After Everything Else (Book 1): Creeper Rise

by Brett D. Houser

  She sat there wishing she had never left home. If she were home, she would be safe, she thought. And then she wondered. The first night hadn’t been too bad. Three days ago, she hadn’t known what she now knew:

  The silence everywhere disturbed her. The duplex was in a normally busy neighborhood. Aside from the noisy neighbors in the other unit, the block had had more than its share of adolescents in old beater cars that roared up and down the streets. It was a blue collar neighborhood, too, and when shifts let out at the meat packing plants there had always been doors slamming and traffic at all hours. But not the night after her visit to the laundry mat. The night had been so quiet that she kept waking up every hour to absolute blackness and dead silence.

  The next morning, panic began to creep in. Sonya tried her phone again and again. She walked out into the street and walked around the neighborhood. No one and nothing out and about. She didn’t even hear cars in the distance. So she returned home and tried to distract herself by reading. It didn’t work. Nervous and restless, she sat down, read the same paragraph over and over and then got up and paced for a while and then started the cycle again. She was glad when it began to get dark outside.

  She wanted to go to bed, to sleep, to not think and worry and wonder what was going on. She took a quick cold shower (the water heater was electric) before going to bed. She was exhausted from a stressful day of fidgeting after a night of sleeplessness. But the silence woke her again in a few hours. As she lay in the total darkness, her mind racing while she tried to understand where everyone was and why it was so quiet, she realized the silence was no longer complete. There was a sound. A quiet thumping came from the unit next door. Over and over again, something was hitting the dividing wall. She had pulled the blanket to her chin and listened to the sound, imagining all the things it could be. She didn’t even come close to guessing what it was, but even in her ignorance, but she had been sure of one thing. She had known she was not getting up to see what it was. Not in the night. Not in the total darkness.

  As she sat in the Montero in the shade of the tree beside the lonely stretch of highway, she shivered despite the heat. Looking back, she was so glad she had not gotten up to go see.

  The next day, the sound continued. It came with such a steady regularity that she was sure it couldn’t be a person doing it. It never stopped. She put her ear to the dividing wall. Shuffle, shuffle, thud. Shuffle, shuffle, thud. Over and over. In daylight, the sound wasn’t nearly as scary. What was scary, though, was the idea of day after day of sitting there waiting for something to happen. What if nothing happened? What if she sat there until there was no more food and she never saw anyone else? She didn’t think it was likely but the in the strange, silent atmosphere, anything seemed possible.

  She did an inventory in the kitchen to occupy her time. There was quite a bit of canned food because that was what she normally ate anyway. Easier to prepare. There wasn’t much in the refrigerator so she didn’t open it. The few items in there were probably bad already. She tried to plan ahead, to think about what she would do when the food ran out, but the sound from next door kept distracting her. When she couldn’t take it anymore, she made the decision to go investigate.

  Despite the vehicle in the driveway, she was sure there was no one home. The neighbors didn’t do quiet. Wherever everyone else was, that’s where the neighbors must be. But something was over there. Some forgotten piece equipment, one of the toys they were always messing with, something. Sonya told herself she was checking it out for their benefit, so when they came back their home would be there as they had left it. But she really knew what she was doing. She wanted to see what it was, and she wanted to see if there was anything in their apartment she could use.

  The front door was unlocked. That didn’t surprise Sonya. They weren’t the careful kind. The living room was the disaster she expected: holes in the dry-wall, stains on the carpet, battered and mismatched furniture, and for some reason she couldn’t decipher, four disconnected toilets in different colors arranged around a card table in the middle of the living room. She stood in the dim light, looking around. The sound was louder in here, but Sonya took the time to search the living room. In a drawer in a battered nightstand serving as an end-table to a floral print loveseat she found a small pistol and a box of bullets. She put the box in her cargo pants and picked up the pistol.

  She knew a little about shooting. Her dad carried a pistol in his truck, and he had taught her to shoot. This one was different than his, though. His was a semi-automatic. This was a revolver. After fumbling with it a bit, she opened out the cylinder and realized it was empty. She thought she could figure out how to load it and shoot it if she needed to. For now, just holding it in her hand made her feel both safer and somehow more nervous at the same time.

  She checked the kitchen. The shelves were mostly empty, but there was a box under the sink marked “Meals: Ready to Eat.” She knew about those. Her dad had been in the Army and had told her about them. He had complained about how awful they were, but she thought they might come in handy. Here was food, and food packaged to be light and last a long time. She pulled the box from under the sink and dragged it through the living room to the front porch. Another quick search around and she found the some keys on a peg by the front door, one of which had the Mitsubishi logo. The key to the Montero. She pocketed it as well. Her dad’s battered old truck wasn’t reliable, and if worse came to worse, she could use the Montero.

