by North, Geoff
Lothair had made his decision. “We’ll remain here until the sun comes up. It will be easier to hunt for food in the light of day, and will give us a better look at our surroundings. Hopefully the genetic enhancements in Edna’s body will help repair her spine some more.”
“And her brain,” Jenny said.
Lothair nodded, even though he thought it unlikely. The chunk of grenade that had blasted up into Edna’s head from under her jaw was still inside. The only way it could come out was by digging in from the top. Lothair thought he might be able to perform the operation. Too bad he hadn’t brought some tools with them. He wandered a few feet away and leaned against an ancient, bent girder sticking up out of the ground. An old metal pail hung on a rusted bolt near the top. Lothair reached in with his fingers and found an inch of water at the bottom. Either it had rained recently, or someone had been drinking from it—perhaps the lawman himself. He pulled it off the bolt and snapped the metal-wire handle free. He twisted one sharp end into a hook. It might be messy, he thought, but it would suffice.
Jenny leaned back and watched them all for a while. Farmer Brian gazed off into the night where his hometown had once stood. Leonard’s eyes were on the stars. He would point to each new one as it became apparent to him, muttering things no one understood under his breath, and rubbing his belly at the same time. Aleea Shon and Mary Gades were sitting off a little ways; even zombie celebrities tended to stick with their own kind, Jenny thought. Eunice sat on the crater rim, half her fat ass hanging down into Big Hole. Jenny wondered if a second crater would appear once she stood up. The woman had hiked up her black dress and was picking clumps of dirt out from between the rolls where her ankles met her feet. Ivan Tevalov was sitting beside her, his dead white eyes staring back at Jenny like a shark.
None of them wanted to sleep. They didn’t need to. Jenny wondered if that was sad.
What did sadness feel like?
She lay back and started counting Leonard’s stars. She gave up after the clouds moved in, and closed her eyes. Jenny didn’t need to sleep. She wanted to.
“Jennifer.”
She was back underground, inside a cavernous room filled with cryogenics cylinders. This wasn’t like the room she had been frozen in for centuries. There were more than three cylinders here—there were hundreds, perhaps thousands. Jenny was walking along a row of them, running her fingers against their black surfaces. They were propped up at an angle, facing her, like cold, silent sentinels.
“Jennifer.”
She peered in the glass window of one and saw a man smiling at her. His eyes were solid black and dead. White, wrinkled fingers appeared, waggling back and forth. He was mouthing the word ‘hello’ over and over, but he hadn’t been the one that had spoken her name.
Jenny looked in on another cylinder a little further down. At first she thought it was empty and was about to step away. A small knock sounded from somewhere inside. She had to stand on the tips of her toes in order to look down inside the cylinder’s depths. A little boy with curly blonde hair and glowing red eyes scowled up at her. The bottom half of his face was caked in blood. He made scratching gestures at her with chubby fingers coated in gore.
The cylinder beside it was filled nearly to the top with rats. They swam amongst each other, writhing in a sea of clawing nails and twisting tails. One rat bit its neighbor. It set off a chain reaction. Blood squirted against the underside of the window, and Jenny watched through what little clear bit of glass was left as the rodents began devouring themselves.
“Jennifer.”
Jenny moved away from the rat cylinder and continued down the long row without looking in on any more. Some were shaking violently in their steel brackets. More knocks and scratches sounded from others. Jenny ignored them all. She kept walking, following the sound of her name. She knew the voice well.
“Jennifer.”
She stepped past the final cylinder and saw a table set into the rock wall. But it was more than a table—it was a booth. It was the same booth as the one in that old Chicago restaurant-diner her mother used to take her to after school. Those were good days. Those were times when her mother had a few free hours and she had wanted to spend them with her. Jenny slid into the booth across from her. The red plastic still made that squeaking noise as she shifted into place. She remembered that soft sinking feeling as her bum settled in.
“Jennifer.”
“You only call me Jennifer when you’re mad.”
“And when I need to get your attention. I didn’t want you dallying around too long amongst those cylinders. Nasty things in there—not the kinds of things a mother wants her daughter to see.”
