CRYERS (5 page)

The gun fell from his fingers, and
the lawman slipped it into the holster at his side. The air smelled funny and
Cobe’s ears were still ringing.

A man emerged out of the dark,
crawling along on his knees. His hands were held high above his head. “Don’t
shoot! Don’t shoot!”

The lawman chuckled. It sounded
like glass being crushed deep in his chest. “How many times you got to be told
in one day, Trot? Pull up yer gawdamn pants.”

2099

2,655 meters underground

253 kilometers northwest of
Winnipeg, Manitoba

Lothair was thinking about a boy
named Samuel he had frozen in 1944. He pictured the fat ten-year-old’s buttocks
sliced and frying in a skillet, the grease bubbling and popping away in a mix
of minced onions and garlic. Lothair had imagined eating the boy’s rear-end for
two years straight. Lothair never slept. He never thirsted for water, but his
stomach continued to rumble, like a distant storm on the horizon that never
moved. The gnawing hunger never went away.

Lothair wasn’t insane. The freezing
process had worked. Something inside his body had changed. He reasoned a
foreign agent had been introduced into his DNA sometime during the period he
first went under to the moment he awoke twenty-nine years ago. Some brilliant
mind—or a team of brilliant minds—had discovered the method to bring a frozen
human being back to life. They may have even cracked the cancer code, and
started replacing old, diseased hearts with new, four-chambered mechanical
organs.

If so, it didn’t answer the
question of why Lothair was still lying in his freeze tube. If he could awake
into blackness and think of eating children for decades on end, then surely the
tumor in his brain was no longer an issue.

Something rumbled, and Lothair felt
the cylinder tremble. That wasn’t his stomach. A minute later, he felt the
sensation again—the cushioned bed formatted to the underside of his cylinder
vibrated.

An incident has occurred above.

It would give himself something
else to think about for the next few years besides eating children. The clock
continued to click away in his brain. Twenty-eight years, ten months, two
weeks, three days, fourteen minutes, and thirty-one seconds.

Thirty-two…

Thirty-three…

Thirty-four…

Willem glanced back over his
shoulder more than once as they headed west. The forested hills were still
there but fading fast. Behind those hills, and another full day’s walk, was
Burn—the town he’d been born and raised in. Until yesterday morning, Willem had
never ventured more than a quarter-mile from the safety of its walls.

“I’d keep my eyes trained ahead if
I were you,” Cobe suggested. “The lawman says we ain’t going back to Burn any
time soon.”

“Just taking a few last looks,”
Willem answered, “in case we don’t ever go back.”

“Don’t talk like that. We’ll be
back...someday.”

Ahead of the boys, Lawson rode
Dust. The big horse ambled along, kicking up dirt for them to chew on. Trot sat
awkwardly behind the lawman, his arms clutched around Lawson’s waist. Willem
shook his head. “Not much worth looking at ahead, unless you like staring at
Trot’s dirty old ass crack.”

Cobe smiled. “Last night, I thought
we were done for. The lawman fed us and kept us safe. Lucky for us, he decided
to keep heading west.” He still didn’t like, or particularly trust, the lawman,
but facts were facts.

“But why? Why would Burn’s only
law-keeper up and leave? What’s to stop him from killing us all, brutal-like,
and headin’ back? Trot? You think that braindumb’s gonna rescue us?”

Lawson’s reply made the one-armed
boy jump. “I could’ve let the howler eat you and yer brother. I could’ve shot
you while you slept. I could tell Dust to kick yer head in right now, and leave
you to rot. There’s a thousand easy ways to kill a little shit like you. So why
don’t you quit thinkin’ what a treacherous, mean, son of a bitch I am and keep
yer mouth shut.”

Willem looked to his brother and
Cobe shrugged.

Trot cleared his throat and changed
the subject. “No one saw me leave Burn. I snuck out of town right after you
rode out.” He twisted around on Dust’s rump and grinned at the boys. “I
followed the horse tracks. I can track real good!”

“Why did you leave Burn?” Lawson
rumbled. “You heard what Lode said. Yer stupidity makes you one of the safest folks
in town.”

“Sick of being teased. Sick of
people slapping and kicking me. I got pride too, you know…not much, but I got
some.”

“Pride will get you killed. Being
stupid ain’t such a bad thing.”

“Just got sick of it is all,” Trot
muttered.

They rode and walked for another
hour. They hadn’t seen the sun, but it was wicked hot. The clouds, still heavy
and gray, had a way of trapping the heat close to the ground. The land was
pretty much the same blasted scape Cobe and Willem were used to seeing, growing
up in Burn. Cobe kicked at the dirt in frustration. Where had he hoped to go?
What would they have found on their own?

