Jiri slowed and then stopped, motioning Andro to do the same. He pointed at the corpses and held his index finger to his lips, the universal signal to be quiet. They approached slowly and as quietly as possible, though they couldn’t do anything to silence the echo their boots made clopping on the concrete floor.
On the far side of the pillar, a form leaned against the stone, arm extended, pointing a gun at them. “Danny?” Jiri said in a quiet but firm voice. “It’s Jiri and Casandro. Put the gun down. Are you hurt?”
No reply came. The pistol trembled but remained pointed in their direction. Jiri approached him and spoke in a soft, soothing tone of voice. He kept his hands up and in front of him. “You’re all right, buddy. Will’s coming and we’ll head back to meet him.”
At the sound of Will’s name, Danny lowered the gun and tucked it his holster. He walked over and met them at the edge of the pillar. He and the professor embraced, and he shook hands with Andro. Jiri looked him up and down, examining him for bites under the blood and gore. “Are you okay? Are you bit?”
Danny wiped a hand across his red-stained shirt and shook his head. “I’m okay.” He gestured absently at his blood-soaked shirt. “This is all theirs. Where’s Will? Is he hurt?”
“He’s hurt but he ain’t injured. He barked his knee pretty good running down here. Let’s go meet him- he’s down the tunnel somewhere.”
“Okay. You guys have point if we run into any creepers. I’m kind of worn.”
“You bet, my friend.” Jiri clapped him on the back as the trio headed for the tunnel’s entrance.
Bad News for The Judge
* * *
They ran into Will 100 yards away from the cubicle apartments. He was listing badly and headed deeper into the tunnel, searching for Danny. He walked in a halting manner, wincing and cursing whenever he put weight on his injured leg. They hurried to his side. Jiri stood on his left and Andro his right; he and Danny faced each other. They exchanged a quick hug; Will slapped him on the back and left a hand resting on his shoulder. He looked down at the concrete for a long moment, swallowed hard, and looked back up. Danny gave him a warm smile.
“You look a mess,” Will finally said.
“You should see the other guys. How’s your knee?”
“I think I just barked it good. Doesn’t feel like I hurt any tendons or ligaments. It’s swelling like a mother, though.” He tapped the pommel to Danny’s machete; the blade was still covered with blood and brains. “How many did you put down?”
Danny shrugged his shoulders. “Thirty-five, forty. I lost count after a while. I’ve never fought more than a handful by myself. It’ll wear you out quick.”
“I’d imagine. Could you tell how they got in there?”
He hooked a thumb toward where he had been and shook his head. “No, the lights quit not far past where I made my stand. They just stumbled out of the dark in ones and twos.” He pointed at Will’s leg. “They walked like you are. It’s a good thing you didn’t come back there- I’d have knifed you.”
“You’d have tried.”
“Let’s get you back home.” Danny looked at Casandro. “Andro, you mind if I get that side and you walk point? I’m not sure I’ve got any good knife strikes left in me tonight.”
Casandro flashed a smile that was blinding white even in the gloom. “No hay problemo, mi amigo, no problem.”
Danny stepped beside Will and nodded to Andro. The Mexican unsheathed a big machete and stepped a few paces in front. They proceeded in that fashion until they reached the cube apartments. They stopped there and left Will leaning against the far wall while they painstakingly cleared each room. Jiri started when a door opened and the wood frame scraped against the cement floor, but relaxed when he saw it was Danny’s little blond. They engaged in a short conversation, then Danny gave her a peck on the cheek and went back to clearing rooms. Satisfied that the housing didn’t hide any creepers or bite victims that had yet to turn, they returned to Will’s side.
They were almost at the exit when they heard the familiar sound of feet shuffling against the ground. The hairs on the back of Jiri’s neck bristled at the telltale noise. They turned toward the sound and Jiri and Andro searched the gloom with their Maglites. The creeper was sidling along the far wall when it saw the light beams and shuffled towards them, growling and snapping its jaws.
