Crawlers

by John Shirley

  Something was rising up, in the midst of the cemetery. A thing like a big metal insect, aiming its body at the sky.

  “Oh, shit, we’re too late,” Harold muttered. “Fuck!”

  Maybe, Stanner thought, but fuck it.

  He slung the backpack over a shoulder, grunting at the weight. He was dead tired—but he felt wired, too. A combination that made his gut churn.

  Or maybe that feeling in his stomach was from the ever-present, unceasing, background hiss of sheer terror. Mostly, terror for Shannon.

  Harold looked at him in something like admiration. And Stanner thought, It’s because I’m good at not showing how scared I am. It was best they didn’t know.

  He took the shotgun, gave Bert the pistol, took a last look around. All clear for the moment. He started through the fence.

  “We’re coming, too,” Bert said, licking his lips.

  Stanner knew Bert had to force himself to say that—and Stanner actually admired him for saying it. “No, Bert,” he said, just loud enough to be heard, over his shoulder. “The fewer we are, the less likely we’ll be noticed in there.”

  And one, he thought, is pretty damn few.

  And then he ran heavily across the street—sprinting wasn’t possible with that weight on his back—and through the gate, into the cemetery. Something moved, about thirty feet away. He crouched and waited. It glided past, low to the ground, and out the gate.

  Stanner trudged onward, almost tripping over a corpse torn from a coffin, some of its limbs utilized by the crawlers; they couldn’t use decayed flesh, but old bones might be utilized. He wondered why the crawlers had picked the cemetery for their cluster. Maybe its location was right for their launch. And they were vulnerable to strong electromagnetics; this might well be the most insulated place. But that wouldn’t help them if he could get the pulser right in amongst the cluster.

  It looked more like a half-cleared demolition site now, with most of the grass gone, tumbled slabs of marble and concrete piled here and there. Mounds of fresh earth, like giant molehills, humped beside gaping holes. Well-beaten crawler paths crisscrossed between the mounds, radiating from the holes. A faint light was shining up from the holes in the cemetery earth.

  Vinnie’s map had indicated the northwest corner of the cemetery. Stanner figured it’d be a mistake to enter the nest too close to its heart. It’d be too well guarded and he wouldn’t have the time he needed. So he dropped the backpack down the nearest hole and dropped in after it. Into one of the tunnels.

  He landed on his feet, shotgun in his hands, grunting—expecting to be jumped.

  There came a distant moan, a high-pitched wordless chattering, a shuffling sound—but no one visibly around. Just tunnels, the occasional glow, a rank smell.

  The kids had done their job. They were luring the crawlers away.

  Shannon was up there.

  Don’t think about that. Stay on task, punk.

  Stanner put his backpack on again, hefted the shotgun for comfort, and headed the way he thought the center of the crawler nest would be.

  Electric lights were strung down here, where the packed-earth tunnels intersected. The crawlers were constantly innovating; the red eye beams were a recent device.

  He came to a side tunnel leading off to a chamber on the right, about forty feet in. A crawler was arched over a man who writhed and whimpered.

  The round earthen chamber was illuminated only by the light from the main tunnel and the red glow of the crawler’s eyes. The crawler was someone Stanner didn’t recognize—a local doctor, perhaps, judging by the white coat, the dangling stethoscope. His lips seemed so red against his pale skin; his thin hair dangled down. He was on all fours, arching his body—which was elongated by the metal extensions in his arms and legs and neck—over a man in the shreds of a gray suit and tie. A balding man with a round face. Not much more could be made out in the welter of blood. The man’s arms and legs were turned all wrong; they were broken that way. A set of probing tools ratcheted on damp bony extensions from the opened gut of the crawler. The silvery tools—drill, something like needle-nose pliers, saws, blades—stabbed down at the man trapped underneath, snatching and pulling and cutting bits out here and there, experimenting. Vivisecting. The crawler chatting to the man casually the whole time.

  Stanner’s insides twisted and he wanted to rush in there and try to put a stop to this. But if he let himself get distracted . . .

  Stay . . .

