by North, Geoff
Lode didn’t tire. He continued to drag the lawman by the scruff of his shirt for another ten miles. Only when it became too dark to travel further did he stop. Lode dropped Lawson unceremoniously onto his face and studied what land he could see ahead in the gloom. “You all see those hills in the distance?”
Lode’s crew squinted into the gathering night and shook their heads. “Ain’t nothing there,” Beff said through his swollen throat.
Willem spoke up. “I see them.” They were the first words he’d uttered since taking the blame for the lawman’s vicious beating.
Lode nodded. “It’s the same range of hills you can see from the wall surrounding Burn. They’re higher here, more rugged. The forest hasn’t been harvested over the years. Folks took to calling them the Dirty Hills. Rudd lies beyond that range.”
“So we gotta climb some more hills,” Devon said. “Ain’t no big deal.”
“You ain’t climbed through those hills. None of you have been in the Dirties.” He paused for a moment and stared down at the lawman’s unconscious form. Cobe got the impression from his look that Lawson had been in those hills before. The old lawman had been everywhere.
Devon chuckled uncomfortably. “Gawdamn it, Lode, they’re just hills.”
“It isn’t the hills and the forest you have to worry about. It’s what’s living there.”
“Howlers?”
Lode was about to answer when Lawson stirred at his feet. The lawman rolled to his side and sat up slowly, in considerable discomfort. Stay down, Cobe pleaded to himself. When he spoke, it was choked and strained—a struggle for him to even breathe—but still the words were clear enough for all to hear. “Wherever…wherever it is…you plan on going…you better make it quick.”
“Another threat, old man?” Lode asked.
“Trouble’s comin’…from the west… I could feel it through my hands and gut on the ground.”
Everyone looked west, where there was still a sliver of red sun on the horizon. Cobe saw something black flicker in front of the sliver and vanish. It returned seconds later along with another black dot, and then a third.
Willem kneeled down next to the lawman and rested his one hand on the earth. “I feel it, too. The ground…like it’s shaking.”
Lode took hold of Lawson by the shirt collar again and started running east.
“Where you going?” Devon yelled after him. “Why you running for them hills if it’s so gawdamn dangerous?”
Beff smacked Devon’s shoulder on his way by. “Run, man! The hills are our only hope.”
Willem and Trot stood on either side of Cobe and gaped towards the setting sun. The last bit of brilliant red was swallowed up in black. Either the sun had sunk completely below the horizon, or the remaining light was being blocked. From the rumble he could now feel in the soles of his feet, Cobe suspected the latter.
The three started to back away. Cobe reached for his brother’s hand without looking. None of them had ever seen a roller this close up before. Now there was a herd of hundreds bearing down on them. They turned and ran after Lode and his men.
Cobe still couldn’t see the hills.
Chapter 30
They had run less than a hundred yards before Cobe could hear more than just the thunderous roar of their hooves. The creatures made deep, guttural breathing sounds—wet snorting noises from hundreds of unseen faces.
Don’t look back. Don’t look back. Keep running. Where are the hills? Don’t look back.
Cobe didn’t look back; he glanced sideways—over Willem’s head—and saw what a roller looked like up real close. In that brief moment he thought his eyes were playing tricks on him in the dark. The thing was all head. It bobbed up and down, five feet from the tip of its boney, bulbous skull to the point of its almost nonexistent chin. Brown fur matted with snot and saliva coated the entirety of its face and flapped over a pointed ear against the rush of air it was pushing through. A glistening black eye the size of Lode’s fist regarded the boys for an instant and was gone. The roller picked up speed and raced past them. Cobe saw the blur of moving limbs under the creature, propelling it forward. The back legs were thicker than Trot’s waist; its front arms were thicker still and twice the length.
A second roller thundered by on the other side. It was bigger. Cobe could see the massive claws curled up into the underside of its furry arms as the back of its wrists pushed against the dirt for traction and balance. The massive head bobbed up and down and its chin dug into the earth, chewing up more dust and dirt, creating a small series of trenches as it went. It looked like a massive boulder composed of bone, muscle, and fur rolling at breakneck speed across the plain.