As if sensing his thoughts, Lawson
brought Dust to a stop and climbed down. He handed his leather water canteen to
Cobe and helped Trot down next. “You had the right idea,” he said to Cobe, as
the boy handed the container off to his brother, “leavin’ Burn like you did.
The folks there, and in Rudd, have no clue what things are like further west,
once you get past them first set of hills.” He settled against a big rock and
beat the dust from his hat against one leg. “There’s other towns…some bigger
than Burn…most smaller. Things are worse there. They don’t even got a river to
plant crops by. Whatever they can seed grows on spit and hope.”

Cobe sat in the dirt and Willem
joined him. The boys remained silent and listened to the lawman tell them what
the world was like. Trot stroked Dust’s coarse hair, watching and listening as
well.

“There’s what you might call
‘remnants’ of an older town beyond them other shit holes. No one lives there
anymore, but something tells me you could. It ain’t like the old days, when
freaks and howlers claimed everything. This town is so old it ain’t got a name
no more. But it was big at one time—maybe bigger than all the land between Burn
and Rudd put together.”

Willem made a noise of disbelief
with his lips that sounded like a fart.

“Ain’t no town that big,” Cobe
said. “There never was that many people in the whole world that could’ve filled
it.”

Lawson shrugged. “Not so sure about
that. You put all the people, howlers, and rollers in one place at the same
time. Who knows, maybe it would’ve been enough.”

“Howlers and rollers ain’t people,”
Willem said. “They don’t live together.”

“Not anymore. But from what I’ve
seen, I get the impression howlers and rollers—and all them other freaks you
kids don’t know nothin’ about—may have been more like us. I suspect we all
lived together in these bigger towns. They were called cities back then.”

“Sitties?” Trot left Dust and
shuffled to stand in front of the lawman. His one hand was twisted about his
belt-rope, tugging up, perhaps, a little too hard. The other hand was
scratching his sweaty forehead. “Did no one work? Is sitting all they did?”

“Spelled different. Not the same
meaning.”

Trot looked more confused than ever.

“Never mind.” Lawson pushed away
from his rock and scooped Willem up in one smooth move. He placed the squirming
boy on Dust’s back and turned to Cobe. “We best keep moving. That’ll be tough,
however, if the two of you drop from exhaustion. Get on up behind yer brother.
‘Ol Dust’ll do the rest.”

Cobe had never sat atop any animal
in his life. Willem was white and frozen stiff—too terrified to slip off the
horse even if he wanted. “Reckon I’ll just keep using my feet.”

“Suit yerself.” Lawson smacked Dust’s
backend lightly and the one-eyed horse started moving west again. Lawson walked
a few feet behind. Trot trotted to catch up and fell in a few paces behind the
lawman.

“Ain’t you going to sit up there
with him?” Cobe called out. Lawson remained silent. Cobe watched his brother
sitting on the horse—his back stiff and leaning forward. His one hand was
buried in black mane, hanging on for dear life. After a few moments, Cobe swore
under his breath and set after them. “You’ll have to help me up,” he said.

The lawman made a snorting noise
and held his hand out—palm up and three feet from the ground—next to his horse.
Cobe gave him a wondering look. “Use my hand like a step and hoist yerself up.”

Cobe swung up behind his brother
easily enough. He was tempted to jump right back down and drag Willem with him
when he felt the strength of the beast under him. The thing was a mass of
moving muscle and warm flesh. Lawson grinned up at him. It looked as if he was
a hundred feet below Cobe, instead of a mere two or three. The fear lessened
with his urge to kick Lawson’s teeth out and wipe the smile from the man’s
face.

“You’ll get used to Dust in a
minute or two, both of you,” he said, lightly smacking the belly between Willem
and Cobe’s legs. “Just try not acting fidgety and such. He don’t care for nervous
riders.”

Willem spoke without taking his
eyes off the horse’s mane. “Easy for you to say.”

Cobe wrapped his arms around his
brother’s waist and dug the sides of his heels into Dust as gently as he could,
until he felt somewhat sure he wasn’t going to slide off. He started breathing
again.

The clouds continued to swim low
over their heads the rest of the afternoon. They rotated in deep, gray pockets,
kicking up dust devils the slow travelers had to either side-skirt or work
straight through. They came across a stream of running water in the basin of a
low valley, but Lawson said it wasn’t safe to drink from. Cobe wasn’t sure he
would’ve touched it, even if the lawman had deemed it safe. The water from the
river next to Burn always looked brownish-gray, but this slow-trickle had a
purple hint to it. Fortunately, there were still three heavy hide flasks filled
with water, strapped over Dust’s back. Cobe rubbed one with his heel and felt
comforted; they wouldn’t go thirsty for some time.

