The Creepers (Book 2): From the Past

by Dixon, Norman

  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 tri
ed 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.

  The man was busy putting cords of wood into an old cast iron stove. Flakes of rust clung to it in patches.

  “How did you get that thing up here?” Howard asked, judging the object to be at least a few hundred pounds. It was the first thing he could settle on. Maybe it was the height that had his brain wandering, or the rush of running? He didn’t question it.

  “Simple science.”

  Ancient technology aside, the rest of the fort was furnished with simple wooden furniture that looked handmade. The circular structure was dominated by a plethora of printed material: hardbacks, paperbacks, engineering manuals, medical journals, hunting guides, skin mags, maps. Many of them crumbled and were spotted with mold, but still readable. There were stacks on every available surface. The small bookcase near the window had long ago been over loaded. It seemed to sag from the weight of the hardbacks on it. Beyond the window, the gray world waited.

  The fresh carcass of a deer lay gutted on the floor near the stove.

  “Was in the middle of dinner before you came yelling into my woods. Terrible, terrible manners.” The man removed his coat.

  He shook his gray mane as he removed his battered ball cap. He started to butcher the meat of the deer, laying long strips on a smoking rack on top of the stove. “I ever tell you about the Imp?”

  The question gave Howard pause. He studied the man closely, took everything in. He suddenly wished he’d taken his rifle. The spike was still on his belt though. The man wasn’t all there. That much was clear. Howard knew the signs of isolation sickness well, madness really.

  “No,” he said, trying to keep the conversation going. Images from the dead racked his mind, but something about the warmth of the fort settled him somewhat.

  The man laughed heartily. “My apologies,” he said, producing a large skillet from under a stack of books. He cut two large portions of venison and laid them on the skillet. A moment later the venison sizzled and filled the fort with a mouth watering scent. “I blame it on the books. My salvation and curse, between those musty pages. Where was I?”

  Howard opened his pack and pretended to rummage through it. His mind was on edge, trembling, but manageable. More dead thoughts whispered through by the thousands. Howard focused on his unstable host, letting the thoughts pass as quickly as they came. Something wasn’t right about the man. Something in the back of Howard’s brain screamed at him to run. He had to tread very carefully.

  “The Imp,” Howard said.

  The man scratched his long ragged beard. His eyebrows were like wandering dead branches arching over his hollow eyes. He held the permanent gaze of someone afflicted by the apocalypse.

  “No story is free. I saved you, you know? They’re out there right now. Listen close. You can hear them walking down there. Been through these before. Usually lasts a few days and then they’re gone. Good thing I caught dinner before you stumbled along. Fucking hills will be empty for weeks now. What’s your name?”

  “Howard.”

  “Well, Howard, you’re young and you’re alive, so I’m going to assume you came from somewhere.”

  Howard started to speak, but the man waved him off.

  “Look.” The man pointed at him with a fork. “I don’t want to know where and I don’t care. I only saved you because you’re not one of them. And had you been a crazy, you would’ve died before we got this far. You look rough. Look like you’ve seen a ghost or two. I know what that’s like.”

  “More than two,” Howard said under his breath.

  Howard wondered what the man had seen in his days? He had enough horror stories of his own. Would his eyes hold the same emptiness one day?

  The dead lamented in the fog below, their moans lingering in the thick wetness. They wandered every which way. Some stayed until they became stuck in the mud, while others slipped over and over. They’d come for him and now they were lost without him. Howard kept his mind open, but his focus remained on the man. He found it easier to breathe that way. Though he’d have to face them for her sake.

  Somewhere behind the hurt, the truth of what he had to do lurked, stalking his reluctance. He didn’t want to face it. Her terrible pleas were not far away. He found himself looking over his shoulder, though he knew she was not there. He pictured her stuck somewhere, crying out to him, crying out to be set free, to be ended. He felt sick again. The smell of the searing meat only made it worse. He was hungry, but the thought of eating was replaced by Jennifer’s teeth trying rip him apart. Her gnashing teeth and empty eyes.

  “Don’t want to know. But if you want to know more about the Imp, and you want dinner, well, you have to give me something. Lot of these books were brought to me over the years and a lot more I found on my own. Getting harder and harder to come by as time goes on. Those I saved repaid the favor. It’s a pretty sweet deal. You take a breather, fill your belly, and then you get the fuck out in exchange for a book or two. If you don’t have one, you have to leave a story. If you have neither, you can climb back down that chain.”

  The man pulled his rifle and aimed it at Howard’s face. “So, Howard, what have you?”

  CHAPTER 18

  Baylor screamed. The reaction was normal, human, as he watched the young men shot one by one and kicked into the massive pit like trash. He stopped the train, leaning over the controls. He felt his teeth about to crack as he ground them together. It took everything he had then to keep the Mad Conductor at bay.

  “It’s better than they dese
rve. Come with me,” Moya said, heading for the door.

  Moya’s men finished the task and moved to the next like ants. All around, fires went up, voices rose here and there, metal clattered, and children laughed. Baylor took it all in. Orange light spread across the sea of growing darkness, while shouts and cries carried from the pit. He played the scenario in the abandoned town over in his head, imagining the remnants of Wyoming Blue lined up along that pit and shot in the back, not the head. Shot with the blood of humanity’s greatest enemy, shot like cattle only to be turned later, to be turned on one another.

  “I think to myself often, Baylor, I think what if the men that killed Josh, what if they knew of his gift? Would that have stopped their bullets? Would they even care that such a thing as ending the Creepers would be possible?”