“We’re glad to see you,” Tom said. He knelt down so his eyes would be on a level with Daufin’s. “Why’d you run away?”
“I went whack-o,” she said.
“Uh…we’ve been…like…teachin’ her Earth lingo,” Tank explained. “She’s been tellin’ us about her planet too. It sounds mighty gnarly, man!” For once, his grim, hatchet-nosed face had taken on a childlike shine of excitement.
“I guess so.” Tom watched his wife brushing their child’s hair with determined strokes, and he thought his heart might break. “Daufin, we just had a talk with something. I can’t say it was a man, and I can’t say it was a machine.”
Daufin knew. “Stinger.”
“Yes.” He looked up at Cody Lockett. “It took Mack Cade’s body and made him into a…” Again, words failed him. “Part man, part dog.”
“One of Cade’s Dobermans is growing out of his chest.” Jessie’s hand continued to guide the brush.
“Freakacreepy!” Nasty said. Her love of danger was stoked and burning. “Man, I’d like to see that!”
“You’re crazy as hell too!” Cody snapped. “It got the Cat Lady,” he said to Tom. “Mrs. Stellenberg. It made her into something with a tail full of spikes, and I shot the bitch full of holes but she just kept comin’.”
“All are Stinger,” Daufin said quietly, standing rigid while she endured whatever it was Jessie was doing. It seemed to be giving Jessie pleasure. “Stinger creates them, and they become Stinger.”
Tom didn’t quite follow that. “Like robots, is that right?”
“Living mechanisms. They think with Stinger’s brain, and they see with Stinger’s eyes. Stinger hears and speaks through them. And kills through them too.”
“Somethin’ mighty big’s been roaming around under the streets,” Cody said. “Is that one of Stinger’s machines too?”
“No,” Daufin said. “That is Stinger itself. Stinger captures and stores bodies for duplication. Signals—you would call them blueprints—pass from Stinger to machines on the ship and there the replicants are made.”
“So we know it got Dodge Creech, Cade, Mrs. Stellenberg, and whoever that was in the autoyard. Plus the thing that left its arm with Rhodes.” Tom stood up and laid the Winchester on the table. “Stinger’s probably taken a lot of others we don’t know about too.”
“There!” Jessie finished her battle with the last snarl and stepped back. She felt light-headed and drifty, and she’d caught a hint of the apple-scented shampoo she’d washed Stevie’s hair with last night. “Now you look pretty again!”
“Thank you,” Daufin said; it was obviously a compliment, and deserved a reaction, though why these people lavished such attention on strands of limp cellular matter was another mystery of the human tribe. Her gaze went to Tom. “You said you talked to Stinger. About me, of course.”
“Yes.”
“Stinger wants me and my lifepod, and an ultimatum was given.”
Tom nodded. “It said it wants you in one hour”—a glance at the racing hands of his watch—“and we’ve got about forty minutes left.”
“Or Stinger will continue the destruction,” Daufin said. “Yes. That’s Stinger’s way.”
“The sonofabitch wants to take her back to prison!” Cody spoke up. “And all she did was sing!”
“Sing? That’s not what Stinger said. He—it—told us about the chemical on your world,” Tom recounted. “The poison, I mean. Stinger said you…” It was crazy, looking at his little girl’s face and saying these things. “Said you were a wild animal.”
“I am,” she answered without hesitation. “To Stinger and the House of Fists, I deserve a cage and a frozen sleep.”
“The House of Fists? What’s that?”
“Stinger’s masters. A race that worships violence; their religion is the conquest of worlds, and their entrance into the afterlife is determined by the deaths of what they consider lower beings.” A faint, gritty smile surfaced. “Wild animals like me.”
“But if they’re trying to control this chemical, isn’t that for the good of—”
Daufin laughed: a mixture of a child’s laugh and the sound of coins thrown to the floor. “Oh yes!” she said. “Yes, they are trying to control the chemical!” The fires ignited in her eyes again. “But not for the good of their brother creatures, no matter what Stinger told you. They want the chemical for their weapons! They want to build deadlier fleets and more ways to kill!” The little body shook with fury. “The more of the chemical they steal from my planet, the closer my tribe comes to destruction! And the closer all worlds come to being destroyed, as well—including this one! Do you think Stinger will leave here and not tell the House of Fists about your planet?” She searched for words, stumbled over the tangle of human speech, grasped hold of a phrase the humans named Tank and Nasty had taught her: “Get real!”
