CRYERS (31 page)

Chapter 54

Aleea pushed
off from Tevalov and lunged at the lawman. There was barely time to react. The
shotgun barrel was still pointed in her general direction. Lawson jammed it
into her face and he heard the scrape of metal grinding against teeth. He
pushed harder, felt something give in the back of her throat, and the barrel
continued on up into the lower part of her brain.

It ain’t her shit hole, but it’s getting the
job done.

Her eyes
opened wide as she dropped to her knees. Lawson pulled back on the handle a few
inches and shoved forward again, twisting her brains further into mush. The
pinpoint pricks of her pupils rolled up and disappeared, leaving nothing but
dead pink. The lawman planted one boot into her chest and dislodged the corpse
from his gun.

Ivan Tevalov
was lying below him, his wet erection still throbbing. Lawson backed away as
the Russian stood. A malevolent show of yellow teeth appeared at the center of
his bearded face. “I’ve never buggered a man before…always wondered what it
might be like.”

Lawson swung
the handle-end towards his head, but Tevalov batted it away. Jenny pushed the
lawman out of the way and drove her shoulder into the older cryer’s gut. They
rolled over twice in the dirt and stopped on the first few feet of accumulated
stones that served as Rudd’s final bridge leading out. The Russian had ended up
on top—his thick, dirty fingers wrapped around the girl’s throat. “I’ve wanted
to do you since the first moment I saw you.” He throttled her harder. “You’ve
wanted it too, admit it.”

Jenny kneed
his drooping testicles, but the man only choked her more ferociously. He
started to bash the back of her head against the rocks; Jenny was beginning to
black out. All that swam in her vision was the white of his glowing eyes,
bobbing up in down in mad streaks as her head continued to bounce off stone.
She thought she heard the lawman yelling into the cryer’s ear.

Lawson had
Tevalov in a headlock. He twisted and pulled, but it did no good. He may as
well have been trying to uproot the old black hanging tree back in Burn with
his bare hands for all the good it was doing. The Russian was too strong, the
thick bones beneath his grey skin too heavily layered with muscle. He hollered
at him to release the girl and face him like a man. Ivan kept on throttling and
pounding. Lawson tore his ear off with his teeth and spat it away. The thing’s
blood tasted foul—it burned and froze the tip of his tongue at the same time.

Ivan didn’t
feel a thing.

Cobe came to
the lawman’s side and grappled with the cryer. Willem joined his brother,
grabbing a fistful of white beard. Trot worked from the other end, pulling at
the thing’s pale legs. It was a monumental effort from all four but ultimately
futile. Tevalov was going to kill the girl, and likely molest her dead body in
front of all of them.

Sara was on
her hands and knees, searching desperately for a loose stone in the bridge to
plant in the monster’s brain. She felt the rocks shake beneath her palms.
Something big and heavy was charging across the bridge from the dark plains.
There’s no one on guard—rollers are charging
into Rudd.
She crawled off to the side and almost plummeted over the edge.
A big horse thundered by. Sara saw someone riding it. A flash of fair skin, a
streak of long, blonde hair.

“Kay!”

Four more
horses rumbled past, kicking up dust and chips of stone.

Lawson had
heard Sara call their daughter’s name. He let go of Tevalov and saw Dust
rearing up on his hind legs directly in front of Willem. He grabbed the boy’s
one arm and threw him towards Cobe just as the horse’s hooves started down.
Ivan Tevalov was too involved trying to murder the girl under him. Dust
connected hard with the back of his head, pulverizing a third of the Russian’s
skull deep into his brain.

The grip
around Jenny’s throat loosened and she pushed her attacker off. Ivan was on his
back now, moaning incoherently and coughing up great wads of blood. Dust reared
up again and caught him with both hooves. One made a sickening crunch into his
chest, the other caught the bottom half of his face. Cobe was still dragging
Willem away and saw one of Tevalov’s glowing white eyeballs pop out of its
socket as the horse rested its full weight down.

Dust and the
other horses settled some and backed away from the mangled remains. Ivan and
Aleea were still crawling around in the dirt, their bodies heaving and
twitching. Even without brains to direct them, the cryers still clung
stubbornly to life. Lawson recalled Strope’s words from their secret meeting—
I’m not sure anything can truly destroy us
now.
He rested his forehead against Dust’s snorting nose, calming the
animal some more, and thanked his old friend for the timely return.

Kay had
slipped off of the horse’s back and was in her mother’s arms. Stunned, elated,
and overwhelmed, Sara could only think of one thing to ask. “Where did you
learn to ride?”

Kay looked
back at Dust and smiled at Lawson. “On the plains…about twelve hours ago. I
think the horse taught
me
… It was as
if he already knew who I was.” The lawman winked at her.

