by John Shirley
The three men laughed in sheer relief—and looked up at the hills. Then their laughter melted away. They looked at one another. They silently went to find the SUV.
Stanner thought, They could all be gone. We might’ve been too late. All those kids could be torn to pieces.
Shannon could be dead.
“Let’s get back to the kids,” Bert said, echoing what Stanner was thinking.
Stanner at the wheel, they drove back toward the hills and the water tank.
They had to drive around cars in the streets, some on fire, some with their inhuman drivers just sitting there dead behind the wheel; many of them with their engines still running, lodged in ditches and crumpled against telephone poles, figures slumped inside, all jumbled. Some of the crawlers were dead beside the road.
“It’s like the Rapture after all, for them,” Bert said.
Twice they drove around dead, altered animals—an eight-legged deer, four of its legs a mix of mechanical and human; a raccoon with a set of metal antennas instead of a head. Both quite dead, lying where they’d fallen en route.
Stanner pulled up beside a big red extended-cab pickup truck with its car alarm keening, rammed into the cinder block wall of a car parts store, in the dusty road shoulder. He stared at the dead man inside. Yeah, about his size. Same hair color. He put the SUV in park, but left it running as he got out.
“There a reason for this stop?” Bert said. “I want to see if Lacey—if she and the kids are okay.”
“Yeah, I’ve got a boy up there,” Harold said.
“If they’re okay, they’ll stay okay,” Stanner said, taking the gas can from the back of the SUV. He shook it; gas sloshed inside, maybe a fifth full. Enough. “If they’re not okay, we can’t help them now. This is something I’ve got to do. It’s for Shannon as much as for me.” He walked over to the truck, opened the door, and reached into the dead man’s pocket. Found his wallet and took it. Then he took out his own wallet, removed the money, put the wallet, replete with credit cards and ID, in the man’s rear pants pocket. It was an unpleasant feeling, to be in a dead man’s pocket. But it wasn’t his first time.
He sloshed gasoline on the dead man’s head, took out the lighter he’d brought along, lit the gasoline, and stood back. He let it burn for a few minutes. The alarm just kept keening and wailing as if the car was reacting to its driver’s burning.
“Oh, Jesus, Stanner,” Harold said, watching the body burn.
After enough of the guy had burned, Stanner dragged the body from the cab of the truck—the guy’s lower half wasn’t burning yet—and rolled it in the dust of the road shoulder till the fire went out. A lot of the guy’s face came off in the process, and Stanner’s stomach lurched at the sight. When that was done, he tossed the rest of the gas on the front of the truck and lit it on fire.
Then he returned to the SUV, bringing the gas can with him. He got into the SUV, and they started off again, leaving the burning truck behind, the alarm fading in the distance.
“What the hell was that about?” Harold asked.
Stanner glanced at him, then looked back at the road. “Just trying to cover my tracks. I’m still on the outside with the Facility. It’s going to take time to square with them. So in the meantime, it’s better they think I’m dead.”
“I hope it works out for you and Shannon,” Bert said. After a moment, when they drove around the body of a fat man in a black suit, he murmured, “Despite all the deaths, it’s funny how things have worked out. I mean, the worst didn’t happen. It’s like serendipity. Especially one part: Harold here, turning up, when we needed him.”
“What are you saying?” Harold asked, looking at Bert with his eyebrows raised. “That God brought me in here?”
“Is that so impossible? It’s grace.”
“You tell those kids that God was here,” Harold said. “You tell my boy Waylon. The kid had to shoot his own mother, for god’s sake.”
Bert nodded. “I know what you mean. And if God helps us, why didn’t he stop the Holocaust, and why didn’t he help when the Chinese soldiers forced children to execute their own parents in Tibet? But see, God can’t help most of the time. God can only put a little spin on the ball, offer a little help here and there, where conditions allow. A lot of wise men have said it’s up to us to do God’s work in the world ourselves. But now and then, where conditions allow, that divine influence—I mean, I hesitate to use that word God, with all the old associations it has—now and then that influence nudges us along, brings us together so we can help ourselves. We have to be alert to those possibilities. Anyway, that’s my—”
“Look out!” Harold yelled, pointing at the road ahead.
