The Creepers (Book 2): From the Past (17 page)

“But what about the Creepers?”

“St. Louis is an empty nest,” Sophie
said

“A what?”

“She’s talking about the flood. Area was
washed out years ago. One of the reasons the old city is so green now. The
Mississippi crested her banks and washed it all away, leaving her fertile silt
behind. I’m sure there are some of them out there, but the herd has been
thinned for sure, stranger. One of the reasons I took this route back. Anyone
lying in wait for us won’t know about this one.”

“Baylor had a hell of a time with this
part of the track. I remember when I was little.”

“He did, girl, that he did, but there’s
never a moment the man isn’t thinking.”

“Have you ever tried to establish any
trade this way? There’s got to be people on the river still.”

“There are, but we should hope to avoid
them. They’re not natural,” Jamie said, looking over her shoulder. “I’m heading
down to put a few more coals in the box and get this bitch up to speed. No need
to waste the light. You should get some shut eye, stranger.”

“I think I’ll do that.”

Sophie sat, bouncing Randal on her lap
while Jamie kept the train moving at a good clip. The ride had smoothed out
some, and the jostles and clatters were few and far between. Herds of deer
scattered as they rode past. Every so often, a Creeper would appear, lost and
hopeless, and they continued right past as if they were unimportant signs along
the road.

“When they’re gone, what’s next?” Sophie
asked.

“Don’t know if they’ll ever be gone,
girl.”

“They will one day.” Sophie stared into
Randal’s chubby face. “They’ll see to it. We won’t have to worry about them
anymore.”

“I suspect you’re right, but that
doesn’t mean we let our guard down.”

“Never,” Sophie said, flashing the
handgun tucked into her waistband. “Never that again.”

“Ever.”

“Jamie, do you think they’re okay?”

“They’re probably in a bit of trouble,
but knowing them two I think they’re okay. Don’t think about them until you
have to, girl. Think about that boy and nothing else.”

“I’m trying.”

“Me too.”

“Do you remember after it happened? When
we were alone in the woods and we heard him screaming that song?”

Jamie smiled. A chuckle escaped her.
“How could I forget. It’s one of the reasons I ran out there. I knew anyone
singing Guns and Roses that terrible couldn’t be all that bad. Insane but not
bad.”

“I think about that day often. Baylor on
top of the train screaming his lungs out, challenging the world. He wasn’t
afraid, and I think seeing that saved me. I know it saved us, but that saved
me, too.”

Jamie nodded without a word.

“I think if I didn’t see him, didn’t
hear him, I’d be lost like the ones that had us.”

“They don’t have us anymore, girl. I saw
to that.”

“For so long I couldn’t think about
anything when the night came. So long, Jamie.”

“I know, dear.”

“And now, now that I have something,
someone to occupy that space, it was good, after a year of not knowing, and now
not knowing again.” Sophie cried while Randal laughed, oblivious to the true
nature of her torment. She wanted Bobby, wanted him near her, wanted his arms
around her. She’d hardly had a chance to know him.

“Dear,” Jamie began then stopped.

“I don’t know if I can do it, Jamie. I
can’t go another year without knowing. How can we come back without him? What
will we be coming back to? We could end up in the same spot. I can’t leave
Randal behind. That’s out of the question.” Sophie’s emotions came roaring out
her little body and she didn’t stop them. She’d consumed their rawness for far
too long. It was time to let go.

“You won’t have to, dear. Baylor won’t
let that happen. He’ll die before he lets that happen.”

“What if he does? What if they do?” She
sobbed.

“They won’t.”

“How can you know? How can any of us
know?” Sophie didn’t have a lick of blind faith in her. She learned long ago
you trusted only what you wouldn’t shoot and nothing else. But something in
Jamie’s eyes gave her pause and it wasn’t the tears.

“Because the crazies are always the
smartest ones, dear. The crazies have learned to let go, and that’s what makes
them dangerous, and Baylor’s crazier than them all.” She tossed coals into the
box and started to hum the tune that Baylor loved to hum when he was most at
peace.

“Howard…”

Howard heard her but he rolled to the
side. He was exhausted. He felt her squirming on top of him, trying to get him
to wake up.

“Howard…”

He felt her trying to pinch his arms
through the thick material of his coat. He pushed her away but kept his eyes
closed. He only wanted another few minutes.

“Howard… Howard… Howard…”

He felt her pinch again. This time he
opened his eyes.

Howard… Howard… Howard…

He realized he hadn’t been hearing her
voice out loud as he blinked away the remnants of a dream. He hadn’t been
hearing it at all. Jennifer’s pleas existed only in the expanse of gray matter
between his ears.

