Crawlers (9 page)

Cruzon compressed his lips. “I won’t gossip about it. I won’t talk to the press. I won’t consult with anyone else in the department— but that last one is a
probably
. It’s about, I won’t say anything unless I have to. It’s, what you call it, provisional. If I think lives are going to be at risk, here . . .” He shrugged.

“All that goes for me, too,” Sprague said.

They looked at Stanner; they waited.

Stanner tried to keep his face relaxed as he came to the lie he had to tell. “All right. There was a
possibility
of a toxic chemical release at the crash site.”

He shifted in his seat, unable to get comfortable. But it wasn’t the chair, it was the way these two were watching his face that made him feel like squirming.

He gestured vaguely. “This toxin—once in the water it might come up in bubbles. Might’ve drifted over the surface, maybe a small cloud that we couldn’t see in the dark. Chances are, even if that
did
happen—and I don’t have any evidence that it did—nothing but a squirrel or a snake or two’s going to die before it dissipates. We detected nothing at the site when we were there. But see, we might’ve lost a canister of this stuff. It might’ve broken open down there in the water and leaked out later on—after everyone who was working out there already took off.”

Jesus Christ,
he thought.
What a crock! Am I sweating? I’m having
to make up one fucking lie after another. I shouldn’t be in fucking intelligence if I can’t be cooler than this, goddamn it.

Usually he analyzed statistics, satellite imagery, sometimes directed small-scale insertions. Until he’d started working with the Facility, he’d always worked on foreign projects.

Having to lie to American citizens bothered him. A couple of perfectly good cops, too. Maintaining a cover story hadn’t bothered him, working overseas. But here . . .

Still, he kept his face relaxed, his voice dismissively casual, as he went on. “We doubt there was a leak. This is all just, you know, a routine health check because there were civilians around.”

“Yeah, well, forgive me if I’m a little doubtful about this concern for civilians, there, ‘Ornery,’ ” Sprague said, tapping the side of his little Styrofoam cup. “I used to work over in south San Francisco. Military dump out there’s been poisoning some of those neighborhoods for decades. They won’t clean it up. What the hell, they figure, that’s ghetto, let ’em get cancer.”

Stanner nodded noncommittally. “That’s not my bailiwick.”

“What’s the effect of this chemical?” Cruzon asked. “You said maybe some dead squirrels. So it kills you dead?”

“It would kill a man, undiluted. But by the time it reached anybody in town the gas would probably be pretty diluted, and all you’d get would be behavioral anomalies.”

Cruzon and Sprague exchanged looks. Then Sprague scowled at Stanner. “ ‘Behavioral anomalies’? What the hell’s that mean? I mean, that could be my wife’s whole family.”

“Well, I’ll tell you,” Stanner began. “No, let me just ask you. Have there been any, like, out-of-the-ordinary incidents?”

“Such as?” Cruzon asked.

“Violent behavior that seems to—to have no explanation. Or, are there any highly unusual break-ins?”

Sprague stared at him. “You sure I shouldn’t be worried about my own exposure, too, Major? I feel fine but—should I have a blood test?”

“No, it would’ve hit you by now, Deputy.” Stanner grinned. “You seem okay to me.”

“What’s this toxic stuff called?” Cruzon asked.

“I’ve told you everything I’m cleared to tell,” Stanner said, feeling as if he was coming out with his first honest remark all day. “Can you help me out, here?”

Cruzon shrugged. “Unusual violence—no. Nothing unusual.”

“Might be best not to eat fish from that area, too,” Stanner said. “I’ll see about getting an advisory issued on fishing. Let out that it’s a sewage leak or something. Don’t eat the fish from around there for a while.”

Sprague shook his head in wonder. “A sewage leak. That what you’re going to say? You people find it pretty easy to lie to folks.”

Stanner managed not to show how much the remark startled him. At least, he hoped it didn’t show. He toyed with his coffee cup and didn’t reply.

Cruzon had made a tent of his fingers. “Unusual break-ins, you said, before? Why exactly would there be—”

“Uh, this toxin,” Stanner improvised, “affects the brain, has a sort of pack-rat effect on some people. Kind of an OCD symptom. They start obsessing about stuff. Objects. Often it’s shiny stuff. Like, say, electronic parts.”