Stanner slammed on the brakes. A naked girl was lying in the middle of the road. They stopped the car and Bert went to look at her. He picked her body up and laid it gently on the grass in front of a house nearby, and put his coat over her. He came back to the SUV and got behind the wheel, continued on their way.
“I remember that girl from the high school,” Bert said. “Very popular girl, name of Cleo. Poor kid.”
Other people—survivors, more than they’d dare hope for—were coming out of their houses, looking around in stunned wonder. Stanner knew they were human—because their confusion was so authentic.
They drove up the hill, up the gravel road, into the darkness, to the stony parking lot below the dark bulk of the water tower. Some trucks and cars were parked here. But that didn’t prove the kids were okay.
They honked their horn, in the signal they’d arranged, three longs and a short. No immediate response. They got out, silently, and walked toward the water tower—and a crowd of kids came rushing around the metal curve of the tank, from the far side of it. There was Adair, there was Waylon, and Donny, and Siseela. No Shannon.
Bert ran, seeing his Lacey. Ran into her arms.
But Shannon . . .
Stanner searched through the kids milling—laughing, crying— around the water tank.
“Has anyone seen . . .”
There she was. Behind the others. Coming toward him. Allowing him a smile. Then coming into his arms. For a moment or two, like a little girl again.
“Dad,” she said. “Daddy . . .”
EPILOGUE
December 19
When Errol Clayborn opened the door, he was beaming a big welcome-to-Christmas-vacation-with-your-family smile.
The smile faded fast.
“Uh, Bert?”
Errol gaped with a poorly disguised mix of dismay and confusion as Bert introduced Lacey, Stanner, Shannon, Harold, Waylon, Adair, Donny, Siseela . . . and Vinnie.
He looked twice at Vinnie. Then at the two black kids. Then back at the hulking, scruffy figure of Vinnie—who stood turned half away, looking at him out of the corners of his eyes.
“Hi, I’m a Christmas lump, I’ve got three wishes to hang over the window when they come in under the sled don’t worry about a thing,” Vinnie said.
Bert laughed at Errol’s expression. “Errol, I got that card you sent with yet another prod to come out for Christmas. And you said I could bring friends.”
“Well, I—”
“Not to worry,” Stanner said, smiling crookedly, spreading his hands. “There’ll be two less, anyway. Shannon and I are just dropping these folks off. We all drove out together and—I just needed to see these people safely somewhere. My daughter and I are heading up to Canada.”
Waylon turned and looked at Stanner, scowling. Then he gravely shook Stanner’s hand. “I was wrong about you, man. You’re, all, a complicated guy.”
“Nobody’s simple. Certainly not my man Vinnie, there. Vinnie, I’m gonna miss you.”
Vinnie turned his back on Stanner. But he was smiling.
So was Shannon, as Stanner put his arm around her. She said, “Maybe my old man’s not so bad.” She said it in a skeptical way that made the others laugh.
“What you gonna do now, Major?” Waylon asked.
Stanner shrugg
ed. Smiled sadly.
“I’ve got to lay low. I’ll probably need an identity change, till I get this straightened out. There’s a senator friend of mine I served with; maybe he can get me square with the Pentagon, eventually. I believe in what I was trying to do, Waylon. I just got off track. I did the right thing in that uniform, once upon a time. I hope—I need— to go back to the right thing, in uniform.”
“Uh,” Errol was saying, looking at the small crowd on the porch.
Bert said, “I’m sure you heard about the disaster in Quiebra, Errol?”
“Hell, yeah, I tried to call you about fifty times. They said it was some kind of viral disaster, killed hundreds of people, still under investigation. Crazy stories coming out of there.”
