by John Shirley
Stanner jumped over the still-thrashing body of the Nick crawler, dashed toward Cruzon—where Harold and Lacey and Waylon were pulling at what had been Adair’s mother, jerking her back so that her head had to stretch out on an extended neck to clamp its jaws into Cruzon’s left shoulder. Cruzon screamed exactly at the moment when Stanner fired the shotgun into the side of her head.
And the thing that had been Adair’s mother exploded—not just her head: her body flew apart, driven by its own cryptic inner reactions, legs spiraling away to trail living strands of intelligent metal through the air.
Cruzon crawled cursing and bleeding out from under her remains.
Stanner shouted, “Look out, Cruzon!” Warning him to avoid the crawling tendrils of still-living nanocells seeking from the crawlers’ corpses. Stanner and the others had to dance around the reaching metal pseudopods on the floor, to get to the front door.
Harold and Bert already were carrying the packing case toward the door, everyone shouting at once and no one clearly hearing. Shannon covering the wailing Adair’s eyes so she wouldn’t have to look at the wreckage of her parents, as they followed Waylon and Lacey and Stanner out to the SUV.
Others were coming, across the roofs, outside. Four, five, maybe eight more.
Stanner and the others with him quickly piled into the SUV: shouting, sobbing, cursing, Stanner fishtailing it down the street, not stopping, not even slowing at the stop sign.
December 14, night
It was getting really dark. Some of the people waiting on the other side of the city water tank were turning on their flashlights.
At least, Donny thought, as he approached them, no one’s switching on night-eyes.
It was cold and windy up here. Trees ringing the water tower swayed and clattered their branches. Below, in Quiebra Valley, the houses were sporadically lit. Now and then there was a distant gunshot.
Donny’s footsteps gave out a metallic ringing as he strode across the big, green-painted top of the flat-topped municipal water tank. The big tank, three stories high, set right into the hilltop, wasn’t entirely full. He could almost sense the water underneath, in the reverberation of his footsteps.
The metal top was marked with gang graffiti and imitation gang graffiti; with burnt, paint-blistered spots from last fall where people had actually built campfires up here.
There was Lance, shivering in a thin jacket. He had a pair of binoculars around his neck.
The crowd of kids seemed to be waiting for something; maybe they were waiting for him. Because when Lance waved at him and said, “Here he is, yo, it’s Donny!” the other kids quieted down and looked his way.
There were teenagers and grade-school-age kids—some of them with even smaller children, holding their hands. Nearly two hundred kids. Most of them looked pretty sketchy, their clothes dirty, their hair snagged with twigs and wild.
Donny felt that somehow Lance had represented him to them as someone who could save them, just because he had called this meeting. He wanted to run, seeing all those expectant, desperate eyes.
“Hi, you guys,” he muttered, walking up. “Uh, I think we should turn off the flashlights. You know? Unless we really need ’em. They could attract attention.”
Whispers, mumbled complaints, but one by one the flashlights went off.
“So, Lance, did you tell people? Like we talked about?”
Lance nodded. “Yeah, dude. It went out over the Internet—that we’d be meeting along Quiebra Creek at the east end of town. But it went only to people who knew we weren’t actually going there.”
Lance handed Donny the binoculars and pointed.
Donny looked, focusing, and a string of moving lights came into definition at the east end, along Quiebra Valley Road.
“So they think we’re out there. Tight.” He tossed the binoculars back to Lance. “Anybody try to leave town?”
“I did,” Lance said, his voice breaking as he went on. “Me and— and two friends of mine. We tried the back road, and then we crashed the car trying to get away from the ones at the roadblock, and ran across country. Sandy—Roy got him. What used to be Roy. Mixed up with some other people. I think they just—just used his head. The animal crawlers got Duncan. And . . . I couldn’t do anything. I got back to the road and I got a ride from Siseela.”
He pointed to where she was sitting Indian style on a folded-up blanket on the metal, with a rifle, maybe a .22, across her knees.
“A gun. Good. Anybody else got guns?”
