by John Shirley
“Reason to shoot a federal agent’s getting better every passing hour, seems to me.” Cruzon reached around behind himself with his free hand, took a small flashlight from a back pocket, switched it on. “You gonna pretend this didn’t start with your fucking satellite? Now kneel down in front of me.”
Stanner hesitated. But then figured Cruzon would probably have turned him around the other way if he was going to shoot him.
“Do it!” Cruzon barked, pointing the pistol at Stanner’s forehead.
Stanner decided not to rush him. His gut told him Cruzon was still human. He knelt, going down on both knees.
“Now open your mouth,” Cruzon said.
Stanner raised his eyebrows instead.
Cruzon flicked the gun barrel so it caught Stanner’s right cheekbone, hard enough to hurt something fierce, not hard enough to break anything. “Open!”
Stanner opened his mouth.
“Wider!”
He opened wide—and Cruzon pointed the flashlight down his throat. Squinted. Then grunted to himself and took a step back.
“Okay, Major. Stand up.” Cruzon lowered the gun, but kept it at his side.
His pulse slowing a little, Stanner got to his feet. “They’ll modify that eventually. But it’s not a bad test for now.”
“What,” Cruzon said, “no more of that bullshit you were handing us before? A ‘gas that makes you do strange things’? That was a goddamn lie.”
“Yeah, well. It’s just part of my job. I had my reasons.”
“Reasons! Come here, Major. I’ll show you reasons.”
Cruzon stalked over to the quivering tarp by the back door. He signaled to someone in the house—probably his wife. White pleated curtains closed inside the sliding glass doors.
Then Cruzon bent down and pulled the tarp away, exposing a man tied up in duct tape and yellow plastic rope. It had been a man, anyway. Short black hair, pale skin, flat gray pouchy eyes that watched Stanner impassively, the remains of a black suit. His mouth duct-taped shut. The suit was torn in a dozen places, and through the rips Stanner could see wounds, and inside the wounds he could see little metal maggots, squirming. One of the man’s hands suddenly came loose from the wrist and extended on a jointed metal stalk to snatch at Cruzon’s ankles.
Cruzon jumped back, then moved around where the hand couldn’t reach, and kicked the man hard in the head. Stanner took a prudent step back himself.
“That used to be a friend of mine,” Cruzon said, staring at the crawler, his eyes moist. “He was an FBI agent I worked with years ago when they were trying to prove a guy up here killed his old lady and buried her over in Nevada. Martin here loved Filipino food. Loved my family. Used to be a great guy, name of Martin Breakenridge.
“Well, a couple of days ago two of my men down at the precinct weren’t on duty when they were supposed to be, and I was passing RadioShack, saw one of them using a big pile of money to buy a shitload of stuff. So I followed one of ’em, patrolman named Lansbury. He went into his house and came out—and I bent the laws some, just to find out what was going on. I look through his place after he left, and I find a pile of money in the guy’s basement. Indications are, it’s the stolen money from the bank. He comes home, surprises me there, tries to kill me.
“And, uh—” He broke off to lick his lips. “And I had to kill Lansbury—had to shoot him three times in the head to really stop him. And I found out what he was. So sure I figure some more things out and I call my friend here, Breakenridge, at the FBI. I figure they won’t believe me if I tell them the story, but if he comes here to see something without me saying what, on my say-so, to see for himself, he’ll believe his own eyes. This was before they had all the phones tied up.
“He did believe me, when he looked close at Lansbury; he had to. He was taking Lansbury in the trunk of his car, back to the city to show some people. Well, he never made it. I figure . . . they were watching. They caught him, I guess. Changed him, before he ever left town. Because Breakenridge came here when I wasn’t home and he tried to turn my wife into one of them. I guess he was setting a trap for me. And I came home and caught him at it.” He sighed, swallowed, and went on, his voice breaking. “And I shot Agent Breakenridge up pretty good, with a ten-gauge shotgun. But he ain’t dead. You can kill ’em, but it’s not so easy. Got to shoot ’em right. And he’s one of them now.
