The Reaper

by S E Lunsford

  “I don’t know,” she shrugged. “A lot.”

  On our trek to the coast, Cassie and I had been warned away from certain areas because people were not only unfriendly, but were seemingly able to tame the creepers enough to use them as protection. I’d thought that the tales were a little farfetched because I couldn’t quite figure out how you’d take a creeper alive unless you had a lot of people working together to do it, and we never saw that large of a group of people. But, if there were cages full of creepers here, as well as that other thing that came into the forest that scattered us, now it seemed as though the stories weren’t that farfetched.

  “Did it look like they had anywhere they were keeping people?” Rosalie asked.

  “I didn’t see anywhere, but that doesn’t mean that they weren’t,” Cassie replied. “Did either of you pay attention when Robert was talking about this safe place?”

  I shook my head. Most of the time Robert was taking point with Chris as we walked through the forest and whatever fragments of conversation that drifted back to me, I didn’t really bother catching. Warmth heated my cheeks as I realized that when I was looking at Chris from behind I wasn’t really focused on what he and Robert were talking about.

  Rosalie looked up at me and smiled as she saw the pink in my cheeks, as Cassie began to chuckle.

  “You’re a heck of a lot of good,” she said.

  “What’s your excuse?” I shot back watching color rise in her cheeks too.

  Rosalie giggled at the both of us.

  “Okay,” I said. “So, because the camp is so big, I think it’s fair to assume they probably have two of our own, my guess would be Robert and Chris because for whatever reason that thing seemed to bypass them and come around the tree after the rest of us. We don’t know why. But, putting the reason aside, we need to figure out where they are and get them out, then figure out where the rest of the guys are.”

  “Or figure out where the rest of the guys are, and work with them to get Chris and Robert out,” Cassie said.

  “That’s the best plan,” I replied, “But, where do you think they’ll be?”

  “I think I know,” Rosalie spoke up.

  An hour later, we were trekking through the forest to the west as the sun creeped overhead. Chilly shadows draped the ground as we made our way through the underbrush as quietly as we could. I constantly scanned the area for climbable trees just in case. But so far, so good. There was no telltale scent of creepers in the air, nor was there the scent of the unfamiliar men who stood below us in the night. Birds were just beginning to sing and small animals began to scamper through the branches above us. All very good signs that there was nothing too dangerous around.

  Cassie and I had learned the hard way that when the animals go quiet there’s a reason for it. If creepers didn’t have their food of choice available, they’d dive into the bodies of unsuspecting animals instead. The animals were pretty smart though, they figured out pretty quickly that the creepers were predators, so they kept quiet whenever creepers were around.

  The trees began to thin out a little, making it more difficult to remain in their shadows. Pulling out my knife, I held it loosely just in case. Glancing over, I saw Cassie do the same. Our bodies were strung with tension by the time Rosalie came to a stop. She waved us forward until we stood one on each side just a step in front of her.

  “There,” she whispered pointing to a grouping of trees.

  Cassie and I glanced at each other. There was nothing remarkable about these trees compared to many groupings we’d come through already. I looked down at Rosalie questioningly. She nodded back up at me.

  “Where?” whispered Cassie.

  “There,” Rosalie said again pointing to the middle of the trees.

  A pit began to form in my stomach, and I began to wonder just what Rosalie was doing. There was no movement of wildlife behind the trees she pointed at, but there was no telltale scent other than the pungent scent of the trees along with the occasional sharp scent of squirrel either.

  I crouched down, so my face was right next to hers.

  “Rosalie,” I said, the pit in my stomach expanding as I realized that we may have just been following the fantasies of a little girl trying to find her brothers. “Rosalie, Cassie and I don’t see what you’re seeing, where are they?”

  “They’re not there,” Rosalie replied her face serious. “But, they will be.”

  “How do you know?” Cassie asked.

  “I just do,” Rosalie said squirming a little where she stood.

