You and Me against the World: The Creepers Saga Book 1 (35 page)

“What’s that for?” Brad asked.

“One for Kira and one for Dani,” she said.

The Tahoe had suffered a number of bullet holes and lost a couple of windows, but other than that, it was still operational. Golden’s crash through the fence had not done any damage to the Escalade. They emptied the Escalade’s cargo area and folded down the seats to provide room for Adam. Thorn would ride in back and monitor Adam’s condition.

“How are they?” Devin asked as he limped into the dining hall.

Tables were drawn together to provide the makeshift beds where Adam and Austin each lay. Around Adam’s bed were discarded blood-soaked towels.

Austin sat up slowly.

“Well, I’ll live,” he said.

“Quite the demonstration out there,” Devin said to his brother.

“Yeah, sorry. I kind of lost my shit for a minute.”

Devin looked into his brother’s eyes. They both knew that his actions had gone way beyond the “loss of one’s shit.” Devin didn’t know the cause, but he was certain anger alone didn’t explain it. Austin knew it too, and he avoided his brother’s stare. There were too many people around to ask further questions, so Devin let it drop for the time.

“I’m fine. I’ll go outside and help the others,” Austin said and slid off the table. He wobbled a little but then straightened.

“Is he, Doc?” Devin asked Thorn.

Thorn looked at Austin and said, “Just take it easy, okay?”

Austin nodded and went outside.

“Is he really fine?” Devin asked again.

“For the moment, I think so, but I need to find a stronger antibiotic,” Thorn answered.

“What about Adam?” Devin asked and limped to his friend’s side.

“He’s stable for now, but we need to find a hospital or clinic where I can open him up and make sure there’s no internal bleeding.”

“You know how to do that?” Devin asked.

Thorn laughed.

“Yes, Devin, in oncology we perform surgery.”

“Okay, so we find a hospital,” Devin said.

“What about you? How is that knee?”

“Freakin’ hurts but I’ll live too.”

“Any chance you’ll agree to stay off it for five minutes?” Thorn asked and gave his friend a tired smile.

“Sure, as soon as we’re on the road, which, by the way, I want to happen as soon as you can move Adam.”

“We can move him now. More time here is not working in his favor.”

“I’ll get the others to help you carry him out.”

They had agreed that they would depart through the back entrance. The access road that Bob and Pam had selected connected to another country road that then emptied onto State Road 33. State Road 33 wound its way into Alabama. They had taken the children into the school where Caroline had given them lunch and calmed their nerves after the horrific events of the day. The kids remained resilient to a degree that Caroline privately considered unhealthy. Had Pam been alive, she could have explained it to Caroline.

They moved the SUVs into positions in front of and behind the van, and then they brought the kids out. The first Creepers charged through the front gate while half the children still waited to get in the van. Dr. Scott’s experimentations with his lab Creepers must have slowed the natural process of the captives. The Creepers that charged them showed much greater evolution. Their jaws yawned with impossible width, and large muscles pulsed and bulged on the sides of their faces. The fingers looked thicker and longer and appeared tipped with dark clawlike nails. The changes had not improved their agility, and they still ran in an awkward gallop. The eyes were different too. Still a blue and white haze yet they seemed to possess a greater awareness, and their attack looked more purposeful. Some of the Creepers stopped to taste the dead bodies on the street. Most charged on toward the team.

There were no heroics this time. There was no pretty dance of death, no V-shaped assault, and no loud music. The team was too tired for it. Instead, they formed a short line and picked off the creatures as they approached. Devin took a glance at his brother to see if anything in his demeanor gave indication of his previous behavior. Austin seemed as normal as one could when engaged in the killing of murderous infected human beings.

Several of the Creepers sensed easier targets within the buildings, and they broke through doors and windows to attack the hiding congregation members. Over the sounds of the gunfire, they could hear the screams inside the buildings. Thoughts of a rescue for the weaponless people of Fort New Hope never surfaced. The team stayed their ground until the last child was inside the van and the SUV’s respective drivers were in place. Then they piled into the vehicles and departed.

As they pulled away, Golden yanked Devin’s sleeve and pointed out the window. At first, he didn’t understand what she wanted him to see. She pointed again, and he followed the path of her finger. There at the back of the horde, he saw the face. Brandon saw it too.