Cobe and his brother were about to die. They would be trampled, mangled, and eaten in the dirt, along with Trot, and whoever was still alive ahead of them. At least he would die knowing where rollers had earned their name.
Willem fell and curled up into a ball. Cobe lay on top of him and shut his eyes. It was as good a place as any. The roar picked up all around them. Dust kicked up from dozens of thumping arms and pushing legs filled the air, making it almost impossible to breathe. The boys gasped and coughed in it. Something hard smacked into Cobe’s shoulder, a glancing blow from a muscular wrist or black hoof; it was impossible to tell. He could hear his brother’s muffled screams beneath him. Another hit to the back of Cobe’s skull pushed his face into Willem’s neck. He could feel the boy shaking. Everything was shaking, and roaring, and rumbling. Cobe never imagined anything could feel and sound so terrifying. It would be over in a few more seconds, he thought. One of those hooves would crush his skull. A set of foot-long claws would tear into his back and shred him in two.
He whispered into Willem that he was sorry. How many times had he apologized to his brother since running away from Burn? He kept on saying how sorry he was, over and over, even though Willem couldn’t hear a word of it. After what seemed like an eternity of roughly ten more seconds, Cobe could hear his brother crying. He could hear himself still moaning apologies.
The dust had started to clear. Cobe looked up and saw a wall of black-gray receding into the north. He cleared his throat and spat out mud. “We’re alive…Willem! We made it!” He crawled off his brother and stood, wavering back and forth unsteadily, spitting shit out of his throat.
“Think I pissed myself,” Willem whimpered.
“I know I pissed myself.” Cobe helped him up.
Willem started to giggle, and Cobe joined him. They were laughing uncontrollably a few seconds later. Willem laughed so hard he fell forward and Cobe tried to catch him. They both ended up back in the freshly trampled earth, kicking up more dust, laughing and crying until they could hardly breathe once again.
The distant rumble of roller hooves weakened, like a storm passing in the night. Cobe stared up at the first stars in the night sky after he was too sore to make another sound.
Willem whispered, “What are we gonna do now? Where we gonna go?”
Cobe was wondering the very same thing. A wail interrupted his thoughts. He sat up and listened. It sounded again, back from the way they’d come. Someone crying.
Willem was on his feet first. “Trot!”
Cobe followed his brother through the rut of roller tracks, calling the man’s name. They found him crawling on his hands and knees. Cobe knelt down next to him. “Are you okay?”
“I’m okay,” Trot blubbered. “I can’t run fast with my stupid legs. Fell as soon as we tried getting away from them.”
A pang of guilt shot through Cobe. He hadn’t even thought of waiting for him.
“They were on top of me as soon as I flopped down on my big gut.”
“I’m sorry, Trot.” Cobe had been apologizing for things out of his control far too much.
“It’s alright. I was just scared…thought I was the only one left. I don’t wanna be left alone no more.”
Willem patted Trot’s stomach. “Too much belly for them dumb rollers to bother with, hey, Trot?” He smiled u
p at him, but Trot couldn’t see the humor in it.
“Did you find the lawman? Did the rollers get him?”
Cobe shook his head.
“We gotta find him. We gotta head for them Dirty Hills and find him.”
It seemed a suicidal task—heading directly into the stampeding herd that had almost killed them all—but Cobe agreed. There was nothing for them in any other direction. The only other places Cobe knew where to go were Burn and Big Hole. He wasn’t returning to either of them any time soon.
The brothers followed Trot at a slow pace. None of them could hear the rollers anymore. The creatures had either swung left or right—thankfully—and rolled off into the night. Cobe started to become hopeful and worried at the same time; hopeful that they would find the lawman alive, but afraid they’d stumble across Lode first.
They discovered Beff first. The only way they could recognize him was from the ponytail trailing out from under his crushed body. The arm and leg on his left side were missing altogether; the rest was a flattened purple pulp.
