The Creepers (23 page)

“Pastor.”

“Suicide is a sin, Cale, and we can’t
have a hero of that caliber waltz into the Devil’s army. Shove the food down
his throat if you have to . . . just be mindful he doesn’t choke, or it’ll be
you who joins the Devil’s brigade for murder." The Pastor sucked on his
knuckle, enjoying the coppery treat with a sad smile. He had lost the voice of
the Lord.

“Yes, Pastor." Cale’s footsteps
sounded out his displeasure at the order.

“Good Lord . . . why couldn’t they all
be like that young man? Obedient, loyal, never questioning, even when he
doesn’t agree?”

But the Lord didn’t hear his question.
The voice of Heaven remained silent.

“I’ll have to change that,” Pastor
Craven mused, eyeing his buck knife gleaming on the counter.

*
* * * *

Ol’ Randy flexed his aching hands and
knees as he prepared for his morning ritual. Even though spring had arrived,
the chill had not yet left the stone walls of the brig. He began with pushups,
one hundred to be exact, though, after he’d burned through his body’s store of
fat his exercises became counter-productive. But he was a stickler for routine,
keeping it up at all costs, including muscle loss. He didn’t have a scale, but
he felt about twenty, maybe thirty pounds lighter. The boy tried to get him to
eat, but he hadn’t the stomach for it most days.

Hunger pangs aside, a gnawing sense of
dread wormed its way around his insides, a sure sign that something bad was brewing.
Each dip of his body sent cracks rattling through his bones. Through gritted
teeth he counted out every pain-filled rep.

Recently, his mind had begun to go. It
was becoming increasingly harder and harder to keep track of his thoughts.
Bobby and Yannek were always there, as was the guilt of never being able to
meet them come spring. Somewhere in his head existed the fantasy world of what
could’ve been. A world in which he would see Bobby, save them all, but it could
never be a reality . . . not for him. At least there was hope for Bobby.

As he moved from pushups to sit-ups, a
rogue thought fluttered into his mind like a bird casting a shadow ten times
its size. Had any of the children that came before the brothers made it? It was
impossible to ever know the answer to that question. He only had his
imagination to supply an outcome he saw fit. It was all he could do. His will
to fight left him the night his boys were murdered by their own, and he had
been helpless to stop it—hell, he didn’t even see it coming, at least, not to
the level it finally rose to.

But what could he do now? He was dying,
and it had nothing to do with the lack of food. He felt it early in the winter,
a burning pain in his left side like a hand of sharp stone clenching and
unclenching his kidney, over and over for hours on end. He’d vomit and sweat
and he’d pray, for he knew what the sign meant. Death was on his way. The Lord
was in the act of calling him home.

The headaches and memory loss started
not long after. Now here it was, first thaw, and he could scarcely remember
everything that had brought him to this moment. Images came and went. Things
that he’d done, had done to him, things that didn’t quite make sense, a movie
reel of his life cut apart and stitched together again in random order. Was it
his body shutting down, or was it yet another of the Lord’s commands?

He heard Cale’s purposeful footsteps
long before the young man stopped in front of his cell. When the keys rattled
in the lock everything collapsed within. How many sit-ups? What did the Lord
want of him? Bobby . . . Yannek . . . what of the future?

“You have to eat something, sir,” the
young man pleaded without being overly loud. He was so afraid a harsher tone
would break the old man in half. “You can’t keep refusing to eat.”

“Sure I can. Just like
he
can
refuse me meals whenever he likes." Ol’ Randy stood with a grunting
effort. Cold sweat rolled down his chest and back.

“But you can’t keep playing this game.
Look what it’s doing to you." Cale didn’t know what else to do. He’d
watched the Pastor and Ol’ Randy wage a war of attrition between each other
over the course of the winter. To what end? He knew neither one would give,
even if it meant death.

“Son, do you know it’s spring now.
Baylor will be coming through the pass. I need to get ready." Ol’ Randy
spoke directly to Cale, but his eyes saw a different reality.

