Crawlers

by John Shirley

  Cal and Adair laughed. Mom just smiled faintly.

  November 26, morning

  Lacey opened her luggage on the single bed. They’d given her the room that doubled as Nick’s office.

  She was puzzled by her sister—and she wasn’t sure what was puzzling her. It was partly what wasn’t happening. It’d be more like Suzanna to help her unpack, chattering the whole time about where she could put her things, asking if she needed anything, telling her about towels—but Suzanna had simply shown her in and silently left her here.

  Normally when they saw one another, Suzanna would take her aside for a recital of complaints about her husband and the kids, and then, after getting it off her chest, following up with how great her husband and kids were, after all. That’s how she always was, and it was fine with Lacey. But nothing like that this time. Suze seemed distant the way people are when they’re angry but don’t want to talk about it.

  But Suzanna appeared at the door with clean towels. “You can use that bathroom off the office, while you’re here. Before you go. Have it to yourself.”

  Lacey looked at Suzanna, trying to find the right tone. “So, Suze. How’re things with the kids?”

  “Fine.”

  “Just fine? How’s Nick?” She lowered her voice. “You were worried about him?”

  “Why would I be worried about him? He’s better than he’s ever been.” She seemed to mean that. She laid the towels on the bed and turned to go.

  “On the phone you said—”

  “Oh. I was wrong. You were right. It was just the meds. He’s back on them. We’re fine.”

  She turned away again.

  “Suze, wait. Seriously, are you mad at me for anything? I put my foot in it somehow?”

  Suzanna paused at the door and looked mildly back at her. “Not at all. Why should I be angry?” She seemed truly in the dark.

  “Okay, whatever. Never mind.” Lacey went back to unpacking, and Suze wandered off toward the garage.

  Lacey was pretty much through when she heard the triple scream. The scream of tires, the scream of an animal, the scream of a girl.

  She rushed out front and saw her niece, Adair, kneeling in the street; a dull-faced pale young man in a rather shabby military uniform stood by what appeared to be a brand-new Ford Expedition sport utility vehicle. It hadn’t any plates yet. And Lacey’s sister, Suzanna, was walking calmly over to the SUV.

  “Adair, honey, come away from there,” Suzanna was saying.

  “Suze? What happened?” Lacey asked, coming out into the cloud-filtered daylight.

  Then she saw the red puddle spreading out from the small, crushed remains. The young marine—that was a marine uniform, wasn’t it?—was staring at the dead cat.

  “Silkie!” Adair sobbed.

  The marine became aware of Lacey, glanced up at her as she approached, and it seemed to her that he adopted the appropriate expression of remorse at that moment.

  “Oh, my God, Adair, that was your cat?” Lacey asked, squatting to put her hand on her niece’s shoulder. Adair turned away from the wreckage of Silkie and buried her face in Lacey’s shoulder. Her only reply was a nod and sobbing. “Oh, jeez, I’m sorry, hon. The poor thing.”

  Lacey glanced up at Suzanna and the young marine. They looked at each other, Suzanna and the soldier, and then at the cat.

  His uniform was dirty, torn here and there. Buttons were missing. The knees were green. Very unusual for a marine. Near unthinkable. He must’ve been out drunk somewhere in a park, Lacey supposed.

  “Corporal,” she said, noticing his stripes. “Were you driving drunk around here?”

  “No, ma’am,” the marine said. “But I’m sure sorry about the cat. She just run out in front of me.”

  “She does that,” Suzanna said. “It’s no fault of yours. You can go on now. I’ll clean this up.”

  The marine nodded. “Thank you, ma’am. But I’m sure sorry about the cat. She just run out in front of me.”

  “You said that,” Lacey muttered. Exactly that, she thought.

  But the marine was already getting into his Ford Expedition. He backed it up and drove around them. And drove away.

  “Suze,” Lacey asked, “do you want me to pick the kitty up and you can take Adair into the house?”

  “No, I’ll do it. I’ll just get a shovel.”

  Lacey drew Adair to her feet and put an arm around her to guide her into the house. “I hate those SUVs,” Adair said. “Big killing machines. People love to get in big killing machines. I hate them!”

