"Cody Lockett! Are you alive?" Daufin's voice came from above.

"Yeah," he rasped. He knew she hadn't heard him, so he tried again, louder: "Yeah! I guess... I wasn't careful enough, huh?"

"Can you"-her memory banks raced for the terminology, and she leaned over the gaping hole but couldn't see him-"climb out?"

"Don't think so. Got hold of a pipe." He kicked out again, still could find no walls. The pipe made an ominous, stressed creaking, and more gobbets of dirt hissed down. "I don't know what's under me!"

The first bite of panic sank deep. His hands were slick with sweat. He tried to pull himself up, to swing a leg onto the pipe for support, but his bruised ribs daggered him with pain. He couldn't get his leg up, and after three futile attempts he stopped trying and concentrated on conserving his strength. "I can't get out!" he shouted.

Daufin measured the sound of his voice at being, in Earth distance, approximately thirteen-point-six feet down, though the echoes gave a distortion of up to three inches more or less. She hung in the doorframe and looked around the floorless room, searching for anything she might use to reach him. The only things left were a few pictures hanging on the cracked walls.

"Listen to me!" Cody called. "You've got to find somebody to help! Understand?"

"Yes!" The knot of muscle in her chest labored furiously. She saw the pattern now: Stinger was searching for her by invading these human abodes and seizing whoever it found within. "I'll find help!"

She turned from the doorway and ran down the steps. Then she was on the street, running toward the center of town, fighting the planet's leaden gravity and her own clumsy appendages. Cody squeezed his eyes shut to keep out the beads of sweat. If he let his fingers relax just a fraction, he would slide off the pipe and plummet down G.o.d only knew how far. He didn't know how long he could hold on. "Hurry!" he called up, but Daufin had gone. He hung in darkness, waiting.

36 Mouth of the South

"Mother!" Noah Twilley shouted as he came in the front door. "We're going to the clinic!" He had left an oil lamp burning on a table in the foyer, and now he picked it up and headed toward the staircase, "Mother?" he called again. Ruth Twilley had remained in her white bedroom, the bedcovers pulled up to her chin while he'd gone with Tom Hammond to the clinic. He reached the stairs and started up. They ended after six risers. Noah stood gripping the broken banister and peering into a dark chasm that had taken down the rest of the staircase. Below, in the depths of the hole, was a little flicker of fire. A broken lamp, Noah realized. Puddle of oil still burning.

"Mother?" he called; his voice cracked. His light ran along fissures in the walls. Ruth Twilley, the Mouth of the South, was silent. The ruined staircase swayed and moaned under Noah's weight, and he slowly retreated to the bottom of the steps.

Stood there, numbed and shaking. "Mother, where are you?" It came out like the wail of an abandoned child.

The lamplight gleamed off something on the floor. Footprints. Slimy footprints, coming down the stairs from that awful hole. Smears and splatters of a gray, snotlike substance trailed along the steps and through the hallway toward the rear of the house. Somebody needs a Kleenex, Noah thought. Oh, Mother's going to blow a gasket about this mess! She was upstairs in bed, with the sheet pulled to her chin. Wasn't she?

He followed the trail of slime drips into the kitchen. The floor was warped and crooked, as if something huge had destroyed the very foundations of the house. He shone the lamp around, and there she was. Standing in the corner by the refrigerator, her white silk gown wet and gleaming, strands of slime caught in her red hair and her face a pale gray mask.

"Who's the guardian?" she asked, and her eyes had no bottom. He couldn't answer. He took a step back and hit the counter.

"The little girl. Explain." Ruth Twilley drifted forward, the glint of silver needles between her fleshy scarlet lips.

"Mother. I... don't..." His hand spasmed and opened, and the oil lamp fell to the floor at his feet. The gla.s.s broke, and streamers of fire snaked across the linoleum. She had almost reached him. "Who's the guardian?" she repeated, walking through the fire. It was not his mother. He knew there was a monster behind Ruth Twilley's slick face and it was almost upon him. One arm came up, and a hand with metallic, saw-blade fingernails reached toward him. He watched it coming like the head of a sidewinder, and he pressed back against the counter but there was nowhere to go.

