Stinger Part 18

"Sheriff, look at that!" Danny had seen it first, and he pointed to the jagged-edged hole in the floor. Vance approached it, and he and Danny stood over the hole peering down into darkness. Squeak squeak. Squeak squeak.

Both of them looked up at the same time, and both of them saw it. A figure sat in the rocking chair in the far corner of the room, slowly rocking back and forth, back and forth. A scatter of National Geographics lay on the floor beside the chair. Squeak squeak. Squeak squeak.

"D-Dodge?" Vance whispered.

"Howdy," Dodge Creech said. Most of his face was in shadow, but he was still wearing his yellow-and-blue-plaid coat, dark blue slacks, pearl-gray s.h.i.+rt, two-toned loafers. His red lick of hair was greased back on his pate, and his hands were folded in his lap as he rocked.

"What's... what's goin' on?" Vance asked. "Ginger's about out of her-"

"Howdy," the other man said again, still rocking. There was no color in his face, and his eyes glittered in the light of the two remaining lamps that hung from the ceiling's wagon-wheel fixture. The wagon wheel was crooked. Squeak, squeak went the chair's runners.

His voice, Vance thought: his voice is funny. Raspy, like air through the ba.s.s pipes of a church organ. It sounded like Dodge's voice, yes, but... different too.

The glittering eyes were watching him carefully. "You're a person of authority, ain't you?" the voice asked, with a humming of sinus cavities.

"I'm Ed Vance. You know me. Come on, Dodge, what's this all about?" His knees were freezing solid again. Something was wrong with Dodge's mouth.

"Ed Vance." Dodge's head tilted slightly to one side. "Ed Vance," he repeated, as if he'd never heard the name before and he was making sure not to forget it. "Yessir, I knew they'd send a person of authority. That'd be you, wouldn't it?"

Vance looked at Danny; the boy was about a hair away from jumping out of his shoes, his hands clutching the rifle to his chest. The cadence of Dodge Creech's voice, the flat phrasing, the drawl: all of it was the same, yet there was that low church-organ undertone, and a rattling like loose phlegm in Dodge's throat.

"So let me pose a question to you, pardner," the figure in the rocking chair said. "Who's the guardian?"

"The... guardian?"

"I didn't stutter. Who's the guardian?"

"Dodge... what're you talkin' about? I don't know anythin' about a guardian."

The rocking ceased. Danny gasped and took a backward step, and he might have plunged into the hole if he hadn't checked himself.

"Maybe you don't at that," the man in the chair replied. "Maybe you do, and maybe you're handin' me bulls.h.i.+t on a platter, Ed Vance."

"No, I swear it! I don't know what you're talkin' about!" The thought hit him like a bullet between the eyes: This isn't Dodge anymore.

The figure stood up. Its clothes made a stiff crackling noise. Dodge Creech seemed two or three inches taller than Vance remembered, and much larger around the shoulders too. There was something funny about the way he moved his head-something like the jerky motion of a puppet on strings, guided by an unseen hand. The figure walked toward Vance, with that strange puppet's gait, and Vance backed away; it stopped, looked from Vance to Danny and back again, and then the white face with its wormy gray lips smiled-a teeth-clenched salesman's smile.

"The guardian," he repeated, and the light gleamed off teeth that were no longer teeth, but thousands of close-packed, blue metallic needles. "Who is it?"

Vance couldn't seem to get his breath. "I swear... don't know..."

"Well sir, maybe I believe you." The figure in the garish sport coat slowly rubbed its thick, colorless hands together, and Vance saw that the fingernails were about an inch long, made of that same blue-tinged metal and edged with tiny saw-blade-like teeth. "You bein' a person of authority and all, I ought to believe you, right?" the thing in Dodge's skin asked. Vance had lost his voice.

Danny's back hit the wall, and a framed picture of Dodge receiving an award at an insurance salesmen's convention clattered to the floor.

