by Jay Brandon
Gladys Leaphorn was no longer interrogating him. She had known Jack for half his life, though she had never remotely been a surrogate grandparent for him. They had their roles, and had respected each other since Jack was fourteen. Gladys stared off across the desert. It was possible that her old eyes saw something coming that neither of the young people could know.
“You know the other possibility,” Gladys said quietly.
Jack nodded. “Someone wanted you to believe I was in these places. They wanted to cast suspicion on me. Rather clumsily, may I say. If I wanted to go unnoticed in Prague I could. And that Chelsea address is one I know well, as you know. I wouldn’t go near it, not any more.”
Gladys’s long eyelashes softened her eyes as she blinked slowly. “That seemed like a strong possibility. Someone wanted you portrayed. Which means that maybe your attackers—”
“—were trying to steal my identity rather than kill me. Or kill me and have someone take my place. But I have no idea why.”
Abruptly the interview was over. Gladys stepped away, moving stiffly with her one arm cane. Arden had picked up the other but didn’t hand it to her. Jack spoke to the Chair’s back. “How do you know they didn’t succeed in replacing me?”
Gladys turned, smiling, and patted his cheek. “If the day comes that I don’t know you, Jack, it will be time to retire. I only hope it’s me these schemers try to fool with a double.”
Twilight had taken the mountains in the distance, turned them into grounded thunderheads. All three stared at the beauty of the darkening desert for a long few minutes. Just as they turned away, Gladys stiffened and said, “What was that?”
“What was what?” Jack asked, but Arden had obviously seen or felt it too. She and her grandmother were staring at the western horizon. “It came and went too fast,” Arden whispered. “Like a flaw in the retina, a peripheral hallucination. But if you saw it too—”
“I’m not sure saw is the right word. It was too fast.”
Nothing more happened, at least not in that part of America. In a few minutes they got into Arden’s car, the Chair in the backseat. After they’d driven a mile, she leaned forward and put her hand on Jack’s shoulder. She had never been motherly toward him. Her touch startled him.
“Stay close for a while, would you, Jack?”
Her voice was a strong combination of commanding, cajoling, and humbly requesting. There was no telling how many people it had swayed over the decades.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.
The rest of that evening was a very busy one across America. It started out tranquilly, most of the country enjoying pleasant fall weather. That’s why so many people were outdoors, taking walks, sitting on porches, camping out. The adventurous were the unluckiest ones.
In a mobile home park outside Hot Springs, Arkansas, Len and Mabel Dawes had just tied down for the night. They were on their way south, slowly, from their home in Detroit. This was the first season of their retirement, Mabel from General Motors as an administrative assistant, Jack from the military and civil service. Their three retirements left them very comfortable at the ages of 66 and 68, respectively. They had children and grandchildren scattered around the country, and Detroit had seemed less and less like home the last few years. So they had sold the house, chucked the jobs, and become hobos, as Len put it. Mabel preferred “gypsies.” Hitting the road, they both felt younger by decades, starting over. They held hands half the way south.
Their tie-down slot featured a tiny patch of green grass, where they sat on folding chairs with drinks in their hands. In a few minutes they might grill something, or decide to drive into town for dinner. They suddenly grinned at each other, realizing their freedom from schedules for the first time in their lives. They had been married forty-three years and felt like newlyweds.
The sky was a strange mix of vibrant blue left over from the day, gray creeping in from the east, a few dark clouds, and one bright white one, something pasted onto the night sky from a painting by Magritte.
“Southern, I guess,” Len said.
Mabel nodded, thinking how wonderful it was to see a brand new sky at her age. She was about to say something along those lines when something crossed beneath that bright white cloud. It moved too fast for the eye to follow. Before one could focus on it, it was some place else. Then it was gone entirely, leaving an unsettled feeling.
“Did you see—?”
Len nodded.
“What kind of plane was that, honey?”