His arm brushed something that clattered on the Formica. He knew what it was, because he'd left it out to spray in the corners. You never knew what might creep in from the desert, after the lights were out.

She was a step away, and her face pressed toward his. A little thick rivulet of slime oozed from her chin.

Noah's hand closed around the can of Raid on the countertop, and as he picked it up he flicked the cap off and thrust the nozzle at her eyes. His index finger jabbed down on the spigot. White bug-killing foam jetted out and covered the Ruth Twilley face like a grotesque beauty mask. It filled her eyes, shot up her nostrils, ran through the rows of needle teeth. She staggered back, whether hurt or just blinded he didn't know, and one of her hands swung at Noah's head; he lifted his arm to ward it off, was struck on the shoulder as if by a brick wrapped up in barbed wire. The shock of pain knocked the Raid can from his fingers, and as he was thrown against the kitchen wall he felt warm blood running down his hand.

She whirled like a windup toy gone berserk, crashing over the kitchen table and chairs, caroming off the refrigerator, her serrated nails digging at her own face and eyes. Noah saw gobbets of gray flesh fly, and he realized she was trying to strip the skin to the bone. She made a roaring sound that became the scream he had heard every day of his life, four or five times a day, like a regal command issued from the white bedroom: "Noooaaahhhhh! "

Whether the thing in his mother's skin knew that was his name or not didn't matter. In that sound Noah Twilley heard the slam of a jail cell's door, forever locking him to a town he hated, in a job he hated, living in a hated house with a crazy woman who screamed for attention between soap operas and "Wheel of Fortune." He smelled his own blood, felt it crawling over his hand and heard it pattering to the floor, and as he watched the red-haired monster crashing around the kitchen he lost his mind as fast as a fingersnap.

"I'm here, Mother," he said, very calmly. His eyegla.s.ses hung by one ear, and blood flecked the lenses. "Right here." He walked four steps to a drawer as the creature continued to flail its face away; he opened the drawer and pulled out a long butcher knife from amid the other sharp utensils. "Noah's right here," he said, and he lifted the knife and went to her.

He brought the knife down in the side of her throat. It slid into the false flesh about four inches before it met resistance. He pulled it out, struck again, and one of her hands caught him across the chest and hurled him off his feet against the counter. He sat up, his gla.s.ses gone but the bent-bladed knife still clenched in his hand, blood rising through the rips in his chest. His lungs gurgled, and he coughed up crimson. The monster's hands were swiping through the air, seeking him, and Noah could see that she had clawed her eyes and most of the facial flesh away. Metallic veins and raw red tissue jittered and twitched in the craters. Chemicals burned her, he thought. Good old Raid, works on all kinds of insects. He stood up, in no hurry, and walked toward her with the knife upraised and the merry shine of madness in his eyes.

And that was when the thing's spine bowed out and there was a crackling sound of bones popping. The back of her gown split open and from the dark, rising blister at the base of her backbone uncoiled a scaly, muscular tail that ended in a ball of spikes.

Noah stopped, staring in stupefied wonder as the burning oil flamed around his feet. The tail whipped to the left, smashing through a cupboard and sending pieces of crockery flying like shrapnel. The monster was crouched over almost double, the network of muscles and connective tissues damp with oozing lubricants at the base of the tail. The ball of spikes made a tight circle, bashed a rain of plaster from the ceiling, and whirled past Noah's face with a deadly hiss.

"My G.o.d," he whispered, and dropped the knife.

Her eyeless face angled toward the noise. The half-human, half-insect body scuttled at him. The hands caught his sides, saw-blade nails winnowing into the flesh. The tail reared back, curving into a stately arc. Noah stared at it, realized that he was seeing the shape of his death. He thought of the scorpions in his collection, pierced with pins. Revenge is mine, sayeth the Lord, he thought. He gave a strangled laugh. The tail jerked forward with the velocity of an industrial piston, and the ball of spikes smashed Noah Twilley's skull into a thousand fragments. Then the tail began whipping back and forth in quick, savage arcs, and in another moment the quivering ma.s.s gripped between alien hands no longer resembled anything human. The tail kept slashing away pieces until all movement had ceased, and then the hands hurled what was left against the wall like a sack of garbage.