The flesh of Daufin’s face had drawn tight, showing the sharp angles of the bones. Her eyes blazed with anger, and she began to pace back and forth in front of the window. “I never meant to come here. My ship lost power, and I had to put it down where I could. I know I’ve brought hurting to you, and to others here. For that I will carry a burden for the rest of my life.” She stopped suddenly, looking back and forth between Tom and Jessie. “Stinger will tell the House of Fists about you, and about this world. Stinger will say you are soft, defenseless life forms who were born to be caged, and they’ll come here. Oh yes, they’ll come here—and they might bring their weapons full of the ‘poison’ they’ve stolen from my planet! Do you know what that ‘poison’ is?”
Tom thought she was about to start spouting steam from her nostrils. “No,” he said warily.
“Of course you don’t! How could you?” She shook her head, exasperated. A fine sheen of sweat glistened on her cheeks. “I’ll do more than tell you; I’ll show you.”
“Show us?” Jessie said. “How?”
“Through the inner eye.” Daufin saw no comprehension on their faces; they were blank slates, waiting to be written on. She lifted both hands toward them. “If you want to know, I’ll take you there. I’ll show you my world, through the eye of my memory.”
The humans hesitated. Daufin didn’t blame them. She was offering a glimpse of the unknown, and what was home to her would be to them an alien realm. “Take my hands,” she urged, and her fingers strained for contact. “If you want to know, you have to see.”
Tom took the first step forward, and when it was done, the hardest part was over. He walked to Daufin and slid his hand into hers. The flesh was oven hot, and as her fingers gripped tight he could already feel the prickling of an electrical charge passing from her into him.
“Jessie?” Daufin asked.
She came to her daughter’s outstretched hand, and took it.
43
Waiting for the Spacemen
AT TWELVE MINUTES AFTER two, Tyler Lucas sat on the front porch of his house with a rifle beside him and waited for the spacemen to come.
The sky was covered with a hazy violet grid. After the power had gone out, he and Bess had driven into Inferno, had seen the black pyramid and gotten the lowdown from Sue Mullinax and Cecil at the Brandin’ Iron. “The spacemen have landed, sure’s shootin’!” Sue had said. “Cain’t nobody get in or out, and the phones are dead too! I swear to God, when that thing hit, it lifted this whole block and me off my feet too, so you know it must’ve packed a punch!”
Then she’d given that giggly laugh of hers—the laugh that had made her so popular when she was a slim-waisted Preston High School cheerleader—and bustled off to fix Tyler and Bess cold hamburgers.
“Ty? Here y’go.” Bess had come out and offered her husband a glass of iced tea. The tea had been made that morning, which was a good thing because the faucets wouldn’t pull up a drop of water. “That’s the last of the ice cubes.” They were small half-moons, and everything in the refrigerator was thawing out quick in this sullen heat.
“Thanks, hon.” He rubbed the col
d glass over his sweating face, sipped at the tea, and gave it back to her when she’d sat down on the edge of the porch next to him. She drank with a deep thirst. Off in the desert a chorus of coyotes howled, their voices jagged and nervous. Tyler watched the road.
They’d decided that when the spacemen came, they would die right here, defending their home. The air-force people had been wandering all over the place before the sun went down, scooping up little fragments of blue-green metal and putting them in weird bags that folded up like accordions. Where were the air-force men now?
Tyler and Bess had driven their pickup west along Cobre Road. A little less than half a mile had cranked off the odometer before they’d come to where the violet grid had entered the earth and blocked their way. Around the grid’s glowing prongs Cobre Road’s asphalt was still bubbling. Tyler had thrown a handful of sand into the grid, and little grains of molten glass had come back at them.
“Well,” Tyler drawled, laying the rifle across his knees, “I never thought there’d come a time when you couldn’t see the stars out here. I reckon progress has caught up with us, huh?”
