Stinger

by Robert R. McCammon

  Silence stretched, and the replicant’s gray lips twitched like cankerworms. “What you can’t seem to figure out is that I’m on the side of law and order. My assignment is to find the criminal and return her to a maximum-security penal world—from which she escaped. She got into a guard and stole a garbage scow. I figure the ship went haywire, sailed off course, and got sucked into the gravity field here. She must’ve jettisoned her guardian and gotten back into her pod before the crash; she ejected, and that’s the story.”

  “Not all of it,” Rhodes said. He kept a poker face. “Why is she a criminal?”

  “After her planet was liberated, she decided to disobey the new prime directives. She started urging her kind to resistance, violence, and sabotage. She’s nothing but a wild animal.”

  “‘Liberated’?” Jessie didn’t like the sound of that. “Liberated from what?”

  “From waste and stupidity. See, there’s a natural chemical on her world that’s poisonous as all hell anywhere else. What you folks don’t know is that all kinds of little wars are going on out there—alliances breaking up, new ones forming, one group deciding it wants a planetary system and another kicking sand about it. Goes on all the time.” The thing’s shoulders shrugged. “Well, suppose some up-and-comer decides to get hold of the poison and start spreading it around. I’m telling you, the shit is deadly. That stuff gets out in space, and it might even drift this way. It cuts right through body armor and dissolves the bones and guts into mush. That’s why we liberated the planet—so we can keep that shit from getting into the arsenals of fruitcakes. Everything was going fine until ‘she’ started raising hell. Made herself out to be a ‘revolutionary’ and all that crap.” The head shook back and forth, the face puckered with a scowl. “She’s trying to get back so she can stir up more trouble—maybe sell that poison to the highest bidder.”

  Rhodes didn’t know whether to buy the story or not. “Why didn’t you tell us this before now?”

  “Because I didn’t know anything about you. As far as I knew, you were helping her. Everybody seemed like they’d rather fight than talk like sensible folks.” Stinger’s eyes bored into Rhodes’s. “I’m a forgiving kind of dude. Let’s be friends. Okay?”

  Just like Mack Cade would’ve done it, Vance thought. Sucker ’em in with a glad hand and squash ’em with a fist. He found his voice, and he said, “Colonel? I inkthay it ielays.”

  Rhodes saw Stinger blink with incomprehension, saw the gears of language start turning behind the manufactured face; they slipped on the grease of pig Latin. I think it lies. Vance had said.

  “Explain,” Stinger demanded, the metallic voice all business again.

  “We’ve got to talk about this. The others and myself.”

  “Nothing to talk about, man. Either we deal or not.”

  “We need some time.”

  Stinger didn’t move, but the dog’s head thrashed angrily. Seven or eight seconds crept past. Rhodes felt sweat trickling from his armpits. “You dudes are playing games with my brain,” the creature said. “Trying to fuck me up.” It advanced on Rhodes, and was right there in his face before he could back away. Gunniston lifted the .45 and aimed it at the monster’s head, and Vance hefted the rifle up and put his finger on the trigger.

  “You listen,” Stinger hissed. The thing was breathing—its imitation lungs doing the job of the originals. The breath was a faint rumbling, like the noise of a blast furnace going at full burn miles distant, and the air from Stinger’s mouth washed into Rhodes’s face and reeked of hot plastic and metal. The dog’s teeth snagged Rhodes’s shirt. “Playtime’s over. I want the guardian and the pod.”

  “We need…more time,” Rhodes said. If he retreated one step or otherwise flinched, he knew those saw-blade nails would be on his throat. “We’ll have to find her.”

  ‘“I tried to be friendly, didn’t I?” The index finger rose up and glided across his chin. “You know, I create things. Out in my ship. I’ve got a workshop in there. Just give me the flesh, and I can create…wonders.” The smile came up again, and the needle teeth glittered inches away from the colonel’s face.

  “I’ve seen one of your creations. The flying thing.”

  “Pretty, huh? If you’d like to see my workshop, I could snatch you under my arm and take you there right now. I could make you over, better than you are. A lot stronger…and a lot meaner too.”

  “I’m already mean enough.”

