CRYERS (32 page)

Chapter 56

It had been a
long, hard ride, just as the lawman promised. They had traveled through the
Dirty Hills during the darkest hours of night without stopping, fearful a few
of Gertie’s kin had remained behind. They didn’t meet any resistance. The
forests were empty, and that seemed to unsettle them even more. It took another
six hours to cross the southwestern plains with the morning sun fast on their
tails. The horses were exhausted by the time they reached the crater wall.

Cobe didn’t
want to believe the lawman when he’d told them where they were headed. Big Hole
was the last place on earth Cobe wanted to visit for a second time in his life,
and he was certain his brother and Trot were of the same mind.

“I won’t be
long,” Lawson said as he slid off of Dust’s back.

Trot followed
him down, although nowhere near as graceful. “That’s what you said last time.”

Cobe was
already on the ground. “If you’re going for weapons and water you’ll need as
many hands as you can get. Me and Willem are coming with you.”

Kay was in
agreement with the boys. “I’ve spent the last few days wandering out on the
plains by myself—Angel’s been through worse. Neither one of us wants to spend
any more time out here alone.”

Sara nodded
behind her. “Where she goes, I go. I’m not going to lose her again.” She
pointed at Lawson. “Or you.”

“I’m coming
too,” Jenny said.

Lawson looked
at her warily. “I don’t see the need.”

“You’ll need
me. My mother showed me things in the last few days…how the facility is laid
out, where we need to go and what we’ll need to do.”

“I know the
place good enough. All we need is guns and water, and I know where to go fer
that.”

“We need to do
more than just defend ourselves.” Jenny started up the slope. “We have to end
this.”

The others
followed her, leaving Lawson and Trot alone with the horses. Trot tugged at the
rope-belt strung around his waist. “You don’t want me to come, do you?”

“Things didn’t
go all that well fer you last time we went down, did they?”

“I won’t
wander off…I’ll stay with you every step.”

“That’s what
I’m afraid of.” Lawson put a steadying hand on the man’s shoulder. “We need
somebody to watch the horses. If Eichberg comes while were below I’ll need you
to take them away from this place, take ‘em somewhere safe.”

Trot was
conflicted, more so than he’d ever been. “I don’t wanna go back inside Big
Hole, but I can’t stay here all by myself. The horses will run off without me.”

“Dust won’t
leave you.” He smacked the big horse’s side affectionately. Dust turned his
head and snorted at the two, the scarred-over hide where his eye once was
seemed like a permanent wink. “You see? At the first sign of trouble, get on up
and ride out. Them other horses will follow.”

Trot was
blubbering once again. “I can’t do it… I don’t wanna be alone.”

“Remember what
I said about bein’ scared of shit yer whole life?”

Trot nodded.
“Just words… It doesn’t change who I am.”

“A man don’t
need to change so much, he’ll do what he’s gotta do to stay alive—heroes,
cowards, there ain’t no difference. Yer still alive, Trot, even after all we’ve
been through. I reckon you can survive another hour or two.”

Trot nodded
slowly and wiped the tears from his cheeks. “I reckon I’ll have to.”

Lawson left
him there and went after the others. When he’d reached the top he saw the six
of them already picking their way down the crater’s inner wall. Something
wasn’t right, something had changed. The big black lake of water sat in the
hole’s bottom third, stinking and motionless. The smell of it always made his
eyes water, and today was no different. Lawson dug his boot heels into the
steep slope and started down. The air had a heavy, hazy feel. The lawman swiped
at his eyes again, trying to focus on where he was placing his feet and the
movement of the slow-moving group further below. It was more than just the reek
of polluted water stinging his eyes and scratching at his throat. The lawman
could smell smoke.

“Hold up!” He
called out, and the others stopped.

They waited
for him where the tangled mess of debris started. It was here where Lawson had
led Cobe, Willem, and Trot deeper into the bowels of Big Hole days earlier. It
had been a difficult and dangerous process, squeezing through layers of crushed
concrete and twisted rebar. Lawson knew this better than anyone; he’d been
entering and exiting the ancient facility for years. The debris was still
there, but it had taken on a new configuration. The lawman worked his way
between the two brothers and leaned over a two-inch thick sheet of rusted iron.
The metal edge was raw and curled back. Lawson cut the side of his thumb on it
and pulled his hand away. Beneath it, the concrete tunnel leading into the
facility was gone. In its place was a jagged, ten-foot wide and ten-foot high
opening into level
A
.

