There was no use in thinking these thoughts. Nothing good came out of them, and they made Curt’s head hurt. He looked into the amber bottle, at the liquid that lay within, and he smiled as if seeing an old friend. But there was a sadness in his smile, because full bottles always ran empty.
“Maybe they’ve got caves,” Burl Keene was saying. “Under Mars. Maybe they just went into their caves when the pictures got took.”
Curt was about to tell him to stop shoveling the horseshit when he heard the bottles clink together on the shelves behind the bar.
It was not a loud sound, and neither Jack nor Burl stopped their jabbering. But Curt had heard it clearly enough, and in another few seconds he heard them clink again. He set his own bottle on the bar and saw a tremor on the whiskey’s surface. “Jack?” he said. Blair paid no attention. “Hey, Jack!” Curt said, louder.
Jack looked at him, fed up with Curt Lockett. “What is it?”
“I think we’re havin’ a—”
The Bob Wire Club’s floor suddenly buckled upward, timbers squealing as they snapped. The two pool tables jumped a foot in the air, and billiard balls were flung out of their racks. Bottles and glasses crashed down behind the bar. Jack was knocked off his feet, and Curt’s barstool went over. He landed on his back on the floor, and under him he could feel the boards pitching and heaving like a bronco’s shoulder blades.
The floor’s motion eased, then stopped. Curt sat up, stunned, and in the lamplight saw a horrible thing: the last of the Kentucky Gent spilling from the overturned bottle.
Harlan and Pete were on the floor too, and Burl was coughing up peanuts. Harlan got to his knees and shouted, “What hit us?”
There was a bang like a sledgehammer on wood. Curt heard the squall of nails popping loose. “Over there!” He pointed, and all of them saw it: about ten feet away, a board was being knocked upward from the floor. The second blow sent it flying up to hit the ceiling, and Curt caught sight of a slim human hand and arm reaching through the cavity. Another timber was knocked loose, then the fingers of that hand gripped the edge of a third board and wrenched it down. Now there was a gap large enough for a person to crawl through, and about three seconds later a figure began to emerge from the floor.
“Holy Jesus and Mary,” Jack whispered, standing up behind the bar with sawdust in his beard.
The figure got its head and shoulders through, then worked its hips free. A long pair of bare legs pulled out, and the figure rose to its feet.
It was a slender and pretty blond girl, maybe sixteen years old, wearing nothing but a lacy bra and a pair of pink panties with “Friday” stitched across the front. She stretched to her full height, her ribs showing under her pale skin and her hair shining wetly in the lamplight. Her face was as calm as if she came up through barroom floors every night of her life, and her gaze went from one man to the next with cold attention.
“I’m dead,” Burl gasped. “I’ve gotta be dead.”
Curt tried to stand up, but his legs weren’t ready. He knew who she was: her name was Laurie Rainey, and she worked afternoons at the Paperback Kastle near the bakery and came in sometimes for grape jelly doughnuts. She was a pretty thing, and he liked to watch her chew. He tried to stand again, and this time he made it all the way up.
She spoke. “Ya’ll are gonna tell me about the little girl,” she said, in a thick whangy Texas accent with a rattling metallic undertone. Her skin gleamed, as if she were coated with grease. “Ya’ll are gonna tell me right now.”
None of the men spoke, and no one moved. Laurie Rainey looked around, her head slowly racheting as if her neck and spine were connected by gear wheels.
“The little girl,” Jack repeated dumbly. “What little girl?”
“The one who’s the guardian.” Her eyes found him, and Jack had the sensation of peering into a snakepit. There were things slithering around in there that he would not care to know. “Ya’ll are gonna tell me, or I’m done bein’ nice.”
“Laurie…” Curt’s mind stuttered like a blown-out engine. “What were you doin’ under the floor?”
“Laurie.” The girl’s head notched toward him. “Is that the guardian’s name?”
“No. It’s your name. Christ, don’t you know your own name?”
