Stinger Part 21

"Check." Rhodes hesitated, looked at his wrist.w.a.tch in the glare of the light. It was almost eighteen minutes until midnight. The witching hour, Rhodes thought. He took the first step into the tunnel, having to bend over only a few inches; the second step was no easier, but he kept going with the flashlight in his left hand and the rifle stock braced against his right shoulder. His finger stayed close to the trigger. As soon as the light was gone, Vance heard the lizard rustle over in its corner and came within a bladder's squeeze of wetting his trousers.

Step by slow step, the colonel moved away from beneath the Creech house. About ten feet in, he paused to examine the substance on the walls, floor, and ceiling. He tentatively touched a drool of it and jerked his hand back; the stuff was slick and as warm as fresh snot. Some kind of natural lubricant, he decided. Maybe an alien equivalent of saliva or mucus. He would've liked to have gotten a sample of it, but he couldn't bear to carry any of it back with him. Anyway, the gunk was all over his shoes. He went on, following the tunnel as it made a long curve to the right. The walls were slowly dripping and the dirt was blood red. He had the weird sensation of walking deeper into a nostril, and at any second he expected to see damp hairs and blood vessels.

The tunnel went straight for about thirty feet before it snaked slowly to the left. Was Stinger a part-machine, part-living hybrid like the dragonfly had been? Rhodes wondered. Or was Stinger Daufin's term for not a single creature, but a collection of them?

He stopped. Listened. A strand of ooze dripped from the ceiling and clung to his shoulder. There was a distant rumbling noise, and a slight vibration in the tunnel floor. It ceased after a few seconds-and then there it was again, a rumbling like a subway train somewhere beyond the walls. Or a subterranean bulldozer, he thought grimly. Little scurryings of fear ran in his belly. The noise seemed to be coming from somewhere to his left. Maybe it was the sound of something digging, or the sound of a ma.s.sive thing moving through an already-dug tunnel. Heading where, and for what reason? If Stinger was digging tunnels like this one under the entire town, then it was either wasting a lot of energy or preparing for a major a.s.sault. There was no way to know what its intent and capabilities were until Daufin explained why it was after her. And first of all, she had to be found-he hoped by himself and not by Stinger.

The noise of either digging or tunnel travel again faded away. There was no telling how far this tunnel went-probably all the way under the river to the black pyramid-but Rhodes had seen and heard enough. He could feel the slimy excretion in his hair, and a strand of it was sliding slowly down his neck. It was time to get the h.e.l.l out.

He retreated, the light's beam spearing along the tunnel in front of him. And the light caught something: a figure, jerking in and then out of the beam, way down at the far end of the tunnel.

Rhodes's legs locked up. The breath froze in his lungs.

There was silence, except for a slow dripping noise.

Something's down there, he thought. Watching me. I can feel the sonofab.i.t.c.h. Just beyond the light. Waiting.

He couldn't move, and he feared that if he did break his legs loose from their terror lock and start running, whatever was down there would be on him before he could make it the sixty feet back to where Vance waited.

Still silence.

And then a voice. An old woman's voice, singing: "Jeeesus loves the little chillllldren, allllll the chillllldren in the worrrlllld..."

"Who's there?" Rhodes called. His voice shook. Smart move! he thought. Like it's really going to answer!

The singing had a metallic undertone, and it drifted past him like a half-remembered Sunday school song from a tinny record player. After a few more seconds, it stopped in midphrase, and the silence descended again.

The flashlight's beam trembled. He aimed the rifle's barrel down the tunnel.

"Praise the Lord!" the old woman's voice called. "Glory be!"

"Step into the light," Rhodes said. "Let me see you."

"Hot hot hot! You're a very naughty boy and you'll get a switchin'!"

It occurred to him that it might really be an old woman, fallen down here and gone crazy in the darkness.

"I'm Colonel Matt Rhodes, United States Air Force!" he said. "Who are you?"

The silence stretched. He sensed a figure, standing just beyond the light. "G.o.d don't like naughty boys," the old woman's voice answered. "Don't like liars, neither. Who's the guardian?"

