The Creepers (34 page)

After saying their goodbyes Bobby and
the stranger began the long trek. Jackson didn’t cooperate at first. He dragged
his feet then fell on his knees, but this did not last long. With the train
beginning to come to life the stranger jabbed the barrel of his assault rifle
into the man’s ribs. The act brought a cheer from the men working on the train.

“Get moving. I won’t be as nice next
time,” the stranger spat.

Bobby gave the beast of a train one last
look. He searched those dark windows for a glimpse of her and was not
disappointed. Even though he was pretty far away he could still make out those
reddish locks and there was no mistaking that pale, ghostly skin. He made a
promise to himself then. He would come back to her. He would come back to this
girl he did not
know,
but with whom he had shared the most special of
moments with. With one last look he turned away and started towards the
Settlement.

The train and its crew quickly faded
from view and the day dipped towards noon. A warm breeze hissed through the
flowering trees, sending them into a to and fro sway. They found the cracked
blacktop of a four lane highway and they followed its course. Sometimes they
had to leave the relative flatness to circumvent clusters of rusted cars.

As they walked Bobby searched for the
undead. They were all around them. Many of the Creepers were beyond
comprehension, having been in the state of rot for untold years. Their voices
nothing more than garbled sounds. Still, Bobby asked them to follow. He sent
out clear, simple thoughts that he repeated over and over again, a mantra of
marching orders. He spoke of staying close but not close enough for his
companions to notice.

He kept his feet moving and his mind
working to gather any and every Creeper that he sensed. Unbeknownst to the
stranger, who was well aware of his gift, Bobby began to assemble a wall of
protection around them. Just as he used the Creepers to bring an end to the
battle around the train, so too, would he use the undead to keep them safe on
their journey. But he had another motive for gathering the Creepers. He needed
bodies if he had any chance of getting close to the Settlement. The town was
built with defense in mind. It functioned around keeping invaders out. Whether
they were Creepers or savages or even coordinated raiders didn’t matter. The
Settlement was a bulwark against any potential enemy tide. If he had any hope
of getting to Ol’ Randy, let alone freeing him, he would need more than bodies.

He needed an army.

However, he wasn’t sure his head could
handle all of those voices. The sheer weight of what he intended to do was more
than enough to break him, and it was only an idea. Even now, with maybe ten or
so Creepers shambling along, their mindless chatter drowned out the stranger’s
whistling, and they added tremendous pressure behind his eyes. How would he
handle hundreds . . . thousands? There was only one way to find out. He had to
keep gathering members of his undead army.

“What’s eating you?" The stranger
asked. He had removed his hood to bask in the sweet afternoon air.

Bobby eyed the scars curiously, but he
dared not to ask about them. He liked the stranger’s company and he didn’t want
to offend the man. “I still don’t know your name. You know all of my secrets
and I know none of yours. Doesn’t seem fair.”

“Life’s not fair,” Jackson shrieked.

Bobby yanked on the rope sending Jackson
into a grunting stumble.

“No, no you don’t, Bobby." The
stranger adjusted the leather bag that held his laptop. “It was the first thing
I ever gave up. Didn’t seem necessary anymore.”

“What are you talking about?”

“What you asked me about, Bobby . . . my
name. It was the first thing I gave up. Have you ever given anything up?”

“I’ve given plenty of things up.”

“Really?" The stranger whistled a
low uneven tune. “Such as?”

“Once, I gave up my winter coat during a
punishment so my brother Peter wouldn’t freeze. Another time I gave up myself,
so that I could be punished in Ryan’s place." Bobby stopped beside an
overturned tractor trailer. Most of it had rotted away, but a small portion of
it formed a good shelter for, what appeared to be, a mild night. “Let’s set
camp here.”

“All admirable things to give up, but
they’re not exactly what I’m talking about." The stranger removed his bag
and set it inside the broken trailer. “I’m talking about truly abandoning
something meaningful, something beyond material.”

