Crawlers

by John Shirley

  Raymond broke the spell, shouting “Fuck you!” and firing the automatic pistol—but Gunderston leapt at Raymond first.

  “It doesn’t matter if you kill me,” he said, tearing Raymond’s arm from his shoulders. He threw the blood-gushing limb, the hand still clutching the gun, over the rim of the tank. “I’m just like a skin cell, boys and girls! Were you paying attention in biology? The body continually makes more cells!”

  Larry gaped at the thing that had been his father, stunned, his thick lips quivering.

  Stanner was running toward the ladder. Deserting them.

  Donny grabbed the .22 from Siseela.

  Raymond was wriggling facedown, his voice bubbling wordlessly as he died, while Cruzon ran up to get a shot with his pistol—but the crawler leapt, shouting, “And I’m the latest design!”

  Twelve yards horizontally, two in the air, the crawler leapt— soared!—and came down on Lance, smashing him onto his back so hard the bones of his chest exploded from his sides. Everything Lance would have screamed with was crushed, and he only made a silent scream with his open mouth.

  Donny tried to get a shot with the rifle, but kids were running in the way.

  Cruzon fired twice and one of the rounds caught the crawler, who only turned and snarled in response, showing a gleeful fat white face, a kind of monstrous parody of his son—who knelt with his hands over his eyes, sobbing.

  The crawler leapt again, coming down in front of Cruzon, his forearm punching out with the force of a mechanical battering ram, slamming the little cop in the middle of the chest. Cruzon flew backwards through the air and fell yelling despairingly over the side of the water tower and into the shadows.

  Donny pushed someone out of the way—he didn’t even see who— and raised the rifle to his shoulder, fired at the crawler, bolted another round in the chamber, fired, and did it again. The Gunderston crawler set himself to leap at Donny.

  Gunderston’s son, Larry—

  His nerdy, pompous, self-indulgent, insecure son, a strictly firstseason fan of Star Trek—

  Larry threw himself at the thing that had been his father, threw his whole weight against him so that the crawler, clutching at the boy, fell heavily on his side, momentarily off balance.

  “Daddy, stop it!” he shrieked.

  For a moment Donny thought he saw a flicker of hesitation on the older Gunderston’s face.

  And then Gunderston’s eyes glazed over, and he broke his son’s neck.

  He threw the body aside and poised to leap at Donny.

  “Oh, shit,” Donny muttered.

  Gunderston’s head flew apart—shot from behind. A second shot punched a hole through his middle, spewing blood and metal bits on the green-painted metal roof of the tank. He flailed—and then fell flat.

  The crawler’s falling revealed Stanner, standing behind him, a smoking shotgun in his hands. “I had it stuck down behind a pipe, near the top of the ladder, in the dark, so I didn’t scare anyone carrying it up here. Guess he didn’t have his eyes turned on all the way when he came up the ladder.”

  Donny sank to his knees, shaking, his heart still hammering. He’d wondered, once, what it was like to be old and afraid of a heart attack. He thought he had some idea, now.

  Stanner walked over to him and helped him to his feet. “You’re a remarkable kid,” he said.

  Donny almost hit him. Instead he shrugged and said, “Who says I get to be a kid anymore?”

  Then he went to talk to the others.

  The thing that had been Sprague had found that if he was very careful and paid close attention, he could do things that weren’t in his primary or secondary directives.

  But he’d had to work hard at it, to let Vinnie go.

  Now, helping to push the seed launcher into place, he found that he was able to move slowly, very slowly, to just sort of drag back so that the others kept having to readjust. He wasn’t thinking of it as stalling. He was careful not to think of it at all. Careful to hide that part of his mind. It was a part of himself that they found hard to read, anyway. Something deep.

  The impulse to resist the All of Us came from the deepest most-inside part of him. Something he had been scarcely aware of, when he was alive. It was as if he’d always been looking outward from that deep place, so he hadn’t been able to see that part of himself— like you can’t see your own eyes without a mirror.

