Crawlers (6 page)

She wondered if she should call Roger. But since when were you obligated to tell your ex-husband where you were moving? She’d kept his surname because she liked the sound of it better, but she barely stayed in touch. Still, it bothered her not to tell him she was moving out of town. Not that he’d really give a damn. He was more interested in hearing from his agent about his new spec script.

She decided she just wanted to go. To Quiebra, of all places: to see sister Suze and niece Adair and nephew Cal and just forget her life here. So she took out her cell phone, put her finger on the button, about to switch it off—and of course that’s when it rang.

She sighed. Hesitated—and answered. “Herrrre’s Lacey,” she said into the cell phone.

“Lacey, you still in town?” It was Chuck Fong, her editor at the L.A. Times.

“Can’t talk, Chuck, gotta catch a train to Berkeley.”

“Come on, you can give me a minute. We’re talking about your career here, Lacey. You’ve been with us eight years, and I’ve always backed you up. One time, one time only, I couldn’t do it and—”

“Chuck, my mind’s made up. I just—”

Naturally the yellow cab chose that moment to show up. A bearded guy in a turban looked at her from the driver’s seat, and she waved. He got out to help her with the bags.

“Lacey, claiming our publisher is in league with death squads? What did you expect? Come on, that was extreme and unreasonable.”

“I didn’t say he was in league with them, I said he was covering up the activities of death squads in Colombia, because he’s backing the right-wing agenda down there. Get the Colombian oil, no matter who gets hurt. And why? Because he’s also on the board of a major oil company, and the newspaper was bought by a multinational, and because he’s got ties to the—”

“Do you know how paranoid you sound? In these times we have to be tough. You’ve got to be supportive of antiterrorism efforts.”

“I support the war against terror. I don’t support death squads. You wouldn’t run my column about death squads, you were censoring me, so I’m taking my toys and going home. I’m sick of L.A. I need to get away.”

“I can’t guarantee you’ll be able to come back.”

“Is that another way of saying, ‘You’ll never work in this town again’? I’ll tell you what, Chuck. If you tell me you’ll run my column as written, I’ll take my bags out of the cab that’s waiting for me over here.”

A crackle—she thought she’d lost the connection. But then he said, “I can’t do that. He won’t let me.”

“Then I’ll send you a card from the Bay Area.”

“Lacey—”

Another call was coming in, and she broke the connection to Chuck and took the call waiting as she picked up the remaining bag and walked over to the cab. “Lacey here.” She put the bag in the trunk.

“Lacey? It’s Suze.”

“Calling to tell me not to come? You Bay Area types don’t want the sleazy Angelenos up there?”

“I’m calling to make
sure
you’re coming. Thanksgiving plans, for one thing. The kids are stoked.”

Lacey got into the backseat of the cab, turned the cell phone away long enough to tell the driver, “Union Station.” She shut the door and said, “Suze, I’m coming unless you don’t want me to.”

“Of
course
I want you to!”

The cab started away. Lacey looked through the back window at her little house, the palm tree, the bird-of-paradise plant. Jerve, the little kid who lived next door, was skating up and down the sidewalk on his silvery scooter. “Then I’m coming. I’m in the cab on the way to the train station.”

“I wish you were coming on the plane. It’s faster.”

“I don’t take them unless I have to. What’s the hurry? I mean, are you okay?”

“Yes, I just . . . I’m a little scared, I guess.”

Lacey rocked back in her seat. It wasn’t like her strong, athletic, independent older sister to admit being scared. “Go on.”

“It sounds so stupid. It’s Nick. I just—he’s so distant and . . . I don’t know.”

“Since when has he been Mr. Warmth?”

“I know—especially when he gets depressed. But he’s been doing pretty good. I had to sort of push him to take a job recently. You know how he gets in that defeatist mind-set.”

The cab drove up the on-ramp and slid onto the freeway. “Yeah, I remember Nick’s ‘why bother, it won’t work.’ But that’s nothing new.”