Cruzon looked at him. “Electronic parts. A chemical that makes you obsess about electronic parts?”

The raised eyebrows said,
Sounds like bullshit to me.

Stanner thought,
Why couldn’t I have drawn a stupider cop? Lord
knows there are enough around. But not this time.

Cruzon leaned back in his chair and gazed at the ceiling as if he had crib notes up there. “Well, actually. There was a little vandalism at the high school. A vocational class, the electronics shop. Last night.”

“Huh,” Stanner said. “Electronics shop. When I was a kid it was woodshop or metal shop and that was it. Anything stolen?”

“I’m not sure.”

Stanner nodded, shrugging unconcernedly. “Well. Maybe I’ll look into it. But there’s probably no connection at all. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

He smiled again, hoping they couldn’t see him shudder.

6

December 3, morning

Adair went to get some clean clothes for school from the dryer, and found her mother wandering around in the garage. Her mom was walking back and forth, in repeating patterns—like a mouse stuck in the patterns of a maze long after the maze has been removed.

“Hi, Mom,” Adair said, bending to open the dryer door. She’d put the clothes in the night before; they were still barely warm. Her bare feet, under her nightgown, were cold on the concrete.

Mom didn’t answer. Adair straightened up and glanced at her, yawning—but the yawn was a fake, to cover the disoriented feeling she got, watching her mom walk around, and around. Mom walked over to Dad’s tool bench. She touched the tool bench twice, shook her head, then turned around and walked across the garage, skirting a stack of boxes containing half-broken diving equipment. She stopped at the wall; reached out and touched the dusty plaster-board. She said, “Perimeter. Someone please. Perimeter. Volume. Someone.”

“Mom?”

Mom ignored her. She went back to the tool bench. She touched it twice, shook her head, then turned around and walked to the farther wall. She touched the wall.

“Mom!”

Still no response. Mom walked to the bench. Touched it twice. “Perimeter. Please.”

Adair got a squeezing feeling, like she’d felt when Dad had his breakdown. Was Mom having a nervous breakdown of her own? Was the whole family fundamentally defective? Maybe someday they were going to find her, too, wandering around in the garage, touching walls and babbling.

Then the door opened suddenly behind her, and she jumped. “Go to school, Adair,” Dad said, hurrying past her. He walked over to Mom, put his arms around her, and whispered something in her ear. Mom struggled—her arms thrashed—and then she went limp. Dad caught her, and she straightened up. She saw Adair watching, and she put her arms around Dad.

They hugged.

Then Mom said, “You shouldn’t catch us playing these little games.”

Dad and Mom looked at her. Then both of them
leered
at her.

Adair backed away and turned to rush through the kitchen door. She heard her parents laughing.

She stopped in the kitchen, trembling, to listen.

“Reinstall?” Dad’s voice came dimly from the garage.

“Reinstall,” Mom said, her voice calm and cheerful.

Adair went to her bedroom and started getting dressed. She started crying partway through putting on her socks, with one sock still halfway onto her left foot. She sat there leaning over, with her hands on the sock, and just sagged like that, her head against her knees, crying.

Cal was walking by. He stopped at her door and stared in at her. “What the fuck are you crying about?”

It sounded harsh, but she knew it was as close as he could get to letting her know he was worried about her.

She made herself stop crying. “I don’t know. I don’t know how to describe it. There’s something wrong with Mom and Dad.”

“What? They’re fine. They started spending a lot of time together again. They go off together for hours. Shit, they hardly hung together at all before this—this—”

She turned to look at him. “Before what?”

“I don’t know. Before they started—hanging together. I guess.”

“You haven’t seen them do anything weird? Or felt like they were—I don’t know—it’s like they’ve been brainwashed, or joined a cult or something.”

“They’re not in a cult. Those people make their kids join, too.”

She picked up her shoes and stared at them. “Yeah. What if they do?”

“Do what?”

“Make us join, too.”

He growled in his throat with exasperation. “Join what?”

