Crawlers

by John Shirley

Adair shrugged. She looked around the inside of the little car as Ms. Santavo backed out of the parking space and drove a bit too fast through the parking lot and into the street.

  It was unsettling, leaving school like this in the middle of the day. Didn’t they have to get permission from her parents or something? She decided that she was being a baby to worry about it, though.

  The silence in the car wore on, and began to be oppressive. So Adair said, “This is a Prius, isn’t it, one of those Toyota hybrid cars?”

  “Yes, it certainly is a Prius. It’s a hybrid.” Then Ms. Santavo’s face seemed to crawl within itself. Where had Adair seen that before?

  And Ms. Santavo turned to Adair and said, almost imploringly, “Please, Adair, help me.”

  “What?”

  Then Ms. Santavo’s face became settled. “Help me understand what’s happening with you. Won’t you tell me what’s going on with you and the kids? Are there a lot of kids, concerned, going to see therapists?”

  “Um, well, they were freaked out about Roy. That kid who disappeared. Do you have any idea where he is?”

  Ms. Santavo glanced sharply at her; held her gaze so it seemed to cling to Adair. They were driving along Quiebra Valley Road toward the countryside. “Why would I know where Roy is?”

  Suddenly Adair felt a nasty tingling in her hands and the back of her neck. She hadn’t expected the cold undertone of hostility in that response.

  “I just meant, um, that since you’re the school guidance counselor, maybe you knew if they found him, like he had just, you know, run away.” She found herself afraid to look at Ms. Santavo. Who seemed to be driving the car without looking at the road, the full force of her attention turned to Adair. “Or something.”

  Adair noticed, too, that they were heading out into the countryside. There was nothing out here for miles but woods and cattle pastures, the occasional horse ranch.

  “I see.” Ms. Santavo was still looking at her—but she drove the curving, narrow road flawlessly, and fast, too, about fifteen miles per hour over the speed limit, with little fine corrections of her hands on the wheel.

  She seemed to become aware it was odd for her to drive without looking at the road—and turned away, stared into the windy distance ahead.

  They were about four miles from town already, Adair guessed. The wind was swishing the tops of the trees warningly; a turkey vulture, poised in a leafless oak, ruffled its shiny black feathers as they passed, its wattled-red head cocking at them.

  As the car swept on, flawlessly taking curves, Adair realized, then, that she was scared, and wanted to get away from the car, as quick as possible, as far as possible.

  She turned to look at Ms. Santavo, who seemed suddenly to realize she’d been behaving oddly.

  “My protocol . . .”

  “What?” Adair said, her voice shaking.

  “Who else is worried about the things you were worried about, Adair? I want to know so I can help them.”

  “ ’Kay. Could you tell me where we’re going? There’s no, like, therapists out here, are there?”

  “Certainly. He has a house out here. He works out of his house. His ranch. It’s a ranch out here. It’s really nice. He has Arabian horses. He has cattle. You’ll love this place.”

  They’re all crappy liars, Adair thought. It’s like they’re just now learning to do it.

  Then she thought, for the first time, Who are “they”?

  Adair said, “Look, I don’t want to do this today, not without talking to my parents. I don’t really think I should do anything without their permission. I think they have to sign something. I mean, I just don’t want to go. Let’s—let’s go talk to my mom first.”

  Ms. Santavo seemed to mull that before answering shortly, “I already have permission from your parents.”

  Even if that was true, it wasn’t reassuring. “I don’t want to go, Ms. Santavo. I’m serious.”

  Ms. Santavo didn’t answer. She kept going. Then, after a stretched-out minute, she said, “We’re almost there.”

  Adair thought, Okay, that’s it, that’s all. How the fuck am I going to get out of this car?

  As if in answer, a sheriff ’s cruiser came swinging toward them, around the curve ahead.

  Adair tensed, opened her mouth to yell, started to raise her left hand to signal for help—

  But Ms. Santavo’s hand clamped over Adair’s left wrist. The pain was immediate and electric. She felt the bones start to crack.

  “Silence!” Ms. Santavo said.

