fighting machine, to save his mother.

But he knew it was too late. Mother was a quarter mile away from him. But he felt it when she died.

Adair was lying flat atop a boulder on a hillside overlooking Quiebra Creek. She was shivering, looking at the lights of Quiebra winking against the backdrop of the night.

She had her two hands over the stock and breech of the gun. The shotgun had four rounds left in it; she’d checked.

Her body throbbed with pain in her neck, her knees, her shins, the palms of her hands, and a long scratch burned hot against her belly. She felt something crawling in her hair, and she plucked it out and flicked it away. A tick, probably. Lots of ticks here. She wondered if the ticks sucked on
them
, too; parasites on parasites who called normal people parasites.

She scratched mosquito bites on her arm.

Then she put her hand back on the gun, got a good grip, and pressed the butt of the stock against the granite to help her get partly up, so that she was kneeling on the boulder. This wasn’t good, though; she was still being hunted and she knew they could see her better this way, against the sky.

She moved so she was sitting facing the other way, her legs dangling over the edge of the boulder, the gun laid across her lap with her hands on it. Ready. Peering into the darkness. Seeing them . . .

There—about a hundred yards back along the creek. A group of ballcrawlers, little animals taken over by the crawlers. Sometimes standing up on each other’s furry and feathered shoulders, quivering along.

They were still experimenting, she realized, whatever they were. They were parasitical, and they were new at this, and they were trying new shapes and formats, looking for different models that worked. And some of them were like Ms. Santavo had been, almost perfect cover, and some of them were new ways to think of life and organizing it, and a lot of that didn’t work. Evolution takes time.

Adair thought she’d like to fire the shotgun into that quivering mass of different animals and just watch the abomination of it fly apart, but she was sure that what remained would just reorganize and attack her.

So she slid off the boulder, on the side opposite the ballcrawlers, and looked around for a moment to see if the marine thing was coming. She could smell it sometimes, the train-transformer human-flesh stink of it, but it hadn’t caught her yet.

She was hungry and tired, but in a way she felt very alive. She just wanted to get to Cal and Waylon and warn them.

That made her think about Mom. And Dad. And her heart ached. She had heard that expression all her life, about heartache, but never before had she felt anything so definitely like an ache in her heart. Like the ache of a broken bone. But the broken-bone feeling was in the center of her, where her feelings lived, and, oh, it ached. Because she was sure they were dead, or something worse.

She felt a seething anger then and wished the marine would come along, or another one, so she could kill one.

Ms. Santavo. She had killed her, hadn’t she?

She hadn’t been thinking about it directly, but it came to her now. She’d killed another person. Only, Ms. Santavo had already been dead, really.

But what if that gas that the major had talked about was real? What if it had affected her mind?

What if she’d misunderstood what Ms. Santavo was doing? What if she’d murdered her?

She looked around the edge of the boulder. Seventy-five yards away, the thing was coming along like a walking scarecrow.

She watched it for a while. It didn’t shimmy into other shapes. It didn’t vanish and reappear. It was absurd but it was internally consistent. It was
real
.

No. She wasn’t seeing things. She hadn’t killed Ms. Santavo. The woman had already been dead.

Adair remembered a line from the Bible. “Let the dead bury the dead.”

She drew back into the cover of the boulder and moved as quietly as possible through the brush toward the lights of town.

19

December 13, night

When Stanner stepped through the wooden gate into Cruzon’s backyard, he felt a very distinctive sensation, a sensation he’d felt once before in a Yemeni alley and would never forget.

It was the feeling of a gun muzzle pressed to the back of his neck.

“Do not move, Major.” Police commander Cruzon’s voice.

Stanner considered the sensation on his neck. “Wait, I think I got it. A nine millimeter?”

“That’s not bad. It’s loaded, too, and there’s a round in the chamber. Now step around back behind the house. I’m going to take the gun off your neck, but it’s going to be about twenty-four inches from your spine.”