  Stinger cackled; there was a sound like grind wheels turning in its throat. “Maybe you are, at that,” the creature agreed, and lifted its left wrist. Embedded in the flesh was the diamond-studded face of a Rolex watch with a tiny inset second hand. “I figure this is a tool to mark the passage of time. I’ve been watching it work. What’s the time right now?”

  Rhodes was silent. Stinger waited. “Three minutes before two,” the colonel said.

  “Good boy. When that long spear rotates again, I’ll be back here. If you don’t have the guardian and the pod, I’m going to create a real special bug squasher.”

  “That’s only one hour! We can’t find her in that short a time!”

  “It’s all you’ve got. You understand, Colonel Matt Rhodes United States Air Force?”

  “Yes,” he answered, and felt doom settle on his shoulders like a cold shroud.

  “One hour,” Stinger said. The thing’s head turned, and Stinger stared at Gunniston and the .45 the man aimed. “Would you like to eat that?”

  Gunniston’s hand shook. Slowly he lowered the pistol.

  “I think we understand each other now.” Stinger walked to the edge of the hole and hesitated with one foot over empty space. The dog’s eyes shone red in the lamplight. “One hour,” the voice emphasized. “Think on these things.”

  The replicant dropped into darkness. They heard it hit bottom, followed by the smack of its boots as it raced away through the tunnel’s ooze. The noise faded, and Stinger was gone.

  42

  The Fortress

  NO ONE SPOKE FOR a long moment. Smoke drifted through the light. Then Vance jabbered, “I was ready to shoot the bastard! I was just waitin’ for the word, and I could’ve blown its head off!”

  “Right,” Rhodes said. He wiped the creeping line of blood from his cheek, his eyes hollowed out and scared. “And gotten yourself and the rest of us torn to pieces too. Tom, what time is it?”

  “One minute till two.”

  “Which means we’ve got fifty-eight minutes to find Daufin and her pod. We’re going to have to split up and start searching.”

  “Hold on!” Jessie said. “What are you saying? That we’re going to give Daufin up?”

  “That’s right. Have you got a better idea?”

  “We’re talking about my little girl.”

  “We’re talking about an alien,” Rhodes reminded her. His insides were still quaking. The smell of hot metal remained in his nostrils. “No matter what it looks like. We’ve gotten into something here that I think we’d better get our asses out of real fast.”

  “I’m not handing my little girl over to that sonofabitch!” Jessie vowed. Tom started to touch her shoulder to calm her, but she pulled away. “Do you hear me? I’m not doing it!”

  “Jessie, it’s either Daufin or a lot of people—your friends—who die. I’m not doubting for one second that Stinger could lay waste to this whole town. Right now I don’t care why Stinger wants Daufin, or what she’s done; I just want to find her and save some people’s lives, if I can.”

  “What about Stevie’s life?” Tears scorched Jessie’s eyes. Her heart was pounding wildly, and she couldn’t seem to draw a full breath. “My God, we’ll be throwing my daughter’s life away!”

  “Not if we can find Daufin and get her to go back into her pod. Maybe that’ll release Stevie.” He couldn’t stand this house any longer; the walls were closing in on him. “I’m sorry, but we don’t have any choice. Sheriff, I say we go get your deputy and break into teams for a house-to-house search. Go up and
down the streets and pick up some volunteers, if we can find any.” He knew that a street search in all this smoke and dust was going to be almost impossible, but there was no other way. “Maybe somebody at the clinic’s seen her, or she might’ve gone across the bridge into Bordertown. Tom, will you and Jessie go check your house and start searching east along Celeste Street from there?”

  Tom stared at the floor. He felt Jessie watching him. “Yes,” he said. “We will.”

  “Thank you. We need to meet somewhere in thirty minutes and map out where we’ve been. How about the Brandin’ Iron?”

  “Fine,” Tom said.

  “All right. Let’s get started.” Without waiting for the others, he left the house and went out to the patrol car, parked in front of the Hammonds’ Civic at the curb. Vance and Gunniston followed, then Jessie and Tom. Vance said, “Better take this,” and gave Tom the Winchester. “I’ll pick up the other rifle at the office. You two be careful, hear?”

  “We will be,” Tom told him, and Vance got behind the wheel, pulled the car away from the curb, and drove back toward the center of town.

