“I’m Major Stanner,” the man shouted. “I’m from the government!”
Behind him came a Filipino cop Donny knew—or had known when the cop was human. Commander Cruzon.
“You guys can check us,” Stanner said. “Look down our throats! I’ll even submit to some cuts. We’re on your side! We’re human!” Others were coming up the ladder, raising their hands as they stepped onto the top of the tank.
Donny recognized Waylon, from school, and Adair. After them came a guy Donny thought was a substitute teacher, and a woman he didn’t know. Then a scared-looking young woman, maybe half Asian. She went to stand next to Stanner.
Then came a big older man, with sandy hair.
Larry got up and ran to him. “Dad! They cut me! They held me down and cut me with a knife!”
The elder Gunderston looked scared and confused. “I heard some shots. I—was anyone shot?”
“There’s one more in my group,” Stanner said. “He’s working on something. He’ll be up here in a minute. We’re going to need your help with it. Anyone of you kids know your electronics? Who’s got skills, here?”
A few voices piped up.
But Raymond said, “Y’all line up over there. We going to check you real thorough.”
Donny nodded. “Raymond’s right. We’ve got to do this. We have to look close. And just keep your hands up.”
Then someone else came up the ladder. A big shambling figure, who walked kind of funny, and everyone was instantly certain that here was a crawler.
Raymond said, “Motherfucker!” and fired the nine wildly at the figure—who went to his knees, wailing, covering his head, as one of the bullets grazed his shoulder.
“Who the hell is that?” Stanner muttered.
Raymond ran closer, getting a bead on the man’s head. The man curled up fetally, babbling to himself.
Donny yelled, “Waitaminute, shit,
wait,
Raymond!”
Raymond hesitated. Donny ran up, staring. “That’s old Vinnie!”
“So you know him, so fucking what. He could still be one of them. He ain’t with the other ones just came. Nobody vouching for him. I don’t see why we should trust any of the so-called grown-ups, man. And look at how weird this motherfucker is.”
Lance came to stand by Raymond. “Raymond’s right, cuz.” He wiped his eyes. “All this bullshit is something the motherfuckin’ ‘grown-ups’ did.” He scowled at Stanner.
Vinnie was talking fervently to his own knees. “They took her parts in the hole, who’s calling star control, wait don’t hurt the bots, let me stay with the gold walking man, the red hand the red hand the red hand the red hand. They’re tied together in a whole, the deputy sent me . . .”
“You see that,” Raymond said. “The man’s talking like a fucking robot with its brains scrambled. He’s one of them.” He put both hands on the nine and steadied it at Vinnie.
Adair walked over and put her hand on Donny’s arm. There was something about her—then Donny realized what it was. Her head was turning this way and that, like Stevie Wonder, as if she couldn’t focus her eyes on any one thing. But she spoke, her voice raspy.
“He,” Adair began. She licked her lips and tried again. “He’s trying to tell us where something is. He wants to show us . . . something.”
“We can check Vinnie here, too,” Donny said. “We’ll have to hold him down. He doesn’t like to be touched. We’ll check all y’all. And listen, you grown-ups, checking you might hurt. So don’t even bother whining about it.”
“You’d better do whatever you’re going to do quick, Donny,” Lance said, looking out at the valley with his binoculars. “Those fuckers are onto us, man. They’re on their way back.”
That’s when Vinnie started squawking at them. So it seemed to Donny. Making squawking sounds and spouting random words. He stood up and started walking toward them—but sideways. Some of the kids tittered as Vinnie did a standing crabwalk within a couple of yards of Donny—and then turned
backwards
to walk closer. And dropped a piece of paper at his feet.
“That guy’s infected, for sure,” Lance said.
Donny shook his head as he bent to pick up the paper. “That’s just Vinnie. That’s just what he’s like. Leave him alone. Yo, Sissy, bring me that flashlight.”
Siseela held the flashlight as he unfolded the paper. It was a sheet torn from the yellow pages. On it was a listing for cemeteries in the northeast Bay Area—Richmond, El Sobrante, San Pablo. Quiebra Cemetery was circled with a pencil line. Next to it in the margin was a rectangular shape, in pencil, with an X in the lower right-hand corner of the rectangle. By the X were the penciled words
ALL US
.