It was the question that Vance had told Rhodes the Dodge Creech creature had asked, and now the colonel knew for sure it was no crazy old lady down there in the dark.

"What guardian?" Rhodes asked.

"G.o.d chews up liars and spits 'em out! " the voice shouted. "You know what guardian! Who is it?"

"I don't know," he said, and he began to back away again. The ooze squished underfoot.

"Colonel?" It was Vance's voice, echoing through the tunnel from behind him. "You okay?"

"You okay?" the awful voice in front of him mimicked. "Where you goin', Colonel Matt Rhodes United States Air Force? Love thy neighbor as thyself. Put out that hot wand of h.e.l.l and let's have us a tea party."

The flashlight, Rhodes realized. It's afraid of the flashlight.

"Naughty, naughty boy! Gonna switch you good and proper!" The thing sounded like a demented grandmother on speed.

He kept backing away, moving faster now. The thing didn't speak again, and all Rhodes wanted to do was to get out of this tunnel, but he dared not turn his back and run. The light was holding it at bay; maybe something in the wavelength of electric light, he reasoned. If alien eyes had never been exposed to electric light before, then...

He stopped. Why wasn't the thing still taunting him? Where the h.e.l.l was it? He glanced over his shoulder, quickly shone the light behind him. Nothing there. A bead of sweat crawled into his eye and burned it like a torch.

And in the next instant there was the crack of earth splitting open and he whirled to see a flurry of dirt erupt in front of him and two gaunt arms with metallic saw-edged fingernails coming up from the floor. The thing scuttled up like a roach, white hair red with Texas dirt and flower-print press hanging in slimy tatters, the old woman's face slick and shining. Needle teeth glinted like blue fire in its mouth as Rhodes thrust the flashlight right into the dead and staring eyeb.a.l.l.s.

"Naughty boy! " the thing shrieked, throwing up one arm over its face and the other swinging viciously at Rhodes.

He backpedaled and fired the rifle. It bucked against his shoulder and almost knocked him flat; the bullet tore a gash across a gray cheek. He fired again, missed, and then the creature that looked like an old woman was charging him, an arm still covering its eyes and its head thrashing with what was either rage or pain.

The thing's other hand closed on his left wrist. Two metal nails winnowed into his skin, and he knew that if he lost the light he was finished. He heard himself scream; the hand had a terrible, crushing power in it, and his wrist felt as if it was about to break.

He jammed the rifle barrel right up against the crook of the thing's elbow and pulled the trigger. Pulled it again. And again, and this time wrenched his arm away from her. There was a roar coming from the creature's mouth like air through a cracked steampipe.

The thing abruptly turned and, its eyes shielded and back bowed with a dowager's hump, scurried away from Rhodes down the tunnel. It flung itself to the floor, began to frantically dig itself down with feet and fingers, throwing damp dirt backward upon Rhodes. In about five seconds it had burrowed halfway into the earth.

Rhodes could stand no more. His nerve snapped, and he fled. Vance had heard an old woman's shout, the sound of rifle fire, and a scream that had made the hairs on the back of his neck do the jitterbug. Now he heard someone running down there-shoes squishing on that s.h.i.t in the tunnel-and then the choked thunder of Rhodes's voice: "Get me out! " The rifle was flung up, but Rhodes held on to the flashlight.

Vance started hauling up the hose, and Rhodes climbed up it as if the devils of h.e.l.l were snapping at his a.s.s. The colonel fought upward the last three feet, grabbed the broken concrete, and pulled himself out of the hole, scrabbling away from it on his hands and knees; he lost the flashlight, which had been clamped under his arm, and it rolled away across the floor.

"What happened? G.o.d A'mighty, what happened?" Vance reached down for the light and turned it on the colonel's face; it was a mask of chalk with two gray-ringed cigarette burns where the eyes had been.

"I'm all right. All right. I'm all right," Rhodes said, but he was cold and clammy and the sweat was running off him and he knew he was one giggle away from the funny farm. "The light. Doesn't like it. Nope! Shot it. Shot it, sure did!"

