Crawlerz | Book 4 | From The Ashes

by Merritt, R. S.

  “Alright. Let me know what she says. I’ve got to report it, but I’ll swing it whichever way you want me to.” Tom said.

  “Ok. Hopefully I’ll know something soon. I’m going to go track them down now and see what they want to do. Leadership meeting at five in the conductor’s office, right?” Jeff asked. More for something to say than because he needed to confirm it.

  “That’s right. Bring some good ideas. We need them.” Tom went back to working on the looting list. He needed to get some men on it while there was still plenty of daylight left. He hoped Jeff could get Yue to commit to some course of action before too long. He was going to need to report what’d happened and what they’d discovered about Yue pretty soon. If not when he checked in tonight, then by tomorrow morning at the latest. It wasn’t the kind of information he could sit on for very long if he wanted to maintain his post.

  Jeff drove the golf cart as fast as it would go back in the direction he’d come from. He was so preoccupied thinking of how to tell Yue about Weathertop that he almost missed seeing the group he was looking for waving at him from a nearby porch. If he hadn’t happened to look up, they’d have been forced to shout to get his attention. No one liked shouting anymore. Silence had been ingrained in all of them at this point.

  Jeff swung the golf cart around and went over to where the little group was waiting. Before he’d gotten completely off the golf cart Yue was telling him she was sorry. Even as she was apologizing and telling him she loved him she was still being careful to keep her distance. He wanted to reach out and grab her but held himself back. LeBron helped him control himself by standing behind Yue and shaking his head fiercely back and forth. Jeff took that to mean he should keep his hands to himself.

  After the awkward greeting Yue directed him to sit with the others on the opposite side of the porch. Jeff sat down wondering what was going on. He started to ask and was once again stopped by LeBron shaking his head. Yue must have seriously freaked out her siblings for them to be acting this cagey. Jeff wanted to ask what was going on but waited for Yue to talk first since that was what LeBron kept indicating he should do.

  “It’s not just you I can’t stand being around anymore. Sorry, that came out wrong. When I’m part of them I’m riding that same current of hate. I can fight it because I’m not actually infected but it’s still pretty strong. Anytime we’re near one of them I’m connected. It’s like they’re a wireless network that I connect to anytime I get close enough to pick up the signal. That’s wrong but I don’t know how else to explain it.” Yue said. It sounded like she was rambling. Everyone got that she was trying to explain a concept that was alien to all of them.

  “How do you kill the connection?” Jeff asked simply.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s even possible now that I’ve connected. Plus, those things are everywhere. I don’t know how we missed them before. There’s one dug into the dirt underneath this porch. It knows we’re here. I’m keeping it calm right now so it won’t attack us. Evidently I can do that now.” Yue started laughing. She laughed until she was crying. Jeff took a step up to go to her.

  “No! Get back from me!” Yue shrieked jumping to her feet. Jeff stopped and took a few steps back holding his hands up in surrender. It broke his heart to see her like this.

  “What can we do to help?” He asked. Then he remembered what he had in his pockets. He searched around for a second trying to remember where he’d shoved them. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t already given them to her. Finally finding what he was looking for he tossed the big bag of pill bottles to Yue. She snagged it out of the air eagerly. She started to take the lid off one of the bottles then she stopped.

  “Let’s put this one out of its misery first. It’s just a kid.” Yue said softly. Drew and LeBron stood up. Drew took a machete out of his pack and LeBron hefted a thick staff he’d taken to using as a walking stick. Yue had been watching to make sure they were ready. Seeing that they were good to go she turned to face the street and went into a trance. Jeff was so busy staring at Yue that he almost missed the tween boy who crawled out from under the porch.

  The boy was naked and covered in dirt. His hair was long and greasy. His nails were long and jagged. He didn’t have the aura of a crawler though. He had the look of a boy who maybe snuck a couple of his dad’s beers. A lost and stumbling attitude. His eyes were open and confused. His mouth wasn’t snapping at the air over and over again like it should be. The infected boy should have been losing his mind in this close proximity to the group of uninfected on the porch. Instead he just looked like a dirty, naked, confused kid standing in the dirt.

  LeBron smacked him in the head with his staff hard enough to knock the ten year old backwards onto the ground. The boy lay there staring up at the sky. A small smile spreading out on his lips. Drew knelt down beside the boy with his machete in his hand. He lifted up the machete but couldn’t make himself bring it down.

  “Give him peace.” Yue said in a sing song voice from the porch. Drew still couldn’t do it. Jeff walked quickly down the porch stairs and over to the boy. He took the machete from Drew and had him move out of the way. Up on the stairs Yue’s eyes rolled back in her head and she collapsed.

  The boys eyes instantly turned red with hate. The peaceful persona was ripped away like it’d never existed. A demon lay there now staring up at the blue sky. It lunged for Jeff who brought the machete down hard. The blade smashed into the kid’s mouth and sank deeply into his jaw. Tooth fragments and blood flew out of the boy’s mouth. The demon inside the boy caught sight of the sun and withdrew. The boy fell to the ground staring sightlessly up into the sky once more. This time with a machete embedded deeply into his palette.