The girl didn’t reply. She blinked slowly, processing the information, and her mouth tightened into an angry line. “What we have here,” she said, “is a failure to communicate.” She turned to her left, walked about three strides to the nearest pool table, and placed her hands under its edge. With a quick, blurred motion, she flipped her hands forward and the pool table upended as if it had the weight of a corn husk. It came off the floor and crashed through the Bob Wire Club’s front window into the parking lot, throwing glass all over Curt’s Buick and Pete Griffin’s pickup truck.
She strode purposefully to the second pool table, balled up her right fist, and smashed it through the green felt covering. Then she picked up one end of the table and flipped it across the barroom into a couple of pinball machines. All the men could do was gawk, openmouthed, and Jack Blair almost fainted because he knew it took three men to lift those pool tables.
The girl’s head racheted, surveying the destruction. There was no damage to her hand, and she wasn’t even breathing hard. She turned toward the men. “Now we’ll have us a nice little talk,” she said.
Burl Keene yelped like a whipped dog and scrambled for the door, but he was way too slow. The girl leapt forward and was on him even as he reached for the knob. She caught his wrist and twisted it sharply. Bones popped, and their jagged edges ripped through the meat at Burl’s elbow. He screamed, still thrashing to get out the door, and she wrenched at his broken arm and chopped a blow at his face with the edge of her free hand. Burl’s nose exploded, and his teeth went down his throat. He fell to his knees, blood streaming down his mangled face.
Jack reached beside the cash register and pulled his shotgun from its socket. The girl was turning toward him as he cocked the gun and lifted it. He didn’t know what kind of monster she was, but he didn’t plan on sharing Burl’s fate. He squeezed the trigger.
The shotgun boomed and bucked. A fist-sized hole appeared in the girl’s belly, just above the panty line, and bits of flesh and gray tissue exploded from her back. She was knocked off her feet, her body slamming against the wall. She went down, trailing gray slime.
“God A’mighty!” Curt shouted in the silence after the blast. “You done killed her!”
Hal McCutchins picked up a cue stick and prodded the twitching body. Something writhed in the belly wound like a mass of knotted-up worms. “Lord,” he said in a choked voice. “You blew the hell out of—”
She sat up.
Before Hal could jump back, the girl grabbed the cue stick and pulled it from his hands so fast his palms were scorched. She hit him across the knees with the heavy end of it, and as his kneecaps shattered Hal fell on his face.
She stood up, her belly oozing and a malignant grin stretching her mouth. Red lamplight glinted off a mouthful of needles. “Ya’ll want to play rough?” the rattling voice asked. “Okey-dokey.”
She slammed the stick’s blunt end down on Hal McCutchins’s head. The stick snapped in two, and Hal’s skull broke open like a blister. His legs kicked in a dance of death, his brains exposed to the light.
“Shoot it!” Curt screamed, but Jack’s finger was already pulling the trigger again. The creature was hit in the side, spun around, and flung backward. A gray mist hung in the air, and Curt screeched because there was sticky wet matter on his shirt and arms. The creature fell over a table but righted herself and did not go to the floor. In the wound her ribs looked to be fashioned from blue-tinged metal, but a thorny coil of red intestines protruded from the hole. She advanced toward the bar with the splintered piece of cue stick in her hand.
Jack fumbled to shove another shell into the breech. Curt scrabbled on his hands and knees for cover under a table, and Harlan and Pete had mashed themselves
against a wall like bugs trapped to a screen.
Jack cocked the shotgun and lifted it to fire. As he did, the creature hurled the cue stick like a javelin. Its sharp end penetrated Jack’s throat and emerged from the back of his neck in a bloody spray, and Jack’s finger twitched on the trigger. The buckshot tore the right side of the monster’s face off, peeled away gray tissue and red muscle right down to the blue metallic cheek and jawbone. Her eye on that side rolled back to show the white. Jack clawed at his throat, strangling, and fell behind the bar.
“Get away! Get away!” Pete was shouting hysterically, but Harlan picked up a chair and flung it at the creature. The thing shrugged off the object and charged at him, gripping both hands around his neck and picking him up off the floor. She twisted his head as easily as a chicken’s, and Harlan’s face turned blue just before his neck snapped.
