Sarge crawled away from it, his hand clenching the black sphere.
“Come down,” a man’s voice said. “Bring the pod with you.”
Sarge didn’t move. Scooter growled softly.
“If you have a light, I want you to throw it down to me.” An impatient pause. “You don’t want to get me super pissed, do you?”
The voice had a Texan accent, but there was something wrong with it. Around the words was a rattling, as if whoever was speaking had a nest of snakes in his throat. And now there was another noise too: a low moan that sounded like a dog in agony.
Sarge tossed the box of matches down the hatch. A hand caught and crumpled it. “Now you and the pod.”
He didn’t know what the man meant about a “pod,” but he whispered shakily to Scooter, “We’re gonna have to go down there. Ain’t no way around it.” He slid toward the hatch, and Scooter followed.
A man-sized shape stood in the hallway. As Sarge reached the bottom of the steps, a hand grabbed the sphere away from him so fast it was only seconds later that Sarge felt pain and the welling of blood from his fingers. Fella’s got sharp nails, he thought. Scratched the fool out of me. He could see the man lift the sphere up before his face. There was something writhing at the man’s chest, where nothing ought to be but skin and shirt.
The man whispered, “I’ve got you.” And the way he said that made the flesh crawl at the back of Sarge’s neck.
The hand placed the sphere down in that writhing mass on his chest. Sarge heard the click of fangs as the sphere was accepted.
And then the man’s arm—as damp and slimy as a centipede’s belly—hooked around Sarge and lifted him off the floor, squeezing the breath out of him. Sarge was too stunned to fight back, and before he knew what was happening the man was striding toward a gaping hole in the den’s floor. Sarge tried to call for Scooter, couldn’t summon up his voice, and then the man had walked into the hole and they were falling. Sarge wet his pants.
The man’s legs hit bottom like shock absorbers, but the impact traveled through Sarge’s body and made his head feel like a sack of shattered glass. Sarge gave a muffled groan. The man began running through the winding dark, boots making a shuckshuckshuck noise in the ooze, and carried Sarge away.
52
The Trade
THE CREATURE’S TAIL SLAMMED through the wall into the room where Curt Lockett and four other people hugged the floor. Bricks flew, and one of them hit the battery lamp that hung on the wall near the door and broke it to pieces. The light went out. Curt heard the boom of a shotgun from the next room. The tail thrashed over his head and exited in a boil of dust, and Curt crabbed out of the room into the corridor as fast as he could move.
The hall was packed full. Dozens of Inferno and Bordertown people crouched close to each other in the sharp glare of the lights, so tight they looked like they were melded together. Dust was billowing through the corridor, babies were crying and so were a few full-grown men. Curt felt pretty near tears himself. He’d come here hunting Cody, but one of the Renegades had told him that Cody was gone. So Curt had stayed to wait for him, and then all hell had broken loose. He crawled away from the door, getting another wall in between himself and that big sonofabitch with the spiked tail. Somebody was babbling in Mexican right next to his ear, but the bodies shifted to give him shelter.
The floor heaved. More bricks caved in, and screams swelled. An old woman was sobbing next to him, and suddenly her hands were on his arm, moving along the forearm until they locked with his fingers. He looked into her wrinkled face and saw that her eyes were clouded with cataracts. She kept rocking back and forth, and the man beside her put his arm around her shoulders.
Curt and Xavier Mendoza stared at each other. “Where’s Cody?” Mendoza asked.
“Still out there somewhere.”
The old woman began speaking frantically in Spanish, and Mendoza tried to comfort her as best he could. Paloma Jurado was desperate to find out what had happened to Rick and Miranda, but as far as Mendoza knew they hadn’t gotten to the building yet.
Curt saw the fat bulk of Stan Frazier squeezed up against the wall not far away. The man was sweating buckets, and he had a shiny hogleg Colt pistol clamped in his hands. When the building shook again, Curt pulled his hand free and crawled to his neighbor. “Hey, Frazier! You usin’ that?”
