CRYERS (19 page)

“He was a
monster. Not part of
our
family.”

Her mother
produced a black binder out of thin air and pushed it towards her. It wasn’t as
big as the books, less than an inch thick, with uneven pages sticking out along
the edges. A small white card was taped on the front with a single word typed
on it.

CRYERS

“Our crimes against humanity have travelled
through generations.”

“What is
this?”

“ABZE did more than take money from wealthy
clients and promise them a second chance. We wanted to
improve
the human race…make it better…enhance it physically and mentally for the
challenges of a future world.”

Jenny stared
at the folder but wouldn’t open it. “It’s what makes us so strong—it’s how he
brought you back after the…grenade.” Even in her dreams, Jenny couldn’t erase
the horrible image of her mother being blown apart at the midsection, and the
horrible piecing of her together again at the hands of her ancient relative.

Edna sighed.
She was inside Jenny’s head, seeing and feeling everything her daughter was
experiencing.
“He wasn’t responsible for
the enhancements. That work began decades after his freezing. My
father—me—we’re responsible for the things you see now. CRYERS was the name
given to a secret project that experimented on involuntary subjects.”

“Involuntary?”

“How many rich people do you know willing to
pay to be guinea pigs? To improve the human condition we needed test subjects.
ABZE found them throughout the prisons and asylums of North America. Hundreds
of throwaways society no longer had any use for. They were the first—our
cryogenic white mice.”

“Cryers.”
Jenny whispered the word. “It’s what we are now. It’s what you made us. Why
didn’t you just let me die, Mom? Why did you bring me back like this?”

“I love you.”

Jenny started
to cry again. “You loved what I was. How will you feel when this dream ends? We
can’t feel much of anything when were awake.” She rubbed the warm tears from
her cheeks and held her fingers out. “We can’t cry when we’re awake… We can’t
love
.”

“We’re alive.”

“Not good
enough. You sound like…
him
.”

Edna
shrugged. A line of blood appeared at the corner of her mouth. It ran down her
chin and dripped to the table. She made an ‘O’ shape with her lips and pushed a
piece of olive-green-colored metal out with her tongue. The grenade shrapnel
clunked down and rolled on top of the Cryers folder.
“Like I said…he’s family. It’s our legacy.”

The
nightmarish quality of Jenny’s dream had returned. The cryogenics cylinders
she’d walked past were making noise. She looked over and saw them shaking. The
glass window in the one closest cracked. A steady pounding from a hundred
different cylinders echoed up into the cavernous shadows of rock—fists beating
against the insides of metal coffins like frenzied tribal drums.

“They want
out.”

“They can
never
be released. I didn’t share
all of our secrets with Great-grandfather. He doesn’t know about
this
project…about the West Coast
installation…where we kept the cryers. Some things—as I’m sure he would
agree—are best kept secret.”
Blood was flowing from her mouth as she
talked, running down her front and splashing onto the table. The black folder
was soaked in it.
“Don’t try to stop him,
kiddo. You can’t win. But you can make sure he never finds out about this
place. Stay with him—stay with your father.”

A gaping hole
had appeared beneath Edna’s chin. Flesh hung from it, and blood squirted out
into her lap along with the flood from her mouth. Her eyes turned pink, with
pinpricks for pupils.

“Don’t leave
me, Mom. Please don’t wake up yet. I want to feel—”

“Wake up.”
The hand on Jenny’s arm was insistent. She opened her eyes and looked into her
father’s face. His skin was gray and scarred, his eyes orange. “It’s time to
go.”

Jenny sat up
and saw Brian Haywood heading down the hill. He was holding Eunice Murrenfeld’s
hand, helping the obese woman along the steep slope. Aleea, Mary, and the
Russian were ahead of them. Lothair Eichberg was already on flat land, setting
out towards a strip of red rising in the east. Leonard trailed behind him,
shuffling his feet and kicking up dust.

Colonel
Strope went to Edna. “Help me with your mother. Her back’s still a mess.”

Jenny watched
as he lifted her to her feet. She was still misshapen and deformed. The pink
eyes settled on her daughter, lifeless and unaware.

Drool spilled
from her gaping mouth. It reminded Jenny of blood.

This is what we are now…no longer human.

We’re cryers.

Chapter
32

Cobe had
never experienced such an odd dream in all his sixteen years. He was walking a
few steps behind a young girl—the same girl he’d seen down in Big Hole where
Lothair and a handful of his kind had held the lawman captive. He called out to
her, but the girl kept walking without even glancing over her shoulder. Her
long red hair was beautiful. Cobe wanted to touch it—he needed to know if it
would be as soft in his fingers as it appeared to his eyes. He tried running,
but his legs were mired in air as thick as water.