But how long would
sometime
be?

They made camp at the edge of a
rocky cliff as the sun bled into the west. Lawson said there would be no fire
that night. Trot was watching some distant activity down on the flat northern
plains. Willem sat next to him, his skinny legs dangling precariously over the
cliff’s edge. “Whatcha lookin’ at?”

Trot tugged nervously on his rope
belt and settled in closer to the boy. “Them black spots down there. You see
them moving back and forth?”

Willem squinted and tried to focus his
vision in the gathering gloom. He saw them—little black dots blowing across the
gray earth, some moving in packs, others moving in pairs, and some speeding off
alone in different directions. It reminded him of a game he had seen the men of
Burn play in the dirt streets, tossing little round stones back and forth. The
game was called
murbles
. “They
people?”

“People don’t move that fast,” Trot
answered.

Willem called his brother over.
Lawson joined them and warned the smaller boy to keep his voice down. “Why you
think I’m not allowin’ any fire tonight?” He pointed with his chin towards the
black dots moving in the north. “Rollers got good eyesight…their sense of smell
ain’t that bad either.”

Trot shuttered. “Rollers? Those
little black things are
rollers
?”

“Yeah, them little black things are
rollers. They ain’t that little close up though. We’re a good two miles from
‘em…should be safe for the night, so long as we keep the noise and movement
down.”

Trot crawled away from the cliff on
all fours, back towards the snoozing Dust. Cobe and Willem joined him a few
minutes later when the gathering dusk made it too difficult to observe the
creatures any longer.

“Maybe I should’ve stayed put in
Burn,” Trot said. “I was teased and bullied, but my life was never in any
danger.” He thought about Lode and remembered the sting of his sword blade on
his buttocks. “Well, not in any
real
danger.”

Lawson returned to them, chewing on
a blade of dead grass instead of smoking one of his foul-smelling cigarettes. “Then
why the hell did you follow me out here?”

“You asked me that this morning.”

“Then give me a better answer.”

Trot didn’t respond right away. He
tried to recall a time when he was happy living in Burn. His jerking walk and
simple mind had always made him a target for ridicule. His parents—Trot could
no longer remember what they looked like—had died from some disease when he was
a child. He couldn’t picture their faces, but he still had nightmares of the
horrible red sores that covered their bodies, the bleeding clusters of pustules
spreading out from their armpits and down from their ears. Some folks told Trot
the sickness that had taken his parents affected him as well. They said it was
what made him dumb. Trot couldn’t ever remember being smart, so he took their
word for it. He had listened to and obeyed every word the folks in Burn had
said in the thirty or so years following—all the good
that
did him. No one had taken him in. No one fed him when he was a
little boy after his parents died. Trot had managed on his own, eating scraps,
drinking from puddles that tasted more like piss than water, and sleeping in
whatever dry bit of back alley he could find.

He looked up at Lawson and smiled
his big, toothy grin. “You say hello to me sometimes. You tip that nice hat at
me and ask me how my day is. No one else does that.”

Lawson shook his head. “Fuck. Had I
known being cordial meant I’d have to babysit you someday, I probably wouldn’t
have given you the time of day.” He lay down on the dirt, away from the other
three, and went to sleep.

The rollers were gone the next
morning. Trot took up residence again behind Lawson on Dust’s back. Cobe and
Willem picked their way along a stony trail, behind the horse riders, that led
down into the northern plains.

“Wouldn’t it be safer to stick to
the cliffs up top?” Cobe asked.

“Safer maybe, but a hell of a lot
longer,” Lawson called back.

“Longer to where?”

“Big Hole.”

Big Hole.
What the hell does that mean?
The lawman seemed more grim than
usual this morning, so Cobe dropped the subject. They ventured further out into
the flat land. Willem—afraid the rollers might reappear—asked if he could ride
atop Dust, said he hadn’t slept well, that he was still tired. Cobe knew well-enough
what was going on inside his brother’s head, and figured Lawson suspected the
same. The lawman grunted, slipped off the horse’s back, and set Willem in his
place.

“There’s another river running west
about four miles north of here.” Lawson rolled a cigarette as he walked and
talked. “It ain’t fit to drink from either, but we can follow it all the way to
where we’re headed. Rollers tend to stay clear of water, so we should be safer
once we get there.”

They came upon the first set of
roller tracks. Cobe placed his foot in a depression of cracked dirt where a
large knuckled hand had settled. He could have stood in it with both feet and
still had plenty of room. The ground was hard, the imprint over an inch deep.
The thing was damn big, Cobe realized. A lot bigger than they had appeared last
night from a couple miles away.