She stared at him.
“It caught fire in the atmosphere,” he went on. “Our radars picked it up, and we figured its point of impact. Only it veered toward Inferno, as if…the pilot was trying to make it closer to town before he crashed. The craft started going to pieces. There’s not much left, just a mangle of stuff that’s too hot for anybody to get close to. Anyway, the sphere is part of it—and I want to find out exactly what it is, and why that didn’t burn up too.”
She couldn’t speak. But this was the truth; she saw it in his face. “You didn’t answer Gunny’s question,” Rhodes said. “Is your little girl mentally retarded? Does she have epilepsy? Any other condition?”
Condition, Jessie thought. What a diplomatic way of asking if Stevie was out of her mind. “No. She’s never had any—” Jessie stopped, because Stevie was lurching out of the hallway on rubbery legs, her arms dangling at her sides. Her head swiveled slowly from right to left and back again, and she came into the room without speaking. Jessie stood up, ready to catch her if the child stumbled again, but Stevie’s legs were working better now. Still, she walked strangely—putting one foot precisely in front of the other as if treading on a skyscraper’s ledge. Jessie stood up, and Stevie stopped with one foot poised in the air.
“Where’s the black ball, honey? What’d you do with it?”
Stevie stared at her, her head cocked slightly to one side. Then, with slow grace, the other foot touched the floor and she continued on, gliding more than walking; she approached a wall and stood before it, seemingly absorbed by the pattern of sunlight on the paint.
“Not in there, Colonel.” Gunniston walked into the den. “I checked the closet, the chest of drawers, under the bed, the toybox—everything.” He glanced uneasily at the little girl. “Uh…what do we do now, sir?”
Stevie turned, a motion as precise and sharp as a dancer’s. Her gaze fixed on Gunniston and stayed there, then moved to Rhodes, finally latching on to Jessie. Jessie’s heart fluttered; her daughter’s expression revealed only a clinical curiosity, but neither emotion nor recognition. It was how a vet might look at an unfamiliar animal. Stevie began that strange gliding walk again, her knees still wobbly, and she went to a series of framed photographs on a shelf at the bookcase. She looked at each in turn: one of Jessie and Tom alone, one of the family taken on vacation in Galveston a couple of years ago, one of Ray and herself on horseback at the state fair, two more of Tom’s and Jessie’s parents. Her fingers twitched, but she didn’t attempt to use her hands. She moved past the bookcase and the television set, halted again to gaze at a wall-mounted painting of the desert that Bess Lucas had done—a painting she’d seen a hundred times, Jessie thought—and then she continued a few steps more to the doorway between the den and kitchen. She stopped; her right arm lifted, as if battling gravity, and she used her elbow to feel the doorframe.
“I don’t really know,” Rhodes replied finally. He sounded as if all the breath had been punched out of him. “Honest to God, I don’t.”
“I do!” Jessie shouted. “My daughter needs a doctor!” She started toward the telephone. The Inferno Health Clinic was a small white stone building a couple of blocks away, and Dr. Earl Lee—Early—McNeil had been Inferno’s resident physician for almost forty years. He was a crusty hell-raiser who smoked black cigars, drove a red dune buggy, and drank straight tequila at the Bob Wire Club, but he knew his business and he’d know how to help Stevie too. She picked up the receiver and started to dial.
A finger came down on the disconnect button.
“Let’s wait just a minute, Dr. Hammond,” Rhodes told her. “Okay? Let’s talk about—”
“Get your hand off the phone. Now, damn you!”
“Colonel?” Gunniston said.
“Please.” Rhodes grasped the receiver. “Let’s don’t bring anyone else into this yet, not until we know what we’re dealing—”
“I said I’m calling Dr. McNeil!” Jessie was furious, close either to tears or to slapping him across the face.
“She’s moving again, Colonel,” Gunniston told him, and this time both Rhodes and Jessie broke off their argument.
Stevie was gliding to another wall, crisscrossed with sunlight. She stopped before it, stood, and stared. She lifted her right hand, turning it back and forth as if she’d never seen a hand before; the fingers wiggled. Then she touched her bloody nose with her thumb and regarded the blood for a few seconds. Looked at the wall again. Her hand moved forward, and her thumb drew a vertical line of blood on the beige wall. Her thumb went back for more blood, drew a second vertical line a few inches to the right of the first.
