Crawlerz | Book 4 | From The Ashes

by Merritt, R. S.

  “Do we just hop in the trucks in the morning and hope for divine inspiration on the way over? I’ve got nothing honestly. I just don’t feel good about driving away.” Jeff said into the awkwardness.

  That seemed to be the general consensus. They broke up the meeting to go to their own corners with the hope that maybe it would come to them while they slept. It was a pretty impossible problem. A gigantic underground base filled with lightning fast monsters they needed to get through to rescue people who may or may not actually be there. The people in the base should still have power. It’s not like the crawlerz would intentionally go around unplugging cords or flipping breakers. The people in the base should still be able to use their communications equipment to let the rest of the world know they needed help.

  LeBron was trying to get his pillow to stay still on an arm rest as he thought about the problem. He was wondering why the base hadn’t called for reinforcements to come help them when he realized something super obvious. It was too late now to do anything about it but that didn’t stop him from hopping off the chair and going over to where Jeff and Yue were sitting beside one another reading books. Yue was reading a regular looking book while Jeff was leafing through a manual on cleaning up toxic spills.

  “That looks riveting.” LeBron joked pointing at the plain white cover of the instructional manual.

  “Well you never know when some random knowledge may come in handy.” Jeff said with a grin. He’d put the book down into his lap with a relieved sigh when LeBron interrupted his reading. Cleaning chemical spills wasn’t half as interesting as he thought it’d be.

  “I’m taking a break from manuals and medical books for a while.” Yue said putting hers down as well. “The apocalypse is definitely a bad thing for horror writers trying to get new fans. All their stories seem tame compared to what we do on a daily basis.”

  “I’m not really sure I’d call ‘Odd Thomas’ a horror novel.” LeBron said trying to see which of the series his sister was reading. He recognized the book since it was one that he’d recently finished and left lying around. Yue must’ve snagged it for a rainy day.

  “You came over here with something in mind other than critiquing our reading material I’m thinking.” Jeff said. He didn’t seem in any hurry to pick his manual back up, but he was curious what’d caused LeBron to rush over to talk to them. Thankful for the reminder LeBron immediately dove into what he’d come over to talk about.

  “Well I was wondering how come the people in the communications room at Weathertop hadn’t called for help. It’s a secure room and the people inside should’ve had some advanced warning of what was going on. Anyway I was trying to picture what may have happened when it occurred to me that we could just go get some reinforcements. If we pulled another hundred men over here, then going down into the base wouldn’t seem quite so much like suicide anymore.” LeBron said with a flourish. He was a little disappointed at the lack of enthusiasm in Jeff’s or Yue’s faces at his idea.

  “How would we get ahold of people? We’d need to drive back to Cape May to use their radio.” Jeff said. He was thinking hard. Beside him Yue was washing down a couple of little pills to get ready for the evening. The crawlerz would be showing up to spread their good cheer at any time now. LeBron thought for a second about the point Jeff had just brought up.

  “I was actually thinking Fayetteville. Weathertop may be closer but the people there can’t fight like we can. The people in Fayetteville are used to living this life. They’ll be good to wade into that giant crawler filled hole with us and drag out the survivors. The more of us there are the less likely we die.” LeBron said. When your enemy moved so fast you could barely see them then putting up a solid wall of bullets was a great option to have in your back pocket.

  “The people in Weathertop could just call the people in Fayetteville on the radio.” Yue said.

  Jeff considered that idea for a minute. He shook his head before laying out why he agreed with LeBron on this one. “Whichever base we show up at will be the one we’re able to get the most resources from. Fayetteville is the closest one with the best resources for this kind of mission. They’re also tied in pretty tight with Weathertop. If anyone’s going to be willing to send men into the base to see what happened its going to be them.”

  “Ok then.” LeBron said. He really didn’t have anything to add. He’d shared his epiphany so quickly with Jeff that he really hadn’t had time to think it through. He said good night and walked back to the seat he’d just sprung out of. His thoughts were spinning in a million different directions. Would the men actually come to Weathertop to try and help? If they did come, would they be able to do any good? Even if a hundred men showed up would they just get overwhelmed by the supernaturally gifted silent killers lurking in the cavernous fortress they were hoping to rescue people from?

  The crawlerz arrival to beat on the train car they were going to sleep in actually helped quiet his nerves. The familiar cold, wet spike of terror ran from his bladder up through his spine into his brain. He fumbled out a nighttime cocktail he’d grown fond of. It was one he took when he didn’t think he was going to have to wake up. It kept the nightmares at bay enough so that he could get some sleep. When they ran out of the pills that kept the crawlerz out of their heads at night that was going to suck. They really needed to get Weathertop back up and running. It was well past time to start on the cross country mass murdering the monsters mission. They needed to get all the crawlerz nice and dead so they could start figuring out what the future of humanity was going to look like.

