Crawlers (39 page)

“I can’t!” a young girl said, her mouth buckling.

“You have to!” Donny said.

A collective sigh merged seamlessly into a moan.

Adair closed her eyes and thought of her folks, coming to get her at summer camp when she was a kid. Her dad teaching her to swim. Her mom insisting that she hadn’t let her win at chess— when she had. Watching her dad working on the boat, and being proud of him; she hadn’t known what it was she was feeling, then, but she knew it now: pride.

She remembered seeing her parents arguing—and how, when they noticed her watching the argument, they made up. They made up, right then and there, just for Adair.

“Everybody we lost, we say good-bye to—and we let go!”
Donny shouted.
“All of them!”

And she thought of Cal. Her big brother, trying not to jeer at her too much when she fell on the skateboard. Helping her up. Cal showing her how to make a simple Web site. Pretending he wasn’t really happy when he saw her expression at Christmas—when he gave her the jacket she’d wanted. Having earned the money himself.

Good-bye, Cal.

Then Donny said, not shouting but his firm voice still carrying, “Now say to yourselves,
my parents are gone! They’re just gone!
I’m going to say it—and we have to say it all together!
My parents are
gone!”

Their faces lit by the spitting fire, by flames rippling from blackening corpses, they called out, with him,
“My parents are gone!”

Adair falling to her knees and saying it into the hands covering her face.

“They won’t ever come back!”

“They won’t ever come back!”

“And we are the adults now!”

“We are the adults now!”

Adair couldn’t say it. But she nodded.

Switched-off flashlight tucked between her breasts, Lacey came rushing down the metal ladder so fast she fell, near the end, twisted her ankle on the gravel at the bottom. “Shit!” She pulled her flashlight from her blouse and swept it over to the SUV. “The son of a bitch! Sneaking off !”

She ran—ankle throbbing—up to the back of the SUV, where Bert was pushing a milk crate with a jumble of electronics onto the lowered tailgate. “Bert, you prick!”

He turned to her with an unpracticed expression of puzzled innocence. “What? I was going to, um . . .”

“Bullshit!”

Stanner and Harold exchanged looks and went to the front of the SUV.

Bert sighed, pushing the box into the SUV and slamming the back. “Okay, I don’t want you to go.”

“What, ‘a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do’ and women stay behind?”

“The fewer who go, the better. What can you do? I mean, in this—this—”

“I can be smart and resourceful and I can watch your back, you dope!”

He reached out to her, and she pulled away, her mouth quivering. “Goddamn it, I just found you and—” Then she let him take her in his arms.

“I know,” he said softly in her ear. “I feel the same way. But I need to feel . . . like I’m doing this for you.
For
you. Maybe it’s old-fashioned. Hell, it’s primeval. But I need to protect you. Let me do that, Lacey.” He drew back and looked in her eyes. “Let me protect you.”

“Okay, cowboy. I’ll wait behind. But you’d better fucking come back.”

“Bert!” Stanner called. “We’re going!”

“I’ll see you in a little while, Lacey,” Bert said.
If any of us make
it . . .

He kissed her and climbed into the SUV, and she watched it drive away.

“Son of a bitch,” she muttered.
“Men.”

Sprague—what had once been Sprague—had been sent to patrol the perimeters of the cemetery.

He looked at the shape rising from the trench they’d dug. Most of the trench was there to absorb the blast back.

The launcher looked to him like one of those projectors they had in planetariums.

Once it was calibrated, and fired . . .

Once the projectile had reached an altitude of a mile . . .

The gliders would release. Thousands of minute glider seeds, nanotech life, released into the air currents, and the world would begin the next state of reorganization, spreading the gospel of the All of Us.

He felt weak, now. He couldn’t fight any longer. He was going to try to forget himself in the All of Us.

Then he saw the fire in the hills. A flickering that quickened to become the dark hump of the hill’s own burning eye. And he saw other lights, from there: thin flashlight beams, aimed upward, around the central fire. It was atop the town water tank, he realized. Where that meeting was. He hoped Vinnie had gotten there.

Then came the thunder—the heavy-metal thunder—the boom of a single guitar chord, an open E, played over and over again, from up there, angry, barely musical, maddeningly redundant: perfect.

Gunderston had told them about the meeting. But he hadn’t said much, and only a dozen colony units had been sent. Now it was obvious that more needed to be sent.

