After Everything Else (Book 1): Creeper Rise

by Brett D. Houser

  Creeper Rise

  By Brett D. Houser

  Text Copyright ©2013 Brett D. Houser

  All rights reserved.

  Table of Contents

  Part One: We Are All Pretty Much Alone

  Part Two: Almost Any How

  Part Three: If Any Civilization is to Survive

  Part One: We Are All Pretty Much Alone

  I have always had a sense that we are all pretty much alone in life, particularly in adolescence.

  Robert Cormier

  Chapter 1 – Sonya

  Sonya woke again to the smell of her own sickness, but knew she was better because she felt like doing something about it. The days before were just a blur of vomiting, fever, and drifting in and out of something that was similar to sleep but wasn’t quite. She was better now but still weak. She didn’t look forward to cleaning up, but there was no one else to do it.

  She rose from her bed and stripped it, bundling stinking bedclothes to be taken to the laundry mat in the very near future. If she wasn’t able to make it before she felt like passing out again, she would sleep on the couch or in her dad’s bed. He wasn’t due back off the road for another week, and that would be enough time to wash his sheets.

  She looked at the bucket beside her bed and shuddered in disgust. Holding it at arm’s length she carried it to the kitchen and rinsed it in the sink. She opened the window over the sink, trying to get some fresh air and clear the house of the smell of sickness. After several deep, head-clearing breaths she realized she should be hungry, so she rummaged in a cabinet and came up with a box of saltines. She nibbled a cracker and took three quick sips of water. She sat at the battered Formica kitchen table and looked out the window, waiting to see what disgusting thing her body would do next. Nothing happened, so she ate a few more and decided to try some orange juice.

  As she poured the juice into a cup, a loud crash in the alley behind the duplex caused her to jump and spill a little. She listened for another crash, but the only thing she heard was the blare of the neighbors’ television in the other unit. She looked out the window and could see someone next to the dumpsters for the apartments on the other side. That must have been who it was. Probably one of the jerks that always let the lid slam after throwing a bag in. Or one of the many dumpster divers in the neighborhood, she thought, but they always seemed a little more considerate when it came to that. She drank the juice and waited a bit longer. Through the open window, she saw the guy was still back there, just standing. She decided it was a dumpster diver. Her dad got mad at them sometimes, but she usually just felt sorry for them.

  Her next step on the road to recovery from her mystery illness involved a shower. A shower always made her feel better, and she couldn’t stand her stink any longer. In the bathroom, she turned on the hot water tap and waited the eternity it took for the water to reach a tolerable level of warmth. She stripped down and stepped in. Looking down at herself, she thought she had lost weight. She had always been thin, but she felt emaciated now. All those people who asked her if she was anorexic before should see her now. The good news was the orange juice and crackers were still sitting well so she began making plans for a larger meal, thinking about stuff with tons of calories. And chocolate. Lots of chocolate.

  In the shower she turned and turned, letting the spray wash away the sickness until the hot water started to cool, then she scrubbed herself head to toe and turned off the water just as it went completely cold. She grabbed a towel, dried herself, and stepped to the steamy mirror. She gave it a swipe and studied her face. Her short black hair stuck out at all angles, and she tried to decide if she wanted to grow it out pixie long or cut it butch short again. She liked her hair short even though her dad told her that she looked more like a junior high boy than a sophomore girl. She moved down to her dark brown eyes, her best feature despite being set too far apart and currently surrounded with dark circles. She wrinkled her nose. Her lips were too thin, and pale. She was sure she had lost weight when she saw how defined her cheekbones were. She shrugged, spiked her hair with some gel and wrapped herself in the plaid flannel robe that her father had worn only once after she had gotten it for him for Christmas two years ago. She went back to the kitchen to check the possibilities for trying to put some weight on.

  For just a second, she thought about school. School was not on the list of things happening today, she thought. There was only a month left, anyway, and teachers were busy trying to catch up the slow kids for the big tests. None of the people she hung out with at school had called, and she wasn’t surprised. She hung out with them, but she wasn’t real close with them. She knew if she disappeared completely tomorrow, there wasn’t really anyone who would miss her much. Of course, she didn’t think she’d miss them, either. There was really only one person in the world she cared about, and as she was making coffee, she caught sight of her cell phone on the kitchen counter. Dad.

  She couldn’t remember the last time she had talked to him. If he had called, and she hadn’t answered, he would be worried sick. If he hadn’t called, she was worried. He called every evening without fail when he was out on the road. She picked up the phone. There were no voice messages, no texts. He might not have left a message, or maybe he had even called and she had talked to him and just couldn’t remember. She checked the call log. The last incoming call was the call he had made to her on Sunday night, the first night she felt like she was coming down with something. She looked at the date on her phone in disbelief. It had been four days since she had talked to him. She knew then that something was seriously wrong.

  She tried to call him, but there was only a strange silence after she dialed the number. There was no out of service message, nothing. She checked the signal. There was none at all, and she usually had all bars at home. Maybe there was just a glitch in the phone, or in the service or something. She relaxed a little. She would try to call him from the pay phone at the laundry mat. She just had the monthly pay-as-you-go service, but he had a contract phone, so maybe she’d get him on a landline.