Jennifer was gone. Her eyes were
distant, glazed over, dead.

She had her mouth clamped on his arm.
Her fingers groped and raked and she growled like an animal.

Howard… Howard… Howard…

“No,” he screamed. He wrenched his arm
free and kicked her away.
No, not her, not anymore,
he thought. His
heart raced. He screamed again and again until his throat was raw. She stumbled
over the roots of the tree. She growled and moaned. All sense of the person who
used to occupy her body was gone.

Howard… Howard… Howard…
It was like his
father said. He could see the cold reality of it now as the world ended for
him. He could sense the broken repeat button. The imprints of her last thought.
She’d called out to him at the end and he didn’t respond. He slept through her
death. His fists shook and his face trembled between the sobs.

Howard… Howard… Howard…

Jennifer’s corpse managed to move beyond
the tangle of roots and come for him again. She cocked her head at an awkward
angle, biting the air, snapping her jaws, clacking her teeth. The wound was
like a depressing badge on her shoulder. Her award for failure to survive.

Howard pushed her away. “No, get away,
go away, stop!”

Jennifer stopped.

Howard broke down. Fell to his knees and
lost the connection. Jennifer’s corpse stumbled towards him again. He threw her
away. She tripped over the roots and landed on her back. Howard pulled the
metal spike from his belt and held it in shaking hands. He raised it and
waited. He was far too unstable to get control of her again. His mind was a
wreck.

“Help! Someone help me! Help!” he
screamed. The words stopped, replaced by meek whimpers, by the utter defeat,
the loss too real for him to comprehend.

He lifted the spike and watched her dead
eyes stare through him. Those once beautiful eyes. The eyes he’d fallen in love
with, along with her long black hair, her pale skin. Howard dropped the spike.
He shoved her back again and cried until there was nothing left inside him.

He felt the foundations of the life he’d
imagined with her crack apart. The love crumbled, slid into the sea of his
broken mind, lost. All was lost. He’d did everything his father taught him to.
He cleaned and dressed the wound and cleaned it again and again. He’d kept her
hydrated and in good spirits. He’d kept her warm. He’d watched her through the
night, but it had not been enough. Her own life’s blood had become toxic. And
now she’d become one of them—a casualty in humanity’s last war.

Howard’s screams stopped as he tried to
catch his breath.

She came for him again and he pushed her
back harder, driving his legs into her and putting all his weight behind the
effort. She slammed into the wet ground, and bits of thick fog swirled around
her.

Howard… Howard… Howard…
her dead mind
called. Her mind that could not comprehend it was dying, it was decaying. A
swarm of microscopic horrors were in control of her now. Little terrible things
that mocked him with the puppet that had been his love.
Howard… Howard…
Howard…
they said. They moved her mouth. Made her reach for him.

He’d done all he could to keep her
alive. He’d have done anything in that moment to give her life.

“I would give anything, Jennifer,
anything for you to come back to me! I don’t know how!” He sobbed. He hadn’t
even been awake, hadn’t been there when the fiery spark of life left her. She’d
been alone in that deep dark night, so alone, while he slept. “I would give
everything . . . everything . . . my love.”

Howard grabbed his pack. He watched her
struggle to regain her footing, watched the things inside of her do a poor job
of being human. He picked up the spike and put it back in the sheath on his
belt.

Howard… Howard… Howard…

He couldn’t bear to bring himself to end
her. He tried. He thought about trying. He held the rifle now. It would be
easy. A reflex. It would be the proper thing to do. Like he’d done for so many
before her, like he’d done for his father, but he couldn’t bear to do it.

Howard did the only thing he could bring
himself to at that moment. Howard ran, ran as fast as he could. Anything to put
space between them, to break the range.

Howard… Howard… Howard…

He ran faster, faster still.

* * * * *

As he escaped her cries, he heard
others. Many more popped into his brain like little empathic bombs. He kept
going. The fog rolled thick around him. Every so often he’d hear a moan close
by, followed by a shuffle, and then the mental intrusion. He screamed each
time. His thoughts were a minefield of raw emotion.

The rain started to fall as he found the
last remnants of a weather-eaten roadway. Rusted hulks of cars abandoned long
ago were now homes to various wildlife and greenery. The bones of the dead made
fine nesting spots. More and more intrusions jabbed at his mind. He heard them
calling out, crying out, he heard the infection’s little masterminds exploring
neural pathways, but really those were his father’s thoughts. The words of a
dead man.

He tripped and stumbled just like them,
trying to escape, but only succeeding in drawing more and more of them along.
He could hear them gathering, growing in number. He could not escape them. Each
breath burned his lungs. He ran harder, heart pounding unmercifully in his
chest.

