CRYERS (14 page)

Chapter 23

2062

Northwestern Memorial Hospital

Chicago, Illinois

Jenny had fought a fine battle,
but her time was up. The machines were keeping her alive now. She had lost half
of her blood in the street after the accident, and the tubes pumping artificial
hemoglobin throughout her broken body wouldn’t sustain her much longer. The
doctors had assured Jenny’s mother that her daughter was feeling no pain. She
was no longer aware. She had slipped into a coma, and there was no coming back.

Jenny disagreed with their
diagnosis.

Her eyes had opened a crack—not
enough for the nurses to notice—but wide enough for Jenny to see within the
room. She could see her mother pacing back and forth at the end of her hospital
bed. She would stop every two minutes or so and call someone on her phone. She
would yell at that someone, shove the phone back into her pocket, and resume
pacing.

Jenny wanted to tell her to go.
She wanted to tell her mother that she didn’t need to stay in this room until
the end. She was sixteen. She was an Eichberg. She could get through this
without anyone holding her hand.

But her mother stayed. She
continued pacing and yelling into her phone until Jenny’s father came into the
room. Jenny hadn’t seen him since her birthday, seven months before. He had
flown home for her party, and flown right back out again the following morning.
He never changed. Other girls’ dads seemed to get a little fatter, a little
grayer, and a little balder each time she saw them. Jenny’s dad was still fit,
his hair was still all there, and it was still all black.

Jenny watched her mom and dad
talk. She couldn’t hear all that well. Things sounded fuzzy. When they started
arguing, Jenny could hear a whole lot clearer.

“I don’t want my daughter’s body
stored away in some godforsaken facility like an ice cube.” The colonel looked
at Jenny as if to apologize, even though he knew there wasn’t any possibility
of her hearing him. “I’ve never felt comfortable with this …this business. I
sure as hell won’t let her become a
part
of it.”

“Jennifer was too young to die.
She was filled with too much life… Please, Michael. Sign the papers and let
me
take care of her now.”

Jenny couldn’t believe what she was
seeing. Her parents were both crying, at the same time, and in the same room.
I really can die and go to heaven now.

Michael wiped the tears away from
under his eyes. “You knew, didn’t you? You knew that once I traveled back
Stateside, getting me to sign those papers was just a matter of time.”

“I’m the president of the world’s
largest cryogenics corporation. It’s my business to offer people a second
chance. She’s our daughter, Michael… She’s a
part of me
. Of course I’m going to have her frozen.”

“I won’t allow it.” Michael moved
to his daughter’s side. Jenny felt his fingers brush a strand of loose hair
away from her forehead. “It’s immoral. It isn’t…right.”

Edna stood next to him. She took a
hold of her daughter’s hand. Jenny couldn’t feel it. But they were much closer
to her now. She could hear every word her mother whispered.

“Then someone will run you over in
the street when you walk out of this hospital. If by some chance you make it to
the airport, a bomb will go off. If it doesn’t go off there, another will
detonate when you’re in the air. I could have you killed a dozen different ways
before you ever get back to your precious desert. And when you’re dead,
I’ll have total say over what becomes of
Jennifer.”

Jenny
would’ve screamed if she could. Her mother was a cold-hearted, murderous bitch.

The colonel
didn’t appear troubled with the threat at all. He simply nodded, as if men and
women that were supposed to love one another threatened to kill each other on a
daily basis. Perhaps in his world, they did.

“I’ll sign
the papers under one condition.” He waited a moment for Edna’s acknowledgement.
She gave the smallest of nods and he continued. “When I die—when I die
without
your help—I want to be frozen
alongside her. If some day your people are able to bring her back, I want to be
brought back with her. I want to be able to protect her in that future
world…like I was unable to do in this one.”

Edna pulled
the papers and a pen from the vest pocket of her black dress jacket.

Jenny
screamed in her mind at her father not to sign.

Colonel
Strope didn’t hear. He signed his own death warrant. Jenny’s mother kissed his
cheek and thanked him. The papers were back in her pocket before the ink had
dried.

She would’ve killed him to get her way.

Jenny felt
herself drifting away. Her parents became indistinguishable gray blobs. They
were still talking but she could no longer make any sense of the words.

She would’ve murdered my dad. She probably
still will.

The thought
stayed with her as she slipped into buzzing darkness.

Her sight
returned moments later—or at least what felt like mere seconds to Jenny.

