Crawlers (28 page)

Still, he was climbing, scurrying along the rafters, afraid to look down now. Then he reached the wall, could just climb down off the rafters, into the window cracked aslant for ventilation, just enough room for a skinny guy to slip squirming through, scraping off pieces of skin as he went, then dropping onto the roof of the adjacent building, ten feet down to the tarry surface. Running across the dampness, smelling night rain and tar and chimney smoke from the houses behind the school.

Running to the far side of the school, where there was a drainpipe, and a field, and the woods, and the paths up the ridge, and beyond the ridge.

The big water tank in the hills.

18

December 13, night

The moon had shrunk to a sliver, seemed to have transferred its diminished brilliance to the phosphorescence lighting the white-caps on the sea.

“Lacey,” Bert said softly. He wanted to show her the sleeping gulls lined up, beaks tucked under wings, perched on a half-buried log in the sand.

But, gazing out over the bay, she suddenly said, “We need to get out of town. I’ve been looking for Adair and Cal. I have to take them with me. I just can’t leave them. But I can’t find them.”

Bert nodded. Coming home, he’d found a note shoved under his door; normally she’d have left a message on his answering machine. “You found out some more?”

“Nothing that I understand—just enough to say that we have to go. We have to get my niece and nephew, and we have to go. I tried to FedEx one of those little devices to an old friend of mine at Cal Tech. It never got to him. And I tried to buy Adair some earrings. For Christmas. At the jewelry store in Old Town Quiebra. The door was open. The cases were empty. I finally talked to the owner. She said a lot of the jewelry had been taken.” She told him the rest of the story about the lady in the jewelry store.

“That’s fairly bizarre. You didn’t call the police?”

“I went over there, and—you remember the mayor? You introduced me. He was there behind the desk, instead of a cop—and instead of that lady who used to be there.”

“The mayor?”

“Yep. And I got this feeling from him. I just couldn’t tell him anything. And I just walked out. And I’ve been trying to find Adair. And then I thought of you.”

She was hugging herself against the cold, staring at something shiny on the beach, half-hidden by a smooth-skinned twist of drift-wood.

He stared down at the shiny thing on the beach, and he sighed. The night before, they’d eaten a dinner she’d cooked for him; they’d shared a bottle of wine—they’d both been just a little tipsy—and they’d kissed. Then they’d made love, and she’d been very patient with him until at last he’d found the way past her defenses, and she’d let go for him.

In the morning she’d left before he’d been up. She’d left a note, saying she was going shopping, meet him later. Thanks for beautiful evening.

The denial was over, though. He couldn’t pretend he didn’t know, on some level, what the bright thing on the beach was: a bright thing that stood in for a dark thing. He could no longer tell himself that the dark thing that was snuffling around every corner in Quiebra was going to let them go on and just be lovers. The dark thing was going to hurt them, or make them fight. And there was going to be no other choice, not really.

She hunkered down to look closer at the thing in the sand, and he hunkered beside her. “It’s like that thing that hit my windshield. The thing that raggedy cat picked up.”

“Something the cat dragged in,” she murmured, chuckling nervously, still gazing at it in fascination.

It was about as big as his hand and made Bert think of those little desk toys, small pieces of chrome on magnets you made shapes of, connecting the pieces up any way you wanted within the magnetic field. An impression of the frontier of organization arising from chaos.

The glittery thing tumbled and writhed along the beach, a coalescence of tiny metal flakes, and when it caught the moonlight and a little gleam from the streetlights at the beach reserve’s parking lot, it seemed to Bert that each was itself another provisional collection of yet smaller parts, each of those in turn a temporary organization of even smaller bits, and so on.

He put his arm around Lacey’s shoulders. “It’s got something like life about it,” Bert muttered. “But it’s dead.” He felt her shudder, at that.

Lacey picked up a stick and poked at the living metal chain—and it immediately wrapped itself around the stick and began to spiral up it toward her hand. She froze, mouth open, staring.

It reached for her fingers.

Bert slapped the glitter-twisted stick away, hard, and it flipped into the nearest of the gulls sleeping on the half-buried log. The bird squawked and rose in a spasmodic flutter, but the glimmer was already twining its neck, making it look like a mythical bird wearing a necklace.

