Their mouths found his arms. He heard
Baylor shouting. The boom of the Mad Conductor’s heavy revolver pulsed against
his ear drums. It all seemed so far away. He felt heavy, so heavy, as if he
were sinking into the world. A slow descent accompanied by the hungry moans of
the Creepers.
The monitors flickered and popped. He
was powerless to stop them. He couldn’t focus. Their cold, slimy mouths tore
his shirt then his skin. He tried to move, to shake them off, but it was like a
dream where he tried to scream, to run, and was powerless to do so.
“Bobby! Bobby!” Baylor’s voice warbled.
Bobby focused on his name. He focused on
the man behind the voice. He pictured those wild eyes and sleek bald head, and
he held that image in his mind’s eye, but it slipped away.
He was running away from the Settlement
in the blinding snow. Bryan’s legs dangled from the fence. Yannek coughed his
life’s blood away with each puff of smoke. Ol’ Randy bled to death in his arms.
The Creepers screamed inside his mind and the world twisted into a torrent of
misery. His rifle echoed amid the chaos. But the memories kept coming.
The world stretched further then rushed
back all at once.
He gasped.
Cold, wet air knifed his lungs. The fire
in his right shoulder was unlike anything he’d ever experienced before. He
blinked, shaking his head to clear away the fuzz.
A Creeper had his arm in its mouth. What
had once been a woman was missing half her face. A cloudy eye bounced on her
torn cheek. Her floppy breasts swayed as she shook Bobby’s in an effort to free
the morsel of his living flesh. Bobby kicked at her.
He swung at her bloody mouth. The Auto
Stryker cut across her face, but not deep enough. More of the fresh Creepers
clawed at him. He rolled towards them. Their voices filled his mind with pleas
in the language of savages. One by one, monitors snapped back on. Bobby plunged
into the thick of them.
“Bobby!” Baylor shouted. His revolver
boomed.
Bobby felt the cold spray of congealed
blood and brain matter. The bullet had missed him by an inch if that.
“I’m here,” he whispered. “Follow my
lead and stop shouting my name.” Bobby worked his way into the thick of the
crowd. He moved like the Creepers, and it wasn’t hard. The wound had him on the
verge of passing out. If he stopped now, it was all over. His only chance was
to work the pit with Baylor.
Baylor’s revolver clicked dry. The Mad
conductor twirled the revolver around and growled at the Creepers, at him.
Bobby moved them with just enough style to sell the show to the frothy crowd
around the lip of the pit. He let the Mad Conductor swing the empty weapon like
a hammer, splattering skulls between curses.
Bobby made them slow. He sent Baylor
easy paper targets, one by one they left his mind, and the world, in violent
sprays of brains and blood. Bobby could see the glee as the Mad Conductor
relished in the swell of it all.
As the Creepers began to thin, Bobby
inched closer. Swiping at Baylor, he whispered, “Make it look real. Come
nightfall, I’ll make for the train. Stall them if you can. Don’t leave without
me. They’re getting ready to move.”
“Motherfuckers,” Baylor roared, pushing
Bobby away to crush another skull. He had tears in his eyes. “I’m sorry.” His
words were barely audible over the shouts of the crowd.
Bobby winked at him and nodded, but to
those above it looked like purely broken motor functions. He lunged for Baylor.
The Mad Conductor tried to spin away, but tripped over a corpse and fell onto
his back.
“You’re fucking crazy, kid.”
“I know,” Bobby said as he tried to take
a chunk out of Baylor’s arm.
“But not as crazy as me. I got one
bullet left in my belt. I’m pushing you back to the Creeper coming up behind
you. Get him in front of you and don’t fucking move, don’t flinch. It’s gotta
look real.” Baylor shoved Bobby back.
Bobby struggled to his feet. The wound
bled terribly. The sky twisted into a vortex. He maneuvered the savage Creeper
in front of him. He could see Baylor through the ragged hole in the thing’s
chest. Baylor’s pistol glinted in the light and then cracked the air. Cold
empty thoughts splattered his face. He fell in time with the savage, a
perfectly choreographed death for all to see.
The crowd cried, “Baylor! Baylor!”
Beneath the savage’s corpse, Bobby began
to slip away. He tried to stay alert, but his arm and most of his right side
went numb and cold. He was having a hard time breathing.
He felt the weight of the final two
Creepers smash on top of him. The sudden jolt kept him from fading altogether.
* * * * *
“Get me the fuck out of this pit!”
The crowd died down as Moya stepped
forward. “Didn’t take you for the bleeding heart, Baylor.” Moya motioned
towards the pit.
“It was just a kid, just a fucking kid!”
“I think, Mr. Keaton, would disagree
with you there. But you made it through. Maybe there wasn’t as much truth to
your myths as you’d like others to believe.”
A ladder was lowered into the pit.
Baylor stared at their faces, each and every one of them: the mothers, the
narrow-eyed gazes openly calling him out, the satisfied smirks, and the awe of
the younger ones. He marked them all. He wiped the blood and brains from his
revolver before holstering it and then he climbed out of the pit.
“That was quite the punch, but a piss
poor attempt.”
“I wasn’t going in that pit.”
“But you did.”
“Just a fucking kid.”
