The Creepers (37 page)

Jackson stood at the top of an
embankment, assault rifle darting back and forth, searching for a target.
Pathos One lay in a hooded-heap near his feet. The rope was still tied around
Jackson's waist. Bobby had his opening.

“I’m coming around! How do I know you
won’t shoot me dead?" Bobby directed the one-eyed assassin to the rope,
urging slowness in his thoughts.

The rifle felt heavy as the world in his
small hands. He could hardly lift it. An act he’d performed without thought,
without fail countless times before. But never had he attempted a shot while
being in a hundred places at once. Signals bounced from the undead moat that
surrounded the area, from his personal thoughts, from the clumsy, yet quiet
movements of his blind, and one-eyed friends. He also had to snap a shot at a
target he was seeing from the opposite angle from which he’d be shooting.

The perspective, or rather the very idea
of perspective blossoming in his mind, made him dizzy. The world
teeter-tottering on the edge of oblivion in the split second of his rounding
the corner of the diner.

Undead hands grasped the rope.

Speak.

Creepers moan.

Jackson’s bearded chin.

Tugging harder, slipping, falling,
stupid dead things.

Jackson’s face in profile, turning now,
assault rifle rising to meet this new enemy.

As Bobby came around the corner he
viewed his target from two different directions, through different eyes, but
when the adrenaline took over he stopped all unnecessary thoughts. The
crosshair slipped over Jackson’s chest, down his arm, to his hand.

Bobby fired.

The round entered Jackson’s wrist,
ricocheted at a ninety degree angle off the grip of Pathos’s weapon, and took
three fingers with it. He dropped the AK47, clutching at his destroyed hand as
the bloody flesh, bone, and sinew dangled uselessly from his forearm. A second
later the two Creepers managed to get a steady hold on the rope around his
waist, but where they lacked muscle they had mass. The sheer weight of them
leaning back at Bobby’s command toppled Jackson Crannen to the ground.

It was then, facing the great nightmare
of his lifetime, that Jackson truly screamed. The Creepers dragged him down the
dew-covered slope.

Bobby found it hard to mentally fight
his way through the wall of hunger that dominated the Creepers’ every cell. He
found it strange work, like having dipped his fingers into syrup for the first
time, springy, sticky, resisting, but then he was through, plunged into that
hollow world that longed only to be full.

He urged his thoughts to grow, to occupy
that vast empty space with the intention of crossing the gulf and keeping the
Creepers from eating Jackson. The last thing he needed was a dead offering.

Their dead, single-minded drive resisted
his intrusion at first, and they had him wishing for better newly dead minds
like the man trapped in Baylor’s beast, something . . . no, he corrected himself,
someone he could communicate with. But he had not found such an example since
he silenced that voice on the train. Had it been a figment of his imagination,
a construct of a troubled teenage mind? He knew better, that lonely voice was
far too real to be faked.

Bobby reached the other side, bridged
the gap, and stopped them just in time. He stood over Pathos One’s limp, but
breathing form, aiming down into the gully.

“I wouldn’t move if I were you,” Bobby
said.

“Shoot ’em . . . fuckin’ shoot ’em. No
matter what I done—I don’t deserve this!” Jackson replied frantically.

The Creepers wavered as if unsure of
their limbs like newborns trying to move beyond the crawl. The wet rotting
refuse of their disease ridden mouths clicked and moaned. A squadron of fat,
greasy flies buzzed maddeningly above them like anti-halos. Other winged and
many-limbed chitinous things crawled and chewed on their weathered hides. Under
Bobby’s command they loomed over Jackson like tidal waves tall enough to block
out the sun, a child’s nightmare villain clutching something sharp and wicked,
the embodiment of fear. So dominating was their presence that Jackson seemed to
forget about his shattered limb. His body shook, twitched, and his face screwed
up in a terrified grimace.

“They won’t,” Bobby reassured.

“Is you crazy? They shit spawn, Creeper
fuckin’ scum, they are our downfall, the Devil’s work,” Jackson spat.

