Stinger Part 23

"I don't know, but I think you'd better come quick. They're pretty torn up about something."

"Take 'em to my office," Early said. "Ed, you can talk to 'em in there."

Mrs. Santos left to get them, but Vance hesitated because he smelled more trouble and he knew Doc Early did too. "How are we gonna find Daufin?" he asked Rhodes. "There are plenty of places she could be hidin'."

"She can't have gotten out of the force field, but that's still a seven-mile radius," the colonel answered. "I don't think she's left town, though. At least she knows she can hide here, and she doesn't know anything about what's beyond Inferno and Bordertown."

"There are a lot of empty houses around," Tom said. "She could be in any one of them."

"She's not going to get very far from the sphere." Jessie couldn't remember if she'd locked the front door or not; that detail had been lost in the hurry to find out what had come down in Cade's autoyard.

"Either Torn or I ought to go back to our house and wait there. She might show up."

"Right. I can get Gunny to round up some volunteers and start combing the streets." The search was not going to be an easy task, he knew, with all that haze out there and the visibility eroding more every hour. "If we go door to door, maybe we can find someone who's seen her." He tried to rub warmth into his left wrist, but the feel of the cold fingers would not go away. "I need some black coffee," he decided.

"I've got to keep going."

"Probably some left over at the Brandin' Iron," Vance said. "They keep a pot full until the stuff gets out and walks off."

Jessie stared at Colonel Rhodes for a moment. He was still pale, but some of the color had resurfaced in his face and his inner fires were lit again. A question had been hanging in her mind: a question that she knew she shared with Tom. It had to be asked, and now was the time. "If... when... we find Daufin, what are we going to do with her?"

Rhodes already knew where the question was aiming. "It looks to me as if Stinger's a lot stronger than she is-and a h.e.l.l of a lot stronger than any of us too. Stinger must know Daufin's out of her sphere and in a host body, and that's what it means by 'guardian.' It's not going to drop the force field until it has her, so I'll jump ahead and tell you that I don't know what's going to happen to Stevie."

"If there is a Stevie anymore," Tom said quietly. Jessie had been thinking that too, and she felt a clench of anguish inside her. But Daufin had said Stevie was safe, and Jessie realized she was clinging to the word of a creature she hadn't even dreamed existed twenty-four hours ago. "I'm going to check on Ray," she told them, and she tore her mind away from the alien that lived in her little girl's skin, walked out of the lab and down the hall to Ray's room.

"I'd best see what those boys want." Vance moved toward the door, dreading the news that waited for him in Doc Early's office. When it rains it pours! he thought, merrily going crazy. He stopped just shy of the door. "Tom, will you come with me?"

Tom said he would, and they left the lab.

McNeil's cluttered office was decorated with bullfight posters and thickets of potted cacti sat on the windowsills. Vance took one look at the strained faces of Rick Jurado and Zarra Alhambra, their eyes sunken and ringed with gray, and he knew the s.h.i.+t had just deepened to about neck level.

"What happened?" Vance asked Rick, who kept s.h.i.+vering and rubbing his throat. Rick told him, speaking in a halting, brain-blasted voice. He and Zarra had gone to the sheriff's office, where Danny Chaffin had told them where Vance was. The deputy had been sitting at the CB radio, calling for help into a sea of static and surrounded by loaded weapons from the gun cabinet. When Rick reached the part about the thing's body bursting a spiked tail, Vance made a soft, choking moan and had to sit down.

"It killed Father Ortega," Rick continued. "Hit him in the head. Just like that." He stopped, drew in a breath and let it out. "It went after me. Caught me, with that... that tail. It wanted to know about the little girl."

Tom said, "Oh, Jesus."

"I thought it was going to kill me. But it said..." Rick's eyes found the sheriffs. "It said for me to take a message to you. It wants to see you. It said you'd know where."

Vance didn't reply, because the room was spinning too fast and the emergency lights threw gargoyle shadows on the walls.