There was a commotion as a large wagon
was pulled to the edge of the pit. Men began to drop ropes and netting in as
the crowd dispersed. They shouted orders and worked with an efficiency that
reminded Baylor of his crew.
“What are they doing?”
Moya pulled her flaming locks away from
her face. “Oh, they’re recycling,” she said with a shrug. “Even dead, our
enemies have many uses. You’ll see soon enough.”
Baylor watched in horror as the bodies
were yanked from the pit by a series of horses. The men secured the decaying
bundle and used a wooden crane to pull the corpses away from the pit. Somewhere
within, Bobby played dead, or he might already be. Baylor held his emotions in
check. This was it. The grand play. He didn’t have any idea what Bobby had in
store. Everything had gone so wrong. Why had the kid exposed himself?
“Keaton would’ve executed you, Baylor.”
He locked eyes with her as she lead the
way towards the heart of the camp. All around, people were packing away their
bed rolls, their children, moving cattle into rickety wagons. Bobby was right.
Whatever he’d seen during the night had no doubt prompted him to action. These
people were getting ready to move.
“All show. It was for the crowd, and you
know it. It was all part of your plan, I’m sure.” Baylor turned to face her.
“Even the kid rushing in when he did. It all fits too well.”
“You give me too much credit,” Moya said
coyly. “Will you lead us west, Baylor?”
Baylor stared at her. The blood from the
savages flaked away from his knuckles as he cracked them.
“Your little hill people are safe. Give
them what you have left and let them scurry away. After your performance today,
I’d call it a fair trade. But be ready for our return. You will wait with
Keaton and then the real journey begins.”
Baylor tried to figure out where her
mind was at. What did she have planned? “You said this was about secrets from
the past…” He tried to find an advantage in her eyes, a warning sign, a slip,
anything, but whatever leverage he’d thought they’d held was gone. His chest
trembled. Somewhere close by, Bobby was dying and he couldn’t do anything about
it. The Mad Conductor laughed at him from the shadows of his mind.
“I did.” Moya stopped and took Baylor’s
hand in hers. He let her trace his long weathered fingers, massage his dirty
knuckles, and then she bent the fingers of his left hand back in a flash. The
bones snapped like twigs. They bent back until the knuckles rested on top of
his hand. The shock drove him to the ground.
The pain was instant and overwhelming.
He couldn’t even struggle. Her movements were so fast all he could do was obey.
“I did indeed.”
Her knee drove into Baylor’s side.
“I was open with you from the start,
Baylor. You should’ve been the same with me. I run a fair game. I don’t like
being lied to. But rest assured your little game did not go unnoticed. The
boy’s blood will coat our bullets. I will raise many in his name. The glory was
all there for you to claim. All you had to do was go along.”
Baylor tried to push her small frame
away, but she had total control of him. Each time he moved, she applied just
enough pressure to send the breath from his lungs.
“You will show my men how to drive the
train. You will work with them.” She turned his arm, locked his elbow. “If you
ever try to play me for a fool again—” she yanked back until the arm snapped in
two— “I will break every other bone in your body, and then I will bring you
back from the dead with the boy’s blood, and your very much alive corpse can
decorate my throne.”
Baylor screamed while the Mad Conductor
raged from the dark corner of his mind.
* * * * *
Bobby held his breath as he cut away a
section of netting. He had to be careful. Two men fidgeted with some boxy
machine a few paces away. They placed several barrels on the other side of it
already. He couldn’t feel his arm, as if it had been cut off like a First War
veteran’s. He sliced another section away and felt the bodies drop an inch. He
cut another. The netting swayed, creaking the wood of the crane, but the men
were too busy with the machine to notice.
“Damn thing has a mind of its own.”
“Told that fat shit his little vegetable
oil fuel wouldn’t work worth a shit.”
“Just wait. Here it is, here it is.”
The machine rattled and chugged then
began to whirr loud and steady. Puffs of acrid smoke filled the damp air as one
of the men worked the choke on the engine. The machine whined.
Bobby cut away another section. The net
snapped, spilling the rotting bodies onto the ground. He could only gather half
breaths. The weight of the dead savages on top him was too much. He could see
one of the men through the gaps in the limbs. Warty nose, fuzzy eyebrows, and a
ragged scar that ran down his cheek and over his lower lip like the zipper of a
coat. The man held one of the bodies by the wrists.
“Come on, Lawson. Help me get this one
in the chipper. I want to be done and three sheets to the wind before we move.”
“He looks like a crunchy one,” the other
man said with a chuckle. “I like them crunchy.”
The weight lessened a bit. Bobby heard
the body hit metal. The machine roared.
“Bastard’s stuck, Lawson. Get the shovel
and push him down in there.”
The machine rattled, then Bobby heard
the sound of the body being torn apart by the technologies of old. The men
grabbed another corpse. Bobby breathed, tried to move his arm, and tried not to
panic. He could hear chunks splattering against the barrels. He had a pretty
good idea what they used the barrels for.
He was able to squirm free. He popped up
fast. The world wavered, but he kept upright, though he didn’t know for how
long. His heart pounded, lacing his system with adrenaline as he drove his
blade into the back of the warty-nosed man.
The man didn’t scream, didn’t cry out.
He just stood there, holding his side in shock.