“They won’t. Because I won’t let them.”

“Yer’bout a whole fuckin’ bird short of
being a buzzard.”

Bobby didn’t know what that meant. He
wanted to scare Jackson into understanding, but he had to be careful. Jackson
wasn’t built like him. He was immune to the Creepers’ Fection, he couldn’t risk
an errant drop in such an open wound. So he directed the Creepers to grab Jackson’s
feet.

They obeyed.

Jackson screamed, kicking at their
grasping hands, but the wound prevented him from putting anything substantial
behind his strikes. The undead hands pulled him towards the wooded area beyond.

“No! NO! LORD HAVE MERCY!” Jackson
cried. He began to stumble his way through a teary-eyed rendition of the Lord’s
prayer.

“They’re going to eat you, Jackson
Crannen, going to eat you up. They’ll start with your toes,” Bobby promised. He
ordered the Creepers to rip off Jackson’s boots. They obliged.

“Kill ’em, Bobby, kill ’em please. I
swear I’m sorry for all I done. So sorry,” Jackson pleaded.

Bobby thought of the snapping jaws of
wild dogs. Clack-clack-clack like automatic weapons fire, snarl-filled, and the
Creepers did their best rendition of that mental image. Jackson seemed to
shrink inside himself. Which, at first glance, didn’t seem possible to Bobby,
but somehow the man looked
smaller.
Bobby made the Creepers shake the
man to rattle him further. The countless repetitions of the word sorry meant
nothing to him. This man, along with a great many of the other Folks, put him
and his brothers through hell. If he didn’t need Jackson’s warm body he’d have
let the pair have their fill and then some.

“Just like you told me once, Jackson.
Remember when I hit that ball over the fence?" Bobby crouched at the top
of the gully, slapped Pathos One, stirring the man, then leered down at
Jackson’s upturned face. At the same time he viewed the bulging jugular through
that slimy, solitary eye. “Remember when me and my brothers won that game
against the
natives
? We were always reminded that we were outsiders once
your parents died . . . do you remember Jackson?”

“What? What’re you talkin’bout, Bobby?”
Jackson stammered. The undead leaned closer, pulled a little harder on his
legs.

“Oh you remember,” Bobby went on in a
cold metallic monotone, “you told me ‘sorry for this, kid, but you had it
coming’ do you remember
now
? When you beat me so bad I couldn’t piss
right for a month? DO YOU REMEMBER NOW!”

“No, Bobby, we taught you better’n ‘at.
We took care of you. Was just growin’ up. Had it easy compared to me and
Thomas.”

Bobby almost let the Creepers rip him
apart at those words. He wondered if the Russian government made a plea like
that to its citizens before they irradiated them. Was that the way of the
world? Do something horribly wrong and just that simple word, somehow, makes it
alright, erases the act. Forgiveness. Bobby had it hammered into his head from
the time he could recognize words. It was part of the Folks’ doctrine, it was
the backbone of Jesus’ words, but whenever Bobby and his brothers uttered that
simple word they were not given quarter. They were not forgiven.

“You taught me how to hate,” Bobby
stood, finishing, “and for that you should be truly sorry." He ordered the
Creepers to drag Jackson back up the slope, taking extra care to make their
progress slow. If Jackson was this terrified now, Bobby wondered if he’d
survive the shock of seeing the army that lurked nearby. The thought made Bobby
smile.

Bobby stoked the smoky fire. The rains
had left everything damp, but he managed to get it going nicely. The tangy
scent of pine tickled his nose. Overhead, the stars blinked silently, and the
moon hung, almost full, in a clear black sky. Silver and gold light scattered
shadows across Bobby’s dirty face. He watched Jackson work through the throes
of a heavy fever. What was left of his bandaged hand clutched to his chest.
Bobby had to practically jam the few pills he’d taken from Baylor down the
man’s throat.

