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?”
It took a few seconds for him to register what she’d said. “What’s happened to him?”
“He fell. To below.”
“Below where?”
She remembered the name Cody Lockett had called into the house, and pronounced it with difficulty: “Mrs. Stell-en-berg’s abode. I’ll guide you there.”
“No way!” Zarra said. “We’re goin’ back to Bordertown! Right, Rick?”
The other boy didn’t answer. He wasn’t exactly sure where Lockett was, but the creature seemed to be saying that he’d fallen under a house. “Do you know how far down he is?”
“Thirteen-point-six Earth feet. An approximate calculation, plus or minus three inches.”
“Oh.”
“By visuals I calculate this tether to be fifteen Earth feet in length.” She struggled to lift up the heavy coil of rope she’d dragged off a shelf. The muscles of the daughter’s arms strained with the weight. “Will you help me?”
“Forget Lockett, man!” Zarra objected. “Let’s get back to our own people!”
Daufin didn’t understand the tone of refusal. “Is Cody Lockett not one of your own?”
“No,” Rick said. “He’s a ’Gade, and we’re Rattler—” He stopped, realizing how dumb that must sound to somebody from another planet. “He’s different.”
“Cody Lockett is a human being. You are human beings. What is the difference?”
“Our kind lives across the river,” Zarra said. “That’s where we’re goin’.” He walked on along the aisle toward the door, paused in the doorway when he saw Rick wasn’t following. “Come on, man!”
Rick kept the flashlight on the little girl’s face. She stared fixedly at him, waiting for his response. Cody Lockett was nothing to him, but still … it seemed like they were all in this together, and the violet skygrid had caged both Renegades and Rattlers alike.
“Please,” Daufin implored.
He sighed and lowered the .38. “You go on back to the church,” he told Zarra. “Tell Paloma I’m okay.”
“You’re off your bird! Lockett wouldn’t do shit for you!”
“Maybe he wouldn’t, but I’m not Lockett. Go ahead, take the car. I’ll come when I can.”
Zarra started to protest again, but he knew that once Rick’s mind was made up, he couldn’t be swayed. “Damn stupid!” he muttered, then, in a louder voice: “You watch your
ass. Got it?”
“Got it,” Rick answered, and Zarra went out to Cade’s Mercedes, got in, and wheeled it toward the bridge.
“Okay,” Rick said to Daufin when the Mercedes was gone and it was too late for second thoughts. “Take me to him.”
39
Highway 67
THE CREATURE’S FIST BANGED down like an anvil on the top of Curt Lockett’s Buick. The metal dented in over his skull, and now the underside of the roof was as crumpled as a crushed beer can. The car was shuddering, just on the edge of going out of control, and the speedometer needle trembled on the wild side of seventy.
Curt screamed, “Get off!” and jerked the car to right and left. The Buick roared around a curve, slipped off the road, and threw up a boil of dust and stones. When he got the tires back on the pavement, he saw a shape before him in the headlights: a pickup truck going about twenty miles an hour, its bed loaded down with a mattress and junk furniture and a little dark-haired Mexican child sitting atop a stack of crates. The child’s eyes had widened with terror, and as Curt fought the wheel the Buick grazed past the pickup and left it in a swirl of dust.
The road wound between red boulders the size of houses. Over the engine’s shriek Curt heard the squeal of the roof peeling back; the metal-nailed fingers were at work, gripped along the top of the passenger door. More screws popped out, and she kept battering the roof in with her other fist. He jerked the car violently left and right again, but the monster held on as tight as a tick.
The roof broke loose from the rim of the windshield. Cracks jigsawed across the glass. Her hand folded around the rusted metal at the top of the driver’s door, and Curt beat at the fingers with his fist. She reached in, groping for him, and almost snagged his hair before he could slide across the seat. The car slewed to the right, left the road, and bounced over ruts that whammed Curt’s skull against the roof dents. And suddenly the creature lost her grip, slid backward over the roof with a skreek of metal nails and down the rear windshield. She tried to catch hold, found nothing to grip. In the rearview mirror, Curt saw her slide over the fishtailing trunk, saw her half-mangled, half-beautiful face glisten in the red glare of the taillights. Her face disappeared over the trunk’s bulbous slope, and Curt whooped with joy.
“To hell with you!” he shouted hoarsely as he veered the car back up on the road. “Teach you to mess with a cowboy!”
Highway 67 straightened out to meet more desert. In the distance, maybe two miles ahead, the purple grid plunged into the earth all along the horizon. It blocked the road, but beyond it was a sea of flashing blue-and-red lights: state trooper cars.
Cain’t such a thing be solid, he remembered Harlan saying. Ain’t such a thing possible.
Curt glanced at the speedometer. Seventy-five. I can bust through it, he told himself. Bust right through like it’s made out of glass. And if I can’t … well, I won’t never know it, will I?
His hands clenched the wheel to hold the jittering tires steady. Curt kept the pedal flat, and he could feel the engine’s heat bleeding through the firewall on his legs.
And then there was a hollow boom like a bomb going off and steam shot from under the hood. Black smoke burst from the tailpipe. The Buick hitched, and metal clanged like Chinese gongs in the engine. That did her, Curt thought. Somethin’ busted bad. Instantly the speedometer began falling: through seventy … sixty-five … sixty …
But the grid was looming up fast. I can make it, he reasoned. Sure thing. I can bust right through that sonofabitch, because can’t such a thing be solid ….
I’m leavin’ my boy behind.
The realization of it knocked him breathless. I’m hightailin’ like a yellow-assed coward, and I’m leavin’ my son back there.