Voices
whispered to him from the line of black cylinders on his right. They were
calling his name, pleading to be set free from their cold tombs. Cobe refused
to look at them; his eyes were lost in the girl’s hair. The cylinders rattled
and banged; the muffled voices inside became screams, demanding release.

The girl came
to a strange table set in a rock wall. She slid along a seat covered in
something red. The other woman was there—Cobe had seen her before, too—the one
leaning into the open cylinder next to Lawson. She was as beautiful as the
young girl. They shared many of the same features. Mother and daughter?

Cobe’s feet
stopped working. He reached out to the women twenty feet away. They couldn’t
see him. He yelled, but they couldn’t hear. Why was he even trying? They wanted
to kill the lawman. They had wanted to kill
all
of them.

It was the
girl. Cobe needed to see her face again. He recalled the brief moment their
eyes had locked in Big Hole—how green they had been. Her hair…those eyes…he
needed more. The things screaming from their cylinders drowned his shouts away.
Mother and daughter could hear nothing—or they chose to ignore it. The two were
in a world of their own, looking through an ancient pile of books soaked in
blood.

Cobe
continued shouting at the girl until someone kicked him in the rear end.

“Keep it
down, you loud-mouth shit,” a rasping female voice said.

Cobe opened
his eyes and smelled the earth. He remembered falling into grass and leaves.
His face was now stuck in cold mud that reeked of urine.

“That’s more
like it,” the voice said. “Few more seconds of yer wailin’ and I woulda cut yer
throat wide open, I woulda.”

Cobe peeled
himself from the wet ground and rolled onto his side. Devon’s lifeless white
face stared back at him. An arrow was stuck in the flesh above his collarbone.
There was a six-inch-wide gash in his throat.

“See? I done
it to him ‘cause the big idiot wouldn’t keep his mouth shut. Tried pullin’ that
arrow out but he wouldn’t shut up. Same thing fer you if you start up with the
shoutin’ again. Dirty don’t lie.”

The back of
his neck and the top of his head throbbed in pain as he sat up. Cobe thought he
might throw up on Devon’s stomach. There, sitting a few feet away from the
man’s corpse on a rotted tree stump, was the woman who’d cut his throat open.
She was more hag than woman—an ancient bag of bones and wrinkled yellow-gray
skin. A few strands of white hair hung over her cloudy blue eyes, like strings
of spit wagging back and forth. The bridge of her nose was a crooked trail of
ancient breaks that led to a bulbous purple tip infested with pustules. She was
grinning—at least that’s what Cobe thought she was doing—and as she did, a
single green-stained tooth scraped along her upper lip. Her jaw clicked as she
ran it from one side to the other; a habit she’d more than likely developed
before Cobe was even born, he supposed.

“You good at
making babies?” the hag croaked.

“Where’s my
brother?”

“Ain’t the
answer I was wantin’ to hear. I’ll ask again… You
good
at makin’ babies?”

Cobe had just
turned sixteen. He’d never been with a girl in his life. The thought of this
old thing wanting to be his first made him want to vomit even more. “I—I
don’t…I can’t—”

The hag
rocked back on her stump. “Not with me, stupid boy! Ol’ Dirty ain’t laid with a
man in years! I wants to know if you can make babies with my daughters.”

Cobe had
experienced unimaginable levels of fear in the last few days since the murder
of his parents—terrors he hadn’t dreamed possible before setting out from Burn
with his brother. An ancient race of people was waking up as cannibalistic
monsters a mile beneath the ground. He’d learned how to use a gun by killing
howlers, and he had run amongst a herd of stampeding rollers. But the decrepit
woman before him now stirred fears inside Cobe like some horrible, disjointed
nightmare.

“No…I can’t
make babies.”

“Can’t, or
won’t? Careful what you say next—laying with one of Dirty’s girls ain’t the
worst thing that could happen here.”

The air
between them was tinged with smoke thick enough to sting his eyes, but not
enough to obscure his view of her. He looked about desperately in their dark
surroundings for a way of escape. They were inside some sort of small cave; a
dank black space. He spotted a narrow opening behind him, a sliver of vertical
light. A small fire crackled outside. The smoke drifted in, watering his eyes
more. Cobe slid on his backside towards it, keeping his eyes on the woman.

“Go on,
then,” she said. “Go outside and find yer brother… Useless little puke.”

