Jagged pieces of badly weathered circuitry ran the length of the Creeper on the left. It was all but scraps of skin and bone, and bits of sun-dried parts held fast within its wired cocoon. The stain of its organic matter dark red beneath it—a death shroud of sorts. The Creeper rattled at Howard's presence, but nothing more.
The other suspended Creeper was in a similar state, but in place of a monitor were two broken cell phones. A snake of jumbled wires ran from its mouth, a bloody red tongue speaking the epitaph of the society that used to be.
Howard felt ill. “What kind of world, Father,” he shouted into the rain.
“I told you I wept for you then and I do so now,” Doc Danielson said from behind him. Howard turned as his father stepped into the light with tears streaming down his face, holding a long metal club out to his side.
Howard jumped up. “You shouldn't be out. You're not well. It's miles from home. This is far even for me.”
“All valid points, son, but it's also good to get out. Besides, I've never really had the chance to truly appreciate what you've done to the city.”
Howard's heart fell as he watched his father cough. The man that gave him life, his rock, his untouchable hero, looked so brittle and frail.
“What we've done, Father. Making the world safe one block at a time, right?” Howard tried to remain optimistic. The emotions swirling like a tempest inside of him were on the very edge. He needed release. His hand tensed on the hammer. The Creepers increased their attempts to reach him. He closed his eyes.
“What do you see, son?”
“Nothing.”
“What do you feel?”
“Their hunger.”
“What do their imprints tell you?”
“Nothing. They are too old.” Howard drifted in that ocean of emptiness he felt whenever a Creeper was within range. He stood on the edge of a great cliff overlooking the black space between galaxies. That unimaginable space—a void waiting to be filled. He could not fill it. He could only hope to ease their suffering by releasing them from the grip of the disease.
“The one in the middle was not one of them,” his father said sadly.
“But I can sense it,” Howard said, his eyes still closed. A cold, imaginary wind nipped at his mind.
“I meant before they nailed him to that thing. What else does your blood tell you?”
“Nothing but emptiness.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. We've been over this already, Father. Many times.”
“Never stop asking questions, son, ever. Never stop learning. If you remember anything I've taught you, remember that. There are still so many unanswered questions about what happened, what is happening within you. I won't be around forever. You must learn.” Doc Danielson coughed again. Bits of thick pinkish mucus flecked his gray beard.
“Don't say that.” Howard squeezed his eyes shut tight. The cough was getting worse. Terror gripped him then. He let go of the void, tensed, and drove his hammer through the brittle skull to his left. Somewhere inside, what was left of the infectious connection broke instantly. The burden lessened.
But the burden of losing the man who gave him life threatened to overtake all. What would he do? Alone, with not even the dead to keep him company? He was terrified.
He stepped around the crucifix and broke another connection. He felt his father’s presence beside him now, ragged breath and all. A death rattle. He'd heard it before, when old Lars took to the gun five years earlier. The old man couldn't bear a slow death and he chose to depart one morning, leaving this life on a clear blue day without a word. The only sound was the single gunshot echoing through an empty Los Angeles.
The man turned Creeper against his will was like the others—skin and bones. He'd been bound with wire and nailed into chunks of concrete that were carefully placed at the feet and hands inside a rusted cage of discarded metal. The implementation was crude, but the message of the shrine was clear: the world had changed.
“Let me, son,” his father said.
He watched as his father drew the club back, muscles straining, bones showing under weathered skin. Not much different from the Creepers. No, not much different at all. What was he going to do? His father brought the club down, smashing through the monitor, finding brain, closing the connection. Howard felt it break, almost like a yawn within him.
He watched his father remove a pair of bolt cutters from his pack.
“What are you doing, Father?”
“We can't leave them like this.” Doc Danielson began cutting through the wires, grunting and coughing from the effort.
“We can come back tomorrow and finish the work. They won't mind. I'd like to think they'd understand.”
“There is still plenty of light left in the day. They deserve better. Remember that. You all deserve better. Don't forget each other. It's one of the reasons we've come to this place in our violent history. Don't forget, son. The world is bigger than you.”
He watched his father fight through a fit of coughs while gently removing the crucified body. He didn't know what to say, but inside he was beyond distraught.
Howard and his father worked through the remainder of the day, sweating and aching from the strenuous task. They were ever respectful of the dead. They spoke not a word to each other while they worked. They were too busy dwelling within the prisons of their own minds.
Howard kept looking, kept checking his father, watching for signs of the end. What would he do? He couldn't help but be paranoid. He had a terrible feeling this would be the last day of his father's life.
CHAPTER 2
Bobby’s hair whipped in the wind as he stared at the mouth of the beast. He remembered vividly the Creeper that found its end there. Bobby had heard it talk directly to him, but in the many encounters since then he’d never come close to achieving such clarity. There were images of things but nothing like the language before the crack of his rifle. Steam drifted past his face, warm then cool, as the machinery cracked and clattered along the tracks.