The other gulls began to wake, hopping and flying away. It was already flapping vigorously above the others, into the night—and then it fell back, as if shot down by a hunter, to flop at the sand and peck frantically at the air.

Lacey said, “Oh, Jesus, Bert!” and ran to the gull, reaching out to it.

“Don’t!” he shouted, hurrying to pull her back.

She let him, sensing the wisdom of it—as the gull thrashed, the living metal twining up its neck, wending down its throat . . .

It continued thrashing—for about forty seconds. Then it stiffened. Its head began to twist around on its neck, like a bottletop unscrewing itself, and its wings began to tear loose from its body, extended out from its middle on bloody metal stalks.

“God
damn
it, Bert, kill it for me, won’t you? Kill the poor thing.”

He used a long stick to flip the bird onto a rock; then found another rock, big as an anvil. Straining, he carried it over and dropped it, smashing the gull past all use. Blood bubbled out from under the stone, mixed with squirming silver bits.

They went hurriedly back toward the other end of the beach and the nominal safety of Bert’s condo.

But stopped when they saw lights on the boat launching ramp. An instinctive caution gripped them both, and holding hands, they walked up on the edge of the concrete ramp that sloped down into the water. Below, a young black man, a white man of middle age, and a young white woman were launching a white-hulled outboard motorboat from a trailer that was hooked to a pickup. They had just pulled the boat into the water, were having to use Coleman lanterns set up in the bed of the truck to help them see.

It was a cold, blustery night, and there was an air of desperation in their movements, their hushed voices. Bert could hear them panting, the woman speaking between soft sobs, the black man muttering at her to be quiet. The older white man said, “Okay, she’s free, let’s get the fuck out of here.”

Bert and Lacey hunkered instinctively behind a boulder to watch. Neither one knew exactly why they were hiding.

Bert was on the edge of asking them what was wrong when he saw a man shape crawling toward them over the rocks piled up in a loose seawall on the other side of the boat launching ramp. The man was dragging himself along the top of the rocks; it looked like dragging at first, until Bert looked closer and saw that he was creeping along the irregular granite pile with the slinky adroitness of an iguana. His arms, glinting aluminum-gray at the joints, extended unnaturally long. The man paused, and his head rotated on his neck, stopping to stare straight upward—though his body was angled facedown. The head tilted on the neck at an angle that should have made broken bones jut from the skin—and Bert recognized the face.

“Morgenthal,” he muttered.

“You know—” Staring, Lacey broke off to swallow, and wet her lips, her voice breathless. “You know that thing?”

“Used to be a guy named Morgenthal. Shop teacher at the high school—” He broke off, leaning forward to see better.

Morgenthal—what had been Morgenthal—had been spotted by the three people who were climbing into the boat. It was gathering itself up on a boulder just above them, poising to jump.

Both the white man and the woman screamed. The black man pulled a pistol from his waistband and fired. The gun thumped and flashed, but the Morgenthal thing leapt like a tiger, with a calibrated efficiency, coming down on the black man, knocking him into the other two so they all tumbled flat in the boat, which rocked and turned sideways from the ramp.

Then the Morgenthal thing began to tear them apart, grabbing bits of them, ripping clothes with flesh, tossing shreds of them over his shoulders like a child throwing a tantrum, yet with blurring speed and efficiency, so that the screaming quickly stopped.

Lacey backed away from the scene, covering her mouth with a hand. She stumbled, fell backwards in the sand, and Bert rushed to help her up, whispering, “Don’t scream, don’t let it hear you. Come on!”

They ran up toward the path edging the beach and all the way back to the condo.

Once there they locked the doors, and—in unspoken mutual agreement—jammed chairs against the knobs. Then Lacey turned to Bert and asked, point-blank, “Is this a dream?”

He reached out and touched the brass doorknob. Cold under his fingers. “No.”

Then he went to the phone, to call someone, anyone—and heard a recording.

“Due to the emergency, the phones are now inactive. They are being repaired. Thank you for your patience.” He handed it to Lacey so she could hear for herself as it repeated.

As she was listening he spotted a piece of paper on the floor, with his name written on it. He picked it up and unfolded it.

“Do you think we should try to drive to another town?” Lacey asked, putting the phone down.