“I couldn’t tell.” Which was saying a lot for Len Dawes, who had flown every kind of military aircraft and several civilian ones, and kept up with the industry.
“You think there’s some kind of experimental base near here?”
“I guess they wouldn’t tell us about it if there were.” Len pointed his chin at the sky. “It dropped something.”
You couldn’t have proven that by Mabel, who squinted and saw nothing, but if Len said such a thing it was true. He had spent twenty-two years in the Air Force, the first two as a pilot in Vietnam. His vision was still perfect, which irritated her no end.
Just as the object neared the ground it began to glow, perhaps from heat friction, so that she saw it too. A cylinder that looked small, but no telling how far away it was, except for Len. She looked at him and he said, “‘bout a quarter of a mile that way. Almost seemed like I felt it thump down.”
“Let’s go see,” Mabel said impulsively. She stood up.
Len continued to sit. Going to look at the thing, whatever it was, struck him as a bad idea. “Come on, come on,” Mabel said, holding out her hand. Just like when she was a young wife trying to talk him into an adventure. He was the fighter pilot and world traveler, but Mabel was the adventurer, even if the adventure was only going to a new mall.
Len said quietly, “It might’ve been the pilot, honey. Some kind of new-fangled ejection seat that didn’t open right.”
“Oh.” She dropped her hand. She certainly didn’t want to see something like that.
Len looked up at her. In the dimness her gray hair looked blonde and the lines in her face were invisible even to his sharp eyes. She looked like the slender young girl he had married, mainly because she was more fun than anyone he had ever met. That was still true.
In the end, they didn’t have to decide whether to go look at the fallen object. It came to them.
The mobile home park was mainly for transients, though there were a few permanent residents. Some had even planted trees, and stayed long enough to see them grow high enough to throw shade. In a few minutes there was a rustling sound like wind through the leaves, except that there was no wind. People who were sitting outside stood up. Neighbors drifted over to neighbors’ yards, saying, “Did you see— Do you hear—?”
They were no longer looking up at the sky, which had grown dark, but out toward the distance, from which the rustling sound came.
The creature that came drifting along the road between the homes made everyone who saw it smile. It was a short cylinder, maybe three feet tall, with a rounded top that featured flashing lights. Wheels carried it forward. It looked, in other words, like R2 D2, from “Star Wars.” Kid’s toy, people thought, or maybe the movies were being re-released.
When “R2” drew to a stop, people gathered around. Mabel would have been one of the first, except that her husband stopped her. He had been in too many dangerous situations to take this one at face value. What the hell did he know about Arkansas, anyway? The tranquil setting had suddenly turned foreign to the veteran Len.
“Oh, come on, honey, it’s probably going to give out movie passes. Let’s not be last in line.”
She tugged at him, he resisted, and their hands parted. Mabel Dawes ran toward the cute little robot.
Half a dozen people were standing right around it, pointing at the lights, trying to figure out its beeps. Another dozen people stood a little farther back, folding their arms and shaking their heads, as if the inner circle were careless childre
n. Mabel had just broken through this ring when the little cylinder went dark. People made accusatory remarks at each other, until it rumbled and the top popped open.
“Mabel!” Len yelled then, but the top’s opening made people think the prizes were about to pop out. Mabel leaned forward as curiously as the rest.
And Len turned and ran.
The spiders came crawling out of the opening of the cylinder. Golden spiders the size of a big man’s hand, metallic, obviously manufactured. Nearly everyone has an instinctive fear of spiders, but these glittered like gold, like prizes. People still leaned toward them. Until they began swarming.
The man squatting in front of the cylinder was a long-time resident of the park who got a discounted rate because he was an in-house handyman. He’d been attracted to the robot because he loved tinkering with things like that, had ever since he was a kid, a real “Popular Mechanics” kind of guy. Even the spiders didn’t scare him, because they were obviously machines. The first golden spider jumped right on to him, landed on his leg. His legs were spread for balance. The spider’s legs suddenly extended to both the handyman’s legs and clamped on. Then the body of the spider clamped onto his groin.
