Crawlerz | Book 4 | From The Ashes

by Merritt, R. S.

  “Yeah, I’m just going to keep us on this side of the inlet for a few…” The guy driving the boat was staring in awe at the massive numbers of infected crawling all over one another. It was obvious he wasn’t going to be sleeping well after seeing that display.

  “Are they like that every night?” LeBron asked.

  The chief shrugged. “More or less. They’ve been getting worse as time wears on. I imagine at some point a derelict ship or something may float through the inlet and they’ll storm the cape. Or maybe an ultra-low tide hits us and they’re able to make it across. Those ones jumping for it now. They might not be able to swim but that doesn’t mean the current can’t carry them to the shore if they land in the right place.”

  “The chief here’s just full of happy thoughts. Sprinkle some Pixie dust on him he could probably just fly to the other side.” Haywood joked. All of them were feeling that itchy sensation in their brains. They’d spent too long on the cape. They were going to have to get reacclimated to being miserable and terrified all the time again.

  “Look. They’re starting to scatter. They feel the sun coming.” Yue said in an odd sing song. The boat crew all gave her weird looks. Her travel companions tried to act like it was normal for people to talk like that. They were doing their best not to draw attention to her weirdness.

  Weird or not her description was accurate. Where five minutes before you could barely see the shoreline through the mob of crawlerz now it was hard to locate even a single one of the infected. The sun rose revealing a shoreline that was devoid of life. It was impossible to tell from this distance that there’d been at least a thousand crawlerz across the water less than fifteen minutes prior. Their driver turned the wheel and headed towards the dock.

  “Where’d they all go? It’s like they just vanish.” The chief asked. It was a rhetorical question he was asking while looking at the dock they were slowly approaching. To everyone’s discomfort Yue answered him anyway.

  “The earth, under the leaves, into the homey darkness above and below the basements, into the ground with the wriggling worms, under the wrecks, anywhere and everywhere the light can’t reach. The stalker ones hang back in the darkness waiting. They’re looking and feeling for us. They know we may come by.” Yue did that sing song thing again. They were going to need to force feed her some anti-depressants if she couldn’t get that under control.

  Everyone shifted around awkwardly when Yue was done with her eerie little monologue. Luckily there was just a few seconds of that before they were all jumping into action as they ran up on the dock. There was no tying the boat to the pier. They wanted to be able to bury the throttle and get out of there if something started happening. They formed a quick line and hustled everyone off the boat onto the dock. Everyone’s gear was handed over and the boat immediately shoved off.

  “They’re not taking any chances, are they?” Drew said a little spitefully. He thought it was a little lame to leave people standing on a dock while you got away from it as fast as possible instead of hanging out to help them if they needed it.

  “Yeah. Let’s follow their lead. No more talking until we’re in the trucks.” Jeff announced. It was amazing how quickly they’d gotten out of practice. Based on the activity they’d just seen from the infected on the ground they were standing on it made sense to keep their mouths shut. If they were close enough to a buried crawler who heard them chit chatting, then the sun being out might not be enough to stop it before it was able to get its teeth into one of them.

  They walked through the mist of the early dawn up to the road where the trucks were neatly parked side by side. Each of the trucks had a big crew cab so they could all fit. There were extra containers of gas in the truck beds along with other supplies. Before they got too close to the trucks, they paused and let Yue do her thing to make sure it was safe. Even after she gave them the nod that it was all clear they still approached with caution. Yue would be the first one to say not to trust the oddball sixth sense she’d somehow ended up developing. It didn’t hurt her feelings at all when Harley and Drew used flashlights to do a quick scan under each of the trucks before getting too close.

  “It seriously took an apocalypse to make it so you could drive more than five minutes in Jersey without having to stop and pay a toll.” Haywood commented from the driver’s seat of the little kids truck as LeBron was calling it.

  They’d split up with Jeff, Yue and Harley in one truck while Drew, LeBron, Lisa and Haywood were in the other. Haywood’s attempt at a joke was pretty much lost on the three southerners in the truck with him. They were familiar enough with toll roads from Florida to know that it was a thing though. The toll roads had been opened in Florida once a national emergency had been declared around the virus. For hurricanes and zombie apocalypses they stopped charging tolls. Unlike hurricanes in the event of a zombie apocalypse you could evidently drive either north, or south was the only major difference.

  They could’ve all crammed into a single truck. The reason to have the two of them was for simple redundancy. If one truck broke down, they could just hop in the other one. This had become especially important now that most people weren’t regularly taking their vehicles to Jiffy Lube. Unless you happened to have a mechanic in your group then anything you drove around for long enough was eventually going to blow up on you. Especially when the answer to fueling vehicles was to shake the gas can to try and get the gas to work the way it was supposed to.