"So I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. See, I've come a long way, and I've already spent a lot of time and effort." The metal-nailed hands kept rubbing together, and Vance realized that a swipe from one of them could rip his face off right down to the skull. "I can find the guardian myself if I have to." The head suddenly whipped to the left with violent motion, and the thing's gaze followed the helicopter through a broken window as it circled the pyramid. "I don't like that thing. Not the least bit. I don't want it flyin' around my property." Its attention returned to Vance, and the sheriff saw that there was no life in Dodge's eyes; they looked wet and dead, like false eyes stuck into a grinning mask. "But I'll tell you true, Ed Vance: if I don't find out who the guardian is real soon, I'm gonna have to lay down the law. My kind of law."

"Who... what are you?" Vance rasped.

"I'm an..." The figure paused for a few seconds. "An exterminator. And you're a big fat bug. I'll be around, Ed Vance, and I want you to remember me. Okay?"

Vance nodded, a drop of sweat hanging from the tip of his nose. "Oka-"

One of Dodge's hands rose. The fingers probed the left eye and wrenched it from its socket. There was no blood, just strands of oozing fluid. The eyeball went into the needle-filled mouth and burst apart like a hardboiled egg as the jaws clamped down.

Danny moaned, fighting against a faint, and madness clawed at Vance's brain.

"When I want you, I'll find you," the creature said. "Don't try to hide. You can't. We square on that, pardner?"

"Sq-sq-square." The word came out in a choke.

"Good bug." And then the figure turned away from Vance, took two long strides, and dropped into the hole in the living-room floor.

They heard it thump to the bottom after a long fall. There was a quick scuttling sound. Then silence. Danny screamed. He sprang to the edge of the hole, lifted his rifle and began firing into it, his face contorted with horror. Gunsmoke whirled through the dusty air, and spent cartridges flew. He came to the end of his bullets, but he kept frantically trying to feed sh.e.l.ls into the chamber.

"Stop it," Vance said, or thought he had. "Stop it, Danny. Stop it! "

The deputy shuddered and looked at him, his finger still jerking on the trigger, his nose running, and the wind whoos.h.i.+ng in his lungs.

"It's gone," Vance told him. "Whatever it was... it's gone."

"I saw it-I saw it looked like Dodge but it wasn't no way no way in h.e.l.l was it Dod-"

Vance gripped his collar and shook him hard. "Listen to me, boy! " he roared, right in Danny's face. "I don't want you goin' as crazy as Ginger Creech, you hear me?" He felt a wetness at his crotch and knew he'd peed his pants, but right now he had to keep Danny from losing his mind. If the boy went over the edge, Vance would be right behind. "You hear me?" He gave another hard shake, which served to loosen the cobwebs of shock in his own brain as well.

"Wasn't Dodge. Wasn't," Danny mumbled. Then, with a gasp of breath: "Yes sir. I hear you."

"Go to the car." The boy blinked dazedly, still staring into the hole. "Go on, I said!"

Danny staggered out.

Vance swung his shotgun up and aimed it at the hole. His hands shook so hard he figured he couldn't hit a barn door in broad daylight, much less an alien who ate eyeb.a.l.l.s and had a thousand needles for teeth. Because that's exactly what it had been, he realized: an alien, dug itself a tunnel from the pyramid across the river and crawled inside Dodge Creech. My property, it had said. And what was that s.h.i.+t about a guardian, and how come it could speak English with a Texas accent?

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, G.o.d 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 n.o.body 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 hoa.r.s.e cry.

"Scooter! Where's Scooter? G.o.d 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 a.s.s! 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, a.n.a.lyze 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 a.s.sembled 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 corner 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 st.i.tches 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. "Okay, 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 st.i.tch ridges less than an inch below his right eye. His Texaco s.h.i.+rt 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 G.o.d, 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 h.e.l.l you call it-it's a pile of s.h.i.+t." 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 sonofab.i.t.c.h 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.

"d.a.m.n, 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 ma.s.sive 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?"