The Creepers (Book 2): From the Past

by Dixon, Norman

  A shimmering wave of bright red drifted between the crosshairs. Baylor froze. A callused fist struck, struck again, and one lonely boy stood against the wave, his toy soldiers unable to help him.

  Baylor settled his breath. Perhaps his death rattle wasn’t quite ready yet.

  * * * * *

  “I see you!” Moya screamed. She swatted the rifle away and drove her sharp knuckles into the boy’s gut. She spun low as a group of the dead came for her. “They cannot defeat me! Tomorrow will come and they will be forgotten!.” She came up in a rush of fists that splattered rotting brains. Her blood became molten as Josh’s ghost burned away the infection inside of her.

  Moya grabbed the boy and pulled him close. She squeezed his weary, bloody face. “I would’ve saved you. I would’ve given you what I could not give him, but the world had different plans for both of us, little one.” She let him go. Before his body hit the ground, her fists connected up and down his torso.

  “You’re wrong!” they moaned at her.

  Moya turned around. Hundreds of dead faces stared at her.

  “You’re wrong!” they moaned again.

  She laughed at them. Her eyes found the boy’s pale lips as they whispered the same sentiment over and over and the Creepers mimed right along. Nothing more than puppets. She picked the boy up and cradled his head in her arms.

  “You are worthy of a true death, a quick death, and I would not degrade you with a second death if that were even possible. You were so much more than they,” she said, recounting the deaths of those that stared at her. Her mind opened the pages of their demise. “Goodbye.”

  * * * * *

  Bobby struggled against her iron grip. His legs slipped in the mud. His fingers dug into her muscled arms, but he could not break free. The air in his lungs depleted as the world wavered. He worked his mind in overdrive, drawing the Creepers in. The conduit lighted and pulsed then began to fade. His brother wandered in the dark on the other side of his thoughts.

  Their voices were gone. The monitors gone. He heard her voice as if it were coming from so very far away. The world became a pinpoint of light and regret.

  Sophie held Randal against her pale breast and reached out to Bobby. He took her cold hand. Together they walked deeper into the darkness around them, moving into the intimate inky folds.

  Then the world came rushing back in a single, solitary, familiar crack. The red-haired woman’s head snapped back. Her hands went limp and her spine rigid. She fell away, no longer a threat, a hundred thousand unfulfilled ideas leaking out of her skull.

  Bobby coughed. His mind worked in a state of flux as the monitors snapped back on in rapid succession. He absorbed the shock with ease, with a perfection he’d mastered without even knowing it.

  The battle waned beyond the shield of the dead. Men on foot and horseback broke for the hills, but the Creepers were not quite done with them yet. Bobby cut off their escape.

  He added them to the fold.

  He reached out to Howard, to this brother he did not know, but lived every day with.

  * * * * *

  He walked through the darkness alone, though Jennifer’s voice lingered still. The weight of what he’d done fell away with each step.

  Am I dead? He thought.

  No. His brother answered.

  Howard was joined in the darkness by a small boy on the verge of becoming a man. His black hair hung in his eyes and his narrow frame looked as if it were about to take a grand stretch. A pale hand flipped the hair from his eyes. Howard caught them in all their cold glory as the darkness abated. It melted away and the truth of where he was became reality once more.

  “No,” Howard cried.

  Bobby’s hand yanked the detonator from him. “Yes.”

  Howard blinked at the setting sun, or was it tears of relief and guilt rolled into one? Those cold yet concerned eyes stared at him as if they were waiting for something, for answers he didn’t have and could never provide.

  “Bobby,” Howard managed.

  “Brother,” Bobby said, wrapping his arms around Howard.

  Howard hugged him back, releasing a surge of light within. Amid all that chaos, hope had conquered doubt. But somehow he managed to feel dirty, as the reality of his familial link with the fate of this young boy settled on his shoulders. The fading testament to Doc Danielson’s work—one broken boy and a broken man unsure of his place in the world. They were murderers, avengers, apostles of a new age.

  Bobby clapped Howard on the shoulder and broke the embrace. Howard’s younger brother plucked a rifle from the hands of a dead man.

  “What are you doing?”

  Bobby fell into the motions, letting his nervousness and terrified glee loose on the unresponsive technology. He broke the rifle down and rebuilt it in less than a minute. He buffed the bullets with his shirt and loaded them into the rifle.

  “It helps keep me from becoming like them.” Bobby nodded towards the fields of slaughter.

  Howard reached out to his brother. “There is a better way.”

  “Is there?”

  Howard didn’t know what to say. He wanted to impart some of his father’s wisdom onto his brother, but those eyes spoke of deeper truths. Truths Howard was too afraid to face.

  Howard . . . Howard . . . Howard . . .

  He began to shake. His nerves frayed and his eyes twitched, awaiting the flood of tears he knew were about to break.

