The Creepers (30 page)

“Price!”

“Boss,” the big man answered from below.

“Get back there and crack open the
thumper! I don’t like this one bit.”

Before he could get his head straight a
rock whistled past his face, followed by another, and another. Soon rocks
rained down from everywhere then the arrows followed. Baylor flattened himself
to the roof cursing everything in existence.

“Wyoming Blue has been compromised!”
Hoss screamed. His voice was laced with terror. But even that didn’t stop him
from returning fire.

*
* * * *

Bobby grappled with the remnants of a
dream he couldn’t quite remember. He tumbled through the gray haze of
awakening. As he fought with the half-forgotten insight he started to hear them,
chattering at first, like mice swarming over a crust of bread. Instead of
squeaks, they conversed in low tones that were more guttural sounds than actual
words, although, a few were as loud and as clear as they had been in life. They
were hungry—so hungry.

Bobby snapped up. Something was wrong,
they were at a dead stop, and someone had been in his room. Sitting on the
small shelf above his bag were several boxes of ammunition for his rifle. The
cardboard was old and yellowed but he’d seen worse. With a splitting headache
forcing a wedge into the center of his skull Bobby started to load his rifle
and his pockets. He didn’t like the idea of someone standing over him while he
slept. He felt stupid for succumbing to exhaustion and exposing himself. But he
didn’t have time to dwell on it as what sounded to him like heavy rain started
to hammer the train.

Bobby pulled the shade aside and nearly
paid for it with his eyesight. Had the window been made of real glass he would
have never seen the light of day again, but it wasn’t. The large chunk of rock
thumped against the plastic, cracking it down the middle, but it held. Bobby
moved away from it, searching the swath of waving green for the culprits. He
didn’t have to search too hard as they came out of everywhere. His heart fell.
No,
he thought with a profound sense of guilt,
it is all my fault. I am
doomed to cause good people their lives.

The attackers were familiar to Bobby. He
thought he’d killed them all, including their leader, but he had been wrong.
Ecky’s death hadn’t stopped the attack. The wild men in military uniforms
swarmed the train with rocks, arrows and clubs. On the roof above, Baylor’s men
were returning fire.

“Oh, dear, you must come with us,” Jamie
said from the door. Her face was beet-red, her eyes streaming worried tears.
Blotches of pinkish-red ran up and down her arms from the stress of it all.
Sophie clutched at her apron, as if it were a shield. The big woman carried a
shotgun that she racked and pointed down the hall. “Hurry now, Bobby, we need
to get to the supply room. We’ll be safe there until Baylor gets this under
control. Hurry.”

Bobby strapped his knife to his belt
calmly, shouldered his rifle and said, “This is my fault. I must do what I can
to help.

“Dear, are you crazy? Have you bumped
your head?” Jamie said breathlessly. She was exasperated. “Come now—” she went
silent. She was about to try to talk Bobby out of it, but she looked into his
eyes. She knew such a task would be pointless. Never before, in all her life
had she met anyone, let alone a boy, so accepting of death, so ready to die.
“You keep your head down and aim straight then.”

Bobby didn’t hear her parting words. The
rocks and the voices of the dead nullified them. Blurriness crept along the
edges of his vision.
Stop, just stop, I don’t want to hear you anymore,
he
thought to them, sending the idea of quiet out to them, but they only seemed to
get louder. The world around him was spinning out of control once more, but he
knew now that he could not dwell on it. That would come later if her survived.
For now he had to fight.

He ducked back as he opened the door and
a jagged rock clanged off the metal railing.

“Ill-advised,” the hooded-stranger said
from the open door of his room. “I don’t understand why so many of us survivors
are so quick to die. I will cover you. Be quick, be smart, kid, or be
dead!" The dirty gray hood swept out behind him as he leaned around the
door with a firearm Bobby was unfamiliar with. After a burst of automatic fire
the stranger said, “Go, and stay low on the top!”

Bobby refused to look about, trusting
blindly in the stranger. If he was going to be of any use he had to get to the
roof, and to cover. He clambered quickly up the ladder amid a rain of stones. As
he ran along the roof, towards the head of the beast, he ducked low but not low
enough. A sharp stone cracked against his shoulder. The pain was like liquid
lightning being injected into his arm. He ran harder. The gap between the cars
seemed too great a distance to clear in a low run, but he didn’t have a choice.
He dived ahead, arms outstretched, and crashed behind the metal cover panels.

“I thought you killed all of them?”
Baylor asked, as he trained his pistol on a wild man running alongside the train.
The Mad Conductor jumped up, snapped off a shot, and quickly ducked back down.

Bobby didn’t answer him. He used the
metal panels to steady his rifle and started searching for targets. As his
scope crossed the swath of Creepers and their prey he found two familiar faces
frantically crying for help. He knew them . . . they were . . . they were the
Crannen’s twin sons. Ice seized his heart. He couldn’t escape his past: it
looked at him through frightened eyes, it spoke within his mind through the
hungry mouths of the dead, it lamented him as the absence of his one hope
became apparent. Ol’ Randy’s face was not among them.

Tears ran down Bobby’s cheeks. Was there
any hope at all?

“If you don’t start shooting, kid, I
might think your little story was bullshit,” Baylor whispered in Bobby’s ear as
he reloaded his pistol.

Baylor’s voice in his ear, the undead
chatter, the Crannen twins’ screams, all of it, sent him into a maddened rage.
He trained his scope on dirty-faced boy that looked to be his own age, perhaps
even younger, but that didn’t matter. The soldier’s uniform, a little too big
for that small frame, painted the youth as an enemy. Bobby put a hole through
that frail chest without a second thought. He snapped to a bearded man with
muddy handprints on his face and sent him to the afterlife.

