Crawlers

by John Shirley

  “You’ve disobeyed me, you little shit,” his mom said. “Everything was coming together, finally. I’m finally part of something good, and you’re trying to ruin it. I’m not going to let you do that, you parasitical little bastard. They’re even offering you sex and you turn it down and God knows you used to masturbate till your hands were raw.”

  “Hold him for us,” Mr. Sorenson said, and Waylon heard them coming from inside the showers.

  But Waylon gathered his consciousness together within him.

  And gathered his feet under him, as they spoke.

  And he lunged, propelled himself at his mom headfirst, slammed his head into her gut, expecting to feel metal but instead feeling a web of hardness under the skin, strong but flexible.

  She went whoof and tipped over backwards, and he shot through the doorway of the showers, knocking the tripod machine down behind him to slow the others as he went scrambling past her, leaping up to get by so that her hand sliced through the air just under his ankle, and his tennis shoe came down hard right on her face; he could feel the crunch of her nose breaking right through the sole of his shoe.

  He was stomping his own mother’s face to get going.

  But it wasn’t his mother. It’s not her. And the implication of that threatened to make the whole world go gray and spongy.

  Then he heard something he’d heard many times before—and had never before realized how poignant, how sweet it was: his mother’s own, real, ordinary voice.

  “Run, baby! Run!” She was fighting it, managed to shout once more. “Run!”

  And he was running already, but as he went he half turned like a football player hoping to catch a pass on the run, to see if maybe Mom was okay now, if she was coming with him. But she was gripping Mr. Waxbury’s legs as he came after Waylon, making him stumble into Sorenson—and Waxbury and Sorenson bent down to rend and tear at her neck so that blood splashed the lockers.

  He was almost relieved to see her die—to see that thing die.

  And then he had reached the doors, and the switch panel that controlled the lights for the gymnasium. Hearing running footsteps behind him, he slapped all the switches down. But it didn’t affect the locker room—only the gym.

  The nearest door was closed with a thick chrome chain that wrapped the handles, with a big Yale padlock on one end. But the chain wasn’t locking the door; it was hanging there loose for when they needed it later. Waylon pulled it rattlingly loose and swung it around, hard, smack into Ronald’s face, cracking him on the side of the head. Metal feelers emerged from the pale round face, to writhe spastically as he fell sideways. Completing the turn, riding an empowering surge of adrenaline, shouting wordless defiance at the boy but inwardly sobbing—Mama! My Mom! My— Waylon swung the heavy Yale lock hard into the light control switches, smashing them. Then, flailing the chain, he slammed his shoulder into the door, banging it open, bursting through into the pitch-dark shouting confusion of the gymnasium. He paused, panting.

  Darkness, but in the light from the locker room, he could see the two ghostly nurse’s uniforms, like clothes on invisible women, coming at him, a glint of metal above the necklines. There were adults— adult things—at the exits. They were coming toward him. The only way out was high up on the walls. The open windows.

  To the right of the door was a switch; he’d seen the custodian use it. He slapped down at it, and the automatic bleachers groaned and creakingly began extending from the wall, crenellated shadows in this dimness, knocking people down, pushing them along the floor.

  Waylon whipped the chain hard into the darkness where the nearest nurse’s face would be. The chain connected; he heard her yell and stumble back into the other nurse.

  Waylon jumped onto the nearest extending stairway of bleachers and ran along the moving aluminum benchtops at an upward angle, balancing on the unfolding, rumbling bleachers as if he were surfing on a mechanical wave. But it was hard to see in the darkened room, only a little light angling from the high windows by the ceiling, and Waylon stumbled, fell, losing the chain as he flailed, smacked his knee on a metal edge, shouted, “Shit!” and got to his feet again, though the bleachers were still opening like an accordion under him.

  The kids were yelling, and Waylon shouted, “They’re monsters, they’re turning us into things, they’re not fucking human, you got to run!” His voice echoed, booming above the others, as he stumbled onward.