  Chapter 31: There and Back Again

  “Why do we do everything so early?” Drew whined.

  “Why do you and Harley stay up all night playing cards?” Lisa asked him back with a scowl. She hadn’t slept well at all. She’d woken up in the middle of a panic attack. In her nightmares something made her think the crawlerz were coming through the floor. She’d hopped wildly up on her chair with her pistol drawn. It’d taken Drew a good twenty minutes to get her calmed down and back to sleep. It wasn’t helping Lisa’s mood that she knew within a day or two they’d be expected to march down into a giant hole filled with the infected to save people who were most likely already dead.

  Everyone gathered their gear and went to stand by the door for the morning door opening ritual. The train car did have the monitors and external cameras installed. The engine wasn’t connected though so they had no electricity. They utilized the less technologically advanced peepholes cut into the wall instead. Jeff was looking to see if there were any surgers standing outside ready to pounce. Declaring the coast clear he opened the door and they proceeded carefully over to the platform.

  The trucks were parked in the lot on the other side of the train platform. Yue was urging them all to move quickly. She’d caught more than one vision of them walking from the mind of a crawler hidden in the shadows around them. This train yard had never been as well maintained as the one in Fayetteville. Now it’d really been overrun. Probably a result of not having a bunch of jarheads running around shooting everything they saw moving underneath the trains.

  They made Fayetteville by noon with minimal drama. The roads were pretty clear between the two bases. Other than the standard apocalyptic garbage, abandoned cars and the random decaying corpses scattered along the cracked asphalt highways. It’d occurred to LeBron on the way to Fayetteville that the crumbling asphalt would never be resurfaced. If he happened to somehow survive long enough to have kids it was very likely they’d be riding around in horse drawn carriages on dirt roads. LeBron was totally fine with using up the remaining modern resources like gas and bullets to rid the countryside of the infected.

  If they weren’t able to kill all the crawlerz it wouldn’t really matter what happened to the roads. They’d all be too dead to care. That included LeBron’s mythical horse drawn carriage driving son. The poor figment would never even get the chance to wonder what it was like to ride in a convertible and eat microwaved popcorn. L
eBron shook off his daydreams as they pulled in at the Fayetteville train depot. They piled out of the trucks and headed towards the administrative offices in the train station.

  Major Tom and a couple of other men including their old pal Lipsey met them halfway there. The major looked like he’d aged about ten years in the weeks since they’d left. His hair was unkempt and appeared a little more salt than pepper. Even more telling he looked like he was trying to smuggle something through customs using the bags under his bloodshot eyes. A dirty bandage tied around his head to cover one of his ears completed the ensemble of a wrung out warrior.

  “Oh good. You’re alive.” Tom said by way of greeting. He looked like he knew he should say something nicer but was too tired to care. Everyone on both sides of the conversation could totally relate to that level of exhaustion. Jeff’s group were all pretty stoked that they’d made it all the way past noon without having to fight for their lives yet.

  “Lucky to be standing here honestly. We did lose a couple of good men along the way.” Jeff responded. They were all quiet for a moment as they remembered the men who hadn’t made it.

  “Are you back for good?” The major finally asked after a respectful amount of time had passed. There was so much death these days. Fayetteville was a well patrolled base where everyone was armed and weary but one or two people a week were still going to be slaughtered. It was just the way of the world now.

  Jeff hesitated a second to organize his thoughts. They could’ve called ahead on the radios in the trucks to say why they were coming back. They’d actually made contact to let the people at the base know they were on the way. Jeff had just felt like the rest of the conversation would be better in person. He doubted they’d be able to get back to Weathertop in the same day with reinforcements anyway. When he felt like he had everything situated in his mind the way he wanted to present it he started talking.

  “We came here straight from Weathertop. There’re a few bodies outside and the main doors are standing wide open. The base fell but there’s most likely survivors still inside. We came back here to collect some more men to help us out. We’re going try and make the push into the base to rescue anyone we can.” Jeff said. He liked the way it’d come out. Concise and to the point. Now he stood there waiting for Tom to rip the statements apart.

  “Sounds about right. Roll out in the morning?” Tom asked.

  “Yeah. I don’t think we’d make it back in time to do anything tonight and there’s just the one train car to sleep in.” Jeff answered.

  “What if we used the train that’s here?” Drew asked. He’d walked around the corner to look out into the train yard. To his mind if they were going to do this then they needed to hurry up and do it. The longer they waited to rescue people the more people were going to die. All he had to do was close his eyes and imagine he was trapped in the dark with no food or water surrounded by those monsters. That was enough to make him work to push everyone along. If they were going to do this then they might as well do it when they had the greatest chance to save the greatest number of people.