“Holy shit, boss—this is fucked, we’re
fucked, how’d they take out an entire unit . . . fucking Wyoming Blue!” Hoss
sputtered, slobbering snot; a scared child.

“They didn’t kill my brother!” Price shouted.
The bulky man rose through the hatch like a shaft of granite caught in a
tectonic shift.

“Get some fire in those tree lines,”
Baylor shouted.

As Bobby ducked down to reload he took
stock of those around him. Baylor and Hoss frantically fired their weapons, but
even as experienced as they were, they had a hard time keeping up with all of
the attackers. Price’s shoulders heaved as he leveled the massive cannon in
front of him, a long belt of short, fat grenades that gleamed gold trailing
behind him. The big man sobbed, firing the belt-fed grenades in every
direction. Each shot out with a thump that resonated, not only in Bobby’s ears,
but in his bones.

The grenades exploded, ripping apart
trees and bodies alike, a series of concussions that sent limbs flying, but the
wild men came still. Some managed to get to the cars and even scale them, but
Bobby and the rest of the Conductor’s men dispatched them with ease. The
undead, too, began to be drawn to the commotion. No longer satisfied with their
offering they began to advance on the train.

While Bobby and the others kept the
front of the train under control the stranger and a handful of Baylor’s men
protected the rear engine. They were well supplied, well prepared, and they
were fiercely devoted to each other and their task. They reminded Bobby much of
the Folks; another pocket of living humanity struggling to survive in a world
gone mad, but unlike his former family these new folks did not scorn their new
companions.

Hot casings sizzled down the back of
Bobby’s shirt. He barely flinched at their sting. He had quickly run out of
targets as the horde of fake soldiers closed the distance to the train. They
shouted wildly in their savage tongue of almost-words, hurling rocks with the
accuracy of bullets, and they were immune to deaths of their fellows. They set
on the train as if it were an evil god, a demon that they saw to wipe from the
face of the earth, and neither bullets, explosions, or even the undead were
going to get in their way.

Bobby ran towards the back of the train,
hoping cars and dodging rocks. Blood burned hot on his head, blurred his
vision, but Baylor ordered him to help them. Even though he was not of them,
held no allegiance to them, an order was order, a thing ingrained within him,
as true as the strange blood that coursed through his veins. As he headed
towards the rear car a wild man reached the top of the ladder at its side. His
eyes were full of rage and his mouth agape revealing badly yellowed, but sharp
teeth. Bobby didn’t slow, even at the sight of the rusty rebar clutched in the
man’s grip, he pulled out his matte black knife and cut the man across the face
from eye to eye as he jumped over to the next car. The wild man fell between
the cars screaming.

“When this is over you must tell me of
your encounter with them in great detail,” the stranger called to him.

“Shut up and get down,” Bobby snapped.

The men at the back of the car looked at
him in an awe that he didn’t understand. For a second he thought he’d taken a
grave injury and didn’t notice it, but upon further inspection, other than cuts
and bruises, he was okay. They didn’t have a chance to stare long, as the wild
men were on top of them now, beating the train with their fists and rocks and
whatever else they could find.

He could feel the pounding through the
metal beneath him, as if he were crouched atop a giant drum. The moans of the
dead added to the terrible song playing within his head. He felt their
shuffles, the sudden change of direction, of focus, they were so . . . hungry.
Somewhere inside he became filled with their hunger like a void had been born
within the walls of his stomach, a vast, yawning chasm he could never hope to
fill. Images rifled through his brain like the flipping pages of a book being
skimmed. The dead were speaking to him—
no,
he thought,
not me, but
through me. I can hear them, feel them, they are aware of me like they are
aware of the others, but they are not speaking to me directly.
Bobby
couldn’t see straight, couldn’t think straight for the noise was too much.

Stop them,
he thought,
projecting the wild peoples’ image inside.
If you can hear me . . . stop
them.
Voices responded to his intrusion, flitting questions, mumbles, but
nothing directly like the night before Ecky died, or the fateful last moments
of the Creeper trapped in the beast’s maw. Each time one of the Creepers was
killed it was like a light being turned off, a loss of radio signal, a hand
muffling a scream.

“Push them back,” the stranger yelled.

Bobby dropped his rifle. His hands clamped
over his ears. The noise, their hunger, broke his mind apart.

“Kid, are you hurt,” the stranger asked.

Bobby was tumbling down into the void so
fast he couldn’t answer the man. He couldn’t do much of anything but fall into
that deep hunger, and it swallowed him whole.

*
* * * *

Jamie had thought she’d seen it all
before, the depths of human depravity, and she thought she’d seen the end of it
when Baylor rescued her. She was wrong. The young men threw themselves against
the door like lunatics trying to force themselves out of the asylum, only, they
were trying to get in, to get to her and Sophie, but she couldn’t let that
happen—wouldn’t let that happen. They’d suffered much at the hands of savage
men and finally found a measure of peace. She racked the shotgun and took aim.
No,
she thought,
I won’t let that happen ever again.

The fatigue-wearing youth banged his
head against the Plexiglas until his blood smeared the window. More soon joined
his efforts, and together they were causing the door to bend inward. The chain
link behind the glass also began to give way. These were not the decaying
muscles of the dead they were the strong newly developed muscles of young men
hopped up on the scent of their own spilled blood.

Jamie screamed as the window collapsed.
The chain held for a moment but then it, too, fell inward.

With Sophie behind her . . . Jamie
opened fire.

*
* * * *

“Have you ever seen anything like it,”
the stranger said. He had run out of ammo and was using his AK-47 like a club,
beating back the wild men, smashing skulls. But now that the din of rocks and
arrows had subsided, he stood, perched on the rear railing open to a strike
that he was quite confident would not come. Even the Mad Conductor, along with
the rest of the crew, stood perfectly still. They were mesmerized by what they
saw.