  Jessie watched the car’s lights move away and be swallowed by the murk. She felt faint and she stumbled, but Tom caught her and she held on to him. Tears tracked through the dust on her cheeks. “I can’t do it,” she said weakly. “Oh Jesus, I can’t give her up.”

  “We have to. Listen to me.” He put a finger under her chin and lifted her head. “I want more than anything in the world to have Stevie back, just like you do. But if Stevie’s gone—”

  “She’s not! Daufin said she was safe!”

  “If she’s gone,” Tom continued, “our world’s not going to end. We have Ray, and we have each other. But if we don’t find Daufin and turn her over to that thing, a lot of people are going to die.” Jessie was almost blinded by tears now, and she put her hands to her face. “We have to,” he repeated, and he opened the door for her and then went around to the driver’s side. Jessie was about to slide in when she heard the muttering of an engine, coming closer. A single headlight showed brownish yellow through the smoke. Somebody on a motorcycle, she realized.

  Tom hesitated, gripping the door handle, as Cody Lockett stopped beside the car. Cody pushed his goggles back up on his forehead. Attached to the handlebars with a strip of electrical tape was a sawed-off baseball bat with nails protruding from it: a weapon from the ’Gade arsenal. “I’m lookin’ for Vance and Colonel Rhodes,” Cody said. “They’re supposed to be here.”

  “You just missed them. They’re on their way to the sheriff’s office.” Tom opened the door and put the Winchester into the backseat. “Who told you they were here?”

  “I…uh…ran into Rick Jurado. Listen…” He glanced at Jessie, could see from her red and puffy eyes that she’d been crying. He didn’t know exactly how to say this, so he just plowed on ahead. “I found your little girl.”

  Tom was speechless. Jessie choked back a sob and said, “Where is she?”

  “Up at the fort. The apartments, I mean. There’s a whole lot of people up there, so she’s okay.” Cody would never forget the faces of Tank, Nasty, and Bobby Clay Clemmons when he’d told them that the little girl wasn’t what she appeared to be. They hadn’t believed him until she’d started to talk, and then their jaws had fallen to the floor. Along with most of the Renegades, there were about two hundred or more people in the building who’d been drawn by the electric lights. Cody had gotten the creature settled in, poured warm beer over the two gashes on his ankle, and taped a cloth around it, then come hunting for Vance and the colonel. “Uh…there’s somethin’ else you ought to know,” he said. “I mean…she looks like your little girl and all, but…she’s not.”

  “We know that,” Tom replied.

  “You do? Man, I thought I was goin’ off the deep end when she told me who she was!”

  “Same here.” He glanced at Jessie, and saw she knew what he was about to say. “We have to tell Rhodes. We can catch him before he leaves the sheriff’s office.”

  “Tom…please. Wait,” Jessie said. “Why don’t we talk to her first? Try to make her understand that we’ve got to get Stevie back?”

  Tom looked at his wristwatch. It was four minutes after two, and he’d never thought a second hand could move so fast. “We’ve got less than thirty minutes before we’re supposed to meet at the Brandin’ Iron.”

  “That’s time enough for us to talk to her! Please… I think we might be able to make her understand better than Rhodes could.”

  His gaze lingered on the racing second hand, but his mind was already made up. “All right,” he said. “Take us to her,” he told Cody, and got behind the wheel as Cody lowered his goggles and swung the motorcycle around.

  At the end of Travis Street, a dozen cars and pickup trucks were parked haphazardly in the apartment building’s lot; a couple of them had run right up to the front door. Cody waited for Tom and Jessie to get out of their Civic, and then he threaded his motorcycle through the vehicles and to the door, which was covered with gray sheet metal and had a narrow view slit like all the first-floor windows. “Open up, Bobby!” he called, and heard the sound of the many latches being thrown back. Bobby Clay Clemmons pulled the heavy door open, its hinges groaning like the entrance to a medieval castle, and Cody powered the motorcycle on through and into the stark white glare of the wall-mounted incandescents.

  He popped the kickstand down and left the Honda near the stairway that ascended to the second floor, and a moment later Tom—carrying the Winchester—and Jessie came in. “Lock it,” Cody said, and Bobby Clay pushed the door shut and shot all four of the bolts home.