  “Rosalie, we trusted you enough to follow you here,” I said. “You need to trust us to tell us how you know.”

  “That’s how the trust thing works,” Cassie said.

  Looking at the trees in front of us, Rosalie sighed.

  “Jasper saw it,” she said.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, standing up as I kept my eyes trained on her. She glanced back and forth between Cassie and I, gauging our reaction to what she had said.

  “Jasper saw it, he said that if we got separated, to look for the tree that looked like Poseidon’s trident from the Little Mermaid, and Carlisle and Edward would meet us there. And that’s the tree that looks like a trident.”

  I raised my eyebrows at Cassie who shook her head. “The Little Mermaid,” she mouthed.

  My stomach had somehow dropped out completely, and was probably in China by the time we both turned carefully looking at the grouping of trees that Rosalie had somehow led us to. There in the middle of the grouping was a tree that did indeed look like a trident. Its trunk and two curving branches making it look like it should be under the sea. Funny thing was, those were the only branches on it, almost as if it had formed to look just like that.

  “We need to wait,” Rosalie announced.

  “For how long?” I sighed in resignation.

  “Just a little bit,” she responded. “They’ll be here soon.”

  Looking over at Cassie, I saw she was every bit as resigned to the situation as I was, but a whole lot more irritated.

  “Might as well,” she said.

  Making our way over to the trident tree we settled in underneath it as the sun continued its slow march through the sky. Although the forest became lighter, it didn’t become any warmer as the damp air clung to everything and fought hard to slide into our clothing making us as miserable as possible.

  As I wrapped myself in my hoodie for what felt like the hundredth time, I realized that complete silence had descended on the forest. Tilting my head I tried to hear beyond where we sat, only hearing even more silence. My muscles instinctively tightened even as I saw Cassie’s eyes widen as the first groans reached our ears. The smell ran into us like wall as my mouth flooded with saliva, and my stomach threatened to upend everything I had eaten.

  “Crap,” I whispered, standing up and realizing there were no trees we could climb into. Cassie pushed Rosalie behind us so her back was to the tree, and we formed a tight triangle around her.

  The first creeper came at us from Cassie’s side. She went into action, quickly roundhouse kicking it with her right foot. It landed near me, and I jumped forward ramming my knife into its eye getting splattered with foul smelling blackish blood for my trouble.

  Pulling my knife out, I saw Cassie was engaging two more even as more were creeping around the trees to my side trying to angle in at me. One pushed forward at me, and I kicked out, knocking its legs out from underneath it, then quickly darting forward and kicking it in the head that collapsed under the pressure of my foot.

  Another took advantage of what it thought was my preoccupation with its fallen comrade, diving at me and scratching at my hoodie covered arm, making deep tears in the fabric as my arm began to sting underneath it.

  The scent of the blood that welled up from the scratches set them off. They groaned even more as I fought to keep up with the amount of them diving and scrambling at us. Cassie had taken to just kicking their heads off as they came at her, a tactic tha
t I knew would only last for so long. I shoved them down, stomping their skulls as soon as they hit the ground and tackling others as they came in wave after unending wave. Rosalie stood silently behind us, but I could hear her rapid breathing and sense her heart was hammering harder than a hummingbird’s wings.

  Blackish blood covered my clothes, my face and my boots as the first rush of adrenaline began to waver. Vaguely I wondered how we were going to keep up the pace. Some of the creepers were holding back behind the trees, as if they were waiting until we were good and truly exhausted before they made their play for us. A tactic that registered somewhere at the back of my mind as something I had never seen before. Usually they were so driven by hunger and need that they had no self-control at all. This made the actions of these notable even as exhaustion began to cloud the edges of my mind, and, I fought to keep going as the pile of creepers grew around us.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Cassie hit the ground as a mindless creeper rushed into her standing leg when she was kicking another. By some miracle it didn't land on on top of her, but undeterred it clawed towards her as she scrambled with her back dragging on the ground trying to get up. Rosalie dove towards her trying to help by pushing her shoulders up. The creeper suddenly went still as it made contact with Cassie’s body, pushing her further into the carpet of the forest floor as Rosalie scrambled out of the way.