  Sonya felt it was time to deal with the sound. She had been putting it off. The sound had crept into her dreams the night before, causing her to have nightmares she could only half remember in daylight. But the half she could remember caused a cold chill to go down her spine. She entered the short hallway that led back to the bedrooms. The sound grew louder. She stopped. Shuffle, shuffle, thump. It came from the bedroom on the left. She glanced into the open door of the bedroom on the right. There were mattresses and dirty clothes scattered on the floor. She fought the impulse to search the room with the open door, to delay the confrontation with her fear. Sonya knew it was time to face her fear. She turned the doorknob of the bedroom on the left and pushed.

  In the Montero Sonya woke with a start. She had been dozing. The night before she had driven late, stopping only when she couldn’t go any further. She had slept poorly. The night had been long, and she had awakened often, peering into the darkness, making sure they weren’t out there. I’m getting sick again, she thought. Her muscles felt weak, her head wouldn’t clear, and she felt helpless. No. She couldn’t be sick now. Being sick might mean that they would get her. It meant not finding her father. And underneath it all, Sonya knew she wasn’t really sick. She was scared.

  The easiest thing to do would be to lie down. To quit. The night people would find her, and then it would be all over. Sonya would no longer have to worry about where to eat, where to get gas, how to find her father, how to keep going in a world that had stopped making sense. No more being afraid. She could just give up and everything would stop.

  “No,” Sonya said under her breath. She opened the door. She swung her legs out and reached up onto the dash to grab the pistol. The pistol was hot in her hand, almost burning her. But it was heavy, and the weight was comforting. “No,” she said more firmly. This was going to be tough. Her body was telling her to quit, but she had her mind focused. She looked back the way she came. She had passed a house several miles back. Then she looked up the road. The heat was causing the road to shimmer and this tree she had stopped under was the only shade in sight. Sonya made up her mind. Forward. She had to keep moving forward. Step by step, she started walking.

  The door to the bedroom swung open easily, revealing a darkened room. She could make out the square of light that was the window, but a sheet hung over it. The sheet was blue, and the blue light in the room made everything look strange. A scatter of mattresses and clothes in this room as well. No sign of what was causing the noise. Then from the closet: Shuffle, shuffle, thud. She
picked her way carefully across the bedroom, stepping over empty pizza boxes, discarded clothing. Shuffle, shuffle.... The sound stopped. Sonya felt a sense of waiting, a sense of…something. Something sensing her. Thud, thud, thud. The closet door vibrated.

  “Hello?” Sonya said, her voice breaking. “Is someone in there?” Every instinct told her to run, to leave, but she had to know. If someone was in there, if someone was sick, she had to find out. She stepped closer, turned the knob. The door opened outward, and Sonya was face to face with one of the neighbors. But he had changed. His face was paled, battered, covered with bruises. The skin was actually split in places. In the dim blue light, the cuts appeared black, but there was no blood running from them. Even in the dim light, Sonya could see that his eyes were white. There were no irises. She was frozen, but then the horror of what she was seeing caused her to start back, tripping over a mattress and falling to the floor. The guy’s arms came up, his hands reaching for where she had just been. Sonya scrambled backward on her elbows, feet kicking, gaining purchase every other kick, sliding over clothes and blankets and all the trash on the floor. The guy stepped out into the room, his hands still held out. He didn’t turn his head toward her, but he started moving in her direction. She rolled and crawled to the door just as he tripped over a mattress himself and went to the floor. She stood quickly, watching him until he started crawling toward her, struggling to rise again. She slammed the door just before he reached it, and the pounding began again.

  There was no water and Sonya was thirsty. She was worried because she had stopped sweating, but the crest of the rise she had seen when she started walking was much closer. She would reach it soon. She paused to look around. There was a heat haze in the air. All around her, soybean fields and cornfields reached as far as the eye could see. Here and there small clusters of trees stood, but at a distance from the road. A rutted track ran along the field to her right next to the road beneath power lines strung on wooden poles. A good sign, she hoped. She started walking again. From the crest of a rise she saw what she had been hoping to see. A farmhouse in the distance. She would find gas there, she hoped. At least there should be water. Maybe another vehicle, but if not, then at least gas.

  That last day at the house she had put everything she thought she would need in the Montero. Even outside the duplex she thought she had been able to hear the pounding. A voice inside her head asked her why she was running away. What if the neighbor was just sick? But she knew. That was more than sickness. She didn’t know what it was, but it was more than sickness. There had been no way she could even consider staying. As much as she wished now she had been better prepared, had planned better, had done more than just flee in panic, she still felt she had made the right decision. She would get to Florida. She would find her father. She didn’t have any real reason to know this, but she had hope. Hope was painful, but hope was all she had.

  Chapter 5 – Chase

  In the middle of the noonday parking lot of a Hy-Vee supermarket, Chase stood staring at the tinted glass windows that covered the front of the store. A four-cell flashlight was clutched in one hand, and in the other he held a baseball bat. He knew two things: One, he was hungry, and two, his normal world had been turned upside down. But most of all he was hungry, and right now.