  Neither Jessie nor Tom had ever been in the Winter T. Preston apartment building before. A long corridor lined with doors—some of them torn off their hinges—went the length of the first floor, and the cracked plaster walls screamed with graffiti in a blaze of Day-Glo orange and purple. The place smelled of marijuana, stale beer, and the ghost aromas of the mine workers and their families who’d lived here: a commingling of sweat, dry heat, and scorched food. For the first time in almost two years, voices other than those of Renegades echoed through the building.

  “This way.” Cody led them up the stairs. The second floor was a mirror image of the first, except a ladder ascended through a trapdoor to the roof. People were sitting in the hallway, and bare mattresses had been dragged out of some of the apartments for them to rest on. They were mostly Inferno people, with only seven or eight Hispanic faces among them. As they followed Cody, Tom and Jessie had to step over and around the refugees; the lights revealed familiar faces: Vic Chaffin and his wife Arleen, Don Ringwald and his family, Ida Slattery, the Fraziers, Jim and Paula Cleveland and many others. The apartments were full too, and a few infants keened a discordant chorus. There was some talking, but not a lot; most people were numbed, and some of them were sleeping sitting up. The heat from all these close-packed bodies was tremendous, and the air was tainted with smoke.

  Cody took them to a closed door that had HQ and KNOCK FIRST scrawled on it in red spray paint above a Billy Idol poster. Cody did knock, and a little sliding aperture opened. Nasty’s green eyes, outlined with glittery gold mascara, peered out. Then the aperture shut, the door was unlocked, and they went in.

  This was Cody’s home whenever he came here. The front room held a cot, a stained plaid sofa with the stuffing leaking out through knife rips, a scarred pinewood table and chairs, and a small, battered refrigerator saved from the dump and forced to gasp out a few more months. The floor was covered with faded brown linoleum that was curling up in the corners, and on the cheaply paneled walls hung motorcycle and rock-star posters. A window, cracked open to admit smoky air, faced south. A short hallway went past a busted-up bathroom and into what used to be a bedroom, now the ’Gades’ armory where a variety of weapons like brass knuckles and pellet rifles hung on wall hooks.

  Tank had been sitting on the sofa, and now he quickly stood up as he saw Mr. Hammond and his wife come
in. His camouflage-daubed football helmet was snug around his skull. Cody relocked the door, and Nasty stepped back to let the Hammonds see who stood at the window, facing them.

  “Hello, Tom and Jessie,” Daufin said, and smiled wanly.

  The moment enfolded Jessie. That was Stevie’s body, Stevie’s face, Stevie’s dimpled smile. Even the voice was Stevie’s, if you chose not to hear the fragile undertone like wind chimes in the cradle of a breeze. Inside that body was Stevie’s heart, lungs, veins, and organs; all of it belonged to Stevie except the unknown center where Daufin lived. Jessie took a step forward, and fresh tears broke. Another step, and Tom saw where she was going and he reached for her but let his hand fall short.

  Jessie walked across the room to the body of her daughter, and she started to place her hands on the little shoulders with the intention of picking the child up and holding her close—just for a moment, to feel the beating of Stevie’s heart and know that somewhere, in whatever way she couldn’t even begin to fathom, Stevie was alive.

  But in the child’s face the eyes sparkled with intelligence and fire—intense and even frightening—that was far beyond Stevie’s years. The face was Stevie’s, yes, but the spirit was not.

  That was clear to Jessie in an instant, and her hands poised over Daufin’s shoulders.

  “You’re…you’re filthy!” Jessie said, and blinked away the tears. “You must’ve been rolling in the dust!”

  Daufin looked down at her own dirty clothes. Jessie’s hands lowered, and brushed loose dust off the T-shirt. “Don’t they teach you to be clean where you come from? My God, what a mess!” The auburn hair was full of tangles, bits of weed and spiderweb strands. Jessie saw Nasty’s buckskin shoulderbag on the table; the bag was open, and the pink handle of a hairbrush protruded. She took the brush out and started going through the child’s hair with the dirt-hating vengeance of a mother.

  Puzzled, Daufin started to back away. Jessie snapped, “Hold still!” and Daufin stood at attention while the brush strokes puffed dust into the air.