More blood. A horizontal line cut the two verticals.
“What the hell…?” Rhodes breathed, stepping forward.
A second horizontal line formed a neat grid on the wall. Stevie’s blood-smeared thumb went to the center space, and made a small, precise O.
Her head turned. She looked at Rhodes and glided back from the wall, one foot placed behind the other.
“Your pen,” Rhodes said to Gunniston. “Give me your pen. Hurry!”
The captain gave it over. Rhodes clicked the point out and walked to the wall. He drew an X in the lower right space.
Stevie stuck her thumb up a nostril and drew a red O in the center left space.
Jessie watched the game of tic-tac-toe in tortured silence. Her gut was churning and a scream pounded against her gritted teeth. This creature with a bleeding nose wore Stevie’s skin, but it was not Stevie. And if that were so, what had happened to her daughter? Where was Stevie’s mind, her voice, her soul? Jessie’s hands clenched into fists, and she thought for a terrible second that the scream was going to escape and when that happened it would be all over. She trembled, praying that the nightmare would snap like a bad heat spell and she would be in bed with Tom calling that breakfast was ready. Dear God, dear God, dear God…
Stevie—or the thing that masqueraded as Stevie—blocked the colonel’s win. In the next move, Rhodes blocked Stevie’s win.
Stevie stared at Rhodes for a moment, looked again at the grid, then back to Rhodes. The face rippled, unfamiliar muscles working. A smile moved across the mouth, but the lips were stiff and unresponsive. She laughed—a whuff! of air forced through the vocal cords. The smile broadened, pushing the lips aside to show Stevie’s teeth. The face, beaming, became almost the face of a child again.
Rhodes cautiously returned the smile and nodded his head. Stevie’s head nodded, with more deliberate effort. Still smiling, she turned away and glided into the hall with her slow wirewalker’s gait.
Rhodes’s palms were sweating. “Well,” he said, his voice tense and raspy, “I believe we’ve got a situation here, don’t you, Gunny?”
“I’d say so, sir.” Gunniston’s spit-and-polish veneer was cracking. His heart boomed and his knees shook, because he’d realized the same thing as Colonel Rhodes: the little girl was either totally freaked out, or she was no longer truly a little girl. And why or how something like that could be was far beyond his logical, four-square mind.
They heard a voice—an exhalation of breath that made a voice, a weirdly chirring sound like wind through reeds: “Ahhhhhh. Ahhhhhh. Ahhhhhh.”
Jessie was the first one to Stevie’s room. Stevie—not-Stevie—was standing before the bulletin board; her—its—right hand was extended, the finger pointing to the construction-paper alphabet letters. “Ahhhhhh. Ahhhhhh,” the voice continued, trying to grasp a remembered sound. The face contorted with the effort of enunciation. Then: “AhhhhA. A. A.” Pointed to the next letter. “Beeeee. Ceeeee. Deeeee. Eeeeee. Effff. Geeeee.” There was consternation over the next.
“H,” Jessie said softly.
“Chah. Achah. H.” The head turned, eyes questioning.
My God, Jessie thought. She grasped the doorframe to keep from falling. An alien with a Texas accent, wearing my little girl’s skin and hair and clothes. She was about to choke on a scream. “Where’s my daughter?” she said. Her e
yes brimmed. “Give her back to me.”
What appeared to be a little girl was waiting, pointing to the next letter.
“Give her back to me,” Jessie repeated. She lunged forward before Rhodes could stop her. “Give her back!” she shouted, and then Jessie had the figure’s cool arm and was spinning it around, looking into the face that used to be her daughter’s. “Give her back!” Jessie lifted her hand and slapped the face hard across the cheek.
The Stevie-creature staggered back, its knees almost collapsing. It kept its backbone straight and rigid, but its head bobbed from side to side for a few seconds like one of those absurd kewpie dolls that nod in the rear windshields of cars. It blinked, perhaps registering pain, and Jessie watched, newly horrified, as the red blotch of her palm came up on Stevie’s skin.
Because it was still her daughter’s flesh, even though something else had crawled inside it. Still her daughter’s face, hair, and body. The not-Stevie touched the red palmprint on her cheek and swiveled toward the alphabet letters again; she pointed insistently at the next.