Pete fell to his knees, his hands upraised for mercy. “Please…oh God, don’t kill me!” he begged. “Please don’t kill me!”
She tossed Harlan Nugent aside like an old sack and gazed down into Pete’s eyes. She smiled, fluid running from the wound in her face, and then she gripped Pete’s wrists, put her foot against his chest, and yanked.
Both arms ripped out of their sockets. The jittering torso collapsed, Pete’s mouth still working but only a whisper of shock coming out.
Under the table, Curt tasted blood. He’d bitten his tongue to keep from screaming, and now he felt a darkness pulling at his mind like a deep, beckoning current. He watched as the creature held Pete Griffin’s disembodied arms before her, as if studying the anatomy. Pete’s fingers still clenched and relaxed, and blood pattered to the boards like a rainstorm.
I’m next, Curt thought. God help me, I’m next.
He had two choices: stay here or make a run for it. It wasn’t much of a choice. He thrust his hand into his pocket and pulled out his car keys. They jingled, and he saw the monster’s head rotate around on its neck at an impossible angle so that the face was where the back of the head ought to be. The single, inflamed eye found him.
Curt shot out from under the table and raced for the broken window. He heard two thumps as she dropped Pete’s arms, then the crash of a table going over. The thing was leaping after him. He jumped through the window like diving into a hoop, hit the ground on his hands and knees, and crawled madly toward the Buick. A hand caught the back of his shirt, and he knew she was right there with him.
He didn’t think. He just did. His left hand gripped sand, and he twisted around and flung it into Laurie Rainey’s savage, ruined face.
Her eye blinded, she tore the shirt off his back and swiped at him with her other hand. He ducked, saw the glint of little saw blades as her fingers flashed past his face. Curt kicked out at her, hit her in the breastbone, and pulled his leg back before she could grab it. Then he was up and running, and he reached his car and slid behind the wheel, his fingers jamming the key home.
The engine made that knocking noise like it did every time it didn’t want to start, only this time it sounded like a fist on a coffin’s lid. Curt roared, “Start, damn you!” and sank his foot to the floorboard. The tailpipe belched dark smoke, the engine’s muttering turned into a growl, and the Buick jerked in reverse. But not fast enough: Curt saw the creature racing after him, coming like an Olympic sprinter across the Bob Wire Club’s lot. He battled the wheel as the tires hit Highway 67’s pavement, trying to get the car turned in the direction of Inferno. But the monster was almost to the car, and he forced the gearshift into first and shot forward to run her over. She jumped just before the Buick hit her, grabbing hold of the roof’s edge and scuttling up onto it on her belly.
He swerved the car, trying to throw her off. She held on, and Curt laid on the accelerator. He turned on the headlights; in the green glow of the dashboard the speedometer needle edged past forty. He realized he was going north instead of south but he was too scared to do anything but keep his foot on the pedal. At fifty the vibration of the bald tires all but jerked the wheel out of his hands, and at sixty the old engine was wheezing at the gaskets.
Something slammed down over his head and a blister of metal bloomed in the roof. Her fist, he thought. She was trying to beat through the roof. Another slam, and a second blister grew beside the first. Her hand crept into the car, fingers wrenching at the roof’s joints. Screws popped loose. There was a shriek of rusted metal; she was bending the roof back like the lid of a sardine can. A crack zigzagged across the windshield.
Screaming at its limits, the engine hit seventy miles an hour and rocketed Curt along Highway 67.
38
The Streets of Inferno
IN THE SEVEN MINUTES since Daufin had left Cody Lockett, she’d seen no other humans on the streets of Inferno. She had gone back to the house of Tom, Jessie, and Ray, and though the doorway was unlocked, the abode was empty of life. She tried the doors of two other abodes, found the door to the first sealed and the second house also empty. The murk was getting thicker, and Daufin found that human eyes had a radically limited field of vision. The brown haze made her host eyes sting and water, and she could see less than forty feet in all directions as she continued along Celeste Street in search of help.