  Diesel had a much longer shelf life which is why most people were driving diesel trucks now. Cars that used regular gasoline had been the first ones they’d turned into window coverings in Fayetteville. Jeff had long had it on his list to find engineers who knew how refineries worked. Even if they couldn’t get them up and running a solid chemical engineer should at least be able to come up with ways to keep the gas they had good for a little bit longer. For about the hundredth time that day Jeff found himself longing for the days of being able to google something. There was probably a YouTube video on extending the longevity of gasoline. If the internet ever started working again that was one of the ones that’d be going viral real fast.

  They hopped on the Atlantic City Expressway and took that to the interstate. That took them through the heart of Philadelphia which was a major soul crusher for Yue. In such a huge city there were just so many lost infected souls going mad. With her sensitivity she got to experience it all vicariously as they sped past the slowly dying city. The infected squatters milling about inside the useless piles of quietly crumbling concrete like gigantic cockroaches.

  They made decent time, but it was getting pretty obvious that four hours was a very optimistic estimate. The interstate was mostly clear. Clearing operations had been sent to ensure that it was. Jeff had been worried the antigovernment guerilla types they’d been ambushed by may have spent some time blockading the roads. They must have also realized how important being able to drive quickly without the fear of crashing headlong into something was in this new normal. Or maybe they were just lazy. Who the hell knew?

  They’d been in the trucks driving by seven that morning. They’d bypassed Baltimore but mostly stayed on major roads headed south towards Weathertop. It was already almost one in the afternoon by the time they made it to Virginia. Everyone was nervously checking the little digital clocks on the dashes of the trucks while doing the mental math on how fast they’d need to drive to make it back to Cape May if this mission turned out to be a bust. At this point it’d be really nice to roll up on a fully functional Weathertop base. Hopefully they’d just run out of batteries for their radio or whatever.

  When they finally made it to the access road leading up to the base it didn’t appear that was going to be the situation though. They drove along the road slowly with dust clouds spinning up around them. They passed the buildings that were used for refugee intake and then drove past some fields. The entrance to the site was up ahead. Something looked off about the huge doors.

  “Look over there.” Yue s
aid loudly over the radio so everyone could hear in both trucks. She’d rolled her window down and was pointing towards a field with a couple of trees in it. There were a few rotting corpses scattered around. There was some random other junk including a knocked over soccer goal with the netting hanging off just one post.

  Jeff and Harley took it all in slowly to digest what it probably meant. By the time they pulled up to the large doors that opened into the complex they were pretty sure they knew what they were going to find. The doors were plenty big enough to drive a couple of big rigs through them. They weren’t super surprised to find a few more bodies lying in the dirt. Even more horrifying than the discarded dead was the fact that the unguarded doors were standing wide open. Jeff stopped the truck and they all got out to take a closer look. Yue only took a few steps before stopping. Her face had turned that pale color they all now associated with her being sober in a crawler zone.

  It didn’t take someone with Yue’s unique skills to see what was going on here. Jeff asked her anyway though. “What are you getting out of there babe?”

  “They’re in there. They’re in there and they have people cornered. There are still survivors. We should leave though. We don’t want to be in the open once it gets dark.” Yue answered.

  That seemed like a pretty solid idea to everyone. The question now was where could they go? They couldn’t just drive back to Cape May and leave people trapped inside Weathertop.

  “I’ve got an idea on a safe place to sleep.” Jeff said. He looked around the group. “Let’s go get settled in. Hopefully inspiration strikes as to what the hell we’re supposed to do next.”

  Chapter 30: Inspiration Leads to Perspiration

  The train yard they’d driven to was the same one they’d been driven to a million years ago to be taken down to Fayetteville. The train car they busted into was actually one of the cars used for transporting people from the massive underground military base at Weathertop to the other locations. Yue thought it might even be the same car they’d been in before, but she couldn’t really tell. She took a seat and reflected that this time at least Drew and Lisa weren’t fighting.

  Although she wasn’t really sure if the PDA or the fighting was worse. They seemed to spend an equal amount of time doing both. Young love and all of that. She looked over at the horse a decade her senior whom she’d hitched her cart to. Jeff was busy organizing the gear from the truck that they’d brought on board. They were lucky to have found such a nice place to spend the night. There were even blankets and pillows piled neatly in one corner for them to use. They were the thin itchy ass green wool blankets the military liked inflicting on its soldiers, but they’d keep you warm at least.

  It was still light outside, so they had the door open to let the air circulate. They’d close it up before it got too late. No one saw any reason to take any chances. It wasn’t like they weren’t used to living in miserable situations. Jeff gave them all time to settle in and wolf down some dinner. Once that was wrapping up, he decided it was time to sit down and figure out what they were going to do. He asked if anyone needed to go outside for anything else. When no one did he shut the door and locked it with a loud finality that got everyone’s attention.

  “Ok.” Jeff said loudly standing at the front of the train car. “We all saw the state of Weathertop. We can’t just turn around and head home though. Yue thinks there are still survivors inside. We need to discuss what we’re going to do about it. I think maybe Yue should go first and let us know what she saw. Sound good babe?”