Willem stated
the obvious. “Someone blew a gawdamn hole into Big Hole.”

“Looks more
like somethin’ blew a hole out,” Lawson replied.

They worked
their way around the metal and rock and entered the facility. A thin layer of
grey smoke clung to the ceiling. It didn’t smell like any kind of smoke Cobe
was familiar with. Lawson led them down the hallway, past the doors marked
janitorial, supplies, and the ones with simplified images of men and women
engraved into the surface. They went into the office and saw the howler Lawson
had shot over a decade earlier still slumped over its desk. Kay jumped, and
Angel regarded its dusty remains with silent hate.

Lawson stepped
around it and went through the door into the next hallway. Sarah was at his
side. She gripped his arm and whispered. “I can’t believe you’ve come back to
this place so many times over the years. Gods, Lawson…
why?
”

He wanted to
tell her that it was his duty. He wanted to explain that the weapons he’d found
in the lower levels of Big Hole had burdened him with the responsibility of
looking after the citizens of Burn. But towns like Burn and Rudd had lawmen and
village-leaders years before Lawson was born. They had managed without the
centuries-old weapons to maintain—although not as effectively—a semblance of
order. No, Lawson wouldn’t lie to her. He had returned time after time because
he’d
wanted
to. Curiosity had driven
him down into the earth, that insatiable need to know what once was.

“It was here,
waitin’ to found and explored,” he finally muttered.

The walls
along the corridor were streaked in frenzied scrapes of blood. Garbage littered
the floor—sheets of yellowed paper, fragments of old clothes. Cobe stopped at
the first door on his left—except the door was no longer there. Someone, or
something, had torn it from the hinges and discarded it inside the darkened
room. Lawson pulled him away and stepped in first.

The cryogenic
cylinder belonging to
James D. Aaron of
Atlanta, GA
was smashed in and dented, but still attached to the wall.
Lawson peered in through the small glass window and saw Aaron’s grey, frozen
face. He was still sleeping or dead—the lawman didn’t care which, so long as he
was inside and sealed.

“Someone tried
gettin’ him out,” Willem said.

Lawson turned
and stared at Jenny leaning against the broken doorframe. “Yer group make all
this mess on the way out?”

She shook her
head. “Eichberg was in too big of a hurry. They didn’t even grab guns.”

Sarah’s arms
were crossed over her chest. She looked cold and scared. “Isn’t that why you
brought us here—guns to arm ourselves with?”

Lawson exited
the room without answering. There were more smashed in doors and damaged
cylinders along the way. They split into pairs and searched each room. Cobe
called out from one of them further down the corridor. “This one’s open!
Someone’s been letting them out.”

The lawman
poked his head in and saw the cylinder-door hanging down. The layer of grey
cushion inside was stained black. Cobe and Willem were standing in front of it,
their feet in a pool of dried blood and fragmented window glass. “No more
wanderin’ off, we stick together.”

They hurried
along in silence, following Lawson down the long hallway. He stopped one last
time at the door labelled
Smudge.
It
was open a crack but undamaged. The lawman looked down and felt the hairs on
the back of his neck rise. A six-inch trail of blood had dried along the outer
edge, a little set of pink paw prints led down the corridor away from them.

“Gawdamn,”
Lawson whispered to no one in particular. He didn’t need to open the door any
further to know the three-foot wide cylinder lay open and empty. “Like I
said—no one wanders away, we stay together, nice and close.”

He took them
to the elevator. The doors were stuck half-open. Lawson considered climbing
down the access ladder but changed his mind.
Too dark, too big a risk of someone falling
. He opened the
stairwell door and herded the others through.

Eighteen levels
, he thought.
Eighteen more floors down and we’ll be able to arm ourselves.

He wasn’t all
that sure they’d make it past level
B
.

***

Trot could see
smoke rising to the northeast. Someone was burning the forests in the Dirty
Hills, he thought. He stumbled away from the horses and climbed the crater wall
for a better look. The hills were a long way off, but the smoke seemed even
further away than that.