Everyone could be sent—except a few guards placed around the cluster.

Sprague—what had been Sprague—set up an alarm. He told them, in their symbology, that his “expert system data,” his memories of being a deputy, informed him that a major Disabling of the Org was going on, centered on that water tower.

Everyone available must go there!

Immediately!

The cluster asked him for certitude.

He staggered under the power of the question. It required all his inner depth to give the answer that his soul demanded of him—to lie to them, for the sake of a secret hope.

Certitude to the probability of 96.9999999999! Disaster if we do not
converge!

Then, the cluster said, for the All of Us, all but designates 7, 3, 53, and 99: converge, to the E chord and the flame, and there destroy all you find; for the seeding is upon us, calibration is done, and pressure is building in the launcher. In thirteen minutes and seven seconds, the world will change, and utopia will become real at last.

23

December 14, night

Shivering in the night’s chill, Stanner tried the cell phone again, though he knew it wouldn’t work. Hoping to reach someone at the Pentagon, to tell them to wait.
Don’t drop the bombs, there’s another way!

Chaos returned his call: just endless static.

He shook his head at Bert and Harold. “No,” he said. “They’ve got an impenetrable barrier up now.”

They were crouching behind the splintered remnants of a wooden fence, across the street from the cemetery. Stanner was preparing to enter the crawler’s home base. Harold was still tinkering with the pulser. Bert cradled the shotgun, helping watch their backs.

“Maybe we’re just being stupid,” Harold said, his hands shaking as he tightened the last screw. “Maybe we should have sent people out through the woods, and just let ’em take their chances and try to get help—try to stop any idea of bombing. We don’t know this thing’s going to work.”

Stanner felt a sudden sympathy for Harold—who’d had so much dropped on his narrow shoulders, so suddenly—and at one and the same moment he wanted to shout at him,
Goddamn it, you said it
would work!

Bert shook his head. “They’d have to convince people about what’s going on here anyway. That’d take much too long.”

Stanner didn’t tell them he was pretty sure that familiar droning sound he even now heard from the sky was a stealth bomber. Soon the bombs would be falling.

The governor of the state of California today asked the president to
declare Quiebra, California, a disaster area after a double explosion at a
refinery set of a firestorm that killed virtually all residents.

Stanner shook his head. Maybe he should have told Shannon to try to make it to the next town. But it would be better to die quickly in an overwhelming flash of heat than to be torn apart by one of those things in the woods, wouldn’t it?

The guitar boomed again, in the distance, from the hilltop. Open E, thumping, echoing, over and over. Calling the crawlers.

“That’s enough guitar, Waylon,” Bert muttered, looking at the firelight up in the hills. “Get the fuck out of there.”

As if Waylon had heard him, the sound died away and ceased altogether. Or did that mean the crawlers had stopped him?

“I’ve gotta go now,” Stanner said, picking up the pulser. “Is it ready or not?”

Harold nodded, gesturing at the contrivance. “Take it.”

The pulser looked like two of the rooftop transmitters joined together, both contrived of old miniature satellite-TV dishes. They were wired toward each other, like a closed clamshell. Four car batteries were taped together on a board under the pulser unit, providing the initial energy.

“That can’t be enough power to do what you need to have done,” Bert muttered, shaking his head.

“That’s the point of the design Bentwaters gave us,” Harold whispered, glancing nervously at the cemetery, watching two more crawlers creep from it; seeing them streak down the street, toward the hills. “The whole point is taking a small amount of energy and multiplying it into one big electromagnetic pulse.”

“Do those things eat, Stanner?” Bert asked, his face ghastly with speculation. “How do they sustain themselves?”

“Yes, sometimes they eat. Anything edible. And, you don’t want to know the details,” Stanner said. He was shoving the crude device into a big canvas backpack. It didn’t quite fit. He had to cut the canvas with Lance’s Buck knife to get it in.

Something was rising up, in the midst of the cemetery. A thing like a big metal insect, aiming its body at the sky.

“Oh, shit, we’re too late,” Harold muttered. “Fuck!”

Maybe,
Stanner thought,
but fuck it.

He slung the backpack over a shoulder, grunting at the weight. He was dead tired—but he felt wired, too. A combination that made his gut churn.

Or maybe that feeling in his stomach was from the ever-present, unceasing, background hiss of sheer terror. Mostly, terror for Shannon.

