CRYERS (18 page)

Chapter
30

They had run
less than a hundred yards before Cobe could hear more than just the thunderous
roar of their hooves. The creatures made deep, guttural breathing sounds—wet
snorting noises from hundreds of unseen faces.

Don’t look back. Don’t look back. Keep running.
Where are the hills? Don’t look back.

Cobe didn’t
look back; he glanced sideways—over Willem’s head—and saw what a roller looked
like up
real
close. In that brief
moment he thought his eyes were playing tricks on him in the dark. The thing
was all head. It bobbed up and down, five feet from the tip of its boney, bulbous
skull to the point of its almost nonexistent chin. Brown fur matted with snot
and saliva coated the entirety of its face and flapped over a pointed ear
against the rush of air it was pushing through. A glistening black eye the size
of Lode’s fist regarded the boys for an instant and was gone. The roller picked
up speed and raced past them. Cobe saw the blur of moving limbs under the
creature, propelling it forward. The back legs were thicker than Trot’s waist;
its front arms were thicker still and twice the length.

A second
roller thundered by on the other side. It was bigger. Cobe could see the
massive claws curled up into the underside of its furry arms as the back of its
wrists pushed against the dirt for traction and balance. The massive head bobbed
up and down and its chin dug into the earth, chewing up more dust and dirt,
creating a small series of trenches as it went. It looked like a massive
boulder composed of bone, muscle, and fur rolling at breakneck speed across the
plain.

Cobe and his
brother were about to die. They would be trampled, mangled, and eaten in the
dirt, along with Trot, and whoever was still alive ahead of them. At least he
would die knowing where rollers had earned their name.

Willem fell
and curled up into a ball. Cobe lay on top of him and shut his eyes. It was as
good a place as any. The roar picked up all around them. Dust kicked up from
dozens of thumping arms and pushing legs filled the air, making it almost
impossible to breathe. The boys gasped and coughed in it. Something hard
smacked into Cobe’s shoulder, a glancing blow from a muscular wrist or black
hoof; it was impossible to tell. He could hear his brother’s muffled screams
beneath him. Another hit to the back of Cobe’s skull pushed his face into
Willem’s neck. He could feel the boy shaking. Everything was shaking, and
roaring, and rumbling. Cobe never imagined anything could feel and sound so
terrifying. It would be over in a few more seconds, he thought. One of those
hooves would crush his skull. A set of foot-long claws would tear into his back
and shred him in two.

He whispered
into Willem that he was sorry. How many times had he apologized to his brother
since running away from Burn? He kept on saying how sorry he was, over and
over, even though Willem couldn’t hear a word of it. After what seemed like an
eternity of roughly ten more seconds, Cobe could hear his brother crying. He
could hear himself still moaning apologies.

The dust had
started to clear. Cobe looked up and saw a wall of black-gray receding into the
north. He cleared his throat and spat out mud. “We’re alive…Willem! We made
it!” He crawled off his brother and stood, wavering back and forth unsteadily,
spitting shit out of his throat.

“Think I
pissed myself,” Willem whimpered.

“I
know
I pissed myself.” Cobe helped him
up.

Willem
started to giggle, and Cobe joined him. They were laughing uncontrollably a few
seconds later. Willem laughed so hard he fell forward and Cobe tried to catch
him. They both ended up back in the freshly trampled earth, kicking up more
dust, laughing and crying until they could hardly breathe once again.

The distant
rumble of roller hooves weakened, like a storm passing in the night. Cobe
stared up at the first stars in the night sky after he was too sore to make
another sound.

Willem
whispered, “What are we gonna do now? Where we gonna go?”

Cobe was
wondering the very same thing. A wail interrupted his thoughts. He sat up and
listened. It sounded again, back from the way they’d come. Someone crying.

Willem was on
his feet first. “Trot!”

Cobe followed
his brother through the rut of roller tracks, calling the man’s name. They
found him crawling on his hands and knees. Cobe knelt down next to him. “Are
you okay?”

“I’m okay,”
Trot blubbered. “I can’t run fast with my stupid legs. Fell as soon as we tried
getting away from them.”

A pang of
guilt shot through Cobe. He hadn’t even thought of waiting for him.

