“The meek shall inherit the earth,” Ginger said, and he frowned because he didn’t know what she was talking about and he didn’t think she knew, either.
“I’m not meek!” he told her. She just kept rocking. He heard the deep, rhythmic tolling of the bell at the Sacrifice of Christ Catholic Church across the river, calling the parishioners. “Sounds like LaPrado’s openin’ up for business. Guess Reverend Jennings will too. It’s gonna take more than church bells to keep folks—”
There was another sound, one that stopped him midsentence.
It was a sharp, cracking noise: bricks being wrenched apart.
Under my feet, Dodge Creech thought. Sounds like the basement floor’s rippin’ to—
“What’s that noise?” Ginger cried out, standing up. The rocking chair creaked on without her.
The wooden floor trembled.
Dodge looked at his wife. Her eyes were glassy and wide, her mouth open in a straining O. Above their heads the wagon-wheel fixture shook, the oil lamps beginning to swing.
Dodge said, “I…think we’re havin’ an earthqu—”
The floor heaved upward, as if something huge had battered it from below. Nails leapt loose, glittering in the lamplight. Ginger staggered backward and fell, shrieking as Dodge toppled to his knees.
She saw the floor split open underneath him with a scream of tortured wood, and her husband’s body dropped into the seam up to his neck. Dust billowed around him and filled the room, but she could still see his face: chalky pale, eyes holes of shock. He was looking at her as she crawled away from the collapsing floor on her back.
“Somethin’s got me,” he said, and his voice was a thin, awful whine. “Help me, Ginger. Please…” He lifted his hand out of the hole for her, and what looked like gray snot was drooling from his fingers.
Ginger wailed, curlers dangling from her hair.
And then Dodge was gone, down the hole in the living-room floor. The house shook again, the walls moaning as if in pain at giving up their master. Plaster dust welled through cracks in the pinewood like ghost breath—and then there was silence but for the creakings of the rocking chair and the wagon-wheel fixture. One of the lamps had fallen and lay unbroken on the round red throw rug.
Ginger Creech whispered, “Dodge?” She was shaking, tears running down her face and her bladder about to pop. Shouted it: “Dodge!”
There was no answer, just the chuckling of water down below, running from a broken pipe. The water soon ran out, and the chuckling ceased.
Ginger pushed herself toward the hole, her muscles sluggish as cold rubber bands. She had to look down it—did not want to, must not, should not—but she had to, because it had taken her husband. She reached the jagged edge and her stomach threatened eruption, so she had to squeeze her eyes shut and ride it out. The sickness passed, and she looked over into the hole.
Just dark.
She reached out for the oil lamp and turned up the wick. The flame guttered and rose to a knifelike orange point. She thrust the lamp down into the hole, her other hand gripping the splintered edge with white-knuckled fingers.
Yellow dust sifted and stirred in small, cyclonic whorls. She was peering down into the basement eight feet below; and in the basement floor was another hole that looked—yes, she thought, oh Jesus son of God Holy Christ yes—gnawed through the concrete bricks. Beneath the basement floor lay more darkness.
“Dodge?” she whispered, and it echoed Dodge? Dodge? Dodge? Her fingers spasmed; she lost the oil lamp, and it fell through the hole in the basement floor, kept falling, maybe ten or twenty more feet, finally shattered against red Texas dirt and the flames gouted as the rest of the oil caught. Down in that hole, Ginger could see the glimmering of ooze where something had dragged her husband to hell.
Her senses left her altogether, and she lay trembling on the warped floor, her body drawn up in a tight fetal position. She decided to recite the Twenty-third Psalm seven times, because seven seemed like a holy number and if she recited loud enough and wished hard enough she would lift her head and see Dodge sitting in his easychair across the room, reading one of his motivational salesmanship books, and the TV set would be tuned to PTL and the thing that could not possibly be a spaceship would be gone. She began to recite, but she almost gagged with terror; she’d forgotten the words.
A church bell was ringing.
