CRYERS (16 page)

Part Three:

Dream

Chapter
27

Cobe watched
the sun wink out of existence over the distant crater rim. An hour earlier—as
they had fought their way out of Big Hole—he thought he might never see it set
again. Now he was almost certain it would be the last time. A calloused hand
smacked his face forward, forcing his head back the other way, towards the
east. Towards Burn. Towards punishment.

“Quit gawkin’
back the way we come. Ain’t nothin’ there for you now.” The hit had come from
the monstrously ugly Devon, one of Lode’s followers. He hit Cobe again. “Don’t
stare at me with them freak eyes of yours either, you pale shit. I’ll poke the
fuckers out and make you a howler if you keep it up.”

Cobe faced
ahead again. He shook his head at Willem, a few steps in front of him, to keep
his mouth shut. The one-armed boy turned away as well, and the four captives
continued stumbling along through the dirt.

“What did you
do with my horse?” Lawson asked further up in the line. The lawman was a big
man, bigger than all of Lode’s men, but next to Lode himself he appeared small
and inconsequential.

The tattooed
brute kicked Lawson savagely in the side of the shin and the lawman fell to his
knees. “How many times do I have to tell you to keep your mouth shut?” He
kicked him again, harder, in the ribs. Lawson made a pained sound and fell
forward onto his elbows. Lode kicked him in the stomach with enough force to
lift him momentarily into the air. The lawman landed on his side in a puff of
dust, coughing and fighting for breath. “I ate your fucking horse.” The six men
traveling with Lode burst into laughter. “I ate the thing, and when the time
comes I’ll shit his remains onto your wrinkly old face.” More laughter.

Trot hobbled
up from the back—which was a difficult thing to do considering the
eighteen-inch piece of rope tied at his ankles. He fell on top of Lawson with
his last stumbling lurches and yelled up at Lode, “Quit kicking him! He’s
already hurt bad enough from the howler attack and them things waking up back
inside Big Hole.”

Lode reached
down and pulled Trot away by a strand of greasy hair. “He’ll be hurting a whole
lot worse when I’m done with him.” Trot whimpered a little more but fell away
when Lode tapped the rusty blade hanging at his side. He knelt down in front of
him. “Who are these people you keep crying about back there?”

Trot stared
into the dirt, afraid to look Lode in the face. “The old man…and the others.
They’re waking up, they’re rising out of their metal beds… Hundreds of them.
Thousands.”

Lode stood
and looked back to the crater rim in the west, three miles away. “I always knew
you were braindumb—never took you for one to be all that imaginative. There’s
nothing back there. There’s no city in the ground.”

Willem spoke.
“Maybe you should go see for yourself.”

“Maybe I
should.” Lode watched as Lawson struggled back to his knees. He kicked him back
down. “Maybe I
will
when this
business is finished.” He pointed at Devon. “It’ll be dark soon. No sense
travelling any further in the cold. Build a fire here and we’ll set out first
thing in the morning.”

Devon didn’t
much care for the sound of that. “Fuck that. We’re out in the open. We start a
fire here, the rollers will be on us for sure before the sun comes up.”

“Good. We’ll
need something to eat.”

Another man,
as ugly as Devon, spoke up. “It was tough enough herding them howlers into the
crater back there… How the hell we expected to survive the night with fucking
rollers running back and forth?” Cobe recognized the man. His name was Ard.
When he wasn’t following Lode and the others around, he was usually piss-drunk
and picking fights in the back streets of Burn.

Lode stepped
over Lawson’s body and strode towards the man in two easy steps. “Make it a big
fire, big enough to keep them away all night long.” He indicated a small forest
of dead wood half a mile to the south. “Take three with you and gather as much
as you can.”

“They’ll
probably cut us down before we make it back. I say we sh—”

Lode punched
him in the face and Cobe heard the cartilage of his nose and the bones in his
cheeks crunch. He fell back into the dirt, quiet and unmoving. Devon leaned
over Ard and winced. “You killed him. Broke his neck with one hit.”

