Stinger

by Robert R. McCammon

  He backed away from the hole, his nerves sputtering. Tendrils of dust and gunsmoke broke, drifted, connected anew around him. He felt like a scream trapped in concrete, and right then he swore that if he got out of this, God willing, he was going to lose fifty pounds by Christmas.

  One step out of the house and he turned and ran to the patrol car, where Danny Chaffin sat gray-faced and staring at nothing.

  27

  Scooter Brought the Stick

  IN A HOUSE AT the far end of Brazos Street, Daufin listened while Sarge remembered.

  “Scooter brought the stick,” he whispered as the dark things moved in his mind. Over the steady tolling of the Catholic church’s bell, he thought he heard gunshots: the rapid cracks of a carbine, like brittle sticks being trod upon. The memories were coming to life, and one half of his brain itched like a wound that must be torn open and scratched.

  “Belgium,” he said. His hands kneaded the air where Scooter had been, just a minute before. “Three-ninety-third infantry regiment, Ninety-ninth Infantry Division, Sergeant Tully Dennison, all present and accounted for, sir!” His eyes were wet, his face strained with internal pressures. “Diggin’ in, sir! Hard ground, ain’t it? Mighty hard. Froze almost solid. They heard some noise out over the ridge last night. Down there in the deep woods. Recon heard trucks movin’ around. Maybe tanks too. Get that telephone cable laid down, yes sir!” He blinked, lifting his chin as if startled by the presence of Daufin. “Who…who are you?”

  “Your new friend,” she said quietly, standing between the light and the dark.

  “Little girl shouldn’t be out here. Too cold. Snow in them clouds. You speak English?”

  “Yes,” she said, aware that he was staring right through her, into that hidden dimension. “Who is Scoot-er?”

  “Old dog just took up with me. Crazy ol’ thing, but Lord can he run. I throw a stick, and he scoots after it. Throw it again, off he goes. Scooter, that’s what he is. Can’t be still. Skinny thing, about half dead when I found him. Gonna take good care of you, Scooter. You and me, we’ll gonna be all right.” He crossed his arms over his chest and began to rock. “Put my head on Scooter’s side at night. Good ol’ pillow. Keeps the foxhole warm. Man, he loves to chase those sticks. Run fetch it, Scooter! Lord, can he run!”

  Sarge’s breath had quickened. “Lieutenant says if there’s any action we won’t see it. No way. Says it’ll be to the north or the south. Not our position. I just got here, I ain’t killed nobody yet. I don’t want to. Scooter, we’re gonna keep our heads low. We’re gonna bury our heads in the ground, ain’t we? Just let all that metal fly right over us, huh?”

  He shuddered, curled his knees up, stared past Daufin. His mouth worked for a few seconds, his eyes full of violet light, but no sound came out. Then a whisper: “Incomin’ mail. Artillery openin’ up. Long way off. Gonna go over our heads. Over our heads. Should’ve dug my foxhole deeper. Too late now. Incomin’ mail.” He moaned as if struck, squeezing his eyes shut. Tears crept from them. “Make it stop. Make it stop. Please oh Jesus make it stop.”

  Sarge’s eyes flew open. “Here they come! Ready on the right, sir!” It had been a hoarse cry. “Scooter! Where’s Scooter? God A’mighty, where’s my dog? Here come the Krauts!” He was shaking now, his body curled up in the chair, the pulse throbbing at his temple like the rhythm of a runaway machine. “They’re throwin’ potato mashers! Get your heads down! Oh Jesus…oh Christ…help the wounded…his arm’s blown off. Medic…Medic!” He clasped his hands to his skull, fingers gripping into the flesh. “Got blood on me. Somebody’s blood. Medic, move your ass! They’re comin’ again! Throwin’ grenades! Get your heads down!”

  Sarge stopped his frantic rocking. His breath caught.

  Daufin waited.

  “One fell short,” he whispered. “Fell short, and still smokin’. Potato-masher grenade. Got a wooden handle. And there he is. Right there.” He stared at a point on the wall: the point where the past’s shadows were emerging, ghostly scenes coagulating and rippling through the grenade smoke of more than forty years before. “There’s Scooter,” Sarge said. “Gone crazy. I can see it in his eyes. Gone crazy. Just like me.”

