“I see,” the man said.
Johnny Brett came in, puffing from his sprint. He was a barrel-chested man of forty-nine who had once been a shift foreman on the rock crushers at the copper mine, and he carried with him a sense of harried weariness. He had eyes like those of an often-kicked hound dog, and he was fully aware of Mack Cade’s power in the community; he was on Cade’s payroll, just as Vance was. He nodded nervously at the two air-force men and, clearly out of his depth, waited for them to speak.
“I’m Colonel Matt Rhodes,” the older man told him, “and this is my aide, Captain David Gunniston. I apologize for dropping in as we did, but this can’t wait.” He looked at his watch. “About three hours ago, a seven-ton meteor entered earth’s atmosphere and struck approximately fifteen miles south-southwest of your town. We tracked it down on radar and we thought most of it would burn up. It didn’t.” He glanced at both the sheriff and mayor in turn. “So we’ve got a visitor from deep space lying not too far from here, and that means we have a security problem.”
“A meteor!” Vance grinned excitedly. “You’re joshin’!”
Colonel Rhodes fixed him with a steady, level gaze. “I never josh,” he said coolly. “Here’s the kicker: our friend’s putting out some heat. It’s radioactive, and—”
“Lord!” Brett gasped.
“—and the radiation will probably move across this area,” Rhodes continued. “Which is not to say that it poses an immediate threat to anybody, but it’d be best for people to stay indoors as much as possible.”
“Day as hot as this is, most folks’ll stay indoors for sure,” Vance said, and frowned. “Uh … will this stuff cause cancer?”
“I don’t think the radiation levels will be critically high in this area. Our weather forecaster says the winds will take most of it to the south, over the Chinati Mountains. But we’ve got to ask your help in something else, gentlemen. The air force has to get our visitor out of this area and to a secured location. I’ll be in charge of the transfer.” His gaze ticked to a clock on the wall. “At fourteen hundred hours—that’s two o’clock—I’m expecting two tractor-trailer trucks. One of them will be hauling a crane, and the other will be marked ‘Allied Van Lines.’ They’ll have to pass through your town in order to reach the impact position. Once there, my crew will start the process of breaking up the meteor to get it loaded and moved out. If all goes as planned, we’ll be gone by twenty-four hundred hours.”
“Twelve midnight,” Danny said; he’d wanted to join the army before his father had talked him out of it, and he knew military time.
“Right. So what I have to ask of you gentlemen is to help with the security arrangements,” Rhodes went on. “Webb’s gotten all sorts of calls from people who saw the meteor pass over Lubbock, Odessa, and Fort Stockton—but of course it was too high for them to tell what it was, and they’re reporting seeing a UFO.” He smiled again, and pulled nervous smiles from the deputy, sheriff, and mayor. “Par for the course, isn’t it?”
“Sure is!” Vance agreed. “Betcha them flying-saucer nuts are comin’ out of the woodwork!”
“Yes.” The colonel’s smile slipped just a fraction, but none of them noticed. “They are. Anyway, we don’t want civilians interfering with the work, and we sure as hell don’t need the press prowling around. The air force doesn’t want to be responsible for any news hound getting a dose of radiation. Sheriff, can you and the mayor keep a tight lid on this situation for us?”
“Yes sir!” Vance said heartily. “Just tell us what we need to do!”
“Firstly, I want you to discourage any sightseers. Of course, we’ll have our own security perimeter set up on-site, but I don’t want anyone coming out there to gawk. Secondly, I want you to emphasize the radiation danger; not that it’s necessarily true, but it wouldn’t hurt to scare people a little bit. Keeps them from getting underfoot, right?”
“Right,” Vance agreed.
“Thirdly, I don’t want any media people anywhere near that site.” The colonel’s eyes were chilly again. “We’ll be patrolling with our ’copters, but if you get any calls from the media I want you to handle them. Webb’s not giving out any information. I want you to play dumb too. As I say, we don’t need civilians in the area. Clear?”
“Clear as glass.”
“Good. Then I think that does it. Gunny, do you have any questions?”
“Just one, sir.” Gunniston turned another page in his notebook. “Sheriff Vance, who owns a light green pickup truck marked ‘Inferno Animal Hospital’? The license is Texas six-two—”
“Dr. Jessie,” Vance told him. “Jessica Hammond, I mean. She’s the vet.” Gunniston produced a pen and wrote the name down. “Why?”