“Mom was doing this weird thing in the garage, then Dad made her stop, then they acted like it was some kind of sexy role-playing game or something.”

“Oh, so they were getting sexy with each other? Fuck, mind your own business. How the hell you think you were born, Adair? If they’re getting, like, all intimate and stuff, it’s a
good
thing.”

“You don’t understand. But I don’t know how to describe it. I mean, you wouldn’t believe me.”

“You know what’s going to happen?”

She could tell he was getting really angry. His voice got all flat, and he was hugging himself in that bottling-up way he had.

He went on, “You’re going to fuck things up. You’re going to make them all self-conscious or something. You’re just freaked out because they’re giving each other more attention than little baby Adair for once. And it bothers you and you’re going to fuck up their getting back together. Just cut it out! Leave them alone! Or they’re going to fucking break up!”

He turned and stormed away down the hall.

She thought,
It’s me. It’s not them. Maybe. I’ll ask Lacey. I’ll talk to
the counselor at school. But except for that I’d better shut up because it’s
probably something wrong with me.

And she pulled on her other sock.

December 3, late morning

“How come we have to move, Dad?” Larry asked.

They were just getting into the station wagon. Gunderston put the key in the ignition as Larry got in beside him, buckling his seat belt.

Larry asked him again, “Seriously, Dad, I mean, an hour ago we were fine at home.”

Larry paused, thinking,
Maybe not fine. But at home.

He went on, “Then the big rush, some emergency. I never did get what it was. I mean it’s dumb—are they going to pay for our hotel?”

“Yes. They are.”

“But what’s it all about? Why do we have to leave?” Gunderston shrugged. “Because . . . there’s some kind of toxic leak or something—from a pipe under the cemetery.”

Larry thought,
The cemetery
.

He hadn’t mentioned what had happened that night. Where Buddy was. None of it—not since they started taking him to the doctor. That creepy doctor had hinted that if he didn’t stop talking about it, they might put him away somewhere.

Larry expected his dad to start the car. Instead he just sat there, looking gravely at Larry—a long look, unusual for him. Dad rarely looked right at people.

Then he looked quickly away.

Larry wanted to tell his dad something, and couldn’t figure out how to say it. The medication made it hard for him to think. Finally, he said, “Well, shouldn’t we call Mom first, before we just go?”

“It’s only temporary. I’ll tell her we’re staying at the hotel for a few days. Everyone on the street is going somewhere. It’s just . . . temporary.”

Larry looked at his dad again and tried to decide what had changed in him. True, Dad wasn’t interested in talking
Trek
or
Star Wars
or Harry Potter or the Civil War or role-playing games anymore. He didn’t watch the sci-fi channel with Larry—or he hadn’t until Larry had asked why he wasn’t watching it. Then Dad had said, “Of course I’ll watch it with you.”

But it wasn’t all that so much. It was more like standing in the bright sun but feeling like you were in the shade. Things didn’t feel the way they should
where
they should.

He decided he was going to stop taking the meds. He wasn’t sure why he’d made the decision. But he knew he had to get his head clear so he could think about this.

But maybe I should be taking them. Maybe there really is something
wrong with me,
he thought.

Up and down the street, people were packing things into cars, getting ready to leave. But no one was leaving Quiebra. The firemen standing at the corner, watching silently from their QFD cars, had insisted that everyone evacuated stay somewhere in town. An evacuation—but not far. They had to be there for some kind of health checkup. They’d all be told about it later, “when everything is ready.”

Dad started the station wagon and they drove away, on their way to a room-and-board place over the Chinese restaurant in Old Town Quiebra.

Larry wanted his mom.

He wanted his dog.

He wanted his dad.

7

December 3, late afternoon

Bert Clayborn was sitting in the uncertain sunshine on the small deck of his duplex. His condo’s back door faced the ocean, and he was eating a late lunch of tomato-cheese salad and watching the gulls wheel and dive over the beach.

A crash from next door; the wall vibrated. Another crash. Things breaking, the girl yelling something he couldn’t make out. That Derry girl, half Pakistani, all goth, who’d dropped out of Contra Costa College—an unpredictable, possibly bipolar girl with visible mood swings. Knowing that, he wasn’t inclined to call the police; it was more likely she was assaulting her own apartment than being assaulted.