“Not—not tonight,” he said softly, and handed her the paper. It read:

Mr. Clayborn,

As you are the only one I know and I guess trust, I am leaving this here to warn you and ask for your help. They have been changing people at a gallop all day, and they did it to my niece. I barely got away from her. I tried to leave town, but they have the roads blocked off. They are telling people it’s some emergency and we have to stay. But there’s nothing about it on TV. If you try to insist on getting by, they take you away right there and you come back as one of them. I don’t know what they are.

I guess these are the Last Days. I’m going to my church and hide there. I don’t want to say which. God will help the righteous. I wanted to warn somebody before I left here.

God Bless.

Mrs. Goodwin

“I hope she got somewhere safe,” he muttered. “She used to try to get me over to that Pentecostal church of hers. I was running out of excuses. She was such a well-meaning old soul.”

“You think those people at the boat? . . .”

He nodded. “If she’s right, they were trying to leave town. They’d tried the road.”

“It’s like it was in the air for a while, wasn’t it? You could feel something, but you couldn’t describe it exactly. Oh, God, my sister. That must be—oh, no.”

He held her as she wept.

Then they turned off the lights in every room but the bedroom, where they lay together, dressed, under the covers. After a while, she reached out and took his hand.

And there it was. A hand touching his—a truly intimate, simple contact—hidden under the covers. He felt the poles of the world shift, then.

He tried to define the change, in his mind, and couldn’t. A predatory nightmare infested the land; it might well kill them both. If they survived, they would never quite sleep well again; they would argue sometimes, and they would hurt one another, perhaps. But they were in this together—as he’d never been, with anyone. He could feel a simple completion, more real than passion. They’d be side by side, facing whatever darkness came along. The poles had shifted—and she was his north, now.

The skinny black cat they’d found in the country came out from under the bed and jumped up beside them, nestling close. After a while, Bert turned out the light and held Lacey in his arms, as together they watched the curtained windows for the coming of the morning light.

December 13, night

He knew exactly what to do. That’s how it was at first. There was no interference from the old self. Not yet. All he had to do was get up from the reorganizer, in the harsh lights of the portable electric lamps that had been set up on poles driven into the dirt; climb out of the reorganization pit, learning to use his limbs as he went. There were too many limbs to coordinate, if he thought about it; but if he simply thought,
Go there,
the mobilization program took over, and he’d find himself moving forward down the tunnel. He discovered, from imitating some of the others he saw, that he could move up the side of the packed-dirt tunnel, too, close beside the strings of lightbulbs stapled to the wooden beam wedged overhead, and felt a feeble kind of happiness then.
I can defy gravity,
he thought.

All the time he was monitoring the All of Us with one part of his enhanced brain, taking the binomial pulse of it, hearing the words in their shorthand and more directly when it was needed:
“Blue and Green converge in future tense, register point seven one three
thousand, enclosing and restructuring . . . Covering soccer field, associates
converting fire department; police entirely converted except for two; moving in on Cruzon . . . Stanner is back in primary operational field,
converging . . .”

Those names sparked something. He knew those names. Cruzon. Stanner. He got mental pictures. That made him think of a third person. He saw the third person in a backyard, putting sauce on steaks over hot coals. Laughing with his wife. That one’s name . . . was Sprague.

Sprague. Leonard Sprague.

Moving down the tunnel, emerging into the cool night air— feeling the coolness distantly on those parts of him that were still capable of feeling it, mostly on his cheeks—he felt a downward spiral inside, at the name
Sprague
. As if that name had fallen with a splash into the surface of his mind and it was sinking, the name spinning down, carrying his consciousness down with it.

Sprague
Sprague
Sprague
Sprague
Sprague
Leonard Sprague

He was already patrolling the perimeter of the entry place over the base of operations of the All of Us—his main task, for now— before it came to him.

It had been his own name.

Sprague.

That wasn’t relevant to his new format. With some of the converted, he knew, the names of their “shells” were important. It was part of the camouflage—necessary, for now. But when you were reset into a completely new format, there was no need for a name. He shouldn’t be able to remember it. But he did. There had been enough of his essential self—maybe what people had once called his spirit, his soul—to retain some sense of . . .