Stinger

"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 eyeglasses, and above the lenses his brows were as shaggy 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." "Hell, I wish I could!" Curt replied. "Wish I could pack up and light out of this shithole and by God 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 shotglass 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 fucker, 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. "Damn 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 seei" 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 sturdy 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 God! Hell, 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 homei Don't you care about your boyi" "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 hell 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 damn bastard sittin' across the river and all hell 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. Sumbitch flew out of that pyramid and knocked it down like it was made out of paper!" "Thing's a spaceship." 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 nobody 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. "Hell, 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 damn 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 abouti



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, nobody 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 horseshit 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. "Jacki" he said. Blair paid no attention. "Hey, Jack!" Curt said, louder.



Jack looked at him, fed up with Curt Lockett. "What is iti" "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 balls were flung out of their racks. Bottles and glasses 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 usi" 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" stitched 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 girli" "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 floori" "Laurie." The girl's head notched toward him. "Is that the guardian's namei" "No. It's your name. Christ, don't you know your own namei" 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 glass 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 knob. 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 cocked 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.



"God 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 mass of knotted-up worms. "Lord," he said in a choked voice. "You blew the hell 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 roughi" 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 hit 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 thorny 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 shell 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 cocked 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 bloody 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 God, 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. God 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.



Curt shot out from under the table and raced for the broken window. He heard two thumps as she dropped Pete's arms, then the crash of a table going over. The thing was leaping after him. He jumped through the window like diving into a hoop, hit the ground on his hands and knees, and crawled madly toward the Buick. a hand caught the back of his shirt, and he knew she was right there with him.



He didn't think. He just did. His left hand gripped sand, and he twisted around and flung it into Laurie Rainey's savage, ruined face.



Her eye blinded, she tore the shirt off his back and swiped at him with her other hand. He ducked, saw the glint of little saw blades as her fingers flashed past his face. Curt kicked out at her, hit her in the breastbone, and pulled his leg back before she could grab it. Then he was up and running, and he reached his car and slid behind the wheel, his fingers jamming the key home.



The engine made that knocking noise like it did every time it didn't want to start, only this time it sounded like a fist on a coffin's lid. Curt roared, "Start, damn you!" and sank his foot to the floorboard. The tailpipe belched dark smoke, the engine's muttering turned into a growl, and the Buick jerked in reverse. But not fast enough: Curt saw the creature racing after him, coming like an Olympic sprinter across the Bob Wire Club's lot. He battled the wheel as the tires hit Highway 67's pavement, trying to get the car turned in the direction of Inferno. But the monster was almost to the car, and he forced the gearshift into first and shot forward to run her over. She jumped just before the Buick hit her, grabbing hold of the roof's edge and scuttling up onto it on her belly.



He swerved the car, trying to throw her off. She held on, and Curt laid on the accelerator. He turned on the headlights; in the green glow of the dashboard the speedometer needle edged past forty. He realized he was going north instead of south but he was too scared to do anything but keep his foot on the pedal. at fifty the vibration of the bald tires all but jerked the wheel out of his hands, and at sixty the old engine was wheezing at the gaskets.



Something slammed down over his head and a blister of metal bloomed in the roof. Her fist, he thought. She was trying to beat through the roof. another slam, and a second blister grew beside the first. Her hand crept into the car, fingers wrenching at the roof's joints. Screws popped loose. There was a shriek of rusted metal; she was bending the roof back like the lid of a sardine can. a crack zigzagged across the windshield.



Screaming at its limits, the engine hit seventy miles an hour and rocketed Curt along Highway 67.