“I’ll break
yours next if you don’t get started on the fire. And you’d better work fast—now
that Ard’s dead, you’ll have one less pair of hands helping.”

Devon wiped
some snot clean from his big, pimply nose and nodded. “Sounds good.”

Cobe watched
the three men jog off into the gloom. That only left three to watch over them.
Getting out of the rope around his ankles would be easy enough. He might even
be able to free Willem, and the two could make a run for it. But where would
they run to? The only chance they had of escaping and hiding was back in the
crater, back underneath the earth in Big Hole. Cobe had no desire to return
there. What waited below was even worse than what had them now. And then there
was Lawson and Trot to consider. Neither was in any condition to run, and Cobe
wouldn’t leave them behind. Not again.

Lode stood in
front of him, a mountain of legs and muscled abdomen blocking his view. “Your
brother and Trot believe there are people back there…living under the ground.
What do you say?”

Cobe shrugged
but remained quiet.

Lode sat down
in a cross-legged position, inches from him. Even sitting, he still came face
to face with the teenager. Cobe could feel the heat from his body, and smell
the stink of his breath. “You hate me for what I did to your father.”

“And our
mother.”

“I’ll let you
and your brother live if you tell me the truth.”

“What truth?”

“About what
you found back there… What the lawman showed you.”

“He didn’t
show us shit.”

“The guns,”
Lode whispered. “This is where he gets them, isn’t it? Take me back there, take
me below and show me where they’re kept and I’ll let you
all
go.”

“No you
won’t.” Cobe could feel the manic energy of the man brewing like a storm set to
unleash. Lode wasn’t used to not getting his way. But he desperately wanted to
know more. Cobe had the information he needed, and for the immediate time
being, he held an advantage over the giant. He would have to use that wisely.
“You’ll kill us all whether I show you or not.”

Lode nodded
slowly. “You’re much smarter than your father…far less pliable. I could’ve had
what I wanted from him without lifting a finger. A bottle would’ve done it.” He
rose back to his feet and patted Cobe on the shoulder with a hand capable of
ripping his arm out at the socket. “Keep your secrets for now, boy. We’ll be
returning to this place soon enough. Once you’ve seen what’s about to take place
in the next few days, you’ll be begging to show me everything you’ve seen.”

Lode went to
his remaining men and Cobe joined his brother, Lawson, and Trot, still sitting
in the dirt.

“Don’t tell
him a gawdamn thing,” the lawman said. He spat blood onto the ground. “Give me
some time to rest, get my strength back…then I’ll finish up with Lode.”

Cobe didn’t
think Lawson could even stand on his own. “You lost your guns back in Big Hole.
You ain’t in no condition to take him on.”

“It’s all my
fault,” Trot whimpered. “They probably followed my dumb tracks all the way from
Burn. They probably watched as I stumbled along, laughing at the way I run. And
I was too stupid to know they was there. Now they’re gonna take us back.
They’re gonna hang us…cut us.”

“Wasn’t your
fault,” Cobe said. “It was my idea to take Willem and run.” He looked at Lawson
to see if he would take any of the blame. The lawman spit again but didn’t say
another word.

Devon and the
others returned a while later, carrying and dragging enough deadfall to see
them through the night. Lode sat next to Ard’s dead body and watched his men
build the fire. “If the rollers do come during the night, we’ll at least have
something for them to feed on.” He smacked the side of the dead man’s face and
giggled.

Cobe settled
down between Willem and Lawson and tried to sleep. Lode’s men were snoring
within minutes. Lode sat through the night and fed the fire next to Ard’s
corpse. The rollers never came, and Cobe wasn’t so sure if that was a good
thing or not.

Chapter 2
8

“Our souls.
They’re gone.”

“What?”
Eunice asked as the old man continued his grisly task.