  He hadn’t eaten since running from his house the day before. The noises in the garage drew him, and when he had tried the door again, it had opened easily. The beam of his flashlight revealed people on the garage floor. Some were dragging themselves around, and as he watched, one stood. He remembered at the time thinking it was some strange party game. But then he had noticed the ones not lying on the polished concrete floor. The ones who had caused him to flee in a panic, leave his safe haven and not return. It had been the ones pounding at the roll-up door leading to the outside world who had turned to face him when he swept the flashlight in their direction. The ones who, in the glaring halogen beam, revealed their white eyes and blackened tongues. White eyes. This he had seen clearly. They were blind, and yet he felt they were very aware of him, as if they had tuned into him, as if he were broadcasting on some frequency they were picking up and homing in on. He also remembered the blackness of their mouths. They’re sick, he thought. They’ve caught something, and they’re sick. When they began lurching toward him, he had slammed the door and run from his house into the late morning sun. The streets had been empty, and he wandered for hours, trying to find anyone who could help him or tell him what was going on. He had found no one.

  The sun beat down on Chase as he studied the storefront, but he was barely aware that he was sweating. The morning before he had left his parents’ house and wandered all day in shock. He had ended up in the park. Water had not been a problem. The water fountain in the park had still been working. That first night, he had slept in the gazebo on the west side of the park, nearest the police station, waiting for someone in charge to show up. He had wrapped up in an old tarp he had found, although it wasn’t really cold out. There had been no moon. The town had been incredibly silent. In the darkness, he could hear muted rustling sounds, possibly even footsteps, but he hadn’t moved. One glimmer of artificial light and he would have been on his feet, running to find the source. But the dragging sounds he had heard had not clearly been footsteps, and he had lain there, trying to silence the sound of his breathing. It had been a long, wakeful night.

  Chase walked to the windows of the Hy-Vee, his nerves taut. He leaned the bat against the hand-rail next to the door and held the flashlight against his side with his arm. Placing his forehead against the glass, he cupped his hands around his eyes to cut the glare. The checkout lanes were empty, as were the aisles he could see. He scanned slowly from left to right and back again, seeing nothing alarming. The store appeared normal. He had seen some things yesterday that had puzzled him. At a gas station not far from his house, cars had been lined up down the block, but each car appeared empty. Many had the doors left open, as if they had been abandoned in a hurry.

  Chase picked up his bat and stepped to the door. He tried pushing and pulling the doors open, but the doors which should have automatically opened at his approach in a normal world didn’t budge. He resigned himself to breaking and entering. He swung the bat, but his first effort only spider-webbed the thick plate glass. His second swing shattered it, and he carefully cleared the shards remaining in the frame with the barrel of the bat. Crouching under the aluminum cross-bar, he entered the store.

  He stopped by the rack of red vending machines with their cargo of glow-in-the-dark aliens, sticky hands, and plastic jewelry. He listened but heard nothing. The heat in the supermarket was not as bad as it had been in the parking lot, but the air was close and the smell was horrendous. Here and there the floor was scattered with cans and packages, but most things seemed to be in order. He supposed what he smelled was what happened when cooling units went out in a store with a fully-stocked deli and meats section. He pulled his t-shirt up over his nose, but it didn’t help much.

  He grabbed a cart from beside the door and put the bat in it. He had carefully thought through what he wanted. He wanted canned stuff. He wanted tuna. He wanted granola bars.

  The cart had a wobbly wheel that caused it to bang as he moved forward. The crash, crash, crash filled the empty store. Chase tried slowing down, and considered grabbing another cart, but he was beginning to grow afraid. He wanted to be out in the bright sunshine and fresh air. The further he moved from the sunlight filtering in through the tinted glass at the front of the store, the more his unease grew. He turned on the flashlight even though it wasn’t really dark. He wanted to be done in here, and in a hurry. He pointed his flashlight at the suspended signs at the head of each aisle. He selected an aisle and started down it, flashlight darting from one side to the other, searching desperately for something he could recognize as food. Halfway down the aisle he paused at a display with Oreos stacked neatly as high as his head. As he reached for a package, he froze. A sound. A low squeak, like th
e faint echo of an athletic shoe on a gym floor. He pointed the flashlight back toward the darkest part of the store. The light reflected from the glass cases of the deli, but nothing moved.

  He realized he didn’t want to turn around to look the other way. He knew there was something behind him, creeping up on him, blocking him from the entrance and he would have to go back into the darkness. He imagined white eyes and a blackened mouth, pale fingers reaching. He jumped backward and spun, the beam of the flashlight slashing around and finding…an empty aisle. With an even greater sense of urgency, Chase strode rapidly down the aisle, grabbing whatever was in reach to throw in the cart. At the end of the aisle, he turned quickly up the next, beam of the flashlight darting ahead and behind quickly, and then once he was satisfied, back to the shelves. Down the third aisle he fairly flew, and his cart was quickly filling, although he didn’t know how much of what he grabbed would be useful. As he turned the dark corner at the back of the store, his light briefly illuminated a figure standing behind the deli counter.