Willem went to spit on the corpse and Cobe stopped him. “Don’t.”
“Why you still treatin’ me like a little kid? Gawdamn it…after all we been through.”
“Spittin’ on dead people is for the likes of Lode. We ain’t like Lode.”
Willem had no argument for that. They found a second corpse another quarter mile along. This one had no head left, and both legs were missing. Its torso and arms were as flat as Beff’s remains. Trot asked weakly, “You think it’s the lawman?”
“Hard to tell,” Cobe answered. It was impossible to tell. The shirt on its back was a shredded mess, a muddy pink slur pounded into flesh and bone. It could’ve been Devon—or one of the others—but chances were it was the lawman. He was incapable of running on his own, beaten and broken as he was. It didn’t belong to Lode, Cobe was certain of that. The remains were too small, and Lode didn’t wear a shirt. “Come on, let’s keep going.”
It was fully dark by the time they noticed the added strain on their legs. They had started climbing up; they’d arrived at the hills.
“Why you think folks call ‘em the Dirty Hills?” Willem asked. “Everything’s dirty…Burn…these dumb plains…the gawdamn hole we climbed outta.”
“Maybe some places are dirtier than others,” Cobe offered.
“Stupid name.”
Willem was chattering a lot again. Cobe knew he was afraid. All three of them were. The lawman was missing once again, and they were headed upward into a black forest that had even given the brute Lode cause to worry. They climbed for another half hour, working their way through stinging bushes filled with thorns, stumbling over giant fallen trunks stinking with rot, and walking around trees, still standing and even thicker.
“So many trees,” Trot said after whacking his forehead into a low-hanging branch. “So much wood. How come the people in Rudd don’t cut ‘em all down and makes houses?”
“Whole place stinks,” Willem answered. “Who’d want to live in a house that smelled like shit?”
“I’ve slept in shit. You get used to pretty much anything when you don’t have no house at all to live in.” Pale light broke through the trees ahead of them. They had reached the top, and a full moon was rising up into the branches, bloated, pink and ominous. Trot leaned against a tree and stared; the light glowed off his fat cheeks, mirroring the oblong orb in the sky. “Bad things come out when the moon’s that color and so big.”
Willem stopped beside him. “Them are just stupid stories grownups tell to scare kids. It’s just a stupid moon. You ain’t still a kid, are you, Trot?”
Trot looked down at the boy, his eyes filled with tears. “Never was a kid... Bad things come when the moon looks like that.”
Cobe came up behind them. He had come to recognize that quiet, shaking quality to Trot’s voice when he was on the verge of panic. “Easy, Trot. You know what my brother’s like when he gets scared.” He gave Willem a warning look.
“I ain’t scared. I seen an old man crush a howler’s head into the wall and then eat its gawdamn brains. I wasn’t scared then, and I ain’t scared now.”
Trot had started to moan. “The lawman…we need the lawman.”
Cobe rubbed his back and whispered, “We’ll find him. Calm down, breathe nice and slow.”
Trot screamed. “Now! I need the lawman now!”
Something thudded into the bark inches from his head. Cobe saw the crude arrow shaft still quivering in the moon’s light. Trot fell silent and they heard something moving in the trees ahead. Someone giggled, and branches snapped somewhere behind them. A child started to laugh. A second arrow landed in the tree inches below the first and closer to Trot’s neck. The giggles of more children sounded all around them. Shadowy forms moved in the branches and tall grass.
Cobe caught the shine from a dozen sets of eyes reflected in the moonlight before something hard cracked against the back of his neck. He fell to his side in a carpet of leaves and saw Trot sitting with his back against the tree. The man’s jaw was hanging open, his eyes staring ahead and unblinking. A third arrow had driven through the center of his forehead, its tip burrowed into the bark behind him. Cobe tried yelling for his brother, but another blow to the top of his skull silenced him. His face struck the ground, sucking up dry leaves and dirt, as blackness overtook him.