Rudd. Eichberg’s burning the whole town down.

Dust snorted a
warning from two-hundred feet below. The other horses began to prance about
nervously.
What’s gotten into them?
Trot
wondered. He cupped his hands against the sweat of his brow to block out the
sun’s brightness. He studied the stretch of barren land between the distant
plume of grey smoke and the nervous animals. His breath caught in his throat
when he spotted two black specks moving towards Big Hole from less than a mile
away.

“No…Oh no…” He
staggered back and almost fell down into the steep side of Big Hole. He caught
himself and spun around. More black specks were lined along the crater’s edge
around him.
People
. Trot blinked the
light from his eyes and tried to focus on them. He counted up to six and
stopped. There were too many of them to be Lawson and the others. The closest
were less than a hundred yards away and closing in fast to his left and right.

One of them
let out a blood-curdling scream that echoed into the hole. Trot thought the
thing was screaming a single word. A second wail sounded from the other side,
and Trot knew what they were yelling.

Food.

Trot stumbled
back in terror again and was unable to stop himself from falling. He slid
head-first and started rolling down the hill, end over end in a grunting,
crying ball towards the horses. A dozen starving cryers spilled over the
crater’s edge towards him.

Chapter 57

They descended
at a steady, quick pace, level after level, uninterrupted. Lawson had started
to believe they might make it all the way down to the armory level until their
progress ended abruptly in the stairwell between levels
K
and
L
. Another
explosion had ripped a substantial section of the upper floor into the one
below. The stairs had vanished beneath a mass of twisted metal, concrete, and
plaster.

They took
turns working in pairs to clear the debris away, hoping to clear enough of a
path through which they could continue down. Willem stood at the stairwell
doorway, clutching a two-foot piece of bent stair-railing in his one hand. His
foot was propped between door and frame, keeping a lookout down the long, dark
corridor where everyone from a thousand years before with K at the beginning of
their last names had been laid to rest. The boy’s eyes were wide and
unblinking. “I can hear somethin’ down there… I swear I can.”

Cobe and Sarah
backed out of the debris hole they had already cleared and let Jenny and Angel
take over. Cobe snuck a peek through the door his brother was holding open. “I
don’t hear anything…probably just all the noise we’re making.”

Lawson
appeared from above, leaning over the railing leading up halfway between levels
K
and
J
. “Keep that racket down. We ain’t gonna get much further if the
things being let out of their beds hear us.”

Jenny pulled a
six-hundred pound block of concrete out from the rubble with considerable
volume. “We
ain’t gonna get no gawdamn
where
if we don’t make some noise,” she replied in a decent imitation of
the lawman’s voice.

Sarah met
Lawson half-way up the stairs. She wiped sweat and dust away from her forehead.
“She’s right, we either get through this crap fast, or we turn back and get the
hell out of here.”

“Leavin’ now
ain’t much of an option.”

“Why not?
We’ve managed to put Rudd behind us. Let’s just keep moving south to Burn, or
better yet, head off in any other direction and settle someplace safer.”

“We ain’t
goin’ to Burn. You seen what them things are capable of.” He indicated down to
Jenny with a nod of his head. “Look at her…barely out of childhood and pulling
chunks of crap a team of horses would be hard-pressed to budge. You think her
ma and pa are just going to let us go? Eichberg will track us down if they
don’t. I seen firsthand the lengths a man will travel to settle things.”

Sarah
whispered back, hoping Jenny wouldn’t hear. “These things aren’t men…they
aren’t even human.”

“More the
reason to get below for them guns. Once we’re armed, I’ll get us away from
here, and that’s a promise.”

Angel called
out from below. “We’ve made it, we’ve broken through!” The girl crawled back
and watched as Jenny yanked a section of mangled staircase free. The rest
crumbled down and crashed into the stairwell landing on level
L
.

Lawson ran
down the stairs pulling Sarah along the way. “If that doesn’t wake the rest of
‘em up, I don’t know what will.”

Willem cried
out. “Somethin’s coming!”

Cobe looked
back through the door onto level
K
and saw the glow of white eyes bobbing up and down in the darkness. Another
pair joined them, round and pink. The creatures started to scream in unison as
Cobe slammed the door shut. He checked the handle and it wobbled uselessly
beneath his fingers. There wasn’t time to warn the others. The door flew open
knocking both boys to the floor.