Her father
was staring down at her. His eyes were orange. His skin was deathly pale and
splattered with blood.

She
did
kill him. My mom killed my
dad. We’re both dead, and he looks like hell.

“Jennifer,”
he whispered. His breath was hot against her face and smelled rotten. “You’re
back.” He didn’t smile. He didn’t tell her how much he loved her, and how much
she’d been missed.

“I’m…I’m not
dead?”

“You’re very
much alive. We all are.” He helped her sit up.

Jenny’s head
started to swim. She felt like throwing up.

“Slow, go
slow. You’ve been sleeping a long time.”

She was cold.
She reached for the hospital bed blanket but couldn’t find it. She was naked.
Her skin was the same pale gray, sickly color as her father’s. Jenny didn’t
feel embarrassed. There was no sense of modesty.

Her father
didn’t seem at all bothered by her nudity either. “Are you hungry?”

Jenny heard
something cracking. It was followed by a tearing, slurping noise.

Animals feeding?

She went to
move her leg off the bed and her foot thudded into metal. She was no longer in
her bed. This wasn’t a hospital. She remembered the papers her father had
signed.

They went through with it. They had me frozen.

Jenny saw her
mother. She was on the floor, hunched over the carcass of a hairless animal,
ripping lengths of flesh away from its back and sucking the pieces whole into
her mouth. She made eye contact with her daughter for a brief moment, and then
turned away. There was an old man on the other side of the corpse; his bald
head and face were coated in blood. Two feet of purple intestine were wrapped
loosely around his neck like a drunken man’s tie. And even through the gore,
the glistening red, and the pink eyes, Jenny thought there was something
familiar about him.
An old picture?

And then it
came back to her. This was Lothair Eichberg—Jenny’s great-great-grandfather.
She had seen the monstrously large portrait of ABZE’s founder dozens of times
in the main lobby of the company’s head office on the way to see her mother. It
had scared the hell out of her every time she laid eyes on it.

“Are you
hungry?” her father asked again.

“No.” She
looked past her feeding relatives and saw another man lying in the corner of the
room. She couldn’t tell if he was sleeping or dead. “Who is that?”

“I don’t know
his name. He found his way into the facility with at least three others. We’re
keeping him alive long enough to find out what it’s like up top…what’s left of
the world outside.”

“What’s
happened outside? How long have I been frozen?”

“A thousand
years, give or a take a decade.” Michael went to the corpse on the floor and
tore a sizeable amount of calf muscle from its too-human-looking leg. He bit
some off and held the dripping mass in front of Jenny’s face. “Go on, eat
something. You have to rebuild your strength.”

Jenny shook
her head. “I said no.”

Lawson
listened to the exchange. He had learned how to read and write from these
people. He had adopted many of their ways. He’d worn their clothes, and he had
kept order in his town with their weapons. The people he’d leeched and stolen
from for decades were cannibals. I’ll be next, he thought. When they were done
with what little remained of the howler, and once they had extracted whatever
information they needed from him, Lawson knew they would eat the flesh clean
off his bones, too. He quietly tested the bonds cutting into his wrists again.
As thin as the plastic stripping felt, Lawson figured it would be strong enough
to hold his arms behind his back until they were finished with him.

They had
taken his guns. Lawson could see the weapons on the floor at the end of the
cylinder the young girl was sitting up in. His hat was there, too, and one of
the grenades he’d taken from the armory room. He shifted his arms and felt with
numb fingers for the second explosive in his back pocket.
Gawdamn.
They had either found it as well, or Lawson had lost it
somewhere along the way.

He wouldn’t
be able to fight his way out of this. The only reason he was still living was
for what they thought he might know. It was a long shot, but the lawman had
nothing else.

“Enjoy that
howler meat while you can,” he growled in a voice that made all four of them
jump. “’Cause when my friends return with the others, we’re burying this place
and all you fuckers fer another thousand years.”

Chapter 24

They had made
it all the way back up to Level A without the lawman’s help. Cobe had led
Willem and Trot through the corridors of locked doors and found the small office
where the howler corpse had finished rotting decades before. When they found
the round tunnel opening with the sign that read
LEVEL A, SUB-JUNCTION 12, EMERGENCY EXIT B,
Cobe finally allowed
himself to breathe easier. Big Hole would only be a bad memory in a few more
minutes.