Frazier made a little gasping noise, his tongue lolling around in a shocked white face. Curt said, “Don’t mind if I do,” and worked the gun out of the sausagey fingers. Then he crawled back on his belly into the room he’d just vacated, where there were two holes in the walls the size of truck wheels. He crouched at the shattered window, pulled the Colt’s hammer back, and waited for that battering ram on legs to come out of the smoke again. He would’ve given his left nut for one sip of Kentucky Gent, but there was no time to let the craving take him because the smoke parted and there was the creature’s shape again, skittering forward. The tail whipped out, hit the wall somewhere to Curt’s right, and hurled a storm of bricks. Curt started firing, heard two of the bullets ricochet off body armor but two more made a satisfying splat as if they’d hit softer tissue. The tail swung in his direction, passed the window, and crashed into the wall of the room next to him. The floor shuddered as if a bomb had gone off. Curt fired the last two shots and saw gray fluid spray from a foreleg—then the thing had withdrawn into the murk again and there was a crunching noise as it backed over cars.
“Here.”
Curt looked around. Mendoza had left Paloma Jurado with his wife and uncle and crawled into the room. He offered his palm, and in it were four more bullets. “He had these in his pocket,” Mendoza said. “I thought you might need them.”
“I reckon so.” Curt hastily dumped the empty cartridges and reloaded. His hands were shaking. “Bitch of a night, huh?”
Mendoza grunted, allowed himself a grim smile. “Sí. You look like somebody stepped on you.”
“Feel like it too.” A bead of sweat swung from the tip of Curt’s nose. “Got in a little scrape up on Highway Sixty-seven awhile back. You don’t have a cigarette on you, do you?”
“No, sorry.”
“Gotta be some smokes around here somewhere.” He clicked the cylinder back in true and lined up a bullet under the hammer. “You seen my boy tonight?”
“He was over in Bordertown about twenty minutes ago. That was the last I saw of him.”
“He’ll be all right. Cody’s tough. Like his old man.” Curt laughed harshly. Mendoza began to crawl back to his family, but Curt said, “Hold on. I want to say somethin’ to you, and I reckon this is the time to do it. Cody seems to think you’re okay. He’s a damn fool about a lot of things, but judgin’ people ain’t one of ’em. You must’ve given him a pretty fair deal. Guess I appreciate that.”
“He’s a good boy,” Mendoza said. He found it hard to look into Curt’s watery, sick-dog eyes. “He’s going to be a better man.”
“Better than me, you mean.”
This time Mendoza met Curt’s gaze. “Sí,” he answered. “That’s exactly what I mean.”
“Ain’t no skin off my ass what you think of me. You’ve been decent to my boy, and I said thanks. That’s it.” He turned his back on Mendoza.
The other man had a hard knot of anger in his stomach. He didn’t know what gave Curt the right to call Cody his “boy.” From what he’d seen, Curt only had use for Cody to clean up the house or bring money and cigarettes home to him. Well, a dog couldn’t change his smell. Mendoza said, “You’re welcome,” through gritted teeth and returned to his wife and uncle.
One thing that old wetback forgot to say, Curt thought. Cody’ll be a better man if he’s still alive. No telling what was roaming around out there in the dust and smoke, and where Cody might be. Why that damn kid went over to Bordertown I’ll never figure out, he told himself. But one thing I know for sure: I’ll kick his butt till it sings Dix—
No. No you won’t.
Curt leaned his chi
n against his gunhand. Those long-tailed bastards out there were still playing a tune on metal, like they knew they were taunting everybody in the building. He started to squeeze off a bullet and then figured he’d better save them. It was a damned funny thing: his head was clear, and he felt all right. His raw flesh was still leaking and hurting like hell, but he could stand the pain. He wasn’t scared—at least, not petrified. Maybe it was because Treasure was with him. If the boy showed up—when he showed up—Curt was going to … well, he didn’t exactly know what he would do, but it wouldn’t be violent. Maybe he’d tell the boy how nice that tie rack looked on the wall, and how he hoped the boy would do more work like that. Say it and mean it. Maybe try to lay off the juice too; that wouldn’t be too hard, considering that for the rest of his life he would hear bones crack when he had a whiff of whiskey. But there was a long way to go, a lot of bad things in between him and Cody. They would have to be shoveled aside, one by one. And that, he figured, was how everything on God’s earth got done.