He drank off the rest of his chardonnay. He allowed himself one glass before going to teach a class. He had taken over a class at Diablo Valley College near the end of term for Darryl Winsecker, who had taught a literature class and who’d suddenly dropped out of the job for “the indefinite future.” There were rumors of long-term alcoholism rehab. Darryl hadn’t settled for one glass of chardonnay.

The phone rang, and Bert grimaced. He was pretty sure he knew who that was. It was that time of year. He just didn’t want to answer.

He knew it would be his younger brother, Errol, and he knew that Errol was going to invite him to spend vacation break with him and his wife, Dory. Dory with her ever-patient, faintly puzzled look whenever Bert spoke. And their videogame-obsessed kids. Errol would want him to come see the family for Christmas, and Bert knew he should go. It would be healthier to spend the holiday with someone; it’d be good for his relationship with his brother— but he just didn’t want to go. And he didn’t want to tell Errol why.

Because I don’t want any more well-meaning “help” from my family,
or any more pitying looks because you think I’m either gay or a loser just
because I don’t get married.

Another crash from next door, and weeping. Should he go over there? But every encounter with her had been like gazing into Edgar Allan Poe’s maelstrom. And the phone was still ringing.

He sighed and stood up. But he didn’t go next door or to the phone. Instead he stood there and watched the gulls some more. White birds, starkly aerodynamic wings with black tips, Nature’s genius in their design—they could do maneuvers beyond the most cunningly wrought aircraft. Graceful and raucous, determinedly survivalist but brattily pushy, garbage-eating scavengers, too. Nature increasingly imitating people, having to accommodate itself to people. But then there had always been scavengers and parasites.

The phone stopped ringing. The crashes from next door ceased, too—though he could hear her talking loudly and cursing.

He could see a big swatch of plastic trash washing up on the beach.
Thoreau would have been apoplectic, seeing what we’ve done to
this planet,
he thought.
And in fact—

The phone started ringing again. He sighed and went to answer it. “Yes?”

“Bertie!”

His heart sank. “Hi, Errol.”

“Listen to that enthusiasm when he says my name! Bad time to call?”

So he’s not without
some
perception, anyway,
Bert thought. “No, I just have a class to teach this evening. Getting set to go.”

“Right-o. But what about getting set to come and visit us? A Connecticut Christmas, Bertie!” Errol began doing his Bing Crosby imitation. “ ‘I’m dreaming . . . of a white . . . Christmas . . . bah bah booh dah booh dee oh . . . with every Christmas card I write!’ ”

Although Errol was a, God help us, science fiction writer, he was heavy into old movies. “Are you trying to torture me into agreeing to come?” Bert asked, sighing.

“You can make fun of me all through Christmas vacation. I’m paying the airfare, the whole shebang.”

“That’s not necessary.”

Bert was distracted by a sudden shout from next door.
“Fuck you,
you’re not going to do it to—”
There was more, but it was garbled.

He brought his attention back to the phone call. “If I want to come, Errol, I can go on-line, get a good fare.” He was touched, despite himself, that Errol wanted him to come out there badly enough that he would offer to pay his way. Errol could be a little cheap sometimes. Maybe he was genuinely lonely. Sure, he had the wife and those kids—but she had that weird little martyred thing going, those sad smiles, and the kids were completely indifferent to their father except when he didn’t show up to see them play soccer. Then they trotted out their own sulky mockeries of their mother’s crucified smiles.

“I’ll try to come.” He heard a police siren from the complex’s parking lot, and the disappointed whine running down as it was switched off. Maybe the cops were coming for the slightly mad girl next door, after all. He hoped she was all right.

Errol chattered on, asking, “So how’s the old love life? And I don’t mean old in the ‘needing Viagra’ kind of way. You dating anybody?”

“There must’ve been a mix-up, Errol, when they were making Jewish mothers. You got accidentally put into a male Gentile’s body instead.”