Cobe started
towards Kay. He was going to hug her. He was going to kiss her on the cheek and
tell her how happy he was to see her again. His heart hammered inside his
chest. Cobe had been plenty scared, plenty of times in the last while, but this
kind of fear outdid all the rest.

He was less
than six feet from her when Angel rushed out of the shadows. The girl’s scrawny
arms wrapped around his waist and she kissed him. Her big teeth smacked against
his, driving their faces apart. She pulled him back in for another. “I
knew
I’d see you again. It’s like we was
meant to be together.”

Kay’s jaw had
dropped wide open, her eyes were wider still.

Cobe never got
the chance to speak with Kay. Lawson had already gathered the other three
horses together into a nervous but controlled group around Dust. “These animals
used to belong to someone—they’re broken enough to ride. Everyone grab a
partner and get on up. It’s time we got the hell out of Rudd.”

***

Edna had told
her great-grandfather everything. The Cryers experiments were actually funded
by a separate entity other than ABZE. In 2039 Edna’s father, Kelvin Eichberg,
had formed the clandestine organization called CRIERS—
Cryogenic Research Initiative Extending Rehabilitative Services.
It
had been a way around the rules and regulations limiting ABZE’s research branch
from achieving their most
noble
ambitions. In Lothair’s day, ABZE was all about bringing the terminally ill and
incurably vain back to life. It had been an enterprise that only catered to the
wealthiest of clients. CRIERS not only wanted to extend human life, they wanted
to improve on it. Lothair’s grandson couldn’t find voluntary test-subjects within
ABZE’s client base, and even if he had, those pesky laws forbidding inhumane
and unethical experimentation had taken the company as far as it could go.

That was when
the deal with the penal system was made. CRIERS took control of prisoners with
maximum life sentences—in particular those with a hundred or more years left to
serve. A legal—and highly secret—precedent was realized; if the prisons were
unable to fulfill their obligation to care for inmates past the natural end of
life, they had to release them to an organization that could.

The prisons
didn’t fight the decision. Kelvin’s new company had paid handsomely for the
custodial transfer of each inmate from over fifty penitentiaries throughout the
US, Canada, and Mexico. Hundreds more were taken from asylums for the
criminally insane.

“How many are
there?” Lothair asked.

Edna had
imagined her coffee-burned face whole again. She stared across the restaurant
table at her great-grandfather through dark brown, human eyes. “CRIERS
transferred over two thousand murderers, rapists, pedophiles, and terrorists
into the Victory facility from 2042 until 2051. When the project was abandoned
just short of its tenth anniversary, 1511 prisoner-patients were placed in
permanent deep-freeze.”

“What happened
to the other five-hundred?”

Edna shrugged.
“The experiments went too far, too fast. We had done all we could with chemical
enhancements and artificial blood replacement. Things got messy with the
introduction of nanotechnology and quantum medicines. There was some limited
success—total cerebral awareness, the integration of titanium and calcium
phosphates creating a virtually indestructible skeletal system, organ
regeneration—”

“Limited
success?” Lothair shook his head disbelievingly. “You don’t give yourself
enough credit, dear.”

“There are
only so many improvements you can incorporate into a human body before
it…protests. There was an incident…” Edna looked down at the table surface and
almost giggled. “I guess you could call it a prison riot considering the men and
women we were experimenting on. Some of the test-subjects revolted, tried to
take control of the facility…It was a hard-fought battle, but they were
eventually subdued. Victory was deemed too dangerous and locked up for good.
The CRIERS project was dead.”

“But the
results weren’t forgotten.” He reached across and took Edna’s hands in his.
“You took
some
of that technology and
placed it within us.”

“I had to be
sure our family and the most generous clients survived…so much started
happening in the second half of the twenty-first century. Wars, extreme climate
change, abnormal solar activity…everything was crumbling all around us. It
forced us into frozen hibernation.”

“You did the
right thing. We have survived. But now that we are here the time has come to
journey west for the Victory facility. Our bodies and minds are far stronger
than they were, but I want more…I need us to become
all
that we can be.”

He tried to
stand but Edna pulled him back down. “Don’t you want to know what became of
your son—your grandson?”

Lothair
settled back into his seat. “My son…Hans. The last time I saw him was in the
twentieth century…the week before I was frozen. His wife and children had been
with him. Kelvin was only a baby.”

“Haven’t you
wondered why they weren’t in cryogenic storage with the rest of us at the
Dauphin facility?”

Lothair
sounded defensive. “I read about our family on the computer before reviving
you. Hans died of natural causes in 2032 and chose not to continue. My
daughter-in-law, Edith, was frozen a year later in the Chicago facility. Their
daughter, Helena—your mother—was frozen at the same location thirty years
after. There were no records at all about young Kelvin.”