The blind thing flailed its way out of the kitchen, following the odor of its spoor, returned to the broken staircase, and dropped into darkness.

37 Bob Wire Club

"Set 'em up again, Jacky!" Curt Lockett banged his fist on the rough-topped bar. The bartender, a stocky gray-bearded man named Jack Blair, looked at him from down the bar where he was talking to Harlan Nugent and Pete Griffin. The light of kerosene lanterns hung in Jack's round eyegla.s.ses, and above the lenses his brows were as s.h.a.ggy as caterpillars.

"Almost a half bottle gone, Curt," Jack said in a voice like a bulldozer's growl. "Maybe you ought to pack up your tent."

"h.e.l.l, I wish I could!" Curt replied. "Wish I could pack up and light out of this s.h.i.thole and by G.o.d I wouldn't never look back!" He pounded the bar again. "Come on, Jacky! Don't cut your ole buddy off yet!"

Jack glared at him for a few seconds. He knew how Curt acted with more than a half bottle lighting his wick. Over at a table, Hal McCutchins and Burl Keene were smoking cigarettes and talking, and others had come and gone. The one thing everybody in the Bob Wire Club had in common was that they had nowhere else in particular to go, no wives waiting for them, nothing to do but kill some time drinking at one-fifteen in the morning. Jack didn't care much for Curt Lockett, but the man was a steady customer. He came down the bar, opened the half-drained bottle of Kentucky Gent-the cheapest brand in the house-and poured him another shotgla.s.s full. When Jack started to draw it away, Curt gripped the bottle's neck in a lockhold.

"Mighty thirsty," Curt said. "Mighty, mighty thirsty."

"Keep the f.u.c.ker, then," Jack said, giving in to the inevitable.

"Yessir, I seen it!" Pete Griffin went on with what he'd been saying. He was a leathery cowboy with blue eyes sunken in a wrinkled, sunbaked face. "d.a.m.n thing's blockin' the highway 'bout five miles north." He swigged from his lukewarm bottle of Lone Star beer. "I was about to hit the pedal and try to tear ol' Betsy right through it, and then I seen somethin' else." He paused for another drink. Ol' Betsy was his rust-eaten red pickup truck, parked in the sandy lot out front.

"What'd you see?" Jack prodded.

"Dead things," Pete said. "I got out and took me a closer look. There was burned-up rabbits and a couple of dead dogs lyin' right where the thing went into the ground. You can see through it, and it don't look as st.u.r.dy as a spiderweb, but... well, I seen somethin' on the other side too. Looked to have been a truck, maybe. It was still smokin'. So I got in ol' Betsy and decided to mosey back thisaway."

"And I'm sayin' ain't such a thing possible," Harlan contended, his voice slurred from four boilermakers. "Cain't such a thing be solid!"

"It is, by G.o.d! h.e.l.l, my eyes ain't gone yet! That thing's solid as a stone wall and it burned them animals up too!"

Curt laughed harshly. "Griffin, you're crazy as a three-legged toadfrog. You cain't see through anythin' solid. I'm dumb as a board, and even I know that!"

"You drive on up there and try to get through it, then!" Pete's face bristled with indignant anger. "I'll come along behind and sweep up your ashes-not that that boy of yours would want 'em!"

"Yeah!" Harlan gave a dry chuckle. "We'll put them ashes in a whiskey bottle for you, Curt. That way you can rest in peace."

"Rest pickled is more like it," Jack said. "Curt, why don't you go on home? Don't you care about your boy?"

"Cody can take care of himself. Always has before." Curt swigged down the whiskey. He was feeling okay now. His nerves had steadied, but he was sweating too much to get drunk. The Bob Wire Club was stiflingly hot without power to run the fans, and Curt's shirt was plastered to his skin. "He don't need me, and I sure as h.e.l.l don't need him."