“ ‘So, vy don’t you get married, already?’ But Jewish mothers are usually right, man. And listen, there’s someone I want you to meet. I mean I know, she lives in Hartford, and you’re on the West Coast, but, you know what, I was talking to Professor Shremminger, over at Connecticut State U, and he thinks that it’s been enough time since that wrangle over tenure. You could come back—”

“I don’t want to go back there. I’ve bought a place out here.”

“You can sell that little hovel.”

“Errol, you’re my younger brother. I’m supposed to tell you what to do. You’re role-reversing on me here.”

“Sell that place, come back here, go back to work at the university. I mean, you and I know they passed you over, but a lot of those guys are gone now. I think there’s a chance you could get the Thoreau chair.”

Bert hesitated. That was tempting. But it wasn’t really likely.

“No, Errol. I burned my bridges. I called them Nazis. And unfortunately they aren’t Nazis. I mean, it’s unfortunate because I’d be vindicated if they were. They’re cronies of Bill Buckley, but they’re just conservatives, and I sounded like a crank.”

A doorbell chimed next door, and he heard the young woman screaming,
“No no no, you can’t come in, I know what you are, I won’t I
won’t!”

“My neighbors are having a run-in with the cops here,” Bert muttered.

Errol slid that right into his thesis. “You see? Living out there in California, with the lunatics? And sometimes you
are
a crank. Like with the women. I swear sometimes, Bert, it’s like you stick to bachelorhood because it’s some kind of political ideal. Hey, married people live longer, man.”

I just don’t want to settle for comfortable misery like you’ve got,
Bert thought. But he said, “I just don’t feel I can relate to the women I meet. If they’re not shallow, then they’re insanely career driven. And I can’t believe you’ve got me talking about this crap again. I’m proud of being an aging bachelor, and let’s leave it at that. Maybe I’ll come out for Christmas. I got to go, man. Work. Thanks for calling. I’ll call you back tomorrow.”

Bert hung up and looked at the gulls once more. They were diving for garbage floating in the ocean.

Then Derry—with her bone-white hair and dark skin and four separate piercings at her nose and mouth—burst through her back gate and ran onto the beach. She was wearing nothing but a long T-shirt that didn’t quite cover her ass, her short brown legs pumping as she ran away from the cops. She stumbled in the sand and fell—and two Quiebra PD officers stalked up to her. One of them glanced over at Bert; smiled and shook his head ruefully.

“Drugs!” the cop said. Bert recognized the guy—Officer Wharton.

Bert nodded, watching as they caught the writhing, sobbing girl, one of them expertly pinning her, the other locking the handcuffs in place. “I’m not on any fucking drugs!” she yelled, turning her dark eyes to Bert. “I’m not! They put their conversion thing in me—” Her eyes dilated, terrified, her mouth quivering between the words. He could see some other piercing, flashing at the back of her tongue. Kind of far back in the throat for a piercing. She was yammering on and on as they manhandled her—not too roughly— toward her condo. “—they tried to change me and I was fighting it. If you get mad and you try, you can stop it from taking you over— sometimes you can—and they can’t let you fight it and—please call somebody outside. They have to be outside the—”

They dragged her back into the condo, and presumably out the front. After a while he heard the cop siren Dopplering away.

Bert sagged into his deck chair, surprised at the emotion he felt after seeing the girl dragged away. He’d barely known her. He’d suspected she was crazy. But he’d have felt this upset, he supposed, even if he hadn’t known her at all. She was in distress, and with mental illness, real paranoia like that, there was so little they could do. The poor kid. There were so many insane people around— especially living on the streets in Berkeley and San Francisco— sometimes you wondered if some pollutant was behind it, or some sort of epidemic virus.

He sighed, and thought,
Move on, Bert. Work up ahead.

He got up to toss the remains of his salad over the low wall to the beach—hoping his neighbors didn’t see it, they hated it when he did that—and watched first one gull, then a scrapping flock of seagulls converge on it.

Then he went to find his coat and car keys. He hoped the car would run.