Danny noticed first. He squinting at the ghoul. ”Is that… ?”
Jiri shook his head and looked down. “This won’t go over well.” He looked back up as the snarling grew louder.
Its eyes were bloodshot circles around opaque pits, its teeth were already blackening, and its skin was a mottled gray. A mixture of blood and black goo dripped downs its arm, dross from a bite wound on its bicep. Its chest was ripped open and flaps of skin hung down by its stomach, revealing an empty void where its heart and lungs should be. Yet there was no doubting its identity.
“Put him down,” Will said in a quiet voice.
Andro stepped forward and removed the cloth and rubber guard from his homemade weapon. He approached the being that used to be David Wright, The Original’s number three man. When he got close enough, the creeper reached for him with a savage and greedy growl. He skipped to the left. The ghoul lunged for him but he was no longer there and it stumbled, then fell to its knees. Andro stepped up and swung at its ear. There was a wet slap, and it stiffened, then fell. Andro wiped the long spike clean on its shirt.
Will issued directions. “Get a blanket from that pile and cover him. Andro, help me back home. You two,” he nodded at Danny and Jiri, “find The Judge and let him know he needs a new assistant lackey.” He started to limp off, but stopped. “Don’t say it like that, fellas. Put it to him easy. Jody’s gonna take this one hard.”
Outside Threats
* * *
Becky walked toward the tunnel entrance, her eyes beaming. She lugged a large stockpot outside and added it to a growing pile of dishes and cookware. Jiri and his team — one of his teams, she thought — had almost finished equipping and setting up the communal kitchen and dining area in tunnel seven. The goal was to have all 152 people in the quarry eating together once a day, starting three days from now. Helping out with the preparation, Will’s group gathered the dishes and kitchenware they didn’t use every day. They placed items in a neat pile they would to the new kitchen later.
People bustled back and forth around her as she walked. Some in their group were finishing breakfast or cleaning up after the morning meal, others filled packs with items they would need that day, and some readied their weapons- all around the living area, people readied for the day ahead.
The creeper’s incursion into the tunnels galvanized the group. If you asked most of them, and they answered honestly, they’d say they’d been taking it easy since making it to the quarry. Sure, they’d built the towers, stood watch, and made scavenge runs. But a walk into the tunnel at just about any time of the day would find up to half the team sitting around talking, napping, or just relaxing. And who would blame them? For seven months they walked and fought, putting down creepers in woods, in houses, and in the street. They slept in the rain and endured the heat of summer. They’d been hungry and thirsty, suffered injuries and seen friends die. Night after night, they slept the restless sleep of a person who knows they might have to wake up and fight for their lives at a moment’s notice.
So they’d earned some downtime. Nights to relax, sleep well, rest their bodies and minds. Days to let sore and injured tissue mend, to build back depleted muscles, and to let painful memories fade.
But the incursion had also marked the last day of their third full week at the quarry. Becky (who had resumed her daily routine of cooking, cleaning, laundry and sundry other tasks for three grown men two days after their arrival) felt it was time the group got off its collective ass and went to work. She wasn’t alone, either; a day before the dead poured into the quarry, she almost collided with Tara when the Californian stormed out of their tunnel, r
ed-faced and muttering about ‘lazy assholes’.
The Originals lost six people to creepers that night. The next day saw a 180-degree shift in her group’s productivity. It hadn’t required a pep talk from Will or one of Danny’s tantrums, either. It was as if each person woke up that morning and said, “Nice rest. Time to get back to work.”
After they buried their dead, they focused on cleanup. Cyrus was a disgusting little pig, and she hated the way his eyes focused on her boobs whenever they were in the same room. But she had to admit he was a genius. He modified a mining cart so that it ran off a car battery and installed a rudimentary drivetrain. He attached a row of five carts to the motorized one and viola- what would have taken six men most of the day, dragging the creepers through the shaft and out into the burn pile, took a couple of hours and three trips with the mine carts instead.