"If I had a family, I'd sure be with 'em at a time like this." Out of habit, Jack took a rag and cleaned the bartop. He lived alone in a trailer behind the Bob Wire Club, and he'd kept the place open after the electricity had gone out because he couldn't have slept anyway. "Seems only right a father ought to be with his boy."

"Yeah, and a wife ought to be with her husband too!" Curt snapped. It had come out of him before he'd had time to check it. The others stared at him, and he shrugged and sipped from the bottle. "Just forget it," he said. "Cody ain't a kid no more."

"Well, still don't seem right," Jack continued, following the swirls of his rag. "Not with that d.a.m.n b.a.s.t.a.r.d sittin' across the river and all h.e.l.l breakin' loose."

"I hear there's an air-force colonel in town," Hal McCutchins said. "He was in the chopper that went down, but he got out okay. Sumb.i.t.c.h flew out of that pyramid and knocked it down like it was made out of paper!"

"Thing's a s.p.a.ceship." Burl Keene, his bulging belly quivering against the table's edge, reached for a handful of peanuts from a bowl. "That's the talk. Thing's come from Mars."

"Ain't n.o.body on Mars." Jack stopped cleaning. "The scientists proved that. No, that thing's come from somewhere a long ways off."

"Scientists don't know nothin'," Burl countered, chomping on peanuts. "h.e.l.l, they don't even believe there was a Garden of Eden!"

"Mars is nothin' but rocks! They took pictures on Mars and that's all you can see!"

Curt scowled and tipped the bottle to his mouth again. Whether the black pyramid had brought invaders from Mars or cat people from Pluto didn't matter much to him; as long as they left him alone, he didn't care. He listened as Jack and Burl went on about Mars, but his mind was on Cody. Maybe he ought to find out if the boy was all right. Maybe he was a fool for sitting here thinking that Cody could handle himself in every kind of jam. No, he decided in the next second, Cody was better off on his own. The boy was a d.a.m.n idjit sometimes, but he was tough as nails and he could make do. Besides, he was probably up at the apartments with that gang of his. They all hung thick as thieves and took care of each other, so what was there to worry about?

Besides, rough treatment was good for Cody. That made a boy into a man. It was the way Curt's father had raised him, bullying and beating. Cody would be stronger for it. Yeah, Curt thought. His knuckles bleached around the bottle's neck. Strong, just like his old man. He couldn't remember the last time he'd talked to Cody without blowing his top. Maybe it was because he didn't know how to, he thought. But the kid was so headstrong and wild, n.o.body could get through to him. Cody walked his own path, right or wrong. But sometimes Curt thought he saw Treasure in Cody's face, clear as day, and his heart ached as if it had been kicked. There was no use in thinking these thoughts. Nothing good came out of them, and they made Curt's head hurt. He looked into the amber bottle, at the liquid that lay within, and he smiled as if seeing an old friend. But there was a sadness in his smile, because full bottles always ran empty.

"Maybe they've got caves," Burl Keene was saying. "Under Mars. Maybe they just went into their caves when the pictures got took."

Curt was about to tell him to stop shoveling the horses.h.i.t when he heard the bottles clink together on the shelves behind the bar.

It was not a loud sound, and neither Jack nor Burl stopped their jabbering. But Curt had heard it clearly enough, and in another few seconds he heard them clink again. He set his own bottle on the bar and saw a tremor on the whiskey's surface. "Jack?" he said. Blair paid no attention. "Hey, Jack!" Curt said, louder.

Jack looked at him, fed up with Curt Lockett. "What is it?"

"I think we're havin' a-"

The Bob Wire Club's floor suddenly buckled upward, timbers squealing as they snapped. The two pool tables jumped a foot in the air, and billiard b.a.l.l.s were flung out of their racks. Bottles and gla.s.ses crashed down behind the bar. Jack was knocked off his feet, and Curt's barstool went over. He landed on his back on the floor, and under him he could feel the boards pitching and heaving like a bronco's shoulder blades.