It must be Sunday, she thought. Sunday morning, bright and new. She sat up, listening to the bell. What was that violet glow coming through the window? Where was Dodge, and why was that hole—
She had always loved the sound of a church bell, summoning her to worship. It was time to go now, and Dodge could come along later. And if he wore that red suit today, she’d skin him, just skin him alive. She stood up, her eyes empty and tear tracks glistening through the dust on her face. She left the house, walked out of her Dearfoams, and kept going barefoot along Brazos Street.
25
Sarge’s Best Friend
“DON’T YOU BE SCARED now, Scooter. I’m not gonna let anythin’ bad happen to you, no siree!” Sarge Dennison patted Scooter’s head, and the invisible animal curled up against his leg. “Don’t you worry. Ol’ Sarge’ll protect you.” He was sitting on the edge of the bandstand in the middle of Preston Park, and had just witnessed the helicopter take off with the pilot and two men aboard. The aircraft reached a height of sixty feet and zoomed to the east, the chatter of its rotors rapidly fading.
Sarge watched it go, until its blinking lights were lost to sight. The bell of the Catholic church across the river was tolling, and a few people stood out on Celeste Street and Cobre Road, looking at the black pyramid and talking, but most had retreated to their homes. He observed the column of violet light, rotating slowly around and around; it reminded him, more than anything, of a barbershop pole. The top of the purple grid was lost in motionless clouds of ebony smoke, and the air smelled burnt. It was a smell he didn’t like, because it made dark things in his mind start to move again.
Scooter whimpered. “Uh-uh, don’t you cry.” Sarge’s voice was soothing, his fingers gentle as they stroked the air. “I’m not leavin’ you.”
There was a movement beneath him, and suddenly he was looking down at a little girl’s face, washed with violet light, her auburn hair full of dust. She had poked her head out from the small crawlspace underneath the bandstand, and now watched him with eyes full of puzzlement.
“Howdy,” Sarge said. He recognized the child. “You’re Mr. Hammond’s daughter. Stevie.”
She said nothing.
“You know me, don’t you? Sarge Dennison? Your mama brought you to school one afternoon. Remember?”
“No,” Daufin said tentatively, ready to draw herself back into the protection of the shell she’d found.
“Well, I surely do. Guess it was last year, though. How old are you now?”
Daufin pondered. “Old,” she said.
She’s got a funny voice, he thought. Kinda raspy, or whispery, or somethin’. Sounds like she could use a cough drop. “What’re you doin’ under there?” Again, no answer. “Why don’t you come on up and say hello to Scooter? I ’member he liked you.”
She hesitated. This creature didn’t seem threatening, and there was a pleasant…what was it termed? A pleasant smile on his cliff of features. Wasn’t that a symbol of nonaggression? And she was curious as well; she’d seen him approach, heard him sit on the surface above her head. He’d been solitary; why was it, then, that he was communicating with an entity he kept referring to as Scooter?
Daufin crawled out. Sarge saw that her clothes were covered with dust, her hands and arms dirty, her sneaker laces untied and dragging. “Your mama’s gonna tan your hide!” he told her. “You’re a walkin’ dustball!”
“I thought I was a daugh-ter,” Daufin said, newly puzzled.
“Well…yeah, you are. I just meant…aw, forget it.” He touched the whitewashed plank at his side. “Take a seat.”
Daufin didn’t fully u
nderstand what he meant, since she saw no chair, bench, or stool for the purpose of resting the rump of the human body, so she simply decided he was inviting her to imitate his position. She started to sit down.
“Hold it! Don’t sit on Scooter!”
“Scoot-er?” she inquired.
“Sure! He’s right here! Scooter, move your butt and give the little girl room. You ’member her, don’t you? Stevie Hammond?”
Daufin tracked Sarge’s line of sight, saw he was talking to what she perceived as empty space.
“There y’go,” Sarge said. “He’s moved now.”
“I pre-fer to…” What was the term? “To take the up-right po-si-tion.”
“Huh?” Sarge frowned. “What kinda talk is that?”
“Web-ster,” came the reply.
