Crawlers

by John Shirley

  Mother muttered something that sounded like, “That’s protocol for pending conversion, frequency seventy-eight-four.” Or something close to that. And then she dragged Mrs. Schimmel into the cemetery.

  Mrs. Schimmel took up the shrieking again, as if someone had cued her, and the two of them vanished down a big hole in the cemetery ground: first Mother and then, pop, down went Mrs. Schimmel, the old woman’s shrieks becoming echoey and harder and harder to hear.

  Deputy Sprague turned to Vinnie and then trotted out into view, revealing the rest of himself. He was like a man who’d had his arms and legs cut off and had been given something like a bug’s legs to replace them; only, the six limbs he’d been given were two human legs, maybe his own, stretched out where his arms should have been, the toes replaced with metal grippers and connected to the shoulders by wet gray metal pistons; the other limbs were mismatched arms from white people, contrasting with his skin, one of them with a fading eagle tattoo, each one connected to the main body with metal parts, ball joints, things cut from scavenged materials and fused into the flesh with a sheath that seemed alive, quivering within itself.

  Deputy Sprague’s neck was gone, replaced with a metal stalk that stretched out farther now, at least twenty-four inches more, so he could tilt his head on the long gray stalk to look back at Vinnie.

  The face was drooling, and long past horror. Torn up some— but it was Deputy Sprague’s face.

  “There’s no more of us coming in this gate for a couple of minutes, and if you run across the street, Vinnie,” Sprague said, in a voice that sounded like Deputy Sprague and sounded like a machine voice, too, “and go through that hole in the fence the big fella made, why, I don’t expect they’ll see you, and you might make it up into those hills. Tell the kids I’ve tried to keep them away from that tank, but if they do a close inspection of my thoughts—wait—” He turned and looked at the cemetery. “Protocol Camouflage horizontal to vertical,” he said. Then he turned back to Vinnie. “Okay for now. But not soon. Get up there, the hills over the school.”

  Then Deputy Sprague turned and scuttled like a beetle across the cemetery and dropped down into one of the holes.

  Vinnie ran through the gate, and across the street, and through the gap in the wooden fence, leaving a trail of lost words in the air behind him.

  22

  December 14, early evening

  Adair kept watch on the bedroom window. The curtains were closed, but she could tell it was starting to get dark out. And things were moving out there. Chattering and crawling north, always to the north.

  She was huddled against the padded headboard of Bert’s bed, her feet under the rumpled blanket. Waylon sat next to her, with a fireplace poker across his lap.

  Like a fireplace poker would stop a crawler, she thought.

  But she was glad Waylon was there. Glad he was thinking about protecting her. Even glad he was foolish enough to believe they could come out of this alive.

  Waylon’s dad was sitting on the end of the bed, looking over Stanner’s shoulder. “That’s the schematic I wanted,” Stanner said. He was at Bert’s desk, using his PC. “But I don’t know if I can build the thing. I thought maybe I could but . . .” He shook his head and swore to himself.

  “You’re hella lucky they didn’t ream that computer out for the parts,” Waylon said.

  Cruzon was sitting in a kitchen chair he’d carried in here. He stared dully at the computer and nodded. “Yeah. All over town, that happen.”

  Waylon’s dad glanced at Cruzon. “How you feeling, Commander?”

  Cruzon shrugged. “I’m okay. I’m just . . . worried about my kids. My wife.”

  Stanner peered at the image on the computer screen. “Looks like a design for an electromagnetic pulse generator.” There was just an edge of excitement in his voice. “DARPA worked one up like this—seems to be based on it. To be dropped by parachute, throw out the enemy’s communications system. And I think the Facility was thinking of using it at Lab 23—but they weren’t sure it would work and they couldn’t wait. So they used one of their bigger non-nuclear bombs.”

  “Of course, it’s theoretical,” Waylon’s dad said, nodding at the schematic. “Maybe it won’t work. But if it works, if the pulse goes out, this generator would have a tremendous effect. It’s a very sophisticated design.”

  The major turned and looked at Waylon’s dad with his eyebrows raised. “You’re familiar?”

  “I work in electromagnetics,” he said, suddenly a little embarrassed. “Field generation and dampening. For wireless transmission. Palm Pilots, wrist uplink units, that kind of thing.”

