“Jessie. Tom. Ray. You. Everyone.”
“I see,” he said, though he did not. “And who’ll do this hurting?”
“The one who’s come here, searching for me.” Her eyes were steady. Jennings thought something about them looked very old, as if a small ancient woman was sitting there wearing a little girl’s skin. “Stinger,” she told him, the word falling from her mouth like something hideously nasty.
“You mean that thing out there? Is that its name?”
“An approx-i-ma-tion,” she said, struggling with the stubborn fleshy slab inside her mouth. “Stinger has many names on many worlds.”
The reverend thought about that for a moment, and if anybody had ever told him he’d be talking to an alien and being told firsthand that there was life on “many worlds” he would have either decked the fool with a good right cross or called for the butterfly wagon. “I’d like to take you to Colonel Rhodes. Would that be all right?”
“He can’t help me.”
“Maybe he can. He wants to, like we all do.” She seemed to be thinking it over. “Come on, let me take you to—”
“That’s her!” someone shouted, startling the trays of grape juice and cracker crumbs out of the reverend’s hands. Mayor Brett was on his feet, standing halfway up the aisle, his wife right behind him and shoving him into action. Brett’s finger pointed at Daufin. “That’s her, everybody!” he yelled. “That’s the thing from outer space!”
The couple in front of Daufin recoiled. One of the little boys jumped over the pew to get away, but the one who’d been watching her just grinned. Other people were standing up for a good look, and nobody was praying anymore.
Jennings rose to his feet. “Hold on now, John. Don’t make a fuss.”
“Fuss, my ass! That’s her! That’s the monster!” He took a backward step, collided with Doris; his mouth was a shocked O. “My God! In church!”
“We don’t want to get all riled up,” Jennings said, making an effort to keep his voice soothing. “Everybody just take it easy.”
“It’s because of her we’re in this fix!” Brett howled. His wife’s pinched face nodded agreement. “Colonel Rhodes said that thing got inside Stevie Hammond, and there she sits! God only knows what kinda powers she’s got!”
Daufin looked from face to face and saw terror in them. She stood up, and the woman in front of her snatched her grinning little boy and backed away. “Get her out of here!” the mayor went on. “She don’t have no right to be in the Lord’s house!”
“Shut up, John!” Jennings demanded. People were already heading to the door, getting out as fast as they could. “I’m about to take her over to Colonel Rhodes. Now why don’t you just sit down and put a lid on—”
The floor shook. Daufin saw the light sticks waver. One of the metallic holders toppled, and burning light sticks rolled across the crimson carpet.
“What was that?” Don Ringwald yelled, his owlish eyes huge behind his wire-rimmed spectacles.
There was a crackling noise. Concrete breaking, Jennings thought. He felt the floor shudder beneath the soles of his shoes. Annie Gibson screamed, and she and her husband Perry ran for the door with their two boys in tow. Across the aisle, old Mrs. Everett was jabbering and lifting both hands toward the cross. Jennings looked at Daufin, saw the fear slide into her eyes again, and then fall away, replaced by a blast-furnace glare of anger beyond any rage he’d ever witnessed. Daufin’s fingers gripped the pew in front of her, and he heard her say, “It’s Stinger.”
The floor bulged along the aisle like a blister about to pop open. Brett staggered back, and his elbow clipped Doris solidly in the jaw and knocked her sprawling to the floor. She didn’t get up. Someone screamed on the other side of the sanctuary. Stones were grinding together, timbers squealed, and the pews rolled as if on stormy waves. Jennings had the sense of something massive under the sanctuary’s floor, something surfacing and about to burst through. Cracks shot up the walls, and the figure of Jesus on the cross broke loose and crashed down upon the altar in a flurry of rock dust.
A section of the church on the left collapsed, the pews splitting apart. Dust whirled through the last of the candlelight, and Daufin shouted, “Get out! Get out!” as people surged toward the doorway, trailing screams. Jennings saw the carpet rip apart, and a jagged fissure opened along the aisle. The floor heaved, shuddered, began to collapse inward as dust billowed up from the earth. Ida Slattery almost knocked Jennings off his feet as she barreled past him, shrieking. He saw Doris Brett fall through the floor, and the mayor was climbing over the twisting pews like a monkey to get to the doorway.
