The Creepers (Book 2): From the Past (19 page)

“I could always say, no,” Baylor said.
The Mad Conductor shouted with joy. Baylor could practically feel the froth
from his mouth. Not yet. Not yet.

“You could, but you won’t once you feel
what it’s like to be alive and free.” Moya bowed. “Until the morning, Baylor.”
She turned and disappeared into the dark, shouting orders.

“Quite the woman.” Keaton returned to
his venison.

Baylor could see the knot of concern in
those tired eyes.
Take it to them, Bobby.

“She sure is.” The Mad Conductor smiled.

* * * * *

Bobby used several Creepers as beacons,
as warning posts. Men whose throats he slit less than an hour ago. He used
their fresh ears and eyes to protect his flanks and rear. He used them now to
bolt from the scene around the tent. Shouts drifted from behind him, but they
had no chance of seeing him. However, if they were savvy, they’d surely pick up
the haphazard tracks he was leaving behind. That’s just what he hoped would
happen.

He darted over a shallow rise, past a
now vacant wagon. The former owner stood in its shadow, hungry and waiting. He
became the perfect guard dog, tongue wagging through the nasty red slash across
his throat. Bobby ran through the wet grass along his preplanned route. He set
traps at several intervals and made sure to avoid them. Whoever followed
wouldn’t be so lucky. They wanted to instill fear then it was fear he would
bring to their camp.

The ghosts of the turned pressured his
mind, but all he could do for them now was honor their deaths. They’d died to
save him and his family and he would do the same. He dropped low and slid
beneath a water-logged branch, and with a careful twist, he missed the crude
spike trap he’d left behind. His path circled him back towards the train. He
sent a few of the Creepers farther out to preserve them for when the hunters
came for him.

He was the prey once more, but not for
long. He could hear them giving pursuit now. The zigzagging pattern he was in
the process of creating would have them stumbling over one another and right
into his traps. As he cleared the last hill before the train, he watched the
first of them die through the eyes of one of their own.

The man had a torch in one hand and a
gun in the other. He flinched at the Creeper’s moan, changed direction, and hit
the wire. A hundred pounds of rotten pine tore the legs from his body. Ragged
shreds of flesh and decimated bone glistened for a second, then all was dark as
the torch hissed out. The man screamed.

Bobby ordered the Creeper to moan. The
man fired blindly. He screamed again. The hammer of his empty gun made dry clicking
sounds. The Creeper fell upon him to feast, sending his screams higher, drawing
the rest of the hunters in that direction.

Bobby leaned against the cold steel of
the beast. He watched the light of many torches moving across the dark hills.
Two monitors flicked off, so he moved into the eyes of the next in line. He lay
the Creeper down in the tall wet grass between two jutting rocks, the perfect
funnel. Two soldiers hit it at a dead run.

Bobby bade the Creeper to rise.

Blood soaked hands groped for them,
caught their legs, sent them falling down the hill where soft flesh found
finely sharpened stakes. The soldiers screamed as Bobby let their fallen
brother feast on them. Gunfire from their comrades silenced them before they
could turn. Another monitor blinked out of existence. Bobby banged his fist
against the steel in triumph. But there was still so much work to do and dawn
was fast approaching.

He donned the hood as he restocked his
supplies from Baylor’s coffers. His undead guards were ever watchful of the
area around the train while he worked.

Pockets full, he began to fan them out,
moving them away from the train and the camp. With the hood pulled low, it was
easy to assimilate himself amid the chaos he’d wrought.

* * * * *

Baylor hid his amusement at their
distress. All through the wee hours they searched, and only wound up losing
more men. Moya returned sometime later with blood soaked hands. She held Baylor
with suspicious eyes, but said nothing. Part of him was certain the powerful woman
knew he was somehow responsible but welcomed the challenge anyway.

“Have you slept,” she asked, crouching
in the torn opening of the tent. She kept her gaze eastward where the rising
fog had yet to roll away. A wall of golden haze met the waking army.

“Not a wink,” Baylor said. “Your man
left in a fit.”

“He doesn’t like when the wolves slip
through.”

“It’s happened before?” Baylor hoped
Bobby was far from the train. They’d be combing through it piece by piece now.

“Of course,” Moya said with an air of
annoyance. “You don’t run things the way we do and think you won’t have
challengers. It’s taxing at times, but keeps me from growing—”

“Complacent. The bane of survivors.”

“Precisely.”

“I thought a lot about what you said
last night.”

Moya rose, stretching her back. She
walked to Baylor, cracked her knuckles, flipped her flowing red mane over one
shoulder. “And what was the outcome?”

“I’m in.” Baylor ran a hand over his
damp scalp. “There’s just one clause.”

“I wasn’t aware I offered a contract.”