  “Is he dead?” Drew asked. He was shaking and white faced. It was always so much harder when it was a child.

  “I don’t think so.” Jeff answered looking down. The tiny chest was still rising and falling regularly. The eyes were unblinking. Blood was flowing in a steady stream out of the boy’s mouth. Jeff reached down with his foot and nudged the boy’s head so that it was straight up and down. The blood coming out of his mouth now had nowhere to go. It pooled up in his mouth and gradually drowned the poor little bastard. Jeff held the boy’s head straight with his boot until the bubbles stopped coming up.

  Drew turned around and puked. Jeff decided not to ask him if he wanted his machete back.

  Chapter 15: Square One

  “Sorry I’m late. Got held up.” Jeff said walking into the breakroom they’d setup as a conference area in the train depot. He’d walked silently along with the rest of the group back to the train car after beating the infected child to death. It somehow made it a thousand times worse the way Yue had gotten the little crawler to walk out from under the porch and just stand there. The little verse she’d sang about giving him peace had been creepy as hell. They’d waited for Yue to wake up before walking back. They’d been worried she wouldn’t deal well with waking up in any of their arms. It’d taken her a while to come around hence Jeff’s tardiness.

  “Understood. You’ve still got blood all over your sleeve by the way.” Tom said. It was funny how murdering people had become such an everyday occurrence that the biggest concern about being covered in blood was having to find new clothes. Tom had mentioned the blood staining Jeff’s sleeve in the same manner he’d have mentioned it if Jeff had a mustard stain on his shirt.

  Jeff sat down. He didn’t really trust himself to speak. He knew his eyes were red rimmed from the tears he’d shed while they waited for Yue to wake up. He’d leaned out over the bannister and imagined the dead child below running around in the backyard of the nice house they were at playing soccer or catch. He’d pictured playing football with the kid. He’d tried to remember what the world was like before casually murdering a tween became socially acceptable. He knew the others at the table would notice the state he was in.

  They wouldn’t say anything though. Among the warrior class Jeff was hanging out with these
days depression was as common as jock itch. Everyone seemed to have different triggers. One of the men who’d died when the high school went down had been assigned to Jeff as a driver and research assistant. The man helped with tasks like setting up the claymores to clear out crawler nests once Charlie pinpointed where they were. He was one of those larger than life guys who seem to have it all under control.

  They’d been driving to a quarry to see what size rocks they might be able to easily take. Jeff had been on a kick to try and see how they could save ammunition. Since the infected liked to run in circles around the bottom of the building he’d thought they may just be able to drop rocks off the roof and crush them. His escort had thought he’d watched to many road runner cartoons as a kid but gamely started up the Humvee to drive him out to the quarry. About halfway there the man had noticed a McDonalds on the side of the road. The sign overhead still advertising the last Happy Meal toys from the last Pixar movie.

  The hard core operator driving the Humvee had stopped the car and put his head down in his hands. He’d bawled his brains out for like five minutes straight. Then he’d found an old t-shirt in the center compartment and blown his nose into it. He’d thrown the used t-shirt out the window and continued driving like nothing had happened. That was the kind of internalized pain people were carrying around inside them in the apocalypse. Jeff and Tom had actually spent some time in their previous planning sessions outlining how important it was to embed therapists and counselors into the groups who’d be holding the front lines. The groups taking the fight to the crawlerz were going to need serious mental help.

  “Well you didn’t miss too much. This has become an idea free zone. Before you got here, we were trying to remember scenes from different end of the world type movies to get the juices flowing. How’s Yue doing?” Tom asked. He’d asked the question casually but both he and the other two men in the room leaned forward eagerly waiting for his response.

  “Speaking of stealing ideas from zombie movies. I know you guys were talking about trying to build up into the sky. That might work, but I’m thinking of an option Drew always wanted to try out. Any nice sized prisons around here?” Jeff asked. He’d purposefully ignored the question about Yue. He hoped she’d have recovered from the events of the day by the time he got back to the train. Even if she hadn’t, he knew he was still going to have to talk to her.

  “I saw that show too. I don’t see much difference between living in a prison and living in the train cars like we’re doing now.” One of the other officers at the table answered. That appeared to be the general consensus. Jeff had always thought it was kind of a moldy nasty death trap idea himself, so he didn’t have any real arguments. He mostly just wanted to avoid talking about Yue. He knew they’d all freak out if he told them Yue had gone from being a crawler divining rod to being able to steer the infected around like they were remote control cars.

  “What if we just lived in the trains full time? We could go around the country massacring the monsters without giving them the option to figure out our weak spots and kill us. If we stay in one place the crawlerz eventually figure out how to get in, then they share that weakness with the thousands of other crawlerz trying to get in. That’s why the high school finally fell. If we roll up in a new city every couple of days, then we may have a better chance at surviving this.” Jeff said excitedly. They were already using the train system to transport people around the country. Why not shift the fight around the same way?