Chapter 31
When Lawson had first led Trot and the boys through the rusted ruins into Big Hole, he had done so with care. It was a conglomeration of twisted girders, miles of rebar, and tons of centuries-old concrete. Unbending metal could tear clothes and rip open skin. Cement boulders—immovable when pushed or pulled—could crush bone if left to shift or fall on their own. Lothair Eichberg and his followers climbed out of Big Hole with much less consideration for physical boundaries and safeties. If a slab of concrete blocked their way, Lothair pushed it aside. When pieces of jutting, two-inch-thick rebar meant crawling further on their stomachs and sides, Colonel Strope bent them back until there was room to walk through.
Lothair realized what a struggle it must have been for the big lawman to gain access to his facility as he pulled himself up onto the crater rim. He breathed in the cool night air and listened to a rumble coming out of the northwest.
Thunder. Rain. He looked up into the night and waited for the first drops to hit his face. He stayed that way as the others hauled themselves up the crater wall to join him. Eunice was last, huffing and puffing slightly, and digging her fingers into earth baked hard as rock. She wasn’t sweating when she reached the top—none of them were. The rain didn’t come, but Lothair wasn’t disappointed. He didn’t know what disappointment was anymore.
Brian surveyed the dark landscape. “No lights…Dauphin’s gone.”
Lothair wondered for another moment what was causing the rumble before he responded, “You were expecting a farming town with a population of less than five thousand to still be there after a thousand years, Mr. Haywood?”
“Nope, suppose I wasn’t…but still…it’s where I grew up, where I raised a family.”
“You’re upset about that?”
“Nope… Funny thing that…I could care less.”
Lothair knew the farmer didn’t find it funny. None of them did. None of them cared any longer about the past. All that mattered was the future; where and what they would eat next. They were surrounded by nothing. Lothair listened more intently to the distant roar in the northeast.
“I’m hungry,” Leonard said, staring up at Orion’s belt and rubbing his stomach.
“I know you are, Leonard. We all are. Something’s causing that sound, something living.” He started down into the black plains.
“Not yet,” Strope called after him.
Lothair looked back. “You need rest, Colonel? After all this time?”
“Not me—Edna. Her body’s still healing.”
Lothair climbed back up the hill and squatted down next to his great-granddaughter. The fusion of her tw
o halves hadn’t been as successful as he’d hoped. Edna could barely stand on her own due to the poor re-join of her spine. She couldn’t sit properly; her legs and abdomen pointed northeast, while the rest of her faced southeast. She had to lean on the dirt with one elbow to stay up. Lothair considered her predicament with cold logic. “I could break her back…make certain the alignment is better this time.”
“You’re not breaking her back,” Jenny said. She sat down next to mother, squeezing Lothair out of the way. The girl had helped her father carry Edna out through the debris and up the crater wall. “She’s suffered enough already.”
“None of us suffer anymore, dear,” Lothair said.
“Dear… Really? We’ve become fucking zombies, and you call me dear?”
Lothair had worked with thousands of children in his former life. He had enjoyed working with children; they were loving and trusting—easy to manipulate. Teenagers were another matter entirely. He hadn’t understood them in the twentieth century, and the thirty-first century hadn’t cleared matters any. He ignored Jenny and patted Edna’s knee, speaking loudly even though her face was less than a foot away. “I need to break your spine. I want to position it better.”
“She can’t understand you,” Strope said. “The piece of grenade shrapnel that went through her brain is still in there. Stuck somewhere beneath her skull.”
Edna had spoken the colonel’s first name when she’d first regained consciousness. She had rasped Jenny’s as well a half dozen times since, but those were the only two words the woman could utter. Lothair had hoped the brain tissue would have repaired itself by now. As she was now, his great-granddaughter wasn’t much use to any of them. She was more pretzel than hominid—a shambling vegetable.
Eunice spoke out loud what he was considering. “Leave her here—or tear her head off. We can get on better without her slowing us down.”
If Jenny was still human she would have likely lunged at the woman and punched her fat face in. Instead she just glared at her. No one would be killing her mother.