Crawlers

by John Shirley

  “We’ve had to do a lot of experimenting, Joe. Some of the early formats were . . . a mess. But as you see, we’ve almost got it down to an art form now. The changeover can happen in a minute or two now.”

  Joe was trying not to look at the door. “And you’re saying I don’t have to take that last trip to the cemetery?”

  “Funny you should say that. You have to go there in one sense. But not to die. We’re using the cemetery, see. Central’s there. It turns out to be the place where there’s the best insulation against electromagnetic fields from the outside. We have a risk problem with—” He broke off, seemed to be listening. “No need to go into that with you. Well, you ready to be rejuvenated, Joe? What do you say?”

  Joe shook his head. “Garraty—or whatever you are—you can kiss my ass. I figured what you are, more or less. And I’ll tell you something. I ain’t much—but I ain’t ever going to be that.”

  “Joe, what else have you got? A choice between the misery of old age, isolation, endless loneliness—and oblivion? Old age is a bitch, Joe. I remember when I realized I was getting old. I was in my early fifties. It’s like being told you have a terminal disease, and seeing the first symptoms of that disease come on you. That’s how it felt. But not now, not the way I am now. This way, Joe, you live pretty much forever.”

  Joe swallowed. His mouth was suddenly so dry, it was hard to do. “Forever?”

  “Well, there’s a little something called entropy that will eventually take its toll—in maybe ten thousand years.”

  “Ten thousand!” It made him tired just to think of it. “Ten thousand years? You’ve gotta be kidding.”

  “Maybe longer. If you join us, all pain ends for you, Joe. All sickness. All weariness. All sadness. All uncertainty, gone. It’s all over with. You get to be part of something beautiful, growing like the patterns in a snowflake. You’d be useful again! If only you could see it the way I do, you’d say yes in a hot second.”

  “But, I wouldn’t be me anymore.”

  “That’s only partly true. They leave you a vestige. It’s enough. How much were you ever really yourself anyway? People kid themselves about that, Joe. Why, one moment they’re in a good mood, then they’re angry and hurt. People are as changeable as fog in a wind, Joe. Wisping this way and that. That ain’t real anyhow.”

  “Speak for yourself. Tell me something. You folks are from, what—outer space?”

  Garraty shook his head, smiling. “Not at all. Right here on earth. We’re not alien creatures, not at all. What we are—all you need to know is, we’re part of something grand now. My missus and I are happy as hell in it. Lots of your friends, too, Joe. Why Harry Delveccio just joined us, and he’s going great guns.”

  “Harry! He’s one of you?”

  “He is. Happy as a goddamned clam. Was him who suggested you.”

  “Whatever he is now suggested me. Harry would never do that. So you, whatever you are, you’re all one thing, really, eh?”

  “Yes and no—but more yes than no.”

  “It’s like—” Joe felt his heart squeeze in his chest. “It’s like something’s eating the town. One person at a time.”

  “We don’t literally eat human flesh—though we would if we ran out of other fuels—oh, I see. A figure of speech. Yes, people are . . . consumed into the overall organism, digested, in a way, made part of the All of Us. But it’s not as if they’re eaten.”

  “Bullshit. You’ve been eaten. You’re eating my town.”

  “Call it what you like. After you, I’m going to be going from room to room here, converting. We need the framework, dontcha know. So what do you say, Joe? The easy way? The way that wastes the least energy, works fastest? All you have to do is open your mouth and close your eyes and blank your mind and—think yes.”

  Joe snorted and shook his head. He leaned a little forward as he said it. “No.”

  “You mean that? The other way is slower and it starts with a reset. Hurts like hell, and it’s so inconvenient to the All of Us.”

  “Inconvenient to the All of Us.” Joe was pointing the gun at Garraty now. “Fuck the All of Us. I don’t think you’re going to be recruiting anywhere here tonight, goddamn you, you misbegotten coldhearted son of a bitch.”

  Garraty smiled—and then he had Joe’s gun in his hand.