“They were on
top of me as soon as I flopped down on my big gut.”

“I’m sorry,
Trot.” Cobe had been apologizing for things out of his control far too much.

“It’s
alright. I was just scared…thought I was the only one left. I don’t wanna be
left alone no more.”

Willem patted
Trot’s stomach. “Too much belly for them dumb rollers to bother with, hey,
Trot?” He smiled up at him, but Trot couldn’t see the humor in it.

“Did you find
the lawman? Did the rollers get him?”

Cobe shook
his head.

“We gotta
find him. We gotta head for them Dirty Hills and find him.”

It seemed a
suicidal task—heading directly into the stampeding herd that had almost killed
them all—but Cobe agreed. There was nothing for them in any other direction.
The only other places Cobe knew where to go were Burn and Big Hole. He wasn’t
returning to either of them any time soon.

The brothers
followed Trot at a slow pace. None of them could hear the rollers anymore. The
creatures had either swung left or right—thankfully—and rolled off into the
night. Cobe started to become hopeful and worried at the same time; hopeful
that they would find the lawman alive, but afraid they’d stumble across Lode
first.

They
discovered Beff first. The only way they could recognize him was from the
ponytail trailing out from under his crushed body. The arm and leg on his left
side were missing altogether; the rest was a flattened purple pulp.

Willem went
to spit on the corpse and Cobe stopped him. “Don’t.”

“Why you
still treatin’ me like a little kid? Gawdamn it…after all we been through.”

“Spittin’ on
dead people is for the likes of Lode. We ain’t like Lode.”

Willem had no
argument for that. They found a second corpse another quarter mile along. This
one had no head left, and both legs were missing. Its torso and arms were as
flat as Beff’s remains. Trot asked weakly, “You think it’s the lawman?”

“Hard to
tell,” Cobe answered. It was
impossible
to tell. The shirt on its back was a shredded mess, a muddy pink slur pounded
into flesh and bone. It could’ve been Devon—or one of the others—but chances
were it was the lawman. He was incapable of running on his own, beaten and
broken as he was. It didn’t belong to Lode, Cobe was certain of that. The
remains were too small, and Lode didn’t wear a shirt. “Come on, let’s keep
going.”

It was fully
dark by the time they noticed the added strain on their legs. They had started
climbing up; they’d arrived at the hills.

“Why you
think folks call ‘em the Dirty Hills?” Willem asked. “Everything’s
dirty…Burn…these dumb plains…the gawdamn hole we climbed outta.”

“Maybe some
places are dirtier than others,” Cobe offered.

“Stupid
name.”

Willem was
chattering a lot again. Cobe knew he was afraid. All three of them were. The
lawman was missing once again, and they were headed upward into a black forest
that had even given the brute Lode cause to worry. They climbed for another
half hour, working their way through stinging bushes filled with thorns,
stumbling over giant fallen trunks stinking with rot, and walking around trees,
still standing and even thicker.

“So many
trees,” Trot said after whacking his forehead into a low-hanging branch. “So
much wood. How come the people in Rudd don’t cut ‘em all down and makes
houses?”

“Whole place
stinks,” Willem answered. “Who’d want to live in a house that smelled like
shit?”

“I’ve slept
in shit. You get used to pretty much anything when you don’t have no house at
all to live in.” Pale light broke through the trees ahead of them. They had
reached the top, and a full moon was rising up into the branches, bloated, pink
and ominous. Trot leaned against a tree and stared; the light glowed off his
fat cheeks, mirroring the oblong orb in the sky. “Bad things come out when the
moon’s that color and so big.”

Willem
stopped beside him. “Them are just stupid stories grownups tell to scare kids.
It’s just a stupid moon. You ain’t still a kid, are you, Trot?”

Trot looked
down at the boy, his eyes filled with tears. “Never was a kid... Bad things
come when the moon looks like that.”

Cobe came up
behind them. He had come to recognize that quiet, shaking quality to Trot’s
voice when he was on the verge of panic. “Easy, Trot. You know what my brother’s
like when he gets scared.” He gave Willem a warning look.

“I ain’t
scared. I seen an old man crush a howler’s head into the wall and then eat its
gawdamn brains. I wasn’t scared then, and I ain’t scared now.”

