CRYERS

by North, Geoff

  “Are you hungry?” her father asked again.

  “No.” She looked past her feeding relatives and saw another man lying in the corner of the room. She couldn’t tell if he was sleeping or dead. “Who is that?”

  “I don’t know his name. He found his way into the facility with at least three others. We’re keeping him alive long enough to find out what it’s like up top…what’s left of the world outside.”

  “What’s happened outside? How long have I been frozen?”

  “A thousand years, give or a take a decade.” Michael went to the corpse on the floor and tore a sizeable amount of calf muscle from its too-human-looking leg. He bit some off and held the dripping mass in front of Jenny’s face. “Go on, eat something. You have to rebuild your strength.”

  Jenny shook her head. “I said no.”

  Lawson listened to the exchange. He had learned how to read and write from these people. He had adopted many of their ways. He’d worn their clothes, and he had kept order in his town with their weapons. The people he’d leeched and stolen from for decades were cannibals. I’ll be next, he thought. When they were done with what little remained of the howler, and once they had extracted whatever information they needed from him, Lawson knew they would eat the flesh clean off his bones, too. He quietly tested the bonds cutting into his wrists again. As thin as the plastic stripping felt, Lawson figured it would be strong enough to hold his arms behind his back until they were finished with him.

  They had taken his guns. Lawson could see the weapons on the floor at the end of the cylinder the young girl was sitting up in. His hat was there, too, and one of the grenades he’d taken from the armory room. He shifted his arms and felt with numb fingers for the second explosive in his back pocket. Gawdamn. They had either found it as well, or Lawson had lost it somewhere along the way.

  He wouldn’t be able to fight his way out of this. The only reason he was still living was for what they thought he might know. It was a long shot, but the lawman had nothing else.

  “Enjoy that howler meat while you can,” he growled in a voice that made all four of them jump. “’Cause when my friends return with the others, we’re burying this place and all you fuckers fer another thousand years.”

  Chapter 24

  They had made it all the way back up to Level A without the lawman’s help. Cobe had led Willem and Trot through the corridors of locked doors and found the small office where the howler corpse had finished rotting decades before. When they found the round tunnel opening with the sign that read LEVEL A, SUB-JUNCTION 12, EMERGENCY EXIT B, Cobe finally allowed himself to breathe easier. Big Hole would only be a bad memory in a few more minutes.

  Trot came to a stop. “We should go back. The lawman might’ve gotten lost.”

  “How could he get lost?” Willem said. “He’s the one that brought us here.”

  Cobe shook his head. “We’re not going back. We’re gonna do as the lawman said and get the hell out of this place.”

  Trot gestured back the way they had come with his curled-up, scabbed hands. “But we didn’t get no books. How are we gonna get on Victory Island without them books?”

  Willem tried pushing him into the tunnel. “Forget the stupid books and forget about Victory Island. Just get your fat ass moving again.”

  Cobe grabbed Trot’s arm and pulled. “He’s right, we can’t stay any longer with them things starting to wake up.”

  They ran through the tunnel, beneath the strip of flickering purple florescent light, until they found the opening in the wall. Cobe looked into the shaft of crumbling concrete and saw a square of dull brown light at the end. “It’s daytime outside. We’re almost there.” He lifted his brother in first. “You go next, Trot.”

  “It’s too hard…won’t be able to pull myself with my hands like this. I want to wait for Lawson right here.”

  Cobe knew he was afraid to crawl back into the small space. Being locked inside that cylinder on Level E had only strengthened his fear of confined spaces. But Trot had to go through. He wouldn’t leave him behind.

  Willem called back to them. “Smells awful in here, like someone shit and pissed themselves at the same time.”

  Cobe peered in after his brother. Something was wrong. He could see snatches of light ahead as Willem’s head and shoulders wiggled back and forth. And suddenly the light was gone.

  “Get out of there, Willem! Crawl back, now!”