“It’s . . . just that he goes off to work but he’s really
secretive
about it. Doesn’t even take his gear. I thought he was having an affair, but . . . Then this morning he said something weird. I mean, I came into the kitchen and he was standing at the sink and he didn’t hear me, I guess, and it was like he was talking to the air. He said, um—what was it? He said something about a ‘conversion.’ But he didn’t seem to be talking about religion.”

“Um, he smoking pot again?”

“No. I don’t think so. It’s like—like he’s really gone into some odd kind of . . . fugue state.”

“You think he could have given up his meds, and not told you? People don’t like to talk about it when they go off antidepressants— or on them either. He could be having a kind of withdrawal from medication.”

“You know what, I thought maybe he hadn’t been taking his meds. You’re probably right. I’m going to see if I can get him to start again. See how you make me feel better? I need you around here to straighten me out when I get crazy.”

Lacey smiled. “Whoa, you must be worried, admitting I might know something you don’t. I’m coming, ‘Sister Act.’ ”

Suze laughed at the allusion to the time they’d dressed up like twin nuns for a Halloween party.

“Okay, we’ll be there. Call us if the train’s delayed.”

“I will. Bye.”

Lacey switched the cell phone off, looked out at Los Angeles. A boulevard unreeled below the elevated freeway like film from a canister, and she wondered if she could really let L.A. go.

She thought she probably could. Her life was taking a sharp turn, and the cab was taking the exit for the train station.

November 24, 11:30 P.M.

Larry’s dad had gone to a Civil War reenactment planning session after work, calling to tell Larry to heat up a frozen pizza and do his homework. But Larry Gunderston had been playing this particular computer game for three and a half hours, with pizza crusts still littering his desk. His back ached in the desk chair; his fingers had stiffened up. But whenever his Jedi character broke through to another level—killing a great many of the enemy to get there—the feeling that came seemed to suck him onward like a slipstream.

It would’ve been four hours, but he’d paused to go on-line, to the
Trek
chat room, where they’d talked more
Star Wars
than
Star Trek
, and now he was thinking about going back on. He’d try again to talk his on-line friend Allison into sending him a picture, if she was in the ROM-exchange chat room. She was reluctant, hinting she was no
Vogue
beauty. He didn’t care, even if she was overweight like him. He needed to think that maybe there was a girl somewhere who—

“Larry? What the heck there, boy, you said you were doing your trigonometry!” His dad was suddenly there in the doorway, a man with narrow shoulders and wide hips, the same thick round glasses as Larry. “I’m gonna call your mom and have her come over and talk to you. I know how you love her lectures.” Mom and Dad were separated; she lived in Oakland.

“I finished the trig,” Larry lied. “It didn’t take very long. I thought you were going to have a beer with those guys after the meeting.”

“Only two guys showed up. Nobody seems to know where the other ones are. The whole thing is—never mind, dammit, do you know what time it is? You’ve got finals, kid. This really
does
go on your permanent record.”

“It’s just preliminary credits till I get into San Francisco State, Dad.”

His dad had come to stand scowling over his chair, staring into the game. “Larry, if you make big swings with your lightsaber that way, the Sith’ll get you. You have to make short, aggressive swings. Here, move, let me show you.”

Larry sighed and got up, let his dad sit down. His dad could waste as much time on a computer game as he could. “I guess I’ll . . .”

Dad was already hunched over the screen, his mind projected into the computer-animated world of the Jedi.

“Yes. Take the dog out, Larry, before you go to bed. Buddy needs to . . . uh . . . See, you have to—hell, I died, but you know what I mean. Did you save that game?”

Larry found the poodle sitting tensely by the front door. He attached the leash and let the poodle drag him outside and down the sidewalk. Most of the houses were dark, except for some TV glow in the occasional picture window. There was a shiny row of silent cars along the curb; boats in some of the driveways were covered with wet tarps. Nothing else. Yet the night seemed almost alive.

It was funny how vivid things seemed outside for a few moments when you first “came up for air” after hours of playing a computer game. There’d been a light rain, and he could smell the soil and the junipers in the damp freshness; and the stars looked sharply blue-white between the clouds. He let the little white dog tug him to the corner across the street from the cemetery, and immediately a movement that didn’t belong caught his eye.