  Struggling to be something more than just a part of the All of Us, even in little ways, seemed to release something hidden in him; it was as if he could sense that secret inward place and know it was connected to something fine, something higher than the All of Us, and higher than people, too. It gave him the strength to work inefficiently.

  He scuttled around the metal shaft of the launcher and managed to stumble on the packed earth wall so that he tumbled into two other servants of the All of Us, and there was a confusion of limbs.

  One of them began to watch him. Sprague was careful to seem to leap back to work.

  Adair watched them pile up the bodies. She felt she was on the breathless edge of another place. She might fall into life or death from here.

  Lacey put her arm around Adair, and Bert put his arm around Lacey. They watched the others at their preparations.

  “We only have a few minutes, Donny,” Stanner said, cradling the shotgun in his arms. Glancing at the sky.

  Donny nodded. “I know. It’ll be quick. It’s just something I feel like we have to do, or we won’t be able to do very much else.”

  He turned to the others—all the kids, a few adults, gathered on the other side of the improvised pyre atop the water tank. An armful of branches had been laid atop the bodies of the Gunderstons, Lance’s body, Raymond’s, Cruzon. Stanner himself had brought Cruzon’s broken body up the ladder, in a fireman’s carry.

  Behind the crowd of kids, Harold and Waylon were setting up some equipment. Some of it really strange. They’d gotten a guitar and an amplifier and speakers, and they’d run wires from the switch box that controlled the waterflow for the tank. There was other equipment Adair didn’t understand, all wired together. There was another piece of equipment, she knew, that they’d left in the car. The pulser, Harold had called it.

  Everyone watched—two hundred kids, a few adults—as Donny approached the pyre for the dead.

  Donny himself poured the gasoline on the improvised pyre. He spoke for everyone to hear, as he poured it on. “They’re going to see this light and they’re going to hear the noise and come up here. And we’ll be gone when they get here. But not too far away—we need them to follow us.”

  He stood back and nodded at Siseela, who lit a book of matches; it flared, she threw it at the pyre, and that flared up, too, roaring.

  Adair listened in a kind of floating rapture, feeling as if she was above the scene, watching from overhead, as Donny turned to the crowd of kids and spoke loudly, like a preacher trying to be heard over the roar of the world; spoke to them all with an instinctive sense of ritual.

  “This isn’t just to say good-bye to Lance and Raymond and these other people here killed by this thing. This is to say good-bye to our parents! It’s their funeral, too!”

  A universal groan arose from the listening kids. They huddled closer together. The smaller ones wept as Donny went on.

  “Maybe not all our parents are gone. Major Stanner says they haven’t got to everyone. But lots of us know for sure. Lots of us know that our parents are dead! And we have to accept that! We have to say yes. Our parents may be walking around, just like living people with free will—but they’re not living at all! Even if they’re walking and talking, if they’ve been changed over, then our parents are dead!” He paused, seeming to get control of himself, and cleared his throat. Then he clenched his fists and he yelled, “They left us too soon! But they didn’t mean to leave us, and it isn’t our fault! That’s two things we have to know! Is everybody clear on that? They didn’t mean to leave, and it isn’t our fault.”

  There were unintel
ligible murmurs of agreement, mixed with groans and sobs. Adair stepped a little closer to Donny to listen, something in her responding, rising like the crackling smoke from the pyre.

  Blue flames rose sinuously and hissed. “Now listen to me,” Donny went on. “It’s Bad Times, what’s happening. It’s hella Bad Times. But we gotta forgive them for leaving us—but we also have to let ourselves cry for them! We each think of our parents, and we cry for them! Think of them now! Think of your folks. If you loved them or hated them, or you weren’t sure, think of them and forgive them and let them go!”

  “I can’t!” a young girl said, her mouth buckling.

  “You have to!” Donny said.

  A collective sigh merged seamlessly into a moan.

  Adair closed her eyes and thought of her folks, coming to get her at summer camp when she was a kid. Her dad teaching her to swim. Her mom insisting that she hadn’t let her win at chess— when she had. Watching her dad working on the boat, and being proud of him; she hadn’t known what it was she was feeling, then, but she knew it now: pride.