“Wish, point, footnote, the fine fucking
print—whatever you want to call it. You want my girl, you stay clear of the
people at the last outpost. You let me do my thing and let them leave. They
don’t have any part in what’s to come. Those people keep to themselves.”

Moya burst into a fit of laughter. Her
narrow lips curled, sending up decade’s worth of fine wrinkles at the corner of
her mouth. “Have you not been paying attention, Baylor? Did you think all of
this was for a few hill stragglers?”

Baylor felt the Mad Conductor ripping at
the walls of his mind. He thought for sure she was headed towards the outpost.
It was the only thing left on this side of the country worth anything.

“Secrets, Baylor. This is about secrets.
Secrets from long ago. It’s time.” Moya turned and walked out of the tent.

Baylor followed.

Much of the camp was lined up along the
muddy path from the tent. Men bearing all manner of arms: handguns, rifles,
swords, clubs, bows, and even rocks clutched in their dirty fingers. Children
hugged their mother’s legs for comfort. Gray smoke twisted from the dead
campfires behind them. Off in the distance, the scent of Moya’s dead army
carried on the wind.

The path took them to a pile of dirt and
the long narrow pit. The newly risen savages moaned from below. Keaton stood
akimbo before it.

“Morning, Mr. Conductor. Fine day for a
challenge, seeing as how you worked us over good last night.”

“Not our first rodeo, Baylor, not by a
long shot.”

Baylor stood before Keaton, before the
pit, the silent crowd at his back. He’d let them guide him this far, but he
wasn’t going into the pit alive. He remembered the soldiers of Wyoming Blue.
The Mad Conductor had the door halfway open, his rigid fingers raking at the
gray matter. Baylor began to sweat.

“I’m not going in any fucking pit.”

“Everyone goes in the pit.”

The Mad Conductor knocked the door off
the hinge, and Baylor lost control. Before he could stop it from happening, he
reached for Moya’s throat. The woman side stepped the grab and had his arm up
and twisted at a terrible angle.

“That was not wise, Baylor. Now you’re
not going into the pit fresh,” Moya said in his ear as she drew his arm up.

Baylor growled from the pain, but he
spun out of the grab and landed a sharp blow against the woman’s rocklike jaw.
She staggered back in surprise. Blood flowed from her split lip. The blow
should’ve knocked her out cold. The Mad Conductor had been banking on just that
outcome, had even put Baylor in harm’s way to get the chance to strike her.

The Mad Conductor retreated, leaving
Baylor to stare down the barrel of Keaton’s pistol.

* * * * *

Bobby broke from the crowd the second he
saw the pistol flash from the man’s belt. He closed the distance just as quick
as the draw. Before the man could react, Bobby had implanted the Auto Stryker
in his elbow and twisted the blade, scraping bone, separating cartilage. Bobby
spun with his strike, dragging the man with him. He yanked the blade free,
leaving the arm hanging by a few scraps of skin and muscle. The gun was still
clutched in twitching fingers.

But as Bobby turned to face them, he
caught the flash of another pistol in the man’s other hand. The bullet tore
through him. He staggered back, dropped the knife. He grasped at air as gravity
pulled him over the edge of the pit. Somewhere far away, Baylor cried out.

The monitors wavered in his mind for a
second, then went out completely as he smashed into the ground. Then he heard
their voices anew. He heard their hungry moans, their clacking teeth, and the
slate gray sky swirled with black. Bobby slipped into a dark and terrible
place.

He could no longer see them, but he
could feel them, feel their teeth, their cold rotten teeth on his flesh. He
tried to scream but nothing came out. The buried nightmare of the old woman
torn in half rattled his mind. Her cold teeth nicking pale belly could not
compare to the many mouths of the dead savages.

He never thought it would end like this.

What does she really want me for?
the smeared
charcoal letters read. Pathos Two held the brittle paper in his plump fingers
and wondered just how he’d answer that question.

He knew of course. The act of kindness
was all part of a façade on their part, but would telling the severely defeated
soldier matter now? Once he caught wind of his friend’s arrival, would this
small indiscretion really matter? It might, and it might keep the man from
giving up the details of the site.

“I don’t know,” Pathos Two lied. “She
doesn’t confide in me that way. I advise, I count, I inform of changes, and
that is the nature of our relationship.”

Post paced about the small wagon,
tapping bottles and flexing fingers.

“You’re going to wear a hole in my
floor. Took me a long time to get this baby up to snuff. Don’t go ruining my
home.”

Pathos Two mixed another nutrient rich
cocktail. He’d been working on the man for some time. Moya’s guidance helped
move things along, but he was quickly growing tired of the man’s company in the
tight quarters. He kept reminding himself that it was necessary to their
future, to their survival, really, and that eased the strain a bit, but not
much.