“You…you look well.”
Edna glanced down at herself. This Edna Eichberg had never been blown in half. Jenny reached over and touched the back of her mother’s hand. The skin was warm and healthy. Jenny saw her own fingers and started to weep. They were tanned. She was human again. They both were.
“It’s okay, Jenny. We can be who we want to be here. We are what we are here.”
“I…I feel things here. The things in the cylinders scared me. I’m crying seeing you like this again. I never thought I’d feel anything ever again except hunger and hate.”
“I told your great-great-grandfather we no longer had souls. I was wrong. They are here—waiting in the dream world.”
“You’re sleeping?”
Her mother smiled a warm, knowing look. Her eyes were brown and beautiful. “I can say your name, and your father’s name. I don’t even realize I’m doing it. I’m practically brain-dead, Jenny. Where do you think the rest of me goes when I’m just sitting there all bent and drooling?”
“Eichberg wants to dig inside your head and take out the grenade shrapnel stuck in there. I saw him take the wire handle off of an old pail. I think he’ll try it tomorrow.” She didn’t call him grandfather, or gramps; Jenny despised the man and refused to consider him as family.
Edna shrugged. “Let him try. He has your father under him, so it wouldn’t do any good trying to stop him.”
“I can talk to Dad. I can make him stop Eichberg.”
“No. You can’t. Your father isn’t your father anymore. None of us are what we should be in that world. Now if you could make him fall asleep…have him pay the two of us a visit…”
“He doesn’t sleep. None of them do.”
“Then it’s just you and me, kiddo.”
“I’ll do it myself—I’ll kill Eichberg.”
There was a stack of books on the table between them that Jenny hadn’t noticed before. Perhaps they’d always been there, or maybe they had suddenly appeared, as things in dreams had a way of doing. Jenny looked at the cover of the one sitting on top. It was titled Cryogenics in the Twentieth Century and Beyond. The author’s name at the bottom was Lothair Eichberg. That made sense. But the red swastika emblazoned on the cover’s center confused her.
“Your great-great-grandfather was a brilliant man. And he was a very evil man.”
Jenny pushed it aside and looked at the other covers. There were no titles or author names identifying them; they didn’t require any. The images were of children in varying degrees of despair and agony. They were strapped to tables with tubes forced into their mouths and noses. Frost had burned sections of their skin black. Jenny batted each book away in disgust as the covers became more gruesome. They grew thicker, heavier—every volume waiting bigger than the one before. Inside, she knew, the pages would be bursting with even more atrocities—thousands of pages detailing all the horrible things Lothair Eichberg had ever done, or had hoped to achieve. The last book, a three-thousand-page tome of torture, was the heaviest of them all. Jenny had to use both hands to push it away. It thumped to the floor next to their table with an awful thud.
“Our family legacy… I thought you should know. If you go up against him on your own, you will lose.”
“He was a monster. Not part of our family.”
Her mother produced a bla
ck binder out of thin air and pushed it towards her. It wasn’t as big as the books, less than an inch thick, with uneven pages sticking out along the edges. A small white card was taped on the front with a single word typed on it.
CRYERS
“Our crimes against humanity have travelled through generations.”
“What is this?”
“ABZE did more than take money from wealthy clients and promise them a second chance. We wanted to improve the human race…make it better…enhance it physically and mentally for the challenges of a future world.”
Jenny stared at the folder but wouldn’t open it. “It’s what makes us so strong—it’s how he brought you back after the…grenade.” Even in her dreams, Jenny couldn’t erase the horrible image of her mother being blown apart at the midsection, and the horrible piecing of her together again at the hands of her ancient relative.
Edna sighed. She was inside Jenny’s head, seeing and feeling everything her daughter was experiencing. “He wasn’t responsible for the enhancements. That work began decades after his freezing. My father—me—we’re responsible for the things you see now. CRYERS was the name given to a secret project that experimented on involuntary subjects.”
“Involuntary?”