  “I don’t have to stand up do I?” Yue asked to the general laughter of everyone. A red faced Jeff shook his head. Yue took a deep breath and continued talking. “Good. After the day we’ve had I didn’t really feel like it. All I can tell you is I saw flashes of people behind doors. Living uninfected people. I sensed what the crawlers are sensing. It’s hard to describe but there’s definitely still uninfected people trapped in the base.”

  “Any sense of where at in the base?” Haywood asked. Yue shook her head.

  “Any ideas on how many?” Jeff asked.

  “No. Like I said I just sensed what the crawlerz were seeing or maybe what they’d already seen. This isn’t science I’m doing.” Yue answered in a frustrated tone of voice before trying once more to explain what she’d sensed. “There are still uninfected in the base. There could be a dozen, or it could be a hundred. They could be right by the front doors or down five levels for all I know. They’re trapped in rooms they’ve barricaded. They’re hiding in the dark. There’s a ton of crawlerz in that hole. No one’s getting out alive if we don’t figure out a way to help them.”

  “Can we even help them? It’s kind of like when everyone got buried back at the warehouse. LeBron said then there were probably people down below.” Harley said.

  “Yeah, and I gave the order to drive away. If there were men stuck down there, then we left them to die. The same as we did to the people on the carrier. The same way I’ve done a million times it seems like. I always justify it in my head but then it comes back and haunts me.” Jeff said. His eyes had gone far away while he talked. Everyone there could relate. They’d all left people behind to save themselves. Compassion was not something you could afford to give into in the new normal.

  “So you want to make up for it by rescuing some skeazy politicians hiding in some closet deep inside a secret base? You think their lives are worth risking ours for?” Lisa asked. Her and Jeff were not on the same page. She wasn’t even in the same section of the library as he was on this one.

  “There’s nobody on this planet that I’d trade for any of you. You guys are my family. You’re right. Let’s not let my guilt decide what we should do. What do you guys think?” Jeff asked the group.

  “I think the President and a bunch of senators and most of our military leadership might be stuck down in that hole. If we want to keep pretending that there’s still a United States left, we should probably go in after them.” Haywood said. His noncommittal shrug told them all where he stood.

  “If we can rescue them without us all dying then we should try. I don’t really care what their titles are.” Harley said.

  “I didn’t like driving away from the warehouse or jumping off the carrier. If we can save some people let’s do it.” LeBron said.

  “If we can do it without dying then I’m down too. There’s no way to guarantee that through. It’s dangerous enough just driving around like we’re doing. You guys really want to go down into a scary dark hole we know is full of those things? You want to do that when Yue is basically telling us we won’t come back out?” Lisa asked. She was staring at them all like they were crazy.

  Drew had been about to say he was down with a little search and rescue. He wisely kept his mouth shut after hearing Lisa say her piece. He had no desire to get in between his girlfriend and everyone else. He leaned back in his chair and pretended to be trying to get his pillow to stay where he wanted it at. The train was silent. Drew glanced up and realized the train was silent because everyone was staring at them. They were all waiting to hear what he had to say.

  “I’ve got to take a leak.” Drew said. He hopped up out of his chair and headed for the door to go outside.

  “It’s getting dark.” Jeff reminded him. Drew spun on his heel and headed for the opposite corner of the train car. He said something about it being “bucket time” as he walked by.

  “He just doesn’t want to piss you off.” Harley said to Lisa. If Drew had been hoping to avoid further enflaming Lisa, he should’ve held off on heading for the pee bucket. She immediately got what Harley was saying. Drew was immediately placed in the doghouse as far as she was concerned.

  “Cool. You guys go get yourselves killed to save a bunch of idiots who let the crawlerz into a secure fortress. I’ll be happy to watch the trucks until you come out. I’ll be leaving by noon though and I won’t be going in after any of you.” Lisa said in a voice filled with venom. She was coiled up and ready to strike.
r />   “So maybe we figure out a way to do it where we don’t die?” LeBron said trying to break through the sudden tension in the air. “Maybe we lure the crawlerz out into the sun somehow. Maybe Yue can pull off some kind of trick to help us get in and out without getting ripped apart…”

  Drew started talking as he walked back over to where they were. He’d evidently finished his bucket business. “Yeah. I think if we can come up with something to try that has some chance of actually working, we should try it. If not, then we say screw it and head back to Cape May or maybe just drive on down to Fayetteville.”

  What Drew thought was a brilliant compromise Lisa thought of as a complete betrayal. She got up and stomped off to the other end of the car. She hurled a couple of tearful threats at them as she left. Drew nodded apologetically to everyone then raced after her. They could all make out Lisa letting him have it. LeBron heard something about how Drew always took everyone’s side over Lisa’s before he tuned them out. They were used to the drama constantly swirling around Lisa and Drew at this point.