  An auspicious start for my visit, Lacey thought.

  Aloud she said, “I know how you feel. I’d have called a cop to check if that jarhead was drunk, but—” She broke off, not wanting to say anything about her sister’s odd indifference. “Anyway, sit down, honey.”

  They sat on the sofa. Lacey saw her sister carrying a big shovel from the backyard toward the street, passing on the other side of the window, just two yards away, so that Lacey could just faintly make out the song that Suzanna was singing to herself as she went to pick up the dead cat. “Time of the sea-ee-sonnnnn . . .”

  Adair had her face in her hands. “Silkie was my friend since she was a kitten. We grew up together.”

  “I know. It looked like she died instantly—but I don’t know if that’s much consolation.”

  Adair looked up at the shadow passing over them, her mom striding by the window, carrying the cat on the shovel to the backyard. “Mom’s going to bury her back there where the gerbil’s buried, by the rosebushes. She used to say that if we bury pets under rosebushes, we see them again in the roses.”

  “That’s kind of nice, really.”

  Adair nodded, wiping her eyes, and got up. “I’m gonna find something to bury Silkie in.” She went dazedly into her bedroom.

  Lacey went out back and saw Suzanna digging a hole, not under the rosebushes but on the side of the house near a can full of yard clippings. The cat was lying on the dirt beside her, its back broken, eyes open and staring, tongue sticking out.

  “Suze? Don’t you want to put the kitty under the rosebushes?”

  Suzanna continued digging, making a perfect little rectangular grave, as if she were born to miniature grave digging. “Why?”

  “Because you told Adair it was nice to do that when she was little, I guess.”

  Suzanna looked up at her. “I did? I guess I’d forgotten. Okay.”

  She pushed the dirt back in the hole with the side of her tennis shoes and went briskly over to the roses and began to dig as Adair came out carrying an old, torn pink silk pillowcase.

  Adair stopped, looking at the cat. “I can’t.”

  Lacey took the pillowcase and knelt beside the dead cat. Trying not to look at it too closely, she eased its still warm body into the pillowcase. She got only a little blood on her thumb, but more blood began to soak through the pink pillowcase immediately. She carried the cat over to the new hole Suzanna was finishing—finishing with remarkable dispatch.

  Once finished, Suzanna went to the garage with the shovel and didn’t come back. Lacey and Adair lowered the pillowcase gently into the hole, and Lacey filled it up, pushing the dirt in with her hands, as Adair tearfully said, “Good-bye, Silkie, you were a hella good cat.” She hugged Lacey quickly, once. “I’m sorry this had to happen as soon as you got here.”

  “I’m sorry you had to lose your kitty at all. I had a little dog, and when it died from old age it was like my own child died. Some people say it’s silly, but . . .” She shrugged.

  They stood there awhile, looking at the little grave together. After a while, Adair let out a long, slow breath and went back into the house.

  Lacey found Suzanna in the garage, gazing placidly into the cryptic electronics inside the back of an old boom box.

  “Trying to decide if the batteries are dead?” Lacey asked.

  Suzanna didn’t even look up from her inspection of the old CD player. “No.”

  Lacey waited. Suzanna s
aid nothing else.

  Finally, Lacey said tentatively, “You know what, I’m a little puzzled. I mean, you had that cat a long time, too. Aren’t you . . . I don’t know. I mean, you always loved animals.”

  Suzanna stood. Seemed to think for a moment, staring into the middle distance. Then she said, “I’m very sad about it. I guess I’m just, you know, at this point in my life, a little blasé about pets. And it looked like she died instantly. Would you like some instant coffee?”

  “Um, sure.” Suzanna went to the door from the garage to the kitchen, and Lacey turned to follow her.

  And then stopped, turned to listen, as once again she heard three screams.

  It was from a street or two away, this time. But it was remarkably similar:

  The scream of tires, the scream of a small animal, the scream of a child.

  5

  December 1, late afternoon

  Adair walked home from the bus stop, carrying her backpack of books over one shoulder. It was making her shoulder ache. Should have left them in my locker. She didn’t think she’d get herself to crack a book tonight.