  “You said to the All of Us,” the crawler said to his victim, “that if we could meet you in San Francisco, where you would feel safe, you would make a deal, you would reap the benefits.” The tools darted down and the man screamed and writhed, and his writhing brought another scream from him because it hurt to move.

  . . . on task . . .

  “You were willing to sell the town that had not made your career as an attorney profitable, but there is so much we must learn.” The man’s scream bubbled up, as another tool stabbed down.

  . . . punk!

  Stanner thought of the bombers that were approaching Quiebra— and forced himself to go on.

  He went another twenty-five feet—and came to a second cross tunnel. Far down to the right, ruby eyes glowed with piercing red beams, tracking toward him. He drew back and crouched. The crawler was the big-bellied jowly male cop he’d seen standing with the lady cop, by the burning car. He was crawling along on his extended legs, looking for intruders, probably. But he missed Stanner—who’d found a foul-smelling heap of rubbish to crouch behind. The crawler hesitated.

  Stanner felt his hands go moist on the shotgun. He tightened his hold, prepared to jump up, to fire.

  Then the crawler moved onward, to the left. And Stanner barely managed to control his gag reflex when he stood and saw that the heap of rubbish he had hidden behind was a pile of human body parts. He recoiled and for a moment he almost ran back down the tunnel.

  Get a fucking grip, ya pussy. Another favorite expression of his father’s.

  “Okay, you old son of a bitch,” Stanner muttered, and moved on, down the tunnel the way he’d been going.

  Bones dangled from the packed-earth roof, between tangles of wire. More than one coffin had become an impromptu ceiling support. The nearest was neatly sliced through from beneath. A swollen-faced woman, staring in death, hung in her Sunday best at an awkward angle from a sheared-open box; her brown hair, flecked with mold, dangled like Spanish moss so that it brushed Stanner’s shoulder as he hurried past.

  And then something bounded from behind, a rush of motion, metal-extended fingers closing around Stanner’s throat. And one of them had him.

  “I thought I heard something, by god,” the crawler said, knocking the shotgun easily from Stanner’s hands.

  And then knocking him out cold.

  Adair felt a certain joy in lighting her first Molotov cocktail.

  She was in the back of a pickup truck driven by Waylon, kneeling in a reeking, rumpled old dog blanket, with Siseela squatting and swaying beside her, steadying her as she lit the Molotov’s rag with a Bic lighter. Lance had stolen the truck earlier and left the keys in it—along with the quart beer bottles brimming with gasoline, stuffed shut with rags.

  “How did he know how to make those things?” Siseela yelled, over the car’s noise and the wind.

  “Probably like I know how to use it!” Adair shouted. She felt better now, since the funeral. She could talk. She could act. She expected to die tonight, but she’d ceased to care. “From movies!”

  And then she threw the flaming bottle at the crawlers bounding behind the truck—into the crawler female’s leering face.

  She knew that face, and the face of the old man bounding beside her, nearly as fast as the truck: the Garratys. But, of course, it wasn’t really them.

  So she didn’t feel bad when the bottle of gas exploded over what had been Mrs. Garraty, the crawler roaring with pain and fury, a figure cloaked all in striated flame, clawing at the air and falling back to be
run over by the police car driven by the lady cop—the crawler who’d once been a lady cop.

  Holding on to the back of the truck’s cab, Adair stood and looked at the other cars up ahead on the winding road leading down from the hills into town. Seven cars full of kids, weaving in and out, some of them firing shots at the pursuing crawlers.

  As she watched, a boy in his parents’ Volvo crashed headlong into a crawler that blocked the road—the crawler flying, falling in front of an SUV. The boy driving the Volvo spun out, crashing. Three crawlers converged on the Volvo.

  She could see more of them, leaping and crawling through the hills, coming after the convoy.

  She hoped Waylon had gotten away from the municipal water tank.

  “You hold me steady this time!” Siseela yelled. Her eyes bright with anger, with revenge, and wet with sorrow. “I want to throw one!”

  Stanner was distantly aware that he was being dragged by his arms along the dirt floor, on his back. His head was throbbing, each throb carrying its message of hot flashing pain, and he was reluctant to open his eyes.