Somewhere behind, Dotsero faded into the darkness. He hadn’t been able to sleep. Not anything more than a few hours a night if he were lucky. He spent most of those nights atop the train, watching the stars go about the universe’s business. Worlds away. With the power of his mind, he could imagine them far removed from the horrors he’d seen, the horrors he’d committed, but he could not change his part in things. This was his life. And what a life it turned out to be.
Images from the dead flickered along with his grand thoughts. They held for mere moments then drifted away, like sand scattered by the wind, as the train moved him out of effective range. There were always more though, always more. The closer they came to the cities the heavier the influx of monitors in his mind. Bobby did not try to gather them. He let them spark and fade. The sheer enormity of the numbers overwhelmed him. How long would it take to remove them all? He couldn’t do it alone. He didn’t even know if he could do it at all. He’d mastered a few thousand, but tens of thousands, millions? He couldn’t comprehend how such numbers would burden his mind. The presence of so many could kill him.
“Knew I’d find you up here, kid,” Baylor said.
“Mr. Baylor,” Bobby said through a yawn as he made room for Baylor beside him. His legs were nowhere near as long, nor were his dirty blue jeans as flashy as Baylor’s black and white checkered pants.
“I thought we talked about that Mr. Baylor shit?”
“I thought we talked about kid?”
Baylor laughed. “Fair enough. About a mile back, we crossed into Utah. Going to be a lot less green around for awhile. A lot less Creepers too. Not too many out this way, but once we get near Salt Lake they’ll be heavy. Last time out, we had to plow through and clean them off later. The beast stunk for weeks.”
“Shouldn’t be a problem this time.” Bobby smiled.
“What’s been eating you, kid?”
Bryan’s legs dangled from the fence. The heat from his brother’s insi
des were frighteningly real, even in memory. Ecky’s last breath. Ol’ Randy’s life fading before his eyes. So much death. “Everything,” he whispered.
“Let it go, kid. Don’t hang on to it. Never did anybody any good.”
“What did you let go, Mr. Baylor?”
“Everything.”
Bobby let that sink in. He didn’t know much about the man before that fateful day on the tracks. The dark-skinned man remained an enigma. Sometimes lashing out, and at other times completely calm and father-like. The Mad Conductor indeed, but Bobby trusted him with his life, with his family’s life. That’s the kind of truth Baylor embodied. You didn’t question it. He was crazy, but genuine, and you sure as shit didn’t fuck with him. Bobby watched the man’s moon slice eyes dart about.
“Things didn’t turn out like I thought, but do they ever?”
Bobby shook his head. He was a father now. They most certainly did not.
“I ever tell you about Dante?” Baylor leaned back, staring into the sky.
“No.”
Baylor shook his head, laughing and sighing in one long drawn out breath. “Stupid mother fucker.”
“I thought you said you let everything go?”
“Just because I say it doesn’t mean I listened to my own advice. And just because you let it go doesn’t mean you forget it. You remember, shit. Yeah, you remember. You remember it always, but you don’t let it hold sway over your emotions. You don’t cry over it anymore. You’ve shed those tears already. You don’t get angry over it. You’ve settled that shit already. You don’t forget, but you don’t hold on. Let it be.” Baylor scratched his chin, searching the moonlit sky for the words.
Bobby took the words to heart. Bryan’s legs. His brothers. He still harbored too much hate to let them go. What if he wasn’t strong enough? The nightmares were already too much, and the glimpses that assailed him during waking hours were beginning to increase. Maybe it was the isolation of the train. On the open road with Pathos One, he’d been able to keep busy, but there were only so many times he could clean his rifle aboard the beast.
“Philly, I think it was Philly. Maybe two, three years after it all went to shit. Still a lot of people around. You know, regular people. You’d see them scuttling along like a bunch of hermit crabs. All kinds of useless shit in shopping carts, on their backs, and none of it would help them. I remember their eyes. Those animal eyes.
“Darting. Always like a bunch of scared animals, clutching possessions close to their chest. TVs and shit. Fucking idiots. Even after a few years passed, they still thought shit was going back to normal. I’ll never forget those eyes. They were always the same when you passed on the road. At first I thought it was because I was black, but then I got the same treatment from my own. It wasn’t race. It was purely predatory. It was stature. Posture. The way I carry myself. Stand tall. Intimidate. Puff up your chest. Basic shit they teach you in the military. Like those Jesus freaks taught you. Be more than you know you are and people will believe it.
“Poor fucks were just scared of me pretending to be big and bad. Thought I was getting ready to pounce on them like they’d been pounced on ten times before.” Baylor pulled a gnarled root from his pocket, broke it in two, and offered half to Bobby.
“Don’t eat it. Chew it. Sweet stuff here,” Baylor said as he set the root in his mouth. “I can remember each of those dirty faces. The kids and their ratty dolls. Like victims of a napalming from those old Nam photos. Walking. Always walking, hugging the main highways for familiarity, for safety in numbers. Fucking fools didn’t know shit and I bet not a single one of them are alive anymore.
