The Bad Place (41 page)

Once, in the garden behind The Home, Thomas watched a toad sit real still for a long time, while a bright yellow flutterby, pretty and quick, bounced from leaf to leaf, flower to flower, back and forth, round and round, close to the toad, then not so close, then closer than ever, then way out of reach, then closer again, like it was teasing the toad, but the toad didn’t move, not an inch, like maybe it was a fake toad or just a stone that looked like a toad. So the flutterby felt safe, or maybe it just liked the game too much, and it came even closer.
Wham!
The toad’s tongue shot out like one of those roll-up tooters they’d let the dumb people have one New Year’s Eve, and it caught the flutterby, and the green toad ate the yellow flutterby, every bit, and that was the end of the game.

If the Bad Thing was playing a toad, Thomas was going to be real careful not to be a flutterby.

Then, just when Thomas figured he should start washing himself and changing clothes for supper, just when he was going to pull back from the Bad Thing, it went somewhere. He felt it go, bang, there one second and far away the next, slipping past where he could keep a watch on it, out across the world, going the same place where the sun was taking the last of the daylight. He couldn’t figure how it could go so fast, unless maybe it was on a jetplane having good food and a fine whine, smiling at pretty girls in uniforms who put little pillows behind the Bad Thing’s seat and gave it magazines and smiled back at it so nice and so much you expected them to kiss it like everybody was always kissing on daytime TV. Okay, yeah, probably a jetplane.

Thomas tried some more to find the Bad Thing. Then, by the time day was all gone and night all there, he gave up. He got off his bed and got ready for supper, hoping maybe the Bad Thing was gone away and never coming back, hoping Julie was safe forever now, and hoping there was chocolate cake for dessert.

BOBBY CHARGED across the floor of the diamond-strewn crater, kicking at the bugs in his way. As he ran he told himself that his eyes had deceived him and that his mind was playing nasty tricks, that Frank had not actually teleported out of there without him. But when he arrived at the spot where Frank had been, he found only a couple of footprints in the powdery soil.

A shadow fell across him, and he looked up as the alien craft drifted in blimplike silence over the crater, coming to a full stop directly above him, still about five hundred feet overhead. It was nothing like starships in the movies, neither organic looking nor a flying chandelier. It was lozenge shaped, at least five hundred feet long, and perhaps two hundred feet in diameter. Immense. On the ends, sides, and top, it bristled with hundreds if not thousands of pointed black metal spines, big as church spires, which made it look a little like a mechanical porcupine in a permanent defensive posture. The underside, which Bobby could see best of all, was smooth, black, and featureless, lacking not only the massive spines but markings, remote sensors, portholes, airlocks, and all the other apparatus one might expect.

Bobby did not know if the ship’s repositioning was coincidental or whether he was under observation. If he was being watched, he didn’t want to think about the nature of the creatures that might be peering down at him, and he sure as hell didn’t want to consider what their intentions toward him might be. For every movie that featured an adorable alien with the power to turn kids’ bicycles into airborne vehicles, there were ten others in which the aliens were ravenous flesh eaters with dispositions so vicious as to make any New York head-waiter think twice about being rude, and Bobby was certain that this was one thing Hollywood had gotten right. It was a hostile universe out there, and dealing with his fellow human beings was scary enough for him; he didn’t need to make contact with a whole new race that had devised countless new cruelties of its own.

Besides, his capacity for terror was already filled to the brim, running over; he could contain no more. He was abandoned on a distant world, where the air—he began to suspect—might contain only enough oxygen and other required gases to keep him alive for a short while, insects the size of kittens were crawling all around him, and there was a possibility that a much smaller dead insect was actually fused with the tissue of one of his internal organs, and a psychotic blond giant with superhuman powers and a taste for blood was on his trail—and the odds were billions to one that he would ever see Julie again, or kiss her, or touch her, or see her smile.

A series of tremendous, throbbing vibrations issued from the ship and shook the ground around Bobby. His teeth chattered, and he nearly fell.

He looked for somewhere to hide. There was nothing in the crater to afford concealment, and nowhere to run on the flat plain beyond.

The vibrations stopped.

Even in the deep shadow thrown by the ship, Bobby saw a horde of identical insects begin to scuttle out of the boreholes in the crater walls, one after the other. They had been called forth.

Though no apparent openings appeared in the belly of the ship, a score or more of low-energy lasers—some yellow, some white, some blue, some red—began to play over the floor of the crater. Each beam was the diameter of a silver dollar, and each moved independently of the others. Like spotlights, they repeatedly swept the crater and everything in it, sometimes moving parallel to one another, sometimes crisscrossing one another, in a display that further disoriented Bobby and gave him the feeling that he was caught in the middle of a silent fireworks show.