“I got you.” Stanner walked along the side of the house, past a prefab plastic doghouse and a neat coil of green garden hose.

Frogs were singing from the little green concrete-banked koi pond in the backyard.

“Isn’t it the wrong time of year for frogs?” Stanner asked.

“Yup,” Cruzon said.

The house was up against a hill, like so many houses in Quiebra, and the steep backyard slope had been terraced and shored up with stone. There was a little leafless ornamental plum tree, and the wooden fences were lined with rosebushes. The two men stood there a moment, listening to the frogs and then an owl.

“Nice yard,” Stanner said. Cruzon didn’t reply, and Stanner wondered if Cruzon was just going to shoot him in the back.

“Turn around,” Cruzon said.

Stanner turned. Cruzon was out of uniform, wearing tan slacks and a white zip-up jacket. He held the 9mm automatic steady, pointing at Stanner’s sternum. Just stood there, backlit by the porch light, looking Stanner over, as if trying to make up his mind about something.

Cruzon’s face was mostly in shadow. Beyond him, lying on the little brick patio by the glass sliding doors, was something about as big as a man under a canvas tarp. Whatever it was twitched fitfully.

Stanner saw a little girl looking at him from beyond the glass. A little black-haired girl; one of Cruzon’s kids. Stanner shook his head at the little girl and frowned so she’d go away. If her father was going to shoot him, it was better if she didn’t have to watch.

The kid backed away from the glass, then ran out of Stanner’s line of sight.

“What’s that supposed to be?” Cruzon demanded.

“There was a little girl. I thought she ought to not . . . be around.”

“That supposed to be clever, a good act, you pretending you care?” Cruzon snapped.

Stanner shrugged. “So you think I’m one of them. I don’t know what to say to that, Commander—except, you’d better be right about that. Before you shoot a federal agent.”

“Reason to shoot a federal agent’s getting better every passing hour, seems to me.” Cruzon reached around behind himself with his free hand, took a small flashlight from a back pocket, switched it on. “You gonna pretend this didn’t start with your fucking satellite? Now kneel down in front of me.”

Stanner hesitated. But then figured Cruzon would probably have turned him around the other way if he was going to shoot him.

“Do it!” Cruzon barked, pointing the pistol at Stanner’s forehead.

Stanner decided not to rush him. His gut told him Cruzon was still human. He knelt, going down on both knees.

“Now open your mouth,” Cruzon said.

Stanner raised his eyebrows instead.

Cruzon flicked the gun barrel so it caught Stanner’s right cheekbone, hard enough to hurt something fierce, not hard enough to break anything. “Open!”

Stanner opened his mouth.

“Wider!”

He opened wide—and Cruzon pointed the flashlight down his throat. Squinted. Then grunted to himself and took a step back.

“Okay, Major. Stand up.” Cruzon lowered the gun, but kept it at his side.

His pulse slowing a little, Stanner got to his feet. “They’ll modify that eventually. But it’s not a bad test for now.”

“What,” Cruzon said, “no more of that bullshit you were handing us before? A ‘gas that makes you do strange things’? That was a goddamn lie.”

“Yeah, well. It’s just part of my job. I had my reasons.”

“Reasons! Come here, Major. I’ll show you reasons.”

Cruzon stalked over to the quivering tarp by the back door. He signaled to someone in the house—probably his wife. White pleated curtains closed inside the sliding glass doors.

Then Cruzon bent down and pulled the tarp away, exposing a man tied up in duct tape and yellow plastic rope. It had been a man, anyway. Short black hair, pale skin, flat gray pouchy eyes that watched Stanner impassively, the remains of a black suit. His mouth duct-taped shut. The suit was torn in a dozen places, and through the rips Stanner could see wounds, and inside the wounds he could see little metal maggots, squirming. One of the man’s hands suddenly came loose from the wrist and extended on a jointed metal stalk to snatch at Cruzon’s ankles.

Cruzon jumped back, then moved around where the hand couldn’t reach, and kicked the man hard in the head. Stanner took a prudent step back himself.

