CRYERS

by North, Geoff

  Lode grabbed his throat and started to squeeze.

  Screams broke out from the west side of the ring. Men and women spilled out from the rocks and into the pit, desperately trying to flee from something coming in. There was nowhere for them to go. People climbed over one another, grasping for the boulders and stones on the east side. A few made it to the top and over—most fell back into the crush of bodies below.

  Cobe dragged his brother away from them and headed back towards Trot. They discovered him huddling behind a series of abandoned sitting rocks. He was crying and shaking.

  “They’re here, Cobe,” he blubbered. “The bad people from Big Hole have found us.”

  Chapter 45

  Lothair snapped someone’s neck and stepped over the dead body into the pit. No one challenged them. When Ivan had torn the heart out of a guard stationed outside and proceeded to eat it in front of others, they had met no resistance at all. Colonel Strope was at Eichberg’s side. Aleea, Ivan, and Lenny were behind them, chewing on the limbs and organs of those too stunned or too slow to get out of their way in time.

  Lothair studied the ring of rocks surrounding them. “It appears to be a blast crater,” he said to the Colonel. “Like the one that hit Dauphin. Nuclear?”

  Strope shook his head. “I don’t think so. Probably a dirty bomb. The Libyans had started dropping them on us during my last tour in New Arabia. They don’t pack as much punch…used mainly to disperse other nasty stuff into the air. I’m betting this one carried chemicals to poison the farmland and starve out the livestock.”

  The crowd had become a mass of twisting limbs. They were still flooding out over the top and fleeing into the plains, but a greater number still—those too young and too old—were being trampled down at the bottom. Eunice shoved Lothair and Strope out of her way. “Plenty of livestock for us now.” She ran into their backs like a battering ram of raking nails and gnashing teeth.

  Lothair saw a big man at the crater’s center hunched over an unconscious form. Eichberg almost smiled when he recognized the boots. He started towards them.

  Yaven intercepted him half way. “What have you done? Who are you people?”

  Lothair batted the old warrior’s head off.

  “This one is mine,” Lode growled. “Find someone else.”

  “That man trespassed into one of my facilities. He caused considerable damage to my property and blew my daughter into two pieces…He will die at my hands, not yours.” Lothair called back for Strope. “Colonel—please join us.”

  Lode stood up. “It’s true what them kids and the lawman said. There really were monsters living under the ground.”

  “Colonel Strope, show this brute what twenty-first century science has made us.”

  Willem woke up not knowing at first where he was. His brother and Trot were pulling him up through rocks. The old tree he had wanted to sit in loomed over them, its ancient roots poked out through the boulder cracks and scraped at his legs as they dragged him along.

  “What’s happening? Are the Rites over?”

  “Our part in it is,” Cobe answered.

  Willem looked over his shoulder down into the pit. Hundreds of people had squeezed themselves up against the far side. They were screaming, crying, and clambering over themselves in a continuous wave. A few grey-skinned ones were pulling them back and tearing off their arms. Willem saw a fat woman with her head shoved up into a flailing man’s stomach. Her head popped out and a trail of intestines followed clamped between her teeth.

  The three made it to the top. Trot leaned up against the tree’s trunk and gasped for air.

  Cobe pulled on his arm. “Come on, we don’t have time to rest.”

  “Not yet,” Willem said. He’d spotted the lawman lying in the dirt. Lode was circling around one of the grey-skins from Big Hole. The one that had introduced himself as Lothair and eaten a howler before Willem’s eyes was with them. The three of them were squaring off. Lode had killed his parents. The grey things scared the shit out of him. He wanted to see all of them die. “I ain’t goin’ nowhere until this is done.”

  They watched Lode strike out.

  The blow shattered Strope’s jaw. It dropped open and teeth fell from his mouth. The colonel held his ground as Lode punched him again. He continued pummeling until the thing’s head and face was a coated red mess of pulverized bone and mutilated flesh. The swollen eyes lids cracked open and Lode saw orange. The giant took a step back. “This isn’t possible… It ain’t fair.”

