Crawlers (30 page)

“Mom,” he heard himself say.

She seemed to hesitate, and her head turned all the way around on her shoulders, her mouth open as a vibrating tendril of metal inside it scanned the air. She had heard him.

A cold white anger rushed through him, then, and he burst from the camellia bush. First the building was rushing toward him, then the strip of grass around it was under his feet, the stairs to the second floor went whipping past, the walkway along the top row of apartment doors flashing by under him, the front door of the apartment coming at him, flying open at his touch—

A quick scuttling sound from the roof.

—then the apartment hallway unreeling past him, her bedroom door, the explosive messiness of her bedroom. The closet door coming, the shoebox on the shelf, the gun in the shoebox, bullets.

He took the box of bullets, shoved them in a pocket, took the gun in his hand.

“Waylon.”

He turned to see his mom standing in the doorway, trying to seem like herself. Remembering to smile. To open her arms. There were gash marks on her neck, where they’d slashed her, back in the locker room. The slashes weren’t bleeding; they were seamed with something like thick cellophane, and through the transparent plastic he could see blood and other fluids, pulsing.

“You’re not her,” he said, his voice hoarse. “They changed her, and then she fought against it, so they killed her. And you’re just a thing in her body.”

“Oh, my baby,” she said. “You’re so wrong! I’m your own mama! Come here!”

She came toward him and put her arms around him and opened her mouth wide, too wide, impossibly wide, something metallic-gray flickered and razzed.

He pressed the muzzle of the .25-caliber automatic pistol against her right eye—
to his own mother’s right eye
—and pulled the trigger, five times.

She fell backwards—but still wasn’t dead. She was just thrashing there on the floor. He heard her mutter something about “emergency reorganization.”

So he found the lighter fluid next to her Zippo lighter on the bedside lamp table, and he poured the fluid all around her. He tossed several crumpled up copies of
People
and
Us
magazines on her for additional kindling, squirted those with lighter fluid, too, lit the last of those and tossed it on. Stepped back from the roaring flames as they caught fire, spread their gospel.

Engulfed in blue and yellow fire, the Mom-thing made a long squealing sound like when a cassette tape gets stuck and spindled up in the player.

The entire time it was like someone else was doing all this shooting and burning—someone who could do what had to be done while the scared grieving Waylon pulled back somewhere, watching, riding along.

Then he walked out of the bedroom, out of the front of the house, past the buzzing smoke alarm. He set off the red-metal fire alarm that perched on the wall in the hallway, so that if any human people were in the building, they’d be warned and get out.

People started tumbling out of their apartments, some of them banging other doors. Spotting the gun Waylon had stuck in his waistband, a white-haired man yelled an angry question. Waylon ignored the old dude and went down the stairs.

By the time he got to the corner of Hillview and Simmons and paused to look back, what home he’d had was roaring with flame, and it was spreading to the other apartments. But at least they weren’t going to use his mom’s body and brain anymore.

Then he turned away. Began walking down the street and down the hill toward Quiebra Valley like some kind of machine himself. Not feeling real, not feeling anything. A human-shaped cutout in space.

His mind started running through an orderly list of explanations of what had been happening. Retrofitted alien technology. Or some secret technology being tested on the town. Androids. But it was all just busywork for his mind. It wasn’t as if he thought anything, really, honestly made sense anymore.

A small dark-blue new-model car was coming toward him up the hill, on Hillview. Coming slowly. Slowing down more. He couldn’t see the driver past the headlights’ glare. It rolled past; he just made out the outline of a man, the glint of eyeglasses.

He thought,
Is that one of them? Does it matter if he kills me? I just
murdered my own mother. Even if she was already dead. I’m probably
insane and it doesn’t matter if I live or die.

But then he thought,
Where’s Adair?

That made him feel real again in a way. Like there was something that could still come alive, inside him.

As the car stopped and began to back up, Waylon thought,
It’s a
cop in an unmarked car, or it’s one of them on some kind of patrol.