My son.
The speedometer had fallen to fifty. The grid was less than a half mile away. I can still make it, he thought.
But his left foot poised over the brake. Hesitated, as the yards swept past.
Damn kid can’t take care of himself, Curt thought. Everybody knows that.
He jammed his foot down. The brake pedal popped, went loose, and sparks jumped from the brake shoes. The inside of the car was full of scorch smell, and the brakes were gone.
The grid grew in the windshield, and beyond them the flashing sea of lights.
He wrenched up the parking brake and fought the gearshift from fourth into second; there was a deep grinding and machine-gun chatter as the gears were stripped. The car jolted, kept going at forty miles an hour the last two hundred yards. He twisted the wheel, but the slick tires had their own mind and even as they started to turn he knew the grid was going to take him.
A hand and arm suddenly reached through the open window of the passenger door. The creature’s head and shoulders pulled through, and Curt realized the thing had been hanging on to the Buick’s side like a leech. The good eye fixed on him with cold rage, the hand straining toward his face.
He screamed, lost the wheel. The Buick angled off the road, heading for the grid fifty yards away. He had time to see that the speedometer needle hung at just over thirty miles an hour, and then the creature with blond hair had pulled half her body into the car.
There was only one way out. Curt wrenched upward on the door’s handle and jumped. He landed in yielding sand, but the impact was rough enough to send constellations reeling through his brain. The wind bellowed out of his lungs, but he had enough sense left to roll away from the car and keep on rolling.
The Buick traveled another fifteen feet and hit the grid. Where the car impacted, the violet weave pulsed a fierce incandescent red, like the eye of a stove. The hood caved inward, the engine block bursting through the rusty firewall like a red-hot fist. Daggers of metal flew into the creature with Laurie Rainey’s face, and she was caught under the dashboard as it folded upon her.
The car bounced back, the crumpled hood glowing scarlet as if it had absorbed heat from the grid. The tires were melting, black smoke belched as oil caught fire, and with an orange flash and an ear-cracking explosion, the Buick tore apart at its seams and debris spun into the air. All of it had taken about three seconds from contact to blast.
Pieces of the car banged down around Curt, who lay on his belly puking up Kentucky Gent. The smell sickened him further, and he kept heaving until there was nothing left but air.
He sat up on his knees. The way his nose was bleeding, it was broken for sure. Not a lot of pain, though. He figured that would come later. He looked at his left arm—the side he’d landed on—and saw tatters of skin hanging down. From the shoulder to the elbow was a red mass of friction burns, and the flesh over his ribs on that side was scorched raw too. Blood tainted his mouth, and he spat out a tooth and stared at what used to be his car.
The remains of the Buick were on fire, but what was left looked like black twists of melting licorice. Fearsome heat lapped at Curt’s face. The grid’s red glow was fading, returning to cool violet. Another blast leapt up from the Buick’s chassis, throwing molten metal like a spray of silver dollars.
Curt stood up. His legs were a little wobbly, but otherwise all right. His tongue found another tooth hanging by a strand of flesh on the left side of his jaw, and he reached in and jerked the bit of broken enamel out.
Something emerged, running, from the Buick’s wreckage.
It was coming right at Curt, but he was too shocked to move.
The thing was charred ebony, humpbacked and twisted. It looked to be a headless, burned-up body with one remaining arm writhing at its side like an injured snake—and at the base of its spine was another burned thing, about five feet long, that whipped wildly back and forth.
Still Curt didn’t move. He knew he ought to, but his brain couldn’t get the order through to his legs.
The horror lurched past about ten feet in front of Curt. He could smell a sickly-sweet reek that might have been burning plastic, and he heard a high, terrible hissing noise. The thing stumbled, went on six more strides, then fell to its knees in the lo
ose sand and began to frantically dig with its remaining hand. Sand flew; it shoved its headless neck and shoulders into the burrow, its feet kicking up spirals of sand. In another few seconds the creature had gotten in up to its waist and then it began to shudder uncontrollably. Its legs twitched, burned pads of its feet pushing with feeble effort.
And finally it lay still, all of it hidden beneath the sand except for the blackened legs.
Whatever it was, Curt wouldn’t have gone a step closer to it for a million dollars and a truckload of Kentucky Gent; in fact, whiskey was the last thing he wanted right now. A sip of water to cleanse the foulness from his mouth was what he craved. He backed away from the charred creature; it did not move again, did not rise from the sand, and he prayed to God that it was dead.
Curt turned, everything hazy and dreamlike, toward the grid.
Beyond it were not only state trooper cars, but several dark blue cars, unmarked vans, and a couple of white panel trucks. And a lot of people over there too: men in trooper uniforms and men in dark blue uniforms and caps. Government men, Curt reckoned. Looked like air-force blue.
He walked nearer the grid to get a better look. The grid made a faint humming noise that pricked pain in his eardrums, and the air smelled of lightning storms. A helicopter was landing beyond the cars; Curt could see the rotors whirling around but could hear no engine sound. Over on the right were two large trailers and more trucks. Off in the distance along Highway 67 were a lot of headlights. Roadblock up ahead, he figured. He blew blood and snot from his nose, wiped his nostrils with his skinned forearm, and saw the excitement on the grid’s other side.
A group of eight or nine men had gathered, and several of them were motioning for Curt to come closer. They seemed to be shouting, from the strained expressions on their faces, but Curt couldn’t hear a word.
He approached to within six feet of the grid and stopped. On the ground just to his left was what looked like half of a burned-up coyote.