The floor's motion eased, then stopped. Curt sat up, stunned, and in the lamplight saw a horrible thing: the last of the Kentucky Gent spilling from the overturned bottle. Harlan and Pete were on the floor too, and Burl was coughing up peanuts. Harlan got to his knees and shouted, "What hit us?"

There was a bang like a sledgehammer on wood. Curt heard the squall of nails popping loose. "Over there!" He pointed, and all of them saw it: about ten feet away, a board was being knocked upward from the floor. The second blow sent it flying up to hit the ceiling, and Curt caught sight of a slim human hand and arm reaching through the cavity. Another timber was knocked loose, then the fingers of that hand gripped the edge of a third board and wrenched it down. Now there was a gap large enough for a person to crawl through, and about three seconds later a figure began to emerge from the floor.

"Holy Jesus and Mary," Jack whispered, standing up behind the bar with sawdust in his beard. The figure got its head and shoulders through, then worked its hips free. A long pair of bare legs pulled out, and the figure rose to its feet.

It was a slender and pretty blond girl, maybe sixteen years old, wearing nothing but a lacy bra and a pair of pink panties with "Friday" st.i.tched across the front. She stretched to her full height, her ribs showing under her pale skin and her hair shining wetly in the lamplight. Her face was as calm as if she came up through barroom floors every night of her life, and her gaze went from one man to the next with cold attention.

"I'm dead," Burl gasped. "I've gotta be dead."

Curt tried to stand up, but his legs weren't ready. He knew who she was: her name was Laurie Rainey, and she worked afternoons at the Paperback Kastle near the bakery and came in sometimes for grape jelly doughnuts. She was a pretty thing, and he liked to watch her chew. He tried to stand again, and this time he made it all the way up.

She spoke. "Ya'll are gonna tell me about the little girl," she said, in a thick whangy Texas accent with a rattling metallic undertone. Her skin gleamed, as if she were coated with grease. "Ya'll are gonna tell me right now."

None of the men spoke, and no one moved. Laurie Rainey looked around, her head slowly racheting as if her neck and spine were connected by gear wheels.

"The little girl," Jack repeated dumbly. "What little girl?"

"The one who's the guardian." Her eyes found him, and Jack had the sensation of peering into a snakepit. There were things slithering around in there that he would not care to know. "Ya'll are gonna tell me, or I'm done bein' nice."

"Laurie..." Curt's mind stuttered like a blown-out engine. "What were you doin' under the floor? "

"Laurie." The girl's head notched toward him. "Is that the guardian's name?"

"No. It's your name. Christ, don't you know your own name?"

The girl didn't reply. She blinked slowly, processing the information, and her mouth tightened into an angry line. "What we have here," she said, "is a failure to communicate." She turned to her left, walked about three strides to the nearest pool table, and placed her hands under its edge. With a quick, blurred motion, she flipped her hands forward and the pool table upended as if it had the weight of a corn husk. It came off the floor and crashed through the Bob Wire Club's front window into the parking lot, throwing gla.s.s all over Curt's Buick and Pete Griffin's pickup truck. She strode purposefully to the second pool table, balled up her right fist, and smashed it through the green felt covering. Then she picked up one end of the table and flipped it across the barroom into a couple of pinball machines. All the men could do was gawk, openmouthed, and Jack Blair almost fainted because he knew it took three men to lift those pool tables.

The girl's head racheted, surveying the destruction. There was no damage to her hand, and she wasn't even breathing hard. She turned toward the men. "Now we'll have us a nice little talk," she said. Burl Keene yelped like a whipped dog and scrambled for the door, but he was way too slow. The girl leapt forward and was on him even as he reached for the k.n.o.b. She caught his wrist and twisted it sharply. Bones popped, and their jagged edges ripped through the meat at Burl's elbow. He screamed, still thrashing to get out the door, and she wrenched at his broken arm and chopped a blow at his face with the edge of her free hand. Burl's nose exploded, and his teeth went down his throat. He fell to his knees, blood streaming down his mangled face.

