CRYERS (27 page)

Chapter 45

Lothair
snapped someone’s neck and stepped over the dead body into the pit. No one
challenged them. When Ivan had torn the heart out of a guard stationed outside
and proceeded to eat it in front of others, they had met no resistance at all.
Colonel Strope was at Eichberg’s side. Aleea, Ivan, and Lenny were behind them,
chewing on the limbs and organs of those too stunned or too slow to get out of
their way in time.

Lothair
studied the ring of rocks surrounding them. “It appears to be a blast crater,”
he said to the Colonel. “Like the one that hit Dauphin. Nuclear?”

Strope shook
his head. “I don’t think so. Probably a dirty bomb. The Libyans had started
dropping them on us during my last tour in New Arabia. They don’t pack as much
punch…used mainly to disperse other nasty stuff into the air. I’m betting this
one carried chemicals to poison the farmland and starve out the livestock.”

The crowd had
become a mass of twisting limbs. They were still flooding out over the top and
fleeing into the plains, but a greater number still—those too young and too
old—were being trampled down at the bottom. Eunice shoved Lothair and Strope
out of her way. “Plenty of livestock for us now.” She ran into their backs like
a battering ram of raking nails and gnashing teeth.

Lothair saw a
big man at the crater’s center hunched over an unconscious form. Eichberg
almost smiled when he recognized the boots. He started towards them.

Yaven
intercepted him half way. “What have you done? Who are you people?”

Lothair
batted the old warrior’s head off.

“This one is
mine,” Lode growled. “Find someone else.”

“That man
trespassed into one of my facilities. He caused considerable damage to my property
and blew my daughter into two pieces…He will die at my hands, not yours.”
Lothair called back for Strope. “Colonel—please join us.”

Lode stood
up. “It’s true what them kids and the lawman said. There really were monsters
living under the ground.”

“Colonel
Strope, show this brute what twenty-first century science has made us.”

Willem woke
up not knowing at first where he was. His brother and Trot were pulling him up
through rocks. The old tree he had wanted to sit in loomed over them, its
ancient roots poked out through the boulder cracks and scraped at his legs as
they dragged him along.

“What’s
happening? Are the Rites over?”

“Our part in
it is,” Cobe answered.

Willem looked
over his shoulder down into the pit. Hundreds of people had squeezed themselves
up against the far side. They were screaming, crying, and clambering over
themselves in a continuous wave. A few grey-skinned ones were pulling them back
and tearing off their arms. Willem saw a fat woman with her head shoved up into
a flailing man’s stomach. Her head popped out and a trail of intestines
followed clamped between her teeth.

The three
made it to the top. Trot leaned up against the tree’s trunk and gasped for air.

Cobe pulled
on his arm. “Come on, we don’t have time to rest.”

“Not yet,” Willem
said. He’d spotted the lawman lying in the dirt. Lode was circling around one
of the grey-skins from Big Hole. The one that had introduced himself as Lothair
and eaten a howler before Willem’s eyes was with them. The three of them were
squaring off. Lode had killed his parents. The grey things scared the shit out
of him. He wanted to see
all
of them
die. “I ain’t goin’ nowhere until this is done.”

They watched
Lode strike out.

The blow
shattered Strope’s jaw. It dropped open and teeth fell from his mouth. The
colonel held his ground as Lode punched him again. He continued pummeling until
the thing’s head and face was a coated red mess of pulverized bone and
mutilated flesh. The swollen eyes lids cracked open and Lode saw orange. The
giant took a step back. “This isn’t possible… It ain’t fair.”

Strope leapt
on his chest and had torn most of the throat out before Lode’s back thudded
into the mud like some great, felled tree. He jammed his thumbs up into the
dead man’s eye sockets and wrenched his skull wide open.

“Must you eat
his brains, Colonel?” Lothair looked away. “It seems so…uncivilized.”

Strope
swallowed down grey matter. “He knocked out most of my teeth. The brains are
soft.”

“It’ll be
nice when your teeth grow back in.” Lothair picked Lawson up into his arms and
exited the pit.

“You seen
enough?” Cobe asked.

Willem
slithered back on his stomach away from the boulder edge. “I reckon.”

Trot was
sitting further away, picking slivers of dead tree bark from the soles of his
bare feet. “The lawman’s dead, and I didn’t see Sara anywhere when all them
folks started running. She must have died too.” His shoulders shook and he
began to weep again.

“The lawman
ain’t dead,” Cobe reassured him. “And just ‘cause you couldn’t see Sara doesn’t
mean she’s dead either.”

“Then what’re
we gonna do?” Trot breathed in through his leaking nostrils and horked out snot
from between his lips. “How are we supposed to survive with no grown-ups to
help us?”

“You
are
a grown-up. You proved that by
running away from Burn all on your own.”