Two lights were coming through the smoke. Daufin stopped, waiting for them to get closer. She could hear an engine: the crude, combustion-powered conveyance called a car. But the car slowed and turned to the right before it reached her, and she saw the red smears of its taillights drawing rapidly away. She ran after it, crossing the sandy plot of earth where she’d hidden under the protective shell and met the Sarge Dennison creature. Another set of headlights passed on Celeste Street, going east, but the vehicle was moving too fast for Daufin to catch and by that time she’d reached Cobre Road. She kept running in the direction of the first car she’d seen and in another moment she saw the red points of the taillights again, just up the street. The car wasn’t moving, but the engine still rumbled. She approached it, saw that the vehicle’s doors were open but no one was in sight. A little rectangle fixed to the back of the car had letters on it: CADE-I. It was parked in front of a structure with shattered light apertures—“windows,” she knew they were termed—and the doorway hung open as well. A square with writing above the doorway identified the structure as INFERNO HARDWARE.
“Place has been ripped off,” Rick said to Zarra as they stood at the rear of the store. He’d found a flashlight and batteries, and he shone its beam into the broken glass counter where the pistols had been locked up. Out of an assortment of eight guns on display, not one remained. “Somebody cleaned Mr. Luttrell out.” He pointed the light at the racks where six rifles had been; they were gone, hacked right out of their locks by an ax or machete. Boxes of ammunition had been stolen from the storage shelves, and only a few cartridges gleamed in the light.
“So much for findin’ a piece, man,” Zarra said. “Let’s get our butts across the bridge.”
“Hold on. Mr. Luttrell keeps a pistol in his office.” Rick started back, through a swinging door into the storeroom, and Zarra followed the light. The office was locked, but Rick bashed open the door with two kicks and went to the manager’s paper-cluttered desk. The drawers were locked too. He went out to the storeroom, found a box of screwdrivers, and returned to the job at hand. He and Zarra levered the drawers open with screwdrivers, and in the bottom drawer, under a pile of dog-eared Playboy magazines, was a loaded .38 pistol and an extra box of bullets. At the clinic Rick and Zarra had listened to Colonel Rhodes’s story about the two spaceships and the creatures called Daufin and Stinger. Rick could still feel the slick scales of that thing’s tail around his throat, and damned if he was going to go back to Bordertown without a gun. The Fang of Jesus paled before Smith & Wesson firepower.
“Let’s go, man!” Zarra urged nervously. “You got what you came for!”
“Right.” Rick left the office with Zarra right behind him. They went through the storeroom door again, and suddenly from the front of the store there
was a crash and clatter that almost made their hearts seize up. Zarra gave a little moan of terror, and Rick snapped the .38’s safety off and cocked it. He probed around with the light, following the beam with the gun barrel.
He couldn’t see anyone. Somebody in here after guns, just like us, he thought. He hoped. “Who’s there?” he said.
Something moved to his left. He swung the light in that direction, toward shelves where coils of rope and wire were kept. “I’ve got a gun!” he warned. “I’ll shoot your damned—” He stopped speaking when the light found her.
She was standing there holding a coil of rope between both hands. A bundle of copper wire had fallen off the shelf, upsetting a display of jars of nails. She was wearing just what Colonel Rhodes had said: a dusty Jetsons T-shirt and blue jeans, and her face was that of Mr. Hammond’s child. Except behind that face, according to Rhodes, was an alien called Daufin and this was the little girl the thing in Cade’s autoyard was looking for. “Don’t move.” His throat clogged up. His heart was beating so hard he could hear the blood roaring in his ears. “I’ve got a gun,” he repeated, and his gunhand trembled.
“Cody Lockett needs help,” Daufin said calmly, squinting into the harsh light. Her memory banks found the term gun and identified it as a primitive percussion-cap weapon. She could tell from the human’s voice that he was terrified, so she stood very still.
“It’s her,” Zarra whispered. His legs were about to fold up. “Oh Christ, it’s her!”
“What are you doing in here?” Rick asked, and kept his finger on the trigger.
“I saw your vehicle. I followed you,” Daufin explained. “Cody Lockett is in need of help. Will you come with me?”