“We saw the truck being towed in the area of the meteor’s impact,” Colonel Rhodes said. “It was taken to the Texaco station a couple of streets over. Dr. Hammond probably saw the object go past, and we wanted to check on her.”
“She’s real nice. Smart lady too. I’m tellin’ you, she’s not afraid to do anything a man vet wouldn’t—”
“Thanks.” Gunniston returned the pen and notebook to his pocket. “We’ll take it from here.”
“Sure thing. You fellas need some more help, you just ask.”
Rhodes and Gunniston were moving toward the door, their business done. “We will,” Rhodes said. “Again, sorry about all the commotion.”
“Don’t worry about it. Hell, you gave everybody somethin’ to jaw about at the dinner table!”
“Not much jawing, I hope.”
“Oh. Right. Don’t you worry about a thing. You can count on Ed Vance, yes sir!”
“I know we can. Thank you, Sheriff.” Rhodes shook Vance’s hand, and for an instant the sheriff thought his knuckles were going to explode. Then Rhodes released him and Vance was left with a sickly smile on his face as the two air-force officers left the building and strode out into the hot white light.
“Wow.” Vance massaged his aching fingers. “Fella don’t look as strong as he is.”
“Man, wait’ll I tell Doris about this!” Mayor Brett’s voice was shaking and thrilled. “I met a real colonel! Lordy, she won’t believe a word of it!”
Danny walked to a window and peered out through the blind; he watched the two men moving away, heading toward Republica Road. He frowned thoughtfully and picked at a hangnail. “Object,” he said.
“Huh? You say somethin’, Danny boy?”
“Object.” Danny turned toward Vance and Brett. He had sorted out what bothered him. “That colonel said Dr. Hammond probably saw the ‘object’ go past. How come he didn’t say ‘meteor’?”
Vance paused. His face was blank, his thought processes unhurried. “Same thing, ain’t it?” he finally asked.
“Yes sir. I guess. I just wonder why he put it that way.”
“Well, you ain’t paid to wonder, Danny boy. We’ve got our orders from the United States Air Force, and we’ll do just what Colonel Rhodes says do.”
Danny nodded and returned to his desk.
“Met a real air-force colonel!” Mayor Brett said. “Lordy, I’d better get back to my office in case people call and want to know what all the ruckus is. Think that’d be a good idea?” Vance agreed that it would be, and Johnny Brett hurried out the door and just about ran to the bank building, where the electric sign spelled out 87°F. at ten-nineteen.
9
Tic-Tac-Toe
JESSIE HAD SEEN THE helicopter come down in Preston Park as Xavier Mendoza pulled the wrecker into his Texaco station and cut the engine. While Mendoza and his daytime helper, a lean and sullen young Apache named Sonny Crowfield, labored to unhook the pickup and get it into a garage stall, Stevie walked away a few paces with the ebony sphere between her hands; she had no interest in the helicopter, or what its presence might mean.
A Buick that had once been bright red, now faded to a pinkish cast by the sun, slid off Republica Road and pulled up to the garage stalls. “Howdy, doc!” the man at the wheel calle
d; he got out, and Jessie’s eyes were bombarded by Dodge Creech’s green-and-orange plaid sport jacket. He strode jauntily toward her, his fat round face split by a grin that was all blinding-white caps. One glance at the pickup stopped him in his tracks. “Gag a maggot! That ain’t a wreck, it’s a carcass!”
“It’s pretty bad, all right.”
Creech looked into the mangled engine and gave a low, trilling whistle. “Rest in peace,” he said. “Or pieces, I might say.” His laugh was a strangled cackle, like a chicken struggling to squeeze out a square egg. He recovered quickly when he saw that Jessie did not share his humor. “Sorry. I know this truck put in a lot of miles for you. Lucky nobody got hurt—uh—you and Stevie are okay, right?”
“I’m fine.” Jessie glanced over at her daughter; Stevie had found a slice of shadow at the building’s far corner, and looked to be intently examining the black ball. “Stevie’s … been shaken up, but she’s okay. No injuries, I mean.”