“I ran
because I was scared. I woulda died out there if it wasn’t for Lawson.”

The screams
of people still being trampled, crushed, and consumed chased Willem even
further from the rocks. “We won’t be doin’ no more growin’ if we don’t get away
from here.”

They
descended out from the rocks and started west. Trot stumbled after them. “Where
we going?”

“Back to
Rudd,” Cobe called over his shoulder. “We’re going to find Kay and then head
north for a ways—just like the lawman wanted us to do.”

They came
across a woman lying on the dusty trail halfway back to town. She was on her
stomach. The shredded white clothes she wore and the black hair seemed familiar
to Cobe.

Willem
prodded her shoulder with his toe. “She dead?”

Cobe knelt
down and gently turned the woman over—the woman from Big Hole.

A girl’s
voice spoke out from behind them. “I warned you in the dream.” Cobe turned and
saw green eyes and red hair. “I told you we were coming, and here we are.”

Jenny kicked
the back of his head and Cobe saw black.

Part Five:

Return to Big Hole

Chapter 46

Earlier that
day—a few hours before the Rites had commenced—Rudd had been home to
six-hundred residents. Another hundred or so had just been visiting. Now it was
a town of empty buildings and abandoned houses. Only a few dozen people
remained.

Cobe and his
brother were two of them. They no longer called any place home, and Rudd was
undoubtedly the last stop for them and the feeble-minded Trot.

But Cobe had
believed they were finished more than once since fleeing Burn a week earlier,
and more than once they had beaten the odds and survived. Perhaps there would
be a way out this time as well. That way rested on the shoulders of the
grey-skinned, red-headed girl called Jenny sitting before him.

“So if you
don’t plan on killing and eating us, what are you going to do?”

“It isn’t up
to me,” she replied.

They had been
herded into Rudd’s biggest building along with some other Rites massacre
survivors like a pack of wild animals. It was a single-story, single-room space
made of crumbling rock walls and timber ceiling. Cobe had learned it had been
the town meeting place from an old man off in the corner. His hands were tied
behind his back and a second rope was looped around his scrawny neck. The other
end was secured to a supporting beam above. He looked like a hanging dog, but
Cobe didn’t think he had much bite left. None of Rudd’s remaining numbers posed
a threat to the things from Big Hole hung up like that and standing on their
toes.

“We’re still
alive,” Cobe said. “You could’ve killed us when we left the pit, but you
didn’t.”

“I’ve kept you
alive until now. I don’t think I have much say on what happens to you in the
next few days. My father and the old pink-eyed bastard are in charge. Those
other ones—fat Eunice and the Russian would just as soon eat all of you in one
sitting.”

The pink-eyed
bastard was related to her. Cobe had overheard the girl talking to the one that
had killed Lode. The old man was her grand-father or some other silly name with
the word
great
in its title. She
didn’t like him—that much was obvious—and Cobe figured they might be able to
use that to their advantage. “I had a dream,” Cobe continued. “I was trapped in
one of those metal beds. You tried warning me…Was it about the old man?”

“We’re all the
same, just as dangerous…just as deadly.”

“So why aren’t
the three of us dead? Why aren’t we strung up like all the rest?” Cobe was
sitting with Willem and Trot in the center of the big room. Everyone else was
tied up and hanging from their necks.

“I found you.
You’re mine.”

“We don’t
belong to nobody,” Willem said.

“I didn’t mean
it that way. I meant I won’t let the others touch you. Aleea, Ivan—those other
cryers—they only see you as food. I’m not like them.”

“You just said
you were all the same,” the younger boy replied.

“I don’t
eat
people.”

Trot moaned.
“I don’t wanna be eaten.”

“I won’t let
them.”

She
wasn’t
like the others, Cobe knew. She
hadn’t consumed human flesh, but she wasn’t human either. Her eyes glowed
green. She was as grey-skinned and dead-looking as those with her. Cobe,
Willem, and Trot belonged to her—no matter how she said it. Jenny was their
only hope. They were alive, and for Cobe that was enough. He would get them out
of this.

The fat woman
named Eunice entered the building. She was a heaving mess covered from head to
toe in blood and gore. She went to the closest hanging survivor and untied the
noose from around his neck. The man slumped to his knees and cried out in pain.

Eunice kicked
him onto his side and snapped the rope holding his wrists together. “Get up and
run. I’ll give you a ten second head start.”

He looked up
at her uncomprehendingly.

“Get up, you
dumb fuck,” she roared. “I’m giving you a fighting chance—or should I just tear
out your lungs right here?”

The man
started to crawl for the doorway.

“One
Mississippi… Two Mississippi…”

He sprung to
his feet and ran.

“That’s
better,” Eunice said. “Three Mississippi… Four Mississippi…” She stopped
counting after five and burst out of the doorway after him.