  The howler screams cut off any more warnings Cobe could make. The noise of it blasted into his ears like something physical. Willem’s feet shook and wriggled. The toes of his worn shoes dug at the cement in a frenzied attempt to pull his body back. The howler screams intensified, became louder—there was more than one. Cobe reached in with both arms and clawed wildly for his brother. He had to move faster, and that was a difficult thing to do crawling backwards with one arm.

  Cobe could see them now past Willem’s thrashing form—fingernails like claws raking all four sides of the tunnel, peeling concrete away in chunks. Willem wasn’t going to make it.

  Cobe felt arms wrap around his legs. Trot lifted him off the floor and pushed his upper body into the tunnel opening. He reached again and found Willem’s ankles. “I’ve got him! Pull us out!” Cobe didn’t think his yells would be heard above the howlers screams, but suddenly his chest and stomach started scraping back along the concrete. He tightened his grip on Willem, and both boys spilled back out of the tunnel as Trot gave it his all with one last momentous pull.

  The gun was back in Cobe’s hand as the first ugly howler face burst out of the tunnel opening. Cobe fired and the bullet ricocheted off concrete next to the thing’s head. He pulled the trigger again and a piece of its throat vanished in a spray of red. Another howler had started to crawl over its still-twitching body. Cobe gripped the gun with both hands and fired three times into its forehead and face. It dropped and more followed. He continued to shoot, and howlers continued to drop.

  The screams and crack of repeating gunfire had deadened his hearing. Everything was ringing. He felt Willem tugging at his arm. Cobe looked at him and saw his lips moving.

  It’s empty. It’s empty.

  There were no more howlers.

  “You did it, you got them all.” His brother was slapping him on the back. Trot was pulling at the remaining dead bodies jamming up the concrete passage. Cobe stared at the gun in his hand. He found it hard to believe that something so small could cause so much carnage and death. He threw it down, suddenly feeling sick from the touch of it. He helped Trot drag the last howler corpse out of the tunnel. Willem pushed him back towards the opening, where they could see dull light showing through the far end once again. “You’re going first this time.”

  A raspy male voice spoke out over the intercom system. “Willem…I have the lawman...I’m going to hurt him unless you come back to me.”

  Trot made a groaning noise that ended up being a whimper. “It’s him. The naked man.”

  Willem looked as terrified as Trot sounded. “Lothair.”

  “Come back to Level E, Willem… Come back and bring your brother and Trot with you... Do it or the lawman dies.”

  The three looked at one another in wide-eyed, solemn agreement. Lawson had saved them all. Without him, they didn’t stand a chance. Cobe picked the empty gun up off the floor. “Maybe we can fool him long enough to give the lawman up.”

  Willem shook his head. “I wouldn’t count on it.”

  Chapter 25

  Colonel Strope slapped Lawson across the face hard enough to keep him from passing out. He pushed the lawman up against the wall and slapped his face again. Lawson’s head snapped back and his eyes reopened. His voice was heavy and slurred. “A hundred…there’s a hundred more of us up top—armed and waiting. Go on…try and leave this place and see what happens. They’ll gun you down like rats fleeing from the shadows.”

  Strope looked at Eichberg. The older man shook his head, and Strope lowered Lawson’s body to the floor. At least
they had removed the plastic from his wrists and ankles, Lawson thought, wiping blood from his broken nose. He peered at his guns, less than fifteen feet away. Three seconds. All he would need was three seconds to get to them and blow the orange-eyed fucker’s brains out.

  “I find that hard to believe,” Eichberg said. “You say there are a hundred armed men above, yet you send two children and an idiot down here to explore? Tell me the truth. Tell me what I need to know and I’ll let you leave.”

  “I find that harder to believe.”

  Lothair looked to his great-granddaughter. “What have you learned?”

  She was reading a steady stream of information from a computer set into the wall. “All two thousand, four hundred and twenty-six cylinders throughout all eighteen levels have functioned properly. We can bring them all back.”

  “And our food reserves?”