"I heard the shots. What were you shootin' a-" His voice clogged and stopped. He had seen something, there in the light, and he felt his stomach heave.

Rhodes lifted his left arm. A gray hand and forearm was hanging on to his wrist, two metal nails dug into his skin and the other fingers clamped tight. At the end of the forearm, where the elbow's crook had been, was a ma.s.s of torn tissue that oozed pale gray fluid.

"Shot it!" Rhodes said, and a terrible grin flickered across his mouth. "Shot it, sure did!"

32 Landscape of Destruction

Rick Jurado stood in the front room of his house, staring through a cracked window toward the smoldering junkyard. Candles burned around the room, and his Paloma was softly crying. Mrs. Garracone, from a few doors down, was crying too, and her son Joey stood with his arm around her shoulders to steady her. Zarra was in the room, his bullwhip coiled around his arm, and Miranda sat on the sofa beside her grandmother, Paloma's hands in her own. Father Ortega waited for an answer to the question he'd just posed. Mrs. Garracone had come to him about twenty minutes before. She'd been to the clinic, had waited anxiously for word about her husband, Leon. But Leon Garracone, who labored in one of the machine shops in Cade's autoyard, had not been found.

"I know he's alive," she repeated, speaking to Rick. "I know it. John Gomez came out alive, and he worked right beside my Leon. He said he crawled out and he could hear other people in there callin' for help. I know my Leon's still in there. Maybe he's pinned under somethin'. Maybe his legs are broken. But he's alive. I know it!"

Rick glanced at Father Ortega, saw that the priest believed as he did: that the odds of finding Leon Garracone alive in the debris of the autoyard were very, very slim. But Domingo Ortega lived on Fourth Street, two doors down from the Garracones, and he had always counted Leon as a good friend. When Mrs. Garracone and Joey had come to him, begging him to help, he'd had to say yes; he'd been trying to find other volunteers, but no one wanted to go into the autoyard with that outer-s.p.a.ce machine sitting in there and he didn't blame them. "You don't have to go," he told Rick. "But Leon was... Leon's my friend. We're going to go in and try to find him."

"Don't do it, Rick," Paloma begged. "Please don't."

"Help us, man," Joey Garracone said. "We're brothers, right?"

"There's been enough death!" Paloma tried shakily to stand, but Miranda restrained her. "It's a miracle anybody got out of that place alive! Please don't ask my son to go in there!"

Rick looked at Miranda. She shook her head, adding her opinion to Paloma's. He was ripped between what he knew was the sensible thing and what he considered to be his duty as leader of the Rattlers. Gang law said that if one of the brothers needed help, you gave it without question. He took a deep breath of smoke-tainted air and released it. The whole town smelled like scorched metal and burning tires. "Mrs. Garracone," he said, "will you take my grandmother and sister to the church with you? I don't want them being alone."

"No!" This time Paloma did stand up. "No, for the love of G.o.d, no!"

"I want you to go with Mrs. Garracone," he said calmly. "I'll be all right."

"No! I'm begging you!" Her voice broke, and new tears ran down her wrinkled cheeks. He walked across the crooked floor to her and put his arm around her. "Listen to me. If you believed I was still out there, and alive, you'd want someone to go in after me, wouldn't you?"

"There are others who can do it! Not you!"

"I have to go. You know that, because you taught me not to turn my back on my friends."

"I taught you not to be a fool, either!" she answered, but Rick could hear in her voice that she had grudgingly accepted his decision.

He held her for a moment longer, and then he said to Miranda, "Take care of her," and he let his grandmother go. Paloma seized his hand, squeezed it tightly, and the cataract-covered eyes found his face. "You be careful. Promise it."

"I promise," he said, and she released him. He turned toward Father Ortega. "All right. Let's get it done."

Mrs. Garracone left with Paloma and Miranda, heading to the Catholic church on First Street. Armed with a flashlight, Father Ortega led Rick, Zarra, and Joey Garracone in the opposite direction, along smoky Second Street toward the blown-down fence of the autoyard and the fires beyond. At the yard's edge, they stopped to survey a landscape of destruction: car parts had been thrown into tangled heaps of metal, piles of tires billowed dense black smoke, and what had been either wooden or brick buildings were either smashed flat or turned to rubble.

