All Roads Lead To Terror: Coming of age in a post apocalyptic world (Dreadland Chronicles Book 1)

by Richard Schiver

  From behind them came the sound of something being violently thrown against the wall, shattering on impact, its pieces clattering to the floor. There was the sound of something solid striking the floor, followed by another, and another, each step getting closer as a faint clicking sound came from the gloom all around them.

  Meat spotted movement against the floral wallpaper, only this time it wasn’t a solid object. From a distance it looked solid, but up close he realized it was comprised of thousands of tiny bodies all scurrying in one direction as they flowed into the room around the doorframe, vanishing into the thick gloom that crowded the corners of the room.

  It was coming.

  Meat reached out and grabbed Window’s hand, pulling him across the room away from the shadowy tendrils that had been encircling his body. From the shadows he felt a brief sensation of longing that quickly became a furious rage as the shadowy tendrils streaked across the room to once more ensnare their captive.

  Meat leaned into his task, dragging an uncooperative Window towards the door as the shadows reasserted their grip and tried to pull him back. He couldn’t allow that to happen, he’d sworn a blood oath with Window when they were both very young and new to Bremo Bluff.

  A promise to never abandon the other no matter how bad it got.

  Meat felt like he was teetering on the brink of insanity as he struggled to pull Window from the creature’s grasp. He wasn’t sure when he came to the conclusion, or realization, that what they faced was a creature straight out of a madman’s nightmare. But connected as he was to its essence, with Window serving as a conductor that joined the two, he saw with startling clarity just what this thing was.

  It had resided at this spot, bound to the ground in which it lived, like a mutant fungi feeding on the occasional unwary traveler as time slowly unfolded around it. Where it came from was anyone’s guess, it had just always been. Watching impassively as man pushed back the wilderness to make room for the structures that would serve as homes and businesses to a growing civilization.

  The old ways had been forgotten, swept aside by the march of progress.

  There were places where the fabric between realities was at its thinnest, where the past, the present, and the future all occupied the same space. Places that for ages were shunned by those more attuned to their presence.

  Shadowy groves of eternal solitude that even the animals of the forest avoided in their daily lives. For these silent places were inhabited by beings that bled across the lines of reality that had been blurred by the blending of the past and present. They had become the essence of legends and whispered tales shared over roaring fires, the basis of man’s fear of the dark, for at night in these deathly places the creatures that roamed about bore little semblance to those man had grown accustomed to.

  Modern man had built up and developed the world in the name of progress. Forests were replaced by wooden structures that gave way to concrete monoliths offering dark basements that allowed this essence to survive, feeding on the despair of those who occupied these structures. Becoming the focus of whispered urban legends passed down from one generation to the next, the stories shared by the children who had been directly affected.

  It had remained trapped in the shadowy chambers of the basement until the Awakening brought it renewed life as terror washed across the land. It had grown then, filling the cavities of the building, drawing sustenance from the fear that surrounded it. Adding its own brand of terror as it focused its energy on a small band of children who had taken refuge with a man of the cloth, who had his own personal secrets that he’d successfully kept hidden from view.

  Secrets that were now out in the open as the children, with nowhere else to flee, had fallen prey to his craven appetites. He had taught them, and he had used them to satisfy his own desires, establishing a symbiotic relationship with the creature that fed a mutual need. The core group of children had grown unrestrained by society, reverting to a primitive savagery as they added to their ranks the only way they knew how, by taking what they could not create.

  In time what he had wrought turned, as it naturally would, upon the creator.

  Thirty Four

  Emerging from the shadowy stairwell Billie-Bob stepped into a wide foyer whose walls were covered with more drawings of assorted crosses all wrapped in barbed wire, some with the image of a crucified man. Among the drawings was that same message repeated over and over in assorted hands.

  Pain is love, love is pain.

  It made no sense.

  Everywhere he looked there were Celtic Trinities bound in the center by a circle, drawn amid the larger crosses, as well as those strange triangles that awakened old memories he’d rather remained still.

  The sound of approaching voices came from the stairs and he slipped into the shadowy depths of the hallway on his right just as the doorway for the main stairs opened behind him. He watched from the shadows as three young boys, wearing loincloths made from drapes, passed across the foyer and vanished down the hallway. If he had been another minute more they would have met in the stairwell as he fled the creature from below. Though they were armed with what looked like rusty machetes it would have been a massacre, with Billie-Bob’s shots alerting the others to his presence.

  As they passed from view he felt something stirring in the shadows behind him, something that reached out to him on a psychic level with icy tendrils that caressed his mind as it stirred old memories he’d rather remained forgotten.

  With his mind’s eye he caught a glimpse of a cramped room lit by the harsh light of a small lantern. He saw an older man with a young boy on his lap, a man he recognized as the Uncle his mother had abandoned him with. The image awakened old terrors as tears of shame and fear washed down his cheeks, tears that were greedily whisked away by something that existed within the shadows around him.