“Means he is in touch with them, Stanner. They’re going to be coming here for him—and because I know about them. From what I can tell, they’re always talking, those things, in their heads.” He turned to Stanner, looked at him, but pointed at the thing that had been FBI agent Breakenridge. “So where’s that thing fit into your reasons for lying to me?”
“The situation—situation seems to’ve changed,” Stanner said, feeling sick. “Don’t you think you should put the fucker out of his misery?”
“I think he’s better evidence this way.” He pulled the tarp back over the crawler. “Now, Stanner, you’re gonna tell me every fucking thing you know. Right now, Major. Now. Then you’re going to make some phone calls.”
Stanner said slowly, rubbing his bruised, swelling cheekbone, “I’ll tell you what I can, but—”
“Everything,” Cruzon said with finality. “And then we make some calls. We report this.”
Stanner made an effort and threw off the habit of secrecy. “I’ll tell you everything. But the phone calls won’t do any good until we make them out of town.”
“Yeah. I worked that out.” He looked at Breakenridge. “Let’s put him in the trunk of my car. If we grab him careful—”
“Hold on. He can communicate with them. And even if we kill him and take his body for evidence, how do we know the part of him that talks to them can’t still talk to them? It could still transmit. We’d have to melt it to slag and then it’d be no proof at all. No.”
Cruzon’s eyes welled up and he looked away, wiped his eyes. Then he looked sharply back at Stanner. He winked grimly. “No, we’re taking him with us. Put him in your rental car.”
Stanner stared. Then he got it. “Okay.” He said it loud enough for Breakenridge to hear.
But they had to kill the thing that had been Martin Breakenridge anyway. They didn’t want it operating, infecting anyone else. The fewer of them staying ambulatory, the better.
It had to be done fast. Stanner did it, while Cruzon kept watch on the street. And Stanner didn’t feel much as he fired the shotgun three times, point-blank, into the back of the Breakenridge-thing’s head, two more times into its spine. He used an ax to sever the head, as if with some supernatural creature of old. Then he slung the remains into the trunk of his rental car and drove it a few blocks away, to a wide dirt track Cruzon directed him to, a narrow little road along the creek, screened by a stand of eucalyptus, where the local kids sometimes parked to get laid. He got out of the car, leaving it trembling in drive, put a sizeable rock on the accelerator, and let the car surge forward on its own, into Quiebra Creek.
He heard sirens and stood still, listening; they were coming closer. The thing that had been Breakenridge had transmitted what they had hoped it would, and some of them, looking out their picture windows, had seen him drive to the dirt road beside the creek. They might stumble around, looking for the car, and if he hid himself pretty well, heading back to Cruzon’s house, that might throw them off, for a while.
Cruzon was a smart little cop.
December 13, night
I was stupid to come back home, Waylon thought.
He was actually across the street from their apartment, squatting in the foliage of a big camellia bush in the front yard of someone’s darkened split-level. Camellias flowered in winter, and the red blooms bedecked the bowl of dark green leaves around him; under his feet fallen blossoms were crinkling brown at the edges, falling apart.
He knew he was cold, in a remote kind of way, but he didn’t really care; he was hungry, but he didn’t want to eat.
He had gone to Russell’s house first, because Russell—f
rom the pizza parlor, the guy who’d sold him the pot—lived a block and a half from the place his mom had rented, up on Hillview overlooking Quiebra Valley. He’d thought maybe he could hide out at Russell’s for a while, then sneak in when the Mom-thing wasn’t there. Get his computer hard drive, some clothes. That .25 pistol his mom kept in her closet.
But at Russell’s he’d taken the precaution of scouting first, when he heard someone moving around in the garage. He’d looked through a side door into the garage, seen Russell standing at a wooden workbench, next to a vise; Russell with his ponytail and his goatee and his tattooed arms and his Slipknot T-shirt, building a transmission device with rapid-fire efficiency, his hands moving so fast Waylon couldn’t follow them. Russell, who’d flunked science three times.
