The Creepers (13 page)

“It hasn’t been dead long. I’d say was
dinner for something, maybe, when we started down hill,” Ecky whispered.
“Sloppy tracks lead away, towards building. Creeper. One, possibly two.”

Why would they drag away a meal instead
of eating it out in the open? Bobby wanted to ask, but didn’t. The Creepers were
unpredictable. Sometimes, they displayed signs of intelligence, brief glimpses,
but more often than not, they moved en masse from one victim to the next.
Perhaps they wanted to get out of the cold. Even the simplest of animals knew
how to react to changing seasons and bad weather. Why should the walking dead
be any different? Bobby took a deep breath. The fact that he had been bitten
and survived was not lost on him, but shelter held top priority. In the back of
his mind, gunfire and the screams of his brothers.

Ecky stepped slowly towards the water
treatment facility. Its smashed windows revealing only darkness and silence.
Using the lampposts as a guide, Ecky navigated the snow-covered walkway. The
blizzard, in all its fury, dumped over a foot and a half of snow in only a few
hours. The front of the building was cloaked in shadow. Through the falling
snow Ecky glimpsed the bent aluminum frames of its double doors, shards of
glass like frozen fangs clung to them, as if something bashed its way out, or in.
It was hard for him to tell with the snow covering up all signs of past
activity, but as he caught sight of a ribcage poking through the fresh powder
about the door, he knew he was approaching a tomb. He wondered how long they
had held out before the Creepers got them. Spots of blood flecked the pathway,
and long, uneven grooves spoke of the telltale dragging feet. He clutched the
crowbar tighter.

Going into an unknown structure was a
cardinal sin. So, too, was allowing yourself to freeze to death. Ecky dropped
his pack at the door and listened. Just under the falling snow, and wind
whistling through the broken windows, he heard it. Slight at first, then
gradually, becoming more clear . . . crunching, moaning.

“Inside, close,” he cupped his ear and
continued, “but can’t pinpoint. Are you ready for this, Bobby?”

Bobby slung his rifle and had the hammer
in hand before Ecky even finished asking the question. He squeezed it
reassuringly, pointing it into the darkness.

Ecky removed a long, black metal
flashlight from his pack. “We clear it, we get warm, seems good deal to me.”

The armor of Bobby’s training began to
crack. He started to shake deep within. He wanted to fall to his knees, he
wanted to open the vault and let everything out. What was the point of it all?
What was he surviving for? For that matter, what were any of them surviving
for? For God? For hope? If God was what they told him, how could such a deity
let this happen? Tears ran down his reddened cheeks.
      

Ecky laid a hand on his shoulder.

“Be quick or be dead,” Bobby said,
stepping in front of Ecky. He crossed the threshold into the thick shadows. He
didn’t pause at the sound of brittle bones cracking under his boots.

Ecky clicked the flashlight and shined
it over Bobby’s head. In the sharp glow the skeletal remains of at least a
dozen bodies littered the entrance like the den of a predatory animal. Torn,
dingy blue uniforms, rusted firearms, broken radios, and broken furniture
covered the floor. Plaques, reminders of a valiant last stand, but another loss
for mankind. Man’s brief history since the end of the First War was filled with
them.

The hall beyond stretched into solid
black. Spaced along its walls, at even intervals, were numbered doors. Yellowed
paper and dry pine needles sullied the once brilliant tiled floor. A lone
skeleton found its final resting place in front of one of the closed doors. The
dried splatter of blood, midway up on the door, a reminder that there was
always that option.

Ecky lifted the light higher, sending
its beam to end of the hall. Bits of dust drifted in its cone. The hall ended
abruptly. Something small and black scurried along the baseboards and out of
sight.

“Look,” Bobby said, pointing the hammer
at a trail of fresh blood that he hadn’t noticed amid the trash. With so much
death and decay he almost missed it.

The random spots of blood did not go
beyond the second door. A wet moan echoed along the hall.

Bobby tensed.

Ecky moved past him, crowbar at the
ready.