People had
started crying again, but the sounds were quiet and strained. The ropes around
their necks choked off most of the terror. Cobe counted how many were left.
Thirty-five.
There had been forty a
short while ago. The cryers had been coming in every hour or so and releasing
them one at a time. At this rate Rudd’s remaining population would number zero
in less than two days.

Jenny had seen
him counting. “They’re not going to kill you or your brother any time soon.
Eichberg wants all the young ones kept alive.”

Trot made another
groaning noise. “Just the young ones?”

“Until they
can find more towns and cities…More people. They can’t take the chance you’re
the only ones. They have to be sure.”

“I don’t get
it,” Willem said.

“They need to
keep you around to make more humans.”

“Gawdamn. I
thought they only did that in the Dirty Hills.”

Cobe wasn’t as
worried as his brother. Making babies and growing them as livestock for these
monsters would require years. There weren’t enough people left in Rudd to
kick-start the process. And at the rate the cryers were eating, there wouldn’t
be any opportunity to make babies at all.

Chapter 47

“I thought I’d
lost you again,” Sara said softly.

The lawman’s
eyes had opened for the first time in over a day. He seemed unaware at first,
his lids heavy-moving, the pupils too large and black. He blinked slowly and
the steel-grey returned. He saw her and tried to smile with lips still swollen
and cracked.

“Freeda.”

Sara’s
frowned. The blows to his skull may have caused damage beyond her ability to fix.
Lawson was living in the past—sixteen years to be precise, following the deadly
contest he’d fought as a younger man. Freeda had brought him back then, and
Lawson was there once again inside his battered mind.

He said the
name again. “Freeda… She saved my life the first time I fought in the
Rites…didn’t think it possible…another beautiful woman could patch me back up
again.”

“You old
fool.” Tears welled up in her eyes and she had to wipe them away to see his
face again clearly. “Why did you sacrifice yourself like that? I could’ve taken
care of Kay and those boys without you throwing your life away.”

“I doubt
that.” He lay there quietly for a few more moments adjusting to the pain his
entire body was finally sending to his brain. It felt as if every bone inside
his tired, old frame had been broken and re-broken for good measure. “I take it
I didn’t defeat Lode?”

Sara applied a
damp cloth to his forehead. “I didn’t think any living thing was capable of
knocking that mountain down.” She paused—not wanting to tell him how things
ended after Lode had throttled him unconscious.

Lawson saw the
concern in her eyes. He sat up with considerable difficulty from the table in
Sara’s home and grasped the hand holding the cloth. “They’re here, aren’t they?
Them things from Big Hole are in Rudd.”

“It was so
horrible,” she whispered, guiding him back down. “They killed so many—tore the
flesh off their bones…the one cracked Lode’s head open and ate his brains.”
Lawson tried sitting up again but Sara held him down. She put a finger over his
lips. “The old one called Eichberg is just outside. He’s waiting for you to
wake up. Said he’s going to make you pay…going to hurt you bad.”

Lawson had
been threatened before. Men had been trying to kill longer than he could
remember. Vengeful men—drunks holding grudges, wife-beaters, kid-touchers, and
dozens more depraved individuals had sworn to take his life. None had
succeeded. Lode had had the best shot at it, but Lawson figured the
grey-skinned, pink-eyed monster named Lothair Eichberg might finally get the
job done.

The lawman
turned his head slowly from side to side, searching. “Where are the kids?
Where’s Trot?”

“The boys are
being held in the town meeting hall along with all the others from Rudd and
Burn. Eichberg made me stay here to see you recover.”

“What about
Kay?” he asked. An even more mournful expression fell over her face.
“Sara…where’s or daughter?”

“She’s
missing… I haven’t seen her since the Rites started.”

More tears
sprung to her eyes and Lawson wiped one as it fell down her cheek. “She ain’t
dead. If she’s got even half of yer smarts and my stubbornness, then she’s
alright. We’ll get out of this mess. We’ll get everyone together again and
leave this gawdamn town behind.”

“I don’t see
how. There’s only eight of them, but they have all the bridges guarded.
Eichberg never sleeps—none of them do.”

“I’ll find a
way.”

“Most of your
ribs were broken and I think you still might be bleeding inside. You can barely
sit up, and you’re going to plan a way out?”

“I just need
some time. A day or two for these old bones to heal.” He stroked another tear
away from her face with his thumb. “I’ve wasted too much of my life away from
you…from family. If I ain’t dead yet, then I figure there’s gotta be some
reason. Maybe the Gods have given me all these chances to do somethin’ better.
Maybe they want me to settle down…finish the rest of my life as a family man.”

Or maybe the
Gods were simply being cruel, Sara thought. Perhaps they were playing with all
of them. Someone screamed out in the street. Another resident of Rudd was being
eaten alive.