Crawlers Read online

  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.

  “What the heck, Larry?”

  “Dad.” Panting. Trying to speak. “The . . . in the cemetery . . . people. Things. Crawling. Chased me.”

  “What?”

  Then the cop was there, coming up the walk. A tall, blue-eyed white guy with a lazy, unconcerned manner as he took out his report book. A name tag on his uniform shirt said J. WHARTON, QPD. “Evening. Had a call about people running through the park? Vandalism, something like that?”

  “You saw them?” Larry asked, peering past him at the street. He saw no one back there except Mrs. Solwiez, in her nightgown, gaping out her front door across the street. The police car’s lights were flash
ing silently.

  “I saw you, in the cemetery, is what I saw, son.”

  “Well, something—someone was chasing me.”

  He rattled out a version of what he’d seen—he found himself toning it down from what he remembered, afraid it would sound like he was lying—and the cop and his dad exchanged looks. Especially at the naked-girl part. The cop skeptical and amused; Dad puzzled, annoyed.

  “That your story?” the cop asked.

  “Yes. It’s what happened. You could go see the hole in the ground yourself.”

  “I’ll go take a look. But you know they were replacing some stones in the cemetery earlier this week. That might’ve made the hole.”

  Larry’s dad turned to him with a suddenness that made him jump. “Son, where’s the dog?”

  Larry blinked. He looked at the broken leash still clutched in his hand. “The dog? He . . . got loose. Oh, no. Oh, God, Buddy.”

  The cop shook his head sadly. “Have you ever searched your son’s room, sir? I have to say that we’re having a real problem with teen drug use here in town.”

  Dad scowled. “Not Larry. Uh-uh. He’s got his vices, but potato chips don’t make you hallucinate. I mean, I’ll look, but . . . I have to assume there was something out there, Officer Wharton. I’m going to go take a look.”

  Suddenly Larry felt a flush of love for his dad, a feeling he hadn’t had for ten years or so. The old man was okay.

  Wharton shook his head ruefully. “Well, I don’t think you should walk around in the cemetery without permission after dark, sir, especially if they’ve been digging the place up. You might step in a hole. But I’ll tell you what, I’ll look for you. We’ll swing by and see what we see and I’ll come back later. But in the meantime, why don’t you come with me to the station, to make a report, and the boy here—I think we should have him looked at. There’s a doctor at the hospital, on call, for psychiatric issues.”

  Larry was outraged, but all he could do was gape and say, “Oh, Jesus, I mean—I’m not—I mean, jeez—”

  It took Officer Wharton a few minutes, but he talked Larry’s dad into it. They got in the patrol car—which made Larry feel kind of important, though he knew that it was stupid to feel that way, considering the cop was assuming he was stoned or crazy—and they drove around the cemetery. Saw no one. Not the dog either. They stopped at the front gate and called to Buddy a few times. No response.

  “I’ll find him later,” Dad mumbled.

  Then they drove to the hospital. Wharton went in with Larry, spoke to some nurses in hushed tones, signed some papers. Larry found himself alone in the emergency room, watching late-night TV on the set in the waiting area.

  Eventually he told his story to a lady psychiatrist the cop seemed to have dated or something—she nodded when Larry told her the cop’s name—and the doctor decided Larry needed some kind of anti-anxiety drug for now. Maybe he’d had an epileptic seizure of some kind, so they might have to change his meds later. Larry felt as if he was being treated like a complete lunatic. They acted as if his feelings about the whole thing were off the map and meaningless.

  While Larry was at the hospital, his dad went off with the cop to make some kind of statement. Why that was necessary, Larry couldn’t understand. His dad hadn’t seen anything. Just him. Normally they’d just write a report in their little book.

  But, hey, Larry decided. You have to trust someone. You could trust the cops, after all. Couldn’t you?

  They never found the dog.

  4

  November 25, night

  “Why’s she coming here on a train?” Cal asked, staring dully down the tracks into the thin fog. They could just make out the headlight of the oncoming train and the big blunt steely outline of the engine.

  “Sometimes,” Adair said, “you can seem so smart and sometimes you’re just, like, retarded. Why does anybody come on a train?”

  They were on the tarmac near the tracks at the Emeryville train station. Across the tracks, past a chain-link fence torn up at the bottom by tramps, was a shopping center with a movie theater, a bookstore, even a jazz nightclub. Beyond that lay the freeway and the bay.

  “She doesn’t like to fly,” Adair’s mom said. She had girl’s soccer league that afternoon, and she was already dressed in her white short-sleeve Quiebra High shirt, white shorts, and white sneakers, and her silver coach whistle was hanging around her neck. Adair wore a dress she called her gypsy dress under a jacket from American Eagle.

  Adair noticed that Cal wore the same clothes as yesterday.

  The train whistled. Getting that quirky look in his eye he got when something was bothering him he didn’t want to talk about, Cal said, “Whoo whoooooo! Hey, Mom, can we blow your coach whistle back at the train?”

