Stinger by Robert R McCammon

Author:Robert R McCammon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2013-10-20T16:00:00+00:00

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“FLASHLIGHT,” THE COLONEL SAID, and Vance gave it to him.

Rhodes bent down, his knees on the basement’s cracked concrete floor, and aimed the light into the hole. There was a drop of about ten feet, and the red dirt glistened as if a huge snail had tracked over it.

“He was sittin’ in a rockin’ chair up there,” Vance repeated for the third time, motioning toward the hole in the den floor above their heads. “It, I mean. Whatever it was—’cause it sure as hell wasn’t Dodge.” He was whispering; his gut churned, and the skin had drawn tight at the back of his neck. But the flashlight beam had shown them that nothing was hiding in the Creech basement except a little green lizard over by the washing machine. “It knew English,” Vance said. “Spoke it like a Texan. How the hell could it know the way we talk?”

Rhodes shone the light around and saw a broken pipe, slick with some kind of gelatinous excretion. A bittersweet chemical smell—not unlike the odor of peaches rotting under a high summer sun—drifted up from the hole to sting his nostrils. “I’ve got two theories, if you want to hear them,” he said.

“Shoot.”

“One, that the creature monitored earth’s satellites and figured out our language. But that wouldn’t account for it speaking with a Texas accent. Two, that it somehow got into the man’s language center.”

“Huh?”

“It might’ve tapped the brain’s language center,” Rhodes explained. “Where an individual’s dictionary is stored. That way it would pick up the accent too.”

“Jesus! You mean…it like got into Dodge’s brain? Like a worm or somethin’?” Vance’s hand tightened around the loaded shotgun at his side. He and Rhodes had gone by the office to pick up the flashlight, and the sheriff also wore a shoulder holster with a fully loaded Snubnose .38 in it. Lying on the concrete within easy reach of Rhodes’s right hand was one of the repeating rifles from the sheriff’s gun cabinet.

“Maybe. I don’t know what the process might be, but it could’ve read the language center like a computer reading a program.” He angled the light in another direction, saw more gleaming red dirt and darkness beyond. “Whatever this thing is, it’s highly intelligent and it works fast. And one other thing I’m fairly sure of: it’s not the same kind of creature as Daufin.”

“How do you figure that?” He jumped; that damned green lizard was scurrying around again.

“Daufin had to learn our language from scratch, starting with the alphabet,” Rhodes said. “The other creature—the one Daufin calls Stinger—uses a much more aggressive process.” Understatement of the year, he thought. “I believe it killed Dodge Creech—or stored him somewhere—and what you saw was its simulation of him, just like that flying bastard simulated our helicopter.”

“Simulated? Is that like a mutant or somethin’?”

“Like a…a replicant,” Rhodes explained. “An android, for want of a better word, because I think part of that weird chopper was alive. Probably the thing you saw was alive too—but just as much of a machine as a living creature.

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