Bobby dropped the weight of his pack and
surveyed the length of road. It curved up and over a hill and had very few
rusty tombs left on it. Much of the countryside had come back to reclaim what
rightfully belonged to it. Creeping brush and tall, wild grass covered almost
all of the old road. A bullet-hole-riddled sign, nothing more than rusty paper
waiting to be blown away, poked out of a thick stand of weeds. Words frozen in
dripping black letters, a nervous spray painted scrawl read:

THE END IS THE
BEGINNING

REPENT ALL YOU
SINNERS

“I gave up hope . . . once,” Bobby said
as he climbed on top of the rear axle. He double-knotted the rope at a good
height. Jackson’s shriek told him that he’d placed it properly. The man was on
his knees, his arms pulled up at a sharp angle.

“Ah . . . and how did it feel?”

Bobby hopped down and dug the hatchet
out of his pack. He found a rotted trunk buried under nature’s growth a few
yards from the trailer. “It was one of the worst things I’ve ever done. It hurt
. . . hurt bad.”

The stranger busied himself with
gathering clusters of dried grass for kindling. “That is how it was for me. I
ceased to be Gabriel.”

“That’s your name . . . Gabriel. Like
the archangel? The messenger from God?” Bobby questioned. Pastor Craven’s voice
drilled the names of the Heaven’s angels into his head from somewhere in his
past. He remembered ruler-smashed knuckles for forgetting the who and whats of
Heaven’s hierarchy. He never forgot again.

“It
was
my name,” the stranger
said rather painfully. “Now, it’s just another such thing on the growing list I
carry." He scratched at the small tuft of hair that clung to his burned
scalp.

Bobby chopped several chunks of earthy
wood from the trunk. He cradled them in his arms saying, “You can take it back.
Just because you gave it up doesn’t mean you can’t take it back.”

“There is no taking it back. Gabriel no
longer exists. He’s, how can I put it, a dead man, a discarded individual who
crumbled along with the rest of humanity.”

As Bobby arranged the pieces of wood in
a rough circle he became worried. The tone of the stranger’s voice, and his
words, tumbled down a dark mountain of memory. “Well, what am I supposed to
call you?”

The knotty scars around the stranger’s
eyes moved ever-so-slightly. “I suppose you could call me by my professional
name.”

“And what is that?" Bobby took the kindling
from the stranger and stuffed it beneath the thinner branches. He used Ecky’s
Zippo to ignite the flames.

“Pathos One.”

Bobby plopped down to ease the tension
in his legs. He didn’t know what to make of the stranger. “And, Pathos, what
exactly is your profession?”

“It’s quite simple really,” Pathos held
his arms out wide and bowed, “I’m a traveling historian of the dead.”

Pastor Craven tilled the soil around
Lyda’s tombstone. During the long winter the constant snow and ice and melting,
and then freezing again, had left it a mess. In between sips of whiskey that
stung his rotten gums he cast nature’s debris aside. He wasn’t quite sure what
he was going to plant in her honor, or why he even felt the urge to mourn anew.
Perhaps, it was the Settlement’s dire need for a more capable doctor. In recent
weeks the pain in his severed leg had become unbearable, and several of the
young ones came down with the Chicken Pox, they’d even lost Teddy Miller to
Pneumonia. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the Crannen Twins, along with several
other men, had yet to return from their annual supply run.

People were beginning to ask questions,
and the Pastor was running out of assurances. Some were even beginning to
question his treatment of Randal. The once proud veteran of three wars spent
the better part of early spring wallowing in his own filth at the bottom of the
Corral’s pit. But what they didn’t know, what they could not see, was the
Lord’s hand in it all. Pastor Craven, though, knew the path he walked was the
most righteous of all.

Some of the younger men, boys really,
were talking of trekking out on their own to find any extra supplies they
could. They were becoming unruly in the absence of so many strong male figures
within the fence. The Pastor was beginning to lose his power, his papal grip
slipping from the yoke, but all was not lost to him yet. He still had God, and
he still had many of their hearts and minds. However, he didn’t know how much
longer he’d be able to maintain control.

