Crawlers (3 page)

Pretty soon the O’Haras would take the Halloween decorations down, store them in cardboard boxes in the garage, and put up the Christmas stuff. They did everything over the top. Her mom said the garish coating of Christmas lights and props made the O’Haras’ house look like a carnival midway. But Adair liked it that way.

“I like how people leave their Halloween and Christmas decorations up way too long,” Adair said. “I think it’s tight. I wish it was always Halloween, like that place where Jack lived in that Tim Burton movie—”

“Yeah! That’s a fucking tight movie!” he said, much to her relief.

Adair and Waylon turned a corner, and the owls declared themselves. One talking to another, tree to tree. Some smaller night bird twittered and muttered and twittered again. Then fell silent.

Then the owls went quiet, too. Waylon was talking about how back home he and his friend had made some kind of Halloween explosive out of cherry bombs with confetti and wax cups and match heads, made some kind of motherhump beautiful blast. But she only half heard him. She felt the night air tighten a little more. The string might break.

Then he started talking about TV lights in windows again, and she tried to make herself listen, but it was hard, with that feeling growing on her.

He pointed at a half-curtained front room window. “It’s like, that window there? You can see just see the light from the TV on the ceiling, but it’s, like, pulsing real fast, and it’s got a lot of red in it? See that? What kind of show you think that is?”

She shrugged. “Um, an action movie?”

“Totally. I check the listings when I get home sometimes, if my mom’s not on-line and I can get on.”

So he was like most of her friends: he’d almost always rather go on-line, more than anything else, at night. Maybe he was just out with her now because he couldn’t get the access line.

The string was twisting tighter.

“What about that one, across the street?” she asked. “What’re they watching? I’m not sure about that one, are you?”

“Oh, yeah. That blue light, and it’s not flickering that much? It’s a drama, or a love story. Because if the light is, like, all jumping around, it’s more actiony, or at least a cop story. Yeah, it just got some soft reddish colors in it . . . a love story. Maybe that movie with Kevin Costner about the message in the bottle.”

“That was so lame.”

He nodded vigorously. “Really.” He sang, softly, “ ‘I had a vision . . . there wasn’t any television.’ ”

She remembered the lines. “The Pixies, isn’t it?”

He gave Adair a look of surprised admiration that kindled a warmth in her. “Yeah. So—okay . . .” He pointed. “There’s that big brown house, they’re watching either an action movie or it’s the action part of a movie. Look at those flashes, explosions, everything. It’s like the family’s having a firefight in their living room, man.”

“They’re all, like, shooting people in their minds,” she said. She glanced at him to see if he thought she was uncool to say that. But he was nodding gravely.

Encouraged, she went on, “Look over there—you can see through the curtains, it’s, like, really dark but there are little spears of light . . . science fiction shit.”

“Totally. See, you got it.”

It gave her a spacey, displaced feeling, looking at the TV lights in the windows; the colored shadows of media dreams.

Waylon articulated some part of her thoughts, but then he took it to extremes that seemed typical of him. “It’s like you’re seeing hypnosis lights. You know, like when a hypnotist uses flashing spinning lights on people. Like we get all these suggestions fed to us all night through television.” He seemed to go into a kind of verbal reverie, talking to himself, reciting something, she thought, as much as talking to her. Like he was rehearsing for an exposé. “People even know, they make jokes about how TV brainwashes them to buy things. I read they use frequencies that make you go to sleep, and into a hypnotic state, and they put in subliminal messages.” Then he seemed to catch himself and glanced at her. “You think I’m, like, paranoid.”

“I think you’re into conspiracy theories.” Then she did that snaking move with her head like her friend Siseela, and did her best black-chick imitation. “It’s all good, G.”

He snorted, and it was his way of laughing.

But that tightening feeling was still nagging her. Adair forced it to the back of her mind.
Think about something else.

She thought about wandering by Cleo’s house, letting Cleo see her with Waylon. Cleo had gone from being her best friend to acting like Adair was a loser. Sometimes, anyway. They were barely talking, because Adair had been becoming friends with Cleo’s boyfriend, Donny, a good-looking, way-too-serious black guy who was into African-American politics and could’ve played basketball, but didn’t want to because he thought it was a stereotype.