  “I’m sorry, with all this lunacy,” Stanner said, “I didn’t get your name. I’m Henri Stanner.”

  “Harold Kulick,” Waylon’s dad said, and they shook hands. “I was in the Air Force myself, for a couple of hitches, and I don’t buy into this business of you being responsible for this mess. I know how it goes.”

  “Cruzon,” the cop said, shaking Harold’s hand in turn.

  Stanner chewed a lip and glanced at the open door. Adair figured he was thinking about his daughter Shannon—a little ways down the hall, in the kitchen, talking to Lacey and probably still saying how horrible he was.

  Cruzon pointed at the screen. “So you know this stuff, Harold.”

  “I’ve noticed something else,” Harold said. “The equipment on the roof, when we came in here—on a lot of roofs. A lot of those parts are there. It might be possible to put together a pulse generator out of a couple of those, and a car battery, say. See, those things on the roof, they’re built along the same principles, from what you were telling me. Only, it seems they transmit information in powerful waves on a lot of frequencies at once. They could also transmit a pulse— so maybe we could use their own gear against them. Wipe their programming and shut them down.”

  “Only if it’s close to their cluster,” Stanner muttered.

  “Their what?”

  “They’re a group mind, with a lot of units spread out over Quiebra—and this unit wouldn’t have the power to reach them all. But there’s a sort of living CPU, the cluster where the greatest mass of nanocells is converged. Probably a lot of interlocked hosts there. If you plant it close to that, it’ll wipe it—and the surge’ll be transmitted to all the others from there.”

  “Theoretically,” Cruzon said. “Harold’s not sure.”

  Adair could see he doubted all this. He seemed right on the edge of giving in to despair.

  “Yeah,” Stanner admitted. “Theoretically. But it’s all I’ve got.” He glanced at the window again. “Judging from what you and Waylon saw, they seem to be converging to the north—probably to get ready for their spawning.”

  “Ugh,” Waylon said. “Spawning.”

  “Or call it dissemination or—wait, Breakenridge called it the Big Seeding. So they’ll get together for that, concentrate their energies. They might be vulnerable then.”

  Waylon sat up straight on the bed. “You’re saying, you actually might be able to—”

  Stanner shrugged. “Worth a shot. A strong enough EM pulse would wipe out their memories, basically unprogram them. They’d just . . . disintegrate into lifeless parts.”

  “Then that’s what the government was planning?” Cruzon asked. “That’s why Bentwaters had the schematic?”

  Stanner shrugged. “He had it because I asked for it. And I think it was something he wanted to push—something he was hoping to implement, somehow. But against orders—so he had to hide the specs. The Facility didn’t think it would . . . cover all the bases.”

  “Like what?” Harold asked.

  Stanner sighed. “Like, covering up the evidence. A hot enough bomb’ll do that. Maybe . . . thermobarics.”

  Cruzon blurted, “They’re going to bomb the town ?”

  “It’s possible,” Stanner admitted. “They’ll figure it’s a trade-off—Quiebra for the rest of the country. Maybe the world.”

  “Jesus fuck!” Waylo
n muttered.

  “Yes, that just about says it all, Waylon,” Harold muttered. “But then, I can’t say I’m really surprised.”

  Cruzon turned to Stanner, his manner much colder now. “When will this happen?”

  Stanner cleared his throat. “I don’t know when. We’d be better off just taking our chances, breaking through the crawlers’ lines, but if there’s a chance we can stop this thing, maybe we can stop the bombing, too.”

  Cruzon said slowly, “How long to build that thing?”

  Harold answered thoughtfully, “I was looking at those rigs on the roof, when we were outside. It wouldn’t take long, really. It’s just a matter of modifications. I’ll have to identify their carrier wave, though.”

  “Can you do that?” Cruzon looked at the window. Probably picturing his family burning up in a thermobaric bomb explosion.

  “Maybe. I can use a radio to work it out, I think.”

  Adair heard a long low growling yowl. Turned to see the cat pacing, sniffing the air, the fur on its back going up.

