CRYERS (15 page)

Chapter 25

Colonel
Strope slapped Lawson across the face hard enough to keep him from passing out.
He pushed the lawman up against the wall and slapped his face again. Lawson’s
head snapped back and his eyes reopened. His voice was heavy and slurred. “A
hundred…there’s a hundred more of us up top—armed and waiting. Go on…try and
leave this place and see what happens. They’ll gun you down like rats fleeing
from the shadows.”

Strope looked
at Eichberg. The older man shook his head, and Strope lowered Lawson’s body to
the floor. At least they had removed the plastic from his wrists and ankles,
Lawson thought, wiping blood from his broken nose. He peered at his guns, less
than fifteen feet away. Three seconds. All he would need was three seconds to
get to them and blow the orange-eyed fucker’s brains out.

“I find that
hard to believe,” Eichberg said. “You say there are a hundred armed men above,
yet you send two children and an idiot down here to explore? Tell me the truth.
Tell me what I need to know and I’ll let you leave.”

“I find that
harder
to believe.”

Lothair
looked to his great-granddaughter. “What have you learned?”

She was
reading a steady stream of information from a computer set into the wall. “All
two thousand, four hundred and twenty-six cylinders throughout all eighteen
levels have functioned properly. We can bring them
all
back.”

“And our food
reserves?”

It was
information Edna didn’t have to look up. “All facilities were supplied with
enough rations to last
all
clients
three years in the event it was deemed unsafe to return to the surface after
thawing.”

“We don’t
need to bring them back all at once. Our appetites have…changed. I highly doubt
the rations stored here will satisfy the hunger we’re experiencing now.”

Strope
stepped away from the lawman. “What are you suggesting?”

“A survey
team. A small number of us, no more than a dozen. We explore the surface and
see what kind of world we would be waking the rest up into.”

“A dozen?”
Edna repeated. “That number seems a little small.”

“And what
would happen if we ventured out and found little or nothing to eat? What would
people like us—people with our appetites—what would they do?”

Strope
answered. “They’d turn on each other.”

“Having
thousands of ABZE clients feeding on one another after a thousand years isn’t
the dream I envisioned for this corporation back in the twentieth century. No,
we’ll bring a few more back and see what it’s like out there.”

“Who do we
bring back?” Edna asked. “How do you make that kind of a choice?”

“That’s
easy,” Lothair said. “Who paid us the most money?”

***

1995

New Orleans, Louisiana

“Bull-
fucking
-shit!” Eunice Murrenfeld smacked
her hand down on the dining room table hard enough to make her fat fingers and
sweaty palm sting.

“Easy now,
dear.” Teddy was sitting next to her, trying his best to keep his voice soft
and reassuring, even though he wanted nothing more than to run from the room
and wait for his wife’s tantrum to peter out. “Your blood pressure.”

“My blood
pressure? My
blood
pressure? Are you
fucking kidding me? My body is riddled with cancer and you’re worried about my
blood pressure?” She grabbed the letter that had been couriered to their home
minutes earlier and shook it in his face. “Read this again, you little shit,
and maybe you’ll understand why I’m so upset.”

Teddy found
more courage and stayed at her side. “You knew ABZE wouldn’t allow your body to
be frozen away from their facilities after our first consultation. They deemed
the ground too unstable in most southern states.”

“I paid them
an extra million to
find
a way.”

“You
forced
an extra million on them and
demanded
it. I told you it wouldn’t do
any good.” He plucked the letter from her hand. “Besides, there’s nothing wrong
with being frozen in Canada. Seems kind of fitting actually.”

Eunice’s
beady eyes narrowed and her big head receded farther into the meat of her neck
and back. The four-hundred-pound woman was a force to be reckoned with when she
was pissed off and screaming furious. But her husband of twenty years had
learned when she went quiet—that was the time to really worry. Her voice
started out low and trembling. “My family has lived in the South for more than
two hundred years. We built our fortune in this fine city growing and providing
the best Satsuma oranges in all the whole world, and this fine city has always
provided for us in return with a fine home and a place to raise our families.” She
slammed the table, this time with her closed fist, and Teddy jumped back. “New
Orleans is my home! I was born and raised here—all the Murrenfelds were born
and raised here.” She was screaming in his face now; spit smacked against his
forehead and cheeks as she raged on. “All the Murrenfelds are buried in New
Orleans, too!” She jabbed a finger at the giant bay window overlooking the
estate grounds and her entire arm jiggled. “Buried right out there on
Murrenfeld property. I’ll be goddamned if they try and freeze my remains in the
godforsaken North!”