Someone touched his shoulder, and he spun around and put the pistol’s barrel into a young man’s face. “What the hell you doin’, sneakin’ up like that?”
“Colonel Rhodes says he wants everybody away from the windows,” Gunniston told him, and eased the pistol aside.
“Too late in here, fella. Window’s done busted.”
“Better clear out and stay in the hallway, though.” Gunniston started to crawl out and head for the next room down.
“Hey!” The name had just clicked through to Curt. “Who’d you say? Colonel Rhodes?” When Gunniston nodded, Curt said, “I’ve got a message for him. Where is he?”
“Six doors up the hall,” Gunniston said, and moved on.
Curt crawled out, past Stan Frazier, stood up, and made his way through the corridor without stepping on more than seven or eight people. He counted off five apartments and at the sixth, the door that had HQ and KNOCK FIRST spray-painted on it in red, he went in without knocking. Inside, crouched on the floor, were two boys Curt recognized as friends of Cody’s, the lady vet and her husband and little girl, and a man with a black crewcut who was on his knees at the window. The man had a rifle, and he’d swung it up at Curt just as the door had opened.
Curt lifted his hands. “You Colonel Rhodes?”
“That’s right. Put your gun on the table.”
Curt did. Rhodes looked like a man you didn’t argue with. His eyes were sunken in dark hollows, and his face was puffy and speckled with glass cuts. “I’m Curt Lockett. Can I put my hands down?” Rhodes nodded and lowered the rifle, and Curt eased his arms to his sides. “I was up on Highway Sixty-seven, right at the edge of where that purple cage comes down. There’s a whole bunch of trooper cars and people on the other side of it. Lot of government brass too. You know a Colonel Buckner?”
“Yes.”
“He’s up there with ’em. He was writin’ on a pad and showin’ it to me, ’cause I could see ’em but I couldn’t hear ’em. Anyway, he wanted to make sure you were okay and find out what was goin’ on. I was supposed to take you the message.”
“Thanks. I guess it’s a little late.”
“Yeah.” Curt looked at the battered wall. “I guess it is.” His gaze went to the little girl. She was trembling, and he knelt down beside her. “Don’t fret none, little darlin’. We’re gonna get out of this, sure as—”
“Thank you for your concern,” she said, and her ancient, white-hot eyes went through him like lasers through tissue paper, “but I am not a little darling.”
Curt’s smile hung by a lip. “Oh,” he said—or thought he did—and stood up.
“Colonel, listen!” Tom said. The rhythmic beating of the creatures’ tails on metal was slowing. The noise stopped. He peered out the window, could see the smaller shapes moving away amid the cars. The larger one had drawn back into the murk and disappeared. “They’re leaving!”
Rhodes looked out, verified that the creatures were indeed retreating. “What’s going on?” he asked Daufin. “Is this some kind of trick?”
“I don’t know.” She came forward to see. The seeker beam still hadn’t returned, and that could mean only one thing: her pod had been found. But maybe not; maybe the beam had malfunctioned, or maybe its power drain was too severe. She knew she was, as these humans might say, grasping at cylindrical drinking tubes.
Tom and Rhodes watched the creatures moving away until the haze swallowed them. Fires still burned on Celeste Street, and from off in the distance there was a crash of timbers exploding into the air: maybe the monster’s wrecking-ball tail knocking a house to fragments. A silence fell, except for the noise of crying babies and adult sobbing.
“Those sonsofbitches gonna come back?” Curt asked.
“I’m not sure,” Rhodes answered. “Looks like they might be calling it quits.”
Daufin strung the meaning of that term together in about three seconds. “Incorrect,” she said. “Stinger does not call it quits.”
“You sure talk funny for a little girl,” Curt told her. “No disrespect meant,” he said to Jessie. And then he remembered something he wished he could forget: Laurey Rainey rising out of the Bob Wire Club’s floor, and her rattling voice saying Ya’ll are gonna tell me about the little girl. The one who’s the guardian. Whatever was going on here, he wasn’t sure he wanted to know about it. “Anybody got a cigarette and a match?” Bobby Clay Clemmons gave him the last six Luckies in the pack and a little plastic Bic lighter. Curt lit up and inhaled down to the depths of his lungs.