“Just think.” Pathos Two handed his
guest the cocktail. “One day we won’t live on the move. One day we’ll have
stable, stationary homes, and we won’t be bullied from them, or threatened from
them, or killed over them. It will be grand, and you’ll have been a part in
making that happen. Isn’t that something?” He waited for a reply he knew
wouldn’t come.

* * * * *

Post drank the cocktail as he thought
about the fat man’s words. There they were again, images of grand hope, of
great fantastic promises, but he knew the man was trying to work him over. It
was tactics, positioning. They were trying to get something from him. He’d run
the gauntlet of emotions just as they’d wanted him to. Great defeat, challenge,
defeat again, and then slowly building him up, reinforcement, and now they were
getting ready to play their aces.

He stood in the doorway watching the
gray day roll by, sipping the sweet cocktail. The buzz he got from it made the
pain in his jaw bearable. Somewhere behind him, Pathos Two made disgusting
slurping sounds as he ate some bastardized concoction of apocalyptic junk food.
Post didn’t care to understand.

The camp had been subdued in the days
since the attack by the savages. Subdued, but not idle. Post could already see
signs of them getting ready to march. There was some commotion two days ago,
and he had not seen Moya since. Pathos Two had been mum about the whole thing.
He didn’t like it, but choice was something of a ruse lately.

Post finished the cocktail and returned
to the cramped wagon. He eyed the gun on the fat man’s table, as he had done
every day since arriving. Between Pathos Two’s absences, Post removed the live
clip and replaced it with another empty one he’d found. He had no intention of
conforming, and he wasn’t about to waste his life unless he’d get a crack at
Moya and her little lap dog. They’d pay, come hell or high water. They’d all
pay.

He unfolded a clean piece of paper and
took the thin piece of charcoal from behind his ear and wrote:

You want the weapons at Umatilla.

The fat man’s face drained of color as
he read the words.

A few days prior, Post had begun to
notice things on his daily walks with Pathos Two. Crates with familiar marks
and symbols, areas of the camp he was deliberately kept out of, the quality of
the older soldiers weaponry, as well as their makes and models. Some of the
ordnance had been recovered from the battle in Utah, but not all of it. He
began to ask the fat man about the movements of the army prior to clashing in
the desert with Post and his men. Pathos Two was pleased to dispense his vast
knowledge freely.

It didn’t take Post long to realize
their march from the border had taken them into familiar territory, in New
Mexico and Texas and Colorado, and now they were headed to Oregon. This had
nothing to do with the last outpost and everything to do with Umatilla. Moya
was collecting every last bit of weaponry left on this side of the country.

“It is the only way, Sgt. Post. The only
way to make this new world a reality. We cannot leave things like that behind.”

They had no place in the old world and
they have no place in this one,
Post wrote.

He’d had his unit wall off the chemical
weapons long ago. It wasn’t an end all solution, but it would keep prying eyes
away if the base had been compromised. Nature had half done the job already,
between floods and landslides. The base itself was gone. The tunnels beneath it
were not, but after years of disaster, the entrance was not easy to find.
That’s why they needed him. They couldn’t just start digging randomly in the
area because they knew what might be lurking beneath them. One wrong move and
Moya’s little Alexander game would meet a horrible end.

“Deterrents always have their place.
They were necessary in the old world, just as they will be in this one.”

They’re not stable,
Post scrawled.

“Neither are we, Sgt. Post.” Pathos Two
smirked. Beads of sweat rolled down his ruddy cheeks. “Humanity has been
unstable since we crawled out of the slop. I’m amazed we didn’t eat each other
alive along the way.”

We waited until after,
wrote Post.

“I guess we did,” Pathos Two laughed.
“With those weapons, she can ensure tomorrow’s success.”

Post eyed the man. They were all so sure
this was the only way to live after the Creepers were gone. End one threat to
create another. It was old world thinking at its finest and had nothing to do
with progress. The Creepers were not done yet, regardless of what Moya and her
ilk thought. Post had seen too much in two decades at war with them. He’d seen
towns cleared, only to be overrun by tens of thousands a week later. No one
really knew how many hordes roamed the country, how many biting mouths were
trapped within their homes, and the countless Creepers lurking in every dark
corner. Unchecked, unseen, but waiting. Just waiting for a chance to bite, and
all it would take was one to start the cycle anew.

The war was far from over.

“About a year after it all went down, I
came across a man. His wife had been raped and beaten to death while he was
forced to watch. When the human refuse was done, they put the man to the torch.
My small group stumbled upon them, and that night I killed a living thing for
the first time. You have to understand that in all my years of life leading up
until that moment, I’d not killed even an ant.”