Trot had
started to moan. “The lawman…we need the lawman.”

Cobe rubbed
his back and whispered, “We’ll find him. Calm down, breathe nice and slow.”

Trot
screamed. “Now! I need the lawman
now!
”

Something
thudded into the bark inches from his head. Cobe saw the crude arrow shaft
still quivering in the moon’s light. Trot fell silent and they heard something
moving in the trees ahead. Someone giggled, and branches snapped somewhere
behind them. A child started to laugh. A second arrow landed in the tree inches
below the first and closer to Trot’s neck. The giggles of more children sounded
all around them. Shadowy forms moved in the branches and tall grass.

Cobe caught
the shine from a dozen sets of eyes reflected in the moonlight before something
hard cracked against the back of his neck. He fell to his side in a carpet of
leaves and saw Trot sitting with his back against the tree. The man’s jaw was
hanging open, his eyes staring ahead and unblinking. A third arrow had driven
through the center of his forehead, its tip burrowed into the bark behind him.
Cobe tried yelling for his brother, but another blow to the top of his skull
silenced him. His face struck the ground, sucking up dry leaves and dirt, as
blackness overtook him.

Chapter
31

When Lawson
had first led Trot and the boys through the rusted ruins into Big Hole, he had
done so with care. It was a conglomeration of twisted girders, miles of rebar,
and tons of centuries-old concrete. Unbending metal could tear clothes and rip
open skin. Cement boulders—immovable when pushed or pulled—could crush bone if
left to shift or fall on their own. Lothair Eichberg and his followers climbed
out of Big Hole with much less consideration for physical boundaries and
safeties. If a slab of concrete blocked their way, Lothair pushed it aside.
When pieces of jutting, two-inch-thick rebar meant crawling further on their
stomachs and sides, Colonel Strope bent them back until there was room to walk
through.

Lothair
realized what a struggle it must have been for the big lawman to gain access to
his facility as he pulled himself up onto the crater rim. He breathed in the
cool night air and listened to a rumble coming out of the northwest.

Thunder. Rain.
He looked up into the night and waited for the
first drops to hit his face. He stayed that way as the others hauled themselves
up the crater wall to join him. Eunice was last, huffing and puffing slightly,
and digging her fingers into earth baked hard as rock. She wasn’t sweating when
she reached the top—none of them were. The rain didn’t come, but Lothair wasn’t
disappointed. He didn’t know what disappointment was anymore.

Brian
surveyed the dark landscape. “No lights…Dauphin’s gone.”

Lothair
wondered for another moment what was causing the rumble before he responded,
“You were expecting a farming town with a population of less than five thousand
to still be there after a thousand years, Mr. Haywood?”

“Nope,
suppose I wasn’t…but still…it’s where I grew up, where I raised a family.”

“You’re upset
about that?”

“Nope… Funny
thing that…I could care less.”

Lothair knew
the farmer didn’t find it funny. None of them did. None of them cared any
longer about the past. All that mattered was the future; where and what they
would eat next. They were surrounded by nothing. Lothair listened more intently
to the distant roar in the northeast.

“I’m hungry,”
Leonard said, staring up at Orion’s belt and rubbing his stomach.

“I know you
are, Leonard. We all are. Something’s causing that sound, something living.” He
started down into the black plains.

“Not yet,”
Strope called after him.

Lothair
looked back. “You need rest, Colonel? After all this time?”

“Not me—Edna.
Her body’s still healing.”

Lothair
climbed back up the hill and squatted down next to his great-granddaughter. The
fusion of her two halves hadn’t been as successful as he’d hoped. Edna could
barely stand on her own due to the poor re-join of her spine. She couldn’t sit
properly; her legs and abdomen pointed northeast, while the rest of her faced
southeast. She had to lean on the dirt with one elbow to stay up. Lothair
considered her predicament with cold logic. “I could break her back…make
certain the alignment is better this time.”

“You’re
not
breaking her back,” Jenny said. She
sat down next to mother, squeezing Lothair out of the way. The girl had helped
her father carry Edna out through the debris and up the crater wall. “She’s
suffered enough already.”

“None of us
suffer
anymore, dear,” Lothair said.