"Where?" Tom asked him.

"The Creech house," he answered finally. "I can't go back in there." His voice broke. "Oh G.o.d, I can't." A brutal echo drifted to him: Burro! Burro! Burro! Cortez Park and pantherish faces swirled around him, and he clenched his hands into fists.

He was the sheriff of Inferno: a joke job. A chaser of lost dogs and traffic offenders. One hand out to Mack Cade and the other over his eyes. The little fat boy inside him quivered with terror, and he saw the door of the Creech house stretching to engulf him.

A hand touched his shoulder. He looked up, wet-lashed, into Tom Hammond's face.

"We need you," Tom said.

No one had ever said that to him before. We need you. The sound of it was shockingly simple, and yet it was strong enough to tatter the long-ago, distant taunts like cobwebs in the desert wind. He lowered his head, the fear still jabbing at his guts. Only it didn't seem as bad as it had been a few seconds before. He had been alone for a long time-way too long, and it was time for that weakling fat boy who carried a Louisville Slugger onto the streets of Bordertown to grow up. Maybe he couldn't make himself walk into the Creech house again; maybe he'd get to that door and scream and keep running until he dropped or a monster with a tail full of spikes reared up before him. Maybe. Maybe not. He was the sheriff of Inferno, and they needed him. And knowing it was true made the taunts drift away, like bullies who had realized the fat little boy walking across Cortez Park cast a man-sized shadow.

Vance lifted his head and wiped his eyes with the back of a pudgy hand. "All right," he said. No promises. The doorway still had to be dealt with." He stood up, and said it again: "All right."

Tom left to get Colonel Rhodes.

34 Worm Meat

"Typhoid! Here, boy!" Mack Cade's voice was giving out from shouting, and at his side Lockjaw was whining and jumping in a jangle of nerves, stopping to fire rapid barks in the direction of the pyramid. Cade let the dog bark, hoping the sound would attract Typhoid. There was no sign of the Doberman. Smoke from burning tires drifted slowly around him, and he walked through a dark wonderland of destruction. The.38, gripped in his right hand, was c.o.c.ked and ready for whatever might be waiting.

Each step took him deeper into the yard. He knew every inch of the place, and now he feared all of them. But Typhoid had to be found, or no amount of c.o.ke in the world would ease his brain tonight. The dogs were his friends, his good-luck charms, his bodyguards, his power translated into animal form. Screw humans, he thought. None of them were worth a s.h.i.+t. Only the dogs mattered. He saw the black pyramid, its damp-looking plates washed with violet light, looming terrifyingly close, and he veered away from it. His polished Italian boots stirred up ashes and dust, and when he looked back he could no longer see any of the houses of Bordertown, just dark upon dark. The yard's familiar buildings-its workshops and storage structures-had been flattened and blasted by the concussion and the explosion of drums of gasoline and lubricants. The sleek rebuilt Porsches, BMWs, Corvettes, Jaguars, and Mercedes that had been lined up ready for pickup and delivery to Cade's masters had been scorched, warped, and tossed like Tonka Toys. My a.s.s is gra.s.s, he thought. No: lower than gra.s.s. My a.s.s is worm meat. The troopers would come, eventually. Then the reporters. It was all over, and the sudden change of his fortunes unhinged him a little further. He'd always expected that if the end came it would be an undercover bust by the federals, or some wild-hair lawyer who decided the money wasn't enough, or one of the fringe players who sang to save his own skin. No scenario of disaster had ever had a sonofab.i.t.c.hing black pyramid from outer s.p.a.ce in it, and Cade figured that would be really funny if he were on the sh.o.r.e of a Caribbean island where there were no extradition treaties.

"Typhoid! Come on, boy! Please... come back!" he shouted. Lockjaw whined, nudged his leg, raced off a few yards, and then darted back to him.

Cade stopped. "It's you and me, buddy," he said to Lockjaw. "Us two against the world."

Lockjaw yipped. A small sound.