“Glad to hear that, surely am.” Creech dug a lemon-yellow paisley handkerchief from the breast pocket of his jacket and mopped the moisture off his face. His slacks were almost the same shade of yellow, and he wore two-tone yellow-on-white shoes. He owned a closetful of polyester suits in a garish rainbow of colors, and though he read Esquire and GQ avidly, his fashion sense remained as raucous as a Saturday night rodeo. His wife, Ginger, had sworn she would divorce him if he wore his iridescent red suit to church again. He believed in the power of a man’s image, he often told her—and anyone who would listen; if you were scared to make people notice you, he said, you might as well sink on down and let the ground swallow you whole. He was a big, fleshy man in his early forties who always offered a quick smile and a handshake, and he’d sold some form of insurance to almost all the residents of Inferno. In his broad, ruddy-cheeked face his eyes were as blue as a baby’s blanket, and he was bald except for a fringe of red hair and a little red tuft atop his forehead that he kept meticulously combed.
He touched the gaping hole in the pickup’s engine. “Looks like a cannon hit you, doc. Want to tell me what happened?”
Jessie began; she registered Stevie standing nearby, then focused all her attention on telling Dodge Creech the story.
Stevie, comfortable in the cool shadow, was watching the black ball do magic. Her fingerprints had begun to appear in vivid blue again; it was a color that reminded her of pictures of the ocean, or of that swimming pool at the motel in Dallas where they’d spent last summer vacation. She drew a cactus with her fingernail, watched as the blue picture slowly melted away. She drew scrawls and swirls and circles, and all the patterns drifted down into the ball’s dark center. This is even better than fingerpaints! she thought. You didn’t have to clean anything up, and there wasn’t any way to spill the paints—except there was only one color, but that was okay, because it sure was pretty.
Stevie had an idea; she drew a little grid across the black ball and began to fill it with Xs and Os. Tic-tac-toe, she knew the game was called. Her daddy was very good at it, and had been teaching her. She filled in all the Xs and Os herself, finding that the Os linked up across the bottom row; the grid melted away, and Stevie drew another one. Xs won this time, in a diagonal line. Time for a third grid, as this one melted away as well. Again, Xs won. She remembered that her daddy said the middle space was the most important, so she started an O there and, indeed, the Os won.
“What’cha got there, kid?”
Stevie looked up, startled. Sonny Crowfield was staring at her; his black hair hung to his shoulders, and his eyes were black under thick black brows. “What is it?” he asked, wiping his greasy hands on a rag. “A toy?”
She nodded and said nothing.
He grunted. “Looks like a piece of shit to me.” He sneered, and then Mendoza called him and he returned to the garage.
“You’re a piece of shit,” she said to Crowfield’s back—but not too loudly, because she knew shit was not a nice word. And then she looked back at the black ball, and she caught her breath with a gasp.
Another blue-lined grid had been drawn in it. The grid was full of Xs and Os, and X had won the game across the top row.
It slowly faded away, back into the depths.
She had not drawn that grid. And she did not draw the one that began to appear, the lines precise and as thin as if sketched with a razor, on the surface of the black ball.
Stevie felt her fingers loosen. She almost dropped the ball, but she remembered her mother saying not to. The tic-tac-toe grid was complete in another couple of seconds, and the Xs and Os began to appear. She started to call for her mama, but Jessie was still talking to Dodge Creech; Stevie watched the grid’s spaces being filled—and then, on an impulse, she put an X in one of them as soon as the ball’s inner finger had finished an O.
There was no further response. The grid slowly vanished.
A few seconds ticked past; the ball remained solidly black.
I broke it, Stevie thought sadly. It’s not going to play anymore!
But something moved down in the depths of the sphere—a brief burst of blue that quickly faded. The razor-sharp lines of another grid began to come up, and Stevie watched as an O appeared in the center space. Then there was a pause; Stevie’s heart jumped, because she realized whatever was inside the black ball was inviting her to play. She chose a space on the bottom row and drew an X. An O appeared in the upper left, and there was another pause for Stevie to decide on her move.
The game ended quickly, with a diagonal of Os from upper left to lower right.
Another grid appeared as soon as the last vanished, and again an O was drawn in the center space. Stevie frowned; whatever it was, it already knew the game too well. But she bravely made her move and lost even faster than before.