  The creepers who were hanging back turned away from us preoccupied by something behind them, and moving in a group towards whatever it was. Oblivious, the ones in front of me were still trying to get to me as I continued to kick, stomp and slash them. I backed away as I did so, so I could check on Cassie who was lying way too still. Rosalie darted forward again, a stick in her hand as she tried to roll the creeper off of Cassie.

  “They’re here,” a familiar voice called out as I stabbed another creeper in the eye. Relief flooded through me as I realized that that’s where the other creepers were heading.

  “We’ll come in from the side,” another voice called out.

  A few more moments of slashing, stabbing and knocking creepers down, and I stood with an even larger pile of them in front of me and no opponent to fight. Two people emerged slowly from the forest and Rosalie ran to one of them, throwing herself on him before I could stop her.

  Carlisle hugged his little sister to him, pulling her in close then pushing her back so he could take a look at her. She had remnants of the fight all over her.

  “I hate zombie gore,” she said smiling up at him.

  “Hey, can someone please help get the rest of the creeper off of me,” Cassie called out, as she struggled to move what was rest of the fallen creeper off her torso.

  Edward was next to her in a moment, pushing off the body that seemed to crumble into a pile of disassociated goo covered bones. Helping her up, he quickly did a once over of her looking for any telltale signs of a bite.

  “I didn’t get bit,” Cassie snapped at him, as she scraped bits of flesh off her clothes, clearly irritated that she got knocked down.

  “Man, you guys were amazing,” Edward said glancing over at me before venturing his gaze back to Cassie.

  “Yeah,” Carlisle said admiration coloring his voice. “We heard them coming over here in droves, so we figured we’d come help whoever it was, and lo and behold there you guys were. You must have been taking down like ten a second.”

  I smiled, the aftereffects of the fight seeping into my muscles that were beginning to feel weighted down. The fact that they had run towards a fight with the creepers to try and help someone else, an unknown someone else, was pretty impressive.

  “Maybe not that many, probably more like five,” I smirked.

  “Either way, impressive,” Edwards whistled, before pulling Rosalie into a hug.

  “Yeah, but we’d better get out of here,” Carlisle said, his tone growing serious.

  “So where are we going?” Cassie asked as Carlisle and Edward began to move.

  “We found a safe spot of sorts,” Carlisle said. “Right near here, we’d better hurry others will smell these,” he glanced back at the reeking piles.

  I glanced back at them too. If we had time and it looked to be relatively safe, as safe as it could be nowadays, Cassie and I would have burned them to give them some sort of honorable burial. I always thought of the Vikings putting their dead on a ship and setting it on fire every time we did it. I didn’t like to think of them as just horrible creatures. At one point they were human, and maybe on some level they still were. There was also a more practical reason for burning them rather than burying them. It didn’t make much sense to bury them because they smelt so bad that the stench reached up through the ground and others were drawn to it.

  “We’d better start moving fast,” I said. “Those piles are going to bring them in in droves.”

  “Yep,” Edward said. “Just like flies on...”

  “Edward!” Rosalie exclaimed.

  Carlisle chuckled as Edward winked at his sister.

  “Poop,” he said.

  As if on cue, distant moans rose somewhere behind us.

  “Better pick up the pace,” Edward said, grabbing Rosalie as he began to run.

  Following quickly, Cassie and I kept moving too. It wasn’t long before we heard some of the moaners reach the piles we left behind. Scanning the forest as we ran, the trees seemed just as thick as they ever did. I shuddered as my arm that was scratched began to itch, feeling as though bugs were crawling over it as we picked up the pace. Reaching over to scratch it my hand came away with blood on it, meaning they’d broken open again. The creepers sense of smell was acute, they could smell fresh blood from an amazing distance, and I just hoped we were far enough way that they couldn’t smell mine. Cassie gave me a worried glance when she saw the blood. Ripping the bottom of her shirt off, she wound it around my arm as we moved.