  Silence equals death, Adair thought.

  The cruiser was about to pass them on the left.

  Adair shot her right hand out and jerked the steering wheel hard into the oncoming traffic lane.

  Ms. Santavo let go of Adair’s wrist and grabbed at the wheel.

  Adair caught a glimpse of Deputy Sprague’s outraged face; she could tell he was swearing, his hands taut on the wheel as he jerked it to try to avoid a—

  Collision. His bumper cracked into the Prius’s left front fender. Sparks and crumpling metal, the cars spinning, the air bags inflating as the Prius whipped around twice, Ms. Santavo going, “Ah, correctionnnnnnn . . .” as she spun.

  Like a soft explosion, the air bags slammed them back in their seats, filling Adair’s vision. And a smell of chalky chemicals went with them.

  A tornado interval, seconds prolonged for what seemed like a long, long spin, as the car squealed in protest.

  Adair clawing at the air bag, pressing hard on the floor with her feet, yelling, “Ohhhhh . . .” The sound getting louder as they jerked to a stop. “Ohhhh, whoahhhh—shit!”

  She felt a stabbing pain in her neck, then they stopped in a cloud of rubber smoke.

  The air bags deflated automatically. Adair coughed up the white lubricant powder that drifted off the bags.

  Ms. Santavo’s hands pushed the remnants of the air bags away. But her face was crawling within itself. And, her voice hoarse, she said, “Yes, it’s a hybrid,” to no one in particular.

  Adair didn’t wait to see what Ms. Santavo would do. She thumbed the red button on her seat belt—the swelling wrist of her left hand screaming with pain as she did it—and jerked the car door open with her right hand, lurched out of the car, turned to see the guidance counselor leaning toward her, fingers dug deeply into the seat cushion up to the knuckles. Where Adair had been a moment before.

  Adair backed away, then heard Deputy Sprague yell.

  “Hey, there, girl, stay right where you are now!”

  She turned to see him coming at her, looming and lumbering at her, hands clutching, his dark face a rigid mask of tension, angry and focused, and it was that chilling focus that made her turn and run from him, thinking, He’s one of them, too.

  Adair sprinted around the front of the Prius, then back around the steaming cop car, almost running in a circle around Sprague.

  Picturing the Road Runner and the Coyote, she leapt feet first down into the gorge of Quiebra Creek, crunching down onto a steep slope coated with dead leaves and storm-broken branches, then slipping, tumbling, the whirling of the car all over again but in another direction, in the grip of a momentum that had its own plans for her.

  She came to a sudden painful stop, smacking the back of her neck against a log. And found that she was conscious—but unable to move.

  Deputy Sprague stood swaying, a little dizzy, between the smoking, crimped front end of his cruiser and the Prius.

  What the fuck? Where had that kid gone?

  He took a deep breath and steadied himself. Get it together, Sprague.

  “Hey, young lady!” he shouted, toward the gully. “Come on back!”

  Must’ve panicked. Well, this was a hell of a thing.

  He turned to the woman in the Prius, bent to look in at her— and he grimaced with the pain in his back. He was going to turn up with all kinds of back problems later.

  The driver looked vaguely familiar. Hadn’t he seen her at the high school? Someone from
the office.

  “You okay there, ma’am?” he asked.

  She gave him a strange look, her face sort of twitching. She started to get out of the car.

  Sprague shook his head. “No, lady. Unless the car’s on fire you stay right there till we check you out. You could have a concussion. You just sit and try to relax. I’ll get on the radio and call for some help. We’re going to get you thoroughly checked out—and I’ll find that young lady who was with you.”

  Sucking air through his teeth at the pain, he straightened up.

  The radio. Call for help.

  A big extended-cab pickup truck drove up and slowed as it passed by the wreck, a couple of pale cowboy-hatted ranch boys gawking down at them. “Hey, uh, you folks need help there, uh, deputy?”

  Great. Ol’ Deputy Sprague got in a fender bender out there right where he give us a ticket.

