Slowly, Chase swung the flashlight’s beam back to the figure. In the white beam, those pale eyes regarded him with utter indifference and the hands rose and reached in his direction. Even though Chase was easily fifteen feet away and a chest-high counter stood between them, he felt immediately threatened. The man was young, dressed in a mechanic’s blue shirt with a name stitched in a flattened red oval over the breast pocket. A ragged tear started just below the man’s hairline and extended down to his right eyebrow, but the wound wasn’t bleeding. He lunged toward Chase, striking the counter and rebounding, dropping to the floor and out of sight. Chase started back, crashing into his loaded cart and sending it shuddering down the aisle behind him.
Chase’s heart pounded in his ears and the hair on the back of his neck stood up. His cart was almost full, and he was done. He was getting out, but he was not going to turn his back on the location where he had last seen the man. He backed down the aisle, one hand extended to locate the cart and his eyes glued to the deli counter. He began arguing with himself. One part of his mind told him, That was one of the sick people. A deeper, more primitive part of his brain said, That was not a person. Not anymore. And Chase felt this was right. There had been no feeling of humanity in those eyes, no sense of another person. Halfway up the aisle, Chase started when his hand encountered the cart. He had been expecting it, but his nerves were so on edge that when he touched it, he felt like a jolt of electricity had struck his hand. He could see no movement from the small section of the deli counter still visible at the end of the aisle. He turned to begin a dash toward the front of the store, pushing the cart in front of him. That was when he saw the silhouettes of two more figures between him and daylight coming toward him down the aisle.
Instinct took over. Chase pushed the cart at the figures as hard as he could. The weight of the cart wasn’t much, but it knocked over the first figure, a woman. She was an older woman in a skirt, and when she fell her legs went up in the air, exposing mottled purple thighs and modest white panties. Granny panties, Chase thought distractedly. The tangle of woman and cart blocked the second approaching figure, causing him to go down as well. He was overweight, and looked like he might have been the store manager; his chinos and white shirt dress shirt with the store logo were covered in dark stains.
Chase darted back down the aisle towards the deli counter. The mechanic hadn’t reappeared. If he could just hook left and get up the next aisle, he’d be clear. He would be in the sunshine. He knew these people (or whatever they were) would not be able to keep up with him on open ground. As he rounded the corner, the path was clear. Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted the mechanic climb to his feet behind the deli counter. He sprinted up the aisle, but as he approached midway, two more figures moved into the aisle between him and the light. He hadn’t grabbed his bat. He really wished he had grabbed his bat. He was going too fast to stop, and he made a decision. He pushed himself as fast as he could go, and as he approached the figures, he dropped into a slide to go between them. His shoulder clipped the legs of the one on the right, and the thing went down, almost falling on him but missing when he rolled to the right and over onto his stomach. Before he completely stopped he had pushed himself up to his feet, spun, and took off at a dead run again. He weaved through the check-out stands, dove toward the door and under the crossbar and scrambled back out onto the baking asphalt of the parking lot. He didn’t stop or even turn to look until he was far out into the middle. His heart thudding in his chest, shaking his whole body, he stopped, gasping for air, and looked back.
At first, there was no movement. Then he saw them: the manager, the grandmother, and what must have been one of the two he had slid past, a guy about his age in a pair of black athletic shorts and a Lakers jersey. They stood at the door pressing against each other and the aluminum bar, grasping at the air, staring at him with their white eyes. As he watched, a fourth, a younger woman in a tank top and sweat pants crawled between their feet and under the bar, out to the edge of the shadow of the storefront. When she reached the sunlight, she stopped. Chase could see that something was wrong with her leg: the knee was bent inward at an impossible angle. Her face showed no sign of the pain she should be in. The creature’s face was blank, mindless, but Chase thought he sensed in her a patient frustration.
Chapter 6 – Marilyn
Marilyn stayed off the roads and away from houses and towns as much as possible. The roads weren’t safe, especially at night, and the further she could stay away from them, the better she felt. Honey had trailed her since leaving the woman’s house, and eventually the golden retriever had begun walking with her. Marilyn was glad of the company.
The first night she had camped in a small clearing off the dirt road, and Honey had lay nearby while she slept. There had been nothing out of the ordinary. The next night had been a different story. She had arrived at Highway 60 with high hopes of flagging someone down and catching a ride. The highway was a four-lane that usually had a steady stream of cars and trucks. That wasn’t the case now, though. There were plenty of cars and trucks on the highway, but they were stopped in the lanes, parked on the sides, parked in the median. And they were all empty. There wasn’t a soul around. Marilyn had run through reasons they might be there, where the people might be. She considered some kind of disaster, maybe a chemical spill. Nothing else made sense. She started walking toward home, knowing that eventually she would come across someone.
Honey had acted strangely the entire time she was walking, bolting from the road into open fields for no reason and then slowly returning. She would occasionally jump when passing forested areas and creep down the center of the median. Between the dog’s behavior and all those cars and no people, Marilyn soon found herself on edge.
