by John Shirley
“Do you think we should try to drive to another town?” Lacey asked, putting the phone down.
“Not—not tonight,” he said softly, and handed her the paper. It read:
Mr. Clayborn,
As you are the only one I know and I guess trust, I am leaving this here to warn you and ask for your help. They have been changing people at a gallop all day, and they did it to my niece. I barely got away from her. I tried to leave town, but they have the roads blocked off. They are telling people it’s some emergency and we have to stay. But there’s nothing about it on TV. If you try to insist on getting by, they take you away right there and you come back as one of them. I don’t know what they are.
I guess these are the Last Days. I’m going to my church and hide there. I don’t want to say which. God will help the righteous. I wanted to warn somebody before I left here.
God Bless.
Mrs. Goodwin
“I hope she got somewhere safe,” he muttered. “She used to try to get me over to that Pentecostal church of hers. I was running out of excuses. She was such a well-meaning old soul.”
“You think those people at the boat? . . .”
He nodded. “If she’s right, they were trying to leave town. They’d tried the road.”
“It’s like it was in the air for a while, wasn’t it? You could feel something, but you couldn’t describe it exactly. Oh, God, my sister. That must be—oh, no.”
He held her as she wept.
Then they turned off the lights in every room but the bedroom, where they lay together, dressed, under the covers. After a while, she reached out and took his hand.
And there it was. A hand touching his—a truly intimate, simple contact—hidden under the covers. He felt the poles of the world shift, then.
He tried to define the change, in his mind, and couldn’t. A predatory nightmare infested the land; it might well kill them both. If they survived, they would never quite sleep well again; they would argue sometimes, and they would hurt one another, perhaps. But they were in this together—as he’d never been, with anyone. He could feel a simple completion, more real than passion. They’d be side by side, facing whatever darkness came along. The poles had shifted—and she was his north, now.
The skinny black cat they’d found in the country came out from under the bed and jumped up beside them, nestling close. After a while, Bert turned out the light and held Lacey in his arms, as together they watched the curtained windows for the coming of the morning light.
December 13, night
He knew exactly what to do. That’s how it was at first. There was no interference from the old self. Not yet. All he had to do was get up from the reorganizer, in the harsh lights of the portable electric lamps that had been set up on poles driven into the dirt; climb out of the reorganization pit, learning to use his limbs as he went. There were too many limbs to coordinate, if he thought about it; but if he simply thought, Go there, the mobilization program took over, and he’d find himself moving forward down the tunnel. He discovered, from imitating some of the others he saw, that he could move up the side of the packed-dirt tunnel, too, close beside the strings of lightbulbs stapled to the wooden beam wedged overhead, and felt a feeble kind of happiness then. I can defy gravity, he thought.
All the time he was monitoring the All of Us with one part of his enhanced brain, taking the binomial pulse of it, hearing the words in their shorthand and more directly when it was needed: “Blue and Green converge in future tense, register point seven one three thousand, enclosing and restructuring . . . Covering soccer field, associates converting fire department; police entirely converted except for two; moving in on Cruzon . . . Stanner is back in primary operational field, converging . . .”
Those names sparked something. He knew those names. Cruzon. Stanner. He got mental pictures. That made him think of a third person. He saw the third person in a backyard, putting sauce on steaks over hot coals. Laughing with his wife. That one’s name . . . was Sprague.
Sprague. Leonard Sprague.
Moving down the tunnel, emerging into the cool night air— feeling the coolness distantly on those parts of him that were still capable of feeling it, mostly on his cheeks—he felt a downward spiral inside, at the name Sprague. As if that name had fallen with a splash into the surface of his mind and it was sinking, the name spinning down, carrying his consciousness down with it.
Sprague
Sprague
Sprague
Sprague
Sprague
Leonard Sprague
He was already patrolling the perimeter of the entry place over the base of operations of the All of Us—his main task, for now— before it came to him.
It had been his own name.
Sprague.
That wasn’t relevant to his new format. With some of the converted, he knew, the names of their “shells” were important. It was part of the camouflage—necessary, for now. But when you were reset into a completely new format, there was no need for a name. He shouldn’t be able to remember it. But he did. There had been enough of his essential self—maybe what people had once called his spirit, his soul—to retain some sense of . . .
Leonard Sprague.
They hadn’t taken so much from him as they’d thought. So he remembered that he had been Sprague.
He wished achingly that he couldn’t remember. He hoped the All of Us would make him forget who he had been.
It would, when it had time. It had priorities, specific time-critical actions to carry out first. The All of Us was busy.
December 13, night
Vinnie was walking along near the Albertsons supermarket on Quiebra Valley Road, at 9:53 P.M., when he started to feel it.
He knew he had to be alone somewhere and had better make it quick. He had no vinegar and he had no medicine and this was going to hit him hard, he could feel it. It was a form of epilepsy, hit him only a few, maybe four times a year; was connected to his condition in some way that even the doctor didn’t understand: it was either epilepsy-related autism or autism-related epilepsy with episodes of OCD or something. And he usually avoided taking his medication because it made him a zombie.