“Young
Kelvin—my
sweet, loving
father—led
the Victory uprising in 2051. He experimented on himself with the nano-quantum
improvements and went insane.”

“Did
he…survive?”

Edna nodded.
“Frozen. Locked away for all time. You scare me, great-grandfather, but what he
turned into, the thing my father became…
terrified
me.”

“All the more
reason to head west. We have family waiting.”

Edna squeezed
at his wrists. “Please, don’t go, there’s so much more to talk about.”

Lothair
twisted his arms until she released him. “You’ve been doing your best to avoid
me ever since I pieced you back together. I find it odd that you’re willing to
speak now.” He studied his great-granddaughter more closely. Something wasn’t
right. “Why did you arrange to have Michael send me to you in this dream?”

“I… I knew
there was no sense resisting any longer. You were right, we need to expand. We
need to take all that we know and grow in this new world.”

“I don’t
believe you.”

She seemed
desperate. “Trust me, I’m telling the truth.”

The table top
had started to vibrate. The two coffee cups were rattling towards the edge.
Lothair could feel the ground shaking under his feet. “You’re stalling…trying
to
keep
me here.” One of the cups
toppled over and smashed against the tile floor.

“I want to
spend time with you. We’ve lost centuries. Tell me what it was like growing up
in Germany… Tell me all about the children you murdered during the war.”

Edna was
crawling across the table. She wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled him
in. Lothair shut his eyes and willed the dream to the end.

Chapter 55

Cobe wasn’t
sure if the Gods had kept them all alive up to this point or if it was just
dumb luck. There had been a dozen different ways each of them should’ve died,
but they were still together, still running. Divine intervention and chance
weren’t helping any of them now. The only way out of Rudd—their only hope of
escape—wasn’t being blocked by a crush of stampeding rollers, or the remaining
grey-skinned monsters from Big Hole. What stopped them now was an ugly girl on
a horse.

“You killed my
Pa,” Angel said.

The lawman
tried working Dust around her, but Angel and her nervous horse stood their
ground at the narrow bridge opening. “We ain’t got time fer this, girl. Yer pa
was a decent man, and he didn’t deserve what he got, but I didn’t kill him.”

“You may as
well have,” she answered. “He couldn’t defend himself against them things once
you was finished with him.”

Willem was
sitting atop one of the horses and Cobe was behind him, holding his one-armed
brother in place with both of his. He twisted around and looked back over Rudd.
The town had gone eerily still since the two cryers had stopped crawling and
twitching in the dirt. There were more of them in the dark, Cobe knew, and the
longer they took arguing, the less distance would be put between them and the
creatures. He called out to Angel. “We lost our father too. If it makes you
feel any better, call the lawman Pa until you can find a better one.”

Lawson gave
him a dirty look.

Sara was
behind Kay on a white horse. “Two daughters in less than a week. Looks you’re
making up for all them lost years after all.”

Angel smiled
at Cobe. “I ain’t lookin’ fer a new Pa, but I can treat him like one if it
makes
you
happy.” She dug her heels
into the horse’s sides and yanked on its mane. The girl rode across the bridge
and into the night. Kay and Sara shot off after her.

Willem looked
back at his brother. “You sure you can ride this thing on yer own?”

“I figure the
two of us can learn quick enough. You steer it by the mane, and I’ll make it
run.” He leaned back and smacked the horse’s rear with the palm of his hand.
The big brown mare exploded into movement.

That only left
the lawman on Dust, and Jenny sitting quietly on the back of an equally subdued
grey animal. Trot stood between them wondering what to do. “Get off the horse
and help Trot up,” Lawson said.

“I’m going
with you.”

Lawson shifted
uncomfortably on Dust’s back. “I don’t think that’s what yer father had in
mind.”

“I don’t care
what my father wants.”

“Why should we
trust you—after all yer people have done, why should I let you ride with us?
What’s to stop you from killin’ us along the way?”

“I haven’t
killed you yet.”

He didn’t
doubt for a second the girl could kill any of them with her bare hands. Maybe
having her along wasn’t such a bad idea—especially where they were headed. He
nodded and looked down at the bewildered Trot. “Go with the girl. We’ll be
ridin’ hard and fast—Dust don’t need the weight of two big men slowin’ him
down.”

“I…I can’t
ride with her,” Trot blubbered. “She’s one of them…she’s a
cryer
.”

He tried
crawling up Lawson’s leg and the lawman pushed him away with the tip of his
boot. “Can’t be scared of shit yer whole life—Go on now, ride with her.”

A horrible
shriek sounded back towards town. Lawson looked past Trot into the night and
saw something big and black charging their way.

“Eichberg
knows,” Jenny said. “He’s sending Eunice to stop us.”