  With her coffee she had a toasted hamburger bun with butter and raspberry jam, and then she went to her room and dressed in a black t-shirt, khaki cargo shorts and black Chucks to head to the laundry mat. She put on some eyeliner and mascara, stuffed her sheets, blanket, and other odds and ends of laundry into the laundry bag her father had kept from when he was in the army. In the kitchen, she rinsed her coffee cup.

  While standing at the sink, she looked out the window into the alley. The dumpster diver stood at the chain-link fence that surrounded the small back yard of the duplex. The morning sun behind the apartment buildings kept the alley in shadow. She couldn’t see if he was one of the regulars or even make out his face at all. Poor guy, she thought.

  Sonya shook quarters from the roll her father had left for her and plugged them into the washer. The laundry mat was empty except for her. There weren’t even any other machines going, and the creepy guy that was usually there to give out change and tell people not to overload the washers wasn’t there, either. She started the washer and stepped outside. The unexpected quiet of the street surprised her. She stood there for a long time, waiting for someone to come by, for a sign of life anywhere. She realized she probably hadn’t talked to or even seen another person for almost a week.

  The laundry mat wasn’t on a main road or anything, and it was ten in the morning on a weekday, but Sonya had only seen one car moving on her walk. That car had been really moving, squalling tires around corners, engine roaring. She had only caught a brief glimpsed of it, but she heard it for a long time after. She had expected to hear a siren. She never did. The sound of the
car faded, and since then there had only been silence.

  She felt strange. She was used to missing her dad when he was on the road, but now she felt like she missed everyone. She had always found most people to be annoying, and had never actually had the opportunity to miss them because they were always there. The vague feeling of loss made her uncomfortable. She went back inside and found the pay phone. She wasn’t sure exactly how to use it, so she read the instructions. Her dad had told her that once upon a time pay phones were almost the only way to call when a person wasn’t at home. She tried to imagine how inconvenient that must have been.

  She picked up the receiver, deposited a quarter, and dialed her dad’s cell phone. Silence. Another quarter had the same result. She hung up. Something very strange was going on. Just then, the lights in the laundry mat went out and the washers she had loaded spun to a stop.

  She waited for the power to come back on. The power went out quite a bit at the duplex, especially in the summer when the whole neighborhood had air conditioners running full blast. This was only May, but it had been pretty warm lately. Ten minutes later and the power hadn’t come back on, so she checked the clothes in the washer. They had been in the rinse cycle and were still soaked. The dark, silent laundry mat was creeping her out. She was going home. She dragged the sopping clothes to the big sink and wrung them out the best she could. She would have to hang everything. At least there was still a clothesline in the back yard.

  She knew she was still weak from being sick, and carrying everything to the laundry mat had made her feel shaky. She wished she had driven her dad’s old pick-up truck, even though she wasn’t supposed to. Everything was at least twice as heavy now and home felt so far away. She stuffed the wet clothes in the laundry bag, located the detergent bottle, picked everything up and started walking.

  Three blocks to home, and Sonya thought she was going to faint at the end of the first block. She stopped at the corner and leaned against the front of a long-closed shoe repair shop in the shade of the tattered and faded awning. She felt light-headed, and dark spots swam in the edges of her vision. Even as she rested, she noted again that there really didn’t seem to be anyone around. No cars in the street, no little kids, none of the sounds she expected from the neighborhood. The houses and apartments were so small, there were usually people lounging on porches or in front yards. Even though she didn’t see anyone, sometimes she felt she was being watched. Once in a while, she thought a curtain shifted or a shape moved in the darkened glass windows of the houses she passed, but when she looked directly, she never saw anyone.

  She remembered an old episode of a show called The Twilight Zone her father had made her watch. A guy had been in the basement or something and there had been a bomb, and he was the last one alive. He had broken his glasses in the end, and she hadn’t understood what the big deal was about that. He was the last person left alive; whatever other problems he had after that just didn’t seem very important.

  The key she wore on a chain around her neck unlocked the front door of the duplex after a few misfires caused by her shaky hands. She thought she would black out before she could get inside. The wet laundry stayed on the porch while she went inside to get a drink of water and rest a little. Before going in, she noted the neighbors’ old Mitsubishi Montero in the driveway, but the television no longer blared.

  This set of neighbors (there had been three different groups move in and out in the four years she and her dad had lived at the duplex) were a group of twenty-somethings living communally who her dad said hadn’t found their purpose yet unless their purpose was to get drunk a lot and try every new fad they could afford. There were old snowboards, broken skateboard decks, climbing equipment, backpack frames, and other unidentifiable sporty looking equipment stacked on the front porch and leaning against the front wall.