But Donny had been dating Cleo a long time; Cleo with her sparkling blue eyes and blond hair and her confidence. Cleo had been getting more and more popular, and Adair was just one of the tolerated kids, not someone to be punked, but not really popular.

But then she decided that it would be just as shallow as Cleo to show Waylon off. And her other friend, Danelle, acted real bored when her friends talked about men, or hung out with men, as if it was so puny and stupid, but Adair knew it was because Danelle was overweight and defensive about not getting dates. Anyway, Danelle was on the other side of town.

Instead, she decided that it would be okay if they ripped off some drinks and got a little loose, just a little. He could even kiss her, and touch her breasts if he wasn’t too heavy about it. So she said, “You want to see if we can steal some of that peach schnapps? My mom doesn’t notice how much there is. My dad’s not supposed to drink, but my mom has a drink sometimes.”

“Sure, schnapps, whatever. I got sick once on peppermint schnapps, though—don’t ever offer me that peppermint kind. Hey, what the fuck is that?”

He was staring past her into the sky over Rattlesnake Canyon. That’s what the kids called it, because the animal control workers came out once a year to put rattlesnake traps up around there. It was really just some nameless little ravine at the end of a dead-end street, with a tiny creek you couldn’t see for the bushes, a trickle that dried up much of the year. Steep slopes choked with undergrowth, shadowed by pines. It would be pitch-dark now, a hostile place defended by ticks and poison oak and rattlers. One time she’d seen a procession of migrating California brown tarantulas coming out of it; you could almost hear cartoony theme music accompanying them as they tiptoed along. Freaked out some of the ladies of the street.

But now there was a screaming in the sky over Rattlesnake Canyon.

A screaming light that seemed to hang there, coruscating, keening to itself as if an extra-big star was having a raving anxiety attack. And then as they watched it—

The burning light arced down, screaming more loudly as it came, as if it were terrified of the impact—

And struck somewhere beyond Rattlesnake Canyon, on the far side of the protected watershed.

About a second and a half after it came down, the shock wave reached them, the ground shivering, carrying with it the
ow-oomp!
of its impact. A flash of light outlined the piney skyline blue-white. Leaves quivered down from the maple tree looming over the sidewalk as the ground shook. Adair grabbed at Waylon to hold on, and he instinctively put his arm around her.

Then the dogs started up, every last one barking all at once, all over Quiebra Valley.

He realized he’d put his arm around her, and she realized she’d grabbed him. They stepped self-consciously away from one another. She looked at him.

But he was staring toward the place the screaming light had come down.

She looked toward the canyon.

“God! What was it? Shit, it musta been an airplane crash!” she burst out, to cover her embarrassment. “Maybe the terrorists blew a plane up—or crashed it into the refinery! There’s a refinery over that way! God, if it was that, we got to get out of the area—it’ll poison the whole town!”

“A plane? No fucking way!” He spoke without looking at her, not taking his eyes off the horizon. “It was a fucking UFO crash! That is so tight! We gotta get there before the Majestic 12 assholes cover it up!”

He was already hurrying toward the gulch.

“Waylon? Wait up!”

“A fucking crashed UFO, dude!”

Adair sighed. She didn’t like it when guys called her
dude
, though the term had nearly lost its gender. “A UFO? Yeah, right. Way more likely a—a helicopter or something. Or a meteor.”

She started after him. He was almost running now, toward Rattlesnake Canyon, faster and faster.

“Wha-at? The way it hovered there before it crashed?” he called to her, over his shoulder.

“It was probably coming right toward us so it only looked like it was hovering.”

They were running toward the dark tangled brush at the dead end of the street. People were coming out on their porches, their balconies, shouting from house to house, looking for the source of the commotion.

Then Adair grabbed his arm and, puffing, pulled Waylon to a stop. “Wait wait wait! We can’t go through the canyon, there’s no path, it’d take all night and we’d get all poison-oaked up. It’s overgrown like big-time.”

“So what! This could be really cool—”

“I know, I know, but we got to get there some other way. It looked to me like it came down by Suisun Bay—where the Sacramento River comes out before it gets to be San Francisco Bay.”

He snorted a laugh and shook his head. “You talk like I’m supposed to know where that is. Christ!”

“I know the bays around here because my dad’s a commercial diver—oh, just come on!”