“Dear Lyda, how I miss you." Pastor
Craven sipped from the bottle, letting the whiskey sting his cracked lips. He
admired and examined every nuance of pain spread across his tired face. “The
Lord took you from us too soon. You deserved better.”

Using his cane for support, the Pastor
eased onto his
good
leg and headed back to his home. There was much to
contemplate.

* * * * *

Time. Passing time. Fading sun. Dark
night. How many such cycles had he witnessed from the bottom of the pit? He
tried hard to keep track by scratching lines in the dirt walls, but he was
certain he’d missed a few . . . maybe more than a few.  

Somewhere between meals of stale bread
and rank meat the forward passage of time no longer mattered to him. To go
forward meant only pain. Each second that passed his body weakened,
degenerating cells, voracious, cancerous things he didn’t quite understand,
with time as their platform, used the meat of him, the death of him, to
preserve their own existence. It was a scary thought, and quite a thought at
that, for such a mind as Ol’ Randy’s.

The future was as dead to him as the
vast majority of humanity. So, it was then, in those dark days, that he sought
the wisdom of his past. Besides, there was little for him to do but just that,
after all, his only visitor was the food being thrown down to him.

Distant echoing gunfire caused him to
shrink further into a ball. The earthen walls filled his flaring nostrils with
the tang of his own urine. He pressed his knees into his frail chest, making the
stabbing pain that accompanied each breath bearable. He shook, not in terror,
but in simple, healthy fear. He shook as the battle came rushing back to him.

* * * * *

Rattle . . . rattle . . . boom. He
couldn’t pinpoint where the fire was coming from. It didn’t even sound close,
in fact, it didn’t seem real, but he knew better. He’d been too long in the
desert and now he’d been too long in the thin mountain air. Before deployment,
despite of what he’d read about the place, he was certain scorching desert heat
awaited him. But the snow-covered, surprisingly green, mountains of Afghanistan
debunked all his misconceptions.

The sniper opened fire again, another
RPG boomed. Fire discipline was something the enemy did not understand . . .
well, most of them at least. He thanked the Lord for that. With the mountains
leaning over him like a scolding teacher the fire echoed far and wide. He
couldn’t locate the source. Bullets pocked the ground, skipped off boulders,
hissed through the air. All the while his men shouted frantically . . .
something they never did, but they’d taken three casualties in two days . . .
something that never happened to them.

“Wild fire—nothing more! Keep yer damn
heads down! Ya’ll actin’ like a bunch of yellow-bellied yankees facin’ a
Southe’n charge!”

“I think we won that war, Sarge!”

“You shut yer yankee mouth, Suarez, and
get me a position on that fuckin’ sniper!” Ol’ Randy roared. The effort had him
gasping for breath. They told him he’d get used to it, but two months in, and he
still felt the mysterious weight of thin air.

“Sir!" The squat Marine scurried on
his belly, removed his helmet, and propped it on the collapsible baton
(non-regulation) he kept in his boot. “Get some, terrorist motherfucker!"
Suarez set his helmet above the dry river bed they were using for cover.

The sniper opened fire again, a few
single shots, full auto, sloppy and stupid. It took the sniper nearly a clip to
hit the helmet, sending it flipping off the baton and clattering among the
rocks. “Shit, these fuckers are all this dumb we’ll be home in time for the
Super bowl! Right, Sarge?!”

“COVERING FIRE, EAST RIDGE, ABOUT A FOUR
CLICKS UP!" Ol’ Randy pretended he didn’t hear Suarez’s boast. He had an
ill feeling they were going to be in for the long haul. “FRANKLIN!”

“SIR!”

“SON, THAT BASTARD PUTS HIS ‘EAD UP ONE
MORE TIME—TAKE IT THE FUCK OFF!”