Gil Lockridge fell through, and his wife Mavis a second afterward as the floor opened under her feet. The Ringwalds’ oldest boy pitched through, and hung screaming to its side as Don reached down for him. “Praise be to Jeeeesus!” Mrs. Everett was shouting insanely.
Pews were splitting with gunshot cracks as the floor pitched wildly, fissures snaking up the walls. Overhead, the wooden rafters began breaking and plummeting down, and the stained-glass windows shattered as the walls shook on their foundations.
Some of the candles had set fire to the carpet up near the altar, and the nibbling flames threw grotesque shadows as people fought to get out the door or climb through the windows. Jennings scooped Daufin up and held her, as he would any child, and he could feel her heart pounding at furious speed. Mrs. Everett fell as the floor collapsed beneath her; she hung to the splintered edge of a pew, her feet dangling over darkness, and Jennings grasped her arm to haul her up.
But before he could, Mrs. Everett went down with such force that his own arm was almost wrenched from its socket. He heard her scream turn into strangling, and he thought, Something pulled her down.
“No! No!” Daufin was shouting, twisting to get out of the human’s grip. Her insides were aflame with rage and terror, and she knew that what was happening in this place was because of her. The screams pierced her with agony. “Stop it!” she cried out, but she knew the thing beneath the floor would not hear her, and it knew no mercy.
Jennings turned, started for the door.
He took two strides—and then the floor broke open in front of him.
He fell, both arms scrabbling for a grip as Daufin held around his neck. He caught the broken edge of a pew, splinters driving into his palms. His legs searched for a foothold, but there was nothing there. A rafter slammed down so close he felt its breeze on his face. He sensed more than felt something moving sinuously underneath him—something huge. And then he did feel it—a cold, gluey wetness around his feet, closing over his ankles. In another second he was going to be jerked down as Mrs. Everett had been; his shoulder muscles popped as he heaved himself and Daufin up, and the suction on his ankles threatened to tear him apart at the waist. He kicked frantically, got one leg loose and then the other, and he latched his knees on the pitching floor. Then he was up again and running, and as the roof began to sag he cleared the doorway, tripped over a crawling body, and pitched onto the sandy lawn. His right side took most of the impact; he let go of Daufin and rolled away to keep from crushing her. He lay on his back, stunned and gasping, as the church’s walls were riddled with cracks and sections of the roof crashed inward. Dust plumed up through the holes like dying breath. The church’s steeple fell in, leaving a broken rim of stones. The walls trembled once more, wooden beams shrieked like wounded angels, and finally the noise of destruction echoed away and faded.
Slowly the reverend sat up. His eyes were itchy with grit and his lungs strained air from the whirling dust. He looked to his side, saw Daufin sitting up with her legs splayed beneath her like those of a boneless doll, her body jerking as if her nerves had gone haywire.
She knew how close the hunter had been. Maybe it had sensed the gathering of creatures in that abode and had struck as a demonstration of its strength. She didn’t think it had known she was there, but it had been so very close. And too close for some of the humans; she looked around, quickly cou
nting figures through the dust. She made out thirty-nine of them. Stinger had taken seven. The knot of muscle at her center would not cease its hammering, and her face felt gorged with pressure. Seven life forms gone, because she had crashed on a small world where there was no exit. The trap had closed, and all running was useless…
“You did this!” Someone’s hand closed around her shoulder and yanked her to her feet. There was rage in the voice, and rage in the touch. Her legs were still wobbly, and the human hand shook her with maddened fury. “You did this, you little…alien bitch!”
“John!” Jennings said. “Let her go!”
Brett shook her again, harder. The little girl felt as if she were made of rubber, and her lack of substance further infuriated him. “You damned thing!” he shrieked. “Why don’t you go back where you came from!”
“Stop it!” The reverend started to rise, but a pain shot from his shoulder down his back. He stared numbly at his feet; his shoes were gone, and gray slime clung to his argyle socks.