  She thought about knocking, but it was dead quiet in there. There was always the odd noise coming from the other side of the thin dividing wall: flushing toilets, random shouts, snoring, vomiting, loud male laughter. In the kitchen she realized why she couldn’t hear the neighbor’s television any more. The clock on the coffee maker was dark. The power was out here, too. She filled a glass with water and took five quick sips. This cleared her head a little. She sat at the kitchen table finishing the water while watching a fly that had come in with her bounce against the pane of the window over the sink. The big blue-green fly, one of the ones her dad called a bottle fly, made an audible tapping sound each time it hit the glass. She watched it for a long time, listening to the droning sound of its wings, the tapping on the glass….

  She sat up with a start. She had been sleeping, right there at the table. She had no idea how long, but she had definitely been sleeping. And she had dreamed. She had dreamed she had gone into the backyard, and the dumpster diver was still there, just standing. She had approached him, and when she had gotten close enough to see his face, she had suddenly realized he was her dad. She reached for him, called out to him, but he hadn’t responded. That was when she had seen his eyes and mouth. They had been sewn shut with black thread.

  Chapter 2 – Chase

  For the first time in almost a week, Chase woke to silence. Every day for the last six days since his dad had left to London on business and his mom had taken a last minute invitation to the Virgin Islands he had either awoken to the thump of bass coming through the house’s sound system or the roar of six different channels on the six televisions scattered through the house. Today not even the sound of doors slamming, screamy giggling, raucous laughter, cell phones ringing, or any of the other noises obnoxious people make in pursuit of mindless fun reached him in his final retreat.

  Chase was sleeping in his parents’ bed. It was actually his mother’s bed, since his dad was gone most of the time. When he was home, he generally passed out in the recliner in his man-cave in the basement. Chase’s mother’s room was still strange to him despite his having taken it over earlier in the week. He couldn’t remember even being in there before, not even when he was little. He remembered once when he was about six being sick in the middle of the night and knocking at the locked door, then falling asleep in the hall waiting for his mother to wake up and take care of him. The housekeeper had found him in the morning and put him back in his own bed, taken his temperature, brought him medicine. There was no housekeeper now, though. No rescue from the craziness going on around him.

  The beginning had been simple enough. He invited a few people over on Sunday to play basketball on the full-length court his dad for his athlete son had built but never set foot on himself. Just a few guys from the football team shooting hoops. Happened most weekends. When they had asked where his mom was he had told them he was on his own for a while. Tommy, his center on the football team, said, “I bet if we looked hard enough we could find some steaks somewhere. Maybe some baking potatoes. Hamburgers. Hot dogs. We could have a little get together, do it up right.”

  Chase remembered slapping Tommy on his meaty shoulder and saying, “Sounds good for you, but what are the rest of us going to eat?” Everyone had laughed. Chase hadn’t seen any problem with it. The house did have that awesome outdoor kitchen that never got used. Then some of the guys asked if they could bring their girlfriends, and that was okay, too. And some of the single guys asked if the girlfriends had friends, and of course that was okay, but the next thing Chase knew, there was a keg in the kitchen and at least forty cars parked up and down the driveway, and things started to be most definitely not okay. The outdoor kitchen was trashed. The pool filled with empty bottles and cans. The kitchen was stripped of all food. The party grew and grew. Chase felt like Mickey Mouse in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

  Not that Chase hadn’t had fun at first. He’d been in there with the rest of them: Playing clumsy water polo in the pool, quarters at the kitchen table, and beer pong in the garage. He didn’t really like to get drunk, but he had learned to drink a little, just enough to avoid branded as a loser, and still have a good time. No
t like a lot of the rest of the guys. They would chug and chug, and at some point there would be vomit. There were a few places in the house that could attest to that fact. At first, some of the other people at the party would help Chase clean a little after one of these events, but when it got late, those friends went home. The ones who stayed all night didn’t seem interested in helping clean up.

  Really, when he thought about it, he didn’t know a lot of the people that had been there the next morning. There had been quite a few faces he had seen in the halls at school, but nobody he really knew or hung out with. He should have put a stop to it then, should have run them off, but he hadn’t wanted to be a jerk. Besides, watching those people destroy his parents’ house had given him a little bit of satisfaction.

  The drinking was bad, but most of the people he knew drank. If the cops had shown up, given the neighborhood and the parents of some of the kids, they might have confiscated booze and sent everyone home with a warning. The pot made him a little more nervous. He’d tried it a few times, but he didn’t care for the feeling. But there was more. Some of the kids who showed up were into pills. They raided their parents’ and their grand-parents’ medicine cabinets. They swapped and traded their Ritalin for Valium, their Adderol for Xanex. Sometimes there was even Oxycontin. And as bad as that seemed to Chase, there was worse. He had gone into the bathroom off the changing cabin by the pool, and a guy he didn’t know, must have been about twenty-five or maybe even thirty, was sitting on the toilet with a needle in his arm. The guy had looked up at Chase with blood-shot eyes and pupils so large he didn’t appear to have an iris, just black holes in the red. The man had slurred, “Bout done here, bro. Help me up? I think my feet have turned into fish.” Chase had quietly backed out and closed the door. He had started really wanting the party to be over then, but he hadn’t done anything. The people came and went. That evening, Sunday, the house filled up again, and the party continued.