  Joe felt the gun go. It was a bullwhip crack, the way Garraty’s hand moved. Joe’s hand still stung from it.

  “This can’t be, this ain’t what I—” Joe began.

  It was almost inexpressible. He had allowed himself to visualize a bunch of ways it would end for him, but this sure as hell wasn’t one of them.

  Then again, maybe it wasn’t so strange. Really, it was just another way for the world to go on rolling right over him.

  But there was no reason for him to take it sitting down. He’d taken it sitting down all his life, watching television, dying a little more each night in prime time. The hell with that.

  Garraty smiled blandly. And Joe knew Garraty was about to kill him.

  Joe stood up and lurched at him, hands balled into fists—and Garraty stopped him dead, grabbing him by the throat. Joe felt like a small boy in a big man’s hand.

  Garraty put the gun aside, on the bureau, then he brought his free hand over to Joe’s head.

  Joe got off a yell or two, but that was something the night nurses had learned to ignore; old folks yelled in the night all the time, what with one thing and another. And of course the security guard wasn’t around to hear it.

  December 10, morning

  Helen Faraday prided herself on not suffering fools. She’d been serving the Lord as a lay minister at the Quiebra Church of Jesus the Annointed for eighteen years, devoting all her spare time to it. It was she who’d seen to it that the previous minister, Reverend Dalbreth, was hounded out after he was found sleeping with a married lady, and it was she who told Mrs. Lambert that her son Eli had been feeling up that Pakistani girl in the baptismal room after hours—leading to a confrontation, which led to Eli running away to become a heroin addict in the city now, which just showed that character will out. Certainly she wasn’t going to accept Reverend Nyeth’s young wife building some kind of sick Internet-porn device in the church basement. She’d heard Mary Nyeth making a sexy joke to another of the church’s ladies, and she’d seen her holding those little Bible-study boys a bit too close if you know what I mean, and it was very likely she was some kind of child-porn person. Of course, Helen couldn’t come out and say that without proof. But she would get her proof today.

  So here she was early in the morning, before anyone else, going down the stairs into the old Witnessing Room. They didn’t use it anymore, since that incident a couple of years ago where that confused widow Mrs. Runciter had become convinced the Angelic Tongues were telling her the church was overrun by demons, and she tried to attack the minister and had to go to the hospital, and the laying on of hands had put her in that screaming fit that never did end.

  Remembering the incident made Helen a bit nervous about descending the rickety stairway, flashlight in hand, into the dark church basement, where the skinny hysterical Judy Runciter had writhed and made blood foam from her mouth as she pointed at each of the church leaders in turn and screamed “Satan sucks through you, Satan sucks through you! Aghibia-habya-meleth-takorda-sha-bababba!” over and over again.

  Mrs. Runciter had smashed the lightbulb and begun clawing at them in the dark, and no one had ever replaced the light down here, after they’d all run screaming upstairs. The Baptists coming out of the church next door that Sunday had thought it all quite smirkily funny as the Church of Jesus the Annointed members milled frantically in the parking lot.

  Helen paused, hearing the stairs creak under her. She was a trifle overweight, enough that she was a tad worried about these stairs collapsing, and she could hear herself breathing, so strangely loud, through her mouth. The air seemed musty and cold and heavy.

  She swung the flashlight beam around as she re
ached the bottom stair, and there was the old braided rug, and the upright piano, both of them coated in dust, and a trail of footprints leading through that dust. The footprints went from the stairs to the low stage at her left, where a cobwebby purple curtain stood, slightly parted. Beyond it was the machine that mumbled to itself, said things that were like what she supposed the Internet had to be. Babbling that made no sense. And she’d seen Mrs. Nyeth down here, standing over the machine.

  She crossed to the low stage and stepped up on it, pushing through the curtains. There was the workbench set up against the wall behind the curtains, the plastered wall painted with a cartoonish mural of Jesus leading two smiling children into a rainbow-arched heaven.