Just looking at him, Waylon was pretty sure. Then Russell held his palm over the transmitter and a little silvery snake came from his hand.
So Waylon backed away from Russell’s house and wandered toward his own. Wondering.
Some people couldn’t be changed into those things without a lot of trouble—but others could. It seemed to have something to do with your state of mind. Whether or not you were already halfway like that, Ronald had said. Somehow. Maybe the more programmed you already were, the more programmable you were likely to be.
Adults could be changed over pretty easily, seemed like. They’d lost some essence that made them resist. Or most of them had.
Like Mom.
He’d been in the calm eye of a hurricane of emotion since he’d left the school, just putting one foot in front of the other and trying not to envision his mom with those lights coming from her eyes, and the boy on his back in the showers with his jaws pried apart— but now the hurricane caught up with him again, and he fell to his knees with the sorrow, the anguish rolling over him in waves.
My mom. My mother.
He felt overwhelmed, unable to decide which way to jump. He’d thought about calling the police—but how likely was it the cops weren’t changed over? They would have been the first to be changed, wouldn’t they?
So he was drawn home, to the apartment he’d lived in with Mom—maybe more because it was his home than because anything useful was there.
Since I’m here, maybe I should go in and get that gun, he thought. The little gun Mom keeps up in her closet.
No. He needed to get away.
He stood up, flexed his knees to get circulation back in them, and felt ready to try moving again.
He’d go look for Adair. Travel through the yards, where he could, try to keep out of the streetlight.
Then he saw his mother. She was crawling on the roof of the apartment building across the street. Dressed as she had been when he’d seen her last, but barefoot, and she was pulling herself across the just-slightly-sloping red tile roof, hugging the tiles with arms and legs stretching out fully to propel herself in little jets of motion— starting, stopping, pulling herself, head revolving.
He turned and vomited onto the mat of crinkled, fallen camellias.
When he looked again she was squatting like an ape in a zoo, next to a satellite dish that had been tricked out with a lot of extra wires and small metal pieces he couldn’t make out clearly. She was turning the dish, placing it in alignment with the others on all the rest of the rooftops, all pointing one way.
“Mom,” he heard himself say.
She seemed to hesitate, and her head turned all the way around on her shoulders, her mouth open as a vibrating tendril of metal inside it scanned the air. She had heard him.
A cold white anger rushed through him, then, and he burst from the camellia bush. First the building was rushing toward him, then the strip of grass around it was under his feet, the stairs to the second floor went whipping past, the walkway along the top row of apartment doors flashing by under him, the front door of the apartment coming at him, flying open at his touch—
A quick scuttling sound from the roof.
—then the apartment hallway unreeling past him, her bedroom door, the explosive messiness of her bedroom. The closet door coming, the shoebox on the shelf, the gun in the shoebox, bullets.
He took the box of bullets, shoved them in a pocket, took the gun in his hand.
“Waylon.”
He turned to see his mom standing in the doorway, trying to seem like herself. Remembering to smile. To open her arms. There were gash marks on her neck, where they’d slashed her, back in the locker room. The slashes weren’t bleeding; they were seamed with something like thick cellophane, and through the transparent plastic he could see blood and other fluids, pulsing.
“You’re not her,” he said, his voice hoarse. “They changed her, and then she fought against it, so they killed her. And you’re just a thing in her body.”
“Oh, my baby,” she said. “You’re so wrong! I’m your own mama! Come here!”
She came toward him and put her arms around him and opened her mouth wide, too wide, impossibly wide, something metallic-gray flickered and razzed.
He pressed the muzzle of the .25-caliber automatic pistol against her right eye—to his own mother’s right eye—and pulled the trigger, five times.
She fell backwards—but still wasn’t dead. She was just thrashing there on the floor. He heard her mutter something about “emergency reorganization.”
So he found the lighter fluid next to her Zippo lighter on the bedside lamp table, and he poured the fluid all around her. He tossed several crumpled up copies of People and Us magazines on her for additional kindling, squirted those with lighter fluid, too, lit the last of those and tossed it on. Stepped back from the roaring flames as they caught fire, spread their gospel.