Trot came to
a stop. “We should go back. The lawman might’ve gotten lost.”

“How could he
get lost?” Willem said. “He’s the one that brought us here.”

Cobe shook
his head. “We’re not going back. We’re gonna do as the lawman said and get the
hell out of this place.”

Trot gestured
back the way they had come with his curled-up, scabbed hands. “But we didn’t
get no books. How are we gonna get on Victory Island without them books?”

Willem tried
pushing him into the tunnel. “Forget the stupid books and forget about Victory
Island. Just get your fat ass moving again.”

Cobe grabbed
Trot’s arm and pulled. “He’s right, we can’t stay any longer with them things
starting to wake up.”

They ran
through the tunnel, beneath the strip of flickering purple florescent light,
until they found the opening in the wall. Cobe looked into the shaft of
crumbling concrete and saw a square of dull brown light at the end. “It’s
daytime outside. We’re almost there.” He lifted his brother in first. “You go
next, Trot.”

“It’s too
hard…won’t be able to pull myself with my hands like this. I want to wait for
Lawson right here.”

Cobe knew he
was afraid to crawl back into the small space. Being locked inside that
cylinder on Level E had only strengthened his fear of confined spaces. But Trot
had
to go through. He wouldn’t leave
him behind.

Willem called
back to them. “Smells awful in here, like someone shit and pissed themselves at
the same time.”

Cobe peered
in after his brother. Something was wrong. He could see snatches of light ahead
as Willem’s head and shoulders wiggled back and forth. And suddenly the light
was gone.

“Get out of
there, Willem! Crawl back, now!”

The howler
screams cut off any more warnings Cobe could make. The noise of it blasted into
his ears like something physical. Willem’s feet shook and wriggled. The toes of
his worn shoes dug at the cement in a frenzied attempt to pull his body back.
The howler screams intensified, became louder—there was more than one. Cobe
reached in with both arms and clawed wildly for his brother. He had to move
faster, and that was a difficult thing to do crawling backwards with one arm.

Cobe could
see them now past Willem’s thrashing form—fingernails like claws raking all
four sides of the tunnel, peeling concrete away in chunks. Willem wasn’t going
to make it.

Cobe felt
arms wrap around his legs. Trot lifted him off the floor and pushed his upper
body into the tunnel opening. He reached again and found Willem’s ankles. “I’ve
got him! Pull us out!” Cobe didn’t think his yells would be heard above the
howlers screams, but suddenly his chest and stomach started scraping back along
the concrete. He tightened his grip on Willem, and both boys spilled back out
of the tunnel as Trot gave it his all with one last momentous pull.

The gun was
back in Cobe’s hand as the first ugly howler face burst out of the tunnel
opening. Cobe fired and the bullet ricocheted off concrete next to the thing’s
head. He pulled the trigger again and a piece of its throat vanished in a spray
of red. Another howler had started to crawl over its still-twitching body. Cobe
gripped the gun with both hands and fired three times into its forehead and
face. It dropped and more followed. He continued to shoot, and howlers
continued to drop.

The screams
and crack of repeating gunfire had deadened his hearing. Everything was
ringing. He felt Willem tugging at his arm. Cobe looked at him and saw his lips
moving.

It’s empty. It’s empty.

There were no
more howlers.

“You did it,
you got them all.” His brother was slapping him on the back. Trot was pulling
at the remaining dead bodies jamming up the concrete passage. Cobe stared at
the gun in his hand. He found it hard to believe that something so small could
cause so much carnage and death. He threw it down, suddenly feeling sick from
the touch of it. He helped Trot drag the last howler corpse out of the tunnel.
Willem pushed him back towards the opening, where they could see dull light
showing through the far end once again. “You’re going first this time.”

A raspy male
voice spoke out over the intercom system.
“Willem…I have the lawman...I’m going to
hurt him unless you come back to me.”

Trot made a
groaning noise that ended up being a whimper. “It’s
him
. The naked man.”

Willem looked
as terrified as Trot sounded. “Lothair.”

“Come
back to Level E, Willem… Come back and bring your brother and Trot with you...
Do it or the lawman dies.”

The three
looked at one another in wide-eyed, solemn agreement. Lawson had saved them
all. Without him, they didn’t stand a chance. Cobe picked the empty gun up off
the floor. “Maybe we can fool him long enough to give the lawman up.”

Willem shook
his head. “I wouldn’t count on it.”