Nightcrawlers is the third and final segment of the fourth episode of the television seriesThe Twilight Zone. It is taken from a short story of the same name by Robert R. McCammon, first published in the 1984 collection Masques.
Plot
Various customers come into a diner during a heavy rain, including a Vietnam veteran named Price. While Price is having coffee, he asks for a cold beer, but the cook, Bob, tells him that the diner does not have a liquor license. Price laments how a cold beer would taste good and a can of Budweiser appears in his hand.
After a confrontation with Dennis Wells, the local sheriff, who says he "wishes he could have gone" to Vietnam, Price is compelled to describe how he fled and abandoned his unit during the war, comdemning all of them to death in the jungles. He relays that he dreams one recurring nightmare in which his unit, "The Nightcrawlers", are hunting him down to exact revenge. Price explains that he and other soldiers were "sprayed with something" which relates to his mysterious condition.
He was endowed with the power of mind over matter (as were the others in his unit), which he demonstrates by materializing a t-bone steak on the grill. The sheriff, who believes Price is a dangerous troublemaker who may be responsible for a massacre at the nearby motel, pulls his gun on Price, but Price melts it with his mind. The sheriff knocks Price unconscious, and the diner begins to experience Price's nightmare: ghost-like soldiers materialize, destroy the diner and the surrounding parking lot and vehicles, and then force their way inside to kill Price, the sheriff and several other diners, before vanishing again.
Injured from a very real gunshot, Bob realises that Price's powers caused the massacre in the hotel as well as the events in the diner. As he is being taken away in an ambulance, he cries out a reminder to the others that Price said there were still four more soldiers with the same abilities.
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