"What is it?" Cade knew that sound: alarm. "What do you h-"

Lockjaw growled, deep in his throat, and his ears lay back. There was a splitting noise in the earth, like a seam of stone breaking. The sand swirled around Cade's boots like a whirlpool, and he was twisted around in a violent corkscrew motion. The ground beneath him collapsed, and his legs disappeared up to the knees. He drew a sharp breath, tasted bitter smoke at the back of his throat. Something moist and lurching had his legs, was drawing him under. He was almost down to his waist within seconds, and he thrashed and screamed but his legs were held fast. Lockjaw was barking fiercely, running in circles around him. Cade fired into the ground, the bullet kicking up a spray of sand. Whatever had him continued to pull him down, and he kept firing until the bullets were gone.

The earth was up to his chest. Lockjaw darted in, and Cade's flailing arms grabbed the dog, pulled the Doberman against him, and tried to use its weight to pull himself free. Lockjaw scrabbled wildly, but the sand began to take the dog's body along with Cade's. He held on, and when he opened his mouth to scream again, sand and ashes filled it, slithering down his throat. The man and his dog disappeared together. Mack Cade's Panama hat whirled in the eddies of the sand, then lay half buried as the earth's circular motion slowed and stopped.

35 The Open Door

While Rick and Zarra had been waiting in McNeil's office, Cody Lockett opened his eyes to candlelight and sat up with a jolt that made the hammering in his skull start up again. He held his Timex up to the candle stuck on the plywood table beside his bed: 12:58. It had been about an hour since he'd come to the house, swallowed two aspirin with a swig of Seven-Up from a half-drained can in the refrigerator, and laid down to rest his brain. He wasn't sure he'd actually been sleeping, maybe just drifting in and out of an uneasy twilight, but his head did feel a little better and his muscles had unknotted some too.

Cody didn't know where his father was. The last he'd seen of Curt, the old man was hightailing it down the street as the helicopter and that other flying thing had battled above Inferno. Cody had watched it all, and after the 'copter had crashed on Cobre Road, he figured he'd zombied out, somehow walking to his motorcycle in front of the Warp Room and winding up here. He was still wearing the b.l.o.o.d.y rags of his Texaco s.h.i.+rt. He stood up from the bed, steadied himself against its iron frame as the walls swelled and slowly rotated. When they stopped turning, he unlatched his fingers and walked across the room to his chest of drawers, opened the top drawer, and got out a fresh white T-s.h.i.+rt. He threw aside the Texaco tatters and worked the T-s.h.i.+rt on over his head, wincing at a st.i.tch of pain along his rib cage. His belly growled, and he uprooted the candle from its little puddle of dried wax and followed its light into the kitchen.

The refrigerator held a few mold-ravaged TV dinners, some brown meat wrapped up in foil, a chunk of Limburger cheese that Cody wouldn't have offered to a dog, and a.s.sorted bowls and cups full of leftovers. He didn't trust any of them, but the candlelight found a grease-stained paper sack in there and he pulled it out and opened it; inside were four stale glazed doughnuts, booty from the bakery. They were as tough as lawnmower tires, but Cody ate three of them before his stomach begged for mercy. In the back of the refrigerator was a bottle of Welch's grape juice. He reached in for it, and that was when he felt the floor tremble.

He stopped, his hand gripping the bottle's neck.

The house creaked. There was a polite clink of dishes and gla.s.ses in the cupboards. Then the rude bang of a pipe breaking deep in the earth.