  Then he heard murmurs, many voices repeating a kind of litany—something about night protocols, night protocols—and suddenly dozens of pairs of small-sourced, long-beam lights switched on in the room. They were tightly defined narrow-beam lights like miniature headlights, the light sources shaped like . . .

  Like eyes. The eyes of the adults in the gym were spearing light. Their eyes shone but not the way a cat’s eyes shone. Like headlights or doubled laser pens, the beams were red-shading-to-green, and they extended, each pair of light beams, all the way across the gymnasium, spearing doubly straight, swinging to take in the screaming children—light piercing this way, turning that way—seeking Waylon, he knew, searching him out in the darkness of the big room.

  Children screaming—

  Children seeing their parents’ eyes light up in the dark with red-green beams, seeing those remorseless beams flicker over them in stripy illumination, seeing their parents get down on all fours, their hands extending on metal stalks from their wrists, to pull themselves up the bleachers with fingers that rippled with far too many joints. Parents propelling themselves along the ground pantherishly, leaping ten yards to come down on all fours; the mothers and fathers becoming hissing crawling human hound-things that smacked the children aside and turned to rend them, slashing with unnatural sideways movements of their jaws as the teenagers and children screamed and ran for the doors.

  Many of the kids escaped out those doors, Waylon saw with some relief. Their erstwhile parents were distracted from him, trying to stop the kids.

  But others came after Waylon. Crawling things in darkness split only by the reflective glow of their double-beamed flashlight eyes and by eye beams from one another; creeping things in house dresses and postal uniforms and suit jackets that came up the now-static bleachers after Waylon, who was frantically scrambling back, away from them, forced upward now toward the wall, the ceiling.

  He paused, panting, on the top bleacher and looked down at them.

  In the lights from their eyes, their gazes crisscrossing like clashing rapiers, he saw them coming. He saw Mr. Sorenson climbing toward him then; and the chunky pale kid Ronald, his face a ruin; and Mr. Waxbury with his PE whistle dangling from his neck; and Mrs. Simmons the English teacher, who’d ripped away her long dress to make it easier to climb, her fat legs like pistons now; and the beer-gutted balding guy in the unseasonal Hawaiian shirt who managed the apartment building where he’d lived with his mom, the guy he suspected of boffing his mother, now grinning at him as he bounded up the bleachers toward him, leaping on all fours, five bleachers at a time.

  Waylon shouted, “No, you fuckers, no fucking way!” and he ran along the top bleacher, barely able to make it out, in slicing occasional probings of their eye beams and the glow from the high windows. He was near the ceiling, coming to the end of the bleachers, a fall of two stories to the floor. And he leapt off the end.

  Caught the tilted-up support pole for a backboard, then swung up parallel to the rafters; the hoop board for PE practice so the girls could shoot baskets, too, that stayed up during games, close beside the end of the bleachers.

  He hung there, knowing they could leap even better than him— and then swung himself, caught another support pole, looped a leg over it.

  But one of them had hit a switch and the hoop’s backboard began lowering itself from the wall, to dangle closer to the floor, and Waylon almost lost his grip as it moved, like it was a machine angrily trying to shake him off.

  Waylon caught a reinforcing wire with one hand, shifted his grip, climbed up the support poles as
the backboard lowered, finding his way in the light from the window he was making his way toward. An open window.

  He crawled across the struts between the support poles, almost falling off as it jerked to a stop, slightly slanted downward, got within reach of a metal rafter, pulled himself up it, heard them bounding onto the metal support poles behind him.

  Still, he was climbing, scurrying along the rafters, afraid to look down now. Then he reached the wall, could just climb down off the rafters, into the window cracked aslant for ventilation, just enough room for a skinny guy to slip squirming through, scraping off pieces of skin as he went, then dropping onto the roof of the adjacent building, ten feet down to the tarry surface. Running across the dampness, smelling night rain and tar and chimney smoke from the houses behind the school.

  Running to the far side of the school, where there was a drainpipe, and a field, and the woods, and the paths up the ridge, and beyond the ridge.