  She remembered seeing her parents arguing—and how, when they noticed her watching the argument, they made up. They made up, right then and there, just for Adair.

  “Everybody we lost, we say good-bye to—and we let go!” Donny shouted. “All of them!”

  And she thought of Cal. Her big brother, trying not to jeer at her too much when she fell on the skateboard. Helping her up. Cal showing her how to make a simple Web site. Pretending he wasn’t really happy when he saw her expression at Christmas—when he gave her the jacket she’d wanted. Having earned the money himself.

  Good-bye, Cal.

  Then Donny said, not shouting but his firm voice still carrying, “Now say to yourselves, my parents are gone! They’re just gone! I’m going to say it—and we have to say it all together! My parents are gone!”

  Their faces lit by the spitting fire, by flames rippling from blackening corpses, they called out, with him, “My parents are gone!”

  Adair falling to her knees and saying it into the hands covering her face.

  “They won’t ever come back!”

  “They won’t ever come back!”

  “And we are the adults now!”

  “We are the adults now!”

  Adair couldn’t say it. But she nodded.

  Switched-off flashlight tucked between her breasts, Lacey came rushing down the metal ladder so fast she fell, near the end, twisted her ankle on the gravel at the bottom. “Shit!” She pulled her flashlight from her blouse and swept it over to the SUV. “The son of a bitch! Sneaking off !”

  She ran—ankle throbbing—up to the back of the SUV, where Bert was pushing a milk crate with a jumble of electronics onto the lowered tailgate. “Bert, you prick!”

  He turned to her with an unpracticed expression of puzzled innocence. “What? I was going to, um . . .”

  “Bullshit!”

  Stanner and Harold exchanged looks and went to the front of the SUV.

  Bert sighed, pushing the box into the SUV and slamming the back. “Okay, I don’t want you to go.”

  “What, ‘a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do’ and women stay behind?”

  “The fewer who go, the better. What can you do? I mean, in this—this—”

  “I can be smart and resourceful and I can watch your back, you dope!”

  He reached out to her, and she pulled away, her mouth quivering. “Goddamn it, I just found you and—” Then she let him take her in his arms.

  “I know,” he said softly in her ear. “I feel the same way. But I need to feel . . . like I’m doing this for you. For you. Maybe it’s old-fashioned. Hell, it’s primeval. But I need to protect you. Let me do that, Lacey.” He drew back and looked in her eyes. “Let me protect you.”

  “Okay, cowboy. I’ll wait behind. But you’d better fucking come back.”

  “Bert!” Stanner called. “We’re going!”

  “I’ll see you in a little while, Lacey,” Bert said. If any of us make it . . .

  He kissed her and climbed into the SUV, and she watched it drive away.

  “Son of a bitch,” she muttered. “Men.”

  Sprague—what had once been Sprague—had been sent to patrol the perimeters of the cemetery.

  He looked at the shape rising from the trench they’d dug. Most of the trench was there to absorb the blast back.

  The launcher looked to him like one of those projectors they had in planetariums.

  Once it was calibrated, and fired . . .

  Once the projectile had reached an altitude of a mile . . .

  The gliders would release. Thousands of minute glider seeds, nanotech life, released into the air currents, and the world would begin the next state of reorganization, spreading the gospel of the All of Us.

  He felt weak, now. He couldn’t fight any longer. He was going to try to forget himself in the All of Us.

  Then he saw the fire in the hills. A flickering that quickened to become the dark hump of the hill’s own burning eye. And he saw other lights, from there: thin flashlight beams, aimed upward, around the central fire. It was atop the town water tank, he realized. Where that meeting was. He hoped Vinnie had gotten there.

  Then came the thunder—the heavy-metal thunder—the boom of a single guitar chord, an open E, played over and over again, from up there, angry, barely musical, maddeningly redundant: perfect.