“The cemetery?” Donny said.
Stanner came and looked over Donny’s shoulder, then at Vinnie. “You saying that’s where they’re based, Vinnie?”
Vinnie had his back to them. But he nodded his head, five or six times more than necessary.
Mr. Gunderston shook his head sadly. “There’s really no point in going there. You’d be overwhelmed, in no time. Just wait here. They’re coming here. Because I just told them where you were.”
Everyone froze. His son turned to look at him.
“Dad?”
Gunderston began to grow as he spoke. His legs divided and extended, his clothes ripping to accommodate them; he bent his knees to crouch. “We had no idea there were so many of you up here. And with some of these others. We don’t want them running around loose.” He looked at Adair. “This one senses things. Her mother warned us about that. We’ve been looking for her.” He looked at Vinnie. “And now I gather that one can listen in on us.”
Raymond broke the spell, shouting “Fuck
you
!” and firing the automatic pistol—but Gunderston leapt at Raymond first.
“It doesn’t matter if you kill me,” he said, tearing Raymond’s arm from his shoulders. He threw the blood-gushing limb, the hand still clutching the gun, over the rim of the tank. “I’m just like a skin cell, boys and girls! Were you paying attention in biology? The body continually makes more cells!”
Larry gaped at the thing that had been his father, stunned, his thick lips quivering.
Stanner was running toward the ladder. Deserting them.
Donny grabbed the .22 from Siseela.
Raymond was wriggling facedown, his voice bubbling wordlessly as he died, while Cruzon ran up to get a shot with his pistol—but the crawler leapt, shouting, “And I’m the latest design!”
Twelve yards horizontally, two in the air, the crawler leapt— soared!—and came down on Lance, smashing him onto his back so hard the bones of his chest exploded from his sides. Everything Lance would have screamed with was crushed, and he only made a silent scream with his open mouth.
Donny tried to get a shot with the rifle, but kids were running in the way.
Cruzon fired twice and one of the rounds caught the crawler, who only turned and snarled in response, showing a gleeful fat white face, a kind of monstrous parody of his son—who knelt with his hands over his eyes, sobbing.
The crawler leapt again, coming down in front of Cruzon, his forearm punching out with the force of a mechanical battering ram, slamming the little cop in the middle of the chest. Cruzon flew backwards through the air and fell yelling despairingly over the side of the water tower and into the shadows.
Donny pushed someone out of the way—he didn’t even see who— and raised the rifle to his shoulder, fired at the crawler, bolted another round in the chamber, fired, and did it again. The Gunderston crawler set himself to leap at Donny.
Gunderston’s son, Larry—
His nerdy, pompous, self-indulgent, insecure son, a strictly firstseason fan of
Star Trek
—
Larry threw himself at the thing that had been his father, threw his whole weight against him so that the crawler, clutching at the boy, fell heavily on his side, momentarily off balance.
“Daddy, stop it!” he shrieked.
For a moment Donny thought he saw a flicker of hesitation on the older Gunderston’s face.
And then Gunderston’s eyes glazed over, and he broke his son’s neck.
He threw the body aside and poised to leap at Donny.
“Oh, shit,” Donny muttered.
Gunderston’s head flew apart—shot from behind. A second shot punched a hole through his middle, spewing blood and metal bits on the green-painted metal roof of the tank. He flailed—and then fell flat.
The crawler’s falling revealed Stanner, standing behind him, a smoking shotgun in his hands. “I had it stuck down behind a pipe, near the top of the ladder, in the dark, so I didn’t scare anyone carrying it up here. Guess he didn’t have his eyes turned on all the way when he came up the ladder.”
Donny sank to his knees, shaking, his heart still hammering. He’d wondered, once, what it was like to be old and afraid of a heart attack. He thought he had some idea, now.
Stanner walked over to him and helped him to his feet. “You’re a remarkable kid,” he said.
Donny almost hit him. Instead he shrugged and said, “Who says I get to be a kid anymore?”
Then he went to talk to the others.
The thing that had been Sprague had found that if he was very careful and paid close attention, he could do things that weren’t in his primary or secondary directives.
But he’d had to work hard at it, to let Vinnie go.