He scrambled
to his hands and knees and crawled outside. The heel of one palm crushed down
against a smoldering coal thrown from the fire and Cobe howled. He jumped to
his feet, shaking his hand in the air. Another woman, half the age of Dirty but
still old, sat across from the fire, laughing at him. Her naked body was coated
from head to foot in gray mud. Cobe looked away, back towards the opening he’d
crawled out of. It was part of a giant tree; the base had been hollowed out
into a crude living area. His eyes wandered up. Cobe had never seen a tree grow
so big and so high. Its uppermost branches, leafless and black, waved in the
sky, scratching at a ceiling of steadily moving gray clouds.

The
mud-covered woman was standing beside him now, rubbing his arm with cold
fingers. “You’re a skinny one. Not so skinny that you can’t make babies though,
hey?”

Cobe backed
away from her. “I’m not making babies with you. I’m not making babies with
anyone
. Where’s my brother?”

“Give the boy
some room, El.” Dirty crawled out from the tree with amazing agility. “He ain’t
ready yet. If you want somethin’ to do, pull that dead body outta my house and
drag it off a ways.”

“He’s dead?”

“It’s what I
said, wasn’t it?”

El looked
disappointed. “I wanted to…well, I was hopin’—”

“Go have some
fun with his corpse in the woods.” Dirty waved the younger woman away
dismissively. “Do whatcha want to him—so long as you do it far enough away the
rest of us don’t hear.”

Cobe looked
away quickly as the woman bent over to crawl inside the tree. Dirty didn’t miss
a thing. “What’s the matter with you? You one o’ those boys that don’t like
girls? ‘Cause if so, I’ll gut you right here and now.”

More muddy
figures appeared in the trees. Naked girls and boys ranging in age from six to
sixty moved towards the fire in a curious cluster. They surrounded Cobe and the
old woman, holding weapons as advanced as bows and arrows all the way down to
sharp-edged rocks. Some held nothing at all, choosing instead to play with the
organs between their legs.

“I like
girls,” Cobe said defensively. “Why do you need me? Looks like you have plenty
enough boys here to make babies.”

Dirty sneered.
“Brothers pokin’ sisters? Uncles fuckin’ nieces? We been doin’ that shit fer
years. Trouble is the babies get uglier and stupider the more a family fiddles
with each other. I find fresh faces and new peckers makes things better.”

Cobe suddenly
found himself wishing he was running with the rollers again. He wanted to be
anywhere but here.

A voice
called out away from the fire, “Do as she says, boy. Screw one of her ugly
daughters and maybe they’ll let us go.” Cobe pushed through the crowd and found
Lode fifty feet away, tied to a tree and grinning. “If it’s your first time,
don’t let nerves get the best of you. It’ll pass. I’ve already fucked four of
them.”

“My
brother…Lawson; where are they?”

Lode
indicated off to the side with a wag of his big tattooed head. “Your brother’s
too young to play with Dirty Gertie’s granddaughters. Not sure why they kept
him alive. Maybe they’ll wait for him to grow into the breeding type.”

Cobe found
them lying in a mound of dirt and leaves. He shook Willem’s arm until the boy
sat up groggily on his own. Lode was still talking. “The lawman keeps drifting
in and out. I was hoping the old bastard might stay awake long enough to
satisfy a woman or two. Maybe I was too hard on him—one kick in the head too
many.”

“We in
trouble again?” Willem asked. “Them people gonna kill us?”

Cobe wasn’t
sure how to explain it to his little brother. “Trouble? Yeah, I suppose we are.
But they ain’t interested in killing and eating us.”

He offered
Cobe a weak smile. “Then we’re gonna be okay. We’ll get outta this.”

Cobe ruffled
the boy’s hair and returned a grin of his own. “Yeah. We will.”

Somebody
groaned beyond the lawman’s unconscious form. Cobe saw something shift, a
blanket of leaves fell away, and Trot sat up looking more dazed and confused than
ever. He winced in pain, and his fat fingers went to the side of his head.
“Oooww…my head hurts.”

Cobe’s jaw
dropped. “You’re alive!”

“Was I…was I
dead?” Trot wasn’t being sarcastic; it was a genuine question.

“I saw you
against the tree with an arrow stuck into your brain.”

“My ear,”
Trot said. He showed Cobe the left side of his face. It was caked in dry blood.
“The arrow caught my dumb ear and pinned me to the tree.” He looked at his
fingers. “Finally stopped bleeding.” He made another pained look. “Hurts really
bad.”

Cobe and
Willem went to him together. They hugged the man tightly, and all three wept.
Cobe whispered in his ear, “Have you ever made babies?”