  Gunderston had told them about the meeting. But he hadn’t said much, and only a dozen colony units had been sent. Now it was obvious that more needed to be sent.

  Everyone could be sent—except a few guards placed around the cluster.

  Sprague—what had been Sprague—set up an alarm. He told them, in their symbology, that his “expert system data,” his memories of being a deputy, informed him that a major Disabling of the Org was going on, centered on that water tower.

  Everyone available must go there!

  Immediately!

  The cluster asked him for certitude.

  He staggered under the power of the question. It required all his inner depth to give the answer that his soul demanded of him—to lie to them, for the sake of a secret hope.

  Certitude to the probability of 96.9999999999! Disaster if we do not converge!

  Then, the cluster said, for the All of Us, all but designates 7, 3, 53, and 99: converge, to the E chord and the flame, and there destroy all you find; for the seeding is upon us, calibration is done, and pressure is building in the launcher. In thirteen minutes and seven seconds, the world will change, and utopia will become real at last.

  23

  December 14, night

  Shivering in the night’s chill, Stanner tried the cell phone again, though he knew it wouldn’t work. Hoping to reach someone at the Pentagon, to tell them to wait. Don’t drop the bombs, there’s another way!

  Chaos returned his call: just endless static.

  He shook his head at Bert and Harold. “No,” he said. “They’ve got an impenetrable barrier up now.”

  They were crouching behind the splintered remnants of a wooden fence, across the street from the cemetery. Stanner was preparing to enter the crawler’s home base. Harold was still tinkering with the pulser. Bert cradled the shotgun, helping watch their backs.

  “Maybe we’re just being stupid,” Harold said, his hands shaking as he tightened the last screw. “Maybe we should have sent people out through the woods, and just let ’em take their chances and try to get help—try to stop any idea of bombing. We don’t know this thing’s going to work.”

  Stanner felt a sudden sympathy for Harold—who’d had so much dropped on his narrow shoulders, so suddenly—and at one and the same moment he wanted to shout at him, Goddamn it, you said it would work!

  Bert shook his head. “They’d have to convince people about what’s going on here anyway. That’d take much too long.”

  Stanner didn’t tell them he was pretty sure that familiar droning sound he even now heard fro
m the sky was a stealth bomber. Soon the bombs would be falling.

  The governor of the state of California today asked the president to declare Quiebra, California, a disaster area after a double explosion at a refinery set of a firestorm that killed virtually all residents.

  Stanner shook his head. Maybe he should have told Shannon to try to make it to the next town. But it would be better to die quickly in an overwhelming flash of heat than to be torn apart by one of those things in the woods, wouldn’t it?

  The guitar boomed again, in the distance, from the hilltop. Open E, thumping, echoing, over and over. Calling the crawlers.

  “That’s enough guitar, Waylon,” Bert muttered, looking at the firelight up in the hills. “Get the fuck out of there.”

  As if Waylon had heard him, the sound died away and ceased altogether. Or did that mean the crawlers had stopped him?

  “I’ve gotta go now,” Stanner said, picking up the pulser. “Is it ready or not?”

  Harold nodded, gesturing at the contrivance. “Take it.”

  The pulser looked like two of the rooftop transmitters joined together, both contrived of old miniature satellite-TV dishes. They were wired toward each other, like a closed clamshell. Four car batteries were taped together on a board under the pulser unit, providing the initial energy.

  “That can’t be enough power to do what you need to have done,” Bert muttered, shaking his head.

  “That’s the point of the design Bentwaters gave us,” Harold whispered, glancing nervously at the cemetery, watching two more crawlers creep from it; seeing them streak down the street, toward the hills. “The whole point is taking a small amount of energy and multiplying it into one big electromagnetic pulse.”

  “Do those things eat, Stanner?” Bert asked, his face ghastly with speculation. “How do they sustain themselves?”

  “Yes, sometimes they eat. Anything edible. And, you don’t want to know the details,” Stanner said. He was shoving the crude device into a big canvas backpack. It didn’t quite fit. He had to cut the canvas with Lance’s Buck knife to get it in.