They would like it if he was a zombie, he supposed, but there had always been zombies, even before they had come, and he’d always been afraid of them, and he knew that people thought he was like one, too, and, as he said aloud, passing some kids on scooters, people thinking he was a zombie, “Well, hey now, that’s just another way to prove that when life plays a joke on you it’s laughing at you and not with you.” And of course, as if the kids were playing the part of Life Itself, they laughed at him.
Their laughter had a shape that hung in the air like wind chimes made of teeth.
And that thought, that image, told him it was already too late to get somewhere alone because now it was hitting him. He just made it to a bus bench and sat down on it, clenching the wooden back, trying to ignore the face painted on the bench next to the slogan “LLOYD MCKENZIE” MEANS “SELL YOUR HOUSE E-Z” and Lloyd’s jolly round winking face on the bus bench turned with hallucinatory ease to leer right at him just as that high tuneless note started that meant the mixing-up fit was coming on full.
He was so scared. It was frightening when things switched places, when the sound of two passing police cars blaring their sirens on the way to the high school became a sickening red taste in his mouth, the taste of a very bad cherry-flavored cough syrup, the kind of cough syrup that was the color of cherries but lied about its taste; when the three older men in the car in front of him pulling over, for a moment, to let the cop cars pass, turned blue like their car while the car turned flesh color and their heads pulsed with a thrumming sound, and it looked just like their heads were part of the car, like those toy cars with the head of a little driver but if you look close the head is attached to a painted-on seat without a body. When the birds flying over were tactile sensations in his eyes, he could feel their shapes pressing in painful stabbing edges to his eyeballs and
. . .
Then he started to hear the moths talking again.
There weren’t any moths that he could see, but it was the same voices he’d heard before when those moths had dived at him and hovered in front of his eyes. He thought of these voices as the moth voices. And he knew somehow that his altered state, the electrical overstimulation that his brain was going through when he had a seizure, was helping him pick up these voices that were in the air all the time. Some of it was just numbers, a voice saying, “010110100-1011001,” and some of it was words that didn’t fit together, “Protocol Beach Embrace Makeover Collection Shortfall of Marathon Zone Oh-Seventeen Green Metareception Umbrella Rebuke Until Further Notice.” And some of it almost made sense, in a sort of way, “Harold Potts, bear with me, we’ve got no clear reception.”
“I’m modeling at high efficiency, will stay at this cover modality until otherwise instructed.”
“Umbrella, the All of This estimated in thirty-three hours, preparing insemination receptacles for expansion, see that the junior high is tested for maximization.”
“Unlocalized youth are still in a state of disorganization and recurrent antipath. We must include them before the Social Organism extends its antibodies to spherical attention recognition in the south-eastern radius.”
Vinnie tried plugging his ears, but it was no use.
And meanwhile a child passing with her mother lost her helium balloon, which soared and bobbled away in the growing darkness; it was the purple of the taste of oranges and it was the shape of the sound of low pipe-organ notes.
And a truck passed with its shape pressing on Vinnie’s forebrain; that’s what he saw in his mind, a truck shape pressed into the soft stuff of his brain like a mold of a toy truck pressed into Play-Doh. And the truck made a sound that smelled like licorice. And a seagull gave a cry that tasted like overripe bananas.
And all that time the voices went on.
“Will need help at 754 Pinecrest and 658 Owlswoop; there is someone resisting . . . Is anyone monitoring the government investigative body? . . . Five thousand Pink Metaimperative sandwheels Beach Road . . .”
They were talking, he knew, those who had changed some of the animals and some of the moths and many of the people. They were talking on their own frequency, and they were completely rational, so rational that only a weeping man having a seizure could hear it.
And then he heard them mention his mother. “We have a conscious resistance, Elizabeth Munson . . .”
And then it said his address. And said, “A definite reset, very stubborn. Not much material of value, but if we need parts . . .”
The seizure was ebbing. It wasn’t the same as a grand mal seizure; it wasn’t so terribly obvious, though he couldn’t walk when it was happening, and no one had called an ambulance. He was there on the sidewalk alone, watching traffic pass. Seeing the moths circling the light over the Albertsons parking lot ENTER HERE sign with unnatural precision.
He was standing, now, though his legs were rubbery. He swayed where he stood. “Don’t fall,” he said aloud, “don’t let the police or the ambulances take you, it’ll be a trip to South Calaboom, most of them have become one of them.”
Oh, but it was so hard to walk right now. He was walking through jelly. He had to get home to help Mother. If only he could turn into a Starbot, transform into a perfectly symmetrical gorgeous flying fighting machine, to save his mother.
But he knew it was too late. Mother was a quarter mile away from him. But he felt it when she died.
Adair was lying flat atop a boulder on a hillside overlooking Quiebra Creek. She was shivering, looking at the lights of Quiebra winking against the backdrop of the night.
She had her two hands over the stock and breech of the gun. The shotgun had four rounds left in it; she’d checked.
Her body throbbed with pain in her neck, her knees, her shins, the palms of her hands, and a long scratch burned hot against her belly. She felt something crawling in her hair, and she plucked it out and flicked it away. A tick, probably. Lots of ticks here. She wondered if the ticks sucked on them, too; parasites on parasites who called normal people parasites.