Teddy tried
reasoning with her. “But you wouldn’t really be dead, honey. It’s like being in
a state of suspended animation. Someday when they’ve found a cure you can
return home.”

She hit Teddy
with the back of her hand hard enough to send him to the floor. “Someday.” She
repeated the word like it was poison in her mouth. “Someday might never come,
and what will become of this place? You couldn’t give me a child to carry on
the family name, could you? Once I’m gone there’ll be no more Murrenfelds
running Murrenfeld business.”

Teddy was on
his knees. He dabbed the blood away from one nostril with his handkerchief. “I
took your last name, Eunice. I am a Murrenfeld.”

She shook her
head and looked out the window, out over the ancestral property. “I used to
think you married me for my money…that you agreed to take my name so this could
all be yours. But it’s more than that, isn’t it?”

Teddy pulled
his chair in front of her and sat back down. He took her fat hands into his own
frail, bony ones. “All I ever wanted was for you to love me.”

Eunice leaned
forward and kissed his forehead. “I’m scared, Teddy-Bear…I don’t want to leave
this place and you. I don’t want to die.”

“It isn’t
dying, and I won’t leave you. When my time is done, I’ll be frozen next to
you.”

Her eyes
searched his for reassurance. “You promise you’ll be there for me when I wake
up? You swear you’ll make them unthaw you first?

“I’ll be
there for you, Eunice…I
swear
it.”

They sat
there in the dining room for the next minute in each other’s arms, quivering,
whimpering, and reassuring. Eunice finally leaned back in her chair and looked
the ABZE letter of confirmation over once again.

“Canada...I’ve
always hated the cold.”

“You won’t
feel a thing.”

Eunice nodded.
“Give them a call. Tell them we’ll be leaving for Dauphin tomorrow.”

***

Eunice opened
her eyes expecting to see Teddy’s watery blue ones staring down at her. The man
peering through the little glass window wasn’t her husband. This man’s eyes
were orange. His skin was too white and pocked over with scars.

Where’s Teddy? He promised he’d be here.

There was a
popping sound followed by a long hiss. The top half of Eunice’s cryo-cylinder
opened. Colonel Strope helped lift the mass of her body up and out of the
extra-large container. Eunice touched the man’s chest. Her fingers crawled up
to the gaping, bloody hole in his shoulder. She tasted his blood and decided it
wouldn’t satisfy the yearning hunger she felt.

Why…did I do that?

Strope held
her hand. “Are you able to walk?” Eunice nodded.

She wasn’t
scared. The sight of him didn’t frighten her. Tasting his blood hadn’t
disgusted her. The fact her husband wasn’t waiting for her after she’d been
thawed hadn’t disappointed like she thought it might.

“Are you
hungry?” Strope asked.

“Starving.”

“There’ll be
plenty to eat on Level E soon enough.” He led her out into a dimly lit corridor
on Level M, where five more people were waiting. None of them spoke. They
didn’t have to. Eunice could see the hunger glowing in their eyes.

Chapter 26

“He ain’t
gonna let us go,” Willem said.

“I know,”
Cobe answered.

“I watched
him bash a howler’s head into the wall, and then I watched him eat its throat
out. He’s gonna eat us, too.”

“He’s gonna
try.”

The three
stepped out of the stairwell and came back onto level
E
. The green flashing light had stopped. The woman’s automated
voice had been silenced.

“He ain’t
gonna eat us,” Trot said. “The lawman will stop him.”

Cobe nodded,
not knowing which one of them had it right. It didn’t much matter one way or
the other anymore. Lawson had saved them all too many times to leave him
behind. They had to come back and try to save the man’s life, and they would
likely get themselves killed and eaten for their effort.

They turned
right at the end of the first corridor and saw Lothair waiting for them further
down, near the room where Trot had originally discovered him.

“He killed a
howler with his hands?” Cobe whispered.

