The path took them to a pile of dirt and the long narrow pit. The newly risen savages moaned from below. Keaton stood akimbo before it.
“Morning, Mr. Conductor. Fine day for a challenge, seeing as how you worked us over good last night.”
“Not our first rodeo, Baylor, not by a long shot.”
Baylor stood before Keaton, before the pit, the silent crowd at his back. He’d let them guide him this far, but he wasn’t going into the pit alive. He remembered the soldiers of Wyoming Blue. The Mad Conductor had the door halfway open, his rigid fingers raking at the gray matter. Baylor began to sweat.
“I’m not going in any fucking pit.”
“Everyone goes in the pit.”
The Mad Conductor knocked the door off the hinge, and Baylor lost control. Before he could stop it from happening, he reached for Moya’s throat. The woman side stepped the grab and had his arm up and twisted at a terrible angle.
“That was not wise, Baylor. Now you’re not going into the pit fresh,” Moya said in his ear as she drew his arm up.
Baylor growled from the pain, but he spun out of the grab and landed a sharp blow against the woman’s rocklike jaw. She staggered back in surprise. Blood flowed from her split lip. The blow should’ve knocked her out cold. The Mad Conductor had been banking on just that outcome, had even put Baylor in harm’s way to get the chance to strike her.
The Mad Conductor retreated, leaving Baylor to stare down the barrel of Keaton’s pistol.
* * * * *
Bobby broke from the crowd the second he saw the pistol flash from the man’s belt. He closed the distance just as quick as the draw. Before the man could react, Bobby had implanted the Auto Stryker in his elbow and twisted the blade, scraping bone, separating cartilage. Bobby spun with his strike, dragging the man with him. He yanked the blade free, leaving the arm hanging by a few scraps of skin and muscle. The gun was still clutched in twitching fingers.
But as Bobby turned to face them, he caught the flash of another pistol in the man’s other hand. The bullet tore through him. He staggered back, dropped the knife. He grasped at air as gravity pulled him over the edge of the pit. Somewhere far away, Baylor cried out.
The monitors wavered in his mind for a second, then went out completely as he smashed into the ground. Then he heard their voices anew. He heard their hungry moans, their clacking teeth, and the slate gray sky swirled with black. Bobby slipped into a dark and terrible place.
He could no longer see them, but he could feel them, feel their teeth, their cold rotten teeth on his flesh. He tried to scream but nothing came out. The buried nightmare of the old woman torn in half rattled his mind. Her cold teeth nicking pale belly could not compare to the many mouths of the dead savages.
He never thought it would end like this.
CHAPTER 19
What does she really want me for? the smeared charcoal letters read. Pathos Two held the brittle paper in his plump fingers and wondered just how he’d answer that question.
He knew of course. The act of kindness was all part of a façade on their part, but would telling the severely defeated soldier matter now? Once he caught wind of his friend’s arrival, would this small indiscretion really matter? It might, and it might keep the man from giving up the details of the site.
“I don’t know,” Pathos Two lied. “She doesn’t confide in me that way. I advise, I count, I inform of changes, and that is the nature of our relationship.”
Post paced about the small wagon, tapping bottles and flexing fingers.
“You’re going to wear a hole in my floor. Took me a long time to get this baby up to snuff. Don’t go ruining my home.”
Pathos Two mixed another nutrient rich cocktail. He’d been working on the man for some time. Moya’s guidance helped move things along, but he was quickly growing tired of the man’s company in the tight quarters. He kept reminding himself that it was necessary to their future, to their survival, really, and that eased the strain a bit, but not much.
“Just think.” Pathos Two handed his guest the cocktail. “One day we won’t live on the move. One day we’ll have stable, stationary homes, and we won’t be bullied from them, or threatened from them, or killed over them. It will be grand, and you’ll have been a part in making that happen. Isn’t that something?” He waited for a reply he knew wouldn’t come.
* * * * *
Post drank the cocktail as he thought about the fat man’s words. There they were again, images of grand hope, of great fantastic promises, but he knew the man was trying to work him over. It was tactics, positioning. They were trying to get something from him. He’d run the gauntlet of emotions just as they’d wanted him to. Great defeat, challenge, defeat again, and then slowly building him up, reinforcement, and now they were getting ready to play their aces.
He stood in the doorway watching the gray day roll by, sipping the sweet cocktail. The buzz he got from it made the pain in his jaw bearable. Somewhere behind him, Pathos Two made disgusting slurping sounds as he ate some bastardized concoction of apocalyptic junk food. Post didn’t care to understand.
The camp had been subdued in the days since the attack by the savages. Subdued, but not idle. Post could already see signs of them getting ready to march. There was some commotion two days ago, and he had not seen Moya since. Pathos Two had been mum about the whole thing. He didn’t like it, but choice was something of a ruse lately.
