Crawlers Read Online Free PDF Page A

dock!” Waylon said.
    “Whoa,” Mason said. Which was more or less what he said to almost anything.
    “See that shit down there,” Waylon said, pushing through a crowd of ogling college students, right up against the yellow tape. “That thing down there’s glowing, man.”
    Adair looked and shook her head. “I don’t think so. It’s just the lights on the dust and stuff. You can’t make out much of anything.”
    “It’s a fucking UFO,” Waylon said. “I’m telling you. But they’re gonna say it’s a fucking weather balloon.”
    “Huh,” Mason said skeptically, gazing at the broken-backed dock. He had his trenchcoat on, was scratching meditatively in his scraggly overgrown soul patch. He had floppy pants hanging off his ass and an
Enjoi Skateboards
T-shirt under the long, greasy coat. Mason was almost thirty-three but dressed fourteen years too young. “A UFO. I dunno, dood.”
    Adair said, “If we could just get closer . . .”
    “Wouldn’t, were I you—that stuff ’s probably radioactive,” said an owlish college student with large round glasses, lank blond hair parted down the middle. Campus Republican at Diablo Valley CC, Adair supposed. He wore the kind of shirt that should have a pocket protector, and he did have the pompous air. “Best let the authorities handle this.” His smug condescension was familiar to her, and then she recognized him: Larry Gunderston, a senior when she’d been a freshman, college student this year.
    “Riiiiiiight,”
Waylon said, snorting. “Trust authority! Buy Enron!”
    Then it was Waylon who was looking past Gunderston, at the sky, and Adair who was saying, “What are you looking at?”
    “Shit. They’re here.”
    “Who?”
    “Majestic 12. It’s all laid out in this book I got. I mean, it’s like . . . even in a PC game,
Deus Ex
—”
    “That’s all, like, urban myth,” Adair said.
    Mason bobbed his head at that. “Yeah, huh. I saw this thing on the Discovery channel, at my aunt’s house. Most of that shit isn’t true, that black helicopters shit—”
    That was the moment the black helicopter landed.
    Beating the air with its blades, rattling the asphalt with blown leaves, the chopper came down on the weedy driveway of the abandoned, boarded-up restaurant. There was a designation on its tail, D-23, but otherwise it was dark and unmarked. The men who got out, however, wore uniforms.
    “U.S. Air Force,” Waylon muttered. “I’m telling you—probably the team they send out whenever there’s a crashed saucer.”
    “Actually,” a black deputy sheriff said, smiling broadly as he walked along the yellow tape toward them, “it’s a crashed satellite, what I hear.” He glanced toward the water. “Funny thing is, I had two reports it crashed out in the middle of the bay. So how’d it get clear over here?”
    Waylon was staring at the three uniformed men who’d arrived in the chopper. They were talking to the cops, pointing up the road. One of them was definitely carrying a Geiger counter.
    “What else I hear,” the deputy said, “it’s all melted half to slag, but you can see that’s what it is, a satellite kinda deal. NASA on the side and everything. All they’ll say about it is, ‘It’s one of the smaller ones.’ ” His broad smile shone toothily in the dimness; he was a big guy, straining his uniform, and he was sweating though the wind had risen, brisk now. Adair thought she recognized him from the D.A.R.E. program at school. She looked at his name tag. SPRAGUE.
    “
I
remember you,” Adair said. “What up, Deputy Dawg.”
    Mason shot her a
Be cool, I’m holding!
look.
    But Deputy Sprague smiled at her. “Hey, I remember—you were the one calling me that. Where was it, over at Quiebra High, right? How those Cougars doing?”
    “They suck.”
    “That’s what I heard. Listen, you kids need to get on home. Nothing cool going to happen now, we all just waitin’ around till they can get a salvage rig out here, and that’s