A few hands went up. Donny nodded. “Well, guns don’t stop them very easily anyway, not for long. But it depends on how much you shoot ’em and where, what I heard.”
“I got a couple Molotov cocktails,” Lance said. “We could make more.”
Raymond stepped forward: a tall black teen in a do-rag; he worked hard at keeping his face acutely expressionless. He lifted a 9mm pistol above his head. “And I got my nine.” Making Donny remember that Raymond was in a rap group called Weapons of Mass Destruction.
Donny noticed some of the kids sniffling, some of them softly crying—trying not to do it out loud. Not all of them small.
He felt like that himself. But he’d found if he kept himself going, moving around, observing, thinking, then he didn’t think about his parents, and he could function. “So here’s my report,” he said. “I just came back from the kids in the woods. The cat-kids. They’re okay so far; the crawlers have other priorities. But it can’t last. Question is, what do we do now?”
“We go home,” an older teen said. He was a slab of a kid with blond hair parted in the middle, owlish glasses, and a heavy brown overcoat. “My dad says we should all go home.”
“Who the fuck’re you?” Raymond asked.
“That dude is Larry Larry,” someone snickered, and a few of the others laughed.
Donny said, “Why should we go home, Larry?”
“My dad said I should tell you—”
“You told your dad about this?” Donny asked sharply. “Man, are you fucking crazy?”
“He’s not one of them.”
“Where is he now?”
“Down the road, waiting for me.”
“When did you get here?” Donny asked.
“Just a couple minutes go. We were driving along—”
“Why? Where were you going?”
“Um, he said he just wanted to go for a drive. And we saw the flashlights shining up here and I knew some kids were planning a meeting somewhere. He said I should see what—what’s going on.”
Raymond turned his cold eyes to Larry. “He asked you to spy, you mean.”
“No! He just thinks we ought to go home and wait and just trust the authorities to do the right thing!”
A much younger Asian kid laughed bitterly. “Dude, do you even know what happened in the high school gym?”
“Look, those people were, like, rogues or something. The real authorities are going to be here to take care of things. You have to trust them, or you fall apart. You can’t go around forming secret gangs and stockpiling guns.”
Donny said, “Normally I’d agree about the guns part, but, man—” And Donny snorted. “—you obviously haven’t been getting out much lately.” Some of the others laughed.
But Raymond and Lance weren’t laughing. Lance stepped up behind Larry, and suddenly he clasped him in a headlock as Raymond stepped up to him.
“Let’s find out what one of these motherfuckers is made of,” Raymond said. He checked the load on his nine.
“Hey,” Siseela said, standing up. “Just chill with that shit, Raymond.”
“Shut up, ho.”
Siseela bristled. “Who you calling ho, motherfucker!”
Raymond ignored her and turned to Larry.
“Raymond!” Donny shouted, striding over to them. “Back off with that nine, man!”
Raymond looked at him. “Who made you the godfather around here, school-president boy?”
Lance was hissing something inaudible in Larr
y’s ear.
“No, hey, come on,” Larry was babbling. His face seemed swollen red. “I’m not—I’m not a—let me go, goddamnit!”
“Where’s your pops?” Raymond demanded.
“I told you!” Larry wailed. “He’s not one of them!”
Donny put a hand on Lance’s arm. “Lance—”
“No, I ain’t letting him go.” But his grip relaxed a bit, and Larry writhed free and ran, yelling.
“Dad!”
Raymond aimed the nine, but Donny knocked his hand down. The gun discharged at the metal top of the water tank, the bullet striking sparks and ricocheting with a whine into the sky. Some of the kids screamed and threw themselves flat. Others quickly closed in around Larry and bore him down—a group of white boys from the Quiebra football team tackling him flat. They started kicking him, one of them smashing his face against the metal underfoot.
Looking at their faces, Donny saw that it wasn’t savagery or cruelty making them do this; it was fear and pain.
He ran into the group, pushed into the melee and threw himself over Larry. “Leave him alone! We’ll check him, just leave him alone!”