“You don’t belong here!” Brett shouted, and shoved her roughly away. She stumbled backward, all balance lost, and gravity took her to the ground. “Oh God…oh Jesus,” the mayor moaned, his face yellow with dust. He looked around, saw that Don and Jill Ringwald and their two sons had made it out, as well as Ida Slattery, Stan and Carmen Frazier, Joe Pierce, the Fancher family, and Lee and Wanda Clemmons among the others. “Doris…where’s my wife?” Fresh panic hit him. “Doris! Hon, where are you?”
There was no reply.
Daufin stood up. Her center felt bruised, and the foul taste of pork ’n beans soured her mouth. The anguished human being turned, started staggering back toward the ruined abode of ritual. Daufin said, “Stop him!” in a voice that reverberated with power and made Al Fancher clasp his hand on Brett’s arm.
“She’s gone, John.” Jennings tried to stand again, still could not; his feet were freezing cold, and seemed to have been shot full of novocaine up to his ankles. “I saw her go down.”
“No, you didn’t!” Brett pulled free. “She’s all right! I’ll find her!”
“Stinger took her,” Daufin said, and Brett flinched as if he’d been struck. She realized the human had lost a loved one, and again pain speared her. “I’m sorry.” She lifted a hand toward him.
Brett reached down and picked up a stone. “You did it! You killed my Doris!” He took a step forward, and Daufin saw his intention. “Somebody oughta kill you!” he seethed. “I don’t care if you’re hidin’ in a little girl’s skin! By Jesus, I’ll kill you myself!” He flung the stone, but Daufin was faster by far. She dodged aside, and the stone sailed past her and hit the pavement.
“Please,” she said, offering her palms as she retreated to the street. “Please don’t…”
His hand closed on another rock. “No!” Jennings shouted, but Brett threw it. This time the rock clipped Daufin’s shoulder, and the pain made her eyes flood with tears. She couldn’t see, couldn’t understand what was happening, and Brett hollered, “Damn you to hell!” and advanced on her.
She almost stumbled over her legs, righted herself before she fell; then she propelled herself away from the human being in the complex motion of muscles and bones called running. Pain jarred through her with every stride, but she kept going, cocooned in agony.
“Wait!” Jennings called, but Daufin was gone into the haze of smoke and dust.
Brett took a few paces after her, but he was all used up and his legs gave out on him. “Damn you!” he shouted after her. He stood with his fists clenched at his sides, and then he turned back toward what was left of the church and called for Doris in a voice racked with sobbing.
Don Ringwald and Joe Pierce helped Jennings up. His feet felt like useless knobs of flesh and bone, as if whatever had grasped him had leeched all the blood out and destroyed the nerves. He had to lean heavily on the two men to keep from going down again.
“That does it for the church,” Don said. “Where do we go now?”
Jennings shook his head. Whatever had broken through the church floor would have no trouble coming up through any house in Inferno—even through the streets themselves. He felt a tingling in his feet; the nerves were coming back to life. He caught lights through the haze and realized where they were coming from. “Up there,” he said, and motioned toward the apartment building at the end of Travis Street. That place, with its armored first-floor windows and its foundation of bedrock, would be a tougher nut for Stinger to crack. He hoped.
Other people were coming from the houses nearby, alerted by the noise and screams. They followed as the two men helped Jennings along the street, and the rest of the congregation moved toward the only building that still showed electric lights.
After a few minutes, Mayor Brett wiped his nose on his sleeve, turned away from the ruins, and walked after them.
31
Below
“FLASHLIGHT,” THE COLONEL SAID, and Vance gave it to him.
Rhodes bent down, his knees on the basement’s cracked concrete floor, and aimed the light into the hole. There was a drop of about ten feet, and the red dirt glistened as if a huge snail had tracked over it.
“He was sittin’ in a rockin’ chair up there,” Vance repeated for the third time, motioning toward the hole in the den floor above their heads. “It, I mean. Whatever it was—’cause it sure as hell wasn’t Dodge.” He was whispering; his gut churned, and the skin had drawn tight at the back of his neck. But the flashlight beam had shown them that nothing was hiding in the Creech basement except a little green lizard over by the washing machine. “It knew English,” Vance said. “Spoke it like a Texan. How the hell could it know the way we talk?”