  Using the train that was there sparked some conversation around logistics. If they all hopped on the train to get over to Weathertop then in the morning they’d be walking from the train depot to the base. That’d take the entire day. Even if they could find a car or truck or something and get it working, they still would’ve been better off waiting until the next morning and just driving there. Unsurprisingly it was LeBron who figured out the approach that solved that problem and made the most sense.

  “Why don’t we get the train moving now with all the men you want to send and then we turn around and drive back? We’ll meet the train when it gets there, and we’ll all have a safe place to sleep tonight. First thing in the morning we head for Weathertop. Once we get there, we send a couple of men back with some of the vehicles from there. Those guys can taxi everybody back and forth between the train depot and the base.” LeBron said. It seemed super simple to him.

  It was so simple most everyone in the little circle of people who’d formed to talk it over opened their mouths to say what was wrong with it. Yue thought they looked like a bunch of fish standing around with their mouths open. She’d known better. LeBron wouldn’t have opened his mouth in front of all these people if he didn’t have a solid plan. A few more logistical details and a time check and it was agreed.

  Jeff waved the people in his group back to their trucks. They moved quickly past the Fayetteville based soldiers who were rushing around now to grab their gear and get on the train. In theory it should take them longer to make the trip in the trucks than it’d take the train. The one scary thing about this plan was how close they were cutting it. There’d only be about an hour of sunlight left when they rolled into the train depot.

  The good news was that they’d just driven the route to get there. They knew it was relatively crawler free with no major obstructions they’d have to go around. They had plenty of gas and two trucks for redundancy. It wasn’t until they were already about thirty minutes away that they got the radio broadcast that the train had left the station. Up until then the radio chatter had been primarily around rounding up the troops and getting them to the station.

  Not all the cars were being taken. Two cars were being left behind for the refugees and other support personnel currently housed at the base. A handful of men had been left behind to function as guards for the non-combatants as well. That left three train cars full of heavily armed men to head in the direction of Weathertop. In addition to men they’d also loaded up explosives, ammunition and the other supplies they thought they might need. All of the planning thus far had centered around getting everyone to the site. They’d tried to drag along whatever might be needed to support whatever plan they ended up coming up with.

  Haywood was convinced that as long as they had a bunch of skilled men to go along with the piles of ordinance that they’d be able to figure out something. Drew had agreed whole heartedly and asked how many crates full of grenades they were bringing along for the ride. They were talking through options for the assault in the morning when a deer leapt out of the overgrown ditch and smashed into the windshield.

  Haywood slammed on the brakes causing them to skid sideways into a wrecked minivan that was sitting on the side of the road. They hit that and Drew and Lisa both flew across the back seat to slam into the window on that side of the truck. LeBron and Haywood in the front seats had both been wearing their seatbelts. More out of habit than for any other reason. Haywood fought down a wave of black dizziness to put the truck in park and step outside. He waved at Jeff who’d already turned around and was heading back in their direction.

  LeBron was checking on Drew and Lisa in the back of the truck when a crawler erupted from out of the dark confines of the minivan the truck had slammed into. The crawler flew across the pavement and latched its teeth into Haywood’s throat. Disoriented from the crash Haywood never even saw the attack coming. He was saved the indignity of turning into a surger since he died before he could become infected. His blood pumped out in hot juicy spurts around the mouth of the crawler. It happened so fast LeBron and the dazed couple in the back of the truck didn’t even see it happen.

  A horrified Jeff and Harley got to see it up close and personal since it happened as they were driving back down the road to make sure everyone was ok. One second Haywood was waving at them and the next Yue was screaming for Haywood to watch out. Jeff hadn’t known what to do since Haywood was just standing there in the middle of the road. Harley had rolled his window down to yell out a warning when the crawler had appeared out of nowhere and taken down their hardcore friend.

  They cautiously pulled their truck up to where Haywood’s truck was idling in park. Harley leapt out of the seat with his tactical shotgun in hand. With his long black jacket flapping around behind him the big man walked over to where Haywood was lying dead in a massive puddle of hot bubbly blood. The wiry demon lying beside him had a look of ecstasy about it. It w
as so covered in blood that Harley couldn’t tell if it was male or female. It was on its stomach so he couldn’t even tell by looking down at the genitalia.

  Not that it mattered if it was a male or a female. It was a crawler that’d just wasted his friend. The patriotic military man was on the opposite side of a lot of issues from the super-sized gypsy roughneck but they’d both shared a common warrior spirit. Haywood was obviously dead. Harley went ahead and put one in his head and one in his heart anyway after blowing the head off the infected.

  When he was done making sure his friend and the crawler were both dead, he walked past the shell shocked trio of Lisa, Lebron and Drew to the bed of the truck. He pulled out one of the jugs of gasoline sitting in the back. He then walked back over and dumped a liberal amount of the gas all over Haywood and his murderer. Drew came around with his mouth hanging open in shock. Harley asked him to get in the truck and drive it up the road past the spot he was about to set on fire.