He’d sent the Creepers back to the
protective ring but their stink lingered still on Jackson’s clothing, serving
as a reminder of how long it had been since he’d washed. It wasn’t good to
forego a bath, ignoring the need for cleanliness led to many unwanted maladies.
He made a note to keep his eyes, and his mind, open for a clean watering hole.

Pathos One pecked away at his keyboard,
no doubt recalling the busy day, but something seemed to be bothering the man.
He’d been strangely quiet since regaining consciousness.

“Are you ever going to see them again?”
Bobby asked, staring up the cosmos’ amazing display.

“Pardon?” Pathos replied over his
shoulder. The hood hid every feature except his chin.

“The other historians.”

“No,” he closed the laptop and put it in
his bag. “At least, I don’t think so, not all of them anyway." He removed
his hood to scratch at his scalp. Whenever he did this it made Bobby do the same,
like seeing a spider or gnat, itchiness by proxy.

A knot burst within the fire, casting
embers upwards to join the stars momentarily before fading to ash at Bobby’s
feet.

“How do you think a retail worker, who
never sailed a day in his life, is faring now, traveling down the coast?”

Bobby didn’t know what a retail worker
was but he said, “I’d like to think he’s doing just fine. You made it, didn’t
you?”

Pathos One laughed, “I did—it’s good to
be optimistic, Bobby. Sometimes, I forget about it entirely. We are supposed to
meet when the world is stable, back in New Jersey, but the world hasn’t settled
down just yet. She’s still working through her issues. I don’t think all of us
will make it . . . statistics really, the odds are not in our favor, but maybe,”
Pathos One looked at Bobby and said, “maybe you can change all of that.”

Bobby followed the trail of a falling
star with his finger as more streaks of orange joined in the fall.

“And so the universe cleanses itself of
another manmade object. Wonder what kind of satellite that was,” Pathos One
asked no one in particular. “Radio station, defense, who knows, a shame, all
that knowledge lost. What will we create when we crawl out of the slop this
time?”

There it was again, that edge to Pathos
One’s words, a hint of anger. Bobby didn’t know if it was the bruise on his
eye, or something else.

“You used them again." Pathos One
wrung his hands. “You did that to yourself to save me. Like back on the train.
I can’t keep falling into debt with you, Bobby, I’ll never be able to repay you
. . . not to mention how bad it must’ve hurt. What happened inside you to bring
such a startling change about?”

“It doesn’t hurt anymore." Bobby
tossed another log on the fire. “It’s getting easier." He wanted to tell
Pathos One how easy but he was not yet ready to reveal the truth of his army.

“But how? How is it even possible? I’ve
thought on it, and read that notebook, and thought some more, but I can’t wrap
my head around it. It was my job to understand things, how we changed, are
changing, what we came from, but this . . . this is beyond me. You can hear
them?”

“In a way. It’s hard to explain."
Bobby searched for the words. “They are waiting to be heard like a signal,
drifting along, and I . . . I don’t know, pick them
up
? They just want
to die, but something is stopping them, using them.”

“The infection." Pathos One
scratched his chin. He gave off the impression of a dog with a bad case of
fleas. He realized he might not make much sense to Bobby. Though the boy was
well spoken, and educated to a degree, there was no telling the full extent of
what the
Folks
taught him. They seemed a superstitious lot from what he
could gather.

“Do you think? How could those tiny
things do it?”

“I’m not sure, but this could be the first
step on to dry land, the hand, this could be the next evolutionary leap for
mankind. You, and from what I gather—if any survive still—the other children
could very well be the jump.”

“Like the Fection.”

“Yes, but an anti
Fection
. A way
for us to fight it, to understand it, and to, ultimately, survive it. Life
finds a way to live . . . always. Before us, after us, some form of life will
remain until the sun dies.”

“The sun can die?”

Pathos regarded the almost alien
child-like pitch that invaded Bobby’s voice reservedly. “Certainly, but it’s a
very long time from doing just that, a very long time, indeed. But now is not
the time for a lesson,” Pathos pushed his palms toward the fire reluctantly,
remembering the sting, “and I am ill-equipped at the moment. What do you plan
to do?”