“I,” Colonel Rhodes offered.
“Iyah,” the creature said. The finger moved.
“J.” Rhodes glanced quickly at Gunniston as the letter was laboriously repeated. “I think it’s figured out the sounds are the base of our language. Jesus, Gunny! What have we got here?”
The captain shook his head. “I wouldn’t care to guess, sir.”
Jessie stared at the back of Stevie’s head. The hair was the same as it had always been, only wet with sweat. And in it were flecks of…what were they? Her fingers touched the hair, and picked out a small piece of something pink, like cotton candy. Insulation, she realized. What were pink bits of insulation doing in Stevie’s hair? She let the piece drift to the floor, her mind clogged and beginning to skip tracks. Her face had gone gray with shock.
“Take her out, Gunny,” Rhodes commanded, and Gunniston led Jessie from the bedroom before she passed out.
“K,” Rhodes continued, responding to the moving finger.
“Kah. K,” the creature managed to say.
Outside, the two trucks—one hauling a crane and the other marked ALLIED VAN LINES—turned off Republica Road and passed by Preston Park on Cobre Road, heading for the desert site where something that had once been a machine had burned to a blue-green ooze.
12
What Makes the Wheels Turn
THE THREE O’CLOCK BELL rang. “Lockett and Jurado!” Tom Hammond called out. “You two stay in your seats. The rest of you can take off.”
“Hey, man!” Rick Jurado already had his white fedora on and had started out of his desk at the back left corner of the sweltering classroom. “I didn’t do anythin’!”
“I didn’t say you did. Just stay seated.”
Other kids were gathering their books and leaving. Cody Lockett suddenly stood up from his desk at the room’s right rear corner. “Hell with this! I’m goin’!”
“Sit down, Lockett!” Tom rose from his own desk. “I just want to talk to the both of you, that’s all.”
“You can talk to my south end while I’m headed north,” Cody answered, and the group of Renegades who sat protectively around him broke into laughter. “Class is over, and I’m gettin’ out.” He strode toward the door, with the others following.
Tom stepped into his path. The boy kept coming, as if he were going to try to slam right through. Tom stayed where he was, braced for the impact, and Cody stopped about three feet short of a collision. Right behind him was a hulking two-hundred-pound senior who always wore a beat-up football helmet painted in mottled camouflage colors; his name was Joe Taylor, but Tom had never heard any of the others call him any name but “Tank.” And right now Tank was staring holes through him with deep-socketed black eyes in a craggy face only a mother could love—a demented mother, at that. Cody said, “You movin’, or not?”
Tom hesitated. Rick Jurado had settled back into his seat, smiling thinly. Around him sat several Hispanic and Indian kids who belonged to the Rattlesnakes. The other seniors who weren’t members of either “club” had already hurried out, and Tom was alone with the beasts. I’ve started this, he thought; I’ve got to finish it. He looked directly into Cody Lockett’s haughty gray eyes and said, “Not.”
Cody chewed on his lower lip. He couldn’t read the teacher’s face, but he knew he hadn’t done anything wrong. Lately. “You can’t flunk me. I’ve already passed the final.”
“Just sit down and hear me out. Okay?”
“Hey, I’ll hear you out, man!” Rick called. He hooked an empty desk toward him and propped both feet atop it, leaning back with his arms crossed. “Lockett don’t understan’ no English no how, Mr. Hammon’,” he said, deliberately thickening his accent.
“Shut your face, spitball,” Tank rumbled.
At once several Rattlesnakes were on their feet; a skinny, curly-haired boy sitting next to Rick leapt up. He wore a red bandanna around his forehead and five or six small crucifixes on chains around his neck. “Fuck you, fat boy!” he shouted in a thin, reedy voice.
“Your mother and sister.” Tank showed him a middle finger.
The Hispanic boy almost flung himself over the rows of desks to get at Tank, who outweighed him by at least seventy pounds—but Rick’s hand shot out and grasped his wrist. “Easy, easy,” he said quietly, his smile still in place and his gaze aimed at Cody. “Hang back, muchachos. Pequin, you settle down, man.”