Now, helping to push the seed launcher into place, he found that he was able to move slowly, very slowly, to just sort of drag back so that the others kept having to readjust. He wasn’t thinking of it as stalling. He was careful not to think of it at all. Careful to hide that part of his mind. It was a part of himself that they found hard to read, anyway. Something deep.
The impulse to resist the All of Us came from the deepest most-inside part of him. Something he had been scarcely aware of, when he was alive. It was as if he’d always been looking outward from that deep place, so he hadn’t been able to see that part of himself— like you can’t see your own eyes without a mirror.
Struggling to be something more than just a part of the All of Us, even in little ways, seemed to release something hidden in him; it was as if he could sense that secret inward place and know it was connected to something fine, something higher than the All of Us, and higher than people, too. It gave him the strength to work inefficiently.
He scuttled around the metal shaft of the launcher and managed to stumble on the packed earth wall so that he tumbled into two other servants of the All of Us, and there was a confusion of limbs.
One of them began to watch him. Sprague was careful to seem to leap back to work.
Adair watched them pile up the bodies. She felt she was on the breathless edge of another place. She might fall into life or death from here.
Lacey put her arm around Adair, and Bert put his arm around Lacey. They watched the others at their preparations.
“We only have a few minutes, Donny,” Stanner said, cradling the shotgun in his arms. Glancing at the sky.
Donny nodded. “I know. It’ll be quick. It’s just something I feel like we have to do, or we won’t be able to do very much else.”
He turned to the others—all the kids, a few adults, gathered on the other side of the improvised pyre atop the water tank. An armful of branches had been laid atop the bodies of the Gunderstons, Lance’s body, Raymond’s, Cruzon. Stanner himself had brought Cruzon’s broken body up the ladder, in a fireman’s carry.
Behind the crowd of kids, Harold and Waylon were setting up some equipment. Some of it really strange. They’d gotten a guitar and an amplifier and speakers, and they’d run wires from the switch box that controlled the waterflow for the tank. There was other equipment Adair didn’t understand, all wired together. There was another piece of equipment, she knew, that they’d left in the car. The pulser, Harold had called it.
Everyone watched—two hundred kids, a few adults—as Donny approached the pyre for the dead.
Donny himself poured the gasoline on the improvised pyre. He spoke for everyone to hear, as he poured it on. “They’re going to see this light and they’re going to hear the noise and come up here. And we’ll be gone when they get here. But not too far away—we need them to follow us.”
He stood back and nodded at Siseela, who lit a book of matches; it flared, she threw it at the pyre, and that flared up, too, roaring.
Adair listened in a kind of floating rapture, feeling as if she was above the scene, watching from overhead, as Donny turned to the crowd of kids and spoke loudly, like a preacher trying to be heard over the roar of the world; spoke to them all with an instinctive sense of ritual.
“This isn’t just to say good-bye to Lance and Raymond and these other people here killed by this thing. This is to say good-bye to our parents! It’s their funeral, too!”
A universal groan arose from the listening kids. They huddled closer together. The smaller ones wept as Donny went on.
“Maybe not all our parents are gone. Major Stanner says they haven’t got to everyone. But lots of us know for sure. Lots of us know that our parents are dead! And we have to accept that! We have to say
yes
. Our parents may be walking around, just like living people with free will—but they’re not living at all! Even if they’re walking and talking, if they’ve been changed over, then
our parents
are dead!” He paused, seeming to get control of himself, and cleared his throat. Then he clenched his fists and he yelled, “They left us too soon! But they didn’t mean to leave us, and it isn’t our fault! That’s two things we have to know! Is everybody clear on that?
They didn’t mean to leave, and it isn’t our fault.
”
There were unintelligible murmurs of agreement, mixed with groans and sobs. Adair stepped a little closer to Donny to listen, something in her responding, rising like the crackling smoke from the pyre.
Blue flames rose sinuously and hissed. “Now listen to me,” Donny went on. “It’s Bad Times, what’s happening. It’s hella Bad Times. But we gotta forgive them for leaving us—but we also have to let ourselves cry for them! We each think of our parents, and we cry for them! Think of them now! Think of your folks. If you loved them or hated them, or you weren’t sure, think of them and forgive them and
let them go
!”