Harold looked at him in something like admiration. And Stanner thought,
It’s because I’m good at not showing how scared I am.
It was best they didn’t know.

He took the shotgun, gave Bert the pistol, took a last look around. All clear for the moment. He started through the fence.

“We’re coming, too,” Bert said, licking his lips.

Stanner knew Bert had to force himself to say that—and Stanner actually admired him for saying it. “No, Bert,” he said, just loud enough to be heard, over his shoulder. “The fewer we are, the less likely we’ll be noticed in there.”

And one,
he thought,
is pretty damn few.

And then he ran heavily across the street—sprinting wasn’t possible with that weight on his back—and through the gate, into the cemetery. Something moved, about thirty feet away. He crouched and waited. It glided past, low to the ground, and out the gate.

Stanner trudged onward, almost tripping over a corpse torn from a coffin, some of its limbs utilized by the crawlers; they couldn’t use decayed flesh, but old bones might be utilized. He wondered why the crawlers had picked the cemetery for their cluster. Maybe its location was right for their launch. And they were vulnerable to strong electromagnetics; this might well be the most insulated place. But that wouldn’t help them if he could get the pulser right in amongst the cluster.

It looked more like a half-cleared demolition site now, with most of the grass gone, tumbled slabs of marble and concrete piled here and there. Mounds of fresh earth, like giant molehills, humped beside gaping holes. Well-beaten crawler paths crisscrossed between the mounds, radiating from the holes. A faint light was shining up from the holes in the cemetery earth.

Vinnie’s map had indicated the northwest corner of the cemetery. Stanner figured it’d be a mistake to enter the nest too close to its heart. It’d be too well guarded and he wouldn’t have the time he needed. So he dropped the backpack down the nearest hole and dropped in after it. Into one of the tunnels.

He landed on his feet, shotgun in his hands, grunting—expecting to be jumped.

There came a distant moan, a high-pitched wordless chattering, a shuffling sound—but no one visibly around. Just tunnels, the occasional glow, a rank smell.

The kids had done their job. They were luring the crawlers away.

Shannon was up there.

Don’t think about that. Stay on task, punk.

Stanner put his backpack on again, hefted the shotgun for comfort, and headed the way he thought the center of the crawler nest would be.

Electric lights were strung down here, where the packed-earth tunnels intersected. The crawlers were constantly innovating; the red eye beams were a recent device.

He came to a side tunnel leading off to a chamber on the right, about forty feet in. A crawler was arched over a man who writhed and whimpered.

The round earthen chamber was illuminated only by the light from the main tunnel and the red glow of the crawler’s eyes. The crawler was someone Stanner didn’t recognize—a local doctor, perhaps, judging by the white coat, the dangling stethoscope. His lips seemed so red against his pale skin; his thin hair dangled down. He was on all fours, arching his body—which was elongated by the metal extensions in his arms and legs and neck—over a man in the shreds of a gray suit and tie. A balding man with a round face. Not much more could be made out in the welter of blood. The man’s arms and legs were turned all wrong; they were broken that way. A set of probing tools ratcheted on damp bony extensions from the opened gut of the crawler. The silvery tools—drill, something like needle-nose pliers, saws, blades—stabbed down at the man trapped underneath, snatching and pulling and cutting bits out here and there, experimenting. Vivisecting. The crawler chatting to the man casually the whole time.

Stanner’s insides twisted and he wanted to rush in there and try to put a stop to this. But if he let himself get distracted . . .

Stay . . .

“You said to the All of Us,” the crawler said to his victim, “that if we could meet you in San Francisco, where you would feel safe, you would make a deal, you would reap the benefits.” The tools darted down and the man screamed and writhed, and his writhing brought another scream from him because it hurt to move.

. . . on task . . .

“You were willing to sell the town that had not made your career as an attorney profitable, but there is so much we must learn.” The man’s scream bubbled up, as another tool stabbed down.

. . . punk!

Stanner thought of the bombers that were approaching Quiebra— and forced himself to go on.

He went another twenty-five feet—and came to a second cross tunnel. Far down to the right, ruby eyes glowed with piercing red beams, tracking toward him. He drew back and crouched. The crawler was the big-bellied jowly male cop he’d seen standing with the lady cop, by the burning car. He was crawling along on his extended legs, looking for intruders, probably. But he missed Stanner—who’d found a foul-smelling heap of rubbish to crouch behind. The crawler hesitated.