Cale had become used to these
interspersed musings. He waited and said calmly, “Jackson and Thomas have
already left to meet him.”

The young man’s words set off a chain of
explosions that ripped Ol’ Randy’s mind apart. He fell to his knees as he tried
to put everything together. This was the dread he’d felt. Bobby wasn’t safe.
Somehow, he had to warn the boy, but what could he do. “Get me out of here!"
He grabbed Cale’s leg.

“Sir, I can’t.”

“You have to . . . for him."

“For who?”

“The boy." Ol’ Randy stood, as if
nothing had happened. He loomed over the younger man, and even though he was
thinner now, he still made for an intimidating figure. Cale backed up.

“You mean Bobby?" The Pastor tried
to get Ol’ Randy to speak of him, and Yannek, but Ol’ Randy would not give in.
And even when the Pastor was not around, Ol’ Randy remained silent when it came
to Cale’s questions about the boy. He never had any intention of being the
Pastor’s snitch, but he wanted to know what had happened to them. Yannek was
practically a brother to him.

Ol’ Randy scowled at him like a massive
cliff in a dream, ready to crack, and send him into oblivion. He had to be
careful, though, Ol’ Randy seemed lucid, but the wrong word could send him into
a fit. Cale knew that all too well, and had the missing tooth to prove it.
About six months ago when the old man first started acting strange Cale had
mentioned that one of the kids had come down with a severe case of the flu and
wouldn’t make it. Before he even knew what was happening Ol’ Randy was on him,
screaming that he was wrong about him. It seemed that Bobby was the only
constant in the man’s troubled mind.

“Yes." Ol’ Randy slumped on the cot.
Shoulders sagging, he went on, “Yes, I mean Bobby. You have to get me out of
here.”

“I . . . how can you ask that of
me?" Cale loved the old man deeply, but he wasn’t about to be an outcast,
or worse, get himself killed to free him. Besides, he wasn’t sure Ol’ Randy
would walk out the front gate if he opened it for him, regardless of what the
veteran said.

“Bobby, Bobby is not safe. They will
kill him. I know the hate in their souls, they will kill the boy. You have to
help." Ol’ Randy sat slumped with head in hands. Sorrow-filled sobs
carried each syllable.

“If you promise me you’ll eat something
I’ll see what I can do,” Cale lied. He had no intention of causing trouble. The
Settlement had seen enough heartache. And even those that harbored a new hatred
for Ol’ Randy would feel crushed if he were to be killed at the hands of their
own. They were supposed to be above the savage nature of the raw countryside;
they weren’t supposed to be the instruments of their own destruction.

“I’m not gonna eat like no damn animal,
son. I want a proper plate, a cup, and a fork or somethin’ . . . ain’t no damn
ungodly beast."

“We tried that already. You damn near
killed the Pastor with a fork.”

“Ain’t nothin’ he didn’t have coming to
him, son,” Ol’ Randy said smugly.

“If I bring you a proper plate you have
to give everything back to me. Then,” Cale raised a pointed finger to the sky
and continued, “and only then, will I help you. Got it?”

“I got it.”

“Now let me see what I can scrounge
up." Cale departed, making sure he double checked the lock on the cell,
and triple checked his own sanity. He’d never felt so conflicted in all his
life.

Shortly after Cale left Ol’ Randy began to
plot. He’d only have a narrow chance at breaking free. Sure, he’d have to
injure the young man, but nothing that he wouldn’t heal from given time. What
worried him was being able to remain focused. He’d spent many months in inner
turmoil with how he wanted to handle his situation. Deciding then to remain
stalwart, and refusing to be combative with the Folks, he would serve his time
and get right with the Lord.

A simple decision. But one based on the
hopes of Bobby’s survival. Jackson and Thomas being sent to Baylor changed
everything.