  It was information Edna didn’t have to look up. “All facilities were supplied with enough rations to last all clients three years in the event it was deemed unsafe to return to the surface after thawing.”

  “We don’t need to bring them back all at once. Our appetites have…changed. I highly doubt the rations stored here will satisfy the hunger we’re experiencing now.”

  Strope stepped away from the lawman. “What are you suggesting?”

  “A survey team. A small number of us, no more than a dozen. We explore the surface and see what kind of world we would be waking the rest up into.”

  “A dozen?” Edna repeated. “That number seems a little small.”

  “And what would happen if we ventured out and found little or nothing to eat? What would people like us—people with our appetites—what would they do?”

  Strope answered. “They’d turn on each other.”

  “Having thousands of ABZE clients feeding on one another after a thousand years isn’t the dream I envisioned for this corporation back in the twentieth century. No, we’ll bring a few more back and see what it’s like out there.”

  “Who do we bring back?” Edna asked. “How do you make that kind of a choice?”

  “That’s easy,” Lothair said. “Who paid us the most money?”

  ***

  1995

  New Orleans, Louisiana

  “Bull-fucking-shit!” Eunice Murrenfeld smacked her hand down on the dining room table hard enough to make her fat fingers and sweaty palm sting.

  “Easy now, dear.” Teddy was sitting next to her, trying his best to keep his voice soft and reassuring, even though he wanted nothing more than to run from the room and wait for his wife’s tantrum to peter out. “Your blood pressure.”

  “My blood pressure? My blood pressure? Are you fucking kidding me? My body is riddled with cancer and you’re worried about my blood pressure?” She grabbed the letter that had been couriered to their home minutes earlier and shook it in his face. “Read this again, you little shit, and maybe you’ll understand why I’m so upset.”

  Teddy found more courage and stayed at her side. “You knew ABZE wouldn’t allow your body to be frozen away from their facilities after our first consultation. They deemed the ground too unstable in most southern states.”

  “I paid them an extra million to find a way.”

  “You forced an extra million on them and demanded it. I told you it wouldn’t do any good.” He plucked the letter from her hand. “Besides, there’s nothing wrong with being frozen in Canada. Seems kind of fitting actually.”

  Eunice’s beady eyes narrowed and her big head receded farther into the meat of her neck and back. The four-hundred-pound woman was a force to be reckoned with when she was pissed off and screaming furious. But her husband of twenty years had learned when she went quiet—that was the time to really worry. Her voice started out low and trembling. “My family has lived in the South for more than two hundred years. We built our fortune in this fine city growing and providing the best Satsuma oranges in all the whole world, and this fine city has always provided for us in return with a fine home and a place to raise our families.” She slammed the table, this time with her closed fist, and Teddy jumped back. “New Orleans is my home! I was born and raised here—all the Murrenfelds were born and raised here.” She was screaming in his face now; spit smacked against his forehead and cheeks as she raged on. “All the Murrenfelds are buried in New Orleans, too!” She jabbed a finger at the giant bay window overlooking the estate grounds and her entire arm jiggled. “Buried right out there on Murrenfeld property. I’ll be goddamned if they try and freeze my remains in the godforsaken North!”

  Teddy tried reasoning with her. “But you wouldn’t really be dead, honey. It’s like being in a state of suspended animation. Someday when they’ve found a cure you can return home.”

  She hit Teddy with the back of her hand hard enough to send him to the floor. “Someday.” She repeated the word like it was poison in her mouth. “Someday might never come, and what will become of this place? You couldn’t give me a child to carry on the family name, could you? Once I’m gone there’ll be no more Murrenfelds running Murrenfeld business.”

  Teddy was on his knees. He dabbed the blood away from one nostril with his handkerchief. “I took your last name, Eunice. I am a Murrenfeld.”

  She shook her head and looked out the window, out over the ancestral property. “I used to think you married me for my money…that you agreed to take my name so this could all be yours. But it’s more than that, isn’t it?”