  He slowly thrust his hand forward, fingers outspread. “No,” the whisper came. “No. Don’t bring the stick. Don’t…”

  A hiss of breath between his teeth: “I haven’t killed yet…don’t make me kill…”

  His hand contorted; now it was clenched around an invisible pistol, the finger gripping the trigger. “Don’t bring the stick.” The finger twitched. “Don’t bring the stick.” Twitched again. “Don’t bring the stick.” A third and fourth times.

  He was crying, silently, as the finger continued to twitch. “Had to stop him. Had to. Would’ve fetched me the stick. Dropped it right into my foxhole. But… I killed him…before the grenade went off. I know I did. I saw his eyes go dead. And then the grenade blew. Didn’t make a loud noise. Not loud. And then there was nothin’ left of him…except what was all over me.” His hand lowered, dangled at his side. “My head. Hurts.” Slowly, his hand relaxed, and the invisible gun went away.

  His eyes had closed again. He sat without moving for a time, just the rise and fall of his chest and the tears that crawled through the lines on his face.

  There was nothing more.

  Daufin walked to the front door and looked through the screen at the skygrid. She was trying to put her thoughts together, analyze and categorize what had just been said; she could make no sense of it, but pain and loss lay at its core, and those things she understood very, very well. She sensed a weariness coming over her, enfolding her, it was a weakness of muscles, sinews, and bones—the fabric that held this daughter’s body together. She clicked through her memory and came up with the symbol N and, behind it, among the neatly assembled subjects: Nutrition. This daughter’s body needed nutrition; it was running down and soon would approach collapse. The Sarge creature had mentioned food. She focused on F and found flat images of Food in her memory: Meat Groups, Vegetable Groups, Cereal Groups. All of them appeared sickening, but they would have to do. The next problem was locating these food groups. Surely they must be close at hand, stored somewhere in the Sarge creature’s box.

  She walked to his side and plucked at his sleeve. He didn’t respond. She tried again, a little harder.

  His eyes opened. The last firing of the spark plug in his brain was going out; he felt whole again, the cold tingling sensation gone. He thought he remembered having a terrible nightmare, but that was all gone too.

  “Food,” she said. “Do you have food here?”

  “Yeah. Pork ’n beans. In the kitchen.” He placed his hand against his forehead. He was trembling all over, and in his mouth there was a taste like bitter smoke. “Get you somethin’ to eat, and then I’ll take you home.” He tried to stand up, had difficulty at first, then got to his feet. “Lord, I feel funny. Shakin’ like a wild weed.”

  Terror gripped him. Where was Scooter?

  There was a movement in the corner, behind Mr. Hammond’s little girl. Over where the shadows lay.

  Scooter padded out of the comer and looked expectantly at him, like old friends do.

  “Mighty prancy, aren’t you?” Sarge asked, and smiled. “Let’s crack open a can of pork ’n beans for our new friend, okay?” He picked up the oil lamp and headed to the kitchen.

  Daufin followed behind, thinking that sometimes the hidden dimension was best left unfathomed.

  28

  The Drifting Shadow

  WORKING IN THE GLARE of a wall-mounted emergency light, Jessie made the last of six stitches and pulled the sutures tight under Cody Lockett’s right eye. He winced just a fraction.

  “If I was a horse,” he drawled, “I’d already have kicked you across the barn.”

  “If you were a horse, I’d have already shot you.” She gave a little extra tug on the filament, tied the sutures off, and snipped the excess. She swabbed another dash of disinfectant on the wound. “Ok
ay, that does it.”

  Cody stood up from the treatment table and walked to a small oval mirror on the wall. It showed him a face with a left eye purple and swollen almost shut, a gashed lower lip, and the stitch ridges less than an inch below his right eye. His Texaco shirt was ripped and splattered with bloodstains—his own and Rattlesnake blood too. His head had stopped its drumrolls, though, and all his teeth were still in their sockets. He figured he’d been lucky.

  “You can admire yourself somewhere else,” Jessie said tersely. “Call the next one in as you leave.” She had four more teenagers to see, waiting in the hall, and she went to the sink to wash her hands. When she turned the tap, a thin trickle of sandy water spooled out.

  “Pretty good job, doc,” he told her. “How’s X Ray? He gonna be all right?”