  Strope leapt on his chest and had torn most of the throat out before Lode’s back thudded into the mud like some great, felled tree. He jammed his thumbs up into the dead man’s eye sockets and wrenched his skull wide open.

  “Must you eat his brains, Colonel?” Lothair looked away. “It seems so…uncivilized.”

  Strope swallowed down grey matter. “He knocked out most of my teeth. The brains are soft.”

  “It’ll be nice when your teeth grow back in.” Lothair picked Lawson up into his arms and exited the pit.

  “You seen enough?” Cobe asked.

  Willem slithered back on his stomach away from the boulder edge. “I reckon.”

  Trot was sitting further away, picking slivers of dead tree bark from the soles of his bare feet. “The lawman’s dead, and I didn’t see Sara anywhere when all them folks started running. She must have died too.” His shoulders shook and he began to weep again.

  “The lawman ain’t dead,” Cobe reassured him. “And just ‘cause you couldn’t see Sara doesn’t mean she’s dead either.”

  “Then what’re we gonna do?” Trot breathed in through his leaking nostrils and horked out snot from between his lips. “How are we supposed to survive with no grown-ups to help us?”

  “You are a grown-up. You proved that by running away from Burn all on your own.”

  “I ran because I was scared. I woulda died out there if it wasn’t for Lawson.”

  The screams of people still being trampled, crushed, and consumed chased Willem even further from the rocks. “We won’t be doin’ no more growin’ if we don’t get away from here.”

  They descended out from the rocks and started west. Trot stumbled after them. “Where we going?”

  “Back to Rudd,” Cobe called over his shoulder. “We’re going to find Kay and then head north for a ways—just like the lawman wanted us to do.”

  They came across a woman lying on the dusty trail halfway back to town. She was on her stomach. The shredded white clothes she wore and the black hair seemed familiar to Cobe.

  Willem prodded her shoulder with his toe. “She dead?”

  Cobe knelt down and gently turned the woman over—the woman from Big Hole.

  A girl’s voice spoke out from behind them. “I warned you in the dream.” Cobe turned and saw green eyes and red hair. “I told you we were coming, and here we are.”

  Jenny kicked the back of his head and Cobe saw black.

  Part Five:

  Return to Big Hole

  Chapter 46

  Earlier that day—a few hours before the Rites had commenced—Rudd had been home to six-hundred residents. Another hundred or so had just been visiting. Now it was a town of empty buildings and abandoned houses. Only a few dozen people remained.

  Cobe and his brother were two of them. They no longer called any place home, and Rudd was undoubtedly the last stop for them and the feeble-minded Trot.

  But Cobe had believed they were finished more than once since fleeing Burn a week earlier, and more than once they had beaten the odds and survived. Perhaps there would be a way out this time as well. That way rested on the shoulders of the grey-skinned, red-headed girl called Jenny sitting before him.

  “So if you don’t plan on killing and eating us, what are you going to do?”

  “It isn’t up to me,” she replied.

  They had been herded into Rudd’s biggest building along with some other Rites massacre survivors like a pack of wild animals. It was a single-story, sing
le-room space made of crumbling rock walls and timber ceiling. Cobe had learned it had been the town meeting place from an old man off in the corner. His hands were tied behind his back and a second rope was looped around his scrawny neck. The other end was secured to a supporting beam above. He looked like a hanging dog, but Cobe didn’t think he had much bite left. None of Rudd’s remaining numbers posed a threat to the things from Big Hole hung up like that and standing on their toes.

  “We’re still alive,” Cobe said. “You could’ve killed us when we left the pit, but you didn’t.”

  “I’ve kept you alive until now. I don’t think I have much say on what happens to you in the next few days. My father and the old pink-eyed bastard are in charge. Those other ones—fat Eunice and the Russian would just as soon eat all of you in one sitting.”