Post finished the cocktail and returned to the cramped wagon. He eyed the gun on the fat man’s table, as he had done every day since arriving. Between Pathos Two’s absences, Post removed the live clip and replaced it with another empty one he’d found. He had no intention of conforming, and he wasn’t about to waste his life unless he’d get a crack at Moya and her little lap dog. They’d pay, come hell or high water. They’d all pay.
He unfolded a clean piece of paper and took the thin piece of charcoal from behind his ear and wrote:
You want the weapons at Umatilla.
The fat man’s face drained of color as he read the words.
A few days prior, Post had begun to notice things on his daily walks with Pathos Two. Crates with familiar marks and symbols, areas of the camp he was deliberately kept out of, the quality of the older soldiers weaponry, as well as their makes and models. Some of the ordnance had been recovered from the battle in Utah, but not all of it. He began to ask the fat man about the movements of the army prior to clashing in the desert with Post and his men. Pathos Two was pleased to dispense his vast knowledge freely.
It didn’t take Post long to realize their march from the border had taken them into familiar territory, in New Mexico and Texas and Colorado, and now they were headed to Oregon. This had nothing to do with the last outpost and everything to do with Umatilla. Moya was collecting every last bit of weaponry left on this side of the country.
“It is the only way, Sgt. Post. The only way to make this new world a reality. We cannot leave things like that behind.”
They had no place in the old world and they have no place in this one, Post wrote.
He’d had his unit wall off the chemical weapons long ago. It wasn’t an end all solution, but it would keep prying eyes away if the base had been compromised. Nature had half done the job already, between floods and landslides. The base itself was gone. The tunnels beneath it were not, but after years of disaster, the entrance was not easy to find. That’s why they needed him. They couldn’t just start digging randomly in the area because they knew what might be lurking beneath them. One wrong move and Moya’s little Alexander game would meet a horrible end.
“Deterrents always have their place. They were necessary in the old world, just as they will be in this one.”
They’re not stable, Post scrawled.
“Neither are we, Sgt. Post.” Pathos Two smirked. Beads of sweat rolled down his ruddy cheeks. “Humanity has been unstable since we crawled out of the slop. I’m amazed we didn’t eat each other alive along the way.”
We
waited until after, wrote Post.
“I guess we did,” Pathos Two laughed. “With those weapons, she can ensure tomorrow’s success.”
Post eyed the man. They were all so sure this was the only way to live after the Creepers were gone. End one threat to create another. It was old world thinking at its finest and had nothing to do with progress. The Creepers were not done yet, regardless of what Moya and her ilk thought. Post had seen too much in two decades at war with them. He’d seen towns cleared, only to be overrun by tens of thousands a week later. No one really knew how many hordes roamed the country, how many biting mouths were trapped within their homes, and the countless Creepers lurking in every dark corner. Unchecked, unseen, but waiting. Just waiting for a chance to bite, and all it would take was one to start the cycle anew.
The war was far from over.
“About a year after it all went down, I came across a man. His wife had been raped and beaten to death while he was forced to watch. When the human refuse was done, they put the man to the torch. My small group stumbled upon them, and that night I killed a living thing for the first time. You have to understand that in all my years of life leading up until that moment, I’d not killed even an ant.”
Post sat on a box of moldy books. Images of a man through the scope of his rifle played out again and again as he listened. The first had been easy, so easy. It was the waiting and watching that took the most out of him. When it was done, when that man lay dead in the streets of Fallujah, Post had become a killer. He didn’t feel any different, which made the next even easier. It wasn’t until after he came home that they started to visit him during the night. Unsuspecting eyes, someone smoking a cigarette, talking to a man next to him, then oblivion courtesy of Uncle Sam’s finest. They kept him awake most nights, crying about the injustice of war in a language he didn’t understand.
“But that day, hearing that man scream, Sgt. Post. The sounds of a broken human being are…” Pathos Two wiped away tears as spoke. “Those are sounds no one should ever have to hear. Those sounds made what I did next easy, so very easy, but I knew there would be others like them, already were others like them, perpetrating atrocities. We could not stop them all. I thought that there was no way. They would endure as men, like they always find a way of enduring. But now we have a chance to end them and ensure that evil is unable to rear its head.”
Post shook his head. He’d been a part of the cycle of violence all his life, and it wasn’t until after everything fell apart that he could truly see it for what it was. Never ending. He’d heard it spoken about often, sung about even more, printed in every language. It was one of the greatest truths of the world, but no one ever listened to the words. Everyone always had some brilliant vision of the future, but in order to get there they had to tap into that dark part of the human brain. They had to clear a few people out of the way. Even the totally sanitized versions of humanity’s future, the peaceful utopias free of physical violence, would eventually succumb to the call of the cycle, and once those peaceful minds were left to thought, the violence would creep back in again.
It won’t work. And I will take no part in what’s to come, Post wrote.
“You must, Sgt. Post. If you value your life, you will.”
Post grabbed the fat man by his collar. He opened his mouth to address the open threat. The pain was so intense he thought he was about to collapse. “I . . . have . . . one response to . . . threats,” Post croaked. He drew his fist back.