“That used to be a friend of mine,” Cruzon said, staring at the crawler, his eyes moist. “He was an FBI agent I worked with years ago when they were trying to prove a guy up here killed his old lady and buried her over in Nevada. Martin here loved Filipino food. Loved my family. Used to be a great guy, name of Martin Breakenridge.

“Well, a couple of days ago two of my men down at the precinct weren’t on duty when they were supposed to be, and I was passing RadioShack, saw one of them using a big pile of money to buy a shitload of stuff. So I followed one of ’em, patrolman named Lansbury. He went into his house and came out—and I bent the laws some, just to find out what was going on. I look through his place after he left, and I find a pile of money in the guy’s basement. Indications are, it’s the stolen money from the bank. He comes home, surprises me there, tries to kill me.

“And, uh—” He broke off to lick his lips. “And I had to kill Lansbury—had to shoot him three times in the head to really stop him. And I found out what he was. So sure I figure some more things out and I call my friend here, Breakenridge, at the FBI. I figure they won’t believe me if I tell them the story, but if he comes here to see something without me saying what, on my say-so, to see for himself, he’ll believe his own eyes. This was before they had all the phones tied up.

“He did believe me, when he looked close at Lansbury; he had to. He was taking Lansbury in the trunk of his car, back to the city to show some people. Well, he never made it. I figure . . .
they
were watching. They caught him, I guess. Changed him, before he ever left town. Because Breakenridge came here when I wasn’t home and he tried to turn my wife into one of
them
. I guess he was setting a trap for me. And I came home and caught him at it.” He sighed, swallowed, and went on, his voice breaking. “And I shot Agent Breakenridge up pretty good, with a ten-gauge shotgun. But he ain’t dead. You can kill ’em, but it’s not so easy. Got to shoot ’em right. And he’s one of them now.

“Means he is in touch with them, Stanner.
They’re going to be
coming here for him—and because I know about them. From what I can tell, they’re always talking, those things, in their heads.” He turned to Stanner, looked at him, but pointed at the thing that had been FBI agent Breakenridge. “So where’s that
thing
fit into your
reasons
for lying to me?”

“The situation—situation seems to’ve changed,” Stanner said, feeling sick. “Don’t you think you should put the fucker out of his misery?”

“I think he’s better evidence this way.” He pulled the tarp back over the crawler. “Now, Stanner, you’re gonna tell me every fucking thing you know. Right now, Major. Now. Then you’re going to make some phone calls.”

Stanner said slowly, rubbing his bruised, swelling cheekbone, “I’ll tell you what I can, but—”

“Everything,”
Cruzon said with finality. “And then we make some calls. We report this.”

Stanner made an effort and threw off the habit of secrecy. “I’ll tell you everything. But the phone calls won’t do any good until we make them out of town.”

“Yeah. I worked that out.” He looked at Breakenridge. “Let’s put him in the trunk of my car. If we grab him careful—”

“Hold on. He can communicate with them. And even if we kill him and take his body for evidence, how do we know the part of him that talks to
them
can’t still talk to them? It could still transmit. We’d have to melt it to slag and then it’d be no proof at all. No.”

Cruzon’s eyes welled up and he looked away, wiped his eyes. Then he looked sharply back at Stanner. He winked grimly. “No, we’re taking him with us. Put him in your rental car.”

Stanner stared. Then he got it. “Okay.” He said it loud enough for Breakenridge to hear.

But they had to kill the thing that had been Martin Breakenridge anyway. They didn’t want it operating, infecting anyone else. The fewer of them staying ambulatory, the better.

It had to be done fast. Stanner did it, while Cruzon kept watch on the street. And Stanner didn’t feel much as he fired the shotgun three times, point-blank, into the back of the Breakenridge-thing’s head, two more times into its spine. He used an ax to sever the head, as if with some supernatural creature of old. Then he slung the remains into the trunk of his rental car and drove it a few blocks away, to a wide dirt track Cruzon directed him to, a narrow little road along the creek, screened by a stand of eucalyptus, where the local kids sometimes parked to get laid. He got out of the car, leaving it trembling in drive, put a sizeable rock on the accelerator, and let the car surge forward on its own, into Quiebra Creek.