“Stevie? Show Mr. Creech what hit us.”
She jumped. Her mother and Dodge Creech were standing nearby, but neither of them had seen what she was doing. She thought Mr. Creech’s coat looked like somebody had sewn it while they had their finger stuck in an electric socket. “Can I take a gander, hon?” he asked, smiling, and held out his hand.
Stevie hesitated. The ball was cool and utterly black again, all the traces of the grids gone. She didn’t want to give it up to that big, stranger’s hand. But her mother was watching, expecting her to obey, and she knew she’d already disobeyed far too much today. She gave him the black ball—and as soon as her fingers left it and Mr. Creech had it in his hand, she heard the sigh of the wind chimes singing to her again.
“This did the damage?” Creech blinked slowly, weighing the object in his palm. “Doc, you sure about that?”
“As sure as I can be. I know it’s light, but it’s the right size; like I said, it was lodged up in the wheel well after it went through the engine.”
“I just can’t see how somethin’ like this could’ve busted through metal. Feels like glass, kinda. Or wet plastic.” He ran his fingers over the smooth surface; Stevie noted that they left no blue fingerprints. The wind-chimes music was insistent, yearning, and Stevie thought, It needs me. “So this is what blew out of the thing that went by, huh?” Dodge Creech held it up to the sun, could see nothing inside it. “Never seen the like of this before. Any idea what it is?”
“None,” Jessie said. “I expect whoever came down in that helicopter might know. Three of them were following it.”
“I don’t rightly know what to put in my report,” Creech admitted. “I mean, you’re covered for collision and injuries and all, but I don’t think Texas Pride’ll understand that a plastic baby bowlin’ ball tore a hole smack dab through a pickup’s engine. What’re you plannin’ on doin’ with it?”
“Turning it over to Vance, just as soon as we can get over there.”
“Well, I’ll be glad to take you. I don’t think your pickup’s goin’ anywhere.”
“Mama?” Stevie asked. “What’ll the sheriff do with it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe send it somewhere to try to figure out what it
is. Maybe try to break it open.”
The wind-chimes music pulled at her. She thought that the black ball was begging her to take it again; of course she couldn’t understand why Mr. Creech or her mother didn’t hear the wind chimes too, or what exactly was making the music, but she heard it as the call of a playmate. Try to break it open, she thought, and flinched inside. Oh, no. Oh, no, that wouldn’t be right. Because whatever was in the black ball would be hurt if it was cracked open, like a turtle would be hurt if its shell was broken. Oh, no! She looked up imploringly at her mother. “Do we have to give it away? Can’t we just take it home and keep it?”
“Hon, I’m afraid we can’t.” Jessie touched the child’s cheek. “I’m sorry, but we’ve got to give it to the sheriff. Okay?”
Stevie didn’t answer. Mr. Creech was holding the black ball down at his side in a loose grip. “Well,” Mr. Creech said, “why don’t we head on over and see Vance right now?” He started to turn away to walk to his car.
The music pained her and gave her courage. She’d never done anything like what streaked through her mind to do; such a thing was a sure invitation to a spanking, but she knew she would have only one chance. Later she could explain why she’d done it, and later always seemed a long way off.
Mr. Creech took one step toward his car. And then Stevie darted forward, past her mother, and plucked the black ball from Dodge Creech’s hand; the wind-chimes music stopped as her fingers curled around the ball, and Stevie knew she’d done the right thing.
“Stevie!” Jessie cried out, shocked. “Give that back to—”
But the little girl was running, clutching the black ball close. She ran around the corner of Mendoza’s gas station, from shadow into sunlight, narrowly missed ramming into the trash dumpster, and kept going between two cacti as tall as Mr. Creech.
“Stevie!” Jessie came around the corner, saw the little girl running across somebody’s backyard, heading toward Brazos Street. “Come back here this minute!” Jessie called, but Stevie didn’t stop and she knew the child wasn’t going to. Stevie ran along a wire-mesh fence, turned a corner, and had reached Brazos; she disappeared from sight. “Stevie!” Jessie tried again, but it was no use.
The Monster Novels: Stinger, the Wolf's Hour, and Mine Page 9