The handyman screamed. Not very many people had seen what happened, and most thought Ed had just caught his finger on something, as happened roughly twice a week. They’d heard Ed scream before.
But not like this. His voice went hoarse, rose to a register higher than it should have been able to reach, then abruptly went silent, though the cords stood out on the sides of his neck as if he were still screaming. His hands dug at his crotch, uselessly. Two of the spider’s legs fended off the man’s hands. The spider’s legs were pointed like needles. Exactly like needles. Ed jerked his hand away, even while the pain in his groin held him nearly paralyzed.
The other spiders had spread through the crowd now. They scuttled up people’s legs, feeling light enough to be shaken off, but that was impossible. The points of those legs stuck fast. Once they’d touched you, it didn’t matter if they stayed on, anyway. The injection had happened. People would shake uncontrollably for a few seconds, then go rigid and topple over. Their faces went from red to white to gray, the gray of dead stone.
Some of the spiders—there were dozens—came spilling over the top of the open cylinder as if it were too full of them and they slopped over the top. A few came leaping out as if shot from guns, though. These caught people in the more cautious crowd holding back. They hadn’t been cautious enough. One of the golden spiders landed on a woman’s face, and as its claws dug in and she screamed her husband tried to pull it off, so the spider got them both.
Mabel stood frozen for long seconds. One of the spiders landed on the man next to her, and his screeching woke her up. She looked all around the scene of panic, people running, stumbling, going down under a hoard of spiders, saw there was nothing she could do to help, and looked instinctively for her husband. But Len was nowhere to be seen. He had run away. For the first time in their lives his sense of self-preservation had trumped his concern for her. That was even more disheartening to Mabel than the attack of the spiders.
She ran, jumping over bodies, hearing screams all around her, coming from farther and farther away as the spiders spread through the park with amazing speed. She kept thinking she felt something touch her, but it was only panic singing along her nerves.
Then Mabel couldn’t stand it any longer, she turned and looked back. Everyone else was down, people she’d come to know slightly, others she never would. Spiders crawled over their bodies as if they would strip the flesh. Some of the bodies twitched, and a few moved, horribly, men crawling while covered with the things, as if the spiders had taken over their bodies and were animating them. Screams had been replaced by moans.
Mabel screamed, though, as she saw one of the spiders, one of the biggest ones, withdraw its stinger from a twitching body’s neck and turn its little red LCD eyes on her. Then it bunched its legs together and came jumping toward her.
They could cover distance amazingly. This one scuttled faster than Mabel could run, but then it leaped, first a sort of warm-up, then its legs bunched together and she knew it could leap high enough to reach her face. Even if she turned and ran, it would land on her back, or her leg. Mabel stood frozen again, screaming. The spider leaped. It soared, coming straight toward her face.
It was a foot from her open mouth when it exploded into a hundred golden shards.
Mabel turned away from the shrapnel, took a couple of steps, stumbled, starting falling.
An arm caught her. A still-strong arm she knew well. She turned and buried her face into Len’s neck. He stood with his service automatic, that hadn’t been fired in twenty years. It still could, though. Len had had to rummage through a couple of boxes in the mobile home before he’d found it.
He fired two more shots at the closest spiders, then turned and pulled Mabel away. Spiders swarmed after them. Len fired over his shoulder, hitting two more. But these weren’t living creatures, to be scared off by an obviously lethal weapon. The spiders had no instinct for self-preservation. They kept coming.
But Mabel and Len got into the trailer, slammed the door, held each other, and shook. “I thought you—” she shivered. “You know I’d never—” he answered.
But there was no time. They could hear the continual thumps of the little metal bodies throwing themselves against the door. Len scrambled forward, through the living space, over the table and into the driver’s seat. The keys were in the ignition. He turned it on, and the sound of the big engine starting was like technological cavalry coming over the hill.