He heard sirens and stood still, listening; they were coming closer. The thing that had been Breakenridge had transmitted what they had hoped it would, and some of
them
, looking out their picture windows, had seen him drive to the dirt road beside the creek. They might stumble around, looking for the car, and if he hid himself pretty well, heading back to Cruzon’s house, that might throw them off, for a while.

Cruzon was a smart little cop.

December 13, night

I was stupid to come back home,
Waylon thought.

He was actually across the street from their apartment, squatting in the foliage of a big camellia bush in the front yard of someone’s darkened split-level. Camellias flowered in winter, and the red blooms bedecked the bowl of dark green leaves around him; under his feet fallen blossoms were crinkling brown at the edges, falling apart.

He knew he was cold, in a remote kind of way, but he didn’t really care; he was hungry, but he didn’t want to eat.

He had gone to Russell’s house first, because Russell—from the pizza parlor, the guy who’d sold him the pot—lived a block and a half from the place his mom had rented, up on Hillview overlooking Quiebra Valley. He’d thought maybe he could hide out at Russell’s for a while, then sneak in when the Mom-thing wasn’t there. Get his computer hard drive, some clothes. That .25 pistol his mom kept in her closet.

But at Russell’s he’d taken the precaution of scouting first, when he heard someone moving around in the garage. He’d looked through a side door into the garage, seen Russell standing at a wooden workbench, next to a vise; Russell with his ponytail and his goatee and his tattooed arms and his Slipknot T-shirt, building a transmission device with rapid-fire efficiency, his hands moving so fast Waylon couldn’t follow them. Russell, who’d flunked science three times.

Just looking at him, Waylon was pretty sure. Then Russell held his palm over the transmitter and a little silvery snake came from his hand.

So Waylon backed away from Russell’s house and wandered toward his own. Wondering.

Some people couldn’t be changed into those things without a lot of trouble—but others could. It seemed to have something to do with your state of mind. Whether or not you were already halfway like that, Ronald had said. Somehow. Maybe the more programmed you already were, the more programmable you were likely to be.

Adults could be changed over pretty easily, seemed like. They’d lost some essence that made them resist. Or most of them had.

Like Mom.

He’d been in the calm eye of a hurricane of emotion since he’d left the school, just putting one foot in front of the other and trying not to envision his mom with those lights coming from her eyes, and the boy on his back in the showers with his jaws pried apart— but now the hurricane caught up with him again, and he fell to his knees with the sorrow, the anguish rolling over him in waves.

My mom. My mother.

He felt overwhelmed, unable to decide which way to jump. He’d thought about calling the police—but how likely was it the cops weren’t changed over? They would have been the first to be changed, wouldn’t they?

So he was drawn home, to the apartment he’d lived in with Mom—maybe more because it was his home than because anything useful was there.

Since I’m here, maybe I should go in and get that gun,
he thought.
The little gun Mom keeps up in her closet.

No. He needed to get away.

He stood up, flexed his knees to get circulation back in them, and felt ready to try moving again.

He’d go look for Adair. Travel through the yards, where he could, try to keep out of the streetlight.

Then he saw his mother. She was crawling on the roof of the apartment building across the street. Dressed as she had been when he’d seen her last, but barefoot, and she was pulling herself across the just-slightly-sloping red tile roof, hugging the tiles with arms and legs stretching out fully to propel herself in little jets of motion— starting, stopping, pulling herself, head revolving.

He turned and vomited onto the mat of crinkled, fallen camellias.

When he looked again she was squatting like an ape in a zoo, next to a satellite dish that had been tricked out with a lot of extra wires and small metal pieces he couldn’t make out clearly. She was turning the dish, placing it in alignment with the others on all the rest of the rooftops, all pointing one way.