He was dragged closer to the tangled, reeking central figure in the room.
Then he felt himself released. He was dropped at the base of the living mound of interlinked crawlers. Immediately hands reached out from the cluster, grasped him, and pulled him closer. The smell of electrical burning and charred flesh and decay was overpowering; the thing moaned in a multitude of voices.
This was the primary CPU of the nanocell colonies, the organizer for all the brains that made up the All of Us. He tilted his head back and got an upside-down glimpse of faces and arms and limbs, bodies heaped but living, like a hive of human flesh. He thought of a picture he’d seen of a “king rat,” which was actually a living cluster of rats whose tails and bodies were somehow entangled—and which supposedly had a collective mind of its own. It was like that, but even more scrambled: bodies fused, faces emerging from torsos, hands from necks, all interconnected and interpenetrated by electronic interfacing and wire. Not quite random, there was a symmetry somehow, but it was a perverse symmetry.
Stanner struggled, but the hands tightened their fingers on his limbs, drawing him close.
The cop who’d brought him spoke in an almost jovial voice. “You’ll feed the All of Us, with some of your tissue—usually your lower half. Eaten by the cluster, the primordial processing unit you see here. The upper half will incorporate nicely, your personal expert systems having some useful application. Protocol seventeen, blue, seventy-four seconds till release.”
They’d reached the cul-de-sac where they’d planned to turn around so they could take the convoy the other way, lead the crawlers in a circle—but Adair saw dozens more crawlers now. They scuttled about in the road, on the rooftops, converging on the convoy of teenagers.
Other crawlers were arriving in cop cars, flashing their lights, screeching sideways across the road to block their escape.
The convoy of kids came to a jerking halt in the middle of the cul-de-sac, Adair and the others looking desperately around. The few guns in the trucks and cars opened fire at the crawlers—and the crawlers only laughed, and moved in on them.
Then Stanner saw Sprague’s face, upside down on the ceiling of the chamber. He moved a little. He wasn’t part of the cluster.
“Please, Sprague,” Stanner croaked.
“Used it all up,” Sprague said. “All my
me
. Nothing left. Can’t struggle anymore. There’s a certain beauty to the All of Us. To what’s planned. Kind of like a planned community. One big housing development. Harmony.”
“Your family, Sprague.”
Stanner felt something gnawing at his thigh. Something else digging into his calf. A clutching thing yanking at the backpack— which was torn away from him and tossed onto the dirt beside the cluster, near one of the gutters for sewage.
Stanner wanted to scream in terror but turned it into a shouted demand.
“Sprague! Your family! Come on, Sprague, there’s always something
more in a man! Look for it!”
Sprague shook his head. Stanner was pulled more deeply into the cluster.
Fingers felt their way blindly around Stanner’s throat; he felt a face nuzzle at him, teeth gnashing to get a grip on his inner thigh; metal extensions tugged at his genitals, closed around his ankles.
“Sprague!”
The fingers around his throat tightened; his breath stopped. Blue lights swarmed before his eyes. He felt something get a grip on his left arm that felt like it had the inexorable mechanical force of a backhoe. It began to pull his arm, to twist, like someone twisting at a turkey leg to wrench it loose from the cooked bird, and he knew that in a few moments his arm would be yanked off his body.
“Sprague, you can be yourself if you choose to, goddamn it! Sprague, be
yourself! Sprague, you can BE!”
Then Sprague dropped from the ceiling, and his mismatched limbs, his ordinary man’s mouth, his metal claws—all began to rend at the cluster’s hands, the strands of living metal gripping Stanner, so that something yelped and the grips loosened. Stanner wrenched himself free, rolled away from the cluster and threw himself onto the backpack.
But the crawler-cop loomed over him. “I thought there was grenades or some such in that pack, but maybe it’s a bigger problem, there, boy,” it said, leering, reaching for the pack. “But we’re launching in about twenty seconds, so it don’t really matter anyhow.”
There was a flurry of motion as Sprague leapt onto the crawler’s back, gripping it from behind with his six limbs, and the crawler changed shape, head spinning on shoulders so it could bite into Sprague’s skull.