  Shots came from somewhere above him, sharp reports that helped to sever the tenuous link that had been established between his memories and the ebony emptiness that throbbed around him. He pushed himself to his feet, fleeing the shadows, and the memories, as he raced across the foyer towards the stairway.

  Climbing the stairs through the shadows he heard a door somewhere above slam open followed by the sound of many feet on the concrete steps. He stepped back into the shadows, sensing that presence all around him once more, as if it were a part of the building itself. There were shouts as the unseen group on the stairs appeared to be going up, instead of down.

  On the third floor, as the shouts of those who inhabited this place came from above his head, accompanied by the thrashing sound of a massive beast moving within the structure, he found the missing children huddled together in one small room. There were eight total, twice what was taken from the Bluff, all young boys, and as he entered the room they began crying in terror.

  “It okay, everything’s all right, I’m here to save you,” he said, trying to comfort them. He recognized two of the children and called out their names. They came to him, their heads down, hands clasped together as they tried to give comfort or draw strength from the one beside them.

  “Do you remember Anna?” Billie-Bob said

  The two nodded in unison.

  “I like Anna, do you?”

  Again that synchronized response.

  “Can you help me?”

  They nodded, now looking up at him with wide eyes.

  “We have to get out of here. I’m going to lead you out of the building, tell your friends they need to stay with me and run when I tell them to.”

  Again that same response and he sent them back to the group who gathered around them. There was a whispered conversation among them, several of them looking up towards Billie-Bob, their eyes falling to he pistol he carried, and the rifle slung across his back.

  It all began to make sense, he hadn’t seen any girls, because there weren’t any. The drawings of the cross surrounded by those strange triangles that he had learned were a secret symbol, a call sign that identified the weare
r as the member of a secret organization. A group his uncle had belonged to before the awakening, a group of men whose tastes ran counter to what many viewed as normal and healthy.

  Two years after finding Bremo Bluff he had asked about the symbol, an image that had haunted his nightmares as the repressed memories of his time with his uncle struggled to come to light. First he had shown it to the Widow Winslow, and she had suggested he talk to Reverend Davis who told him quite frankly what that symbol represented.

  In the time before the double triangle, as well as the Celtic trinity bound by a circle in the middle, had served as a secret symbol for pedophiles to recognize one another.

  His uncle had been a pedophile, and his mother had left he and his brother in his care.

  “They roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws,” he whispered as the realization of what had happened to he and his brother suddenly washed through him and he struggled to draw comfort from the words of an old story his mother used to read to him when he was frightened. He remembered her soft voice as she read the words he knew by heart, a story of the night, and its adventure to a wild place.

  A place not unlike the wilderness in which they now lived.

  His uncle’s voice replaced his mother’s in his mind as the words whispered through his thoughts. He moaned softly to himself as his understanding, coupled with a child’s shame and terror grew.

  “Pain is love, love is pain,” his uncle’s voice whispered in his mind.

  “Are you all right?” said one of the children who had gathered around him while he was lost in his thought, pulling Billie-Bob from his thoughts, bringing him back to the present and the danger they all faced.

  From above came the sound of screams and shouts, shots were fired, as something massive lumbered across the floor directly above their head. He had to get the children out, now.

  Thirty Five

  From the hallway came the crashing sound of its steady approach, shattering walls as it manifested itself and lumbered through the interior of the structure. Screams of terror drifted up from the floors below them as the children who had kept this creature fed fled from its unrestrained rage.

  Window came free with an audible pop and both of them fell into the hallway as awareness quickly returned to Window’s eyes. At the other end of the hall, draped in thick shadows, they spotted movement. A slender appendage rose up from the debris covering the floor, whipping to one side it impaled its tip in the wall with a loud thunk.

  Scrambling to their feet they raced down the hallway to the stairwell. Meat glanced over the edge, into that inky well of darkness, spotting movement in the thick shadows that filled the passage that was their only escape.

  Behind them the approaching creature, shrouded by dense shadows, pulled its bloated bulk towards them. Meat caught a brief glimpse of swollen flesh covered by a rash of red protuberances like infected boils that looked like they would pop at the slightest touch. Strands of a coarse black hair protruded from several of the infected bumps. The creature vanished into the shadows, reaching out with slender appendages that groped blindly into the lighted stairwell, the pointed tips twitching back and forth as they sought its prey.

  The sight of the searching tentacles drove them up the steps, coming to a door at the top; they pushed through from one hellish nightmare into the next. They emerged onto the roof of the building, amid a forest of towering crosses from which hung the dead and decayed carcasses of men, women, and children.

  A flurry of flapping wings beat harshly at the air, accompanied by the shrill cries of a murder of crows as they took to flight, disturbed by Meat and Windows sudden appearance.

  Among the dead the dying cried out, one was the child who had led them into the trap, next to him was the old man they had seen at the apartment building, another was Gregory who had been crucified close to the edge of the roof whose surface was covered by a layer of blood, gore, and bird droppings.