  It was already getting dark. She saw that the few remaining jack-o’-lanterns were even more sunken in, their grins loonily lop-sided now. She thought about her friend Danelle, who seemed sort of happy that her parents had said they were moving. At least she could’ve acted sad to be leaving her friends. But then Adair was her only friend, just about, and most everyone had treated her like shit at school, it was true.

  A turkey vulture wheeled overhead and swept away; blackbirds trilled repetitively from a red-blossomed bottlebrush tree beside the sidewalk. It hadn’t rained for a while, and she’d heard newspeople worrying there wouldn’t be enough water in the snowpacks to replenish the reservoirs. Leaves that should have been pasted to the street rattled dryly ahead of her in the breeze, toward Waylon.

  He was standing behind the bole of a liquidambar tree, a little ways down the street, waiting for her. Like he was hiding, but watching for her. Which was kind of weird.

  “Yo, Mister Waylon,” she said, walking up. He was dressed just like he had been a couple weeks before, when the satellite had come down, she noticed. “Hardly seen you around school.”

  “I haven’t been coming much. My mom’s been a basket case and . . . I just felt like keeping my head down, sorta.” He looked past her down the street, jamming his hands in his pockets.

  “There some reason you’re acting like you’re hiding?”

  He hesitated, looked at her, then back at the street. “You see those marine guys driving around?”

  She felt a taut anger constrict her throat. “Those pricks. One of them killed my cat. Ran Silkie over.”

  “Lot of people lost cats around here.”

  “And he just mumbled and drove away. Fucking asshole.”

  “I thought that—that they were following me, those guys. More than once. I think it was because I was spying on the satellite thing.”

  She put just a shade of teasing mockery in her voice. “So now you’re all ‘it’s a satellite’ and not ‘it’s a UFO’?”

  He shrugged a reluctant concession. “I think it was a satellite. It looked like it. But they’re up to some shit. It could totally have, like, reverse-engineered technology from Area 51 in it or something. They reverse-engineer shit from UFOs.”

  “ ’Kay.”

  “No, they do!”

  “ ’Kay.”

  He snorted. “Okay, fine. I’ve got a book I’ll show you about it.”

  “ ’Kay. I’m getting cold.”

  He looked at the street, then at her, then at the sky. “I could walk you home.”

  She sighed. She’d hoped saying I’m getting cold might induce him to put an arm around her. “You could walk me home, yeah. But then I’d be home.”

  “You don’t feel like going home, either?”

  “No. My parents are just ‘whatever,’ no matter what happens lately. They don’t fucking care anymore. God, it was so lame on Thanksgiving last week. They just went through the motions. Lacey was so embarrassed for them. She moved out to a hotel. Mom kept hinting. She has so changed. It’s all fucked up.”

  He looked at her curiously. “You didn’t used to cuss this much.”

  “I didn’t used to feel like it so much.”

  “Well. My mom makes a big deal about Thanksgiving. She kept it together pretty well. Cooked the turkey and we watched football. Which she likes. She gets off watching those linebackers. Like I care about football.”

  “But that’s nice you watched it with her.”

  He shrugged and fell silent. So they just walked for a while, passing the turn onto her block. At the corner they saw Mr. Garraty pushing his wife in her wheelchair up the walk to the ramp that led to the porch of their ramshackle ranch-style house. Mr. Garraty was limping. Mrs. Garraty was on the stout side, a round-faced old woman with bottle red hair, swelling ankles showing under her long woolen coat. Her husband was a stooped man in a heavy knit sweater, once tall and now getting humpbacked, his sagging cheeks pale, his eyes watery gray, his hair a wisp on his head. Both of them were in their eighties. Adair remembered her mom saying the Garratys should be in a retirement home or with children, someplace they could be taken care of.

  They started up the ramp, and Mr. Garraty started to lose traction and the wheelchair slid back a little, his wife giving a little squeak of anxiety at this. Then Waylon surprised Adair by stepping up behind them.

  “Lemme help you with that,” Waylon mumbled. Mr. Garraty was startled and looked at first like he was going to yell for the cops, but then realized this punky-looking kid was actually trying to be helpful. Adair followed them, pleased, as Waylon helped push the old woman onto the porch.