  Her flashlight found an entirely different sort of contraption on the workbench now, something like a satellite dish but not exactly. It didn’t give out a sound like the other machine had, as she played the flashlight over its parts. The only sound was the creaking . . .

  . . . of the basement stairs.

  She turned and saw both the Nyeths coming down here: Mrs. Nyeth, a slight red-haired figure in a brown shift and little flat shoes, leading the way; Reverend Nyeth, a man in a turtleneck sweater, with a high forehead and a perpetually purse-mouthed, skeptical look, following with his flashlight.

  Helen switched off her own flashlight and retreated into the dim back corner of the stage area, near the curtain.

  “Well, whatever it is you have to show me, Mary,” the reverend was saying, “I don’t see why it couldn’t wait till I put a lightbulb in down here.” He paused to look around. “It’s absurd, you know, not using this space just because someone lost touch with her common sense.”

  “I agree, Charles,” Mary Nyeth said. “I have been using it, in fact. As for a lightbulb, the new models won’t need them, and you’ll be one of the new models.”

  “I’ll be what?”

  “Never mind. I’ll show you, right in here.”

  Helen held her breath and tried to make herself small as Mary Nyeth stepped through the curtain and showed the contraption on the workbench to her husband.

  “What the dickens is that thing? Where did it come from?”

  “It’s a transmitter, Charles. It boosts a certain carrier wave. I made that transmitter myself.”

  “You made it? Come now.”

  “Lots of people have been making them. Haven’t you seen them around town?”

  “Now that you mention it—Mary, what’s going on? Will you tell me, in heaven’s name?”

  “Just relax. It won’t hurt, not so much, if you relax.”

  Then Helen watched as little Mary Nyeth took her larger, more powerful husband by the throat and bore him down backwards, the reverend struggling and calling, “Mary, what? Mary! What—don’t!”

  And she watched as Mary knelt on her husband’s chest and extruded a bristly, living metal stalk from her mouth and forced it down his throat from her own.

  Helen didn’t scream—she only just managed not to scream—but she knew Mary must have noticed her pushing through the curtain and fumbling through the darkness to the stairs, clawing her way up them on her hands, and barking her knees and shins.

  She got out the side door and to the little parking lot—some corner of her mind was amazed she could move as quickly as that—and she got to the minivan she used to take the kids to Vacation Bible School and was driving away before Mary came out, staring after her.

  And Helen thought, Mrs. Runciter was right after all.

  But she daren’t say that to the police. She’d have to get them to come out here with some other story.

  When she got home, breathing hard, slick with sweat under her dress, she dashed right to the phone on the kitchen counter and called 911.

  “Yes, hello?” Her own voice sounded shrill in her ears. “I want to report . . . an attack. A woman attacked her husband at the church. She forced some kind of metal thing down his throat.”

  “And your name?”

  “Helen Faraday.” Oh, Lordy, her mouth was dry. She felt faint, dizzy.

  “Stay where you are and we’ll send someone over.”

  “No, please, send someone to the church.”

  “Certainly. Just stay where you are.”

  The line went dead, and Helen hung up. Then it occurred to her that they hadn’t asked what church or which people.

  She found that she was afraid to call back, though she wasn’t sure why. Well, the police would be here in a few minutes. She would tell them which church. And who.

  Mrs. Nyeth killed the Reverend Nyeth, at the Church of Jesus the Annointed, she would say.

  But was that woman Mary Nyeth? It was hard to think of her as Mary Nyeth now.

  Helen allowed herself some of the rosé wine she kept for special occasions, and she was almost calmed down when it came to her that she had seen a lot of those transmitter things around town—things like the device this demonic woman was building in the basement.

  Why should it be a surprise that the devil was using technology? Porn had exploded across the Internet, television had become hideously sexy, and people babbled on cell phones when they should be praying.

  Then something more occurred to her. The transmitters were everywhere in Quiebra, so this must be some kind of citywide conspiracy. How far did it go? How could they get away with it, without the help of—

  A sharp knock came on the door. A new wave of panic swept her from her stool at the counter, sending her dashing to the back door. She would go through the back gate into that little dirt alley between the houses and get away from there.