  The pink-eyed bastard was related to her. Cobe had overheard the girl talking to the one that had killed Lode. The old man was her grand-father or some other silly name with the word great in its title. She didn’t like him—that much was obvious—and Cobe figured they might be able to use that to their advantage. “I had a dream,” Cobe continued. “I was trapped in one of those metal beds. You tried warning me…Was it about the old man?”

  “We’re all the same, just as dangerous…just as deadly.”

  “So why aren’t the three of us dead? Why aren’t we strung up like all the rest?” Cobe was sitting with Willem and Trot in the center of the big room. Everyone else was tied up and hanging from their necks.

  “I found you. You’re mine.”

  “We don’t belong to nobody,” Willem said.

  “I didn’t mean it that way. I meant I won’t let the others touch you. Aleea, Ivan—those other cryers—they only see you as food. I’m not like them.”

  “You just said you were all the same,” the younger boy replied.

  “I don’t eat people.”

  Trot moaned. “I don’t wanna be eaten.”

  “I won’t let them.”

  She wasn’t like the others, Cobe knew. She hadn’t consumed human flesh, but she wasn’t human either. Her eyes glowed green. She was as grey-skinned and dead-looking as those with her. Cobe, Willem, and Trot belonged to her—no matter how she said it. Jenny was their only hope. They were alive, and for Cobe that was enough. He would get them out of this.

  The fat woman named Eunice entered the building. She was a heaving mess covered from head to toe in blood and gore. She went to the closest hanging survivor and untied the noose from around his neck. The man slumped to his knees and cried out in pain.

  Eunice kicked him onto his side and snapped the rope holding his wrists together. “Get up and run. I’ll give you a ten second head start.”

  He looked up at her uncomprehendingly.

  “Get up, you dumb fuck,” she roared. “I’m giving you a fighting chance—or should I just tear out your lungs right here?”

  The man started to crawl for the doorway.

  “One Mississippi… Two Mississippi…”

  He sprung to his feet and ran.

  “That’s better,” Eunice said. “Three Mississippi… Four Mississippi…” She stopped counting after five and burst out of the doorway after him.

  People had started crying again, but the sounds were quiet and strained. The ropes around their necks choked off most of the terror. Cobe counted how many were left. Thirty-five. There had been forty a short while ago. The cryers had been coming in every hour or so and releasing them one at a time. At this rate Rudd’s remaining population would number zero in less than two days.

  Jenny had seen him counting. “They’re not going to kill you or your brother any time soon. Eichberg wants all the young ones kept alive.”

  Trot made another groaning noise. “Just the young ones?”

  “Until they can find more towns and cities…More people. They can’t take the chance you’re the only ones. They have to be sure.”

  “I don’t get it,” Willem said.

  “They need to keep you around to make more humans.”

  “Gawdamn. I thought they only did that in the Dirty Hills.”

  Cobe wasn’t as worried as his brother. Making babies and growing them as livestock for these monsters would require years. There weren’t enough people left in Rudd to kick-start the process. And at the rate the cryers were eating, there wouldn’t be any opportunity to make babies at all.

  Chapter 47

  “I thought I’d lost you again,” Sara said softly.

  The lawman’s eyes had opened for the first time in over a day. He seemed unaware at first, his lids heavy-moving, the pupils too large and black. He blinked slowly and the steel-grey returned. He saw her and tried to smile with lips still swollen and cracked.

  “Freeda.”

  Sara’s frowned. The blows to his skull may have caused damage beyond her ability to fix. Lawson was living in the past—sixteen years to be precise, following the deadly contest he’d fought as a younger man. Freeda had brought him back then, and Lawson was there once again inside his battered mind.

  He said the name again. “Freeda… She saved my life the first time I fought in the Rites…didn’t think it possible…another beautiful woman could patch me back up again.”