“Holy fuck! Is that—?”

“Connor,” Devin answered.

“But, I mean, how?”

“I don’t know. Drive.”

Brandon drove.

Paper castles in the wind

They sped down the access road and away from Fort New Hope. Devin closed his eyes and, in quiet contemplation, considered how it was that his former friend had traveled such distance. He wondered why Connor would follow them and, more importantly, how his infected friend had found them. He thought about the precious time they had wasted by remaining at the fort. He thought about how that decision had nearly cost them their lives. He thought about the lives it had cost. He thought about Adam, and he thought about his brother.

Brandon sensed his friend’s melancholy.

“What do we do now?” he asked in a quiet voice.

Devin remained silent, and Brandon let the question drop.

“We follow the plan,” Devin finally replied. He was quiet again for a while, and then he said, “Just like we should have done before I let false hope get in the way.”

“It’s what we all wanted,” Brandon said, but his friend turned back toward the window and was silent.

A few miles farther, they approached three people walking along the roadside. The three walkers turned their familiar faces to watch the approach of the vehicles. Brandon and Devin recognized them from Fort New Hope.

“Do we stop and pick them up?” Brandon asked.

Devin shook his head.

“No, keep going,” he said. “Let their God take care of them.”

The vehicles sped by the expectant faces.

“We need to find that hospital soon,” Thorn called from the cargo area. “Adam’s bleeding has started again.”

Devin nodded and searched the GPS unit’s map. He found a clinic on their route. It was fifty miles away. They could be there in less than an hour. The Creepers would make it in a day or two at the most. He had no doubt they intended to follow.

More impossible choices. The life of his friend or the safety of the group? He didn’t need to take a poll to know how his companions would vote.

“There’s a surgical clinic about forty minutes from here,” Devin said.

“I can keep it together that long,” Thorn replied.

Devin turned and looked out the window at the passing countryside. He wondered if there really were any safe places left. He wondered if his father’s plan was the correct one to follow. He wondered if it was all worth it.

He felt a hand on his shoulder, and he turned to look at its owner.

Golden’s blue eyes met his. She gave him a little smile. You had to look closely to see it. These days, her smile was a delicate thing that was easy to miss. He put his hand on hers.

He still didn’t know if it would all be worth it in the end, but Golden reminded him that it was always worth trying. That was what love provided: a hope that glowed like a small ember of light in the vast consuming darkness.

The caravan drove on into their uncertain future.

Epilogue

An Epic Introspective

These ghosts sing bittersweet

Weeks had become months and seasons changed. Winter approached.

The blue shark eyes stared out at the asphalt horizon. They were again children of the daylight, and the western sun reflected in her sad eyes. She led the small group, the remainder of their once-large band of survivors. For a long time, they had zigzagged across the southwest on foot, hunted by the relentless infected. They traveled on foot, first by necessity, and now because the desolate landscape offered no usable vehicles. They had been the “bait.” A distraction meant to lead the Creepers deep into the western desert so the children could journey toward some uncertain place of safety. She didn’t know if the others still lived, if their efforts had been successful, and if the sacrifices were in vain, or in reward. It no longer mattered to her.

All around her were great swaths of scorched earth. Darkened craters, burned-out fields, abandoned and rusting instruments of the old world. This place was the aftermath of some great and final battle, a futile attempt to hold on to a world that had withered and departed without regard to hopes or prayers or tears. The landscape marked the fading symbol of man’s insistence that he could forge a world where his will alone defined the natural order. But all those efforts had failed. In the end, nature mandated its own design, and man’s world had died. In that death, all the instruments of man’s world, all the fragile testaments of God’s supremacy crumbled, and turned to dust. Like the useless iPod still clipped to her belt, its
battery long since drained and its electronic voices asleep. It was dead like this new world. Things that had once been that no longer were. Family, friends, and places she had known. All dead and gone.