“Truth is, Errol, it wasn’t a virus. So you don’t have to worry about catching anything. We were caught up in that ‘disaster,’ and these people needed someplace to go, and you invited me and a friend—and I couldn’t bring just one, not this time. So, just for the holiday. You know. We’ll all sleep on the floor. We brought sleeping bags.”
“Uh, sure. I mean, there was an emergency and—” Then he glanced over his shoulder and smiled—taking some kind of obscure personal satisfaction in it as he turned back to Bert and said, “I guess my wife’ll just have to . . . suck it up.”
A little girl with tousled brown hair and big hazel eyes looked past Errol from inside the house. “Dad, you said you’d watch Starbots with me.”
“Starbots!” Vinnie gasped.
She looked at him. “You like Starbots?”
He couldn’t look right at her. He looked at the mailbox beside the door. But he said, “Oh, yes, very much. It’s a part of my land of where to go, for three thousand miles in three directions.”
“Okay!” She grabbed his hand—after a moment he stopped trying to draw it back—and pulled him past her father, into the house.
Stanner chuckled. “Well, we’ll be in touch, Bert.” They shook hands.
“So, uh, whoever’s coming in, uh, come on in and, uh . . .” Errol began.
Bert and the others ignored Errol, watching Stanner and Shannon walk to the rented minivan. Watching them wave a final time; watching them start to back out the driveway.
Then Waylon ran up to the minivan, banged on the window by Stanner, till he stopped the car. “Yes, Waylon?”
Waylon was excited, hands balled into fists. Voice too loud.
“Yo, dude, you got to tell me—on the way here you said you’d tell me before you left, man. ’Kay: You worked in that secret black chopper Pentagon Area 51 stuff. What about the aliens, man? The UFOs? Knowhatamean? The saucers!”
Stanner smiled faintly. He looked at the others. Winked at Adair. She smiled back at him.
Then he said, “Ah, the aliens. The saucers. Right. Well, I’ll tell you.” He leaned toward Waylon and stage-whispered, “That’s another story—dude.”
Then Stanner backed up the car, drove away down the street. And he and Shannon headed north.
The world becomes smaller and smaller as it becomes more and more uniform. People lose the power of any separate wisdom . . . Man’s inventions increasingly take charge of him. We see machines becoming disproportionate to human life. It is surely obvious that the development of machinery is not the development of man and it is equally obvious that machinery is enslaving man and gradually removing him from his possibilities of normal life and normal effort, and the normal use of his functions. If machinery were used on a scale proportionate to man’s needs it would be a blessing . . . Man is his understanding— not his possession of facts or his heap of inventions and facilities.
—Maurice Nicoll,
Living Time and the Integration of the Life
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Shirley is the author of more than a dozen books, including Demons; City Come A-Walkin’; Really, Really, Really, Really Weird Stories; and the newly reissued classic cyberpunk trilogy A Song Called Youth—Eclipse, Eclipse Penumbra, and Eclipse Corona. He is the recipient of the Horror Writers Association’s Bram Stoker Award and won the International Horror Guild Award for his collection Black Butterflies. Shirley has fronted punk bands and written lyrics for his own music, as well as for Blue Öyster Cult and other groups. A principal screenwriter for The Crow, Shirley now devotes most of his time to writing for television and film.
Visit the author’s Web site at www.darkecho.com/John Shirley.
SELECTED WORKS BY JOHN SHIRLEY
Novels
A Splendid Chaos
Eclipse
Eclipse Penumbra
Eclipse Corona
Wetbones
City Come A-Walkin’
The Brigade
And the Angel with Television Eyes
Spider Moon
Demons
Short Story Collections
Black Butterflies
Darkness Divided
Really, Really, Really, Really Weird Stories
Heatseeker
A Del Rey® Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 2003 by John Shirley
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Del Rey is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
www.delreydigital.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Shirley, John, 1953-
Crawlers / John Shirley. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
I. Title.
PS3569.H558C73 2003
813’.54—dc21 2003045346
www.randomhouse.com
eISBN: 978-0-307-41484-7
v3.0
