The Creepers (2 page)

“Good men all. If it weren’t for their
sacrifice you young-uns wouldn’t be here now. Good answer, son. I was gun’ have
you all here spend some time wit this here Creeper. But,” Ol’ Randy dug the
chew from his mouth, threw it on the ground, wiped his fingers on the orange
jumpsuit, and continued, “but . . . seein’ as how you all wanna play silent
types and let Bobby here do all the work. I’m gonna’ make it hard on him.”

Here it comes, Bobby thought. The gleam
had returned. It always seemed to happen like this. In every class he excelled,
and in every class he paid for it with extra work, or worse. He didn’t fault
the other boys for their lack of forwardness. They were afraid. Sure they
picked their spots, avoiding the harsher punishments for the most part . . .
and sure, they relied on Bobby to speak up, but he couldn’t fault them for it.
He didn’t flinch while he waited to see what Ol’ Randy had in store for him. He
wasn’t afraid.

Ol’ Randy went to the flag pole, undid
the chain, let it fall to the ground. “Kill it!”

The Creeper stumbled forward.

The boys ran every which way, screaming,
but not Bobby. He stepped left, then right, and came up behind the Creeper. He
searched frantically for a weapon. The Creeper was slow, but driven by hunger, it
was relentless. It turned on a shaky leg and raked the air in front of Bobby.
His heart thudded against his small ribcage. He darted to the side and tripped,
tried to catch himself, but his momentum proved too great. His feet tangled
with the chain and he fell on his side. He quickly rolled to his back.

The Creeper shambled forward, tongue
swinging back and forth like the shaft of a grandfather clock. It towered over
him. Bobby looked around for help. The boys were gone, and Ol’ Randy laughed as
he leaned on Tilda for support.

It was then that something in Bobby’s
young mind broke. For the first time he knew fear, but it was more than that,
so much more. The sensation rocked his body, loosened his bowels, and
came cascading over his defenses. He couldn’t get up,
couldn’t will his limbs to move. He could only wallow in a pool of his own
filth. He screamed. The Creeper fell to its knees, straddling him. It grabbed
his shoulders and leaned forward. The fingers were hot points of pain that felt
like molten steel being pushed into his flesh. Oh, did Bobby scream.

Ol’ Randy continued to laugh.

He stared into its gaping mouth. The
graying meat of the tongue missed his face by inches. Did he have any minute
cuts on his face, any openings, what about his eyes, his nose? He clamped his
mouth shut. The Fection. Bobby’s vision blurred with tears. He made tiny fists
and beat the Creeper’s chest. The thing groaned, trying to work its broken jaw
into a bite. The cruel bony fingers dug deeper. The Creeper tilted its head,
dead eyes inquisitive, and then . . . then its head was gone. Evaporated. The
spray of blood, bone and brain matter hung majestically for the briefest of
moments then rushed past Bobby’s face and splattered on the green grass behind
him. The echo of the fifty caliber shot rattled his mind back to the present.

The skull on the center console shouted,
“Hey, asshole!”

Bobby did a double take. No. Not the
skull, Ryan.

“Hey, Bobby, what the hell?" Ryan
punched Bobby in the chest. “You went all loopy for a second. Did bones get ya
all scared?" Ryan picked up the skull and the lower jaw. He made its teeth
clack in Bobby’s face. “Hey, Bobby, Bobby, the Creepers got me. Yessir they
did." Clack. Clack. “Bobby, gimme a little nibble, just a taste, I haven’t
had a bite to eat in ages. Come on, come-onnaaaahhhh.”

Bobby slapped the skull out of Ryan’s
hand. It shattered on the weather beaten blacktop.

“Stop it.”

“I was just playing, Bobby. You freaked
me out for a minute. You slipped back again didn’t you?" Ryan ran his
fingers through his hair.

“Yeah." Bobby kicked a piece of
skull under the car. “But it doesn’t matter. It’s getting late. What if we get
caught?”

“Well if you weren’t taking all day we’d
have been there by now. Help me open the trunk." Ryan pulled a faded blue
ball cap from his back pocket, and put it on to keep his stringy black hair
from his face. He whistled through the gap in his front teeth.