Adair was at school, trailing along after Waylon, after-hours. He was going to Mr. Morgenthal’s electronics shop. Waylon was working on some kind of radio that could, he thought, pick up “secret government frequencies” he’d read about at
disinfo.com
, only he told Mr. Morgenthal it was an ordinary CB and that he wanted to use some school equipment.

Adair was feeling shitty. First of all, she still felt uncomfortable around her parents. That weird ritual in the garage. Some kind of sex thing? Hard to believe. But what else could it be?

She felt like she was a mute, or a ghost; she was around people, but she couldn’t talk to them, not about what was on her mind. There was Waylon, but she felt reluctant to talk to him about what was happening with her parents. His theories about things were always so extreme. She had opened up a little at lunchtime, though, saying, “You know what, I just feel like there’s something wrong with my parents, like the whole town is off, but—maybe I’m just imagining it. But my mom and dad, I don’t get it.”

He just chuckled dryly and shook his head. “Tell me about it. My mom is
so-oo
fucked up. And my dad—he got mad and just said, ‘the hell with ’em both.’ Well, maybe he didn’t say the hell with ’em both, but he acts like that. We haven’t heard from him in . . .” There was a little catch in his voice when he said that. He seemed to brood about it for a while, and she didn’t feel like she could say any more. Even though she felt that whatever was going on was a whole lot worse. She didn’t want to diminish what he was feeling, but she didn’t know how to explain. It sounded insane when she tried.

So even though she was walking down the hall with Waylon, she felt a stab of loneliness. Cleo hadn’t even called to tell her she’d dyed her blond hair with Day-Glo blue streaks.

Danelle had moved away, and Siseela was someone she saw mostly only at school.

And here came Cleo and Donny around the corner, walking together but not as close as they used to, Cleo with her blue streaks, Donny’s hair in short dreads. Cleo on her cell phone; Donny checking his beeper. Handsome with high cheekbones, a strong chin, Donny could be an actor, but he wanted to run for office someday.

Siseela came up then, too, from behind—a gangly girl with corn-rowed hair, bland blouse, and always a long skirt, because her parents were Jehovah’s Witnesses. She got a lot of sympathy for being stuck with Jehovah’s Witness parents, and her having to pretend she believed in that bullshit just to get along.

All of them carrying books or backpacks, the kids clustered near the door of the shop. Waylon, who was “about as social as the Unabomber,” as Cal put it, sighed and leaned against the wall with an impatient look toward Morgenthal’s classroom; not wanting to talk to the group, wanting to go in, but knowing that Adair wanted him to wait for her.

She thought,
Maybe he’s into me, if he acts like that. Waiting for me
when he wants to do something else. But then why doesn’t he make a move
or something?

“Lookit Cleo’s hair,” Siseela said. “She all like that singer Pink, only she’s Blue.”

“I think it look good,” Donny was saying, talking to Siseela.

Adair knew him: he’d say “it look good” to Siseela. Adair had heard him say, “I’m fittin’ to go to UC Berkeley, I get accepted,” to Siseela. Black English. But the day before, he’d said to Adair, “I’ve applied to Berkeley, and I think I can get in. I’m not totally sure.” With perfect diction.

But then, half the white students were deliberately talking in Black English. White kids affectionately calling each other “nigger,” even. The black kids called them “white niggers”—or “wiggers.”

Donny, anyway, had a jump on being a politician. He had the instincts.

With Waylon squirming restlessly, the group talked about movies, complained about the jenky dances at the Youth Center, how the school was getting all shabby and “hella ghetto,” Cleo said, oblivious to Donny’s glare; he thought that expression was racist. And about how Siseela was getting her navel pierced without her parents knowing, and how she was going to hide it from them. Then she related with horror that they were going to make her do that door-to-door Jehovah’s Witness thing soon.

“I’m not gonna be no JW pod people, yo,” she said. They talked about how a bunch of people had had their home PCs or Macs stolen. Donny said he’d heard that sometimes the computers had just been torn apart, parts stolen, and that brought up how there had been some kind of big rip-off from the electronics class, and some people’s cars had been stripped—and how freaked out they were. One of the kids was suicidal without his computer: ate two bottles of Tylenol and half his mom’s Valium, had to have his stomach pumped.