  “No, thanks, I’m calling it in,” Sprague told the ranch boys. “We’re okay, best keep moving, don’t want to block up the road, thanks for asking,” rolling it all together in one sentence as he waved them on.

  They nodded and waved and drove on, accelerating to roar around the curve at a speed that probably deserved a ticket. Sprague walked stiffly to his cruiser to call for help.

  Should have called even before he got out of the car, he realized, but he had been shaken up himself. The whole thing had been so damn unexpected.

  He reached through the open car door for the microphone on the squawker—and someone pulled his gun from his holster, from behind.

  “Don’t touch that radio,” the woman said. “I don’t wish to be thoroughly checked out.”

  He turned, wincing at the motion, and saw the little dark woman from the Prius with his revolver in her hand, cocking it and aiming it at his head.

  She went on calmly. “You might get a physician from outside of town. That would be a serious problem.”

  Her calm voice didn’t go with her appearance. Her hair was mussed, her face streaked with white powder, her eyes big and dilated.

  It took him a moment to fully understand that he’d let someone take his gun; now he really was going to look like a jackass. His own motherfucking gun.

  And then he saw her hand tremble. She had it aimed at his head—and he knew she was going to fire.

  He blurted, “Shit!” And he slapped down just as she squeezed the trigger, his hand knocking the muzzle down but not at the ground like he’d hoped. The gun kicked back hard in her hands, flashing and roaring, and he felt something punch him in the upper chest, an expanding circular wave of numbness that made him rock back against the car.

  Sprague had been shot once before, and it wasn’t as big a shock as it might’ve been for someone else. He managed to close his fingers around the revolver’s cylinder, jerked the gun away from her, straight-armed her in the sternum with his other hand so she staggered back away from him.

  Then his knees went all jelly and he started sliding down the car.

  Sliding to a sitting position with his knees drawn up. The pain from the gunshot was really rolling now, an expanding rippling of white-hot burn that sucked all the strength from wherever it went. And it went all through him, again and again, one burning ripple after another.

  Going into shock, he thought. Call in. Get help.

  But his belt squawker wouldn’t work here, he knew, in this end of the valley, with the high hills around, and he couldn’t yet get to his feet to climb into the car.

  The woman was moving again, slipping around the back of the car now. What was wrong with her? Why had she done this?

  Something else was going on. That kid had been running for a reason—running from this woman.

  Sprague coughed; felt a choking pressure building in his left lung. He figured it was filling with blood. He tried to remember what that meant for his chances.

  It couldn’t be good.

  A wetness on his belly and lap made him more aware of blood pumping from the wound in his chest; it came out in pulses, feeling first hot as it hit the air, and then cold as it ran down his chest. His heart was betraying him: each time it pumped, it pulsed more blood out of him.

  Slow down, he told it. Get a compress over it, he told himself.

  But he couldn’t think of how to do that. His mind was molasses.

  He heard the little dark crazy woman speaking to someone he couldn’t see. As if in response, there was a scraping sound, like a weight being dragged, and then a soft whoosh, then clunk as something was heaved—or jumped—to hit the top of his car. He could feel the impact as it shivered through the cruiser’s frame; he felt it in his shoulder blades, up against the fender.

  Then something was slithering along, moving nearer, over the top of the vehicle. He could just glimpse the big sliding movement out of the corner of his eye when he half turned his head.

  Whatever it was, it was coming—crawling toward him, literally crawling over the car.

  Then it leapt over his head.

  And dropped to the ground in front of him, scuttling around crabwise to face him. The way the thing looked penetrated his growing fogginess.

  Not exactly a thing—a he, maybe, a man, of sorts, on all fours, knees and elbows tucked in close to the body, clothes all torn up, face muddy and gouged, ribbons of flesh hanging on one side, the side missing an eye.

  Even so, Sprague could just make out the guy’s face. He put it together with the tatters of the uniform: Yeah, it was one of those young marine guards from the crash site.

  The jarhead’s hair was all overgrown, his face bearded and the beard all matted. His left eye was the one missing, its socket glinting a restless silver. A metal tongue licked from his mouth as he came toward Sprague in little twitchy fits and starts, literally crawling over the asphalt.