Engulfed in blue and yellow fire, the Mom-thing made a long squealing sound like when a cassette tape gets stuck and spindled up in the player.
The entire time it was like someone else was doing all this shooting and burning—someone who could do what had to be done while the scared grieving Waylon pulled back somewhere, watching, riding along.
Then he walked out of the bedroom, out of the front of the house, past the buzzing smoke alarm. He set off the red-metal fire alarm that perched on the wall in the hallway, so that if any human people were in the building, they’d be warned and get out.
People started tumbling out of their apartments, some of them banging other doors. Spotting the gun Waylon had stuck in his waistband, a white-haired man yelled an angry question. Waylon ignored the old dude and went down the stairs.
By the time he got to the corner of Hillview and Simmons and paused to look back, what home he’d had was roaring with flame, and it was spreading to the other apartments. But at least they weren’t going to use his mom’s body and brain anymore.
Then he turned away. Began walking down the street and down the hill toward Quiebra Valley like some kind of machine himself. Not feeling real, not feeling anything. A human-shaped cutout in space.
His mind started running through an orderly list of explanations of what had been happening. Retrofitted alien technology. Or some secret technology being tested on the town. Androids. But it was all just busywork for his mind. It wasn’t as if he thought anything, really, honestly made sense anymore.
A small dark-blue new-model car was coming toward him up the hill, on Hillview. Coming slowly. Slowing down more. He couldn’t see the driver past the headlights’ glare. It rolled past; he just made out the outline of a man, the glint of eyeglasses.
He thought, Is that one of them? Does it matter if he kills me? I just murdered my own mother. Even if she was already dead. I’m probably insane and it doesn’t matter if I live or die.
But then he thought, Where’s Adair?
That made him feel real again in a way. Like there was something that could still come alive, inside him.
As the car stopped and began to back up, Waylon thought, It’s a cop in an unmarked car, or it’s one of them on some kind of patrol.
He put his hand on the gun. One bullet left. Better run.
>
He turned and sprinted toward the side yard of the nearest house.
Heard a car door, running footsteps.
He got to the gate in the fence, pulled on its hasp, opened it— and a sleek black attack dog rushed at him, teeth bared.
He slammed the gate shut. It thumped creakingly as the dog struck on the other side, barking with frustration.
To Waylon’s right stood a thick hedge he’d never get through before the guy from the little sedan caught him. He started the other way, jumped over a stubby dead light fixture that was supposed to illuminate the garden, ran two steps more, jumped over a plaster lawn gnome, sprinted across the square of grass; started up the steep slope to the yard of the next house up the hill.
A strong hand gripped the back of his jacket and pulled him back down to the lawn.
“Hold it there, boy!”
Waylon twisted from the grip, spun, pulling the .25 pistol, raised it to the man’s startled face. Pale blue eyes, squarish face, hair just a little long only because he rarely remembered to cut it.
“Waylon?” the man said. “Christ, put down the gun!”
It was his father. Waylon’s dad. Waylon lowered the gun, but didn’t put it away.
His dad stammered, staring at the gun. “What, Waylon, what are you doing with that?”
“Why—why are you here?”
“I hadn’t heard from your mom, and she wouldn’t give me her phone number, so I came out to see for myself if you were all right. Waylon, lord, boy, what’s going on?”
Kill him—they’ve probably gotten to him, too. Best you can do for him is kill him.
His father glanced up the hill, where the flames were beginning to brighten the sky. “Some kind of fire up there. Fire trucks sure taking their time.” He looked back at Waylon. “Give me that gun, goddamn it.”
He reached for Waylon’s gun. Waylon pointed the pistol at his father and pulled the trigger.
Click on an empty chamber. Five rounds in a small .25 caliber.
“Shit!” his dad blurted, slapping the gun away. “What the fuck are you trying to do? What’s going on?” Nearly crying.