  Get a grip!

  He looked, and saw the jowly cop’s face: pallid, edged by puffy red tissue, extending on a metal stalk from the dirty uniform collar. The cop’s arms were moving like a jackal’s front legs to either side of Stanner, and it took him a moment to see how he was being carried. Metal filaments were extending from the converted cop’s underside, gripping his clothing, winding around his upper arms.

  He could feel his heels dragging in the dirt—and he could feel the pack still heavy on his shoulders. It had become a sort of sled under his back as he was dragged over the ground.

  Am I still myself ? Stanner wondered. He took stock—and could find no other mind nestled with his own. No sense of having been violated, physically. They hadn’t changed him over. They had other plans for him, then.

  He was dragged about ten yards farther—and they’d entered a large circular chamber, maybe seventy feet in diameter. Tilting his head painfully, Stanner could make out other tunnel entrances converging from every direction. In the center something hulked, quivering, restless within itself. There were faces in it, many faces, and limbs and machinery that seemed randomly intertwined. The cluster.

  Down a corridor to one side he could see the bottom of the launching mechanism, and crawlers clambering around its base.

  He was dragged closer to the tangled, reeking central figure in the room.

  Then he felt himself released. He was dropped at the base of the living mound of interlinked crawlers. Immediately hands reached out from the cluster, grasped him, and pulled him closer. The smell of electrical burning and charred flesh and decay was overpowering; the thing moaned in a multitude of voices.

  This was the primary CPU of the nanocell colonies, the organizer for all the brains that made up the All of Us. He tilted his head back and got an upside-down glimpse of faces and arms and limbs, bodies heaped but living, like a hive of human flesh. He thought of a picture he’d seen of a “king rat,” which was actually a living cluster of rats whose tails and bodies were somehow entangled—and which supposedly had a collective mind of its own. It was like that, but even more scrambled: bodies fused, faces emerging from torsos, hands from necks, all interconnected and interpenetrated by electronic interfacing and wire. Not quite random, there was a symmetry somehow, but it was a perverse symmetry.

  Stanner struggled, but the hands tightened their fingers on his limbs, drawing him close.

  The cop who’d brought him spoke in an almost jovial voice. “You’ll feed the All of Us, with some of your tissue—usually your lower half. Eaten by the cluster, the primordial processing unit you see here. The upper half will incorporate nicely, your personal expert systems having some useful application. Protocol seventeen, blue, seventy-four seconds till release.”

  They’d reached the cul-de-sac where they’d planned to turn around so they could take the convoy the other way, lead the crawlers in a circle—but Adair saw dozens more crawlers now. They scuttled about in the road, on the rooftops, converging on the convoy of teenagers.

  Other crawlers were arriving in cop cars, flashing their lights, screeching sideways across the road to block their escape.

  The convoy of kids came to a jerking halt in the middle of the cul-de-sac, Adair and the others looking desperately around. The few guns in the trucks and cars opened fire at the crawlers—and the crawlers only laughed, and moved in on them.

  Then Stanner saw Sprague’s face, upside down on the ceiling of the chamber. He moved a little. He wasn’t part of the cluster.

  “Please, Sprague,” Stanner croaked.

  “Used it all up,” Sprague said. “All my me . Nothing left. Can’t struggle anymore. There’s a certain beauty to the All of Us. To what’s planned. Kind of like a planned community. One big housing development. Harmony.”

  “Your family, Sprague.”

  Stanner felt something gnawing at his thigh. Something else digging into his calf. A clutching thing yanking at the backpack— which was torn away from him and tossed onto the dirt beside the cluster, near one of the gutters for sewage.

  Stanner wanted to scream in terror but turned it into a shouted demand.

  “Sprague! Your family! Come on, Sprague, there’s always something more in a man! Look for it!”

  Sprague shook his head. Stanner was pulled more deeply into the cluster.

  Fingers felt their way blindly around Stanner’s throat; he felt a face nuzzle at him, teeth gnashing to get a grip on his inner thigh; metal extensions tugged at his genitals, closed around his ankles.