  Sprague said, “Oh, no.”

  He raised his gun—but it felt so heavy in his hand now, it was hard to aim. He didn’t think he had the strength to pull the trigger. He tried. It was like pulling a metal staple from a wall with one finger. The thing was poised to jump at him.

  Fire the gun, goddamn it.

  The gun fired, and a piece of the crawling thing’s upper left shoulder exploded. The thing twitched and recoiled—slightly. Sprague knew that wasn’t going to be enough.

  Fire again, you bastard, shoot him! But the gun was too heavy. It sagged into his lap.

  The crawling marine’s head seemed to give a twist, and there was a sound like a tooth coming out of its socket, and the head extruded from his shoulders on a kind of jointed silvery-wet stalk, the mouth opening, opening wider, wider, jaws distending, visibly unhinging like an anaconda’s.

  The head whipped out to snap shut over Sprague’s hand, ripping the gun away, and three, no, four fingers, too, tearing them away as easily as soft candy in its yellow teeth.

  Sprague hadn’t quite the strength to scream. He only moaned and looked at the dripping bony slivers where the upper right part of his hand had been.

  Then the crawling thing’s body crept up, still on all fours, moving just like a lizard to poise over Sprague. Its hand—something wrong with his wrist, something gray and wet there—grabbed Sprague’s left ankle and jerked him toward it so he slammed onto his back. He knew he’d cracked his head on the asphalt, but it was a distant sensation, a doughy kind of pain.

  Then Sprague felt himself gripped—by what, he wasn’t sure, something bristly on the underside of the crawling guy’s body. Gripped and then dragged, leaving a red trail behind him. The marine was dragging him around the car, and it hurt to move that much, real pain breaking through the blanket of numbness. The pain and the shock was making it hard to care where he was going.

  He was vaguely aware, as a darkness closed gradually but inexorably in on him, that he was dragged on his back, off the road, into mud, into the wet, overhanging brush.

  The darkness was almost complete, but he could see the black cross of a turkey vulture soaring over, through the tree leaves. He was almost grateful when the crawling t
hing began its methodical tearing and rending.

  The darkness filling more and more of his vision, like some kid with a black crayon scribbling his idea of night over the scene.

  There was a final decisive rending and a sensation of arctic cold searing deep in his vitals. Then the darkness was complete.

  16

  December 13, noon

  Adair was starting to feel like she could move again. The rubbery feeling in her limbs was receding; the dizziness was a bit less. She could draw her legs up and turn a little.

  Then she saw the silhouette of Ms. Santavo on the edge of the road above her. The quick movement of Ms. Santavo’s head, peering down at her.

  Adair bit the scream down into a whimpering sound, as gravel and clods of dirt and pieces of stick clattered down around her, dislodged by Ms. Santavo’s feet as she skidded down the slope.

  No. She wasn’t going to be buried out here with Roy. She knew they’d killed Roy. She could feel it. Roy was dead.

  She got a sudden, jarring mental image of Cal, talking to people on-line, not thinking about what he was saying.

  And Waylon—the way he went on about conspiracies. They monitored the town’s kids on-line somehow. Were they going after Cal now? And Waylon?

  Ms. Santavo paused. Something was in her hand, maybe a heavy stick, like a club. She came on again, sliding carefully down to poise herself over Adair.

  Adair got her feet under her, waited till Ms. Santavo was almost on top of her—and launched herself upward, propelling her head into Ms. Santavo’s midriff. Which was a lot harder than she expected.

  But Ms. Santavo tilted, fell full length backwards against the steeply angled slope, grunting, dropping a long black shape of some kind; losing her footing, sliding down so her feet became lodged under a curve of the stump.

  Riding the energy of a sudden surge of triumph, Adair vaulted over the log and skidded further down the slope to the gully’s bottom—and saw what it was that Ms. Santavo had dropped.

  Not a club. It was a shotgun. A police shotgun.

  She had a vague sense of having heard gunshots. What if she’d been wrong about Deputy Sprague? He must’ve been shooting at them.