  “You old fool.” Tears welled up in her eyes and she had to wipe them away to see his face again clearly. “Why did you sacrifice yourself like that? I could’ve taken care of Kay and those boys without you throwing your life away.”

  “I doubt that.” He lay there quietly for a few more moments adjusting to the pain his entire body was finally sending to his brain. It felt as if every bone inside his tired, old frame had been broken and re-broken for good measure. “I take it I didn’t defeat Lode?”

  Sara applied a damp cloth to his forehead. “I didn’t think any living thing was capable of knocking that mountain down.” She paused—not wanting to tell him how things ended after Lode had throttled him unconscious.

  Lawson saw the concern in her eyes. He sat up with considerable difficulty from the table in Sara’s home and grasped the hand holding the cloth. “They’re here, aren’t they? Them things from Big Hole are in Rudd.”

  “It was so horrible,” she whispered, guiding him back down. “They killed so many—tore the flesh off their bones…the one cracked Lode’s head open and ate his brains.” Lawson tried sitting up again but Sara held him down. She put a finger over his lips. “The old one called Eichberg is just outside. He’s waiting for you to wake up. Said he’s going to make you pay…going to hurt you bad.”

  Lawson had been threatened before. Men had been trying to kill longer than he could remember. Vengeful men—drunks holding grudges, wife-beaters, kid-touchers, and dozens more depraved individuals had sworn to take his life. None had succeeded. Lode had had the best shot at it, but Lawson figured the grey-skinned, pink-eyed monster named Lothair Eichberg might finally get the job done.

  The lawman turned his head slowly from side to side, searching. “Where are the kids? Where’s Trot?”

  “The boys are being held in the town meeting hall along with all the others from Rudd and Burn. Eichberg made me stay here to see you recover.”

  “What about Kay?” he asked. An even more mournful expression fell over her face. “Sara…where’s or daughter?”

  “She’s missing… I haven’t seen her since the Rites started.”

  More tears sprung to her eyes and Lawson wiped one as it fell down her cheek. “She ain’t dead. If she’s got even half of yer smarts and my stubbornness, then she’s alright. We’ll get out of this mess. We’ll get everyone together again and leave this gawdamn town behind.”

  “I don’t see how. There’s only eight of them, but they have all the bridges guarded. Eichberg never sleeps—none of them do.”

  “I’ll find a way.”

  “Most of your ribs were broken and I think you still might be bleeding inside. You can barely sit up, and you’re going to plan a way out?”

  “I just need some time.
A day or two for these old bones to heal.” He stroked another tear away from her face with his thumb. “I’ve wasted too much of my life away from you…from family. If I ain’t dead yet, then I figure there’s gotta be some reason. Maybe the Gods have given me all these chances to do somethin’ better. Maybe they want me to settle down…finish the rest of my life as a family man.”

  Or maybe the Gods were simply being cruel, Sara thought. Perhaps they were playing with all of them. Someone screamed out in the street. Another resident of Rudd was being eaten alive.

  Chapter 48

  The girl poked her head up out of the hole and looked around in all directions. The sun was low on the horizon and her skull cast a long black shadow against the cracked earth.

  “I think it’s okay…can’t see nothin’.”

  Anna pushed up on her daughter’s boney rear-end. “Then make room, girl. Climb out so I can get me some fresh air.”

  Angel crawled out and helped her mother. “What kinda monster you figure lived in that hole, Ma?”

  “What do you mean lived? I reckon it’s still about somewhere…Maybe watchin’ us right now and readyin’ to jump.”

  Angel sneered. The buck teeth slid over her bottom lip and dug into her pimpled chin. “Quit tryin’ to scare me... You been scarin’ me ever since we left Rudd.”

  Anna crawled all the way out from the tight space and shook dry soil from her hair. “Gotta keep you aware—make sure you’re lookin’ out fer yourself, and not relyin’ on yer pa no more.”