  Howard . . . Howard . . . How—

  A loud crack rent the air as Jennifer fell silent. Bobby stared down the sights of the sleek black weapon. Smoke swirled around his stoic face. He racked the bolt and shouldered the weapon.

  “She was not who you thought she was, not anymore. Go to her, bury her or burn her, then leave her.” Bobby clasped Howard on the arm. “But never forget her. That is all we can do to honor them.”

  Howard’s relief came on the wings of Bobby’s shot. It was instant and infinite, as if a terrible parasite had been ripped violently from his body. He fell to his knees.

  Looking up at his brother, he said, “I couldn’t do it . . . I couldn’t do it.”

  “None of us should have to, but it’s our way of life,” Bobby said, staring off into the distance. The dead swirled and swarmed over the fields, devouring parts of the fallen while many of the newly dead returned to life and joined them. The cycle of the infection never breaking, always moving, propelled by the hunger of the parasites.

  Howard shook his head and stood. The detonators clinked as he swayed unsteadily.

  Bobby caught him. “No one should have what’s beneath us. No one.”

  “No one will.” Howard smiled. “There are innocents among them. Jennifer’s people. People who have suffered long at the hands of a mad woman and her army. For what? So much death and for what, Bobby? Does it ever end?”

  “No,” Bobby said sharply. His deep dark eyes looked beyond the fields onto his own painful memories. Then a brightness, like a streaking meteor, came across his eyes. “But it can get better. There are things beyond death, beyond this war. Things that have always been here, but are forgotten time and time again—” Bobby turned in place. His head twitched for a second. “The women are alive.”

  Howard smiled then turned away. He went to bury Jennifer’s corpse. The wind stirred the long grass and the Creepers moaned right along with it. High-pitched screams piped at odd intervals throughout the long day, but they too turned to moans.

  CHAPTER 26

  Bobby found Baylor using a hammer on the badly damaged train. He stepped around the bodies as if they were normal parts of the natural landscape. In the back of his mind, he watched his brother bury his love. He adjusted his thoughts to block the imagery. Baylor hammered a piece of bent metal clumsily with his left arm. His right arm was tied in a sling made from his torn jacket.

  “Thank you,” Bobby said, sitting down on the scorched metal beside Baylor.

  “Fucking still owe you one, kid. Don’t think we’re even yet,” Baylor sa
id with a grunt. He brought the hammer down again then flipped it over his shoulder and laughed. “Who the fuck am I kidding? Twenty years to make her, all that time, that effort…” Baylor sat down next to Bobby.

  The sun spilled purple-orange across the black horizon. A chill wind howled over the hills as the night announced its coming. Bobby watched Baylor wipe a cold sweat from his bloodied brow.

  “Long time ago, when I was a little older than you are now, I had this job. Used to fill the shelves at a pet store.”

  “A what?”

  “They have dogs on the Settlement?” Baylor asked. His wild, wide eyes parenthesizing the shock on his face.

  “Yeah, they used them to help herd the cattle.” Bobby laid the dead man’s rifle across his lap and began to break it down.

  “Well it was a place to get dogs and the supplies to keep them. I used to stack bag after of bag of dog food. Day in day out, week in week out. It was this rapid cycle of consumption. We had these big bins and we’d fill them with cow ears. We’d get these things in boxes by the thousands. Most days I didn’t even think about what I was doing, you know?

  “Just get them filled. Had to keep them filled. Cow ears, pig ears, bones. Fill them and keep them filled. Then one day, I’m elbow deep in ears, ears that once belonged to a living breathing thing. I’m there looking at them, knowing each pair were part of a whole animal at one point. They’re all tattooed with numbers. And the enormity of the brutal process really hit me. Wasn’t a non meat eating thing either.

  “It was something else. It was a recognition of what we’d allowed ourselves to become. We became a far more efficient cycle than nature herself, savagely so, turn and burn. And it didn’t matter who we had to lead us, where he or she came from, it didn’t matter. The cycle was the same. It ground us down and chopped us up, divided us just like those parts and sold every last bit of us back to ourselves, and we welcomed it with open arms. We filled our guts with it. Our lives in neatly stocked bins on a store shelf.” Baylor threw a charred chunk of the beast out into the darkening field.

  “Turn and burn. I realized it was someone’s idea of how things should be. When I looked at her, listened to her, I knew I’d come to another realization. I’d come to witness another cycle. There was one common factor in the creation of both of them, Bobby, and it didn’t have to do with our age or what time we came from. No, didn’t have shit to do with people from before the war started, nothing to do with us dinosaurs.

  “But it has everything to do with people allowing things to happen. Back then, before the war, before the infection started. We’d already started to give up the fight. We just let it happen, and when those of us not willing to surrender tried to stand, we were slapped down. Just like Wyoming Blue when it came time to face her army.”

  “We didn’t fall to them.”

  “No.” Baylor squeezed Bobby’s shoulder. “No, we didn’t. Don’t ever give in for a false sense of security. Don’t ever give in, Bobby. She promised them freedom from the fear of the Creepers, from fear of the infection, but in the end—” Baylor waved his hand around and settled his pointing finger on Bobby— “You showed her the error of her ways.”