He remembered what Manfred and Gavenall had told him about the crimson decorations along the rim of the bug’s shell, and he saw that the white lasers were focusing only on the insects, busily scanning the markings around each carapace. Their owners were taking roll call. He saw a white beam fidget over the broken corpus of one of the bugs he had kicked, and after a moment a red beam joined it to study the carcass. Then the red beam jumped to Bobby, and a couple of other beams of different hue also found him, as if he was a can of peas being identified and added to someone’s grocery bill at a supermarket checkout.

The floor of the crater was teeming with insects now, so many that Bobby could see neither the gray soil nor the litter of excreted diamonds over which they clambered. He told himself that they were not really bugs; they were just biological machines, engineered by the same race that had built the ship hanging over him. But that didn’t help much because they still looked more like bugs than like machines. They had been designed to mine diamonds; they were not attracted to him whatsoever; but their disinterest did not make him feel better, because his phobia guaranteed that
he
was interested in
them.
His shadow-chilled skin prickled with gooseflesh. Short-circuiting nerve endings sputtered with false reports of things crawling on him, so he felt as if bugs swarmed over him from head to foot. They were actually creeping over his shoes, but none of them tried to scurry up his legs; he was grateful, because he was sure he would go mad if they began to climb him.

He used his hand as a visor over his eyes, to avoid being dazzled by the lasers that were playing on him. He saw something gleaming in the scanner beams only a few feet away: a curved section of what appeared to be hollow steel tubing. It was sticking out of the powdery soil, partly buried, further concealed by the bugs that scurried and jittered around it. Nevertheless, at first sight Bobby knew what it was, and he was overcome with a horrible sinking feeling. He shuffled forward, trying not to crush any of the insects because, for all he knew, the alien penalty for the additional destruction of property might be instant incineration. When he could reach the glinting curve of metal, he seized it and pulled it loose of the soft earth. It was the missing railing from the hospital bed.

“How LONG?” Julie demanded.

“Twenty-one minutes,” Clint said.

They still stood near the chair where Frank had been sitting and beside which Bobby had been stooping.

Lee Chen had gotten off the sofa, so Jackie Jaxx could lie down. The magician-hypnotist had draped a damp washcloth over his forehead. Every couple of minutes he protested that he could not really make people disappear, though no one had accused him of being responsible for what had happened to Frank and Bobby.

Having retrieved a bottle of Scotch, glasses, and ice from the office wet bar, Lee Chen was pouring six stiff drinks, one for each person in the room, as well as for Frank and Bobby. “If you don’t need a drink to steady your nerves now,” Lee had said, “you’ll need one to celebrate when they come back safe.” He had already downed one Scotch himself. The drink he poured now would be his second. This was the first time in his life he had drunk hard liquor—or needed it.

“How long?” Julie demanded.

“Twenty-two minutes,” Clint said.

And I’m still sane, she thought wonderingly. Bobby, damn you, come back to me. Don’t you leave me alone forever. How am I going to dance alone? How am I going to live alone? How am I going to live?

BOBBY DROPPED the bed railing, and the lasers winked off, leaving him in the shadow of the spiny ship, which seemed darker than before the beams appeared. As he looked up to see what would happen next, another light issued from the underside of the craft, too pale to make him squint. This one was precisely the diameter of the crater. In that queer, pearly glow, the insects began to rise off the ground, as if they were weightless. At first only ten or twenty floated upward, but then twenty more and a hundred after that, rising as lazily and effortlessly as so many bits of dandelion fluff, turning slowly, their tarantula legs motionless, the eerie light gone out of their eyes, as if they had been switched off. In a minute or two, the floor of the crater was depopulated of insects, and the horde was being drawn up effortlessly in that sepulchral silence that accompanied all of the craft’s maneuvers except for the base vibrations that had called the insect miners from their bores.

Then the silence was broken by a flutelike warble.

“Frank!” Bobby cried in relief, and turned as a gust of vile-smelling wind washed over him.

As the cold, hollow piping echoed across the crater again, there was a subtle change in the hue of the light that issued from the ship above. Now the thousands of red diamonds rose from the ash-gray soil in which they lay and followed the insects upward, gleaming dully here and brightly there, so many of them that it seemed as if Bobby was standing in a rain of blood.

Another whirl of evil-scented wind cast up a cloud of the ashy soil, reducing visibility, and Bobby turned in eager expectation of Frank’s arrival. Until he remembered that it might not be Frank but the brother.

The piping came a third time, and the subsequent puff of wind carried the dust away from him, so he saw Frank arrive less than ten feet from him.

“Thank God!”

As Bobby stepped forward, the pearly light underwent a second subtle change. Reaching for Frank’s hand, he felt himself become weightless. When he looked down he saw his feet drift off the floor of the crater.