Stinger

"Found her walkin' right in the middle of the street, a block south of the church," Curt Lockett explained. "Just about knocked her flyin', but I put on the brakes in time." Sheriff Vance regarded Ginger Creech again; she was standing barefoot in his office, and from the door she'd left bloody prints. Must've slashed her feet on broken glass, he figured. Lord, she's ready for the funny farm!

Ginger's eyes stared straight ahead, a few remaining curlers drooping in her hair, her face a pale mask of dust.

"Swear to God, she scared shit out of me," Curt said, glancing at Danny Chaffin. The deputy made another circle of Ginger. "I was on my way to the liquor store. Know where a man can get a drinki" "Liquor store's locked up," Vance told him, rising from his chair. "That was one of the first things we did." "Reckon so." Curt rubbed his mouth and gave a nervous smile; he felt as if he were shaking to pieces, and finding Ginger Creech walking like a brain-blasted zombie hadn't helped his jitters any, either. "It's just... y'know, I kinda need somethin' to take me through the night." From the open collar of his wrinkled white shirt hung his newly discovered necktie.

"Gingeri" Vance waved his hand in front of her face. She blinked but did not speak. "Can you hear mei" "I'm lookin' for my boy," Curt said. "either of you seen Codyi" Vance had to laugh. He felt like he'd gone ten rounds with Celeste Preston thirty minutes ago, when he'd driven over to the Chaffin house on Oakley Street to pick up his deputy. He'd wound up explaining about the spaceship to Vic and arleen Chaffin too, and arleen had begun crying and moaning about it being the end of the world. Vance had returned Celeste to her car, and the last he'd seen of her she was driving westward in that big yellow Cadillac. Probably headin' for her hacienda and gonna hide under her bed, he thought. Well, nobody wanted her hangin' around here anyway!

"Curt," he said, "if you didn't sleep twenty hours out of the day, you'd be dangerous. Your boy raised hell at the Warp Room around nine-thirty, started a gang fight that put a bunch of kids in the clinic - which, with all these hurt people we've got, Doc McNeil sure as shit don't need." "Cody... in a fighti" Time was all screwed up for Curt. He glanced at the clock, saw it had stopped at two minutes after ten. "Is he all righti I mean..." "Yeah, he's okay. Busted up some, though. He headed over to the clinic." Which meant a doctor's bill, Curt thought. Damned fool kid! He didn't have the sense God gave a bug!

"Gingeri It's ed Vance. Danny, hand me that flashlight on the desk." He gripped it, flicked it on, and aimed it at the woman's sightless eyes. She flinched just a fraction, her arms stiffening at her sides. "Gingeri What happenedi How come you're - " She gave a terrible shudder, and her face strained as if its muscles were about to burst through the flesh.

"She's having a fit!" Curt squalled, and backed across the woman's bloody tracks toward the door.

Her gray lips trembled and opened. "'The... Lord... is my shepherd, I shall not want,'" she whispered. "'He maketh me lie down in green pastures. He... He leadeth me beside still waters...'" Tears broke and ran, and she stumbled on through the Twenty-third Psalm.

Vance's heart was pounding. "Danny, we'd better get over to Dodge's house. I sure as hell don't like the looks of this." "Yes sir." Danny glanced at the glass-fronted cabinet that held the assortment of firearms, and Vance read his mind because he was thinking the same thing.

"Break out a shotgun for me," Vance said. "a rifle for you. Get 'em loaded." Danny took the key ring from him and unlocked the cabinet.

"'I will... fear no...'" The words gripped in her throat. "'Fear no... fear no...'" She couldn't make herself say it, and fresh tears streamed down her face.

"Curt, I want you to get Ginger to the clinic. Find early and tell him - " "Hold on!" Curt protested. He wanted nothing to do with this. "I ain't a deputy!" "You are now. I'll swear you in later. Right now I want you to do what I say: take Ginger over there and tell early how you found her." He took the shotgun Danny gave him and put a few extra shells in his pockets.

"Uh... what do you think happenedi" Curt's voice trembled. "To Dodge, I meani" "I don't know, but we're gonna find out. Ginger, I want you to go with Curt. Okayi Can you hear mei" " 'Fear no...'" She squeezed her eyes shut, opened them again. " 'Fear no...'" "ed, I don't know about this," Curt said. "I'm not deputy material. Can't you get somebody else to take her overi" "Oh, Christ!" Vance shouted as his own raw nerves stretched toward the breaking point. Ginger jumped and whimpered and retreated from him. "Here! I'll pay you to do it!" He dug into his back pocket, brought out his wallet, and flipped it open. The only thing in there was a five-dollar bill. "Go on, take it! Go buy yourself a damned bottle at the Bob Wire Club, just move your ass!" Curt's licked his lower lip. His hand burrowed into the wallet and came out five dollars richer.