The Pastor meant to finish the job if
the boy surfaced there. Ol’ Randy couldn’t allow that to happen. A high-pitched
squeal disrupted his thoughts. As tall as he was he could not reach the small
slit of a window, nothing more than a thin rectangle of light that cut through
the stone walls. He could make out golden clouds of a warm afternoon, the
slight breeze by the movement of them. And somewhere not too far of the kids
were playing baseball, he realized, as the crack of a bat accompanied the
squeals.

The smell of the air packaged with the
sounds sent him back to his childhood. In a world he didn’t even consider real
anymore he was being led along by his father towards the roar of a crowd. It
was a rare thing to be able to go to a Braves game, rarer still to be in the
presence of a sober father on a warm summer afternoon. Boiled peanuts, cotton
candy . . . no, must not . . . he tried to fight the memory—Bobby, the
sacrifice of the women, Yannek. But the call of the field proved too powerful.

He fell further into the memory, but
what made it a horrifying thing for him was that he knew what was happening. He
knew he was losing himself, knew he was dying, and knew he needed to act now to
help Bobby, but he couldn’t. Never in his life had he imagined it would end
this way . . . lunacy, madness, the complete and total loss of reason. Ol’
Randy cried then, as he watched the Braves with his father. He couldn’t stand
it.

Why did his only failure have to come at
the end of his life?

Bobby awoke
suddenly to an eerie sensation running up his spine. He tried to recall the
words, he was sure that he’d heard them, but he couldn’t wipe the film of sleep
from his brain. He thought it was Ecky that had said something to wake him but
. . .

Where was
Yannek?

After using the
highway to put even more distance between them and the wild horde Ecky finally
allowed him to rest. They had stuffed themselves into a drainage pipe opposite
a decrepit gas station. With Bobby’s ankle a mess Ecky took first watch. But
where was he?

Bobby quietly
readied his rifle. He couldn’t see anything except the moon’s silver light
lining a bank of cloud. Everything was nearly pitch black and the thundering of
awakened insects was a drill to his eardrums. He began to squirm his way out of
the pipe when he heard it again.

Eyy—rr—ning . .
. annnny—en—omes

Bobby craned his
head to hear it better when he realized,
hearing
the voice was
impossible over the buzzing and chirping of insects. As he came up from the ditch
Bobby heard the voice again, a slow thing, like water thick with algae gurgling
in a dying stream.

Eyy—rr—ning . .
. erld—o—old

The pain had his
ankle stiff and sore, causing him to limp, but it wasn’t the pain that stopped
him dead in his tracks. As soon as he came over the rise back onto the road he
found the source of the voice in his head and he found Ecky.

Outlined by a
thin ray of moonlight Yannek stood in the center of what was left of the
crumbling black top. Circling him were at least half a dozen Creepers. The
weary engineer held his gun up, but he hadn’t fired it yet.

The Creepers
weren’t moving. They just seemed to be shut down like robots, as if someone
suddenly ripped out their source of power. But Bobby knew they were not shut
off. He heard one of them speak inside his head. Ol’ Randy’s words came back to
him, a passage of the journal he’d poured over all through the winter. It had
him questioning every encounter he’d ever had with the Creepers, even his first
lesson all those winters ago.

In the presence
of their children our dead mothers became docile . . . as if held in thrall by
the sight of their children. It is something more than that, but I have not the
technology, man power, or time to quantify it. . . .

He didn’t really
understand it, until now. The voice droned in his head again, but it was
different this time, softer and slightly higher in pitch—another voice—but
clear, concise.

The-they are
coming . . . many men . . . this direction, the voice warned.

“Bobby, this is
. . .”

“Quiet.”

Any-en-ning . .
. ose-ow,
another
voice added.

The cloud cover
broke, splashing them with bright white light, revealing the faces of the
Creepers around them. A woman, fresher than most, a simple half-moon bite on
her pale forearm. The rest were badly decomposed men. Victims of many harsh
winters and the plentiful Colorado wildlife. His view of them put the voices
within in perspective. From what he could see, and guess, the male Creepers
were without tongues; some had ragged, grayish stumps, and the others had only
bone white smiles.