He felt a blow on his back; a second one bruising his ribs. Then a gunshot—but it had been fired into the air. Shaken by the gunfire, the crowd pulled back. Donny got to his knees, turned to see Raymond holding the smoking nine over his head. He’d fired a shot to drive them back.
“Back off from my man,” Raymond said. Closing ranks with the other black kid. “Acting like a bunch of wiggers. Come on, let’s check nerd boy.”
Lance and the football players held Larry flat on his back while they looked down his throat, probing with a flashlight.
They didn’t find anything. Lance pulled a Buck knife and prepared to cut Larry’s arm open, to get another look inside him. Larry screamed.
“No!” Donny said. “Let him up, Lance! He’s not one!”
Lance began cutting. Larry shrieked. Blood oozed and spattered when Larry tried to break free. One of the younger boys started crying.
Donny grabbed at Lance’s knife hand—and missed as Lance slashed at him, now, cutting Donny’s coat sleeve, cutting his upper shoulder.
“Back the fuck off, Donny!”
“Stop it, Lance!” Donny shouted, his face close to Lance’s.
Lance held the knife rigidly, breathing hard, his eyes wild.
Donny wanted to draw away from that knife, but he was afraid of what Lance—white-faced and shaking—might do to Larry Gunderston.
“Okay, all right, Lance. You already cut him. Now go ahead and look into that cut you made in his arm.”
Lance stared at him a moment, then turned and used a finger to probe the cut he’d made. Larry writhed, his face contorted. The long cut pumped blood, and nothing else.
Lance stood up, staring down at Larry. He moved off to the edge of the crowd. Donny could see Lance’s shoulders shaking.
“Why don’t you all check each other!” Larry yelled tearfully. “How do you know, goddamn it! Cut each other open, why don’t you!”
“Mostly,” Donny said, “the thing that’s changing people doesn’t like the young ones much. Mostly they just get used for parts. But there’s some got taken over. Some who were half robot already. If you want to check each other, why not.”
“I’m gonna fucking sue you shit-heads,” Larry was wailing, sitting up, clutching his wound as the others let him go.
“Shut the fuck up, dumbass,” Raymond said.
Donny went on, raising his voice so everyone could hear. “But we should move ahead! Make our plan! I figure we might start a big fire, near the borders where they’re patrolling, keep ’em busy with that, get the attention of the county authorities maybe.”
“I don’t advise that,” a voice said from the steel ladder at the edge of the water tank.
Everyone turned to look—and they saw that it was a man in early middle age, and with him was a cop. There were cries of fear from the crowd, and whispers urging violence. Donny cursed himself for not setting up sentries.
Raymond swore and pointed his 9mm pistol. The man—Donny recognized him from somewhere, maybe he’d seen the guy in the halls at the school, going into Morgenthal’s class—was raising his hands in surrender, but that didn’t mean anything; a crawler might do that to get you off guard.
“I’m Major Stanner,” the man shouted. “I’m from the government!”
Behind him came a Filipino cop Donny knew—or had known when the cop was human. Commander Cruzon.
“You guys can check us,” Stanner said. “Look down our throats! I’ll even submit to some cuts. We’re on your side! We’re human!” Others were coming up the ladder, raising their hands as they stepped onto the top of the tank.
Donny recognized Waylon, from school, and Adair. After them came a guy Donny thought was a substitute teacher, and a woman he didn’t know. Then a scared-looking young woman, maybe half Asian. She went to stand next to Stanner.
Then came a big older man, with sandy hair.
Larry got up and ran to him. “Dad! They cut me! They held me down and cut me with a knife!”
The elder Gunderston looked scared and confused. “I heard some shots. I—was anyone shot?”
“There’s one more in my group,” Stanner said. “He’s working on something. He’ll be up here in a minute. We’re going to need your help with it. Anyone of you kids know your electronics? Who’s got skills, here?”
A few voices piped up.
But Raymond said, “Y’all line up over there. We going to check you real thorough.”