Vance gently took Ginger's arm and led her out. She came along docilely, her feet leaving bloody prints and her strained whisper of "'Fear no... fear no...'" sending shivers down the sheriff's backbone. Danny locked the door behind them and Curt guided the madwoman to his Buick, got her inside, and drove away toward the clinic, the tailpipe dragging and scratching sparks off the pavement.

Vance drove the patrol car while Danny sat in silence on the passenger side with his hands clamped like vises around the rifle. Dodge Creech's house, made of sand-colored stucco with a red slate roof, stood near the corner of Celeste and Brazos streets. The front door was wide open. The sheriff and deputy could see the faint glow of candles or lamps within the house, but there was no sign of Dodge. Vance pulled the car to the curb, and they got out and started up the pebbled walk.

about eight feet from the door, Vance's legs seized up. He'd seen one of Ginger's slippers lying on the dry lawn. a coldness was writhing in his belly, and the doorway looked like a mouth, ready to crunch down on him as he entered. From a great distance he thought he heard brutal young voices taunting Burro! Burro! Burro!

"Sheriffi" Danny had stopped at the door. "You okayi" In the dim violet light Vance's face glittered with sweat.

"Yeah. Fine." He bent over and rubbed his knees. "Just old football knees. Sometimes they flare up on me." "I didn't know you ever played football." "It was a long time ago." He was perspiring everywhere: face, chest, back, ass. a cold, oily sweat. His career as a sheriff had been limited to breaking up fights, investigating traffic accidents, and hunting down lost dogs. He'd never had to fire a gun in the line of duty, and the idea of going into that house and seeing what had made Ginger Creech go crazy made his balls crawl as if they were packed full of spiders.

"Want me to go on ini" Danny asked.

Yes, he almost said. But as he stared at the doorway, he knew he had to go in first. He had to, because he was the sheriff. Besides, he had a shotgun and Danny had a rifle. Whatever it was in there, it could be shot full of holes just like anything else. "No," he said huskily. "I'll go first." It took all his flabby willpower to start walking again. He entered the Creech house, flinching as he cleared the hungry doorway. a loose floorboard mewled under his right boot.

"Dodge!" he called. His voice cracked. "Dodge, where are youi" They walked toward the light, through a foyer and into the living room, where a couple of oil lamps threw shadows and dust floated in layers from floor to ceiling.

"Sheriff, look at that!" Danny had seen it first, and he pointed to the jagged-edged hole in the floor. Vance approached it, and he and Danny stood over the hole peering down into darkness.

Squeak squeak. Squeak squeak.

Both of them looked up at the same time, and both of them saw it.

a figure sat in the rocking chair in the far corner of the room, slowly rocking back and forth, back and forth. a scatter of National Geographics lay on the floor beside the chair.

Squeak squeak. Squeak squeak.

"D-Dodgei" Vance whispered.

"Howdy," Dodge Creech said. Most of his face was in shadow, but he was still wearing his yellow-and-blue-plaid coat, dark blue slacks, pearl-gray shirt, two-toned loafers. His red lick of hair was greased back on his pate, and his hands were folded in his lap as he rocked.

"What's... what's goin' oni" Vance asked. "Ginger's about out of her - " "Howdy," the other man said again, still rocking. There was no color in his face, and his eyes glittered in the light of the two remaining lamps that hung from the ceiling's wagon-wheel fixture. The wagon wheel was crooked. Squeak, squeak went the chair's runners.

His voice, Vance thought: his voice is funny. Raspy, like air through the bass pipes of a church organ. It sounded like Dodge's voice, yes, but... different too.

The glittering eyes were watching him carefully. "You're a person of authority, ain't youi" the voice asked, with a humming of sinus cavities.

"I'm ed Vance. You know me. Come on, Dodge, what's this all abouti" His knees were freezing solid again. Something was wrong with Dodge's mouth.

"ed Vance." Dodge's head tilted slightly to one side. "ed Vance," he repeated, as if he'd never heard the name before and he was making sure not to forget it. "Yessir, I knew they'd send a person of authority. That'd be you, wouldn't iti" Vance looked at Danny; the boy was about a hair away from jumping out of his shoes, his hands clutching the rifle to his chest. The cadence of Dodge Creech's voice, the flat phrasing, the drawl: all of it was the same, yet there was that low church-organ undertone, and a rattling like loose phlegm in Dodge's throat.

"So let me pose a question to you, pardner," the figure in the rocking chair said. "Who's the guardiani" "The... guardiani" "I didn't stutter. Who's the guardiani" "Dodge... what're you talkin' abouti I don't know anythin' about a guardian." The rocking ceased. Danny gasped and took a backward step, and he might have plunged into the hole if he hadn't checked himself.

"Maybe you don't at that," the man in the chair replied. "Maybe you do, and maybe you're handin' me bullshit on a platter, ed Vance." "No, I swear it! I don't know what you're talkin' about!" The thought hit him like a bullet between the eyes: This isn't Dodge anymore.

