by John Shirley
“Dad?”
Waylon couldn’t hold on any longer. He sank down, hunkering, put his arms around his dad’s knees. Sobbing.
“Dad . . . Daddy . . .”
December 14, 1:00 A.M.
She decided to get off the street for a while, after she saw what happened to Mason’s uncle Ike.
Adair hardly knew the guy. She’d met him a few times. A beefy bully of a man who had collected rifles till he’d had to sell them just to pay the rent and keep himself in beer. But he had at least one rifle left. As she lay on her stomach, resting under an RV parked in the driveway, a half block off San Pablo Dam Road, she saw Uncle Ike carrying a rifle as he half ran, half limped down the middle of the street. One cowboy boot on, the other foot clad only in a dirty white sock. He turned sometimes, to prop the rifle on his shoulder, aim it at no one she could make out. But she hadn’t seen him fire it yet.
Then a pickup pulled around the corner, a Chevy four-by-four with about six young men and a couple of women in the back, all of them white. The big pickup barreled right at Ike; you could tell it was angling to hit him.
He fired at the truck, the rifle making a muzzle-flash and a big thud against the drum of the night air. Spider cracks appeared in the windshield. The pickup swerved its left front wheel into a ditch and fishtailed to a stop. The riders in the back piled out and rushed Uncle Ike, each one carrying a length of pipe or a two-by-four.
Ike was backing up, squealing as he cocked the rifle—that’s exactly what the sound was, Adair decided, a squeal—and managed to fire once more, so that one of the women went down.
But then the others were on him, knocking him off his feet, standing in a circle around him, methodically beating him until he lay still.
She could see that he was still breathing. Then one of them knelt beside him and pried at his mouth.
She couldn’t bring herself to watch anymore. She squirmed backwards from under the RV as quietly as she could, dragging the shotgun, and crept away through a side yard into the backyard of the dark house where the RV was parked. A little fountain was gurgling merrily back here, a plaster nymph pouring water into a plaster bowl. An ax was stuck in a stump next to some firewood.
She was so tired. She needed to rest somewhere. And she couldn’t be on the street with this kind of thing going on—with what was happening between them, and people like Ike who were trying to fight them.
She could hear more gunfire, a little ways away. They must have the town blocked off from the rest of the world, somehow. She’d thought she heard a warning siren once from the refinery. Maybe that was their excuse—a refinery leak. But wouldn’t rescue workers be coming from other towns then?
It was hard to think. She had to go somewhere to rest and think.
She’d seen a darkened hardware store, up on the Dam Road, as the residents sometimes called the big street to the south. She could go through backyards, run across the street before anyone saw her.
She pulled the ax from the stump, not caring about the pain in her injured hand, and began climbing fences. She had to toss the ax and shotgun over each time, gathering them up as she dropped to the ground. She went through the backyards of three houses and she was lucky: no dogs, no one looking out back.
She got to the corner, peered out past a looted liquor store that stank from the broken booze bottles littering its floor. At the sound of sobbing she glanced into the store. Someone out of sight was weeping, muttering in some foreign language, maybe Arabic. It sounded like a man, and she glimpsed his arm stretching out from under an overturned counter, his hand clutching weakly in a puddle of blood.
She spun at the rumble and blare of a fire truck racing erratically down the street—but it almost instantly passed out of sight, over a hill. Were the firemen still firemen?
She looked up and down the four-lane road. Now, go for it. The street was clear—as far as she could tell.
She darted across to the hardware store and around back.
The ax wasn’t very sharp, but after four good whacks it severed the wires running to the alarm box. Whether that would really stop all the alarms, she wasn’t sure, but she thought it was worth trying. She’d made up her mind that she was going to break into the hardware store, no matter what.
It was easier than she’d thought it would be. It was an old building, and the glazed-glass window over the back door was flimsy. She used a trash can for a boost up, dropped the shotgun through to the storeroom inside as carefully as she could, and slithered herself through. Came down painfully on her hands in broken glass, but was only slightly cut because the broken pieces were lying flat.
So far that’s how everything’s been, she thought, sucking blood from a cut on the heel of her hand. The edges turned away from me. But my luck can’t last.
She retrieved the shotgun and went out into the main room. A couple of overhead lights were still on, but the place wasn’t the neat museum of homey goods it should’ve been; it was a mess. Hardware junk was lying all over the floor between the aisles. One of the shelves had been pushed over to lean on another, like a half-fallen domino.
The power tools looked to be completely looted out, gone. The antennas section, empty. The cash registers had been reamed out. The laser scanners taken.
She peered out the front windows. No one she could see out there.
The gun counter had been looted, too—but she did find one of the main things she’d come in here for. Shotgun shells. A big box of them, on the floor behind the broken glass counter.
She stuck those in her coat and went to camping goods. She chose a sleeping bag; she needed that. There, a pup tent. She took them both, tying them together with a length of cord cut with a folding utility knife—and she took the knife, too.
A little snack food sat at the registers—some candy bars, plastic eight-ounce bottles of Sprite and Coca-Cola. A couple of energy bars. Those would be good. She filled a plastic bag with energy bars, candy bars, peanuts, and sodas.