  Teddy pulled his chair in front of her and sat back down. He took her fat hands into his own frail, bony ones. “All I ever wanted was for you to love me.”

  Eunice leaned forward and kissed his forehead. “I’m scared, Teddy-Bear…I don’t want to leave this place and you. I don’t want to die.”

  “It isn’t dying, and I won’t leave you. When my time is done, I’ll be frozen next to you.”

  Her eyes searched his for reassurance. “You promise you’ll be there for me when I wake up? You swear you’ll make them unthaw you first?

  “I’ll be there for you, Eunice…I swear it.”

  They sat there in the dining room for the next minute in each other’s arms, quivering, whimpering, and reassuring. Eunice finally leaned back in her chair and looked the ABZE letter of confirmation over once again.

  “Canada...I’ve always hated the cold.”

  “You won’t feel a thing.”

  Eunice nodded. “Give them a call. Tell them we’ll be leaving for Dauphin tomorrow.”

  ***

  Eunice opened her eyes expecting to see Teddy’s watery blue ones staring down at her. The man peering through the little glass window wasn’t her husband. This man’s eyes were orange. His skin was too white and pocked over with scars.

  Where’s Teddy? He promised he’d be here.

  There was a popping sound followed by a long hiss. The top half of Eunice’s cryo-cylinder opened. Colonel Strope helped lift the mass of her body up and out of the extra-large container. Eunice touched the man’s chest. Her fingers crawled up to the gaping, bloody hole in his shoulder. She tasted his blood and decided it wouldn’t satisfy the yearning hunger she felt.

  Why…did I do that?

  Strope held her hand. “Are you able to walk?” Eunice nodded.

  She wasn’t scared. The sight of him didn’t frighten her. Tasting his blood hadn’t disgusted her. The fact her husband wasn’t waiting for her after she’d been thawed hadn’t disappointed like she thought it might.

  “Are you hungry?” Strope asked.

  “Starving.”

  “There’ll be plenty to eat on Level E soon enough.” He led her out into a dimly lit corridor on Level M, where five more people were waiting. None of them spoke. They didn’t have to. Eunice could see the hunger glowing in their eyes.

  Chapter 26

  “He ain’t gonna let us go,” Willem said.

  “I know,” Cobe answered.

  “I watched him bash a howler’s head into the wall, and then I watched him eat its throat o
ut. He’s gonna eat us, too.”

  “He’s gonna try.”

  The three stepped out of the stairwell and came back onto level E. The green flashing light had stopped. The woman’s automated voice had been silenced.

  “He ain’t gonna eat us,” Trot said. “The lawman will stop him.”

  Cobe nodded, not knowing which one of them had it right. It didn’t much matter one way or the other anymore. Lawson had saved them all too many times to leave him behind. They had to come back and try to save the man’s life, and they would likely get themselves killed and eaten for their effort.

  They turned right at the end of the first corridor and saw Lothair waiting for them further down, near the room where Trot had originally discovered him.

  “He killed a howler with his hands?” Cobe whispered.

  “Made it look easy… Don’t go thinkin’ you can take him on all by yourself. He might look like an old man, but he could tear you to pieces, too.”

  “Listen to your brother, Cobe,” Lothair called out. “He speaks the truth.”

  “Good fuckin’ hearing too,” Willem added.

  Cobe pointed the empty gun at Lothair’s face from fifteen feet away. “Where’s the lawman?”

  Lothair stepped to one side of the open doorway. “Inside.”

  Willem went first into the room where Lothair’s female descendants had been frozen for centuries. He saw the woman that had wanted to eat him leaning against one of the open cylinders. A younger version of her was sitting on the floor a few feet away. Trot followed in after the younger boy, his round eyes searching desperately for the lawman. He found him in the corner closest to the door. Lawson was set in an uncomfortable position, his back propped up against the wall and his head resting down against his chest.

  “He’s alive,” the woman said.

  Cobe still had the gun trained on Lothair. “He better be. Now let my brother and Trot help him up so the four of us can get the hell out of here.”