He put his hand on the gun. One bullet left. Better run.

He turned and sprinted toward the side yard of the nearest house.

Heard a car door, running footsteps.

He got to the gate in the fence, pulled on its hasp, opened it— and a sleek black attack dog rushed at him, teeth bared.

He slammed the gate shut. It thumped creakingly as the dog struck on the other side, barking with frustration.

To Waylon’s right stood a thick hedge he’d never get through before the guy from the little sedan caught him. He started the other way, jumped over a stubby dead light fixture that was supposed to illuminate the garden, ran two steps more, jumped over a plaster lawn gnome, sprinted across the square of grass; started up the steep slope to the yard of the next house up the hill.

A strong hand gripped the back of his jacket and pulled him back down to the lawn.

“Hold it there, boy!”

Waylon twisted from the grip, spun, pulling the .25 pistol, raised it to the man’s startled face. Pale blue eyes, squarish face, hair just a little long only because he rarely remembered to cut it.

“Waylon?” the man said. “Christ, put down the gun!”

It was his father. Waylon’s dad. Waylon lowered the gun, but didn’t put it away.

His dad stammered, staring at the gun. “What, Waylon, what are you doing with that?”

“Why—why are you here?”

“I hadn’t heard from your mom, and she wouldn’t give me her phone number, so I came out to see for myself if you were all right. Waylon, lord, boy, what’s going on?”

Kill him—they’ve probably gotten to him, too. Best you can do for him
is kill him.

His father glanced up the hill, where the flames were beginning to brighten the sky. “Some kind of fire up there. Fire trucks sure taking their time.” He looked back at Waylon. “Give me that gun, goddamn it.”

He reached for Waylon’s gun. Waylon pointed the pistol at his father and pulled the trigger.

Click
on an empty chamber. Five rounds in a small .25 caliber.

“Shit!” his dad blurted, slapping the gun away. “What the fuck are you trying to do? What’s going on?” Nearly crying.

“Dad?”

Waylon couldn’t hold on any longer. He sank down, hunkering, put his arms around his dad’s knees. Sobbing.

“Dad . . . Daddy . . .”

December 14, 1:00 A.M.

She decided to get off the street for a while, after she saw what happened to Mason’s uncle Ike.

Adair hardly knew the guy. She’d met him a few times. A beefy bully of a man who had collected rifles till he’d had to sell them just to pay the rent and keep himself in beer. But he had at least one rifle left. As she lay on her stomach, resting under an RV parked in the driveway, a half block off San Pablo Dam Road, she saw Uncle Ike carrying a rifle as he half ran, half limped down the middle of the street. One cowboy boot on, the other foot clad only in a dirty white sock. He turned sometimes, to prop the rifle on his shoulder, aim it at no one she could make out. But she hadn’t seen him fire it yet.

Then a pickup pulled around the corner, a Chevy four-by-four with about six young men and a couple of women in the back, all of them white. The big pickup barreled right at Ike; you could tell it was angling to hit him.

He fired at the truck, the rifle making a muzzle-flash and a big thud against the drum of the night air. Spider cracks appeared in the windshield. The pickup swerved its left front wheel into a ditch and fishtailed to a stop. The riders in the back piled out and rushed Uncle Ike, each one carrying a length of pipe or a two-by-four.

Ike was backing up, squealing as he cocked the rifle—that’s exactly what the sound was, Adair decided, a squeal—and managed to fire once more, so that one of the women went down.

But then the others were on him, knocking him off his feet, standing in a circle around him, methodically beating him until he lay still.

She could see that he was still breathing. Then one of them knelt beside him and pried at his mouth.

She couldn’t bring herself to watch anymore. She squirmed backwards from under the RV as quietly as she could, dragging the shotgun, and crept away through a side yard into the backyard of the dark house where the RV was parked. A little fountain was gurgling merrily back here, a plaster nymph pouring water into a plaster bowl. An ax was stuck in a stump next to some firewood.