She started to answer, but could not. She was a tough old bird, and she hadn’t cried for a long time. There were tears in her eyes now, and her throat had constricted. Tyler eased an arm around her. “Kind of a pretty light, though,” he said. “If you like purple.”
“I hate it,” she managed.
“Can’t say I cotton to it much, either.” His voice was soft, but he was mulling over some hard questions. He didn’t know how they would come, or when, but he didn’t mean to give up without one hell of a fight. He was going to drill as many as he could, and go down fighting like Davy Crockett at the Alamo. But the worst question gnawed at him: should he save a bullet for Bess, or not?
He was thinking about it, his gaze on the road, when he heard a woman scream.
He looked at Bess. They stared at each other for a second. The woman’s scream came again.
They both realized what it was at the same time. Not the scream of a woman, but the shrieking of Sweetpea, back in the barn.
“Get a flashlight! Hurry!” he told her, and as she ran inside he sprinted on his wiry legs off the porch and around the house. The barn was about thirty yards back, next to Bess’s cactus garden. He heard the frantic thump of Sweetpea’s hooves hitting the sides of his stall, and Tyler’s palms were wet around the rifle. Something was at the horse.
He threw back the crossbeam and hauled the doors open. Everything was as dark as sin in there. The big palomino was still screaming, about to bash the boards loose. Tyler shouted, “Whoa there, Sweetpea! Settle down, boy!” but the horse was going wild.
Tyler’s first thought was that a sidewinder or scorpion must’ve gotten into the stall—but suddenly there was a cracking noise and the barn’s floor shook under his boots.
Sweetpea grunted as if he had been kicked in the belly. There followed a thrashing, panicked sound coupled with Sweetpea’s high screams. Tyler looked over his shoulder, saw Bess running with a flashlight’s beam spearing ahead. She gave it to him, and he aimed it at the horse’s stall.
The palomino was sunk up to his flanks in the sandy earth, broken floorboards jutting up around him. Sweetpea’s eyes were red with terror, and foam snorted from his nostrils as he fought. His hind legs had disappeared into the hole, the front legs pawing at the air. Muscles rippled along his body as he tried to tear loose from whatever was pulling him through the barn floor.
Tyler gasped, the sense knocked out of him. The horse sank another two feet, and the barn echoed with Sweetpea’s cries.
“The rope!” Bess shouted, and reached for the lariat coiled near the door. There was a slipknot already on it, and she widened the noose, swung the rope twice around to play it out, and let fly for Sweetpea s head. Her aim was off by six inches, and she quickly reeled it back to try again as the horse was jerked down to his shoulders in a spray of sand.
On the next attempt, the rope slipped over Sweetpea’s skull and tightened around the base of the neck. The rope pulled taut between them, started smoking a raw groove through Bess’s hands. Tyler dropped the rifle, wedged the flashlight into the joint of two beams, and grabbed the rope, but both he and Bess were wrenched off their feet and dragged across the splintery floor. Sweetpea disappeared into the earth up to his throat.
Tyler struggled up, the rope entwined around his hands and his shoulder muscles popping. He planted his boots and fought it, his fingers turning blue, but he was being pulled steadily toward the stall. Now only Sweetpea’s muzzle was still visible, and the sand was starting to slide over it.
“No!” Tyler yelled, and heaved backward on the rope so hard the raw flesh of his fingers split open like blood-gorged sausages. The sand eddied around like a whirlpool, there was a last feeble thrashing, and Sweetpea was gone.
But the rope continued to be drawn downward by a tremendous strength. Bess grabbed her husband’s waist, and they went to the floor again. “Let go!” Bess screamed, and Tyler opened his bloody fingers but the rope was tangled around his hands.
Bess held on, splinters piercing her arms and legs. Tyler was trying to shake the rope loose, and they were almost pulled under the railing into Sweetpea’s stall before he felt the tension go slack.
Tyler lay on his belly, tears of pain crawling down his cheeks. Bess rolled over on her side, softly moaning.
He sat up, forced his hands to close around the rope and started pulling it from the depths. “Bess, bring the light,” he told her, and she silently went to get it.
The rope came up, foot after foot. Bess retrieved the flashlight. Its bulb had dimmed, in need of a fresh battery. She pointed it toward the empty stall.