  “Sprague!”

  The fingers around his throat tightened; his breath stopped. Blue lights swarmed before his eyes. He felt something get a grip on his left arm that felt like it had the inexorable mechanical force of a backhoe. It began to pull his arm, to twist, like someone twisting at a turkey leg to wrench it loose from the cooked bird, and he knew that in a few moments his arm would be yanked off his body.

  “Sprague, you can be yourself if you choose to, goddamn it! Sprague, be yourself! Sprague, you can BE!”

  Then Sprague dropped from the ceiling, and his mismatched limbs, his ordinary man’s mouth, his metal claws—all began to rend at the cluster’s hands, the strands of living metal gripping Stanner, so that something yelped and the grips loosened. Stanner wrenched himself free, rolled away from the cluster and threw himself onto the backpack.

  But the crawler-cop loomed over him. “I thought there was grenades or some such in that pack, but maybe it’s a bigger problem, there, boy,” it said, leering, reaching for the pack. “But we’re launching in about twenty seconds, so it don’t really matter anyhow.”

  There was a flurry of motion as Sprague leapt onto the crawler’s back, gripping it from behind with his six limbs, and the crawler changed shape, head spinning on shoulders so it could bite into Sprague’s skull.

  Sprague shrieked in pain—and relief, and fell away, as his head cracked like a boiled egg. He went limp, dead with finality.

  Stanner clawed through the pack. He found the little toggle Harold had wired in, threw it, and tossed the pack into the mass of the cluster. The device had to go off close to the cluster to work.

  The pulser went off, its EMP field sweeping through the cluster’s primary store of nanocells; transmitted from there to every crawler in communication with the All of Us.

  There was a high-pitched whine, which grew with every crawler it reached, and every light in the crawler nest sizzled and burst— and everything went pitch-black.

  All the streetlights went out. The cars’ engines died. The lights on the cop cars went out, too. Adair barely noticed.

  The crawlers were setting themselves to leap.

  Adair had a tire iron ready to swing at the livid face coming at her—Mr. Garraty, leaping onto the back of the truck. The crawler poised quivering over her and Siseela.

  And fell on its face in the bed of the pickup. Its head fell from i
ts neck; its arms fell from its shoulders. Wherever the living metal sheath connected its segments, the parts fell away.

  All up and down the street, and all over town, the crawlers began falling apart.

  Mr. Garraty spoke, once. “Oh, thank God,” he said.

  And then he was dead.

  It took a long moment for it to sink in. Another long moment of sobbing relief. And then the cheers and whoops began.

  “Holy shit,” Harold muttered, looking around. They were waiting for Stanner by the smashed-open fence, across from the cemetery.

  The entire town had blacked out. The distant headlights up in the hills had gone black. The streetlights were dead. The only light came from the stars.

  A long groaning moan rose from the cemetery—a chorus of mixed despair and gratitude. Then silence.

  “I think we did it!” Bert said.

  Harold nodded. They grinned at each other. Then Harold looked toward the cemetery. “Should we go look for Stanner?”

  There was a droning from the sky overhead.

  Bert looked up to see a delta shape blacking out the sky. Just an absence of stars, marking its presence.

  “Oh, no, Harold. Look at that. The military’s making their move. With great timing as usual.”

  Harold grabbed Bert’s upper arm and waited for the explosions. The bombs were said to be big. He wondered if he’d feel anything.

  The bombs fell. They heard them whining down, humming down, then screaming down, almost directly overhead.

  They saw them strike the cemetery with a whu f-whu f THUD.

  Then . . . nothing.

  “Oh!” Harold said suddenly. “The pulser was set to continue for a full minute! They dropped the bombs—but the pulser’s still working! The bombs are regulated with electronics, Bert!”

  Bert leapt up and shook his fist at the delta in the sky. “Ha, you bastards! We beat both of you! Your machines, and those machines! Fuck the whole bunch of you!”

  Harold and Bert hugged each other, dancing around in circles, as Stanner walked out of the cemetery, pretending to shake his head with disapproval. “You guys should get a room or something, please. I like to be liberal, but . . .”