“Something my
granddaughter told me shortly after waking up. She said there was a lack of
everything… No feelings at all…that our souls were gone.”

Eunice instinctively
placed a fat hand at the center of her chest—that place all humans reached for
when thinking about their hearts, their souls. “I thought…I had hoped my Teddy
would be here when I awoke.” She scratched between the ample cleavage of her
bosom with sharp gray nails that had once been colorful and constantly
manicured to perfection. “I’ll admit I was slightly disappointed, maybe even a
little sad…but the old Eunice…who I remember being—she would’ve had a screaming
fit at waking up without him.”

“I believe
Edna only had it half right.” He scooped up a double handful of burned
intestines from the floor and placed it inside the open cryo-tube. “I feel
something now…after so long, after so many centuries I feel something more than
the gnawing hunger.”

Eunice bent
over and picked up a charred bit of liver. It may have been a piece of lung, or
a chunk of kidney—she couldn’t be sure—and popped it in her mouth. She chewed
and spoke at the same time. “All I feel is hungry. Can’t we at least unthaw one
of the survivors to eat? I’m starving, goddamn it.”

“Spit it
out.”

“Huh?” A line
of black juice dribbled out of her open mouth and trailed down the great
expanse of her second, bulging chin.

“Spit it out
now
. That’s part of my granddaughter
you’re eating.”

“What difference
does it make? She doesn’t need it anymore.”

“We’re not
savages. We won’t consume our own kind.”

“You’re
kidding, right? Is that what you’re feeling now? Some need to make funny?”
Eunice kept chewing.

“Do what he
says,” the girl sitting in the corner said. “Spit it out.”

Eunice turned
to look at her. The girl’s eyes glowed a hateful green. Eunice spit the piece
out.

Lothair had
begun to arrange the damaged intestines and other remaining organs into a mass
between Edna Eichberg’s upper and lower halves. “Jennifer doesn’t find any of
this amusing, and neither do I. We
won’t
eat our own. We’re not cannibals.”

Eunice wiped
the blood and drool from her face and licked it off the back of her hand. “So
what
is
it you’re feeling besides
hunger?”

Lothair looked
up from his work for the first time, his pink eyes meeting hers. “Hatred. Rage.
A longing for revenge. This was…this is my great-granddaughter—Jennifer’s
mother. I’ll see that the ones who did this to her pay.”

“So how do we
survive until then? How are we going to live without food?”

“I lay awake
inside my cryo-tube for a thousand years without eating. Our bodies have
changed; they’ve been enhanced to survive. We can go a little while longer
without food.”

“That’s easy
for you to say. Look at you…skinny old prick. Have you taken a good look at
me?” She thumped a bloodstained fist into her belly. “There’s a lot of Eunice
to satisfy here. Waiting between meals wasn’t one of my strengths
before
I was frozen…not sure if any of
those enhancements have cured that.”

Lothair
gently pulled Edna’s legs up until they touched the intestines and organs. “You
were one of the first I had revived due to the substantial financial
contributions your family made to ABZE—over a hundred million, according to
computer records. I felt somewhat obligated. Don’t make me regret the decision.
Keep quiet.” When he was satisfied, Lothair guided his great-granddaughter’s
upper body into place. He tucked the shredded intestines and blasted organs
into the gaping recess of what was once her stomach, and pulled the legs up
further.

Jenny left
her corner and approached him. “Is it going to work?”

Lothair stood
back and wiped the blood off against the white dress shirt he’d last worn as a
human being ten centuries before. “According to the records it should. The
advances ABZE made in the seven decades after I was frozen were tremendous. It
was always my dream to see clients cured of their ailments and finally unthawed
to continue their lives. I never imagined how much further my descendants would
take things. The developments with artificial blood…the restructuring of
DNA…unleashing the full potential of the encephalon—prosencephalon,
mesencephalon, rhomencephalon…all of it.”