And overshadowing all was the black pyramid, its base sunken into the earth.

"I wouldn't do what you're thinking," someone warned. Sitting on the hood of his Mercedes was Mack Cade, smoking a thin cheroot and regarding the ruins like a fallen emperor. Typhoid crouched at his feet, and Lockjaw sat in the backseat. Cade still wore his Panama hat; his tanned face, wine-red shirt, and khaki trousers were streaked with soot. "Nothing in there worth going after."

"My dad's in there!" Joey answered adamantly. "We're gonna bring him out!"

"Sure you are." Cade spewed a thread of smoke. "Kid, there's nothing left but bones and ashes."

"You shut your filthy mouth!"

Typhoid stood up and growled darkly, but Cade rested one booted foot on the dog's back. "Just telling it like it is, kid. There are some drums of paint and lubricant that haven't blown up yet. That's what I'm waiting on. You want to get yourselves killed, you go right ahead."

"You know where Leon Garracone was working," Ortega said. "Why don't you do something worthwhile for once in your life and help us find him?"

"Garracone, Garracone..." He thought for a moment, trying to place a face with the name. They all looked alike to him. "Oh, yeah! Garracone was always b.i.t.c.hing for a raise. He worked in the engine shop. That's what's left of it." He pointed, and through the haze they could make out a heap of broken bricks about fifty yards in.

"John Gomez got out," Ortega said, undaunted. "He's cut up and burned, but he's alive. Leon could still be-"

"Sure. Dream on, padre. Anyway, what the h.e.l.l is Garracone to you? " He removed the cheroot from his mouth and flicked it away. The gold chains around his neck made a tinkling noise as he moved.

"Leon is my friend. Which is something I don't suppose you understand."

"I've got all the friends I need, thanks." Cade had a staff of five Mexican servants at his house, a live-in teenage mistress-a little c.o.ked-up go-go dancer from San Antonio-and a fat-bellied cook named Lucinda, but his real friends were always with him. The two dogs never judged him, or pressured him, or gave him bad vibrations. They were always ready to rip the throats out of his enemies, and they obeyed without question: to him, that was true friendship. "Jurado, you've got more sense than this. Tell 'em how crazy they are, man."

"We've got to see for ourselves."

"You'll see, all right! Man, didn't you get a look at that flying b.a.s.t.a.r.d? There's something alive in that f.u.c.ker!" He motioned toward the pyramid. "You go out there and it'll chew your a.s.ses up too!"

"Let's go," Ortega urged. "This leech is useless."

"My mama didn't raise any fools!" Cade retorted as the others started into the autoyard, watching their steps over the twisted sheet-metal fence and the wicked coils of concertina wire. "I'll tell Noah Twilley where to find your bodies!" But they paid him no more attention and moved into the yard past heaps of razor-sharp metal and smoking debris. Soon afterward, they heard the blare and crash of Cade's tape deck, cranked up loud enough to blast G.o.d's eardrums: Alice Cooper, wailing about dead babies in a cupboard.

The sandy ground was littered with parts of engines and cars, charred wooden planks, bricks, and other junk. Zarra lagged behind to poke around the warped cha.s.sis of what appeared to have been a Porsche, thrown upside down by the concussion. Father Ortega saw a man's bloodstained shirt lying nearby, but he didn't call attention to it. The dark smoke of smoldering tires hung close to the earth, unstirred by a breeze, and piles of wreckage glowed fierce red at their centers. The black pyramid loomed frighteningly close. Rick hesitated, looking up toward the column of light that whirled around and around with hypnotic effect at its apex, then got his legs moving again. But he couldn't shake the feeling of being watched. It was a sense he'd developed by necessity, to guard against a 'Gade coming up behind him at school and taking him down with a kidney punch. The back of his neck p.r.i.c.kled and he kept glancing around, but nothing moved through the smoke. It was more than being watched, he decided; it was a sensation of being taken apart, measured, dissected like a frog in biology cla.s.s. "Creepy in here," Zarra muttered, walking just to Rick's right, and Rick knew Zarra must be feeling it too.