Together they managed to lift the rusted
trunk. Bits of flaked metal twisted in the light of the oncoming Colorado
winter. Bobby almost expected to find another corpse. Instead, he found himself
looking at Ryan’s secret stash: one battered and dirty rucksack, a
chestnut-stocked .22 carbine, a hunting knife, and a long-barreled revolver.

“You take the revolver,” Ryan said
handing it to Bobby.

Bobby accepted the weapon in shaking
hands. When that cold steel touched his palm the shaking stopped and his
training took over. He looked down the road clogged with the rusted vehicles of
refugees from the First War. He wondered how many of them wished they had had a
firearm before the Creepers final rush came. So much death. All down the road
bleached bones poked from their final resting places, dead flowers on forgotten
graves. Bobby flipped open the chamber, fully loaded, he snapped it back. He
tucked it into his belt. And to think the Folks had caused their deaths. He
wished he didn’t know the truth.

“You’re not going to believe this,
Bobby." Ryan slung the rifle over his shoulder and did the same with the
rucksack. “You always asked me where I was all those times before lights out.
You’re about to find out. Come on." Ryan headed down the road, kicking
rocks as he went.

Off in the distance the forms moved aimlessly
over the fields. Bobby forced one more glance at the Settlement before
following Ryan down the old Still Water Road.

The wind whistled into the valley, a
breath from winter. Bobby zipped his thin windbreaker as far as it would go.
The iron sight of the revolver dug painfully into his back. Sweat stung his
eyes and burned icy-hot on his brow. Winter wouldn’t be too long off now, a
week or two at best. Ryan stood on a gently sloping bluff overlooking the
field. Bobby trotted up beside him.

“We’re here, Bobby boy." Ryan
rummaged in his rucksack and pulled out a pair of binoculars. He pressed them
to his eyes and looked off to his right.

Bobby followed Ryan’s line of sight to a
large wooden structure. The boards that made up its outer shell sagged from the
weight of many winters. The rough beams were darkened with age and the windows
long since blown out. The roof had collapsed in on itself, the black peaks at
either end, a pair of charred hands reaching towards the heavens for salvation.
Bobby shivered as he fully laid eyes on the Tenenbaum Schoolhouse.

“See that shit, Bobby boy?” Ryan laughed
roughly in his pubescent-strained voice.

“I see it.”

He’d never, not in a million winters,
not ever, never ever, thought he would see the Tenenbaum Schoolhouse up close.
The reality of it, looming in the fading light made him sick to his stomach.
Bobby remembered the lesson well, and he could recall vividly the images,
sounds, and smells his imagination conjured up during
those long winter nights. Back during the First War, before the Creepers’
final wave broke and filled the Valley with death,
the Tenenbaum Schoolhouse served as one of the original safe havens in the
greater Boulder area. The basement had been converted into a field hospital,
while the upper floors provided sound defensive positions. In the middle
floors,
several hundred brave Colorado souls
prayed for an end to the madness, rally round the family. Once Denver fell,
their prayers were answered, only not in the manner they had hoped.

It was during the summer of the big
rains, he remembered now from the lesson. With Denver overwhelmed,
supplies were cut off, and the Tenenbaum Brave were
all alone: a couple hundred rifles, a couple thousand rounds of ammunition, and
a couple weeks supply of food and water. The sky was dark with fat angry clouds
and the echo of thunderclaps rattled the valley. Out of the fog,
the Creepers launched their attack, but launch wasn’t
exactly right. They’d gathered again:
a mass of
hungry, mindless undead, seeking food.

The soaked terrain was like a sea of
muck and mud. Nearly passable for a human, but for the Creepers it should have
been unthinkable—downright impossible. They simply did not possess the
demanding motor skills necessary to traverse the slippery slopes of the valley.
And at first this proved true. Bobby remembered listening to the recordings
from the Tenenbaum Brave. They were laughing, laughing their asses off at the
bumbling Creepers. Bobby and his classmates, too, laughed along with them. Then
the laughing stopped and the gunfire started.

