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“came up for air” after hours of playing a computer game. There’d been a light rain, and he could smell the soil and the junipers in the damp freshness; and the stars looked sharply blue-white between the clouds. He let the little white dog tug him to the corner across the street from the cemetery, and immediately a movement that didn’t belong caught his eye.
    He peered into the slightly overgrown cemetery—a patch of rolling green below the protected watershed and the tract homes on the other three sides. Most of the tombstones were of the old standing granite variety, but there was a swath of the easy-maintenance stones flush with the ground, and it was through there that three figures were crawling along.
    At first he thought they must be coyotes, hugging the earth as they crept up on some jackrabbit, but as his eyes adjusted he saw that they were people. He couldn’t see how old or what type—though one of them appeared to be a mostly naked woman.
    Must be teenagers playing some kind of war game or . . . vandals or . . .
    He thought he ought to tell his dad—who’d probably call the police. There had been vandalism in the cemetery before. But he needed to get a closer look. And if the woman really was naked . . . He urged the dog across the street, past the low fence and into the cemetery. Buddy snuffled at a fresh grave, where silk flowers struck a bright note against the flat gray stone. Larry looked for the crawling people, couldn’t find them at first.
    There they were, about forty-five yards ahead of him, among the old tombstones now, emerging from behind a group of mossy, rain-streaked upright stones. It was like these people were crawling in triangular formation: the pasty old man—he looked vaguely familiar—taking point; the Chinese guy who ran the kung fu place at the mall, coming behind on the left side; and on the right, a young blond woman wearing only bra and panties, whose long hair was mucky with lawn clippings from dragging on the ground. They were creeping toward a big hole, which at first Larry took to be a waiting grave. But then he saw it was shaped more like a trapdoor, about three feet square, and a sudden spray of dirt came out of it, like a giant gopher was kicking soil out of the way. The three figures kept the same distance from one another, the same crawling formation, but still they moved in fits and starts, as if going from slow-motion to fast-action at random—and yet they did it all together.
Pulling
their way across the ground.
    Larry’s attempt to process what he was seeing went something like:
    Insane drug users

or maybe

Satan worship cult doing some ritual in the cemetery

or maybe they’re

People gone insane from some poison in the water

or

Murderers hiding their deed with this strange behavior

or could be

I had a computer-game overdose leading to epilepsy and I’m

hallucinating this

but

No, this is real—let’s go back to the Satan cult.
    He finally settled on a combination—
drug-addled insane Satan
cultists vandalizing the cemetery.
    He knew he needed to tell someone what he was seeing. But for one thing he found it difficult to stop looking at that girl, her long white nude legs pumping against the grass, as the three figures crawled silently toward that dirt-spouting hole. Larry backed up in revulsion and fear, half stumbling, but not able to look away.
    Then something made his stomach lurch—a woman’s head extended from the hole in the ground on a metal stalk. The head rotated, and she saw him. A middle-aged woman, her hair in disarray, her eyes blank but seeing him. He could
feel
her gaze; the feeling made his testicles retreat up against him.
    The other three, the crawlers, stopped dead—and turned all three heads at once, sharply, to look at him, as if they had seen him, too, when the head from the hole had seen him.
    Then they started moving again, changing course, coming toward him. Moving faster now. And their bodies were changing. To