Sarge laughed, scratched his head. His fingers made a grainy noise in the stubble of his hair. “You’re a card, Stevie!” She watched the fingers move across his skull, then she plucked up a bit of her own hair and examined the difference. Whatever these life forms called human beings were composed of, they certainly had very few common characteristics. “So why are you hidin’ under the bandstand?” Sarge asked, his right hand rubbing Scooter’s muzzle; Daufin’s eyes followed the wavelike movements. He took her silence as sullen. “Oh. Did’ja run away from home?”
No reply.
He went on. “Ain’t much to run to when you run away from home around here, is there? Bet your folks are kinda worried about you, huh? ’Specially with that big booger sittin’ over there?”
Daufin gave the towering object a quick, cold glance, and a shudder passed through her host body. “Is that what you call it?” she asked. “A big…” This term was not in Webster language. “Boo-ger?”
“Sure is, ain’t it?” He grunted, shook his head. “Never seen the like. Scooter ain’t either. You could just about put the whole town inside that thing and still have room left over, I’ll bet.”
“Why would you?” she asked him.
“Why would I what?”
She was patient, sensing that she was dealing with a life form with minimal capabilities. “Why would you want to put the whole town in-side that big boo-ger?”
“I didn’t mean really. I just meant…y’know, for instance.” He regarded the skygrid. “I saw a plane hit up there and blow—boom!—just like that and gone. Sittin’ on my porch, I saw it happen. Talkin’ to the reverend a little while ago. The reverend says it’s like a glass bowl turned upside down over Inferno. Says nothin’ can get in, and nothin’ can get out. Says it’s somethin’ from…” He motioned with a wave of his hand toward the night. “Out there, a long ways off.” His hand reached back to touch Scooter. “But me and Scooter’ll make out all right. Yessir. We’ve been together a long time. We’ll make out all right.”
De-lu-sion, she thought. A persistent belief in something false (opposite of true) typical of some mental (of or relating to the mind) disorders. “What is Scoot-er?” she asked.
He looked up at her, as if startled by the question. His mouth opened; for a few seconds his face seemed to sag on the bones, and his eyes glazed over. He stayed that way as she waited for an answer. Finally: “My friend,” he said. “My best friend.”
There was a growl, a noise of a kind Daufin had never experienced before. It seemed to gain volume, a harsh rolling and tumbling of tones that she could feel at her very center.
“You must be hungry.” Sarge’s eyes had cleared. He was smiling again. “Your stomach’s talkin’.”
“My…sto-mach?” This was a new and astounding revelation. “What mes-sage does it send?”
“You need food, that’s what! You sure talk funny! Don’t she, Scooter?” He stood up. “Better get on home now. Your folks’ll be huntin’ you.”
“Home,” Daufin repeated. That concept was clear. “My home is…” She searched the sky. The grid and the smoke clouds blocked off her reference points, and she could not see the star corridor. “Out there, a long way off.” She mimicked his gesture, because it seemed an appropriate way to demonstrate great distance.
“Aw, you’re joshin’ me now!” he chided her. “Your house is just up the street. Come on, I’ll walk you home.”
His intention was to escort her back to the box where Stevie, Jessie, Tom, and Ray dwelled, she realized. There was no reason to hide anymore; there was no exiting this planet. The next move was not hers. She stood up on stalks that still felt gangly and precarious, and began to follow this creature across a fantasy landscape. Nothing in her deepest dreams had prepared her for the sights on this planet: rows of insanely built boxes brooding on either side of a flat, brutally hard surface; towering, ugly-hued growths studded with fearsome-looking daggers; the people’s means of conveyance smaller boxes that jarred along the hard surfaces with sickening gravitational pressures and made noises like the destruction of worlds. She knew the terms—houses, cactus, automobiles—from that nightmarish collection called Britannica, but absorbing the written descriptions and flat images was far less disturbing than the realities. As they walked along and Daufin struggled with gravity, she heard the Sarge Dennison creature talking: “Come on, Scooter! Don’t run off and get all dirty, now! No, I ain’t gonna throw you a stick!” She wondered if there was a dimension here of which she was unaware—another world, hidden beyond the one she saw. Oh, there was much here to study and contemplate, but there was no time.