“They were lucky I wasn’t one of the crazies. Bunch of savages would scour the roads like it was the wild fucking west, raping, kidnapping, stealing, killing. Survival’s a dirty fucking game. An ugly one, but it never had to be. I can’t even understand how such people exist or why they exist. But it’s because of those people I got a chance to known Dante.
“I’m pretty sure it was Philly,” Baylor said again, waving the root about and spitting off the side of the train. The track bent slightly to the right. The train shifted with a long screech that echoed for miles around. “Everyone was moving here and there and nobody had any direction. But I did. Had me a nice set of clothes and canned food and I was armed to the teeth, heading down south to open ground. The cities and ’burbs were too jam packed.
“Was a night like tonight. Clear and crisp. The moon had the road lit for miles. I could see the shadows like something out of an old silent film. Strange silhouettes shuffling along. I stayed just off the road in the tree line, moving fast, just trying to get clear. I heard them long before I saw them. Screaming. Just insane screaming and cursing.”
Bobby remembered the wild woman and her terrible voice. Ecky’s face as his mouth bubbled with blood. He bit down on the root, wishing the memory would fade, but the ghosts refused to be cast away.
“I could see these lights, torches way ahead. There were so many. I’d heard about such gangs from others during my trek south. People I talked to were lucky. They were able to hide. Cannibals, psychos, degraded humanity, call them what you will. I don’t know if any language left on this planet can adequately describe those animals. I thought I put up a tough front, but nothing compared to that gang. People were snatching up their kids and bolting.
“The gang knew and they continued the slow march down the road. Every once in a while, a few torches would break from the mass and you’d hear shots and screams, mostly screams. They were the approaching storm and they left nothing but desolation in their wake. At least, they did until Dante. He couldn’t have been any taller than you. A little wiry Italian Jew from somewhere in Jersey. Maybe a buck fifty in a pair of cement shoes. I didn’t even hear him that night.
“I’m standing there watching the torches and hearing the horror and this voice. This fucking voice says from behind me, ‘They’re at it again. Not on my watch. Been tracking them since Monmouth. What they did to that girl and her mother. Hey, buddy, you in?’
“I had my hand on the trigger, but I didn’t even know where this guy was. Just a voice in the dark. The torches are getting closer. The screams are getting louder. At this point, I’m ready to move farther from the road until they pass. My conscience wants me to make a bee-line for them, but rationality trumps it. ‘I can’t,’ I tell the trees, because I still have no clue where this guy is. ‘Sure you can. You’re just afraid. Afraid to do something. Afraid to be the first. I’ll make it easy. You don’t have to be because I already am.’
“Kid, it was crazy. He was as close as you are now, but I couldn’t see him. He kept jabbering on, egging me on. Then he tapped me on the shoulder. ‘Boo,’ he said with this wicked laugh. ‘I’ve been watching you for a few days, guy. You don’t think like the sheep. More like a wolf, like me. Maybe a wolf ain’t the right word. Shepherd may be better—a watcher. There are a few like us out here, keeping to ourselves. We keep doing that, won’t be anyone left to watch soon. Damn nutjobs going to ruin what little hope we got left.’ Kid you’d think the way he was going on he’d be armed like me. No. Crazy little guy had nothing but a bloodstained baseball bat.
“He stood there, sizing me up. I almost shot him then just to shut him up and give myself a chance to get away. But then I heard this scream. This terrified little scream, and of everything I let go I kept that one. It’s what made me save Jamie and Sophie all those years ago. It’s what made me give you a chance. It’s always been there. I know what I said before about letting go but that scream is the one exception.
“It belonged to a little girl, and it set something off inside of me. ‘Knew you were a good guy. Name’s Dante, friend, Dante Chaggreddino. Not that that means anything anymore. How’s about you say we go down there and set things straight?’
“Most of the torch bearers were kids themselves, but they were already lost. Their eyes dead, just like the Creepers. There’s no coming back from a stare like that. Vacant souls arm
ed with knives, and clubs, and guns, and a wanton disregard for human life. Before I even had a chance to start popping shots, Dante bowls right into the fray and starts cracking skulls. He dipped in, dropped a few, and ducked out. The gang was so amped up on blood, rape, and adrenaline they had no idea what was going on, and by the time they did it was already too late. We worked through them for what seemed like hours.
“I couldn’t go into my pack to reload, so I started swinging my rifle by the barrel. I broke the fucking stock. I lost track of Dante, but I heard his voice and that fucking laugh of his. I remember finding the girl huddled behind a car. I tried to tell her it was okay now, but she was so scared, so little, before I could grab her she was off into the darkness. I don’t know what happened to her, but I hope that she made it. I hope the evils of the world are nothing to her now.”
Bobby waited for Baylor to continue, but when he didn’t he asked, “What happened to Dante?”
The Creepers (Book 2): From the Past Page 2