After Everything Else (Book 1): Creeper Rise

by Brett D. Houser

  Next to her, Marilyn started sobbing quietly. Sonya rose up on an elbow and tried to see her face in the darkness. Sonya found her hand and held it, and Marilyn quieted. In the front seat, Honey whined and peered out the window. Chase swerved, causing Sonya and Marilyn to shift together. Sonya had never been very close to anyone except her father. She kept the people she called her friends at a distance: they were never invited to her house, and she rarely accepted invitations to their houses. Sometimes boys paid attention to her, but she shut them down quickly when they let her know they were interested. Sometimes she felt like she was being too mean, like maybe she was missing something. Other girls talked about boys, and dating, and who they liked or who liked them. It seemed silly to Sonya, but it also seemed…important. Why all the fuss if it wasn’t important?

  She thought about Chase. She thought it was strange that they had only known each other for a couple of days, but when Marilyn had shown up, Sonya had been protective of their…whatever it was. She liked that she and Chase got along. She would be thinking there had to be an easier way to do something, and before she could say anything, he would have found the easier way. He seemed to be a step or two ahead of her in that respect. He seemed to be always trying to make her laugh by saying sarcastic things, but she thought maybe whether she laughed or not wasn’t really that important, and he was doing most of it for himself. Maybe if he joked about things, he could push them away a little. She wondered if he did that for the same reason she thought about her father when things got tense.

  She also liked his flashes of kindness. That wasn’t something she expected. She hadn’t known the quarterback at her school. She’d had classes with some of the jocks, but from what she could tell, they weren’t much like Chase. They were always goofing on somebody or running somebody down. Not all of them, but most of them. And none of them had time for her. She remembered once dropping her pen in class, and this guy in a letterman jacket watched her get out of her desk, walk back, and pick it up when it was lying not six inches from his foot. She remembered Chase making sure she always had water when she needed it, always going in first wherever they stopped, always making sure she was all right.

  She thought about the girls she had known, and the way they acted when they thought a boy liked them, or when they liked a boy. She felt she was different. She would notice the quiet guys, the ones busy doing homework, or drawing, or reading. She would feel something, but never enough of that something to talk to them. And she figured there was probably a reason she chose the quiet ones: she didn’t want them talking to her either. Chase was the exact opposite of those guys in lots of ways. She wanted to think of him as a brother or a cousin; that would probably be for the best. Still, there had been that little feeling when he had walked out of the woods with Marilyn in tow….

  She wondered what was wrong with her. So many dead, so much going on, and she was thinking like that. What she should really be focused on was finding her dad. She knew that’s what he would be thinking about. And then it hit her. He would come looking for her. What if they passed each other?

  She was wide awake. Should she stop Chase? Should they all go back to Omaha and wait for her father to come save them? What was the right thing to do? She wanted to crawl up and talk to Chase right then, but Marilyn had thrown an arm across her and was still clutching her hand. Besides, the dog was riding shotgun. It would wait until morning. She tried to relax, but her mind raced. Eventually, her thoughts and worries became broken, fragmented, and stopped making sense completely. Exhaustion at last pulled her down into unconsciousness.

  Chapter 16 – Marilyn

  Marilyn fell asleep quickly enough after they arranged the back of the Suburban into a sleeping area. She and Sonya had lain down shortly after sunset while Chase and Honey chased the headlights through the darkness. She wondered if she was doing the right thing, leaving with these two strangers, but with a certain amount of resignation, she went. She lacked the emotional energy to do anything except follow the easiest path and apart from just lying down and dying, this was the easiest path.

  Sleep wouldn’t stay, though. She woke in the darkness, not sure how long she had been out. The movement of the Suburban, the proximity of Sonya, the weight of the days before, and the thought of the days to come kept her teetering on the edge of sleep, not allowing her to fall back into oblivion. She thought about her mother. Dead. She thought about her father. Also dead. And her brothers, and her neighbors, and her pastor, and all the people from church and school and most likely everyone in town. Find your reason for surviving, Chase had said. She couldn’t think of one. But she couldn’t think of a reason to die, either. She hovered on the edge of unconsciousness, but each time the world took that sideways jump that meant sleep was almost on her a new thought about someone gone, a new realization about a face she would never see again, a new jolt of sadness hit her. Finally, she felt the Suburban stop. The vibration from the motor stopped. A short electric whine signified the windows coming down slightly. Another series of motor sounds as Chase put the seat back and reclined it. She listened to him shift and turn in his seat for a long time, muttering to himself, then finally his breathing evened out. Beside her, Sonya was breathing steadily as well. Marilyn could just make out the form of Honey curled in the front seat.