She looked at the phones, considered trying to use them to call—who? If Waylon was right, this was some kind of government operation. Who could you trust? She could try the Highway Patrol, maybe, tell them some of the truth—they’d think she was lying if she told them all she’d seen—but she doubted she’d get through to them in the first place.
Those crawl-things’d be monitoring the phones, even cell phones. She didn’t know what the things were, except that they interfaced with high technology—that much she was sure of.
They monitored the kids on-line somehow, too, so even if she found a computer in a store office somewhere, it wouldn’t be safe to go on-line. So how was she going to contact Cal? If he was still alive . . .
She started sobbing, then, standing by the candy rack, near the front of the store, and she slapped a big jar of miniature screwdrivers so they went spinning to bang against the glass of the front window. And she yelled Cal’s name and she yelled for her mom and dad.
Then a car swung into the parking lot, headlights knifing through the window. It stopped, its headlights still turned on. Two other lights speared out from behind its steering wheel—two narrow red laserlike beams, exactly at the level where eyes should be. The dual, thin red beams swung like seeking eyes, like questing antenna—and somehow she knew that’s pretty much what they were—into the front of the hardware store.
She threw herself flat. The twin beams of red swept the place she’d stood only a moment before, five feet above where she lay on the cool tile. Then there was the sound of the car, moving.
She picked herself up and looked through the front window. The car was driving away. No, it moved only to the next storefront. It pulled up in the next parking lot over, in front of a placed owned by some Chinese people, the Happy Time Good Donuts shop, and the red eye beams cut again into the night. Sweeping.
Then the red lights switched off and the car drove away. And she breathed again.
It hadn’t seen her, she decided. It was checking around.
So maybe she’d be relatively safe here, for tonight, if it had decided the place was empty.
She picked up the tent, the sleeping bag, the food, and went to make camp in the back of the store.
December 14, 2:00 A.M.
It was the tenth time in twenty minutes that Waylon had peered through the slit in the curtains.
They were on the second floor of the motel; nothing much was happening on the street down there. A car went by, once. Then the road seemed achingly quiet.
“Will you get away from that window, boy, and come here and talk to me?” his dad growled.
Dad was sitting in a chair beside the bed of his motel room, his big feet clad in black socks up on the bed. The TV was turned on, the volume low. It was a CNN report about violence in India.
Waylon glanced at his dad. Poor old Dad. Poor old Harold. How could he tell him?
Waylon went over to sit on the bed, and thought he ought to tell Dad what had really happened to Mom. How she had already been dead—how he’d had to kill her all over again. Kill his mother.
He hadn’t been able to tell him that part yet.
He got up and went to the window, looked through the curtain slit.
“Cut that out!” his dad barked.
Waylon turned around, started toward the bed, knew he couldn’t sit down, went back to the window, remembered Dad didn’t want him to go there, went back toward the bed, couldn’t sit, back toward the window. Walking in circles.
Waylon’s dad sighed. “Son, I should never have let her take you.”
Waylon frowned at him. “What?”
“See, her drug problem was maybe worse than you knew. She was doing amphetamines, too, sometimes.”
Waylon grunted. “Duh.”
His dad’s eyebrows bobbed. “You knew?”
“Obvious, Dad.” And my own drug problem was worse than you knew, he thought. But aloud he said, “Mom had custody of me. You couldn’t help it.”
“I should have come sooner. She didn’t have a legal right to take you out of state. I could’ve fought it—but I had been laid off so long, and I was afraid I’d have to take time off from the new job. I spent my life training to work in microwave transmission, wireless—and never got to do it. Not directly. I finally had the chance. I thought she’d come around, or I’d come and get you later. And I just couldn’t deal with her. But it was—” He seemed to crumple up, where he sat, around some pain he didn’t want to tell his son about. “I just wasn’t strong enough, I guess. And you seemed so distant the last couple of years. I guess I thought you didn’t care much if I was there. But I did call—then she changed the number on me. Moved you again. I had to use a goddamned private detective to find you guys.”
Waylon almost said it. Almost told his dad that if he’d come just a little sooner, Mom would still be alive. He could’ve protected her, maybe. Taken them out of town.
Or maybe Dad would be one of them, too. Waylon swallowed. He wanted to hug his dad, but after that first outburst, it was back to the old reserve.
“Dad, you have to understand what’s been going on here. You really have to believe this.”
His dad nodded to the TV. “There’s nothing about it on CNN, or the local news,” his dad said. “Some weird . . . outfit. Taking over the town. And I can’t believe any of this could be happening without some sort of report. Well, it’s time to get serious. We’re going to go to the police, find out what’s happening.”
“Dad, we can’t. They’re—the police are probably all changed. You said you saw some weird stuff when you were coming into town. Well, the phones don’t work, the streets are almost deserted—go ahead, try the phone. And that guy who checked us in—he seemed so scared. I mean, shit, Dad, please, please, get a clue.”
His father sighed. “Things break down for lots of reasons. If you saw someone in that school gym—in the showers—hurting a child, we have to call the police. Anyway, I want to know if they’ve found your mother. She must’ve left when the building caught on fire. Don’t you want to find out if she’s all right?”