He ran screaming.

And the dead followed.

The ends of them came and went. Their
last gasps repeated. He felt like his head was about to split apart, but if it
did? Would he become like Jennifer? No, that was impossible. He was immune from
the infection, but not from losing his mind. He’d seen it happen before. It
would become too much, this living, this hanging on, clinging to life, and the
end would seem such a sweet release. He found the rifle in his mouth. The sight
scraped his teeth. He gagged.

“Keep screaming like that and I’ll do
the job for you.”

Howard tried to block it out. He tried
to settle into some kind of calm. But whatever sense of himself he had was
gone. All he could focus on was her clacking teeth, her eyes, those lost eyes
staring right through him.

“You could save me the bullet and do it
yourself. That might be the better idea. Either way, stop screaming.”

Howard couldn’t. He couldn’t stop. He
couldn’t even react as the owner of the voice stepped out of the fog and
knocked him flat on his back. Swirling gray stretched to a thin point as the
voices of the dead begged in sorrow. A face hovered above him.

“Are you deaf?” the man said, raising a
long rifle.

“No.” Howard held his hands up.

“You going to scream like that again?”
The man had his head tilted to the side, listening, gauging the sucking sounds
of Creepers plodding through the mud.

“I can’t promise anything.”

The man pressed the barrel of the rifle
into Howard’s forehead. “All your screaming has gathered them. Hear them out
there. They’re coming. Probably woke the whole damn city.”

“It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters.”
Howard searched for definition in the man’s face, but everything was fuzzy. He
wasn’t even sure the man was really there.

“Damn.” The man flipped his rifle around
like a club and crushed the skull of a rotting Creeper that broke through the
fog.

Howard rolled away as the bloated body
crashed down and popped like a water balloon, spilling putrescence all over the
pine needle covered ground. Howard tried to reach out. He tried to work his
gift, but there were too many. His frayed sanity trembled, making it impossible
to feel them clearly.

“They’re coming.” The man turned and
grabbed Howard by the collar and ran through the thick fog.

“My rifle,” Howard shouted.

“Should’ve thought about that before you
started calling the whole damn state down on us. Get moving,” the man finished
in a whisper.

Howard felt them all anew. It was Los
Angeles all over again. It was the shift. The moment that scarred him forever.

He followed the man through the thick
mud and up a slope. The sun lingered somewhere beyond the blinding sheet of
gray. As Howard tried to keep pace with the man, his broken mind started to
search his memories for normalcy. What it dredged up was not pleasant. Howard
was in his early teens. He’d been playing in the garden, listening to snippets
of the dead. He’d always heard them, for as long as he could remember, but that
day he heard them in a new way.

Up until that day, when they went out
into the city to clear the Creepers away, he’d simply be there. Just his
presence would be enough. That day in the garden he suddenly felt them all. He
felt the raw emotions. He felt the loss. His father tried to explain it away as
a hormonal shift due to his age. Howard refused to believe it. His father, none
of them, knew, and it was a constant sticking point all his life. They didn’t
know the depths of what he saw and heard. He almost jumped from the roof that
day. He remembered old Tinson telling him it would get better. That it had to.

That was enough to stop him. But now…

“Here. Hurry up if you want to live.”
The man stood beneath a massive tree, uncoiling what looked like a vine, but as
Howard got closer he realized it was a length of rusted chain. The man climbed
up the chain and out of sight.

Howard heard him far above, but he
couldn’t gauge the distance because of the fog.

“Better hurry,” the man called.

Howard wanted to tell the man he wasn’t
afraid of them. He wanted to tell the man that they had nothing to fear with
him there, but he couldn’t get a grip on them. Their voices cried out as he
hurried up the chain.

Fifty feet up, Howard parted the last of
the thick boughs and pulled himself up onto the floor of a room. Arms burning
from the climb, Howard did not rest as he reeled the length of chain up and
coiled it near the narrow trapdoor. He closed it over, looking around in
wonder. It was all fog and trees and rain and now this.

The intricacies of the treetop fort
amazed Howard. It looked as if the man had painstakingly constructed his safe
haven over the course of many years. With the energy of youth and the
adrenaline of fear, he found the perfect location to build his home. The slope
of the mountain prevented any Creeper from ever coming within a hundred yards.
Steep and slick most of the year, the angle of the mountainside defeated their
lack of motor skills. The man’s little slice of heaven was the closest thing to
the perfect defensible position.

The high angled roof was alive with moss
and the sound of soft rain. Mottled greens and dark brown and long stringy
vines of ivy hung from the ceiling and walls. Thick white roots poked through
the beams, pointing like glistening fingers. The fort smelled of sweet damp
earth.