  She wished she could join them in sleep. The night was dark, but she thought she could make out the gray beginnings of dawn around them. She could hear frogs, but none of the sounds of the forest. She knew they were probably past that, out into the flats past Sikeston before getting to the big river. She felt every ounce of weight in her exhausted muscles dragging her down, making her lie still, but there was more than gravity at work on her. She lacked the will to make her muscles move. She felt she might as well have been carved from stone. She turned her mind to prayer.

  Our Father, she thought, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth…. She wondered if this was God’s will. This seemed so cruel. At church, they always talked about the kindness of God, the goodness of God. How kind an act was it to have an eight year old boy die in front of her, then have him get up and try to kill her as well? My ways are not your ways. She wondered about Satan and the devil and how that fit in. Satan was against mankind. He could do this. That seemed to be the easy answer. But God would have to let Satan do this. He had let Satan try to break Job. He had let Satan tempt Jesus. Would He destroy the world? He had done it before. She knew the bible said He would do it again, but this? And why let her live when so many people died?

  Marilyn’s mind ran on and on, question after question. After so long, she began to feel a little like she did while meditating, except she was fully alert. She was aware of time passing around her, the movements of everyone in the car, the breathing, and, well, the smell of three people and a dog in a small area. But just like while she was meditating, she felt no desire to move. Her brain raced, her questions kept coming. She didn’t find all the answers, but many of her questions were answered by biblical passages, even if she didn’t like the answers. She lay staring out the window at the darkness until she noticed a bird singing. The bright sound pushed at the darkness, and she noticed the darkness had turned gray and then the gray light began to be tinged with pink. She rose on one elbow. Near the car, on a compass flower stem that towered above the surrounding roadside weeds a red-wing black bird perched. She watched as it twitched its tail, sang one final note, and flitted away. She lay back down, and closed her tired eyes.

  Part Three: If Any Civilization is to Survive

  If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.

  Ayn Rand

  Ayn Rand’s “philosophy” is nearly perfect in its immorality.

  Gore Vidal

  Chapter 17 – Chase

  Chase sat next to Sonya in the middle of Highway 60 on a blanket munching a granola bar and drinking a warm Gatorade. Chase kept an eye on the Suburban, which was a hun
dred feet back down the road. Sitting closer would have been better, but the smell of road-kill creeper surrounded the vehicle. Sonya ate nothing, which worried Chase a little.

  “Eat something. You look like you could blow away.” He looked at her to see how she would take the gentle teasing. She seemed unperturbed.

  “I’ve never been a big breakfast person.” He followed her eyes to see where she was looking. She seemed to be studying the massive bridge just ahead, the upper portion of which was just visible over the treetops. “What happens if we get to the bridge and there’s no way to take the Suburban across?” Her question addressed the very issue that had been bothering him since he realized they would again be crossing the Mississippi River, and the only way to do that was by bridge. The experiences on previous bridges didn’t leave him optimistic about the chances of the bridge being clear. If cars were jammed guardrail to guardrail all the way across, they had to make a tough decision.

  “Two options. One, we abandon Suburban and walk across, find a vehicle on the other side. That means carrying everything or completely restocking. Two, we try to find another bridge somewhere.” He cursed himself for not trying harder to find an atlas. He had checked a few cars and a few gas stations along the way, but apparently people had stopped carrying them. He realized probably too late that his best bet would be to look in a big rig, but since thinking that, he hadn’t seen any. Just local pulp trucks, and they didn’t need atlases. “But another bridge is no guarantee, either. We could check every bridge from here to New Orleans and they might all be blocked. I’m thinking our best option is to walk it and get another vehicle, as much as that would suck.” Sonya nodded.