She was so tired. She needed to rest somewhere. And she couldn’t be on the street with this kind of thing going on—with what was happening between
them
, and people like Ike who were trying to fight them.

She could hear more gunfire, a little ways away. They must have the town blocked off from the rest of the world, somehow. She’d thought she heard a warning siren once from the refinery. Maybe that was their excuse—a refinery leak. But wouldn’t rescue workers be coming from other towns then?

It was hard to think. She had to go somewhere to rest and think.

She’d seen a darkened hardware store, up on the Dam Road, as the residents sometimes called the big street to the south. She could go through backyards, run across the street before anyone saw her.

She pulled the ax from the stump, not caring about the pain in her injured hand, and began climbing fences. She had to toss the ax and shotgun over each time, gathering them up as she dropped to the ground. She went through the backyards of three houses and she was lucky: no dogs, no one looking out back.

She got to the corner, peered out past a looted liquor store that stank from the broken booze bottles littering its floor. At the sound of sobbing she glanced into the store. Someone out of sight was weeping, muttering in some foreign language, maybe Arabic. It sounded like a man, and she glimpsed his arm stretching out from under an overturned counter, his hand clutching weakly in a puddle of blood.

She spun at the rumble and blare of a fire truck racing erratically down the street—but it almost instantly passed out of sight, over a hill. Were the firemen still firemen?

She looked up and down the four-lane road.
Now, go for it.
The street was clear—as far as she could tell.

She darted across to the hardware store and around back.

The ax wasn’t very sharp, but after four good whacks it severed the wires running to the alarm box. Whether that would really stop all the alarms, she wasn’t sure, but she thought it was worth trying. She’d made up her mind that she was going to break into the hardware store, no matter what.

It was easier than she’d thought it would be. It was an old building, and the glazed-glass window over the back door was flimsy. She used a trash can for a boost up, dropped the shotgun through to the storeroom inside as carefully as she could, and slithered herself through. Came down painfully on her hands in broken glass, but was only slightly cut because the broken pieces were lying flat.

So far that’s how everything’s been,
she thought, sucking blood from a cut on the heel of her hand.
The edges turned away from me.
But my luck can’t last.

She retrieved the shotgun and went out into the main room. A couple of overhead lights were still on, but the place wasn’t the neat museum of homey goods it should’ve been; it was a mess. Hardware junk was lying all over the floor between the aisles. One of the shelves had been pushed over to lean on another, like a half-fallen domino.

The power tools looked to be completely looted out, gone. The antennas section, empty. The cash registers had been reamed out. The laser scanners taken.

She peered out the front windows. No one she could see out there.

The gun counter had been looted, too—but she did find one of the main things she’d come in here for. Shotgun shells. A big box of them, on the floor behind the broken glass counter.

She stuck those in her coat and went to camping goods. She chose a sleeping bag; she needed that. There, a pup tent. She took them both, tying them together with a length of cord cut with a folding utility knife—and she took the knife, too.

A little snack food sat at the registers—some candy bars, plastic eight-ounce bottles of Sprite and Coca-Cola. A couple of energy bars. Those would be good. She filled a plastic bag with energy bars, candy bars, peanuts, and sodas.

She looked at the phones, considered trying to use them to call—who? If Waylon was right, this was some kind of government operation. Who could you trust? She could try the Highway Patrol, maybe, tell them some of the truth—they’d think she was lying if she told them all she’d seen—but she doubted she’d get through to them in the first place.

Those crawl-things’d be monitoring the phones, even cell phones. She didn’t know what the things were, except that they interfaced with high technology—that much she was sure of.

They monitored the kids on-line somehow, too, so even if she found a computer in a store office somewhere, it wouldn’t be safe to go on-line. So how was she going to contact Cal? If he was still alive . . .

She started sobbing, then, standing by the candy rack, near the front of the store, and she slapped a big jar of miniature screwdrivers so they went spinning to bang against the glass of the front window. And she yelled Cal’s name and she yelled for her mom and dad.