Crawlers (41 page)
“Dad,” she said. “Daddy . . .”
EPILOGUE
December 19
When Errol Clayborn opened the door, he was beaming a big welcome-to-Christmas-vacation-with-your-family smile.
The smile faded fast.
“Uh, Bert?”
Errol gaped with a poorly disguised mix of dismay and confusion as Bert introduced Lacey, Stanner, Shannon, Harold, Waylon, Adair, Donny, Siseela . . . and Vinnie.
He looked twice at Vinnie. Then at the two black kids. Then back at the hulking, scruffy figure of Vinnie—who stood turned half away, looking at him out of the corners of his eyes.
“Hi, I’m a Christmas lump, I’ve got three wishes to hang over the window when they come in under the sled don’t worry about a thing,” Vinnie said.
Bert laughed at Errol’s expression. “Errol, I got that card you sent with yet another prod to come out for Christmas. And you said I could bring friends.”
“Well, I—”
“Not to worry,” Stanner said, smiling crookedly, spreading his hands. “There’ll be two less, anyway. Shannon and I are just dropping these folks off. We all drove out together and—I just needed to see these people safely somewhere. My daughter and I are heading up to Canada.”
Waylon turned and looked at Stanner, scowling. Then he gravely shook Stanner’s hand. “I was wrong about you, man. You’re, all, a complicated guy.”
“Nobody’s simple. Certainly not my man Vinnie, there. Vinnie, I’m gonna miss you.”
Vinnie turned his back on Stanner. But he was smiling.
So was Shannon, as Stanner put his arm around her. She said, “Maybe my old man’s not so bad.” She said it in a skeptical way that made the others laugh.
“What you gonna do now, Major?” Waylon asked.
Stanner shrugged. Smiled sadly.
“I’ve got to lay low. I’ll probably need an identity change, till I get this straightened out. There’s a senator friend of mine I served with; maybe he can get me square with the Pentagon, eventually. I believe in what I was
trying
to do, Waylon. I just got off track. I did the right thing in that uniform, once upon a time. I hope—I need— to go back to the right thing, in uniform.”
“Uh,” Errol was saying, looking at the small crowd on the porch.
Bert said, “I’m sure you heard about the disaster in Quiebra, Errol?”
“Hell, yeah, I tried to call you about fifty times. They said it was some kind of viral disaster, killed hundreds of people, still under investigation. Crazy stories coming out of there.”
“Truth is, Errol, it wasn’t a virus. So you don’t have to worry about catching anything. We were caught up in that ‘disaster,’ and these people needed someplace to go, and you invited me and a friend—and I couldn’t bring just one, not this time. So, just for the holiday. You know. We’ll all sleep on the floor. We brought sleeping bags.”
“Uh, sure. I mean, there was an emergency and—” Then he glanced over his shoulder and smiled—taking some kind of obscure personal satisfaction in it as he turned back to Bert and said, “I guess my wife’ll just have to . . . suck it up.”
A little girl with tousled brown hair and big hazel eyes looked past Errol from inside the house. “Dad, you said you’d watch
Starbots
with me.”
“Starbots!”
Vinnie gasped.
She looked at him. “You like
Starbots
?”
He couldn’t look right at her. He looked at the mailbox beside the door. But he said, “Oh, yes, very much. It’s a part of my land of where to go, for three thousand miles in three directions.”
“Okay!” She grabbed his hand—after a moment he stopped trying to draw it back—and pulled him past her father, into the house.
Stanner chuckled. “Well, we’ll be in touch, Bert.” They shook hands.
“So, uh, whoever’s coming in, uh, come on in and, uh . . .” Errol began.
Bert and the others ignored Errol, watching Stanner and Shannon walk to the rented minivan. Watching them wave a final time; watching them start to back out the driveway.
Then Waylon ran up to the minivan, banged on the window by Stanner, till he stopped the car. “Yes, Waylon?”
Waylon was excited, hands balled into fists. Voice too loud.
“Yo, dude, you got to tell me—on the way here you said you’d tell me before you left, man. ’Kay: You worked in that secret black chopper Pentagon Area 51 stuff.
What about the aliens, man?
The UFOs? Knowhatamean? The saucers!”
Stanner smiled faintly. He looked at the others. Winked at Adair. She smiled back at him.
Then he said, “Ah, the aliens.
The saucers.
Right. Well, I’ll tell you.” He leaned toward Waylon and stage-whispered, “That’s another story—dude.”
Then Stanner backed up the car, drove away down the street. And he and Shannon headed north.
The world becomes smaller and smaller as it becomes more and more uniform. People lose the power of any separate wisdom . . . Man’s inventions increasingly take charge of him. We see machines becoming disproportionate to human life. It is surely obvious that the development of machinery is not the development of man and it is equally obvious that machinery is enslaving man and gradually removing him from his possibilities of normal life and normal effort, and the normal use of his functions. If machinery were used on a scale proportionate to man’s needs it would be a blessing . . . Man is his understanding— not his possession of facts or his heap of inventions and facilities.
—Maurice Nicoll,
Living Time and the Integration of the Life
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Shirley
is the author of more than a dozen books, including
Demons
;
City Come A-Walkin’
;
Really, Really, Really, Really Weird Stories
; and the newly reissued classic cyberpunk trilogy A Song Called Youth—
Eclipse
,
Eclipse Penumbra
, and
Eclipse Corona
. He is the recipient of the Horror Writers Association’s Bram Stoker Award and won the International Horror Guild Award for his collection
Black
Butterflies
. Shirley has fronted punk bands and written lyrics for his own music, as well as for Blue Öyster Cult and other groups. A principal screenwriter for
The Crow
, Shirley now devotes most of his time to writing for television and film.
Visit the author’s Web site at
www.darkecho.com/John
Shirley.
SELECTED WORKS BY JOHN SHIRLEY
Novels
A Splendid Chaos
Eclipse
Eclipse Penumbra
Eclipse Corona
Wetbones
City Come A-Walkin’
The Brigade
And the Angel with Television Eyes
Spider Moon
Demons
Short Story Collections
Black Butterflies
Darkness Divided
Really, Really, Really, Really Weird Stories
Heatseeker
A Del Rey® Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 2003 by John Shirley
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Del Rey is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Shirley, John, 1953-
Crawlers / John Shirley. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
I. Title.
PS3569.H558C73 2003
813’.54—dc21 2003045346
eISBN: 978-0-307-41484-7
v3.0