  They sat enjoying the cool of the morning. The sun was well-up, but the heat of the day hadn’t started. Chase told Sonya about when he was a little boy, getting up early on summer mornings, before his parents, and going downstairs and grabbing a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter, and then going back up to his room and climbing out on the roof to eat it and watch the world wake up. While he told the story, he found himself tearing up a little. Home. He didn’t miss his parents. He missed a place where he knew what was going to happen every day, where things made sense even if they weren’t ideal.

  To lighten the mood, he changed the subject. “Have you seen the signs for the next town?”

  “Yeah. Cairo, Illinois. So?”

  “So haven’t you read Huckleberry Finn? Cairo is where the Ohio River joins the Mississippi. They passed it in the night, missed the turn, and that’s how they ended up in such deep doo-doo for the rest of the book.”

  Sonya shrugged. “Yeah, I guess I remember that part. It didn’t seem that important when I read it.”

  Chase feigned shock. “Not important? Not important? It’s only the one event that made all the following action possible!”

  Sonya raised her eyebrows and started to reply when Honey, still in the Suburban with the sleeping Marilyn, began barking. Chase turned to look back, and four creepers had come out of the weed-infested ditches and surrounded the vehicle. He tensed, and Sonya must have felt his alarm because she turned. When she saw the creepers, she screamed.

  The creepers all turned as one toward the couple sitting on the blanket. Two of them appeared to be fairly fresh and moved quickly. It was apparent they had been pretty healthy before they turned. One, the man, wore running shoes (or at least one running shoe – the other was missing), running shorts and a tank top. One bicep appeared to have been chewed on and had started to rot, but otherwise he was whole. The other was a woman, just as freshly turned. The third was not so fresh and hobbled on what was an obviously broken ankle: the foot was turned around backwards. It wore a suit, but the suit was torn in several places and rotting flesh appeared in the tears when it moved. The last one was in the worst shape. Most of the skin from its face was gone and the only clue to gender was the longer hair. The body had rotted and bloated into a pulpy mass, barely covered by sweat pants and a t-shirt. This one appeared to be confused, turning back and forth between the barking dog and the couple sitting on the blanket.

  Chased mentally cursed himself as an idiot for not bringing the rifle. “Sonya, start running. Go down the road. I’ll try to get around them and get in the Suburban, and then I’ll come pick you up,” Chase said under his breath.

  “Are you sure? We can both go. Marilyn can catch up to us….” Sonya began, but trailed off when Chase held up the keys.

  “Go. It’ll be okay.” The first creeper was within fifteen feet, the second close behind. The third was well behind, and the fourth appeared to have locked in on them as well. Chase prepared himself to weave between them, but just the thought that one of them could touch him made him hesitate. He felt the adrenaline in his system telling him to go-go-go, but then Marilyn called from the Suburban.

  “GET DOWN.”

  Chase looked past the creepers. Marilyn stood beside the open door of the Suburban holding the rifle to her shoulder. Chase retreated back to where Sonya was still back-pedaling, and pulled her to the ground. A gunshot split the air, and the fourth creeper, the one closest to the Suburban, hit the ground. Chase watched as Marilyn, with an almost eerie calm, aimed again and dropped the third creeper. The two leading creepers stopped and begun to turn and Marilyn fired two shots in quick succession. The woman creeper dropped, but the man only staggered and half-turned, revealing that the bullet had only grazed its skull, causing a flap of hair and bloodless flesh to fall down over one white eye. It seemed to sense Chase and Sonya again and started toward them. Chase half-rose but another shot sounded and the creeper dropped with an exploded skull not six feet from where Chase crouched. He stood slowly, barely aware of Sonya’s grip on his arm. He turned to her, and she was deathly pale. She was staring at his legs. The gore from the last creeper freckled his shoes and jeans. He found himself giggling slightly. “Now I have two reasons to change my pants.”

  Chase put the Suburban in park and surveyed the scene around them. They were atop a levee and could see in all directions. There were no creepers in sight. He reminded himself that didn’t mean they weren’t there; they just weren’t moving around. Yet. The sound of the Suburban could draw them out. He looked at Sonya beside him, still pale, kneading her hands together in her lap and muttering to herself. Marilyn in the back seat, however, seemed to be calm, turning her head side to side as she looked out each window.