Stanner felt his hands go moist on the shotgun. He tightened his hold, prepared to jump up, to fire.

Then the crawler moved onward, to the left. And Stanner barely managed to control his gag reflex when he stood and saw that the heap of rubbish he had hidden behind was a pile of human body parts. He recoiled and for a moment he almost ran back down the tunnel.

Get a fucking grip, ya pussy.
Another favorite expression of his father’s.

“Okay, you old son of a bitch,” Stanner muttered, and moved on, down the tunnel the way he’d been going.

Bones dangled from the packed-earth roof, between tangles of wire. More than one coffin had become an impromptu ceiling support. The nearest was neatly sliced through from beneath. A swollen-faced woman, staring in death, hung in her Sunday best at an awkward angle from a sheared-open box; her brown hair, flecked with mold, dangled like Spanish moss so that it brushed Stanner’s shoulder as he hurried past.

And then something bounded from behind, a rush of motion, metal-extended fingers closing around Stanner’s throat. And one of them had him.

“I
thought
I heard something, by god,” the crawler said, knocking the shotgun easily from Stanner’s hands.

And then knocking him out cold.

Adair felt a certain joy in lighting her first Molotov cocktail.

She was in the back of a pickup truck driven by Waylon, kneeling in a reeking, rumpled old dog blanket, with Siseela squatting and swaying beside her, steadying her as she lit the Molotov’s rag with a Bic lighter. Lance had stolen the truck earlier and left the keys in it—along with the quart beer bottles brimming with gasoline, stuffed shut with rags.

“How did he know how to make those things?” Siseela yelled, over the car’s noise and the wind.

“Probably like I know how to use it!” Adair shouted. She felt better now, since the funeral. She could talk. She could act. She expected to die tonight, but she’d ceased to care. “From movies!”

And then she threw the flaming bottle at the crawlers bounding behind the truck—into the crawler female’s leering face.

She knew that face, and the face of the old man bounding beside her, nearly as fast as the truck: the Garratys. But, of course, it wasn’t really them.

So she didn’t feel bad when the bottle of gas exploded over what had been Mrs. Garraty, the crawler roaring with pain and fury, a figure cloaked all in striated flame, clawing at the air and falling back to be run over by the police car driven by the lady cop—the crawler who’d once been a lady cop.

Holding on to the back of the truck’s cab, Adair stood and looked at the other cars up ahead on the winding road leading down from the hills into town. Seven cars full of kids, weaving in and out, some of them firing shots at the pursuing crawlers.

As she watched, a boy in his parents’ Volvo crashed headlong into a crawler that blocked the road—the crawler flying, falling in front of an SUV. The boy driving the Volvo spun out, crashing. Three crawlers converged on the Volvo.

She could see more of them, leaping and crawling through the hills, coming after the convoy.

She hoped Waylon had gotten away from the municipal water tank.

“You hold me steady this time!” Siseela yelled. Her eyes bright with anger, with revenge, and wet with sorrow. “I want to throw one!”

Stanner was distantly aware that he was being dragged by his arms along the dirt floor, on his back. His head was throbbing, each throb carrying its message of hot flashing pain, and he was reluctant to open his eyes.

Get a grip!

He looked, and saw the jowly cop’s face: pallid, edged by puffy red tissue, extending on a metal stalk from the dirty uniform collar. The cop’s arms were moving like a jackal’s front legs to either side of Stanner, and it took him a moment to see how he was being carried. Metal filaments were extending from the converted cop’s underside, gripping his clothing, winding around his upper arms.

He could feel his heels dragging in the dirt—and he could feel the pack still heavy on his shoulders. It had become a sort of sled under his back as he was dragged over the ground.

Am I still myself ?
Stanner wondered. He took stock—and could find no other mind nestled with his own. No sense of having been violated, physically. They hadn’t changed him over. They had other plans for him, then.

He was dragged about ten yards farther—and they’d entered a large circular chamber, maybe seventy feet in diameter. Tilting his head painfully, Stanner could make out other tunnel entrances converging from every direction. In the center something hulked, quivering, restless within itself. There were faces in it, many faces, and limbs and machinery that seemed randomly intertwined.
The cluster.

Down a corridor to one side he could see the bottom of the launching mechanism, and crawlers clambering around its base.