Pequin, whose real name was Pedro Esquimelas, was trembling with fury, but he allowed himself to be restrained. He sat down, muttering obscenities in gutter Spanish; the other Rattlers—among them Chris Torrez, Diego Montana, and Len Redfeather—remained standing and ready for trouble. Tom could hear disaster knocking at the door; if he didn’t keep control of this, the classroom could erupt into a battlefield. But at least Pequin had quieted. Tom knew the boy had a fiery temper that got him into a fight almost every day; his nickname was appropriate, because a pequin was a small chile pepper that would make the devil reach for Pepto-Bismol.
“How about it?” Tom asked Cody.
The boy shrugged. In his locker was the tie rack he’d finally finished; he wanted to get that home and work a couple of hours for Mr. Mendoza, but otherwise he wasn’t in a hurry. “If I stay, they stay.” He nodded at his entourage—six tough ’Gades: Will Latham, Mike Frackner, Bobby Clay Clemmons, Davy Summers, and Tank.
“Okay. Just sit down.”
Cody sauntered back to his desk. The others followed his lead. Tank leaned one massive shoulder against the cinder-block wall and cleaned his fingernails with an unbent gem clip.
“I’m gettin’ old waitin’, amigo,” Rick announced.
Tom walked to his desk and sat on its edge. On the blackboard behind him was the outline of a Robert E. Howard Conan story he’d asked them to read for a discussion of laws in a barbarian culture. Very few had done it. “Tomorrow’s your last day of school,” he began. “I wanted to—”
“Oh, madre!” Rick moaned and pulled the fedora down over his eyes. Pequin put his head on his desk and snored noisily. The ’Gades watched in stony silence.
Tom’s shirt was wet, sticking to his back and shoulders. The fan was only blowing hot air around. Tank suddenly burped; it was like a howitzer going off, and brought laughter from the ’Gades and silence from the Rattlers. Tom tried again: “I wanted to tell you that—” but his voice snagged. None of them were even looking at him. They didn’t give a shit, had already retreated behind masks of boredom. Dammit to hell! he thought. I might as well try to lasso the damned moon as get them to listen! But he was mad now—mad at their bored poses, mad at whoever was supposed to fix the screwed-up air conditioners, mad at himself for being so stupid. He felt the walls closing in on him, a rivulet of sweat running down his neck; a surge of anger grew and swelled, thrashed mightily—then broke its bounds and rushed through him.
His hand reacted to it first. He picked up the Governments in Transition textbook from hi
s desk and threw it with all his strength across the room.
It whacked against the back wall like a gunshot. Pequin jumped and lifted his head. Rick Jurado slowly pushed the fedora up off his eyes. Tank stopped cleaning his nails, and Cody Lockett’s gaze sharpened.
Tom’s face had reddened. “So that gets your attention, huh? A loud noise and a little destruction? Does that make the wheels turn?”
“Yeah,” Cody answered. “You should’ve thrown that fuckin’ book against the wall the first day of class.”
“Tough guys—and girl,” Tom said, glancing at Maria Navarre, who sat with the Rattlers. “Real tough. Lockett, you and Jurado have got a lot in common—”
Rick snorted with derision.
“A lot in common,” Tom continued. “Both of you have outdone each other acting tough and stupid so you can impress the losers sitting around you right now. I’ve seen your tests. I know the difference between bullshitting and holding back. Both of you could’ve done a whole hell of a lot better if you’d—”
“Man, you’ve got runnin’ off at the mouth!” Cody interrupted.
“Maybe so.” Rivers of sweat were flowing from Tom’s armpits. He had to keep going. “I know both of you could’ve done a lot better. But you pretend you’re dumb, or bored—or just fucked up.” The use of that word cemented their attention. “I say you’re both cowards.”
There was a long silence. Lockett and Jurado’s expressions were blank. “Well?” Tom prodded. “Come on! I can’t believe two tough guys like you can’t come up with some sharp—”
“Yeah, I’ve got somethin’ to say.” Cody stood up. “Class dismissed.”
“Okay, go ahead! Get out! At least Jurado has the guts to stay and listen!”
Cody smiled coldly. “You’re walkin’ a mighty fine wire, mister,” he said. “I’ll sit and listen to your shit durin’ school hours, but when that bell rings it’s my time.” He shook his head, and his skull earring threw a red glint of sunlight. “Man, who do you think you are? You think you know all the answers, and you can just spout ’em out? Mister, you don’t know a jackdamn thing about me!”