  “Yes.” Thank God, she thought. Three of Ray’s ribs were badly bruised, his left arm had been almost dislocated, and he’d come very near biting a piece out of his tongue, not to mention the other cuts and bruises. Right now he was resting in a room down the hall. A few of the other kids had lost teeth and been cut up, but there were no broken bones—except for Paco LeGrande, whose nose had been shattered. “Somebody could’ve been killed.” She dried her hands on a paper towel, feeling grains of sand between her fingers. “Is that what you were trying to do?”

  “No. I was tryin’ to keep X Ray from gettin’ his clock cleaned.” He regarded his own skinned knuckles. “The Rattlers started it. The ’Gades were protectin’ our own.”

  “My son’s not a member of your gang.”

  “It’s a club,” Cody corrected. “Anyway, X Ray lives on this side of the bridge. That makes him one of us.”

  “Club, gang, whatever the hell you call it—it’s a pile of shit.” She crumpled the paper and tossed it into the wastebasket. “And my son’s name is Ray, not X Ray. When are you and the Rattlesnakes going to stop tearing this town to pieces?”

  “It’s not the ’Gades who’re tearin’ things up! We didn’t ask ’em to jump X Ray and bust up the Warp Room! Besides”—he motioned toward the window, at the black pyramid—“that sonofabitch did more damage in about two seconds than we could’ve done in two years.”

  Jessie couldn’t dispute that fact. She grunted, realizing she’d come down pretty hard on the boy. She didn’t know much about Cody Lockett: just what Tom had told her, and that his father worked at the bakery. She recalled that she had smelled alcohol on the man’s breath one day when she’d gone in for some sweet rolls.

  “Damn, it’s big.” Cody went to the window. Some of the roughness had left his voice, and it held a note of awe. A few fires were still burning in Cade’s junkyard, spiraling sparks into the sky. Up at the top of the glowing violet grid was a massive dark cloud of smoke and dust, hanging motionlessly over Inferno and blanking out the moon. Cody had never put much stock in the idea of UFOs and aliens before this, though Tank swore that when he was nine years old he’d seen a hovering light in the sky that had scared his underpants brown. He’d never thought much about life on other worlds, because life on this one was tough enough. All that stuff about UFOs and extraterrestrials seemed too distant to be concerned about, but now…well, this was a horse of a different shade. “Where do you think it came from?” he asked, in a quiet voice.

  “I don’t know. A very long way from here, I’m sure.”

  “Yeah, I reckon so. But why’d it come down in Inferno? I mean…whatever’s inside it could’ve landed anywhere in the world. Why’d it pick Inferno?”

  Jessie didn’t answer. She was thinking about Daufin, and where the little girl—no, she corrected herself—where the creature might be. She looked out the window at the pyramid, and a single word came to her mind: Stinger. Whatever that was, Daufin was terrified of it, and Jessie was feeling none too easy herself. She said, “Better tell the next one to come in.”

  “Okay.” Cody tore himself away from the window. He paused at the door. “Listen…for whatever it’s worth, I’m sorry X Ray got hurt.”

  She nodded. “So am I, but he’ll be all right. I guess he’s tougher than I thought.” She stopped short of thanking him for helping her son, because the details were still unclear and she saw him and Rick Jurado as the instigators of a gang fight that could’ve ended in kids getting killed. “You’ll probably need something for a headache,” she said. “If you ask Mrs. Santos at the front desk, she’ll get you some aspirin.”

  “Yeah, thanks. Hey, maybe I’ll have a neat little railroad track to remember tonight by, huh?”

  “Maybe,” she agreed, though she knew the scar would be hardly noticeable. “Anybody here to take you home?”

  “I can walk. Gotta pick up my motor, anyway. Thanks for the patch-up job.”

  “Try to stay out of trouble, okay?”