“Daufin? I know you’re in there!”
The voice came from the parking lot. The heart hammered in Daufin’s chest, and she wavered on her feet: but she knew it had only been a matter of time, and now the time had come.
“Daufin? That’s what they call you, isn’t it? Come on, answer me!”
Tom and Jessie recognized Mack Cade’s voice. Rhodes thought he could make out a figure standing atop a car just beyond the edge of the light, but he wasn’t sure. The voice might be coming from anywhere.
“Don’t make this any harder than it has to be! My time is money!”
Curt sat on the floor, the cigarette clenched in a corner of his mouth and his eyes narrowed behind a screen of smoke. He watched the little girl that he knew was no longer truly human. Tom started to pull her away from the window, but she said, “No,” and he let her alone.
“You want me to stomp a few more bugs in the dirt, I will!” Stinger promised. “It’s up to you!”
The chase was over. Daufin knew it, and all her hiding was done. “I’m here!” she called back, and her voice drifted through the smoke to the figure she could just barely see.
“Now that wasn’t so hard, was it? You gave me a good run, I’ll say that for you. Gave me the slip in that asteroid field, but you knew I’d find you. A garbage scow’s not built for speed.”
“They’re not built for reliability, either,” she said.
“No, I guess not. You want to come on now? It’ll take awhile for my engines to warm up.”
Daufin hesitated. She could feel the walls of Rock Seven closing around her, and a torture of needles and probes awaited.
“I don’t really need you anymore,” Stinger said. “I’ve got your pod. That’s enough to secure my bounty: When I take off, there’s no way for you to get back to your planet. But I thought maybe—just maybe—you might like to trade.”
“Trade for what?”
“I’ve got three live bugs in my ship. Their names are Sarge Dennison, Miranda Jurado, and Cody Lockett.”
Curt sat very still. He stared straight ahead, and wisps of smoke curled from his nostrils. Belly-down on the floor, Zarra whispered, “Madre de Dios.”
Daufin looked at Tom and Jessie, and they saw Stevie’s features pinched with agony. Jessie felt faint; if Stinger had the pod, he had Stevie too. She lowered her head, tears beginning to creep down her cheeks.
“I’m waiting,” Stinger prompted.
Daufin drew a
deep breath. Another Earth phrase, one taught her by Tank and Nasty, came to mind: up shit creek. The humans had done all they could for her; now she would have to do all she could for them. “Let them go and I’ll come to you,” she said.
“Right!” Stinger laughed dryly. “I didn’t get to be this old by being stupid. You come to me first, then I let them go.”
She knew Stinger would never set them free. They would bring him a bonus from the House of Fists. “I need time to think.”
“You have no more time!” It was an angry shout. “Either you come out right now or I take your pod and the three bugs! Understand?”
Curt smiled grimly, but his eyes were glazed. “Goddamned Mexican standoff,” he muttered, with no apologies to Zarra.
“Yes,” Daufin answered. Her voice cracked. “I understand.”
“Good. Now we’re getting somewhere, right? Lot of bad vibes in this dump, Daufin. At least you could’ve crashed on a planet that smells better.”
Rhodes eased the rifle’s barrel out the window, but Daufin said quietly, “Don’t,” and he took his finger off the trigger. Daufin raised her voice: “Take them. I’m not coming.”
There was a shocked silence. Jessie pulled her knees up to her chin and began to rock like a child. Curt watched the cigarette smoke drift toward the ceiling.
“I don’t think I heard you,” Stinger replied.
“Yes you did. Take them. My pod and the three humans. I’d rather die here than live in a prison.” She felt the blood rushing into her face. With it came a torrent of rage, and she leaned precariously out the window and shouted, “Go on and take them!”
“Well, well,” Stinger said. “I misjudged you, didn’t I? You sure that’s how you want to play it out?”
“I’m sure.”
“So be it. I hope you like this place, Daufin; you’re going to be here for a mighty long time. I’ll think about you when I jingle my change.” The figure, which had been shielding its eyes with its single arm, got down off the car and strode away.
As Stinger left the parking lot, another figure rose up from between two cars over on the far left, almost to the red boulders that ended Oakley Street, and hobbled toward the fortress.