Nightcrawlers (The Twilight Zone) - Plot

Plot

Just prior to a number of various customers coming into a diner during a heavy rain, a state trooper, Dennis Wells, known to the workers, comes in and describes a massacre at a local motel. Then after a near-collision between two cars on the road just outside, a Vietnam veteran named Price comes into the diner. 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 Wells, 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, condemning 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 apparently 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 trooper, who believes Price is a dangerous troublemaker who may be responsible for the motel massacre, pulls his gun on Price, but Price melts it with his mind. The trooper knocks Price unconscious but it is too late. 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 and the trooper, before vanishing again. Bob is wounded but survives.

Bob realizes 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.