  “If you’re gonna get in close enough with that thing,” Waylon said, “somebody’s got to get their attention, set up a distraction. Anyway, shit, we hella need to let the kids know what’s going on. And I think they’re gonna want to help. Those things fucking killed their parents.”

  “Where do we find these kids?” Harold asked.

  “Up in the hills,” Waylon said. “There’s a plan to meet up there. And if it doesn’t work, that’s one way out of town with, like, lots of cover.”

  Stanner smiled wearily at Adair. “You see?” he said. “Maybe we can bring the world back again—almost the way it was.”

  She nodded her head slowly, because he seemed to want some kind of response from her.

  But she didn’t believe it.

  The cat was pacing, pacing . . .

  December 14, evening

  Harold and Bert and Stanner and Cruzon unscrewed two of the transmitters from the roof of the apartment building—finding no one else in the building at all.

  That is, no one alive. They’d found parts of someone, on a concrete balcony—pieces resembling the victim of a “torso murderer”— but no one commented on that. It was just how it was now.

  They organized the transmitters and placed them, along with every other piece of applicable equipment they could find, into an old packing case of Bert’s, along with his computer and a couple of car batteries taken from abandoned minivans on the street.

  While Harold organized the electronics, Stanner and Bert and Cruzon cautiously scouted the dark, deserted complex of beachside condos, found the looted remains of a body in a Chevy SUV stopped at a stop sign. The back window of the SUV was broken inward, glass shattered over the body of a child in the back; a girl of about eleven with her neck broken, her eyes and arms missing.

  Stanner was glad Shannon and Adair were with Lacey back at Bert’s place. He and Bert laid the girl’s body tenderly on a mattress in an open garage nearby, Cruzon covering her white, ravaged face with a sleeping bag. They returned glumly to the SUV. The keys were there, but they also found parts of what was probably one of the girl’s parents scattered around the floor of the front seat. Judging from the hips and crotch, a man. The crawlers apparently had orders for specific body parts, and took only what they needed.

  Bert stared at this salad of body parts—and turned away to be sick in the gutter. Stanner only felt sick. Cruzon and Stanner gathered the parts up in a plastic garbage sack; after a while Bert helped them. They put those in the open garage, too.

  “I guess whoever it was stopped at a stop sign,” Cruzon muttered, “and the crawlers caught up with them.”

  Bert snorted. “A stop sign—with the crawlers after them. Just the habit of obedience.”

  Stanner shook his head. “I think he chose that moment to fight back, is all.” The SUV was still in park, and the key was switched on. Stanner guessed that the guy had put it in park so he could grab at the shotgun that lay in the backseat, but he hadn’t got it into play in time. The car had remained in place, running in idle till it ran out of gas. There was a three-gallon gas can in the backseat.

  Stanner took the gas can and poured its contents into the SUV’s tank, Bert standing beside him with a shotgun in his hand, Cruzon on the other side of the car, pistol ready. As the fuel gurgled in, Stanner squinted up at the sky.

  Bert looked at him. “You looking for . . . bombers?”

  Stanner glanced at him. Then he admitted, “I guess I am. I don’t know when to expect them. If we can make it unnecessary, maybe they won’t have to come. So let’s hurry the hell up.” He tossed the gas can aside. They got into the SUV, drove back to Bert’s.

  Bert left the shotgun leaning against the wall in the living room. They found the others gathered in the bedroom.

  As they came in, Harold and Waylon were hefting the open packing case of equipment onto the bed. They all stood around it, Waylon with his fireplace poker, Cruzon with his hand on his gun: the men and Lacey looking at the case, trying to decide if they should take anything else with them. Shannon was in the living room with Adair.

  But then Adair came to stand in the doorway, with the skinny black cat in her arms. The cat seemed restless, staring around with its ears laid back. “The cat is staring at the windows,” Adair said. “And I feel it, too. Mom and Dad and the others.”

  They looked at her, surprised that she’d suddenly begun speaking again.

  Then the realization hit Stanner. “What do you mean you feel them?” Stanner said.

  No one answered for a moment, and he started toward Adair, thinking he had to do whatever was necessary to protect Shannon.

  And had the crawlers infected his daughter? She’d been in the next room, alone with Adair.

  Reaching for Adair, he said to the others, “We’d better hold her down, look her over. She could’ve been infected, converted by them at some point. It’s not always obvious when it happens.”