Her hand touched the iPod. The movement was a habit that had begun when the batteries had drained. She hated the unconscious compulsion to ensure it was still on her belt. Hated it because it was a childish fear that she might lose the useless device that drove the obsession. She understood that the silent iPod served as a physical reminder that hope had once existed. A reminder that they had been friends and that they could still love in a world of death. Sometimes she wished she could throw the thing far into the empty fields. Prove that she could dislodge herself from the last physical symbol of hope and, in doing so, embrace that hope no longer existed. Once, she had held it in her hand—she had been seconds away from pitching it into a stagnant pond—but the memories it held were too strong, and in the end she could not part with it.

In a way, the iPod linked her to the world. It was a talisman, and even the dead battery could not silence its real voice. The music was all there, and every song and every melody still played in her mind. Each song a voice she had known and loved. Their harmonies sang bittersweet, they held her upright, and they propelled her forward. They sang to her often, they tried to give her comfort, and they insisted that she continue. She wished they would stop. If it were her choice alone, she would just sit down on the roadside and wait. Wait for the Creepers to catch up to them and to finish what had started in some faraway place. A place that no longer seemed real, a place that may never have been real.

Deep within her was a broken and sad thing. Its weight grew heavier with each step, and it became solid, like the twin machetes entrusted to her. She knew what this thing was, and it scared her more than the Creepers and more than thoughts of her own death. She had expended so much energy pushing it away and trying to refuse it. The thing that she feared was a part of her; it was that young, happy girl’s soul who had died in a closet so long ago. She didn’t want that part of herself anymore. She could not bear the thought of bringing that girl into this world. Instead, she would prefer to be done with this world, to be finished with this life, to let death come and take away the ghosts. No more memories, no more pain. To simply slip into the darkness and find the place where her family and friends had gone. But the voices inside spoke with such clarity, and they whispered something that sounded like promises. They demanded she keep the young girl’s heart alive until it was safe again to laugh and to cry. The voices spoke like whispers of wind, like pieces of music drifting across a great empty divide. They told her to continue; they told her the group needed her and that they needed her strength. She had no interest in laughter or tears. She had no interest in ever being that naive innocent girl again. She had no interest in hope, but others had sacrificed for her, and to that, she owed a debt; therefore, she carried on into the west.

One last dance

She accepted that their next battle would be their last. They were once strong. They were once a force of love and friendship. Now they were less. She was all of them now. She carried each of the fallen and the missing inside her like the songs on her father’s iPod. She was the Death Dancer and the football player, she was the young man who’d found love on the day he died, she was the mechanic who’d died for her sister, and she was the man who’d died for her. She was her mother and her father, and soon she would be the baseball player, the reluctant leader, the girlfriend, and the best friend. She would be all of them until her last dance. She would dance that last dance with them and for them—for that is all she had left to give.

The others had fallen behind. She turned and waited. The sight of them drew deep lines of sorrow across her heart. A final dance was all they, too, had left. They could no longer run, for they had no strength left for it. So yes, she would dance one last dance with them, for these people she had once loved. Love was something dead and gone too; she had no energy to find those feelings. A voice argued that she was wrong. That the love was still there and that it was the only thing of any value. She silenced the voice because it sounded too much like that naive girl from the closet. It didn’t matter anyway; it was all wishful thinking, but she would stay until the very end.

She would dance until her last three bullets were gone, until her arms could no longer wield the knives, and until the last of them had fallen and she no longer had a reason to live. Then she would lie down and let it end.

Her brother limped forward with an impossible unwavering determination. He was the young man who’d had leadership forced upon him. This world had stolen his youth and exuberance from him, piece by piece. Each time that he wrongly blamed himself for someone’s death or for some mistake another piece was torn away. Even as his physical strength seeped away, he remained their leader, and he continued to carry the weight of that responsibility even when he could barely carry his own physical weight. That responsibility that had been born of love had come at such a great cost. The young man who had once smiled so easily had lost that carefree optimism and now wore only an expression that showed the grim determination to keep those that remained of them alive.

Devin’s leg grew worse each day and with every step. He would never run again, but that didn’t matter since he would not run even if it were still possible. He would expend the last of himself trying to save Caroline’s life and that of their unborn baby. Even now, he managed to support her, to carry her weight, although the cost of such was evident in his own physical deterioration. Golden imagined the baby would come soon, by the looks of things—perhaps in a few more weeks. She considered that it might be best if they all died before the birth. A blessing in a way, but one she knew her brother would not entertain. There were moments, however, when she saw a look in his eyes. A shadowed expression of fear that spoke to the likely outcome of their journey. The only possible outcome to their journey.