Jack reached beside the cash register and pulled his shotgun from its socket. The girl was turning toward him as he c.o.c.ked the gun and lifted it. He didn't know what kind of monster she was, but he didn't plan on sharing Burl's fate. He squeezed the trigger.

The shotgun boomed and bucked. A fist-sized hole appeared in the girl's belly, just above the panty line, and bits of flesh and gray tissue exploded from her back. She was knocked off her feet, her body slamming against the wall. She went down, trailing gray slime.

"G.o.d A'mighty!" Curt shouted in the silence after the blast. "You done killed her!"

Hal McCutchins picked up a cue stick and prodded the twitching body. Something writhed in the belly wound like a ma.s.s of knotted-up worms. "Lord," he said in a choked voice. "You blew the h.e.l.l out of-"

She sat up.

Before Hal could jump back, the girl grabbed the cue stick and pulled it from his hands so fast his palms were scorched. She hit him across the knees with the heavy end of it, and as his kneecaps shattered Hal fell on his face.

She stood up, her belly oozing and a malignant grin stretching her mouth. Red lamplight glinted off a mouthful of needles. "Ya'll want to play rough?" the rattling voice asked. "Okey-dokey."

She slammed the stick's blunt end down on Hal McCutchins's head. The stick snapped in two, and Hal's skull broke open like a blister. His legs kicked in a dance of death, his brains exposed to the light.

"Shoot it!" Curt screamed, but Jack's finger was already pulling the trigger again. The creature was. .h.i.t in the side, spun around, and flung backward. A gray mist hung in the air, and Curt screeched because there was sticky wet matter on his shirt and arms. The creature fell over a table but righted herself and did not go to the floor. In the wound her ribs looked to be fashioned from blue-tinged metal, but a th.o.r.n.y coil of red intestines protruded from the hole. She advanced toward the bar with the splintered piece of cue stick in her hand.

Jack fumbled to shove another sh.e.l.l into the breech. Curt scrabbled on his hands and knees for cover under a table, and Harlan and Pete had mashed themselves against a wall like bugs trapped to a screen. Jack c.o.c.ked the shotgun and lifted it to fire. As he did, the creature hurled the cue stick like a javelin. Its sharp end penetrated Jack's throat and emerged from the back of his neck in a b.l.o.o.d.y spray, and Jack's finger twitched on the trigger. The buckshot tore the right side of the monster's face off, peeled away gray tissue and red muscle right down to the blue metallic cheek and jawbone. Her eye on that side rolled back to show the white. Jack clawed at his throat, strangling, and fell behind the bar.

"Get away! Get away!" Pete was shouting hysterically, but Harlan picked up a chair and flung it at the creature. The thing shrugged off the object and charged at him, gripping both hands around his neck and picking him up off the floor. She twisted his head as easily as a chicken's, and Harlan's face turned blue just before his neck snapped.

Pete fell to his knees, his hands upraised for mercy. "Please... oh G.o.d, don't kill me!" he begged.

"Please don't kill me!"

She tossed Harlan Nugent aside like an old sack and gazed down into Pete's eyes. She smiled, fluid running from the wound in her face, and then she gripped Pete's wrists, put her foot against his chest, and yanked.

Both arms ripped out of their sockets. The jittering torso collapsed, Pete's mouth still working but only a whisper of shock coming out.

Under the table, Curt tasted blood. He'd bitten his tongue to keep from screaming, and now he felt a darkness pulling at his mind like a deep, beckoning current. He watched as the creature held Pete Griffin's disembodied arms before her, as if studying the anatomy. Pete's fingers still clenched and relaxed, and blood pattered to the boards like a rainstorm.

I'm next, Curt thought. G.o.d help me, I'm next.

He had two choices: stay here or make a run for it. It wasn't much of a choice. He thrust his hand into his pocket and pulled out his car keys. They jingled, and he saw the monster's head rotate around on its neck at an impossible angle so that the face was where the back of the head ought to be. The single, inflamed eye found him.