“Help me, you fat fuck!” someone shouted from outside.
Post dropped Pathos Two on the floor and moved to the back of the wagon. He kept his eyes on the gun and his hand on the full magazine sitting in his pocket.
“Get out here, or I’m fixing to put a hole in your fucking belly and let the hunger take you!”
Post could hear Keaton but he couldn’t see the man. Something in that voice was off. The fat man angled himself to navigate the narrow door of the wagon.
Post snatched the gun from the table, dropped the empty clip, and slapped in the loaded one. He chambered a round and slipped the gun behind his back, tucking it into his belt. He pulled his shirt low and went to the doorway. The threat enraged him. His heart pounded. His mind raced. He began to plan many scenarios of what he was about to do. This was it. Weeks of waiting to do something were over.
Keaton was in the process of holstering his revolver, standing there as if it were any other day, a routine thing, and it didn’t seem to bother him in the least that his other arm hung on by nothing more than scraps of skin and tissue.
“Sgt. Post, clear the table!” Pathos Two cried.
Post smiled as he swept the remnants of the fat man’s meal onto the floor.
Keaton walked into the wagon and wrinkled his nose at the floral smells of Pathos Two’s many botanical creations. He picked up the fallen chair and sat in it, calm as could be. He scratched his beard. His ruined arm flopped at his side. The barrel of the gun tapped on the rough wood of the chair leg.
“Smells like old lady farts in here, fatty,” Keaton said. “See what we can do about this here wound and make it snappy.”
Pathos Two’s lips trembled. “There is nothing to do about it.”
“Sure as shit there is,” Keaton spat. The shock was evident on his face. “Cut it the fuck off!”
“Sgt. Post, I need you to get the green box from under the shelving behind you. And then I need you to hold Mr. Keaton down. He’s in shock right now, but that won’t last once I start cutting.”
Keaton laughed. His sour breath hung in the air like the fog of morning. “Soldier boy’s friends already did the work for you,” he said with nod at Post. “Told her she couldn’t work the train man over. I fucking told her tigers like that don’t ever change they stripes. Never.”
Post dropped the box at his words. He regained his composure and put the box on the table. He’d fired the relays. He put the warning out there. Baylor probably thought he was on a rescue mission. Post cursed his longtime friend silently.
“We was about to test him and he goes all swinging on Moya. Caught her too, but as I’m holding a gun on him, a fucking little dirty urchin from the camp decides to have a swing at me. Little fuck caught me in the elbow with a knife. I put that bitch into the pit with a care package in his body. He better hope it turns him before the Creepers eat him up.” Keaton looked around. “You got something to drink? A bit parched, you husky fuck.” He laughed again. “Fucking kid took my arm.”
“What about the Mad Conductor?” Pathos Two asked as he laid out a pair of shiny scissors and removed a pristine scalpel from a plastic bag.
“Fuck should I know? Where’s mah drink?” Keaton swayed in the chair. His face was bone white. His arm swung back and forth, silver pistol catching the candle light of the cramped wagon with each pass. “He went down to save the kid. Fucking old world idiots. Dead is dead. He wasn’t going without a fight. I don’t much like sending men into the pit too injured. Just not fair.”
“Sgt. Post, if you would please.”
“Pleasure,” Post managed.
“Fuck you, soldier boy. Fuck you good.”
Post put the rough man in a half bear hug as Pathos Two lifted Keaton’s wounded arm onto the table. Keaton roared and kicked out, but Post had him good and tight.
“Fat fuck, fat fuck!”
Pathos Two began to cut with the scissors.
Post imagined letting go as Keaton passed out from the pain. He could drop the man and put a bullet in his brain and then dispose of Pathos Two, but Keaton was only part of the equation. Moya was the top of pyramid, the queen, the mother to them all. As much as he regretted to admit it, he needed Keaton.
“Amazing what the human body is capable of,” Pathos Two said with a spool of thread hanging out of his mouth. After cutting away the limb, he trimmed the ragged skin and disinfected every inch of the wound.
As Post watched the man work, folding skin and sewing, repairing, his thoughts drifted to Baylor. Th
e Mad Conductor had been around too long, survived too many encounters, to be beaten by the pit. However, in close quarters, injured, nothing was for sure. He didn’t even know if Baylor had been given the luxury of a weapon. How had it all gone so wrong?
They were two men trying to patch the world back together and they thought they had it figured out. They helped each other but were not beholden to one another or any shared ideal. They were just decent men in a time where there were far too few. That’s all. Just two who grouped with two more and then three and then more, much like Moya’s army. Would they collapse when their matriarch was gone? Would they scatter or rise up in anger?
Post helped Pathos Two lay Keaton out on the floor. The weight of the gun had him thinking of possibilities. For so long, he thought only of the next meal, the next day, nothing beyond that, but now he had a chance to do something to make up for all of that, to make up for losing his men.
The Creepers (Book 2): From the Past Page 19