“
Dear
… Really? We’ve become fucking
zombies, and you call me
dear?”

Lothair had
worked with thousands of children in his former life. He had enjoyed working
with children; they were loving and trusting—easy to manipulate. Teenagers were
another matter entirely. He hadn’t understood them in the twentieth century,
and the thirty-first century hadn’t cleared matters any. He ignored Jenny and
patted Edna’s knee, speaking loudly even though her face was less than a foot
away. “I need to break your spine. I want to position it better.”

“She can’t
understand you,” Strope said. “The piece of grenade shrapnel that went through
her brain is still in there. Stuck somewhere beneath her skull.”

Edna had
spoken the colonel’s first name when she’d first regained consciousness. She
had rasped Jenny’s as well a half dozen times since, but those were the only
two words the woman could utter. Lothair had hoped the brain tissue would have
repaired itself by now. As she was now, his great-granddaughter wasn’t much use
to any of them. She was more pretzel than hominid—a shambling vegetable.

Eunice spoke
out loud what he was considering. “Leave her here—or tear her head off. We can
get on better without her slowing us down.”

If Jenny was
still human she would have likely lunged at the woman and punched her fat face
in. Instead she just glared at her. No one would be killing her mother.

Lothair had
made his decision. “We’ll remain here until the sun comes up. It will be easier
to hunt for food in the light of day, and will give us a better look at our
surroundings. Hopefully the genetic enhancements in Edna’s body will help
repair her spine some more.”

“And her
brain,” Jenny said.

Lothair
nodded, even though he thought it unlikely. The chunk of grenade that had
blasted up into Edna’s head from under her jaw was still inside. The only way
it could come out was by digging in from the top. Lothair thought he might be
able to perform the operation. Too bad he hadn’t brought some tools with them.
He wandered a few feet away and leaned against an ancient, bent girder sticking
up out of the ground. An old metal pail hung on a rusted bolt near the top.
Lothair reached in with his fingers and found an inch of water at the bottom.
Either it had rained recently, or someone had been drinking from it—perhaps the
lawman himself. He pulled it off the bolt and snapped the metal-wire handle
free. He twisted one sharp end into a hook. It might be messy, he thought, but
it would suffice.

Jenny leaned
back and watched them all for a while. Farmer Brian gazed off into the night
where his hometown had once stood. Leonard’s eyes were on the stars. He would
point to each new one as it became apparent to him, muttering things no one
understood under his breath, and rubbing his belly at the same time. Aleea Shon
and Mary Gades were sitting off a little ways; even zombie celebrities tended
to stick with their own kind, Jenny thought. Eunice sat on the crater rim, half
her fat ass hanging down into Big Hole. Jenny wondered if a second crater would
appear once she stood up. The woman had hiked up her black dress and was
picking clumps of dirt out from between the rolls where her ankles met her feet.
Ivan Tevalov was sitting beside her, his dead white eyes staring back at Jenny
like a shark.

None of them
wanted to sleep. They didn’t need to. Jenny wondered if that was sad.

What did
sadness feel like?

She lay back
and started counting Leonard’s stars. She gave up after the clouds moved in,
and closed her eyes. Jenny didn’t need to sleep. She
wanted
to.

“Jennifer.”

She was back
underground, inside a cavernous room filled with cryogenics cylinders. This
wasn’t like the room she had been frozen in for centuries. There were more than
three cylinders here—there were hundreds, perhaps thousands. Jenny was walking
along a row of them, running her fingers against their black surfaces. They
were propped up at an angle, facing her, like cold, silent sentinels.

“Jennifer.”

She peered in
the glass window of one and saw a man smiling at her. His eyes were solid black
and dead. White, wrinkled fingers appeared, waggling back and forth. He was
mouthing the word ‘hello’ over and over, but he hadn’t been the one that had
spoken her name.

Jenny looked
in on another cylinder a little further down. At first she thought it was empty
and was about to step away. A small knock sounded from somewhere inside. She
had to stand on the tips of her toes in order to look down inside the
cylinder’s depths. A little boy with curly blonde hair and glowing red eyes
scowled up at her. The bottom half of his face was caked in blood. He made
scratching gestures at her with chubby fingers coated in gore.