Waylon made a soft whimpering sound and found he was smacking his fists on his own forehead.
“Will you stop walking in circles and—and for God’s sake stop hitting yourself. Look, I’m sorry I’ve been so out of touch, but she wouldn’t give me the phone number. I should have written, but I figured she wouldn’t give that to you, either.”
Waylon groaned. “I can’t—you wouldn’t—understand about Mom. You’d have to see for yourself. And it’s too late.”
The tears started streaming again, and he started walking in circles again, clutching the hurt that consumed the whole middle part of him.
His dad came over and stopped him from walking in circles by putting his arms around him.
“Waylon, what the hell’s happened to you, son? You’re not on drugs again?”
“No!”
“Something happened to you,” his dad muttered. “I can tell it’s something real. But this stuff about people turning into—”
There was a scraping, scuttling sound from the roof.
Waylon pulled away, clapped his hand over his dad’s mouth. Whispered, “Listen.”
His dad listened, frowning at the ceiling. “What the hell is someone doing on the roof at this hour?” Shaking his head, he pulled on his loafers, got up, and started toward the door. “I’m just going to have a look. You stay here, Waylon. I’ll just—”
“Don’t go outside!”
But before he could react, his dad had pushed past him, was opening the door. A dark shape leapt out on the walkway.
“Dad!”
Waylon tried to pull him back—and then found himself staring, along with his dad, at what was happening outside.
Dozens of people were passing by, all in the same direction. Some of them were driving, but lots of them were on foot, many of them on all fours. They were crawling, loping on altered, extended limbs, down the sidewalks, in the middle of the street—and over rooftops. Some of them clung to the sides of the houses, echoing locusts again, scuttling along after one another.
There were fat housewives and skinny college students and men in firemen’s yellow-and-black.
There was a man in a priest’s black shirt and collar but wearing no pants at all.
There was a middle-aged heavyset black lady Waylon remembered from the cash register at Albertsons supermarket.
There were bearded men in turbans from the Sikh temple, and one or two people who were stark naked.
More and more people of all kinds, with repellently protracted arms and legs, crawling over the houses, the streets, through the bushes. Like a migration of locusts. All moving in the same direction.
“They’re going toward the cemetery,” Waylon muttered. And it came to him that the handmade transmitter dishes on the roofs were all pointed that way, too.
“Okay,” his dad said huskily, drawing Waylon back and closing the door. “I think I believe you.”
Hands shaking, Waylon’s dad locked the door and put the chain over it. He turned out the light and backed away till he ran into the bed. He fell back to sit on it, still staring, mouth open, at the door.
Waylon sat beside him, and his dad silently put his arm over his shoulders.
Then Waylon let the words pour out with his tears, with the snot streaming from his nose.
Told his dad what had happened to Mom.
December 14, 7:00 A.M.
Maybe it was the moths that turned me in, Adair thought, and almost laughed at the idea.
But someone was moving around, outside the hardware store. Male voices; the laboring engine of a good-size vehicle.
Adair had slept inside the pup tent—slept in a tent though she was indoors, between two cardboard crates. She’d felt safer, sleeping in the tent, for no good reason. She had wakened just before dawn from nightmares that seemed to flow seamlessly together with real life.
She’d gone to look out the front window, afraid what she mi
ght see, and what might see her—but all she saw were the moths.
They were near the front door of the hardware store, flying in box-shaped formation; in rigid, right-angle turns, straight-line ways that moths shouldn’t fly.
It seemed to her they’d sensed her watching and had come over to the glass to look back in at her. So she’d retreated into the back room again.
Now, at maybe seven in the morning, someone was coming. She had slept badly, but she’d slept. She had made herself eat something. She had loaded the shotgun. She didn’t want to wait for them to come in and corner her.
She made sure the safety was off and unlocked the back door, stepped blinking out into the dull morning light.
Mason’s van was pulled up, thirty feet from the door. Cal and Mason sat in the van just gaping at her, Mason behind the wheel.
“Whoa,” Mason said. “There she is.”
“Adair?” Cal said, getting out of the van. Coming over to her as he went on. “Jesus! Where have you been! The cops have been looking for you. Me and Mason were looking for you all night!”
She stared at them. “How did you know I was here?”
“Bill Corazon’s dad said he saw you going around the back of the store last night.”
But she was hardly listening. She had started crying—and put her arms around him.
“Cal—Mom and Dad, that woman from the school, the counselor.”
He stepped back from her, his hands on her shoulders. “Adair, I know. I know. Listen, just come on. I’ve got a plan.”
He took the shotgun from her, and she started ahead of him toward the van, a place of refuge, ready and waiting.
And then she saw Mason looking at her. Looking at her intently.
“Mason.” Adair shook her head. She turned away from the van and walked around the corner of the hardware store.
“Where the fuck are you going?” Cal called after her.
“I just want to see if any of them are—are out there.”
She waited till Cal followed her around the corner, spoke to him in a whisper. “Cal, I don’t trust him. Mason. At the site—there was something wrong with him then. I swear. I thought I was seeing things, but I wasn’t. Ms. Santavo, she—are you listening to me?”