On the other side of the road walked Brandon. Devin’s best friend, when such terms still existed. He fared better than the rest, but Brandon would not run, either. He had never left his friend’s side, and he never would. His ruined and useless left arm hung at his side. It was the cost of his loyalty. His blue eyes appeared as cold and dark as she imagined her own did. Eyes that saved their fleeting embers of warmth for the last of his friends. He was still there to catch those who tripped and to carry more than his share of the burden. She knew he would be the first to die in their next encounter with the Creepers. A lack of strength would not cause his death. It would result from his willingness to sacrifice himself. He would take the first wave of infected in a hopeless attempt to give the rest a chance to live. His sacrifice would gain them a few extra moments, but no more; their chances for survival no longer existed.

Austin walked slightly ahead of Brandon. Several times, Brandon reached out and straightened Austin’s slow, listing gait. The poison should have consumed him long ago. With greater frequency, he coughed up blood from his broken insides. Austin remained as stubborn as he had ever been, and he refused to die. There were no illusions that he would live to see another month, each day now a borrowed gift, a gift she suspected was more for his brother than for himself. She saw as much in Austin’s eyes and in Devin’s refusal to consider anything for his brother but a miraculous victory over death. When she looked at Austin, they silently communicated that his end was close now. Like his brother, though, he remained determined to continue. She knew that he would walk until they ran out of road or he ran out of life. He still carried his rifle on one shoulder and his baseball bat on the other. She doubted he possessed the strength to swing the bat, but he had surprised her many times before with his well of strength. She would not count him out of the fight just yet.

Closets of the mind

The thought of her own death did not bother her. She had already died before. Once in a closet and again when she saw the terrible rage in her sister’s eyes. She knew that this journey was hopeless, understood that they could not fight their way out of the inevitable and even accepted that her death would bring the peace she longed to experience. As she watched the small group struggle along behind her, a sudden and unexpected anger exploded in her. The ferocity of it astounded her. The thought of their death seemed so unfair and wrong that she wanted to scream. It felt like a red, hot thing in front of her face, and she took a step forward to greet it. The sudden rage drove her desire to find the pursuing infected and kill each one of them with her bare hands.

Devin, Caroline, and their baby deserved a life together. They deserved birthdays and Christmas mornings and a chance to be a family. Brandon deserved to have his loyalty repaid with something better than death. Why should his sacrifice be worth no more than a few extra minutes of horror for the friends he was so willing to die for? Austin had remained strong for so long, he had jumped into every battle with unwavering courage; and even now, he painfully continued just to give his brother hope. He deserved to lie down and rest. He deserved to slip away peacefully and surrounded by his loved ones. He didn’t deserve to take his last breath in an unfair fight.

The feelings were so strong and so powerful that she physically began to shake and she could barely contain the vengeful scream that boiled in her throat.

“So why let them die?”

It was her stepdad’s voice. It was not the first time he had spoken to her. The reality of it, the possibility of it, did not matter. It sounded real, and twice that voice had saved her life.

“Because it’s the plan,” she answered. “We lead the Creepers away from the others. We save the children.”

“And you have done that. So now go find the others. Save the last of your family and friends.”

“I don’t know. We’re supposed to lead them away, and they still follow us.”

“Goldie, was the plan for you to stay in the closet forever?”

“I don’t know.”

“Of course it wasn’t. It was to keep you safe until you were saved. It’s time to leave that closet again. It’s time to save those who can be saved. To give them a chance. You’re the leader right now. You’re the only one who can.”

“No. Devin is the leader. I’m just out front because I’m still strong.”

“Yes. Stronger than you think. Look at your brother. He can’t make this decision. He already carries too much. The guilt of every death. He has the weight of responsibility for Caroline, for his unborn baby, for Austin, for all of you. You need to carry this for a while.”

“But I don’t know what to do or where to go.”

“Do you remember what I used to say? When you find yourself in a hole, what do you do?”

She smiled. “Stop digging.”

“Exactly. So stop digging. Do you think this group can walk all the way to the Pacific?”