  “Let’s take a moment to regroup before we get to the bridge,” Chase suggested. “There’s a chance we’ll be walking for a bit. Somehow, I don’t think it’ll be easy, no matter what we find there.” The others agreed, and they stepped out of the Suburban. Marilyn went to the rear and grabbed a granola bar and a bottle of water from their dwindling supplies. They stepped away from the vehicle, sitting in a line on the edge of the pavement, Chase in the middle. Honey lay between Chase and Marilyn.

  “Marilyn, where did you learn to shoot like that?” he asked.

  “I do some hunting. Dad couldn’t wait for the boys to get old enough, so he took me to the deer woods. Turkey, too. That rifle is okay. I can see where a shotgun might be better, though.” Chase looked at her in wonder.

  “Are you any good with a pistol? Sonya has one.” Marilyn shook her head.

  “No, just hunting weapons. I can field dress a deer, though, and I think I could butcher one out, at least enough to get some meat. If we had some way to store it. Or we could at least eat well for a night or two until it started to go over.” She looked at the granola bar. “We’re going to need some real food soon enough.”

  Chase nodded. “Biggest problem with real food is storage. We can get a cooler that plugs into the lighter to keep stuff cold. Sonya’s dad is a truck driver; he has one. We may have to chance an interstate to hit up some big trucks. Atlases, coolers, other stuff. We’ve been trying to find a place that would have some gear, too. Camp cooking stuff.”

  Marilyn said, “I had some stuff. I left it in my backpack at home.” The calm she had held all
morning slipped but she quickly recovered. Chase watched the quiet confidence return to her face. Sonya leaned forward and addressed Marilyn.

  “So you can point a gun and pull a trigger. But how can you shoot at someone like that?” Chase nudged Sonya. He was afraid that Marilyn’s new-found confidence (and usefulness) might be fragile. But she just shrugged off Sonya’s question.

  “Those things are not ‘someones.’ Those things are just things. What was left behind when the people died and their souls moved on. And for whatever reason, they are moving around. There’s some stuff in the bible that talks about that kind of thing. Zechariah talks about plagues of people like walking corpses. But it’s not exactly the same. It doesn’t feel right. Anyway, those things are not people. And shooting them is not a problem for me.” She took a long drink from her water, finishing the bottle.

  Chase was intrigued. “So you don’t think this is God’s doing?”

  Marilyn shook her head. “Everything is God’s doing. But this,” she waved her arm around, “doesn’t seem like what I read in the Bible. This is something different. But it is God’s will.”

  They sat in silence for a while, Chase growing more curious but wanting to be careful about approaching the next topic on his mind. Sonya made a move to stand up, but Chase put a hand on her arm, gave her a look, and then turned to Marilyn.

  “You’re pretty big on this God thing, huh?”

  She turned to him. “Yes. I am.”

  He returned her gaze. “So…when we found you in the forest that night you said something about seeing the soul leave someone who had been bitten and Satan enter. I really think it’s important that we understand that. What did you mean?”

  At first she was reluctant, but Chase pushed. Finally she seemed to give up and started talking. Chase sat listening intently as Marilyn told of finding Seth and then watching him die. She told the story in a monotone: flat, emotionless, as if she had been a witness and was relating it back. She told about going downstairs and crying, and of losing track of time for a bit. Chase thought about how little he had gone through in comparison as she talked. She said there was a period where she wasn’t sure if she had slept or continued doing things, but she did remember digging a grave for Seth in the pasture next to the house. She said it was probably too shallow, but her muscles and fatigue hadn’t allowed her to dig any more. Then she had gone up to get him to prepare him for burial. She told them Seth had met her at the top of the stairs. She remembered turning and running back down the stairs, and then the sound of that little body falling down the stairs, and the clear snap of bones. She had stopped and turned when she reached the door. He had been lying at the bottom of the stairs, neck broken and head at an impossible angle. His arms and legs were no longer moving, but his jaw was still working, and his blackened tongue had been darting in and out while his white eyes glared up at her.