By the time they got her cousin Mason away from his bong and into his van, got gas in it, and got him to make the necessary turns, there were already state troopers, two trucks of firemen, several coastguardsmen, a couple of sheriff ’s deputies, and three or four dozen onlookers at the crash site. Probing lights were stabbing around, but most of them were focused into what Adair supposed was the site itself, under a disused dock beside a closed-down seafood restaurant overlooking Suisun Bay.

Maybe half a mile to the west, the Carquinez Bridge made a black-iron silhouette against the sky, its girders picked out in lamplights, its roadbed streaked with headlights.

The crash site was yellow-taped, but most of the cops, along with the firemen and the coasties on the small white cruiser idling in the water near the smashed-in dock, were staring into the steaming gap where thick beams had been smashed into smoking flinders. The dock itself had crunched down into the water.

Adair and Waylon and Mason got out of the van, and all the men in uniform ignored them. Firemen in yellow slickers stood by with fire extinguishers and hoses, but there was no fire to put out.

“The fucking thing smashed right through the dock!” Waylon said.

“Whoa,” Mason said. Which was more or less what he said to almost anything.

“See that shit down there,” Waylon said, pushing through a crowd of ogling college students, right up against the yellow tape. “That thing down there’s glowing, man.”

Adair looked and shook her head. “I don’t think so. It’s just the lights on the dust and stuff. You can’t make out much of anything.”

“It’s a fucking UFO,” Waylon said. “I’m telling you. But they’re gonna say it’s a fucking weather balloon.”

“Huh,” Mason said skeptically, gazing at the broken-backed dock. He had his trenchcoat on, was scratching meditatively in his scraggly overgrown soul patch. He had floppy pants hanging off his ass and an
Enjoi Skateboards
T-shirt under the long, greasy coat. Mason was almost thirty-three but dressed fourteen years too young. “A UFO. I dunno, dood.”

Adair said, “If we could just get closer . . .”

“Wouldn’t, were I you—that stuff ’s probably radioactive,” said an owlish college student with large round glasses, lank blond hair parted down the middle. Campus Republican at Diablo Valley CC, Adair supposed. He wore the kind of shirt that should have a pocket protector, and he did have the pompous air. “Best let the authorities handle this.” His smug condescension was familiar to her, and then she recognized him: Larry Gunderston, a senior when she’d been a freshman, college student this year.

“Riiiiiiight,”
Waylon said, snorting. “Trust authority! Buy Enron!”

Then it was Waylon who was looking past Gunderston, at the sky, and Adair who was saying, “What are you looking at?”

“Shit. They’re here.”

“Who?”

“Majestic 12. It’s all laid out in this book I got. I mean, it’s like . . . even in a PC game,
Deus Ex
—”

“That’s all, like, urban myth,” Adair said.

Mason bobbed his head at that. “Yeah, huh. I saw this thing on the Discovery channel, at my aunt’s house. Most of that shit isn’t true, that black helicopters shit—”

That was the moment the black helicopter landed.

Beating the air with its blades, rattling the asphalt with blown leaves, the chopper came down on the weedy driveway of the abandoned, boarded-up restaurant. There was a designation on its tail, D-23, but otherwise it was dark and unmarked. The men who got out, however, wore uniforms.

“U.S. Air Force,” Waylon muttered. “I’m telling you—probably the team they send out whenever there’s a crashed saucer.”

“Actually,” a black deputy sheriff said, smiling broadly as he walked along the yellow tape toward them, “it’s a crashed satellite, what I hear.” He glanced toward the water. “Funny thing is, I had two reports it crashed out in the middle of the bay. So how’d it get clear over here?”

Waylon was staring at the three uniformed men who’d arrived in the chopper. They were talking to the cops, pointing up the road. One of them was definitely carrying a Geiger counter.

“What else I hear,” the deputy said, “it’s all melted half to slag, but you can see that’s what it is, a satellite kinda deal. NASA on the side and everything. All they’ll say about it is, ‘It’s one of the smaller ones.’ ” His broad smile shone toothily in the dimness; he was a big guy, straining his uniform, and he was sweating though the wind had risen, brisk now. Adair thought she recognized him from the D.A.R.E. program at school. She looked at his name tag. SPRAGUE.