They cleared the first door quickly, a
ransacked supply closet, its shelves bare. To the right they checked the next
room. A ring of scorched filing cabinets lay on their sides at its center and a
pile of refuse littered with mice droppings sullied the left wall. Nothing
moved. The dead plant workers had used it to warm themselves. Ecky thought of
burning trashcans on cold Moscow nights long ago. As he angled the light back
towards the door  Bobby shouted, but before Ecky could turn back around
something crashed into his waist.

The flashlight clattered to floor. He
didn’t need it to know what snapped at him. The wet moans were all the
information he needed. Ecky jammed the crowbar across its chest and pushed it
back. A split second later Bobby had the flashlight.

Shreds of burnt clothes fused with
blistered skin. The Creeper’s lower half was a mess, as if it had been caught
in a wood chipper. Its legs were bent, knees held together with what was left
of its muscle tissue and ligaments. Half of its face was nothing more than a charred
skull. Maggots dripped from its mouth onto Ecky’s jacket.

The engineer kept its snapping mouth at
bay with the crowbar across its throat, but he couldn’t free himself from the
dead weight. Another series of guttural moans echoed in the hallway.

Bobby checked over his shoulder, clear.
He jumped over a filing cabinet and yanked the Creeper off of Ecky. It turned
on him, snapping, barely missing his arm. Bobby didn’t even flinch. He had no
fear of being bitten . . . not anymore. He swung the hammer, cracking the
Creeper’s skull at the temple. The brittle, charred bone shattered, strong
steel finding rotten gray matter with a
thock.
Its body went limp,
sprawling atop the garbage.

The cone of the flashlight on the door,
Bobby waited.

Ecky was on his feet, taking a step
back. The moan grew louder, and it was followed by the shuffling of feet.

“Come on you bastard,” Ecky said.

A swollen gray belly crossed the
doorframe. It sloshed and leaked from tears that exposed the rotting innards
within. The tears had the hallmarks of a desperate animal’s claw, a wild swipe
as the rotting Creeper sunk its teeth in. The Creeper’s fingers worked liked
rusted machinery, an after effect of rigor mortis. Dark blue jeans, a
blood-stained red and black flannel, a big, bug-riddled beard, a blackened
blotch across the forearm that had once been a tattoo; the Creeper did not fit
in with the other’s. The thing had come well after the battle to keep them out.

Ecky swung the crowbar like a baseball
bat. The curved end cracked against the Creeper’s skull and tore a chunk of it
off. The stinking body hit the floor with a plop. Putrescent bodily fluids
oozed out of it.

Ecky spat on the twice-dead corpse,
wiping the crowbar on its jeans. With the amount of noise they made any other
Creepers in the area would’ve been moaning and shuffling by now, but it was
silent, save for the wind and pattering snow.

“What are you doing, Bobby?”

Bobby, hammer stuffed in the waist of
his jeans, had the mangled corpse under the arms. He was no longer afraid. Whatever
secret coursed through his veins made him immune to the Fection. He didn’t
understand it, but it had been three days since he’d been bitten. While his
bite wasn’t nearly as bad as Ryan’s, everything that had been drilled into them
about the Fection gave twenty-four hours from contact before it took hold. And
it wasn’t the Fection that killed Ryan, a cold bullet from Lyda’s Colt saw to
that.

Bobby dropped the corpse, unzipped his
jacket, exposed the purple bruise on his stomach and said, “Ryan wasn’t the
only one bitten. That was three days ago, Ecky! I’m still breathing, still have
a pulse!”

“Bobby, what . . .”

“I’m cold, I’m tired and my brothers are
dead . . . dead . . . my broth—” Bobby lost it. The slight cracks became gulfs
as the pain came flooding in, swallowing him, driving him to his knees. They
were all dead. Tears ran down his cheeks. In between sobs, he silently wished
he were with them in death, but another part of his brain scoffed at the
thought. The milky eyes of the mangled Creeper stared at him. Images of his
brothers’ deaths flashed at him from those dim orbs. Raw anger burned at the
back of his throat, a scream that harkened back to the days of primitive man
escaped him.