Rhodes shone the light around and saw a broken pipe, slick with some kind of gelatinous excretion. A bittersweet chemical smell—not unlike the odor of peaches rotting under a high summer sun—drifted up from the hole to sting his nostrils. “I’ve got two theories, if you want to hear them,” he said.
“Shoot.”
“One, that the creature monitored earth’s satellites and figured out our language. But that wouldn’t account for it speaking with a Texas accent. Two, that it somehow got into the man’s language center.”
“Huh?”
“It might’ve tapped the brain’s language center,” Rhodes explained. “Where an individual’s dictionary is stored. That way it would pick up the accent too.”
“Jesus! You mean…it like got into Dodge’s brain? Like a worm or somethin’?” Vance’s hand tightened around the loaded shotgun at his side. He and Rhodes had gone by the office to pick up the flashlight, and the sheriff also wore a shoulder holster with a fully loaded Snubnose .38 in it. Lying on the concrete within easy reach of Rhodes’s right hand was one of the repeating rifles from the sheriff’s gun cabinet.
“Maybe. I don’t know what the process might be, but it could’ve read the language center like a computer reading a program.” He angled the light in another direction, saw more gleaming red dirt and darkness beyond. “Whatever this thing is, it’s highly intelligent and it works fast. And one other thing I’m fairly sure of: it’s not the same kind of creature as Daufin.”
“How do you figure that?” He jumped; that damned green lizard was scurrying around again.
“Daufin had to learn our language from scratch, starting with the alphabet,” Rhodes said. “The other creature—the one Daufin calls Stinger—uses a much more aggressive process.” Understatement of the year, he thought. “I believe it killed Dodge Creech—or stored him somewhere—and what you saw was its simulation of him, just like that flying bastard simulated our helicopter.”
“Simulated? Is that like a mutant or somethin’?”
“Like a…a replicant,” Rhodes explained. “An android, for want of a better word, because I think part of that weird chopper was alive. Probably the thing you saw was alive too—but just as much of a machine as a living creature. Like I say, I don’t know how it works, but I think one thing’s particu
larly interesting: if Stinger did create a replicant of Dodge Creech, it screwed up on the teeth and fingernails.”
“Oh. Yeah. Right,” Vance agreed, recalling that he’d told Rhodes about those metallic needles and the blue saw-edged nails.
“There are probably other differences too, internally. Remember, to it we’re the aliens. If somebody showed you a blueprint of a creature you’d never seen before, and gave you the raw materials to make it with, I doubt if the final result would look much like the real thing.”
“Maybe so,” Vance said, “but it seems to me the sonofabitch has just figured out a better way to kill.”
“Yeah, that too.” One more revolution of the light’s beam in the hole, and he knew what had to be done. “I’ve got to go down in there.”
“Like hell! Mister, your head must be screwed on with rusty bolts!”
“I won’t argue that point.” He shone the light around the basement and stopped it at a coil of garden hose hanging from a wall hook. “That’ll have to do for rope.” His light found a water pipe on the wall nearby. “Help me secure it around there.”
They got the hose tied and knotted and Rhodes threw its free end into the hole. He pulled at it a few times to make sure it would bear his weight, and then he balanced on the hole’s edge for a minute until his heartbeat calmed down. He tossed Vance the flashlight. “Drop that and the rifle to me when I get to the bottom.” He felt a flagging of his courage. He still had Taggart’s blood up his nose and brown streaks of gore and grasshopper pee all over him.
“I wouldn’t do it,” Vance advised soberly. “Ain’t worth gettin’ yourself killed.”
Rhodes grunted. He’d just as soon mark this off as a sorry misadventure, but Vance sure as hell wasn’t going to do it; there was no one else but him, and that was how things were. His testicles crawled, and he had to go before all his courage ebbed away. “Here goes,” he said, and swung his weight out over the hole. The pipe creaked ominously but remained bolted to the wall. Rhodes climbed down into the darkness, and a few seconds later his shoes squished as they touched bottom. “Okay.” His voice echoed back to him, doubled in volume. “Drop the light.”