The figure stood up. Its clothes made a stiff crackling noise. Dodge Creech seemed two or three inches taller than Vance remembered, and much larger around the shoulders too. There was something funny about the way he moved his head - something like the jerky motion of a puppet on strings, guided by an unseen hand. The figure walked toward Vance, with that strange puppet's gait, and Vance backed away; it stopped, looked from Vance to Danny and back again, and then the white face with its wormy gray lips smiled - a teeth-clenched salesman's smile.

"The guardian," he repeated, and the light gleamed off teeth that were no longer teeth, but thousands of close-packed, blue metallic needles. "Who is iti" Vance couldn't seem to get his breath. "I swear... don't know..." "Well sir, maybe I believe you." The figure in the garish sport coat slowly rubbed its thick, colorless hands together, and Vance saw that the fingernails were about an inch long, made of that same blue-tinged metal and edged with tiny saw-blade-like teeth. "You bein' a person of authority and all, I ought to believe you, righti" the thing in Dodge's skin asked.

Vance had lost his voice.

Danny's back hit the wall, and a framed picture of Dodge receiving an award at an insurance salesmen's convention clattered to the floor.

"So I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. See, I've come a long way, and I've already spent a lot of time and effort." The metal-nailed hands kept rubbing together, and Vance realized that a swipe from one of them could rip his face off right down to the skull. "I can find the guardian myself if I have to." The head suddenly whipped to the left with violent motion, and the thing's gaze followed the helicopter through a broken window as it circled the pyramid. "I don't like that thing. Not the least bit. I don't want it flyin' around my property." Its attention returned to Vance, and the sheriff saw that there was no life in Dodge's eyes; they looked wet and dead, like false eyes stuck into a grinning mask. "But I'll tell you true, ed Vance: if I don't find out who the guardian is real soon, I'm gonna have to lay down the law. My kind of law." "Who... what are youi" Vance rasped.

"I'm an..." The figure paused for a few seconds. "an exterminator. and you're a big fat bug. I'll be around, ed Vance, and I want you to remember me. Okayi" Vance nodded, a drop of sweat hanging from the tip of his nose. "Oka - " One of Dodge's hands rose. The fingers probed the left eye and wrenched it from its socket. There was no blood, just strands of oozing fluid. The eyeball went into the needle-filled mouth and burst apart like a hardboiled egg as the jaws clamped down.

Danny moaned, fighting against a faint, and madness clawed at Vance's brain.

"When I want you, I'll find you," the creature said. "Don't try to hide. You can't. We square on that, pardneri" "Sq-sq-square." The word came out in a choke.

"Good bug." and then the figure turned away from Vance, took two long strides, and dropped into the hole in the living-room floor.

They heard it thump to the bottom after a long fall. There was a quick scuttling sound. Then silence.

Danny screamed. He sprang to the edge of the hole, lifted his rifle and began firing into it, his face contorted with horror. Gunsmoke whirled through the dusty air, and spent cartridges flew. He came to the end of his bullets, but he kept frantically trying to feed shells into the chamber.

"Stop it," Vance said, or thought he had. "Stop it, Danny. Stop it!" The deputy shuddered and looked at him, his finger still jerking on the trigger, his nose running, and the wind whooshing in his lungs.

"It's gone," Vance told him. "Whatever it was... it's gone." "I saw it - I saw it looked like Dodge but it wasn't no way no way in hell was it Dod - " Vance gripped his collar and shook his hard. "Listen to me, boy!" he roared, right in Danny's face. "I don't want you goin' as crazy as Ginger Creech, you hear mei" He felt a wetness at his crotch and knew he'd peed his pants, but right now he had to keep Danny from losing his mind. If the boy went over the edge, Vance would be right behind. "You hear mei" He gave another hard shake, which served to loosen the cobwebs of shock in his own brain as well.

"Wasn't Dodge. Wasn't," Danny mumbled. Then, with a gasp of breath: "Yes sir. I hear you." "Go to the car." The boy blinked dazedly, still staring into the hole. "Go on, I said!" Danny staggered out.

Vance swung his shotgun up and aimed it at the hole. His hands shook so hard he figured he couldn't hit a barn door in broad daylight, much less an alien who ate eyeballs and had a thousand needles for teeth. Because that's exactly what it had been, he realized: an alien, dug itself a tunnel from the pyramid across the river and crawled inside Dodge Creech. My property, it had said. and what was that shit about a guardian, and how come it could speak english with a Texas accenti

He backed away from the hole, his nerves sputtering. Tendrils of dust and gunsmoke broke, drifted, connected anew around him. He felt like a scream trapped in concrete, and right then he swore that if he got out of this, God willing, he was going to lose fifty pounds by Christmas.

One step out of the house and he turned and ran to the patrol car, where Danny Chaffin sat gray-faced and staring at nothing.