“Call 911!” he shouted. “Tell somebody about this!”
Mabel started doing so. She was a good, brave woman, she’d be all right in a minute. Len backed out without paying much attention to his mirrors, then ripped forward, tearing a couple of hoses and electrical wires. They weren’t connected to the RV’s engine, though. They just needed to get a few miles down the road and they could make whatever repairs were needed.
In his mirrors, in the glow of his sidelights, he could see the flashes of golden spiders falling off the vehicle. They bounced on the road, a few lying still, some struggling to catch him. They didn’t have remotely enough speed, though. Len’s blood raced with adrenaline. He knew he could outrun Richard Petty.
Not all the spiders fell off, though. On top of the RV, two clung, legs spread wide, then a drill came out of each body, diamond-tipped, and began drilling. The noise of the engine masked the sound, until each had made a small circular hole. Two legs of each spider lifted the metal circle aside and threw it overboard. Then each dropped through the hole.
Half a mile down the highway, the RV began to shake, rocked both by the driver’s panic and by screams within. The vehicle moved even faster for another quarter of a mile, then went into a skid and finally turned over.
The sound of the crash was not particularly loud. The state highway had a fair amount of traffic, but not at that moment. The RV lay on its side in the night. Nothing emerged from it. Whatever was inside just stayed there, waiting for the rescuers who would inevitably come.
The attack in Omaha was different, but based on the same pattern. The plane too fast to be believed zoomed past, leaving a couple of cylinders in its wake. When people approached to investigate, white powder sprayed out, in a circle wide enough to catch everyone within twenty feet. “Anthrax” was one of the scariest words that could be screamed there in cattle country. The closest victims fell down, dying on the spot. Others on the fringe ran. Some who didn’t even look affected at first crept away, back home, spreading the disease through their families and neighborhoods.
The cruelest happened in Louisville and Minneapolis and Tulsa. There the robots landed on playgrounds just before sunset, where parents let children continue to play in the mild evening. The robots were so familiar to the children they came flocking, and parents hardly even bothered to call them away. Many of the kids didn’t have pa
rents there, anyway. They were neighborhood playgrounds, a block or two from home, within the sound of a parent’s call. And some of the children were young teens, sitting on swings and talking and feeling vaguely nostalgic for their childhoods, so few years past.
When the robots’ tops opened the children were startled, then delighted as the little cylinders spewed out their cargo, spraying them in a high arc where they fell clattering among the children.
Cell phones.
They came in pink and silver and bright metallic green, and everyone grabbed for them. These were nine and ten-year-olds, just below the age of owning their own cell phones, but old enough to crave them. Even the young teenagers who already had cell phones wanted these newer models. They shoved younger kids out of the way to lunge for them. Everyone got one. A few started making calls right away. “Guess what I just got!” The cell phones were already activated. Kids played with them happily, punching buttons to find out their numbers and calling each other, making call lists, playing games. They knew how to work these devices as instinctively as their grandparents had spun tops and picked up jacks.
Most of them didn’t even notice the tiny warm slithery feeling as something was injected from the phones into their ear canals. Certainly no one displayed symptoms in that first golden hour of twilight. The most susceptible grew dizzy walking home. But by early evening they all had fevers. When news began to break about what these cylinders were doing across the country, a few cautious parents took their sick children to emergency rooms. One alarmed ER doctor even ordered a CT scan, and thereby located the tiny radioactive seed that had worked its way down the child’s blood vessels into his lungs, where it was poisoning him with growing rapidity. But finding the seed didn’t solve anything. There was no antidote.
By midnight the parents and caregivers and medical personnel had the “illness” too. The poisoning elements spread with amazing speed. Hundreds were infected before morning, and the infection like wildfire as emergency workers tried to contain it. Whole portions of the three cities were quarantined, but to no avail.