A woman, naked
and reeking like something dead, landed on the tiles between Willem’s feet and
scrambled up his legs, snapping her teeth. Cobe swung out with the piece of
railing his brother had dropped and connected with the thing’s ear. Her white
eyes scrunched shut, and Cobe readjusted the steel bar in both hands, bringing
it down with all of his strength into the top of her skull. Pink Eyes—a man
dressed in suit of black and matching tie—lunged through the open doorway and
wrestled Cobe onto his back. He jammed a thumb into the thing’s eye and it
tried to bite the soft underside of his wrist. Hot saliva leaked out over its
bottom lip and dripped onto Cobe’s chin and throat. It felt like the burning
rain they’d been caught in on their way to Rudd.

Lawson took
hold of the cryer and wrenched it away from the boy. He placed his forearm into
the back of its neck and rammed its face into the concrete wall. Its arms
flailed frantically and the lawman bashed its face a second time. The arms went
still, but there was still some kick in its legs. Lawson gave it another hit,
and another. He released the body and watched as it slid down in a trail of
blood, spit, and shattered teeth.

“You can never
just kill something quickly, can you?” Sarah said.

“Get me to the
guns and I’ll show you what fast killin’ is all about.”

They climbed
down through the wreckage between floors. Jenny went last, lifting Willem down
to his brother. Cobe spoke to the lawman as he made way for the girl to jump
down. “Those cryers were easier to kill than the others.”

Lawson nodded.
“They weren’t anywhere near as fast or strong. Maybe Eichberg did somethin’ to
them ones he woke up first.”

“He didn’t do
anything,” Jenny said. “Only those closest to my family and the ones with a lot
of money got those extra…perks.”

“Then gettin’
to the weapons shouldn’t be so hard,” Willem added as they descended past level
L
. “They’re just a bunch of mindless
freaks.”

“I wouldn’t
rest all that easy, son,” Sarah pointed out. “One of those
mindless freaks
almost tore your throat out with its teeth.”

The lights in
the stairwell went out. Everything was black.

“Nobody move
another inch,” the lawman warned.

They waited in
silence. Cobe held Willem in front of him. He could feel one of the girls
pressing up against his back—Kay, Angel, Jenny—he wasn’t sure who. Returning to
Big Hole had been an unsettling idea to begin with—stuck there in complete
darkness with the dead returning back to life was terrifying.

A voice called
out all around them.

“Lawwww-maaaan.”

Lawson
whispered into the dark. “Eichberg.”

“Where
are you, Lawman? I can’t see you… Let’s try this.”

There was a
momentary buzz somewhere above their heads and the stairwell lit up in red.

“Emergency
lighting, Lawman… used primarily in case of an unexpected, facility-wide power
failure. Or in this case, to scare the living hell out of trespassers… Aaaahh,
there you are. Excellent… you all appear very uptight and apprehensive. The
lights are working.”

Lawson covered
his mouth with his hand and whispered. “Keep moving towards the armory. Don’t
listen to him.”

Jenny looked
about in the dull light for the security camera. “He can see us, but I don’t
think he can hear us.”

“Oh,
but I can, Jennifer. All ABZE facilities are monitored constantly for movement
and sound. The tapes have been rolling for a thousand years, recording only the
settlement of dust and the noise of eternal silence. If I were at all
sentimental, I would say the old place was pleased to finally have some
activity inside after so long.”

“Go to hell,
you old Nazi,” she yelled.

There was a
long pause as her words echoed above and below.

“Old
Nazi…That’s what your father called me when I caught him scheming with your
mother. They thought they could get rid of me… begin a
new
society of super-humans on the bones of a
less-deserving civilization… Ironic, wouldn’t you say, dear? What did they
think we were trying to accomplish in the twentieth century?”

“Where’s my
mother?” Jenny called out. “What have you done with my father?”

She had
stopped between levels
M
and
N
. Everyone else had continued down,
leaving Jenny and the lawman alone. “Quit playin’ his games,” Lawson urged.
“He’s trying to slow us down.”