  The smell overwhelmed them as they made their way through the forest of carcasses. Stopping at the old man they carefully cut the barbed wire that bound his arms and legs to the cross and was wrapped around his body. Life imitating art, or vise-versa. Carefully they lowered him to the gore covered surface of the roof. The crows had been at him, one of his eyes had been pulped and his face was covered with small cuts, some healing, while the rest were fresh and oozing blood.

  “You’ll be okay now old timer.” Meat said as he pushed himself to his feet.

  But would he really? There was no time to worry about that. His shots in the room had surely drawn the attention of those who inhabited this place.

  As if to confirm this the door opened and one of those savage children stepped onto the roof, in his hand he carried a makeshift pike. Meat drew his pistol and fired, the report sent the crows into renewed flight as the boy dropped to the surface of the roof, his weapon clattering harmlessly to the ground.

  Another boy followed the first and the roar of Windows revolver overpowered what he had been yelling as he came through the door. He dropped to the surface of the roof alongside the first boy.

  A head peeked around the corner of the door and Meat placed a round into the door itself, the boy who had been hiding behind it dropping to the surface of the roof, clutching his stomach with both hands.

  “Please help me,” the child who had brought them to this hellish place begged from his place upon the cross. A strand of barbed wire had been wrapped around his forehead, the barbs piercing the flesh, blood staining his face in rivulet of red. So far he had escaped the attention of the crows that had been gorging themselves on the bounty provided.

  “Leave him.” Window said, before crossing to where Gregory hung from his cross.

  “Please, they made me do it.”

  Meat was torn between his desire for revenge and his need to protect those who could not protect themselves. A conflict that stopped him for a brief moment as the crows circled in the air above, their shadows cast upon the roof, so close together they nearly blocked the sun.

  Finally Meat shook his head.

  “Please,” the young boy whispered through parched lips. The heat on the roof was intense, its black surface, that which could still be seen beneath the layers of gore, served to amplify the heat of the sun. Pushing the temperature into the low hundreds.

  Meat shook his head as he surveyed the crosses that covered the roof. The carcasses of men women and even children hung lifeless from these towering crosses, confirmation, as if any were really needed, of the depths of the savagery these children had sunk. None of these children would warrant even the slightest bit of mercy from him. They had made their bed, and now they would die in it.

  “Leave me alone,” Gregory cried out as Window worked to cut away his bonds. They had used barbed wire to bind Gregory’s arms and legs, wrapping it securely around his body. He was bleeding from multiple points all over his body. He had been placed at the edge of the roof so he had fared far worse than the old man. Both of his eyes were gone, the empty sockets leaking bloody tears that streaked both cheeks.

  “It’s us, Meat, Window, we’re here to save you.”

  “Leave me, I can’t see anymore, I’m no good to anyone.”

  Using his wire cutters Window proceeded to cut away the wires that bound Gregory to the cross. Carefully they lowered him to the surface of the roof.

  “Just let me die,” Gregory said as he grabbed Meats shirt in one bloodied hand. “I’m no good to anyone anymore, I’ve lost everything that’s ever mattered to me. I just want to die.”

  Meat looked up at Window who was sitting on his haunches across from him.

  “What do we do?” Meat said.

  “Give him what he wants.” Window said as he pulled his revolver.

  “It was fun while it lasted,” Gregory said, “but I’m ready to go now, just make sure I don’t come back.”

  Window nodded as he lowered the muzzle of his r
evolver and placed it under Gregory’s chin.

  Thirty Six

  In single file they raced as quickly and as quietly as they could with Billie-Bob in the lead. Reaching the door to the stairwell they stopped as Billie-Bob carefully opened the door and leaned into the landing. Pushing the door all the way open he motioned for the children to follow.

  From above came the sound of pounding feet on concrete stairs, shouts and cries mingled with occasional shots from pistols Billie-Bob immediately recognized as belonging to Meat and Window. He glanced over the railing, down into the black emptiness of the stairwell and knelt down among the children who were all watching him with frightened expressions.

  “I want all of you to hold hands with the person in front of you and the person behind you. It’s going to be dark and scary while we run down the steps. Don’t stop until I tell you. Okay?”

  Several sniffles came from the children as they all nodded their heads. Small hands instinctively were wrapped about others as they crowded closer to Billie- Bob. One of the boys looked over the railing, into that well of darkness, and began crying for his mother. The boy next to him wrapped his arm around his shoulders as he tried to comfort him.

  “Let’s go,” Billie-Bob said as he slowly moved down the steps ahead of them.

  From the stairwell above came cries of anger punctuated by the sharp report of a handgun and the sound of pounding footsteps on the concrete stairs. The children quickly followed Billie-Bob into the dense shadows.

  Reaching the landing for the second floor he stopped and waited while the rest of the children caught up with the main group. From directly above a child screamed in a shrill voice.

  “What are you doing out of your room?” A deeper voice responded to the scream and Billie-Bob turned back up the steps. Rounding the turn in the stairs he saw one of the boys from the savage band leading four of the boys back to the room he had rescued them from.