Post sat on a box of moldy books. Images
of a man through the scope of his rifle played out again and again as he
listened. The first had been easy, so easy. It was the waiting and watching
that took the most out of him. When it was done, when that man lay dead in the
streets of Fallujah, Post had become a killer. He didn’t feel any different,
which made the next even easier. It wasn’t until after he came home that they started
to visit him during the night. Unsuspecting eyes, someone smoking a cigarette,
talking to a man next to him, then oblivion courtesy of Uncle Sam’s finest.
They kept him awake most nights, crying about the injustice of war in a
language he didn’t understand.

“But that day, hearing that man scream,
Sgt. Post. The sounds of a broken human being are…” Pathos Two wiped away tears
as spoke. “Those are sounds no one should ever have to hear. Those sounds made
what I did next easy, so very easy, but I knew there would be others like them,
already were others like them, perpetrating atrocities. We could not stop them
all. I thought that there was no way. They would endure as men, like they
always find a way of enduring. But now we have a chance to end them and ensure
that evil is unable to rear its head.”

Post shook his head. He’d been a part of
the cycle of violence all his life, and it wasn’t until after everything fell
apart that he could truly see it for what it was. Never ending. He’d heard it
spoken about often, sung about even more, printed in every language. It was one
of the greatest truths of the world, but no one ever listened to the words.
Everyone always had some brilliant vision of the future, but in order to get
there they had to tap into that dark part of the human brain. They had to clear
a few people out of the way. Even the totally sanitized versions of humanity’s
future, the peaceful utopias free of physical violence, would eventually
succumb to the call of the cycle, and once those peaceful minds were left to
thought, the violence would creep back in again.

It won’t work. And I will take no part
in what’s to come,
Post wrote.

“You must, Sgt. Post. If you value your
life, you will.”

Post grabbed the fat man by his collar.
He opened his mouth to address the open threat. The pain was so intense he
thought he was about to collapse. “I . . . have . . . one response to . . .
threats,” Post croaked. He drew his fist back.

“Help me, you fat fuck!” someone shouted
from outside.

Post dropped Pathos Two on the floor and
moved to the back of the wagon. He kept his eyes on the gun and his hand on the
full magazine sitting in his pocket.

“Get out here, or I’m fixing to put a
hole in your fucking belly and let the hunger take you!”

Post could hear Keaton but he couldn’t
see the man. Something in that voice was off. The fat man angled himself to
navigate the narrow door of the wagon.

Post snatched the gun from the table,
dropped the empty clip, and slapped in the loaded one. He chambered a round and
slipped the gun behind his back, tucking it into his belt. He pulled his shirt
low and went to the doorway. The threat enraged him. His heart pounded. His
mind raced. He began to plan many scenarios of what he was about to do. This
was it. Weeks of waiting to do something were over.

Keaton was in the process of holstering
his revolver, standing there as if it were any other day, a routine thing, and
it didn’t seem to bother him in the least that his other arm hung on by nothing
more than scraps of skin and tissue.

“Sgt. Post, clear the table!” Pathos Two
cried.

Post smiled as he swept the remnants of
the fat man’s meal onto the floor.

Keaton walked into the wagon and
wrinkled his nose at the floral smells of Pathos Two’s many botanical
creations. He picked up the fallen chair and sat in it, calm as could be. He
scratched his beard. His ruined arm flopped at his side. The barrel of the gun
tapped on the rough wood of the chair leg.

“Smells like old lady farts in here,
fatty,” Keaton said. “See what we can do about this here wound and make it
snappy.”

Pathos Two’s lips trembled. “There is
nothing to do about it.”

“Sure as shit there is,” Keaton spat.
The shock was evident on his face. “Cut it the fuck off!”

“Sgt. Post, I need you to get the green
box from under the shelving behind you. And then I need you to hold Mr. Keaton
down. He’s in shock right now, but that won’t last once I start cutting.”

Keaton laughed. His sour breath hung in
the air like the fog of morning. “Soldier boy’s friends already did the work
for you,” he said with nod at Post. “Told her she couldn’t work the train man
over. I fucking told her tigers like that don’t ever change they stripes.
Never.”

Post dropped the box at his words. He
regained his composure and put the box on the table. He’d fired the relays. He
put the warning out there. Baylor probably thought he was on a rescue mission.
Post cursed his longtime friend silently.

“We was about to test him and he goes
all swinging on Moya. Caught her too, but as I’m holding a gun on him, a
fucking little dirty urchin from the camp decides to have a swing at me. Little
fuck caught me in the elbow with a knife. I put that bitch into the pit with a
care package in his body. He better hope it turns him before the Creepers eat
him up.” Keaton looked around. “You got something to drink? A bit parched, you
husky fuck.” He laughed again. “Fucking kid took my arm.”