  “The train cars are big enough to let us haul around all the ammunition and supplies we’d need. We could figure out how many men per car were needed. The cars themselves are pretty solid. Sounds like a good idea to me. Not really sure why we weren’t doing something similar to begin with.” Tom said getting excited about the idea.

  “We weren’t doing this to begin with because it doesn’t meet the requirements of the mission sir. Our priority is to establish a beachhead that’s safe and allows us to expand outward. The original vision was a walled city with room to grow crops. Kind of like the fortress that survived over in the UK.” The other officer at the table commented. He was right of course. The mission wasn’t to ride around the country trying to kill as many crawlerz as they could. The mission was to create safe zones and begin to rebuild.

  “You guys know that place in Britain collapsed right? It eventually got overrun. I wonder if we aren’t approaching this all wrong. Maybe our settlements need to constantly be on the move.” Jeff said. He was thinking out loud. He could see that Tom was struggling not to tell him that a moving settlement was an oxymoron.

  “There’s no reason we need to stay in one place. Staying in one place is how we keep losing. Every time you bunch people up in one location and try to make it secure, you’re actually doing the opposite. The crawlerz keep attacking that one position until they find a way in. Either a way they make themselves or some kind of screwup the people staying in that place make. Forgetting to lock a door, leaving a window open, getting back to base just a minute or two late one day. It doesn’t take much.” Jeff continued. He was warming to the ideas coming to him now. It looked like Tom might be getting it as well.

  “So we stop doing the thing that’s not working and try something different. Instead of large groups in fixed fortifications you’re saying small groups that are mobile. What about crops then? We can’t keep eating expired SpaghettiOs forever.” Tom asked.

  “Plenty of wild game you can kill during the day. We can plant crops during the day too. It’s not like the crawlerz care if we plant a bunch of corn and leave it there for a month or two. I have no idea how long it takes for corn to grow. We come back and pick it when it’s time to pick it.” Jeff answered excitedly. He was really liking this new concept.

  “Fuel’s not going to last forever. I don’t see how we rebuild civilization riding around in trains for forever.” One of the other officers at the table commented.

  “It’s not forever. Just until we kill enough of the crawlerz to make staying in one place safe again. I see what you mean about fuel though. We may have to dig up some of the coal burning engines and setup people to be coal miners again. I don’t think we’re going to have the expertise and manpower to refine gasoline again for a generation or two. We can charge batteries with solar or dams or even windmills. We’re not trying to power a city. We just need enough to make a train move during the day and maybe cars and trucks.” Jeff said.

  “I think it might end up being a hybrid model. You’ve got people in places like Weathertop then you have all the field guys out there constantly moving like you’re talking about. Sounds like something we should be exploring at least.” Tom said

  “Agreed.” Jeff said. The other men around the table nodded as well. It made a lot more sense than repeating the same mistakes they’d already made trying to fortify existing structures.

  The major dismissed the other men but asked Jeff to stay behind. Jeff moved a couple of chairs over closer to Tom. He knew where this was headed. It was a conversation he’d hoped to avoid. Tom pulled out a report that’d been stapled together and handed it to Jeff. Jeff took a couple of minutes to scan through it then put it back on the table. He sat there with his arms crossed wondering what to say.

  “Well what do you think of the report?” Tom finally asked. They didn’t have long to screw around. Nobody wanted to get caught outside the train cars once it started getting dark.

  “It’s pretty much spot on. Planning on sending it in the morning?” Jeff asked. The report was a detailed accounting of what’d happened to the base. It included the mind tricks Yue had performed to rescue Harley, Tom and the other soldier out of the Humvee. It also detailed how Yue had been able to locate the crawlerz inside the wreckage of the high school the next day making the search and rescue operation much safer for all involved.

  “I am. I wanted your feedback on the recommendations section first. How about you take it and talk to Yue then get it back to me with your markups first thing in the mornin
g. I want to send it back with the train whenever it gets here.” Tom said.

  Jeff appreciated the gesture. Tom was giving him the chance to talk to Yue and phrase the recommendations however they wanted to. The more he thought about it the more Jeff was sure that the field was the best place for Yue. At least from a military standpoint when it came to developing her skills. She’d languish back at Weathertop. No way they were letting a crawler get anywhere near the base. The people in charge there knew what’d happened on board the Ford. If an aircraft carrier in the middle of the ocean with watertight compartments and Marines guarding it could go down, then so could Weathertop.

  Jeff sighed as he entered the train car. The Marine standing at the door saluted him and asked if anyone else was coming aboard. Jeff told him he was good to secure the car for the night. The Marine did so quickly. The sky was starting to get a little too dark for the man’s comfort. Not that anyone would think any less of him for that. You had to be an idiot to be caught outside after dark. It wasn’t a bad thing to have someone a little paranoid in charge of securing the doors for the night.