He grabbed the hammer and drove it down,
smashing the Creeper’s forehead. He drove it down again and again, crushing the
dead face to pulp. He swung harder, channeling all of his hatred into the
broken visage. He struck and struck, drowning out Ecky’s cries. Cold mush
splashed his face. He drove the hammer until the face was no longer there, and
then he drove some more, breaking the bloodied tiles. The only thing he’d be
able to recall later was the headless body, and the soreness of his arm.

Ecky used a length of rubber hose to
lasso the bodies and drag them out of the room. He busied himself with the
toils of preparing their shelter rather than focus on what he had witnessed
this day. He stopped every so often to ensure that Bobby still drew breath. He
had not gone near the boy since his wild outburst, and decided it best to leave
him asleep. His fear of that military precision had been dwarfed by Bobby’s
revelation and the aftermath that followed. What had the Crannen’s found? An
immunity to the Fection was unheard of, yet, living proof slept the sleep of
soul-consuming mental anguish just a few feet away.

Using a brittle perfume ad Ecky rolled a
cigarette and lit it. Then he prepared a fire. The smoke tasted of sandalwood,
but he didn’t care, foul on his tongue, burning his throat, it kept his mind
from wandering to dark places. Most of the plant’s files had been burned, but
Ecky managed to find a few stragglers. He dumped them in the center of the
cabinets.

With crowbar in hand Ecky retrieved his
pack from the entrance.

Bobby moaned, cried out, whimpered.

Ecky wiped the cold mop of hair and
sweat form the boy’s brow. His lips were blue. He had to get the fire going.
The blizzard ruled out any dead wood, and with his hands beyond numb, he didn’t
dare to cut any for risk of injury. The Settlement’s medicine could not help
them now. Even a simple scratch could be enough to kill. He managed to find
several shelves, though, they were coated with vinyl paint and weren’t exactly
real
wood. The rest of the offices had been pilfered long ago for fuel. Ecky
picked through the corpses for rags of clothing and added them to the fire pit.
As a last resort he ripped down several ceiling tiles. It wouldn’t be a nice
pine-scented fire, and the smoke would carry a toxicity, but it would do.

The flames burned an eerie greenish-blue
and bits of burnt plastic floated in the air, but it provided warmth. He
couldn’t help but notice how much Bobby looked like a corpse under the light of
the fire, like one of them, fighting inside a nightmare, twitching. Ecky felt
deeply for the boy, and there were many questions, but they would have to wait.
Survival first, everything else . . . after.

Ecky opened his pack and checked their
supplies: a moth-eaten bedroll, second set of clothes, two canteens, Bobby’s
scoped R700 with thirty rounds. . . Ecky whistled low and silently thanked the
grizzled old veteran who had handed him the pack.

“Randy, son of bitch,” Ecky said, moving
the clothes aside to reveal a CAR-15 with four loaded clips. He said a prayer
for his friend. There was no telling what had been his fate, but he couldn’t
dwell on that now. He continued to rummage through the packs:  hammer,
crowbar, a week’s worth of smoked beef, another week’s worth of MREs, one
magnesium bar, M-9 Bayonet Knife, hatchet, twenty five feet of nylon rope, and
the Benchmade Auto Stryker that he knew Bobby never parted with. It could be
worse. The supplies were a good starting point, and could get them through a
small encounter, but soon they’d need ammunition and medical supplies. If they
didn’t get lucky pilfering then they’d have to hit the roads and soon. The
thought did not sit well with Ecky.

Something clattered in the hall.

Ecky froze, listened, nothing. “Could be
wind,” he whispered. He knew better, otherwise he wouldn’t have made it this
far into hell in one piece. With decades of practice he had the gear re-stowed,
in better order, in seconds. He slapped a magazine into the CAR-15, put the
others in his pockets and adjusted the strap. Dropping the packs near the
chemical fire, he checked Bobby’s rifle. Without hesitation he tapped the boy’s
cheek.

“Time to get up,” he said, hating
himself for doing it. “Bobby, get up.”

Bobby snapped to attention. Face
distraught, eyes swollen, he fell into the cadence of the moment. He could read
the urgency clearly on Ecky’s face. Like a computer, he rearranged the thoughts
in his mind, putting the horror of loss under many layers, not forgetting, but
moving them far enough away to keep him frosty.