Something's under the house, he realized. His heart picked up hot speed, but his mind was cold and clear. He could feel the tremor of the boards under his sneakers, like the way the floor used to shake when slow-moving freight trains pa.s.sed, heavy-laden, on the copper company's tracks. The floor's vibration ebbed and stopped. A whiff of dust floated through the candlelight. Cody was holding his breath, and only when his lungs jerked for air did he gasp. The kitchen smelled of burning rubber; the stink of Cade's autoyard was sliding through the cracks. Cody brought the grape juice out, unscrewed the cap, and washed down the last of a glazed doughnut that had lodged in his craw. The world had gone freak-o since that d.a.m.ned b.a.s.t.a.r.d had crashed down across the river. Cody didn't care to speculate about what might have pa.s.sed underneath his feet; whatever it was, it had been maybe ten or twelve feet below the ground. He wasn't planning on waiting around to see if it came back, either. Wherever the old man was, Cody thought, he'd have to cover his own a.s.s this time. Anyway, G.o.d always looked out for fools and drunks.

He blew the candle out, laid it on the kitchen counter, and left the house, getting astride his motor at the bottom of the steps and putting on his goggles. The street was tinged with violet, layers of smoke lying close to the concrete and making Inferno look and smell like a battle zone. Through the pall, Cody could see the s.h.i.+ne of the lights up at the fortress. That was the place to go, he decided; there was too much dark everywhere else. First he wanted to run past Tank's house, over on Circle Back Street, to see if the dude was there with his folks before he went up to the apartment building. He stomped a couple of times on the starter before the engine cranked, and drove toward Celeste Street. His headlamp's gla.s.s had been broken during the fight-beer bottle probably clipped it, he reckoned-but the bulb was still working. The light stabbed through the dirty haze, but Cody kept his speed down because Brazos Street was riddled with cracks and in some places buckled upward as much as six inches. His tires told his backbone that whatever had gone under his house had pa.s.sed this way too.

And then he was almost upon her.

Somebody standing in the middle of the street.

A little girl with auburn hair, her eyes glowing red in the headlamp's beam.

"Look out!" Cody shouted, but the little girl didn't budge. He jerked the wheel to the left and hit the brakes; if he'd pa.s.sed any closer to the child he could've flicked her earlobe. The Honda flashed past her and the front tire hit a bulge in the pavement that made the frame shudder; Cody wrestled the handlebars and brakes to keep from cras.h.i.+ng into a stand of cactus. He pulled up about two feet short of porcupine city and skidded the Honda around in a flurry of sand. Its engine coughed and quit.

"Are you crazy?" Cody hollered at the child. She was just standing there, holding something in cupped hands. "What's wrong with you?" He whipped off his goggles, beads of sweat burning his eyes. She didn't answer. She seemed not to even know how close she'd been to kissing a tire. "You almost got yourself killed!" He chopped down the kickstand, got off, and strode toward her to pull her out of the street.

But as he reached her, she lowered her arms and he could see what was cradled in her hands. "What is this?" she asked.

It was an orange-striped kitten, probably only a month or so old. Cody glanced around to get his bearings and saw they were standing in front of the Cat Lady's house. A few feet away, the orange mama tabby sat on her haunches, patiently awaiting the return of her own.

"You know what it is," he snapped, his nerves still raw. "It's a kitten. Everybody in the world knows what a kitten is."

"A kit-ten," the child repeated, as if she'd never heard the word before. "Kitten." It was easier that time. Her fingers stroked the fur. "Soft."

Something weird about this kid, Cody thought. Mighty weird. She didn't talk right, and she didn't stand right either. Her back was too rigid, as if she were straining against the weight of her bones. Her face and hair were dusty, and her blue jeans and T-s.h.i.+rt looked as if she'd been rolling on the ground. Her face was familiar, though; he'd seen her somewhere before. He remembered where: at school one afternoon in April. Mr. Hammond's wife and the kid had come to pick him up. The little girl's name was Sandy, or Steffi, or something like that.

"You're Mr. Hammond's kid," he said. "What're you doin' wanderin' out here alone?"

Her attention was still focused on the kitten. "Pretty," she said. She'd reasoned it was the younger form of the creature that waited not far away, just as the form she occupied was the young female form of the human beings. She stroked its body with a gentle touch. "This kitten is a fragile construction."

"Huh?"

"Fragile," she repeated, looking up at him. "Is that not the correct term?"