Eunice
scratched at her centuries-old perm. “Rhomen-
what?
”

“Our brains.”
Lothair went to the computer screen built into the wall next to the half-ruined
cryo-tube and fed more questions into it. “We’ve
all
been changed. We’ve been made stronger, hardier…less
susceptible to disease. We’re practically immortal.”

Jenny hugged
herself. “We’ve been turned into freaks. It’s disgusting.” Lothair didn’t
answer his great-great-granddaughter. He was busy absorbing decades of research
and development, learning what had been accomplished and acted upon in his long
absence. She spoke again. “They experimented on me against my wishes. I never
asked to be frozen. It isn’t fair.”

Lothair heard
that. “Fair? Your mother preserved you. Her decision is the reason you’re
sitting there, and you say it isn’t fair?” He wondered what the girl would think
of her great-great-grandfather’s past. Did she know anything about her
heritage? Was she aware of ABZE’s beginnings back in 1940s Germany, and
Lothair’s experimentation on children? He found it highly unlikely. Lothair
considered telling her all about it when he heard movement out in the corridor.

Colonel
Strope entered the room with five recently revived ABZE clients. “It took a
while, but we found the exit—there’s an emergency-flood-relief tube up on A
Level. It’s the only way they could’ve escaped.”

“So it looks
like we aren’t destined to spend the remainder of our long lives trapped
underground,” Lothair said.

Eunice pushed
the old man aside and stood challengingly in front of Strope. “Show us where it
is. I don’t plan on spending another hour under the dirt like some goddamn
rodent.”

Jenny moved
to her mother’s remains and spoke softly into Lothair’s ear. “I thought you
said we had no souls…no emotions.”

He shrugged.
“For the most part, I still believe that to be true. The base instinct to
survive is what we’re experiencing now. My rage and hunger for vengeance is
undoubtedly a need to rid ourselves of a threat to our continued existence.”

“Admit it,”
Jenny whispered, “we’re
still
human.”

Lothair shook
his head slowly. “No longer… Humans are the enemy.” He went to the freshly
thawed ABZE clients huddled closely around Strope and eyed them individually,
taking on an almost militaristic role, as the colonel himself had done
centuries before. He started with a beautiful black woman. “Your name is Aleea
Shon. You were very famous, extremely wealthy. You were an entertainer.”

“I’m a
singer.”

Lothair ran
his fingers along the woman’s smooth skull. “And female singers in the 2030s
always shaved their heads bald?”

“It’s the—it
was
the style back then.”

“Do you still
consider yourself a human, Aleea?”

Aleea felt
her bare arms and stomach. She looked down at her nude body and shook her head.
“There was an accident…the plane went down. I remember my body burning…the
smoke was so thick. After that, everything became a blur. I think people were
talking to me…telling me about the procedures my body was undergoing. Always
telling—never asking. The surgeries, the reconstruction...there were dozens.
And then all those friends stopped talking—they stopped visiting. It was all
doctors and professionals wearing masks. After a while even their visits
ended.”

“There was
only so much they could do,” Lothair offered softly. “There was only so much
they could repair at the time.”

“I was dead,”
Aleea said. “So to answer your question—no, I don’t consider myself human any
longer. I don’t know
what
I am
anymore.”

“You’re
alive
.” He went next to a stocky
middle-aged man with a thick gray beard behind her. “You are Ivan
Tevalov—frozen in 2055. Your assets in oil company holdings made you the
wealthiest man in Russia. Your political ambition ignited a third Cold War and
resulted in the deaths of over a hundred thousand civilians in Kiev.”

Tevalov
seemed confused, and responded in Russian.

Lothair
nodded and continued in the man’s language. “Of course. I understand. You’ll
find it easy enough now to learn a second language, and a third, and a fourth.”
He steered him towards the computer in the wall. “Learn English first, please.
It will make communication with the others less difficult.”