  “If it wasn’t for you we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now.”

  “Fair enough, kid, but what I’m trying to say is don’t let her happen again. When it’s Randal’s time to step up, when I’m long fucking gone from this world, when you’ve scattered my ashes in the hills back east.” Baylor stared Bobby down with his crazy eyes. “When that time comes, you tell him what I told you. You tell him about what happened here. You warn him. You do whatever you have to do to make him understand it can never happen again. The cycle cannot be allowed to start. It’s about time we changed the way of things anyway.”

  Bobby nodded. He dropped the last of the shells into the rifle and slipped it onto his back.

  “It’s getting dark. We’d better get some shuteye. I’m still trying to figure out how we can get the beast going, but It’s not looking good. We don’t have enough hands to get her going again.”

  “We have all the hands we need,” Bobby said, the darkness hiding the smile that parted his lips.

  * * * * *

  Howard found an old woman nervously clutching her hands to her chest. Her wrinkled face spoke of many years passed under harsh conditions, yet there was a brightness behind her light gray eyes. A cable full of burning oil lamps stretched along the broken windows of the old school bus, lighting the small caravan and casting odd shadows on the trembling women standing behind their heavily armed matron.

  “Something strange going on here,” she said, racking a shotgun. A pair of long rifles crisscrossed on her back and several scared sets of eyes peered around her wiry frame. Her long gray hair tumbled down her shoulders like sheets of dirty ice. Her lips pursed, setting a series of bark-like runnels around them and down her chin.

  “They will not harm you,” Howard said, waving his empty hands at the swath of Creepers moving towards the top of the hill.

  “Ain’t them I’m worried about, but I’ll harm you if you take another step, sir,” she said, leveling the shotgun at him. She peered down the sight. “Long have we suffered by the likes of you.” She nodded at the headless body at her feet. “Never again. I suggest you move along.”

  “I plan on it,” Howard said calmly. “I’m not one of them. I only wanted to let you know she did this for you.” Howard let the words ripple on the cool breeze. “I met her in California. I saved her and she saved me. Every step of the way she reminded me about all of you. She never forgot. She gave everything for you and me.” Howard nodded slowly. There was nothing left for him here. He’d done what was asked of him. He’d done what he promised her he’d do. He’d buried her. It was time to move on, time to try and forget, but where and how?

  The woman took his words fine enough, her deep resolve unshaken, then a slight tremor shook the lines upon her face. Tiny cracks in her brave façade caused a leak of tears to run from her tired eyes. “Jennifer.” The shotgun fell from her hands. Many voices carried from the deep shadows behind her.

  “Is she here?”

  Howard shook his head. His own tears ran streaks of reflected orange down his face as the lanterns flared in the stiff breeze. They rattled against the rusted shell of the old school bus, joining the almost constant ululations of the Creepers and the wind. It was as if Jennifer were speaking from far beyond the finality of death.

  Howard turned to leave then stopped. “There is a place back east, a place for all of you.”

  “What about you?” the woman asked.

  “There are still some things I need to settle before I can leave.” The massive bomb beneath their feet wavered in his mind, along with what lay beyond the hastily erected walls. He would ensure no one would ever want or possess the dust covered relics of old. That time had come and passed. “Go to the train. My brother is there. He can help. She would’ve wanted that assurance for you.”

  “And what do you want, sir?” The woman rubbed the tears away with the back of her hand and retrieved the shotgun.

  “I want us to forget everything that came before.” Howard clutched the old phone in his pocket. A trickle of hypocrisy ran through him, but he did not shy away from it. What he needed to remember of the past was the only thing of any importance now. The wars, the rules, the ideas, the technology, none of it helped to change anything for the better. They were still knee deep in the blood of each other, on another smoking field. All that he needed from it was what his father left him with. His brothers and sisters were all that mattered now, at least to him. If he could just reach them, speak with them, know them on the level he now knew Bobby, then maybe everything would make sense. Maybe one of his siblings would have the answers he sought. Or maybe it was all one drawn out tortuous fantasy to give his life meaning. There were too many variables, too many raw emotions spiraling within after his brush with death to even begin to put the pieces together.


  “We’re too stubborn to forget, sir. It’s just not in our nature to,” she said.

  “I guess we’re a different breed then,” he said, tracing the outline of the sleek device, knowing he had the same problem. If only they could all follow in the late Doc Danielson’s footsteps, but then again even the good doctor couldn’t escape it. The messages and locations proved that.

  “If you decide not to head east, don’t linger here,” Howard said. He turned away, unable to face the woman’s deep eyes. There was something beyond pain in them—a pair of mirrors reflecting feelings still very prevalent in his mind. “It won’t be safe.”

  Howard left the woman and headed towards the train. He looked inward, hearing his brother’s mind as if he were right next to him calling out orders.