He peered into the slightly overgrown cemetery—a patch of rolling green below the protected watershed and the tract homes on the other three sides. Most of the tombstones were of the old standing granite variety, but there was a swath of the easy-maintenance stones flush with the ground, and it was through there that three figures were crawling along.

At first he thought they must be coyotes, hugging the earth as they crept up on some jackrabbit, but as his eyes adjusted he saw that they were people. He couldn’t see how old or what type—though one of them appeared to be a mostly naked woman.

Must be teenagers playing some kind of war game or . . . vandals or . . .

He thought he ought to tell his dad—who’d probably call the police. There had been vandalism in the cemetery before. But he needed to get a closer look. And if the woman really was naked . . . He urged the dog across the street, past the low fence and into the cemetery. Buddy snuffled at a fresh grave, where silk flowers struck a bright note against the flat gray stone. Larry looked for the crawling people, couldn’t find them at first.

There they were, about forty-five yards ahead of him, among the old tombstones now, emerging from behind a group of mossy, rain-streaked upright stones. It was like these people were crawling in triangular formation: the pasty old man—he looked vaguely familiar—taking point; the Chinese guy who ran the kung fu place at the mall, coming behind on the left side; and on the right, a young blond woman wearing only bra and panties, whose long hair was mucky with lawn clippings from dragging on the ground. They were creeping toward a big hole, which at first Larry took to be a waiting grave. But then he saw it was shaped more like a trapdoor, about three feet square, and a sudden spray of dirt came out of it, like a giant gopher was kicking soil out of the way. The three figures kept the same distance from one another, the same crawling formation, but still they moved in fits and starts, as if going from slow-motion to fast-action at random—and yet they did it all together.
Pulling
their way across the ground.

Larry’s attempt to process what he was seeing went something like:

Insane drug users
or maybe
Satan worship cult doing some ritual in the cemetery
or maybe they’re
People gone insane from some poison in the water
or
Murderers hiding their deed with this strange behavior
or could be
I had a computer-game overdose leading to epilepsy and I’m
hallucinating this
but
No, this is real—let’s go back to the Satan cult.

He finally settled on a combination—
drug-addled insane Satan
cultists vandalizing the cemetery.

He knew he needed to tell someone what he was seeing. But for one thing he found it difficult to stop looking at that girl, her long white nude legs pumping against the grass, as the three figures crawled silently toward that dirt-spouting hole. Larry backed up in revulsion and fear, half stumbling, but not able to look away.

Then something made his stomach lurch—a woman’s head extended from the hole in the ground on a metal stalk. The head rotated, and she saw him. A middle-aged woman, her hair in disarray, her eyes blank but seeing him. He could
feel
her gaze; the feeling made his testicles retreat up against him.

The other three, the crawlers, stopped dead—and turned all three heads at once, sharply, to look at him, as if they had seen him, too, when the head from the hole had seen him.

Then they started moving again, changing course, coming toward him. Moving faster now. And their bodies were changing. To facilitate speed, their arms and legs seemed to come apart and grow; their limbs
sectioned and extended
on ratcheting metal linkages. Their mouths opened—all three at once—and silvery tendrils extended from between their lips, wriggling toward him as if to sniff the air.

The dog was barking frantically.

And then Larry turned and ran, yelling, “Dad Dad Dad Dad
DAD
!” Half dragging the dog behind him till the leash suddenly went slack in his hand—but he didn’t turn to look. Some distant part of his mind was amazed at his own speed, his legs outpacing the thumping of his heart as he ran through to the street, around the corner toward home.

The dog somewhere behind him barked wildly, yelping. Then . . .

Silent.

He heard a siren whoop briefly behind him, as he ran up to the porch. Then his dad was on the porch, and a police car was pulling up in front of the house. Dad was opening the front door, frowning.

Larry collapsed against his dad, gasping for air. His skin flickered with points of heat as his lungs tried to catch up with the demands of his astonished muscles. Dad was staring at him.