“Edna’s
fine… as good as a mindless vegetable can be in a town abandoned to a pack of
fornicating, inbred savages. They were burning Rudd to the ground when we came
after you. Leonard cut off your father’s head with a rusty axe while he was in
the dream state with your mother… Not much of a military man… sleeping while on
duty.”

The stair
railing in her hand crumpled between her fingers. “You old bastard.”

“You
aren’t fit to be an Eichberg… I’ll see you die with the rest of them.”

Lothair went
silent for a time as Lawson and Jenny caught up with the others on level
S
. Angel was sitting on the stairs, crying
into the palms of her dirty hands. “I can’t take this no more, the red lights,
that voice… What is this place?”

Kay tried
comforting her. “We seen it all, remember? There isn’t anything to be scared
of.”

“Like hell
there ain’t. I shoulda let them howler’s take me after they was done my Ma… I
wish I was dead.”

Eichberg
started up again.
“It shouldn’t be long now, child. I’ve been looking over some recent
security footage… It appears Ivan Tevalov snuck away for a short time before we
left for Rudd and thawed a couple of his family members. They’ve been wandering
around for days, climbing level to level in search of food. Perhaps you’ve
already seen them during your descent…”

Willem shouted
out. “We killed them! Smashed their gawdamn brains in!”

There was a
pause.
“Yes… I see what’s left of them now above you…very nasty… Most of the
ABZE clients here weren’t endowed with additional abilities. They were frozen
and left untouched for centuries. Those two awoke without much left functioning
in their brains. Mindless. Soulless. Starving. I’m not surprised the seven of
you were able to dispose of them so easily, but I think having to fight your
way through over two-thousand more will be difficult.”

Eichberg’s
voice cut off and was replaced with a high-pitched wailing noise.

Angel cringed
further into the stairs, fearfully. Jenny called out over the sound. “It’s a
siren—he’s thawing
everyone
in the
facility.”

“Armory!” The
lawman shouted running down the steps two at a time. “
Now!
”

Lothair spoke
again as the siren continued its ominous wail.
“That brings back memories of the
Blitz… I was in London during the winter of 1940, travelling under a false
guise, procuring medical equipment… I would receive warnings in advance before
the air raids, but the sound of those sirens haunted me for decades… It seems
to be having the same effect on you. Perhaps it’s become an inherent feature in
all humans—spreading from one generation to the next, until the reason is
forgotten but the fear remains.”

Willem was
ahead of the rest, swinging around the landing of level
Q
-
R
and onto the stairs
below. “Doesn’t he ever shut the fuck up?”

“I
went a thousand years without uttering a word, Willem. Allow me these few
minutes to reminisce some before you all die.”

A door crashed
open on one of the floors above. Cobe looked up and saw a twist of black
shadows dancing on the red-lit walls. A dozen brain-dead, starving cryogenic
pioneers from the twenty-first century spilled into the stairwell, screaming
and snarling. They started running down the steps, pushing and falling, biting
at shoulders and necks and ears, climbing over top of one another in a mad
frenzy for space and the chance of feeding on something fresher than their own
kind. More poured out from levels
N
,
O
, and
P
. The stairwell became too crowded to hold the rush; hand rails
buckled outward from the crush of moving weight. A body toppled over somewhere
even further above and hurtled down past Cob’s face. He saw the thing’s head
crack open on a railing below—the arms and legs spun wildly until it hit the
bottom level in a silent splatter of black.

There was an
awful grown of metal giving way and the low pop of bolts surrendering their
hold in concrete. Lawson and Sarah pushed the others up against the wall as
bodies rained down in a wash of clawing grey. Cobe could hear their cries, the
thuds of bodies falling on top of one another below. And through it all, the
awful wail of the siren droned on.

The door into
level
T
was still closed as Lawson
led them down, but a noticeable bulge had appeared in its metal surface. Grey
fingers pressed through the crack above the lock, scratching frantically along
the edge.
Three more levels
, Cobe
thought. He remembered them from before. After
T
there was
U-V, W,
and
X-Y-Z
. It may as well have been three
hundred levels. They started climbing over the bodies of the dying and dead.
Kay screamed out as a hand wrapped around her ankle. Willem stumbled in a mound
of writhing limbs and fell forward down onto the next floor.