Tyler walked into the stall, continuing to draw the rope up. It was wet, and glistened in the murky light. Everything was dreamlike to him, this couldn’t possibly be real, and in a minute or so he would awaken to Bess’s call that breakfast was on the table. He sank to his knees beside the broken floorboards and watched the rope slither from the sand.
Its other end emerged. Tyler picked it up. Held it toward the light. Strands of thick gray ooze dripped from the ragged edge.
“Looks like…it’s been sawed clean through,” he said.
And a shape came corkscrewing up in a whirl of sand, so fast Tyler had no time to react.
A pair of jaws opened. Silver-blue needles snapped shut on Tyler’s throat.
The flat, reptilian head flailed viciously from side to side, the needle teeth ripping through tissue and arteries. Tyler’s mouth filled with blood. He realized that the rope had not been sawed; it had been chewed.
That was his last thought, because with the next savage twist the creature broke his neck. It kept twisting, and Tyler’s head with its bulging, sightless eyes began to crack from the spinal column.
Bess screamed, dropped the flashlight as her hands pressed to her mouth. She saw what the creature was: a large dog—a Doberman concocted from a madman’s nightmare. Instead of hair, its hide was covered with leathery, interlocking scales, and beneath it the knots of muscle bunched and rippled.
Its amber eyes found her. The thing gave Tyler’s neck one last ferocious shake and began to stretch its jaws impossibly, wide, like the unhinging jaws of a snake. It flung the dead man aside.
Bess backpedaled, tripped, and fell on her tailbone. The monster scrabbled up over the top board of Sweetpea’s stall, dropped to the floor, and advanced on her, its mouth trailing Tyler’s blood.
The Winchester had tripped her up. Her legs were lying across it. She swung the rifle up and started shooting at the approaching shape. One bullet furrowed across its skull, a second entered its shoulder, a third slammed into its ribs. But then it was upon her, and its mouthful of needles clamped shut on her face.
She kept fighting. Her finger continued to spasm on the Winchester’s trigger, sending bullets through the walls while the other fist beat at the thing’s scaly hide. She was a Texas woman, and she didn’t giv
e up easily.
The issue was settled in another five seconds. Bess’s skull broke with a noise like that of a clay jar cracking, and rows of needle teeth sawed into her brain.
Blood ran through the hay. The monster released the crushed mass and turned upon the flashlight, tearing it to pieces with teeth and metal-nailed claws. Then it crouched in the darkness, belly to the floor, and listened eagerly for the sounds of any other humans nearby; there were none, and the thing gave a low grunt of what might have been disappointment. It climbed back into Sweetpea’s stall and began to dig down through the sand where the horse had gone. The monster’s front and hind legs moved in a blur of synchronized power, and in another moment it had burrowed into the earth and the sand shifted over it like a whisper.
44
Through the Inner Eye
“DON’T BE AFRAID,” DAUFIN said. “Seal your external visualiz-ers.”
“Huh?” Tom asked.
“Close your eyes.”
He did. And promptly opened them again. “Is this…going to hurt?”
“Only me, because I’ll see my home again.”
“What are you going to do?” Jessie’s arm was tight, ready to pull away.
“I’m going to take you on a journey, backward through the inner eye. I want to answer your questions about why I’m called a criminal. These things can’t be told; they must be experienced.”
“Wow!” Nasty stepped forward, the light sparkling off the bits of golden glitter in her Mohawk. “Can I…like…go with you?”
“I’m sorry, no,” Daufin said. “There’s only room for two.” She caught Nasty’s wistful expression. “Maybe some other time. Close your eyes,” she repeated to Tom and Jessie, and they did. Cody came closer to watch, and his heart was beating hard but he didn’t have a clue as to what was about to happen.
Daufin’s eyes shut. She waited, as the energy cells of her memory began to charge like complex batteries.
Jessie feared that Stevie’s body temperature was getting too high, and that the heat would damage her brain and organs. But Daufin had said that Stevie was safe, and she had to trust this creature or she would lose her mind. Still, the hand she held continued to heat up; Stevie’s body could tolerate such a fever for more than a few minutes without breaking down.