The next issue at hand regarded THE question on everyone’s mind- how had the creepers accessed the tunnel? Will sent Coy and his dog, Sally, into the shaft to look for answers. Later that night, the teen told Becky about the expedition.
For a half-mile beyond its opening, tunnel eight’s width was enormous. It was one of three in the quarry that measured seventy-five feet at the entrance, then flared to 125 feet once inside- almost as wide as a football field. That was the primary reason The Judge had selected it for living quarters. Once you got half a mile in, though, it narrowed to less than half its earlier width.
Even at half the size of the shaft that proceeded it, the tunnel’s size boggled the mind. Sixty feet across, twenty feet high, with those enormous pillars every fifty feet. They traveled northwest for about a mile when another tunnel bisected theirs, creating a crossroad. It was the first time he’d seen shafts cross in that manner and he had no idea which path he should pursue. He cast his light around, peering at the tunnel walls and trying to decide which way to go. With a bark, Sally turned right and he followed, the pair now traveling east.
They had walked a little more than a mile of the shaft that cut through tunnel eight when he realized he could see natural light ahead. As he jogged closer, it became clear the light source was too small to be one of the big entrances. Sunlight, pale and weak, illuminated a rectangle with rough, uneven sides on the tunnel floor. As he peered through the opening the light flowed through, he realized he was looking through a cutaway to the rear of a natural cave. It was long and skinny, about six feet wide with an eight-foot-high ceiling.
He stepped through the access way and coaxed Sally in after him. He walked the length of two football fields before stepping onto solid ground at the mouth of the cave. Its pitch was steep- Sally’s nails had a hard time finding traction on the stone floor and she slipped several times before they made it to the top.
All Coy could figure was the men who dug the shaft knew of the cave’s existence and had dug through the rock separating the two- maybe to sneak a break in the fresh air, maybe to access their work without starting in the pit, or maybe due to some other reason. There was no way to know.
The cave’s entrance was located on the grounds of a restored Civil War-era mansion, well back from the house near a tree line. Her hackles up, Sally inspected the area around the entrance. Nose to the ground, she growled and pawed at the dirt, stopping often to look around. She followed the scent a short distance away, then lost it. She tried to pick it back up, loping in ever-widening circles before pacing back. She sat down and looked at Coy, panting in defeat. Marks in the yard between the road in front of the mansion and the cave caught his eye, sending a chill ran down his spine. Twin sets of tire tracks ran from her location to the road in front of the mansion. Whatever made them had been weighty enough to tear up the grass in a handful of spots; Coy had borne witness plenty of times to the way a livestock trailer could mangle turf, and these chunks of torn-out grass were exactly what it looked like.
“Do you know what that means, Mom?” Coy asked later. He marched back and forth, his face flushed. He continued without waiting for an answer. “Someone sabotaged us, that’s what. Somebody lead those creepers around, or enticed them, hoping they’d take out The Originals.
“Coy honey, you can’t know that for sure. And quit pacing- you’re making me dizzy.”
“There’s nothing else it could be. Unless a herd of fifty creepers found and entered the cave entrance, walked through the tunnels, and made the right turns until they found The Judge’s group by chance. The odds against that are astronomical.”
“Maybe a few of them heard the sound of people, or smelled them, or picked up on a vibration or something. And the rest followed.”
“It’s a couple of miles from the cave to The Originals quarters. There’s no way for any of the things you said to happen over such a distance.”
“That’s easier for me to believe then the idea that somebody weaponized the dead in order to do us harm. Who would do such a thing? Why?”
Coy shook his head. “I don’t think anybody tried to harm us. Whoever did it let them go in Jody’s tunnel, not ours.”
“What does your Dad think?”
“Pretty much the same thing. All the guys do.”
That conversation left a weight in the pit of her stomach. They finally found a place of relative safety from the creepers. Was it possible that they had humans after them?
The Hendrickson Girls
* * *
That someone might have tried to sabotage the quarry had everyone in a tizzy for a week. But with no definitive proof and no further attacks interest waned, and daily life became the little community’s focus. Becky was happy to see the incursion fade into the background and work resume.