Sprague shrieked in pain—and relief, and fell away, as his head cracked like a boiled egg. He went limp, dead with finality.
Stanner clawed through the pack. He found the little toggle Harold had wired in, threw it, and tossed the pack into the mass of the cluster. The device had to go off close to the cluster to work.
The pulser went off, its EMP field sweeping through the cluster’s primary store of nanocells; transmitted from there to every crawler in communication with the All of Us.
There was a high-pitched whine, which grew with every crawler it reached, and every light in the crawler nest sizzled and burst— and everything went pitch-black.
All the streetlights went out. The cars’ engines died. The lights on the cop cars went out, too. Adair barely noticed.
The crawlers were setting themselves to leap.
Adair had a tire iron ready to swing at the livid face coming at her—Mr. Garraty, leaping onto the back of the truck. The crawler poised quivering over her and Siseela.
And fell on its face in the bed of the pickup. Its head fell from its neck; its arms fell from its shoulders. Wherever the living metal sheath connected its segments, the parts fell away.
All up and down the street, and all over town, the crawlers began falling apart.
Mr. Garraty spoke, once. “Oh, thank God,” he said.
And then he was dead.
It took a long moment for it to sink in. Another long moment of sobbing relief. And then the cheers and whoops began.
“Holy shit,” Harold muttered, looking around. They were waiting for Stanner by the smashed-open fence, across from the cemetery.
The entire town had blacked out. The distant headlights up in the hills had gone black. The streetlights were dead. The only light came from the stars.
A long groaning moan rose from the cemetery—a chorus of mixed despair and gratitude. Then silence.
“I think we did it!” Bert said.
Harold nodded. They grinned at each other. Then Harold looked toward the cemetery. “Should we go look for Stanner?”
There was a droning from the sky overhead.
Bert looked up to see a delta shape blacking out the sky. Just an absence of stars, marking its presence.
“Oh, no, Harold. Look at that. The military’s making their move. With great timing as usual.”
Harold grabbed Bert’s upper arm and waited for the explosions. The bombs were said to be big. He wondered if he’d feel anything.
The bombs fell. They heard them whining down, humming down, then screaming down, almost directly overhead.
They saw them strike the cemetery with a
whu f-whu f
THUD.
Then . . . nothing.
“Oh!” Harold said suddenly. “The pulser was set to continue for a full minute! They dropped the bombs—but the pulser’s still working! The bombs are regulated with electronics, Bert!”
Bert leapt up and shook his fist at the delta in the sky. “Ha, you bastards! We beat both of you! Your machines, and those machines! Fuck the whole bunch of you!”
Harold and Bert hugged each other, dancing around in circles, as Stanner walked out of the cemetery, pretending to shake his head with disapproval. “You guys should get a room or something, please. I like to be liberal, but . . .”
The three men laughed in sheer relief—and looked up at the hills. Then their laughter melted away. They looked at one another. They silently went to find the SUV.
Stanner thought,
They could all be gone. We might’ve been too late.
All those kids could be torn to pieces.
Shannon could be dead.
“Let’s get back to the kids,” Bert said, echoing what Stanner was thinking.
Stanner at the wheel, they drove back toward the hills and the water tank.
They had to drive around cars in the streets, some on fire, some with their inhuman drivers just sitting there dead behind the wheel; many of them with their engines still running, lodged in ditches and crumpled against telephone poles, figures slumped inside, all jumbled. Some of the crawlers were dead beside the road.
“It’s like the Rapture after all, for them,” Bert said.
Twice they drove around dead, altered animals—an eight-legged deer, four of its legs a mix of mechanical and human; a raccoon with a set of metal antennas instead of a head. Both quite dead, lying where they’d fallen en route.
Stanner pulled up beside a big red extended-cab pickup truck with its car alarm keening, rammed into the cinder block wall of a car parts store, in the dusty road shoulder. He stared at the dead man inside. Yeah, about his size. Same hair color. He put the SUV in park, but left it running as he got out.
“There a reason for this stop?” Bert said. “I want to see if Lacey—if she and the kids are okay.”
“Yeah, I’ve got a boy up there,” Harold said.