Cody didn't reply for a few seconds. He couldn't; his voice was lost. Mighty, mighty weird, he thought. Warily, he replied, "Kittens are tougher than they look."

"So are daughters," Daufin said, mostly to herself. She carefully leaned over and placed the kitten on the ground in the exact spot she'd found it. Immediately the older quadruped picked it up by the scruff of the neck and bounded away with it around the corner of the house.

"Uh... what's your name?" Cody's heart had begun slamming again, and a trickle of sweat crept down the middle of his back. Already wet rings were coming up under his arms, and the night's heat was stifling. "It's Sandy, isn't it?"

"Daufin." She stared steadily at him.

"I think I'm about ready for a rubber room." He pushed a hand through his tangled hair. Maybe he'd suffered a worse punch than he'd thought, and his brains had been knocked loose. "You are Mr. Hammond's little girl, aren't you?"

She pondered a correct response to his question. This one had strange discolorations on his cliff of features, and she could see that bewilderment had taken the place of anger. She knew he would think she was as alien as she thought him to be. What was that strange extension dangling from the hearing cup called an "ear"? Why was one visual orb smaller than the other? And what was the now-silent monster that had roared down on her through the murk? Puzzles, puzzles. Still, she felt no terror in him, as there had been in those others when she'd fled the destroyed abode of ritual. "I have chosen to..." What would the proper translation be? "To clothe myself in this daughter." She lifted her hands, as if she were showing off a new and wonderful dress.

"Clothe yourself. Uh-huh." Cody nodded, one eye large and the swollen eye twitching. "Man, you've looped the loop for d.a.m.n sure!" he told himself. This looked like Mr. Hammond's kid standing before him, but she sure didn't use a kid's words. Except maybe if she was out of her mind, which he wasn't doubting. One of them had to be. "You ought to be at home," he said. "You shouldn't be walkin' around by yourself, not with that thing sittin' over there."

"Yes. The big booger," she said.

"Right." Another slow nod. "You want me to take you home?"

"Oh!" It had been a quick intake of breath. "Oh, if you could," she whispered, and she looked up at the gridded sky. The darkness claimed all reference points.

"You live on Celeste Street," Cody reminded her. He pointed toward the vet's office, just a couple of blocks away. "Over there."

"My home. My home." Daufin reached toward the sky, her hands open. "My home is very far from here, and I can't see the way." Her host body trembled, and she felt a heat behind her own cliff of features. It was more than the increase in the rush of that vital fluid through the miraculous network of arteries, more than the muscle pump's brain-timed beating. It was deeper, a yearning that burned at the center of her being. Within it, her memories of home began to unfold. They came to her in her own language of chimes, but they were synthesized through the human brain and left her tongue in human speech. "I see the tides. I feel them: rising, falling. I feel life in the tides. I feel whole." Cody saw her body begin to undulate slightly, as if in rhythm with the currents of a spectral ocean. "There are great cities, and groves of peace. The tides move over mountains, through valleys and gardens where every labor is love. I feel them; they touch me, even here. They call me home." The movement of her body abruptly stopped. She stared at her hands, at the frightening appendages of alien flesh, and the memories fled before the horror of reality.

"No," she said. "No. That's how my world was. No more. Now the tides carry pain, and the gardens lie in ruins. There is no more singing. There is no more peace, and my world suffers in the shadow of hate. That shadow." She reached toward the pyramid, and Cody saw her fingers clench into a claw, her hand trembling. She closed her eyes, unable to endure the visions behind them. When they opened again, they were blurred and burning. There was a wetness around them, and Daufin put a hand to her cheek to investigate this new malfunction. She brought her hand away, the fingers glistening and a single unbroken drop of liquid suspended on the tip of the longest digit.

Another drop ran down her cliff of features and into the corner of her mouth. In it she could taste the tides of her world.

"You won't win," she whispered, staring fixedly at the pyramid. Cody felt something inside him shrink back; her eyes were blazing with a power that made him fear he might explode into flame if they were aimed at him. "I won't let you win."