Will returned to nearby Mormont Trucking with Clark Tullin in tow. They tinkered with diesel engines and replaced fluids until they had four tractors that ran well enough to pull a trailer a few miles over the country roads. They spent the better part of a day towing empty trailers to the quarry. The bustle and noise brought the dead in droves- the guards in the towers put down fifty-seven creepers that day. Once eighty-two trailers were parked in rows on the bottom they began work on a barrier. Drivers pulled them, one by one, two miles deep into the tunnels. They parked them end-to-end from one side of each tunnel to the other.
On an earlier scavenging run, a team had noticed a small cabinet shop three miles north of the pit. Jiri led a crew there to gather as much plywood and two-by-fours as they could fit in a truck bed in one trip. To ensure that the creepers couldn’t scuttle through the gap between the bottom of the trailer and the tunnel floor, they nailed the plywood to the trailers and braced at the bottom with the two-by-fours. The finished barriers were perfect. By blocking access to the front of the shafts, they protected the tunnel-dwellers from any more attacks from the rear. Yet it was simple to remove the wood braces and scamper under the trailers in they ever needed to flee or hide deep in the shafts.
Danny led alternating teams on daily scavenging runs and the plunder from those trips piled up. Food, clothing, tools, weapons, and countless other items were distributed as needed or stored in their respective tunnels. A half-dozen of The Originals participated in the scavenging trips on a regular basis; they were becoming proficient at clearing rooms and putting down the dead.
They continued to restrict the scavenging to homes in the country and within ten miles of the quarry. Will forbid trips into any of the nearby towns. As long as they plundered more than they needed from the rural homes nearby, he wanted to wait until he and a crew had a chance to drive through the closest towns to see the magnitude of the creeper population for himself and assess the level of danger in rethinking his edict. “Besides,” he often said, “there are enough farms within ten miles of here to keep us busy for five lifetimes. And farms are where all the good stuff is.”
Justin rode along on each scavenging trip and mapped out each trip, farm by farm and field by field. He’d developed an extensive and intricate diagram of the land for five miles east, north and west of The Underground. If someone asked, “If yo
u go a mile north, two miles west, and a mile back north again, what color is the third house on the left?” Justin could flip through his maps and answer.
Coy left out on trips of his own twice a day. He and Sally left every day at dawn and returned hours later with all manner of wildlife- deer, wild turkeys, rabbits, ducks and geese, and fish of every type and size. Some days they brought back domesticated animals that had escaped their pens and thrived in the wild. Feral hogs, chickens that found roosting places safe from predators, and on one memorable occasion, a small steer supplemented the wild game. Coy cleaned and processed his kills and stored the meat in a trailer they designated as a locker. It sat outside of the tunnels along the bluff wall, where the winter weather acted as a natural refrigerator and made the cuts last longer. How to protect them in a few months when spring came and the weather warmed was a puzzle that needed solving.
One cold and dreary morning, Coy came back from a hunting trip leading a string of horses. When the Hendrickson girls saw the dirty and skinny nags they squealed and ran to them, taking them from Coy and co-opting them as their own in no time at all. The little herd consisted of three mares, a gelding, and a clumsy little bay yearling that must have been born just before the outbreak occurred.
Fifteen-year-old Ashley dutifully did whatever job anyone asked of her. Meghan, two years her junior, spent every waking minute with her dog Stebbin and avoiding everyone except her sister. The horses changed that. For the first time since Will’s group rescued them, the sisters found something that gave them joy. The minute the girls finished their chores, they rushed to the makeshift horse pen Danny and Will built. The pair kept them fed and clean, brushed them and shoveled their messes. Will directed scavengers to keep an eye out for feed stores during their runs. Danny strung a tarp between two trailers to give the small herd a place out of the elements. In response, the sisters yammered at him day and night to build them a corral; not just any corral, but one that was partly in and partly out of a tunnel.
The Haven Series (Book 2): Haven Page 12