  He started to flip a witticism at her, but her eyes were honest and he let his swaggering pose drop. “I’ll try,” he said, and left the room. In the hallway, also lit by the harsh emergency lights, he told the next boy waiting on the bench to go in; the guy was a Rattler, with sullen eyes and a lower lip that looked as if it had lost a tangle with a meat grinder. Then he walked along the hall, passing rooms on either side. From one of them wailed a man’s voice, a sound of pure agony. The smell of burned meat hung in the air, and Cody kept going. People were bustling around, throwing long shadows in the half-light. A Hispanic woman with blood all over the front of her dress hurried past him. A man on crutches and with a large bandage stuck to the side of his face stood in a doorway, staring blankly and muttering. Cody saw Doc McNeil coming, supporting a woman with dusty gray hair from which pink curlers dangled. She was wearing a blue robe, her face dead white and her eyes as wide as if she’d just stuck a finger into an electric socket. McNeil helped her into a room on the left, and Cody couldn’t help but notice the bloody footprints on the carpet.

  Then he was through the gauntlet of suffering and had reached the front desk, where he asked the round-faced nurse, Mrs. Santos, for his aspirin. She gave him a few tablets in a little plastic bottle, made sure she had his name and address down on the records sheet, and said he could go home. The waiting room was full of people too, most of them Bordertown residents who’d been shaken up by the concussion or who were waiting for word on injured relatives.

  As Cody crossed the waiting room and headed for the door, his father stood up from a chair in the corner and said, “Boy? Hold on a minute.”

  Cody glimpsed the garish necktie and almost burst out laughing. No wonder the old man didn’t wear ties; the thing emphasized his sinewy neck and made him look like a geek. Cody had had enough of the medicinal odors and anguished noises of the clinic, and he kept striding out the door without waiting for his father. His motorcycle was still parked in front of the Warp Room, and he meant to claim it. Behind him, his father called, “Cody! Where’re you goin’?”

  Cody might have slowed a step or two; he didn’t realize it if he had. But then his old man was catching up with him, really stretching out those long legs. Curt walked to the side with the length of a man separating them. “I’m talkin’ to you. Don’t you understand English no more?”

  “Just go away,” Cody said, his voice clipped and tight. “Leave me alone.” Over the smells of scorched metal and burning rubber, the aromas of Vitalis and body odor reached him.

  “I came to see about you. Heard you got yourself in a fight. Lord, you look like you got your ass busted for sure!”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Looks must be deceivin’, then.” Curt watched the helicopter slowly circling over Cade’s autoyard, making tentative approaches to the black pyramid and then veering away through the smoke. “I’m tellin’ you,” he said, “hell has sure come to Inferno. Ain’t that about the weirdest sumbitch you ever saw?”

  “I guess so.”

  “It’s spooky. Somethin’ like that shouldn’t be. You know, I almost ran over Ginger Creech awhile ago. She was just strollin’ down the street in her nightgown. God knows what’s happe
ned to Dodge. Whatever’s goin’ on, it’s knocked Ginger right off her tracks.”

  The woman in the blue robe, Cody thought. Mrs. Creech. Sure, he should’ve recognized her. But then again, he’d never seen her looking like a crazy woman before.

  “Guess what?” Curt asked when they’d gone a few more strides. “I’m a deputy. Don’t that beat all? Yessir! Sheriff Vance said that if I was to take Ginger to the clinic, he’d make me a deputy. Bet I’ll get me a badge. A silver badge, all shiny and nice.” The helicopter zoomed overhead, stirring a storm of dust off the street, and turned toward the pyramid again. Curt gazed up at the skygrid. He didn’t know what the thing was, but it was something else that should not be. It reminded him of jail bars, and started a crawling sensation of claustrophobia at the back of his neck. Without lights, Inferno resembled a ghost town, all the swirling dust and running tumbleweeds adding to the sense of desolation. Curt’s thirst was getting stronger, and he thought it was somehow right that just as he was given some responsibility, Inferno was falling to pieces. He looked at Cody, walking beside him, and he saw how close that cut was to the boy’s eye. Tomorrow morning he was going to feel as if he’d stuck his head into a blender. “You all right?” Curt asked.

  “What the fuck do you care?” It came out before Cody could stop it.

  Curt grunted. “Hell, I didn’t say I cared. Just asked, that’s all.” He let silence reign for a few seconds, then tried again: “I got busted up like that once. A Mexican did it, in a bar. Fast little bastard, he was. Man, I couldn’t see straight for a week!”

  “I’m okay,” Cody told him grudgingly.

  “Yeah, you’re a tough pair of nuts, ain’t you? That shirt’s a goner, though. Guess old Mendoza’ll pitch a fit, huh?”