A day full of fear and so much walking with a pack exhausted her, and despite wanting to find someone, get somewhere, find out what was going on, she realized she was going to have to camp out again. She didn’t set up her tent when she stopped for the day in the late afternoon. There had been no sign of rain moving in and there wasn’t much wind, so she had just stomped down the grass in a fallow field just across the highway from a wooded area and laid out her sleeping bag. She had eaten only a little of her dwindling supply of food, sharing a bite or two with Honey. She tried to rest, to sleep, even though it was still daylight, but she could not get the woman out of her mind. Honey had lay a little ways away from her, but when the sun started dropping, the dog crept closer and closer to Marilyn. Finally she was close enough that Marilyn could feel Honey trembling. The dog was terrified.
She understood why when dusk fell. She watched in horror as people walked out of the edges of wooded areas and crawled out of a box culvert that opened in an embankment beneath the highway about one hundred yards from where she had set up. She knew why Honey had acted as she had all day. In the dying light of the sunset had seen the white eyes and black mouths, the staggering gaits. Most had seemed to have no direction, just wandering about, but then as if hearing some unseen order, all faced to the west and started moving in that direction. One small girl lagged behind the others, but moved with just as much determination. None of them wandered more than a few yards from the highway and median.
She expected Honey to bolt, to run away. Instead, Honey had grown very still. For hours Marilyn watched the shadows, singly and in small groups, moving westward on the highway. After the sun dropped completely, a nearly-full moon had risen. Shadow after dark shadow had moved by, and although the details were not clear, she could see well enough to know by their movements that these people were all suffering from the same illness. Except she wasn’t so sure it was only an illness anymore. A sense of wrongness emanated from them, nauseating her and filling her with dread.
She feared for her family. Something was causing these people to be like this. On one level she couldn’t believe this sort of thing could happen to her family. She told herself God would look out for them, but in the recesses of her mind she began to doubt. In Isaiah it was writt
en, My ways are not your ways. In the darkness she didn’t sleep, but she imagined her homecoming and it was like a dream: her questions about what was going on would be answered, her family would be glad to see her, her father would apologize for not coming to get her and she would understand because there was no way he could leave the rest of the family while this was going on. She held on to this vision until dawn. Shortly after the sun came up, she saw one last man stagger down the side of the embankment and crawl into the culvert. With his disappearance, Marilyn relaxed slightly, and exhaustion overtook her. She slept.
When she awakened later that morning, the sun was above the trees on the east side of the clearing. Honey was no longer by her side. She checked her watch, and it was ten ‘o clock. Her mouth was dry. She drained the last of her water, checked her compass, and set out east. Within moments, Honey had come bounding to her, wet and muddy. She must have found a creek. She seemed to have recovered from the night before, but she still shied from culverts and wooded areas. When the highway bent to the north, Marilyn continued east, striking out across a field, putting the highway and the people of the night behind her, she hoped.
The fourth day, Marilyn knew she would make it home the following day. She was exhausted. Her legs were scratched, her clothes were torn, and her feet were blistered, but she had covered the ground. She had used back-roads when possible, and followed a power line for a long distance, but often she had been going cross-country, through forest and brush and up and down the hills. Honey had stayed with her for the most part. Sometimes she would disappear for extended periods of time, but she always returned. Each time she came back, Marilyn was glad. She tried to distract herself by worrying about Honey when she disappeared, but she was really more afraid for her family.
Beneath her fear for her family and anxiety to be home, she felt a little pride in her accomplishment. She thought if she pushed it she could arrive home just at dark or shortly after, but she decided against it. They lived on the outskirts of town, close enough that she was afraid of what she might have to face in that last stretch of the journey. She had avoided most of the Sick Ones (so she had begun calling them in her head) in her travel, but a close call at a house where she had stopped for water had made her think things were getting worse. Honey had warned her that someone was in the house, but she desperately needed water, so she took a chance and filled her water bottles at the outside faucet. The Sick One there, a large man wearing only boxer shorts, had crashed through a battered screen door and followed her through a stand of trees until she had crossed an open field where he had stopped halfway and turned back.
As she set up her camp on the highest, most open ground she could find, she wondered if she was holding back from going home because she feared what she would find. But exhaustion and logic finally told her she was doing the right thing. Before she lay down for the night, she scanned her surroundings for any type of movement. She looked at Honey, who was lying at a distance, eyeing her in case Marilyn decided to give her any more food. Marilyn couldn’t give her anything, because there was nothing. Her hunger woke her every few hours until dawn. Each time she sat up, looked around, then dropped back to sleep. Her body seemed to be getting accustomed to sleeping in intervals, but not to the hunger that was wearing her down.
She waited until well into morning to break camp. There was no sense in trying to move around before then; the Sick Ones, if they were in the town, would be out. After a couple of hours walking she came to the edge of the family property. Honey was prancing ahead of her, giving no indication that any Sick Ones were nearby. She passed the area where she had once camped, and the thought crossed her mind that maybe she should feel guilty. If she had been home maybe this wouldn’t have happened. She wondered if she had been selfish in wanting to get away on her own.