Her head swiveled back over her shoulder. The pain of unyielding structures stopped her head from a full rotation. Bones, she knew they were termed. The bones of her host body’s arms and legs still throbbed from her contortions. She understood that bones were the framework of these creatures, and she recognized them as marvels of engineering to withstand this gravity and absorb the stunning punishment that came with “walking.” These creatures, she mused, must have a deep kinship with pain, because it was ever-present. Surely they were a hardy species, to endure such tortures as “automobiles” and “streets” and “sneakers.”
She stared for a moment at the big booger and the violet grid, and if Sarge Dennison had seen the angle of her neck, he would’ve thought, correctly, that it was on the verge of snapping. The trap is set, she thought in her language of chimes. Already there had been hurting. Soon the trap would spring, and here in this lifepod called In-fer-no there would be extinction. Much extinction.
In her chest there was a crushed sensation, more painful than even the gravity. These human beings were primitive and innocent, and they did not know what was ahead.
Daufin’s steps faltered. It will happen because of me, she thought. Because I came here, to this small planet on the edge of the star corridor—a young civilization, still a distance away from the technology to take them into deep space where a million worlds and cultures yearned for freedom.
She’d hoped to learn their language, stay long enough to tell them about herself and why she was racing along the star corridor, and leave long before this; it had never occurred to her that they wouldn’t have interstellar vehicles, since most of the civilizations she was familiar with did. The trap is about to spring, she thought—but I must not throw myself into it. Not yet, not until there is no more chance. She had promised this daughter would be safe, and she kept her promises.
Her head swiveled away from the skygrid and the black pyramid, but they remained as ugly as open wounds behind her eyes.
They reached the Hammond house. Sarge knocked at the door, waited, knocked again when there was no response. “Nobody to home,” he said. “Think they’re out lookin’ for you?”
“I am here,” she answered, not fully understanding. This Sarge creature was a disrupter of language.
“I know you’re here, and Scooter knows you’re here, but…little lady, you sure know how to throw a curveball, don’t you?”
“Curve-ball?”
“Yeah. Y’know. Fastball, curveball, spitball—baseball.”
“Ah.” A smile of recognition skittered across her mouth.
She remembered the spectacle on the teeah-veeah. “Safe!”
“Right.” Sarge tried the doorknob, and the door opened. “Looky here! They must’ve left in a mighty big hurry!” He poked his head in. “Hey, it’s Sarge Dennison! Anybody to home?” He didn’t figure there was going to be a reply, and there was none. He closed the door and looked up and down the street. Candles flickered in a few windows. There was no telling where the Hammonds might be, with all the confusion of the last hour. “You want to go lookin’ for your folks?” he asked her. “Maybe we can track ’em do—”
His voice was drowned out by the rotors of the helicopter as it flashed past overhead, going west, sixty or seventy feet off the ground. The noise shot Daufin off her feet and propelled her forward. She clamped both hands to one of Sarge’s and stood close, her body shivering.
Child’s scared to death, Sarge thought. Skin’s cold too, and… Lord, she’s got a strong grip for a kid! He could feel his fingers prickling with a needles-and-pins sensation, as if his hand was snared by a low-voltage electric cable. The feeling wasn’t unpleasant, just strange. He saw Scooter running around in circles, also spooked by the ’copter’s passage. “Ain’t nothin’ to be scared of. Just a machine,” he said. “Your folks oughta be home pretty soon.”
Daufin hung on to his hand. The electric tingling was moving up Sarge’s forearm. He heard her stomach growl again, and he asked, “You had any dinner?” She was still too skittish to speak. “I don’t live too far from here. Just up Brazos Street a ways. Got some pork ’n beans and some ’tater chips.” The tingling had advanced to his elbow. She wouldn’t let go. “You want to have a bowl of pork ’n beans? Then I’ll bring you back here and we’ll wait for your folks?” He couldn’t tell if that was okay by her or not, but he took the first step and she did too. “Anybody ever tell you you walk funny?” he asked.
They continued toward Brazos, Daufin’s hands latched to Sarge’s. The steady pulse of energy she emitted continued through Sarge Dennison’s nerves, into his shoulder and neck, along his spine, and up into his cerebral cortex. He had a mild headache; the steel plate’s playin’ its tune again, he thought.