  “There, the stink on the shirt should cover op the smell,” she said breathlessly.

  “Almost there,” Carlisle called.

  Cassie and I glanced at one another as we continued to run. Trees rose up all around us, and unless there was some sort of tree house they had discovered, there was no way there was anything remotely safe nearby. As if to prove me wrong, in one step, the forest ended and we went from running on loamy ground to running on the asphalt of a parking lot. The slap of our feet on the hard surface accompanied by our panting was the only sound for a moment. Then the moans behind us told us the creepers were somehow catching up.

  A small group of buildings including a mini-mart, a gas station and a motel sat in what used to be a stopping place for travelers going on vacations in the area. Glass shards crunched under my feet, they littered the area near the market that had gaping holes where the windows used to be. The motel was forlorn, and nearby cars were still in its parking lot waiting for their owners to return. The sight of a stuffed pink elephant caught my eye as we ran past a mini-van whose owners clearly never made it into the motel from the looks of the dark stains on the asphalt near the doors. Looking at the stains caused a pain to rise up in my chest that had nothing to do with running.

  “Here,” Carlisle called out before diving behind the motel into a three-story parking garage.

  Running after him I couldn’t figure out how in the world we could be safe in the structure with its gaping car ramp, until he and Edward began to pull a gate across the way in. They sealed it closed with an old lock just as one of the creepers ran into it on the other side. The two waved us forward as more creepers began to pound on the gate, until we were hidden from view by cement walls.

  Except for the driveway where the gate was, those cement walls sealed off the entire first floor of the structure. As we stood there panting I thought it might be entirely likely that our scent may be cut off from the outside too.

  “We’re safe for now,” Carlisle said. “But, if the guys who are looking for us notice a bunch of creepers outside they’ll know where we are, so we can only stay for a little while.”<
br />
  “What is this place?” Cassie asked, her eyes taking in the immenseness of the parking garage.

  “Uh, a parking garage,” Edward looked at her with barely concealed surprise, as if she’d gone ‘round the bend.

  “I know that,” she snapped. “But, why is there a parking garage here?”

  We all went silent thinking about that.

  “Uh, because people need to park,” Edward ventured.

  Cassie sighed deeply, before shaking her head. “Never mind.”

  “Maybe they got really crowded in the summer,” I hesitated. “Who knows? I’m more concerned with how we’re supposed to get out.”

  “We found another way out, that will take us past those rotting idiots out there,” Edward said.

  “They’re sick,” I said glaring at him.

  “So,” he shot back. “Sick or not they’re still rotting idiots that want to eat us.”

  “Whatever,” Cassie said, clearly pushing aside anymore questions about how odd it was to have a three-story parking garage near an old motel. “Do you know where the others are? We overheard some of the guys who were looking for us, and they said they captured a couple of people.”

  “How’d you do that and not get caught?” Carlisle asked looking back and forth between us.

  “We were up in a tree,” Rosalie said. “You should have seen it, Dani and Cassie were amazing. We went straight up the tree, and then we slept there, and during the night some guys were talking underneath us and they didn’t even know we were there.”

  Carlisle and Edward looked at us a new respect dawning in their eyes.

  “Impressive,” Edward said, his glance lingering on Cassie until it became a full blown look. She tried not to squirm under his gaze until the tension between them stretched out and became too much for her. Her face turned pink.

  “That’s what we do,” she said loudly, walking over to me. “Let me see your arm.”

  “You get bit?” Carlisle asked, wariness creeping into his voice.

  “No, just scratched,” I answered, pulling my arm out of Cassie’s grip. “It’ll be fine. We didn’t see anything except that thing come through and everyone scattered. Do you know where the rest of them are?”