“How many rich people do you know willing to pay to be guinea pigs? To improve the human condition we needed test subjects. ABZE found them throughout the prisons and asylums of North America. Hundreds of throwaways society no longer had any use for. They were the first—our cryogenic white mice.”
“Cryers.” Jenny whispered the word. “It’s what we are now. It’s what you made us. Why didn’t you just let me die, Mom? Why did you bring me back like this?”
“I love you.”
Jenny started to cry again. “You loved what I was. How will you feel when this dream ends? We can’t feel much of anything when were awake.” She rubbed the warm tears from her cheeks and held her fingers out. “We can’t cry when we’re awake… We can’t love.”
“We’re alive.”
“Not good enough. You sound like…him.”
Edna shrugged. A line of blood appeared at the corner of her mouth. It ran down her chin and dripped to the table. She made an ‘O’ shape with her lips and pushed a piece of olive-green-colored metal out with her tongue. The grenade shrapnel clunked down and rolled on top of the Cryers folder. “Like I said…he’s family. It’s our legacy.”
The nightmarish quality of Jenny’s dream had returned. The cryogenics cylinders she’d walked past were making noise. She looked over and saw them shaking. The glass window in the one closest cracked. A steady pounding from a hundred different cylinders echoed up into the cavernous shadows of rock—fists beating against the insides of metal coffins like frenzied tribal drums.
“They want out.”
“They can never be released. I didn’t share all of our secrets with Great-grandfather. He doesn’t know about this project…about the West Coast installation…where we kept the cryers. Some things—as I’m sure he would agree—are best kept secret.” Blood was flowing from her mouth as she talked, running down her front and splashing onto the table. The black folder was soaked in it. “Don’t try to stop him, kiddo. You can’t win. But you can make sure he never finds out about this place. Stay with him—stay with your father.”
A gaping hole had appeared beneath Edna’s chin. Flesh hung from it, and blood squirted out into her lap along with the flood from her mouth. Her eyes turned pink, with pinpricks for pupils.
“Don’t leave me, Mom. Please don’t wake up yet. I want to feel—”
“Wake up.” The hand on Jenny’s arm was insistent. She opened her eyes and looked into her father’s face. His skin was gray and scarred, his eyes orange. “It’s time to go.”
Jenny sat up and saw Brian Haywood heading down the hill. He was holding Eunice Murrenfeld’s hand, helping the obese woman along the steep slope. Aleea, Mary, and the Russian were ahead of them. Lothair Eichberg was already on flat land, setting out towards a strip of red rising in the east. Leonard trailed behind him, shuffling his feet and kicking up dust.
Colonel Strope went to Edna. “Help me with your mother. Her back’s still a mess.”
Jenny watched as he lifted her to her feet. She was still misshapen and deformed. The pink eyes settled on her daughter, lifeless and unaware.
Drool spilled from her gaping mouth. It reminded Jenny of blood.
This is what we are now…no longer human.
We’re cryers.
Chapter 32
Cobe had never experienced such an odd dream in all his sixteen years. He was walking a few steps behind a young girl—the same girl he’d seen down in Big Hole where Lothair and a handful of his kind had held the lawman captive. He called out to her, but the girl kept walking without even glancing over her shoulder. Her long red hair was beautiful. Cobe wanted to touch it—he needed to know if it would be as soft in his fingers as it appeared to his eyes. He tried running, but his legs were mired in air as thick as water.
Voices whispered to him from the line of black cylinders on his right. They were calling his name, pleading to be set free from their cold tombs. Cobe refused to look at them; his eyes were lost in the girl’s hair. The cylinders rattled and banged; the muffled voices inside became screams, demanding release.
The girl came to a strange table set in a rock wall. She slid along a seat covered in something red. The other woman was there—Cobe had seen her before, too—the one leaning into the open cylinder next to Lawson. She was as beautiful as the young girl. They shared many of the same features. Mother and daughter?
Cobe’s feet stopped working. He reached out to the women twenty feet away. They couldn’t see him. He yelled, but they couldn’t hear. Why was he even trying? They wanted to kill the lawman. They had wanted to kill all of them.