  “Don’t be silly,” she said vaguely, as she shaded her eyes against the sun breaking through the clouds and watched the train pulling up.

  He grabbed her whistle, started blowing on it though it still hung around her neck. Tweeeeeeee.

  Mom only stared at him, as if she was some kind of cryptographer trying to decode what he was doing.

  Seeing that he wasn’t going to get a rise from her, Cal dropped the whistle, shrugging.

  The train clashed its wheels, squealed its brakes, and came to a grudging stop, reeking diesel. A chubby, blank-faced porter walked up to the first car with portable steps, put them down in front of the nearest door, and waited to help people off. An elderly white-haired woman got off, waving at Adair’s mom—and then looking away in embarrassment as she focused her weak eyes and realized that she wasn’t the daughter or niece she’d been expecting. Wearing a look of disappointed abandonment, the old woman walked past them toward the station.

  Then Mom’s sister Lacey climbed down from the train. To Adair, she looked the same as she had three years ago. An attractive woman with long chestnut hair, bangs cut across her forehead, a Long Beach tan, a softer, more humorous face than Mom’s. But then, she wasn’t married with kids, and she was younger than Mom.

  Lacey wore oxblood dress pants that looked like they might’ve come from Macy’s, a gold link belt, a white silk blouse, tennis shoes that didn’t quite go with the rest of it. Just a little makeup. Mom almost never wore any either.

  Lacey’s nails were oxblood, too, but pretty short, because she typed a lot, Adair supposed. She was a journalist.

  “Hi, you guys!” Lacey said, wheeling two hefty American Tourister bags up to them. “Thanks for picking me up.” She beamed at her sister. “Suze! You look great!”

  Lacey embraced her sister, and after a moment Mom returned the embrace. Lacey stepped back as if to appraise her, looking a little puzzled by something.

  “Glad you could come,” Mom said. She said it brightly, but with no real conviction.

  “Well, I guess I’m committed, ’cause I put a lot of my stuff in storage. I’ve been sort of mulling moving out here. Into the city, probably, if I can get a job that’ll pay for the rents you guys put up with around here.”

  “I can’t advise it,” Mom said. “The rents are . . . horrendous.”

  Lacey’s eyebrows went up. “You were just saying what a good thing it was for me to come, just last night.” She chuckled, hiding her hurt behind a mask of amused indifference, and grinned at Adair. “Your mom has turned mercurial. Wait a minute, that can’t be Adair, not after just three years. Not this gorgeous babe. No way.” She turned a facetious scowl on her sister. “What’ve you done with my niece, and who is this imposter?”

  Adair smiled at the joke, but Mom had a peculiar blandness in her face as she looked back at Lacey. “What do you mean?”

  “Hello, Mom?” Adair said. “It’s a joke?”

  Mom smiled. “Hello? I was joking, too.”

  “And look at Cal!” Lacey went on. “All-star something or other. Damn, they grow kids big now. You helping your dad with the business still?”

  Cal looked away. “Not lately.”

  Mom turned to Cal. “Cal? Isn’t th
ere something you’re supposed to do?”

  “Uhhh . . . no?”

  Adair turned him a look of slack disgust. “Get her bag, dumbass!”

  “Oh, okay, I was going to, whatever,” Cal mumbled. He took the larger of the two bags, and they started toward the parking lot.

  “There are wheels on those bags, Cal,” Lacey said, smiling, seeing Cal was carrying it by his side. “High technology. It’s the latest thing.”

  “Oh, yeah, huh.”

  “What a dumbass,” Adair said.

  “That’s twice you called me that. Next time you want me to fix your computer you can just shit-can it.”

  “Then you suck,” Adair said matter-of-factly.

  “You suck.”

  “You suck.” She dropped back to walk beside Lacey. “Hey, you’re gonna be here for Thanksgiving?”

  “I will.”

  “It’d be so cool if you moved out here, Lacey!” Knowing she was bubbling a bit but meaning it. There was something reassuring about Lacey, right now.

  “You could help me pick out an apartment, if I decide to do it,” Lacey said. “I sold my car just to have enough cash to pay down on a nice place. You have to have big security deposits, I’ve heard. Key fees and all that.”

  “It’s not so bad now, with the dot-com collapse,” Adair said. “Rents have gone down some.”

  “I’ve got some applications in with the local papers, but I’m not even sure I want to work for them. To tell you the truth, I think I’m going to take a couple of college classes or something, till I figure out what else to do. I’ve already found a little local school to give me that ever-elusive sense of purpose.”

  “I recommend the colleges in San Francisco,” Mom said, unlocking the car. “They’re much better.”

  “Oh, no, Diablo is good. It’s one of the best ones!” Adair burst out. Wondering why Mom so obviously didn’t want her sister to go to school around here. Is she trying to push Aunt Lacey away?

  “Diablo is exactly the one I picked,” Lacey said, smiling at Adair. “Give me the school named after the devil, every time.”