“Go!” Lawson
yelled at her. “Catch up to the others.” He bent over and struggled to help
Trot up behind him. It had taken too long. The fat cryer was less than thirty
feet away and she was moving fast. The lawman didn’t have to pull on Dust’s
mane or kick him in the sides; the old horse knew what kind of danger was
closing in. There wouldn’t be enough time for him to turn. The creature’s mouth
was already open—Lawson could see strings of saliva whipping over her blacks
lips and sticking to the rolls of her chins.

Something
slammed into Eunice’s shoulder. The force of it knocked her off balance and the
obese woman fell to the ground. She sat up and cursed. “Fucking arrow! Some
fucking asshole shot me with a fucking arrow!” Another one thumped into the
middle of her chest. She looked down at disbelievingly. “Fuck.”

Two more flew
into her great gut. Eunice stood back up. Her immense legs were quivering, her
arms whirled about for balance. “Stop it,” she wheezed. “Please stop shooting.”
An arrow lodged in the center of her throat and black blood squirted out. “It
hurts, it hurts.” Her voice was weak and had a pronounced whistle.

Lawson, Trot
and Jenny remained at the foot of the bridge and watched with fascinated horror
as the cryer fell again. She was back on her knees, clawing at the air between
them, pleading soundlessly for mercy.

From the
town-side of Rudd’s moat Eunice’s attackers emerged. They scrambled over the
rocky edges covered in shit and piss, carrying their bows and arrows, their
vicious clubs, and their stone knives. They ignored the horses and the riders
and went straight for the shaking hulk of blob crying in the dirt.

“We don’t need
to see this,” the lawman said. He turned Dust south and they clomped across the
bridge, picking up speed out on the plains.

Eunice was
covered in a press of wet, stinking bodies. She had managed to pull the arrow
out from her throat and the one that was causing the most agony from her chest.
It wouldn’t end like this. She wouldn’t allow it. Eunice reached out and found
a throat. She tore the flesh and cartilage free and was sprayed over in warm
blood. She drank it down and felt a surge of energy. Nothing like getting your
second wind, she thought. A thigh pressed into her face and she bit down.
Self-preservation and panic washed through the crowd causing the bodies to move
off of her.

Eunice was
back on her feet, shrieking and whistling. “Fucking cowards! Dirty, inbred
cocksuckers! Eichberg should’ve let us murder all of you back in your goddamned
hills!” She was covered in excrement and dripping blood. A dozen of her
attackers were circling around, waving their clubs and knives but keeping their
distance. Dozens more were climbing up from the moat. One was holding a lit
torch in front of her and moving slowly.

Eunice knew
instantly who it was. “You filthy old whore.”

Dirty Gertie
waved the fire back and forth between them. “You got spirit, girl… I’ll give
you that. Might’ve been a time when I let somma my boys diddle you. I could’ve
used some strong daughters.”

“Fuck you.
Fuck your boys, and fuck your daughters.”

“Too late fer
that.”

Someone with a
wooden bucket ran forward and threw its contents over Eunice’s head. Something
vile-smelling and pungent sloshed down her shoulders and into the crack between
her heaving breasts. Gertie jerked forward and smacked the end of Eunice’s nose
with her torch. Her face and hair erupted in blue flame, and Gertie’s children
let out a collective gasp. They danced around the thrashing woman as the fire
spread down her arms and caught in the remains of her dress. Eunice tried to
scream one last time but Gertie jammed the torch into her open mouth.

Lothair
watched dispassionately from the shadows as Eunice Murrenfeld went up in flame
like a mountain of melted marshmallow. His centuries-long obligation to one of
ABZE’s most generous contributors had come to an end.

“We gonna let
them get away with that?” Leonard asked.

Lothair placed
a finger over the young man’s lips. They knelt down further behind the old
well. “I don’t care about them.” He pointed towards the bridge behind Eunice’s
smoking remains and Leonard watched his finger trail slowly southward. “I’m
more concerned with the lawman.”

Leonard shook
his head. “We can run real fast, but horses can run faster. We’ll never catch
them, and we don’t know where they’re headed.”

“I have a good
idea where they’re going, Leonard. And when we catch up, what will we do with
them.”

“We’ll make
them pay. We’ll make them sorry they ever crossed you.”

“What happens
to people that cross me?”

Dutz started
to speak again, but Lothair stopped him. “Don’t tell me…
Show
me.”

Leonard opened
the burlap sack between his feet and lifted a severed head out. He held it up
by the hair and wiggled it back and forth before Lothair. “You kill the people
that cross you.”

“That’s right,
Leonard. Now put that thing away. I want to be halfway back to the Dauphin
facility before the sun rises.”

Leonard poked
at the head’s cold face. “Can I eat one of the Colonel’s eyeballs first?”

“No. Cannibals
eat their own kind, son… We’re not savages.”