It was the girl. Cobe needed to see her face again. He recalled the brief moment their eyes had locked in Big Hole—how green they had been. Her hair…those eyes…he needed more. The things screaming from their cylinders drowned his shouts away. Mother and daughter could hear nothing—or they chose to ignore it. The two were in a world of their own, looking through an ancient pile of books soaked in blood.
Cobe continued shouting at the girl until someone kicked him in the rear end.
“Keep it down, you loud-mouth shit,” a rasping female voice said.
Cobe opened his eyes and smelled the earth. He remembered falling into grass and leaves. His face was now stuck in cold mud that reeked of urine.
“That’s more like it,” the voice said. “Few more seconds of yer wailin’ and I woulda cut yer throat wide open, I woulda.”
Cobe peeled himself from the wet ground and rolled onto his side. Devon’s lifeless white face stared back at him. An arrow was stuck in the flesh above his collarbone. There was a six-inch-wide gash in his throat.
“See? I done it to him ‘cause the big idiot wouldn’t keep his mouth shut. Tried pullin’ that arrow out but he wouldn’t shut up. Same thing fer you if you start up with the shoutin’ again. Dirty don’t lie.”
The back of his neck and the top of his head throbbed in pain as he sat up. Cobe thought he might throw up on Devon’s stomach. There, sitting a few feet away from the man’s corpse on a rotted tree stump, was the woman who’d cut his throat open. She was more hag than woman—an ancient bag of bones and wrinkled yellow-gray skin. A few strands of white hair hung over her cloudy blue eyes, like strings of spit wagging back and forth. The bridge of her nose was a crooked trail of ancient breaks that led to a bulbous purple tip infested with pustules. She was grinning—at least that’s what Cobe thought she was doing—and as she did, a single green-stained tooth scraped along her upper lip. Her jaw clicked as she ran it from one side to the other; a habit she’d more than likely developed before Cobe was even born, he supposed.
“You good at making babies?” the hag croaked.
“Where’s my brother?”
“Ain’t the answer
I was wantin’ to hear. I’ll ask again… You good at makin’ babies?”
Cobe had just turned sixteen. He’d never been with a girl in his life. The thought of this old thing wanting to be his first made him want to vomit even more. “I—I don’t…I can’t—”
The hag rocked back on her stump. “Not with me, stupid boy! Ol’ Dirty ain’t laid with a man in years! I wants to know if you can make babies with my daughters.”
Cobe had experienced unimaginable levels of fear in the last few days since the murder of his parents—terrors he hadn’t dreamed possible before setting out from Burn with his brother. An ancient race of people was waking up as cannibalistic monsters a mile beneath the ground. He’d learned how to use a gun by killing howlers, and he had run amongst a herd of stampeding rollers. But the decrepit woman before him now stirred fears inside Cobe like some horrible, disjointed nightmare.
“No…I can’t make babies.”
“Can’t, or won’t? Careful what you say next—laying with one of Dirty’s girls ain’t the worst thing that could happen here.”
The air between them was tinged with smoke thick enough to sting his eyes, but not enough to obscure his view of her. He looked about desperately in their dark surroundings for a way of escape. They were inside some sort of small cave; a dank black space. He spotted a narrow opening behind him, a sliver of vertical light. A small fire crackled outside. The smoke drifted in, watering his eyes more. Cobe slid on his backside towards it, keeping his eyes on the woman.
“Go on, then,” she said. “Go outside and find yer brother… Useless little puke.”
He scrambled to his hands and knees and crawled outside. The heel of one palm crushed down against a smoldering coal thrown from the fire and Cobe howled. He jumped to his feet, shaking his hand in the air. Another woman, half the age of Dirty but still old, sat across from the fire, laughing at him. Her naked body was coated from head to foot in gray mud. Cobe looked away, back towards the opening he’d crawled out of. It was part of a giant tree; the base had been hollowed out into a crude living area. His eyes wandered up. Cobe had never seen a tree grow so big and so high. Its uppermost branches, leafless and black, waved in the sky, scratching at a ceiling of steadily moving gray clouds.