  But the police were outside the back door, too, and they didn’t bother with an explanation. There was a white officer named Wharton, from his name tag, and a Chinese-looking one named Chen. They just grabbed her by her forearms and dragged her screaming into the back of the police van in the alley. It was one of those big black-and-white vans, and there was a short, dark-skinned, sorrowful-eyed Hispanic man in there, cuffed to a metal post.

  She struggled and yelled, “Someone help me!” and almost pulled loose. Then one of the officers—she wasn’t sure which—hit her, once, just above the right ear, with some kind of truncheon, and she fell sick and dizzy to her knees, close by the Hispanic man. They grabbed her wrists roughly and cuffed her, then climbed out, without saying a word. She felt hot wet blood running down her ear, onto her shoulder.

  They slammed the back doors of the van with a steely clang and got in the front, started the engine. And drove the van away.

  “I’m sorry they’ve hurt you,” the Hispanic man said.

  She looked up at him—wincing at the pain the movement caused— and she burst into tears. He nodded sympathetically as she wept and the van drove on and on.

  After a couple of minutes, she swallowed her sobs and asked, “Where are they taking us?”

  “I think, to the cemetery . . . or to a building near it.” He had no Latino accent. Central Californian. “From what I could find out, there’s a tunnel in an old barn there that goes under the cemetery.”

  She saw then that he wore a police blouse, but it was torn open, buttons missing, and his T-shirt was stained with blood. “You’re— you’re a policeman, too?”

  “They’re not police—not anymore. But I’m still a police officer. Yes. That’s why I said I’m sorry.” He spoke softly, so she could just make him out over the rumble of the van. He seemed to speak only as a kind of afterthought. She had the feeling he’d already given himself up for dead. “It was my job to stop them,” he went on. “Me and some others who found out. They haven’t taken over all the department, you understand. They don’t seem able to change everyone over at once. They have to make something—something they use in that changeover first, and that takes time. A few of the fellows at the station are left, and some of them only kind of half know. I was suspicious, called over to the Justice Department, Oakland PD. I called all over the Bay Area. I even tried to call Washington.” He chuckled sadly. “I thought I
was talking to the Justice Department and the Oakland PD. Only, I wasn’t. They’ve taken over all the phone lines. They monitor cell phone output, too. Calls out to any kind of law enforcement office are routed back to . . . I don’t know what you call it, some kind of switchboard they control. And you’re not talking to who you think you’re talking to. If there’s anything in the call that’s dangerous to them, they arrange for you to be picked up. If it’s like a liquor store robbery, they switch it over to the real cops, I guess, and you wonder why you have to report it twice. I could have gone to Oakland in person, but they watch you too close for that.” He shrugged and swallowed hard. “Lots of people have been taken, the way you and I have, when they tried—tried to call for help . . .”

  His voice trailed off. The van rumbled on, and she felt close to throwing up on the floor. She made urping sounds, but she kept it down.

  After a time he added, “Yeah, they—they have the town pretty well sealed off, and they watch places that could be dangerous to them, outside town.” His voice broke, then. He turned his face away from her.

  “What will they do to us?”

  He didn’t answer her for a while. Then, as the van was pulling up somewhere, he said, “If they can convert you, they will. Or they’ll kill you and use you for parts.”

  Helen started praying, then, and went into a kind of trance, even speaking in tongues, as the back of the van opened and they came and collected her and the Hispanic cop.

  She kept waiting for God to intervene, as they dragged the two of them onto the red-stained wooden floor of the old barn, but—as they methodically cut off the little dark policeman’s head—she began to suspect that God wasn’t going to answer, this time.

  December 10, afternoon

  Ms. Santavo was a petite little woman, shorter than Adair, who wore ladies’ business suits that she had to have specially made for her. They didn’t make them in children’s sizes. She was actually half Vietnamese, half Filipino, if Adair remembered rightly, married to a Mexican guy named Santavo.