They crossed the yard to the jumble of bricks and metal beams that Cade had pointed out. Not far away was a mound of cars and pickup trucks that had been crunched together like a bizarre sculpture. Joey Garracone got down on his knees in the sand and started tossing broken bricks aside and calling for his father.

"You and Zarra start on the other side," Ortega suggested, and they went around the collapsed building-where they came face-to-face with a burned-up corpse lying next to a crumpled sky-blue Corvette. The corpse's head was smashed in, and broken teeth gleamed in the gaping mouth. Whoever he was, he had reddish-blond hair; a white man, not Joey's father. The heavy, sickly-sweet odor of burned meat reached them, and Zarra gasped. "I'm gonna volcano, man!" He turned and ran away a few yards, bending his head toward the ground. Rick clamped his teeth together, walked past the dead man, and stood waiting for the dizzy sickness to pa.s.s. It did, mercifully, and then he was ready to work. Zarra came back, his face yellow.

They began to search through the ruins of the engine shop, clearing away some of the mountain of bricks. After about ten minutes of work, Ortega uncovered another dead man: it was Carlos Hermosa-Ruben's father-and the way the man's body was contorted Ortega knew the spine and neck must be broken. Joey stared for a moment at the corpse, his face covered with dust and sweat, and then he silently continued his labor. Ortega made the sign of the cross and kept tossing bricks aside. The work was hard. It looked to Rick as if the whole building-which had been a flat-roofed structure about forty feet long-had caved in on itself. He moved a length of pipe, and broken bricks tumbled down along with a charred sneaker that he at first thought might have a foot in it but was empty, its owner either buried or blown out of his shoe by the concussion. He came to a metal beam that Zarra helped him shift with back-wrenching effort, and after the beam was laid aside Zarra looked at him and said quietly, "Do you hear that?"

"Hear what?"

"Listen!"

Rick did, but all he could hear was Cade's tape deck playing.

"Hold it. I don't hear it anymore." Zarra walked into the wreckage, searching for the sound he'd heard. He bent down, tossed more bricks and rubble away. Then: "There! You hear that, man? Over this way!"

"I didn't hear anything." Rick went to where Zarra was and waited. A few seconds pa.s.sed-and then, m.u.f.fled and indistinct, came the clink of metal against metal. It was a steady rhythm, coming from somewhere deep within the ruins, and Rick realized somebody was signaling. "Hey! Father!" he shouted.

"Over here!"

Ortega and Joey came running, their clothes and skin filmed with dust. Zarra picked up a piece of pipe and hit it against a brick a few times, and they all heard the answering knocks from below. Ortega got down on his knees, shining the flashlight in amid the bricks in search of an airs.p.a.ce. Zarra kept signaling, and the clinking noise came back to him.

"It's Domingo Ortega!" the priest shouted. "Can you hear me?"

They waited, but heard no response. "Help me," Ortega said, and he and the boys began to work at a fever pitch, digging their way down through three or four feet of rubble. Within minutes their hands were sc.r.a.ped raw, and blood seeped from cuts in Rick's palms. Ortega said, "Hold it," and leaned forward, listening. There was the sound of metal on metal again, someone hammering at a pipe. "Can you hear me down there?" Ortega hollered.

A weak, raspy shout drifted up: "Yeah! Oh Christ, yeah! Get us outta here!"

"Who are you? How many are with you?"

"Three of us! I'm Greg Frackner! Will Barnett and Leon Garracone are down here too!"

"Papa!" Joey yelled, tears streaming down his cheeks. "Papa, it's Joey!"

"We're down in the work pit, and there's all kinds of s.h.i.t wedged in on top of us," Frackner continued. "I can see your light, though!"

"Are you hurt?"

"Broken arm, I reckon. Ribs don't feel too swift either. Will's coughin' up blood, and Leon's pa.s.sed out again. I think his legs are busted. What the h.e.l.l hit us, man? A bomb?"

Ortega avoided the question. "Can you move at all?"