From what they could gather from the
tapes, the Creepers broke the wall of fog and descended upon the Schoolhouse in
light numbers. But an hour into the siege they were coming by the thousands.
The muddy ground no longer mattered as wave after wave of Creepers shuffled on
the backs of those that came before. Bobby could see the scene clear as day in
his mind’s eye. The valley floor was alive with moaning, flailing arms and legs
and mouths. The Creepers kept coming like ants locked onto the scent of a
picnic. They filed into the valley, absorbing the loss from terrain and
gunshots alike, and they kept coming.

The recordings dragged on for hours. Those
hours, which started with laughter and the crude jokes of rough men and women,
drifted into the strict orders of battle: precise shots, exploding powder,
triumphant cheers. But it did not last. The last hour of the tapes always
haunted Bobby. Shattering glass, splintering wood, awful screams, terrible
cries, the scattered bursts of the Braves’ last stand. But worst of all were
the children’s pleas. Once the Creepers dismantled the defenses, and fed on
those ill-fated souls, it didn’t take them long to start in on the children’s
rooms.

The children of the Tenenbaum Brave
begged for mercy, cried for their mommies and daddies. The Creepers didn’t hear
them, didn’t care . . . they only sought living flesh, sustenance, and they
found it in those children. They broke the room’s outer wall like the shell on
a succulent Alaskan Snow Crab. There were hours of tape, of moans, and wet,
crunchy sounds. Bobby knew because he and the other boys were forced to listen
to every bite until the Creepers moans faded. The stunned silence of that
classroom, so far removed now, but the horror of that rainy summer day lay just
under their feet, and in front of their eyes. Bobby and Ryan stood on a field
of dead, human and Creeper, covered with years of lush growth. The Tenenbaum
Schoolhouse loomed in the sunset, a memorial, a tombstone, the final resting
place of heroes in their eyes.

“Long rest far from the Creepers
breast,” Bobby spat a good one into the tall grass, a sign of deep respect.

“Long rest far from the Creepers breast."
Ryan did the same.

“Bobby boy, you’ll never believe what I
found inside. You ready?”

It was wrong to disrespect the dead. The
Folks hammered it home in one of the First War Commandments: Thou shalt not
desecrate the places of the fallen. No one knew the price paid for breaking the
commandment, no one dared ask.

“But, Ryan, the—”

“Yeah, yeah the third one . . . I
know." Ryan took the binoculars from his eyes, leaving two red rings and
put them back in the rucksack. “Do you believe everything the Folks tell you?”

Bobby was afraid of what might happen,
but at the same time he didn’t want to look like a wuss. “No." He kicked
at the grass, carefully avoiding Ryan’s searching eyes. They both knew the
Folks hated them, and their brothers, but the Settlement was home—their only
home. A low moan drew his eyes further from Ryan’s look. What he thought were
animals down in the fields—were not animals at all.

They were Creepers.

Bobby drew the revolver and cocked the
hammer. His heart raced but he settled into action like a robot. Arms steady,
aim true, Bobby homed in on the nearest Creeper. An old woman, well before the
Fection got a hold of her. Now she was in advanced decay. Her purple evening
gown,
stained with scarlet blood and dirty brown
mud, hung from her drooping shoulders like a drape adorning the window of an
abandoned home. The gown was torn down the front, perhaps grabbed by one of her
victims in a last ditch effort for survival, exposing her udder-like breasts,
swollen gray nipples pointing straight to hell.

Bobby held his breath, eased his finger
down on the trigger, but before he could fire Ryan grabbed his wrist.

“It’s okay, Bobby. Besides, she’s a good
fifty, sixty yards away. If you’re even
lucky
enough to hit a headshot at this distance,
you’d
ruin all the fun.”

Bobby lowered the gun. “I could hit her
clean." His mouth went dry and everything he knew told him it was a bad
idea, but the look on Ryan’s face, mischievous, fierce, and hopeful . . . the
look reassured him. He put the hammer back in its resting place and slid the
revolver into his waistband. The old woman fell on the rocks at the base of the
bluff.

“Come on you old hag! Come and get me
laaaa-ragggh!" Ryan put his arms out like one of them. He rolled his head
to the side and laughed at the Creeper, as it broke brittle bones on the cold
stone trying to get at them. “Stupid Creeper.”