Donny nodded. “Raymond’s right. We’ve got to do this. We have to look close. And just keep your hands up.”
Then someone else came up the ladder. A big shambling figure, who walked kind of funny, and everyone was instantly certain that here was a crawler.
Raymond said, “Motherfucker!” and fired the nine wildly at the figure—who went to his knees, wailing, covering his head, as one of the bullets grazed his shoulder.
“Who the hell is that?” Stanner muttered.
Raymond ran closer, getting a bead on the man’s head. The man curled up fetally, babbling to himself.
Donny yelled, “Waitaminute, shit, wait, Raymond!”
Raymond hesitated. Donny ran up, staring. “That’s old Vinnie!”
“So you know him, so fucking what. He could still be one of them. He ain’t with the other ones just came. Nobody vouching for him. I don’t see why we should trust any of the so-called grown-ups, man. And look at how weird this motherfucker is.”
Lance came to stand by Raymond. “Raymond’s right, cuz.” He wiped his eyes. “All this bullshit is something the motherfuckin’ ‘grown-ups’ did.” He scowled at Stanner.
Vinnie was talking fervently to his own knees. “They took her parts in the hole, who’s calling star control, wait don’t hurt the bots, let me stay with the gold walking man, the red hand the red hand the red hand the red hand. They’re tied together in a whole, the deputy sent me . . .”
“You see that,” Raymond said. “The man’s talking like a fucking robot with its brains scrambled. He’s one of them.” He put both hands on the nine and steadied it at Vinnie.
Adair walked over and put her hand on Donny’s arm. There was something about her—then Donny realized what it was. Her head was turning this way and that, like Stevie Wonder, as if she couldn’t focus her eyes on any one thing. But she spoke, her voice raspy.
“He,” Adair began. She licked her lips and tried again. “He’s trying to tell us where something is. He wants to show us . . . something.”
“We can check Vinnie here, too,” Donny said. “We’ll have to hold him down. He doesn’t like to be touched. We’ll check all y’all. And listen, you grown-ups, checking you might hurt. So don’t even bother whining about it.”
“You’d better do whatever you’re going to do quick, Donny,” Lance said, looking out at the valley with his binoculars. “Those fuckers are onto us, man.
They’re on their way back.”
That’s when Vinnie started squawking at them. So it seemed to Donny. Making squawking sounds and spouting random words. He stood up and started walking toward them—but sideways. Some of the kids tittered as Vinnie did a standing crabwalk within a couple of yards of Donny—and then turned backwards to walk closer. And dropped a piece of paper at his feet.
“That guy’s infected, for sure,” Lance said.
Donny shook his head as he bent to pick up the paper. “That’s just Vinnie. That’s just what he’s like. Leave him alone. Yo, Sissy, bring me that flashlight.”
Siseela held the flashlight as he unfolded the paper. It was a sheet torn from the yellow pages. On it was a listing for cemeteries in the northeast Bay Area—Richmond, El Sobrante, San Pablo. Quiebra Cemetery was circled with a pencil line. Next to it in the margin was a rectangular shape, in pencil, with an X in the lower right-hand corner of the rectangle. By the X were the penciled words ALL US.
“The cemetery?” Donny said.
Stanner came and looked over Donny’s shoulder, then at Vinnie. “You saying that’s where they’re based, Vinnie?”
Vinnie had his back to them. But he nodded his head, five or six times more than necessary.
Mr. Gunderston shook his head sadly. “There’s really no point in going there. You’d be overwhelmed, in no time. Just wait here. They’re coming here. Because I just told them where you were.”
Everyone froze. His son turned to look at him.
“Dad?”
Gunderston began to grow as he spoke. His legs divided and extended, his clothes ripping to accommodate them; he bent his knees to crouch. “We had no idea there were so many of you up here. And with some of these others. We don’t want them running around loose.” He looked at Adair. “This one senses things. Her mother warned us about that. We’ve been looking for her.” He looked at Vinnie. “And now I gather that one can listen in on us.”