“If they’re okay, they’ll stay okay,” Stanner said, taking the gas can from the back of the SUV. He shook it; gas sloshed inside, maybe a fifth full. Enough. “If they’re not okay, we can’t help them now. This is something I’ve got to do. It’s for Shannon as much as for me.” He walked over to the truck, opened the door, and reached into the dead man’s pocket. Found his wallet and took it. Then he took out his own wallet, removed the money, put the wallet, replete with credit cards and ID, in the man’s rear pants pocket. It was an unpleasant feeling, to be in a dead man’s pocket. But it wasn’t his first time.
He sloshed gasoline on the dead man’s head, took out the lighter he’d brought along, lit the gasoline, and stood back. He let it burn for a few minutes. The alarm just kept keening and wailing as if the car was reacting to its driver’s burning.
“Oh, Jesus, Stanner,” Harold said, watching the body burn.
After enough of the guy had burned, Stanner dragged the body from the cab of the truck—the guy’s lower half wasn’t burning yet—and rolled it in the dust of the road shoulder till the fire went out. A lot of the guy’s face came off in the process, and Stanner’s stomach lurched at the sight. When that was done, he tossed the rest of the gas on the front of the truck and lit it on fire.
Then he returned to the SUV, bringing the gas can with him. He got into the SUV, and they started off again, leaving the burning truck behind, the alarm fading in the distance.
“What the hell was that about?” Harold asked.
Stanner glanced at him, then looked back at the road. “Just trying to cover my tracks. I’m still on the outside with the Facility. It’s going to take time to square with them. So in the meantime, it’s better they think I’m dead.”
“I hope it works out for you and Shannon,” Bert said. After a moment, when they drove around the body of a fat man in a black suit, he murmured, “Despite all the deaths, it’s funny how things have worked out. I mean, the worst didn’t happen. It’s like serendipity. Especially one part: Harold here, turning up, when we needed him.”
“What are you saying?” Harold asked, looking at Bert with his eyebrows raised. “That God brought me in here?”
“Is that so impossible? It’s grace.”
“You tell those kids that God was here,” Harold said. “You tell my boy Waylon. The kid had to shoot his own mother, for god’s sake.”
Bert nodded. “I know what you mean. And if God helps us, why didn’t he stop the Holocaust, and why didn’t he help when the Chinese soldiers forced children to execute their own parents in Tibet? But see, God can’t help most of the time. God can only put a little spin on the ball, offer a little help here and there, where conditions allow. A lot of wise men have said it’s up to us to do God’s work in the world ourselves. But now and then, where conditions allow, that divine influence—I mean, I hesitate to use that word
God
, with all the old associations it has—now and then that influence nudges us along, brings us together so we can help ourselves. We have to be alert to those possibilities. Anyway, that’s my—”
“Look out!” Harold yelled, pointing at the road ahead.
Stanner slammed on the brakes. A naked girl was lying in the middle of the road. They stopped the car and Bert went to look at her. He picked her body up and laid it gently on the grass in front of a house nearby, and put his coat over her. He came back to the SUV and got behind the wheel, continued on their way.
“I remember that girl from the high school,” Bert said. “Very popular girl, name of Cleo. Poor kid.”
Other people—survivors, more than they’d dare hope for—were coming out of their houses, looking around in stunned wonder. Stanner knew they were human—because their confusion was so authentic.
They drove up the hill, up the gravel road, into the darkness, to the stony parking lot below the dark bulk of the water tower. Some trucks and cars were parked here. But that didn’t prove the kids were okay.
They honked their horn, in the signal they’d arranged, three longs and a short. No immediate response. They got out, silently, and walked toward the water tower—and a crowd of kids came rushing around the metal curve of the tank, from the far side of it. There was Adair, there was Waylon, and Donny, and Siseela. No Shannon.
Bert ran, seeing his Lacey. Ran into her arms.
But Shannon . . .
Stanner searched through the kids milling—laughing, crying— around the water tank.
“Has anyone seen . . .”
There she was. Behind the others. Coming toward him. Allowing him a smile. Then coming into his arms. For a moment or two, like a little girl again.