It took only
seconds for the Russian billionaire to familiarize himself with the
touchscreen. Ivan had been frozen not long before civilization’s collapse; the
technology wasn’t that far ahead of what he was used to. Eichberg went back to
the group and singled out a young man staring at the floor. “What’s wrong,
Leonard? Are you finding the adjustment hard?”

The
man—barely out of his teen years based on appearance—shrugged and scratched his
short brown hair with a single finger. “Hungry. I’m hungry.” Leonard looked up
into Lothair’s eyes. “You know my name. How do you know my name’s Leonard?”

Lothair
rubbed the spot between his shoulders. “Mr. Leonard Dutz’s parents were the
wealthiest people I ever knew. Leonard’s father, Anderson, was a friend of mine
back in the early 1970s. His early contributions helped ABZE grow into the
giant it would become. Leonard was born in 1966. Leonard, if you haven’t
already guessed, has Down syndrome. And although Anderson was my friend, and
extremely generous, he was also one of the most ignorant men I ever knew. He
saw something
wrong
with his son. He
thought Leonard could someday be cured. But you weren’t
sick
, were you, Leonard?” Leonard continued scratching his head.
“Down syndrome isn’t a sickness…it isn’t a disease that requires curing. I
experim—I
met
dozens of boys with
Down syndrome when I was a much younger man. They were gentle and loving…they
were everything the human race
should
have
been. It was my pleasure to work with them.” Lothair was now standing in front
of him. He tilted Leonard’s head up with a finger. “You were ten years old the
last time I saw you. You don’t remember me, do you, Leonard?”

Leonard
looked into the old man’s pink eyes and squinted hard. Finally he shook his
head and looked back down at his bare feet. “I’m hungry.”

“Yes, we all
are.” Lothair stared at the others. “I refused Anderson when he asked to have
Leonard frozen. He never spoke to me again. But it seems my old friend finally
had his way after I was laid to rest. He had his only son frozen in 1986.
That
is what the human race is. We’re
not a part of it anymore.”

Jenny was
still standing at her mother’s side. “Happy birthday.”

Lothair
raised an eyebrow at her.

“You said
Leonard was born in 1966. That makes him eleven hundred years old. People our
age don’t go by months and days anymore, do they?”

If Lothair
was still capable of smiling, he would’ve done so. “You’re right… How does it
feel being eleven hundred, Leonard?”

“That’s
silly. No one can live that long.”

“They can
now,” Eichberg whispered. He went to another woman. She was small and frail;
gray skin hung from her cheeks in flaps, and the size small ABZE one-piece
she’d chosen to wear was still far too large on her skeletal frame. She didn’t
have much more hair than Lothair; the remaining wisps of white looked like
strands of cotton candy clinging to her liver-spotted skull. “Miss Mary
Gades—film actress.”

“Movie star,”
she corrected him.

Lothair
nodded. “I saw some of your movies in the sixties. You were stunning…brilliant.
I always wondered what became of you. It would seem the latter part of the
twentieth century and the first few decades of the twenty-first were hardly as
kind.”

“I was a
has-been by the late eighties. Spent most of the next thirty years in doctors’
offices replacing what skin I had left with plastic… Didn’t do me much good,
did it? Finally sank the last of what I had into being frozen. I was hoping
maybe to wake up young and beautiful again. Guess I didn’t give your company
enough cash.”

“Do
you
feel human, Mary?”

She made a
farting noise with her blue lips that made the skin hanging down her chin
waggle back and forth. “Do I fucking look human?”

Colonel
Strope grabbed Lothair by the arm before he could get to the next of the
freshly thawed. “We’re wasting time. There’s nothing for us down here.” Strope
was used to acting, not waiting. The installation belonged to Eichberg, and he
would follow the man’s orders. But his patience was waning.

Lothair
pulled his arm free. “Soon, Michael. Soon.” He went to the final man in the
group, leaning against the wall with his arms folded across his thick chest and
ample belly. “You
had
to be one of
the first ones thawed, didn’t you, Mr. Haywood?”