“Made it look
easy… Don’t go thinkin’ you can take him on all by yourself. He might look like
an old man, but he could tear you to pieces, too.”

“Listen to
your brother, Cobe,” Lothair called out. “He speaks the truth.”

“Good fuckin’
hearing too,” Willem added.

Cobe pointed
the empty gun at Lothair’s face from fifteen feet away. “Where’s the lawman?”

Lothair
stepped to one side of the open doorway. “Inside.”

Willem went
first into the room where Lothair’s female descendants had been frozen for
centuries. He saw the woman that had wanted to eat him leaning against one of
the open cylinders. A younger version of her was sitting on the floor a few
feet away. Trot followed in after the younger boy, his round eyes searching
desperately for the lawman. He found him in the corner closest to the door.
Lawson was set in an uncomfortable position, his back propped up against the
wall and his head resting down against his chest.

“He’s alive,”
the woman said.

Cobe still
had the gun trained on Lothair. “He better be. Now let my brother and Trot help
him up so the four of us can get the hell out of here.”

Lothair
rasped, “I’m not entirely convinced there’s any ammunition in that gun.”

“How badly
you wanna find out?”
 
Cobe pointed it at
the white spot between Lothair’s pink eyes.

“Not
terribly.”

“Where’s the
other one?” Willem asked. “Where’s the guy with the orange eyes?”

“I sent him
off to bring more of our kind back,” Lothair said. “We’ve been sleeping for a
thousand years…well
most
of us have
been sleeping. It’s time for us to come back. We want the four of you to be a
part of it. We need you to tell us what it’s like out there. We need to know
where we can find more…
people
.”

“More food,
you mean,” Willem said.

Trot squatted
down next to Lawson. “Where are his guns and hat? I ain’t never seen the lawman
without his guns and hat.”

“Here,” Edna
answered. She pointed down to the lawman’s possessions next to her foot.

Trot’s eyes
lit up. “He had
two
green balls?”

“What’re you
talking about?” Cobe asked.

The green
balls! The lawman dropped one on the floor when he freed me from that bed with
the door on top. I didn’t know he had another one.”

“The
grenades,” Willem laughed. “He’s talking about them grenades the lawman took
from the armory level.”

“Yeah, green
balls,” Trot said, digging into the back of his pants. “I got the other one he
dropped right here!”

Lawson leapt
up, snatched the grenade out of his hand and pulled the pin. “Get outta the
room—now!” He threw it towards Edna. She moved and the grenade landed inside
the open cylinder. Lawson pushed Trot out through the door after Cobe and Willem.
Edna tried bringing the cylinder lid down but the explosive went off first,
blowing her body into two halves at the midsection.

The blast
knocked Lawson into the hallway. Trot dragged him to his feet and pulled him
along after the boys. “I knew you’d find a way to save us all, I just
knew
it!”

They hurried
back up the stairs to Level A without stopping. They didn’t encounter any more
flesh-eating people awakening from the past. There were no more howlers
wandering in the stairwell or hallways. Lawson went first into the concrete
tunnel and the four crawled out after him. They picked their way slowly up
through the blasted remains of twisted girders and concrete columns.

“The books,”
Trot blurted out when they were halfway up the crater wall of dirt. “We forgot
the books for Victory Island.”

“Fuck the
books,” Willem said.

Lawson
stopped climbing and looked back the way they’d come. No one and nothing was
following. He breathed easier knowing the grenade had likely done its job.
“Yeah…fuck the books.”

Cobe was the
first one to climb completely out of Big Hole. A shadow fell over his eyes and
a hand clamped over his mouth before he could shout. Willem and Trot were
silenced next as they climbed up and over the edge.

Lawson came
out last. A huge boot kicked him in the face, knocking him onto his side.

“Did the
howlers we sent down keep you boys busy?”

The lawman
looked up and saw a mountain of muscle and red tattoos. “Lode.” He was
surrounded by a gang of murderous henchman.

The giant
kicked him in the ribs. “You didn’t think I’d let you leave Burn that easily,
did you?” He pulled his sword out and pressed the end of it against Lawson’s
throat. “I’m taking you back, lawman. I’m going to see you swing for your
crimes. I’m going to see
all
of you
hang.”