  The big water tank in the hills.

  18

  December 13, night

  The moon had shrunk to a sliver, seemed to have transferred its diminished brilliance to the phosphorescence lighting the white-caps on the sea.

  “Lacey,” Bert said softly. He wanted to show her the sleeping gulls lined up, beaks tucked under wings, perched on a half-buried log in the sand.

  But, gazing out over the bay, she suddenly said, “We need to get out of town. I’ve been looking for Adair and Cal. I have to take them with me. I just can’t leave them. But I can’t find them.”

  Bert nodded. Coming home, he’d found a note shoved under his door; normally she’d have left a message on his answering machine. “You found out some more?”

  “Nothing that I understand—just enough to say that we have to go. We have to get my niece and nephew, and we have to go. I tried to FedEx one of those little devices to an old friend of mine at Cal Tech. It never got to him. And I tried to buy Adair some earrings. For Christmas. At the jewelry store in Old Town Quiebra. The door was open. The cases were empty. I finally talked to the owner. She said a lot of the jewelry had been taken.” She told him the rest of the story about the lady in the jewelry store.

  “That’s fairly bizarre. You didn’t call the police?”

  “I went over there, and—you remember the mayor? You introduced me. He was there behind the desk, instead of a cop—and instead of that lady who used to be there.”

  “The mayor?”

  “Yep. And I got this feeling from him. I just couldn’t tell him anything. And I just walked out. And I’ve been trying to find Adair. And then I thought of you.”

  She was hugging herself against the cold, staring at something shiny on the beach, half-hidden by a smooth-skinned twist of drift-wood.

  He stared down at the shiny thing on the beach, and he sighed. The night before, they’d eaten a dinner she’d cooked for him; they’d shared a bottle of wine—they’d both been just a little tipsy—and they’d kissed. Then they’d made love, and she’d been very patient with him until at last he’d found the way past her defenses, and she’d let go for him.

  In the morning she’d left before he’d been up. She’d left a note, saying she was going shopping, meet him later. Thanks for beautiful evening.

  The denial was over, though. He couldn’t pretend he didn’t know, on some level, what the bright thing on the beach was: a bright thing that stood in for a dark thing. He could no longer tell himself that the dark thing that was snuffling around every corner in Quiebra was going to let them go on and just be lovers. The dark thing was going to hurt them, or make them fight. And there was going to be no other choice, not really.

  She hunkered down to look closer at the thing in the sand, and he hunkered beside her. “It’s like that thing that hit my windshield. The thing that raggedy cat picked up.”

  “Something the cat dragged in,” she murmured, chuckling nervously, still gazing at it in fascination.

  It was about as big as his hand and made Bert think of those little desk toys, small pieces of chrome on magnets you made shapes of, connecting the pieces up any way you wanted within the magnetic field. An impression of the frontier of organization arising from chaos.

  The glittery thing tumbled and writhed along the beach, a coalescence of tiny metal flakes, and when it caught the moonlight and a little gleam from the streetlights at the beach reserve’s parking lot, it seemed to Bert that each was itself another provisional collection of yet smaller parts, each of those in turn a temporary organization of even smaller bits, and so on.

  He put his arm around Lacey’s shoulders. “It’s got something like life about it,” Bert muttered. “But it’s dead.” He felt her shudder, at that.

  Lacey picked up a stick and poked at the living metal chain—and it immediately wrapped itself around the stick and began to spiral up it toward her hand. She froze, mouth open, staring.

  It reached for her fingers.

  Bert slapped the glitter-twisted stick away, hard, and it flipped into the nearest of the gulls sleeping on the half-buried log. The bird squawked and rose in a spasmodic flutter, but the glimmer was already twining its neck, making it look like a mythical bird wearing a necklace.

  The other gulls began to wake, hopping and flying away. It was already flapping vigorously above the others, into the night—and then it fell back, as if shot down by a hunter, to flop at the sand and peck frantically at the air.