The cylinder
beside it was filled nearly to the top with rats. They swam amongst each other,
writhing in a sea of clawing nails and twisting tails. One rat bit its
neighbor. It set off a chain reaction. Blood squirted against the underside of
the window, and Jenny watched through what little clear bit of glass was left
as the rodents began devouring themselves.

“Jennifer.”

Jenny moved
away from the rat cylinder and continued down the long row without looking in
on any more. Some were shaking violently in their steel brackets. More knocks and
scratches sounded from others. Jenny ignored them all. She kept walking,
following the sound of her name. She knew the voice well.

“Jennifer.”

She stepped
past the final cylinder and saw a table set into the rock wall. But it was more
than a table—it was a booth. It was the same booth as the one in that old
Chicago restaurant-diner her mother used to take her to after school. Those
were good days. Those were times when her mother had a few free hours and she
had wanted to spend them with her. Jenny slid into the booth across from her.
The red plastic still made that squeaking noise as she shifted into place. She
remembered that soft sinking feeling as her bum settled in.

“Jennifer.”

“You only
call me Jennifer when you’re mad.”

“And when I need to get your attention. I
didn’t want you dallying around too long amongst those cylinders. Nasty things
in there—not the kinds of things a mother wants her daughter to see.”

“You…you look
well.”

Edna glanced
down at herself. This Edna Eichberg had never been blown in half. Jenny reached
over and touched the back of her mother’s hand. The skin was warm and healthy.
Jenny saw her own fingers and started to weep. They were tanned. She was human
again. They both were.

“It’s okay, Jenny. We can be who we want to be
here. We are what we are here.”

“I…I feel
things here. The things in the cylinders
scared
me. I’m
crying
seeing you like this
again. I never thought I’d feel anything ever again except hunger and hate.”

“I told your great-great-grandfather we no
longer had souls. I was wrong. They are here—waiting in the dream world.”

“You’re
sleeping?”

Her mother
smiled a warm, knowing look. Her eyes were brown and beautiful.
“I can say your name, and your father’s
name. I don’t even realize I’m doing it. I’m practically brain-dead, Jenny.
Where do you think the rest of me goes when I’m just sitting there all bent and
drooling?”

“Eichberg
wants to dig inside your head and take out the grenade shrapnel stuck in there.
I saw him take the wire handle off of an old pail. I think he’ll try it
tomorrow.” She didn’t call him grandfather, or gramps; Jenny despised the man
and refused to consider him as family.

Edna shrugged
. “Let him try. He has your father under
him, so it wouldn’t do any good trying to stop him.”

“I can talk
to Dad. I can make him stop Eichberg.”

“No. You can’t. Your father isn’t your father
anymore. None of us are what we should be in that world. Now if you could make
him fall asleep…have him pay the two of us a visit…”

“He doesn’t
sleep. None of them do.”

“Then it’s just you and me, kiddo.”

“I’ll do it
myself—I’ll kill Eichberg.”

There was a
stack of books on the table between them that Jenny hadn’t noticed before.
Perhaps they’d always been there, or maybe they had suddenly appeared, as
things in dreams had a way of doing. Jenny looked at the cover of the one
sitting on top. It was titled
Cryogenics
in the Twentieth Century and Beyond.
The author’s name at the bottom was
Lothair Eichberg. That made sense. But the red swastika emblazoned on the
cover’s center confused her.

“Your great-great-grandfather was a brilliant
man. And he was a very evil man.”

Jenny pushed
it aside and looked at the other covers. There were no titles or author names
identifying them; they didn’t require any. The images were of children in
varying degrees of despair and agony. They were strapped to tables with tubes
forced into their mouths and noses. Frost had burned sections of their skin
black. Jenny batted each book away in disgust as the covers became more
gruesome. They grew thicker, heavier—every volume waiting bigger than the one
before. Inside, she knew, the pages would be bursting with even more
atrocities—thousands of pages detailing all the horrible things Lothair
Eichberg had ever done, or had hoped to achieve. The last book, a three-thousand-page
tome of torture, was the heaviest of them all. Jenny had to use both hands to
push it away. It thumped to the floor next to their table with an awful thud.

“Our family legacy… I thought you should know.
If you go up against him on your own, you will lose.”