Cody hadn't moved. At first he'd been sure either he or the little girl had leapt headlong into the Great Fried Empty, but now... now he wasn't sure. The black pyramid must have a pilot or crew of some kind. Maybe this kid was one of them, and she'd made herself-itself-resemble Mr. Hammond's daughter. On this sweltering, crazy night it seemed that all things were possible. And so he blurted out a question that on any other night of his life would have sealed his permanent residence in the Great Fried Empty: "You're not... from around here, are you? I mean... not... like... from this planet? "

She blinked away the last of the searing wet, and her head swiveled toward him with smooth grace.

"No," she said, "I'm not."

"Wow." There was a knot in his throat the size of a basketball. He didn't know what else to say. It made more sense now that she was wandering around in the dark and hadn't known what a kitten was; but why would the same creature who was so gentle with a kitten destroy the helicopter? And if this was an alien from the pyramid, what was the thing burrowing under the streets? "Is that yours?" He pointed at the pyramid.

"No. It belongs to... Stinger."

He repeated the name. "Is that... like... the captain or somebody?"

She didn't understand what he meant. She said, "Stinger is..." There was a hesitation as her memory scanned the volumes of the Britannica and the dictionary. After a few seconds, she found a phrase that was accurate in Earth language: "A bounty hunter," she said.

"What's he hunting?"

"Me."

This was too much for Cody to comprehend all at one time. Meeting a little girl from outer s.p.a.ce in the middle of Brazos Street was weird enough, but a galactic bounty hunter in a black pyramid was one brainblaster too many. He caught movement from the corner of his eye, looked over, and saw two cats nosing around the wilted shrubs in Mrs. Stellenberg's yard. Another cat was standing on the porch steps, wailing forlornly. Kittens scampered from the brush and chased each other's tails. It was after one o'clock in the morning; why were Mrs. Stellenberg's cats out?

He walked to the Honda, angling the headlight so it shone at the Cat Lady's house. The front door was wide open. The cat on the steps arched its back, spitting in the headlight's glare.

"Mrs. Stellenberg!" Cody called. "You all right?"

Coils of smoke meandered past the light. "Mrs. Stellenberg!" he tried again, and again there was no reply.

Cody waited. The open door both beckoned and repelled him. What if she'd fallen in the dark and knocked herself out? What if she'd broken a hip, or even her neck? He was no saint, but he couldn't pretend he didn't care. He walked to the foot of the steps. "Mrs. Stellenberg! It's Cody Lockett!"

No answer. The cat on the steps gave a nervous yowl and shot past Cody's feet, heading for the brush.

He started up. He had taken two of the steps when he felt a quick tug at his elbow.

"Careful, Cody Lockett," Daufin warned, standing right beside him. Stinger had pa.s.sed this way and its reek lingered in the air.

"Yeah." She didn't have to tell him twice. He continued up the steps and paused at the doorway's dark rectangle. "Mrs. Stellenberg?" he called into the house. "Are you okay?"

Nothing but silence. If the Cat Lady was in there, she couldn't answer. Cody took a deep breath and stepped over the threshold.

His foot never found the floor. He was tumbling forward, falling through darkness, and Daufin's restraining hand was a half second too late. Cody's mouth opened in a cry of terror. It came to him that the front room of the Cat Lady's house had no floor, and he was going to keep falling until he crashed through the roof of h.e.l.l.

Something whammed underneath his right arm, knocking the wind out of him, and he had the sense to grab hold of it before he slid off. He gripped both hands to a swaying thing that felt like a horizontal length of pipe. Dirt and stones cascaded into the darkness beneath him. He didn't hear them hit bottom. Then the pipe's swaying stopped, and he was left dangling in midair. His lungs heaved for breath, and his brain felt like a hot pulse of overloaded circuits. He locked his fingers around the pipe, kicked out, could find nothing there. The pipe began swaying again so he ceased his struggling.