  Waylon snarled, “Motherfucker!” and swung the poker hard against Stanner’s upper arm.

  Recoiling from the stinging pain, Stanner spun to face Waylon, who was circling him, putting himself in between Adair and Stanner.

  Waylon half crouched, the poker gripped in both hands.

  “Back off, you fucking black-chopper drone! She just gets, like, intuitions sometimes, so just back the fuck off!”

  “I only want to examine her.”

  “I said no! She’s been through enough!”

  “Cruzon,” Stanner said grimly, rubbing his bruised arm. “Toss me your gun. I don’t think he’ll make me use it.”

  Cruzon hesitated. Adair’s eyes had grown big, her mouth quivering. She shrank back from Stanner.

  Shannon was there, then, pushing past Adair and Waylon. “Dad, cut it out! She was with me and I know she’s okay.”

  Stanner stepped back, and he suddenly felt bone tired—and mingled with the fatigue was a profound sadness. “I’m—okay, I’m sorry. I just—I’m as stressed out as any of you. We’re all overwhelmed. There was a—” He suddenly felt as if he might cry in front of them, and dug deep to get control. “There was a little girl— in the back of the car that we—we put her in a garage.”

  He turned away.

  Then Lacey said, in a burst of impatience, “What about what Adair said? She said they were coming.”

  That’s when the bedroom window shattered inward, window glass flying with a sound like a panicky wind chime, and a human head thrust itself in on a long metal stalk. It was what had been Morgenthal.

  “Been looking for you,” the crawler said, and thrust more of itself through the window.

  “Hey!” Cruzon shouted, to draw the thing’s attention to him. He aimed his pistol and fired, placing three rounds directly in the crawler’s face. It splashed blood and maggotlike metal and fell thrashing at Lacey’s feet.

  Stanner admired the fact that she didn’t scream, though he could see she wanted to. Instead, she pulled a dre
sser down over the writhing thing with a thudding smash, and herded Waylon and Adair out the bedroom door, as Bert and Harold grabbed the packing case. They heard a great tramping, trammeling from the roof. How many?

  Then the front door, barred only with a flimsy lock, burst splintering inward, a crawler forcing its way in—what had been a woman. At the same moment the plate glass window shattered, a crawler carrying the drapes into the room with it. It took Stanner a moment to recognize the man who came bounding across the room. The diver from the wreck. Adair’s father, Nick Leverton.

  Stanner heard someone behind him scream sobbingly—but then the creature who’d been Nick struck Stanner head-on, knocking him backwards, and a pallid, grinning, almost human face shoved close to his own, filled the world, mouth opening. A seeking metal tendril probed at Stanner’s lips, as arms reinforced with steel pressed him inexorably down.

  All his life a warrior, at that moment Stanner felt like a little boy in a rapist’s brutally strong hands.

  There came a steady, nauseating swack-crack, repeated over and over again, and blood and lubricant splashed onto Stanner’s face, as he realized that Waylon was smashing that fireplace poker repeatedly into the top of Nick’s head, shouting incoherently with each blow.

  The Nick-thing shuddered and his grip loosened. Stanner rolled him off and looked up to see Cruzon shrieking for help. A woman was bearing him down. She looked something like Adair and Lacey, was maybe Adair’s mother. Her metal-tipped hands clamping Cruzon’s wrists, snapping at his throat.

  Another crawler was oozing through the window, scrabbling along the wall in defiance of gravity: a crawler with a baby’s head and metal pistons for arms and mismatched hands, and the body of a large dog and four metal and flesh legs that gripped the wall with steely wires along their tiny human feet.

  Stanner made himself go to the shotgun, distantly aware that Shannon had drawn Adair back into the hallway. He felt like the air had turned to hot wax around him, every step an effort against a wave of an inarticulate sense of it’s too much, it’s finally too much. He grabbed the shotgun, and it was as if the touch of a familiar weapon set his reflexes in motion, and another state of mind took him, so that he could move easily now, whirling and, despite the stiffness in his shoulder where Waylon had hit him, firing point-blank at the baby-faced crawler so that the drooling obscenity of its false infantility vanished in a spray of red.