  Lacey said, “Oh, Jesus, Bert!” and ran to the gull, reaching out to it.

  “Don’t!” he shouted, hurrying to pull her back.

  She let him, sensing the wisdom of it—as the gull thrashed, the living metal twining up its neck, wending down its throat . . .

  It continued thrashing—for about forty seconds. Then it stiffened. Its head began to twist around on its neck, like a bottletop unscrewing itself, and its wings began to tear loose from its body, extended out from its middle on bloody metal stalks.

  “Goddamn it, Bert, kill it for me, won’t you? Kill the poor thing.”

  He used a long stick to flip the bird onto a rock; then found another rock, big as an anvil. Straining, he carried it over and dropped it, smashing the gull past all use. Blood bubbled out from under the stone, mixed with squirming silver bits.

  They went hurriedly back toward the other end of the beach and the nominal safety of Bert’s condo.

  But stopped when they saw lights on the boat launching ramp. An instinctive caution gripped them both, and holding hands, they walked up on the edge of the concrete ramp that sloped down into the water. Below, a young black man, a white man of middle age, and a young white woman were launching a white-hulled outboard motorboat from a trailer that was hooked to a pickup. They had just pulled the boat into the water, were having to use Coleman lanterns set up in the bed of the truck to help them see.

  It was a cold, blustery night, and there was an air of desperation in their movements, their hushed voices. Bert could hear them panting, the woman speaking between soft sobs, the black man muttering at her to be quiet. The older white man said, “Okay, she’s free, let’s get the fuck out of here.”

  Bert and Lacey hunkered instinctively behind a boulder to watch. Neither one knew exactly why they were hiding.

  Bert was on the edge of asking them what was wrong when he saw a man shape crawling toward them over the rocks piled up in a loose seawall on the other side of the boat launching ramp. The man was dragging himself along the top of the rocks; it looked like dragging at first, until Bert looked closer and saw that he was creeping along the irregular granite pile with the slinky adroitness of an iguana. His arms, glinting aluminum-gray at the joints, extended unnaturally long. The man paused, and his head rotated on his neck, stopping to stare straight upward—though his body was angled facedown. The head tilted on the neck at an angle that should have made broken bones jut from the skin—and Bert recognized the face.

  “Morgenthal,” he muttered.

  “You know—” Staring, Lacey broke off to swallo
w, and wet her lips, her voice breathless. “You know that thing?”

  “Used to be a guy named Morgenthal. Shop teacher at the high school—” He broke off, leaning forward to see better.

  Morgenthal—what had been Morgenthal—had been spotted by the three people who were climbing into the boat. It was gathering itself up on a boulder just above them, poising to jump.

  Both the white man and the woman screamed. The black man pulled a pistol from his waistband and fired. The gun thumped and flashed, but the Morgenthal thing leapt like a tiger, with a calibrated efficiency, coming down on the black man, knocking him into the other two so they all tumbled flat in the boat, which rocked and turned sideways from the ramp.

  Then the Morgenthal thing began to tear them apart, grabbing bits of them, ripping clothes with flesh, tossing shreds of them over his shoulders like a child throwing a tantrum, yet with blurring speed and efficiency, so that the screaming quickly stopped.

  Lacey backed away from the scene, covering her mouth with a hand. She stumbled, fell backwards in the sand, and Bert rushed to help her up, whispering, “Don’t scream, don’t let it hear you. Come on!”

  They ran up toward the path edging the beach and all the way back to the condo.

  Once there they locked the doors, and—in unspoken mutual agreement—jammed chairs against the knobs. Then Lacey turned to Bert and asked, point-blank, “Is this a dream?”

  He reached out and touched the brass doorknob. Cold under his fingers. “No.”

  Then he went to the phone, to call someone, anyone—and heard a recording.

  “Due to the emergency, the phones are now inactive. They are being repaired. Thank you for your patience.” He handed it to Lacey so she could hear for herself as it repeated.

  As she was listening he spotted a piece of paper on the floor, with his name written on it. He picked it up and unfolded it.