She approached the house. Everything looked normal. Her father’s truck was gone, but her mother’s Buick was in the driveway. She could see her youngest brother’s bicycle lying in the shade of the silver maple out front, but there was no sign of anyone moving around, and that was strange. Her brothers were always outside during the day. Her mother insisted on it. While one or two of them might have been at a friend’s house, it was strange that none of the three would be outside doing something. Her heart pounded a little harder and she hurried a little more, a stitch developing in her side as she broke into a shuffling run across the field. She slipped out of the straps of her backpack, dropped it, and broke into a full run, climbed the five-strand barbed wire fence that separated the yard from the pasture, crossed the yard and dashed up the steps. Honey stayed by her side. The door was unlocked and she burst inside, Honey close behind and whining.
Marilyn ran from room to room, calling for her mother, her brothers, her father, but there was no response. In the kitchen, there were dishes on the table in the breakfast nook. Flies buzzed around, landing on the yellow remains of an over-easy egg and on the crusts of toast her brother Jimmy always left despite her father’s urgings that the crust was the best part. And then Marilyn began to really panic, because her mother would never have left the house with dirty dishes on the table.
Marilyn sat at the table, sipping water from a glass, Honey at her feet. She had cleared the dishes and washed them in the sink. Her mother would have been proud of Marilyn for clearing the dishes, but not about the dog in her kitchen. She had repeatedly told all of her children time and again that animals were for the outside.
The water from the tap tasted very good to Marilyn after days of drinking from a canteen. Her father had complained a little about the taste when they had gone on city water, but at least they still had water when the power to the well failed. She had eaten canned tuna on crackers with mandarin oranges in syrup for lunch, and the hunger she had been feeling from days on short rations disappeared. She had fed Honey some Vienna sausages from way back in the pantry. No one in the house would eat them.
Before eating, Marilyn had searched the house and all the outbuildings, but there was no one here, and no signs of where they might have gone. Marilyn didn’t even know what day they had left. Judging by the remains of breakfast, it had been a weekday. Weekends were pancakes, waffles, eggs, hash browns: the works. And her father’s place hadn’t been set. He usually just had a bowl of cereal on weekday mornings and left before everyone else woke up. That explained the truck being gone. The dishes were crusted hard, so it hadn’t been today. It may have been yesterday, or two days before, or maybe even a week before. Marilyn just couldn’t tell.
She couldn’t just sit and wait, though. She had walked this far, and nothing had gone as she had imagined it. The longer she sat and thought, the more her faith that her family was safe failed her. She had to do something. She wasn’t ready to venture too far from the house yet. Someone might come home. Someone might show up. And she felt safe. She looked outside and checked her watch. It was only three in the afternoon. She wanted to be home when evening started to set in, but she had enough time to get to the neighbors’ house and back. Then she realized she didn’t have to walk any more. Her mother’s car was in the drive, and from where she was sitting she could see the keys hanging from the hook by the door. With new resolve and a sense of purpose, she felt her hope return. She grabbed the keys from and banged out the screen door, heading toward the car, Honey trailing close behind and leaping into to the car when Marilyn opened the door.
At first glance the neighbor’s house had been much like her own: empty. She had knocked, but there had been no response. When she tried the door, it was unlocked. She didn’t feel like she had at the Sick One woman’s house. This was almost a second home. Their families had been close, and she had spent a lot of time growing up in this house while her parents had played cards with the Obermanns. She had also babysat here. The Obermann’s only child, a boy named Seth, had been born when Marilyn was ten. She had started babysitting when he was three. She had awakened many times on the sofa to the sound of the Obermanns coming in after an evening at the Fel
lowship Hall at church. Once she had even stayed the night when they had gone on a retreat.
She stepped inside cautiously, motioning for Honey to stay outside. Honey was very watchful, but not frightened. She sat obediently at the open door. There were no sounds of anyone at home. Everything was in place, right down to Seth’s muddy tennis shoes on a newspaper by the door. She walked through the living room, glancing at the stairs that led up to the bedrooms on the second floor. She walked through the dining room and into the kitchen. There, she found things in much the same shape as they had been at her own house. Dishes on the table, all three settings. But Seth’s dishes were pushed to the side, and in his place was an empty box of crackers and a jar of peanut butter. Marilyn stopped, puzzled. “Seth?” she whispered. Then louder, “Seth? Are you here?” She listened. Nothing. She walked back through the dining room, and then the living room. She started upstairs, and then stopped. “Anyone? Hello?” She turned back down the steps and started for the open front door where Honey was staring fixedly at the top of the stairs behind her. She spun quickly. Standing up at the top of the stairs, pale and swaying slightly, stood Seth.
Part Two: Almost Any How
He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.
Friedrich Nietszche
Chapter 7 – Chase
Chase lay sweating in the Suburban. The windows were down a few inches, but there wasn’t enough breeze to reach inside. He tried to lie completely still and catch some sleep. He had tried to block the sunlight coming in the windows with some flattened boxes he found in a dumpster behind a convenience store, but broad shafts of light came in through the many gaps. He was miserable, but come nightfall, he knew it would be worse in some ways. The creepers would be out then, so he planned to drive as much as possible.
After Everything Else (Book 1): Creeper Rise Page 4