  “Thank you,” Mr. Garraty said. “I’ve been meaning to fix that ramp. The tar paper on it came loose last year. It’s a mite too slick.”

  Mrs. Garraty stared at Waylon and Adair for a moment through her coke-bottle glasses, frowning; then she smiled, making a great many lines in her face suddenly stand out. “Oh, that’s Adair, Suzanna’s girl, Benny,” she said.

  “Well, for heaven’s sake, as if I don’t know that,” Mr. Garraty said. “I remember her when I was doing the electrics over at her grade school, she was always asking questions.” He smiled at the memory. “And this is her young man, who helped us up here, I expect.”

  “Benny, good gosh, you have no reason to blather out your presumptions like that,” Mrs. Garraty said.

  “Uh, well, anyway,” Waylon said, genuinely embarrassed. “I was just—we were just—so anyway, we’ve got to—”

  “Why don’t you kids come in for some hot chocolate?” Mrs. Garraty asked. “It’s the least we can do.”

  Mr. Garraty chuckled seeing the expressions on their faces. “Look at that, now, you’ve scared them, Judith. The thought of sitting around in our old kitchen with us. I’d be looking for an out myself if I was this boy here. What’s your name, son?”

  “Um, Waylon?”

  “You’re not sure?”

  “Sure, I’m—yeah, it’s—”

  Adair poked Waylon. “He’s teasing you, dumbass. We should go, Mr. Garraty, it’s nice to see you guys. We’ve got to go home.”

  Mr. Garraty was already turning away, unlocking the front door, mumbling as he fumbled with the key. “Well, thank you, Waylon, Adair. You startled me, there, but I’m glad you came up, I might’ve— darn this key.”

  Adair tugged at Waylon’s arm, and the two of them went on their way, Adair waving good-bye to Mrs. Garraty as her husband backed her wheelchair through the door. She vanished through the door, sitting down and backwards, waving.

  Adair looked at Waylon. “That was really—”

  “Shut up,” he said, wincing.

  So she didn’t say it. But she thought, He helped them without thinking about it. That’s what he’s really like.

  She kept hold of his arm.

  December 2

  Major Henri Sta
nner stood outside the Cruller on a cool morning, sipping from a Styrofoam cup and looking down what passed for the main drag in Quiebra. The Cruller’s house coffee tasted like some artificial-flavor designer’s idea of essence of almonds, and maybe vanilla.

  He turned and glanced back into the coffee shop. The red-haired lady behind the counter smiled at him and turned a patient look of gentle inquiry to a little old lady whose greatest joy, probably, was deciding whether to have the almond-paste bearclaw or the apricot-jam filled. Maybe the coffee was second-rate, but the place was better than a Starbucks; it belonged here, had been here for years. It felt singular, and singular felt friendly.

  It was an awkward little town, in some ways, he thought, with its attempt at drumming up business for the merchants by calling the little main drag Quiebra’s “Historic Old Town”; with its increasingly uneasy mix of ghetto-refugee black kids into Jay-Z and 50 Cent and low-slung sedans, and white kids into Kid Rock and four-by-fours.

  He’d been looking the town over for a week, off and on, while supervising the site. He was beginning to like the place, warts and all. And he was worried about Quiebra.

  He dropped the coffee half-finished into a trash can and started for the police department. He was wearing his Air Force officer’s uniform and getting curious stares from some of the passersby. A tall, gangly teenage boy looked at him speculatively.

  “Yo, officer,” the boy said. He wore a Raiders jersey, a lot of pimple cream discoloring his face. He shifted a backpack from one shoulder to the other. “Can you get me into the paratroopers?”

  “I’m not a recruiter, son. Sorry.” Stanner slowed enough to be polite, talking as he sidled by.

  “Whatcha doing here then?”

  Stanner snorted to himself. The generation of bluntness.

  But he smiled and said, “I’m visiting a friend, is all.”

  Going to have to ditch the uniform for sure. Get into some civvies after today.

  He waved and continued on his way. The police station was tucked into something called the Quiebra Department of Public Safety. You had to look close to see the word Police. The building was shiny-new, all red tile and stainless steel, part of an L-shaped complex that included city hall and the fire department.