She scratched mosquito bites on her arm.
Then she put her hand back on the gun, got a good grip, and pressed the butt of the stock against the granite to help her get partly up, so that she was kneeling on the boulder. This wasn’t good, though; she was still being hunted and she knew they could see her better this way, against the sky.
She moved so she was sitting facing the other way, her legs dangling over the edge of the boulder, the gun laid across her lap with her hands on it. Ready. Peering into the darkness. Seeing them . . .
There—about a hundred yards back along the creek. A group of ballcrawlers, little animals taken over by the crawlers. Sometimes standing up on each other’s furry and feathered shoulders, quivering along.
They were still experimenting, she realized, whatever they were. They were parasitical, and they were new at this, and they were trying new shapes and formats, looking for different models that worked. And some of them were like Ms. Santavo had been, almost perfect cover, and some of them were new ways to think of life and organizing it, and a lot of that didn’t work. Evolution takes time.
Adair thought she’d like to fire the shotgun into that quivering mass of different animals and just watch the abomination of it fly apart, but she was sure that what remained would just reorganize and attack her.
So she slid off the boulder, on the side opposite the ballcrawlers, and looked around for a moment to see if the marine thing was coming. She could smell it sometimes, the train-transformer human-flesh stink of it, but it hadn’t caught her yet.
She was hungry and tired, but in a way she felt very alive. She just wanted to get to Cal and Waylon and warn them.
That made her think about Mom. And Dad. And her heart ached. She had heard that expression all her life, about heartache, but never before had she felt anything so definitely like an ache in her heart. Like the ache of a broken bone. But the broken-bone feeling was in the center of her, where her feelings lived, and, oh, it ached. Because she was sure they were dead, or something worse.
She felt a seething anger then and wished the marine would come along, or another one, so she could kill one.
Ms. Santavo. She had killed her, hadn’t she?
She hadn’t been thinking about it directly, but it came to her now. She’d killed another person. Only, Ms. Santavo had already been dead, really.
But what if that gas that the major had talked about was real? What if it had affected her mind?
What if she’d misunderstood what Ms. Santavo was doing? What if she’d murdered her?
She looked around the edge of the boulder. Seventy-five yards away, the thing was coming along like a walking scarecrow.
She watched it for a while. It didn’t shimmy into other shapes. It didn’t vanish and reappear. It was absurd but it was internally consistent. It was real.
No. She wasn’t seeing things. She hadn’t killed Ms. Santavo. The woman had already been dead.
Adair remembered a line from the Bible. “Let the dead bury the dead.”
She drew back into the cover of the boulder and moved as quietly as possible through the brush toward the lights of town.
19
December 13, night
When Stanner stepped through the wooden gate into Cruzon’s backyard, he felt a very distinctive sensation, a sensation he’d felt once before in a Yemeni alley and would never forget.
It was the feeling of a gun muzzle pressed to the back of his neck.
“Do not move, Major.” Police commander Cruzon’s voice.
Stanner considered the sensation on his neck. “Wait, I think I got it. A nine millimeter?”
“That’s not bad. It’s loaded, too, and there’s a round in the chamber. Now step around back behind the house. I’m going to take the gun off your neck, but it’s going to be about twenty-four inches from your spine
.”
“I got you.” Stanner walked along the side of the house, past a prefab plastic doghouse and a neat coil of green garden hose.
Frogs were singing from the little green concrete-banked koi pond in the backyard.
“Isn’t it the wrong time of year for frogs?” Stanner asked.
“Yup,” Cruzon said.
The house was up against a hill, like so many houses in Quiebra, and the steep backyard slope had been terraced and shored up with stone. There was a little leafless ornamental plum tree, and the wooden fences were lined with rosebushes. The two men stood there a moment, listening to the frogs and then an owl.
“Nice yard,” Stanner said. Cruzon didn’t reply, and Stanner wondered if Cruzon was just going to shoot him in the back.
“Turn around,” Cruzon said.
Stanner turned. Cruzon was out of uniform, wearing tan slacks and a white zip-up jacket. He held the 9mm automatic steady, pointing at Stanner’s sternum. Just stood there, backlit by the porch light, looking Stanner over, as if trying to make up his mind about something.
Cruzon’s face was mostly in shadow. Beyond him, lying on the little brick patio by the glass sliding doors, was something about as big as a man under a canvas tarp. Whatever it was twitched fitfully.
Stanner saw a little girl looking at him from beyond the glass. A little black-haired girl; one of Cruzon’s kids. Stanner shook his head at the little girl and frowned so she’d go away. If her father was going to shoot him, it was better if she didn’t have to watch.
The kid backed away from the glass, then ran out of Stanner’s line of sight.
“What’s that supposed to be?” Cruzon demanded.
“There was a little girl. I thought she ought to not . . . be around.”
“That supposed to be clever, a good act, you pretending you care?” Cruzon snapped.
Stanner shrugged. “So you think I’m one of them. I don’t know what to say to that, Commander—except, you’d better be right about that. Before you shoot a federal agent.”