CRYERS (33 page)

The seven
stayed together. Sarah and Jenny pulled at Kay until she was free. Lawson and
Cobe caught up to Willem and dragged him back to his feet. Angel kicked at
faces and stomped down on fingers, shouting obscenities her parents wouldn’t
have believed the girl knew. The
W
level door was open but the supporting frame had collapsed under the press of
weight trying to crash through. Those first few along the bottom had been
trampled by others trying to climb over. Those still living were jammed up
against the steel frame. Cobe saw a face in the middle, biting into the metal.
Its teeth broke off and it continued chewing with bloody gums. More weight
pressed in from behind and the thing’s face pushed up against the frame. Its
lower jaw caught along the bottom edge, the top half of its face continued
moving forward. Cobe looked away before its face was severed in half.

They stayed
together through it all and made it to the armory floor. Lawson picked his way
over shattered corpses towards the door.

“You
have trespassed on private property, Lawman. You have murdered my clients and
stolen their belongings... I won’t allow it to continue.”

They heard
something rumble. The siren began to warble. Jenny felt it under her feet and
yelled at the others. “Get away from the door!”

The explosion
blew the heavy steel outward into pieces. Chunks of shredded metal slammed
against the stairwell and tore into the bodies stacked around its base. Fire
and smoke roared out after it.

Cobe was lying
on the floor. His ears were ringing and when he tried to breathe, smoke filled
his lungs. Something was crawling up his legs. It pulled along his shirt and
dug into his throat.

“Get up! Get
up!
Get up!
”

He opened his
eyes and saw Willem propped up on his chest. Cobe wrapped an arm around the boy
and sat up. Sarah and Kay were sitting in front of them, looking equally dazed.
Jenny was a few feet away, helping Angel to her feet. Cobe looked towards the
armory and saw the lawman stagger through the billowing smoke and settling
dust.

Lawson paused
for a moment at the gaping hole and stared through into what remained inside.
“Nothin’… Not a gawdamn thing left.” He went to Sarah and Kay. “You two okay?”
They nodded solemnly. He looked at the others one by one. “Well it looks like
my plan has gone to shit… Anyone else have an idea?”

Bodies
continued falling from above. Those still alive were rushing down the last
level of stairs. The siren continued to sound.

Lothair
answered the lawman.
“Stay where you are. I’m on my way.”

Chapter 58

Eichberg
wouldn’t have the chance to kill them on his own. A thousand mindless, raging
ABZE customers would see to it first. Lawson was only dragging out the
inevitable. He herded them into the burning shell of the armory, kicking at the
melted remains of weapons strewn all about. There were pieces of charred gun
handles and bent rifle barrels. Cobe and Willem grabbed a few of the bigger
fragments. If they couldn’t fire bullets, they would use them as bats and throw
them like rocks.

Cobe stumbled
into Jenny as he searched. The cryer was standing in a melted puddle of cabinet
glass. Her grey face had a distant, serene look to it. Her eyes were closed.
Cobe pushed at her. “Don’t just stand there—we have to fight them!”

“There’s an
office on the far side of the room,” she said.

Willem was
staring at her now as well. “Where we got them books the first time.”

Jenny
continued speaking. “Another door inside. Another way out… Another way out.”

Cobe realized
where the girl was inside her head, and who she was in communication with. He’d
been there himself. “She’s dreaming! She’s talking to her Ma!” He grabbed Jenny
by the arm and dragged her through the wreckage towards the far side of the
armory room. Lawson saw where they were headed and motioned for the others to
follow.

The dark
window Cobe and Willem had seen their reflection was gone. Glass shards
littered the desk and floor inside; most of the books in the shelf wall had
been burned to a crisp. Jenny was still in her trance-like state, repeating the
three words over and over.
Another way
out, another way out, another way out.

The creatures
were inside the armory. Some were caught up in the torn steel edges of what
remained of the doorframe and wall, the flesh tore away from their trapped
bodies as others tried pushing through. Some were on fire, the stench of
boiling blood and cooking skin drove the entire horde into a feeding frenzy.
Cobe stood in the office staring out through the broken window. He watched as
they ate one another, biting at throats and faces.

“I been in
this room a half-dozen times,” Lawson said, studying the smoke-blackened walls
with desperation. “There ain’t no other door out.”

Willem had
crawled behind the desk on his hand and knees. “No door in the walls, maybe.”

Lawson and
Sarah pulled the desk away. There wasn’t much to see other than broken glass
and smoldering ash. Angel pushed the broken chair off to one corner as Willem
brushed some of the debris away. His fingers sunk into a wide recess and found
a metal bar. “I knew it!” He cried. “There’s some kind of handle here.”

Kay was standing
beside Cobe now, staring mutely at the carnage taking place where the armory
door once stood. The monsters were digging deeper into each other, tearing into
chests and stomachs for meatier organs. A few dozen more had spread out into
the room, crawling along on all fours, chewing at garbage on the floor and
choking on smoke.

But one of
them was walking on two feet. Cobe could no longer tell if it was a man or a
woman. The top of its head was a melted glob of steaming hair and scalp, the
rest of its body was char. It was headed straight for the office, its blank
blue eyes glowing with cold, emotionless intent.

Kay whispered.
“It isn’t like the rest… It’s like Eichberg.” She held Cobe’s hand and looked
at Jenny. The girl was leaning up against a wall, her green eyes staring up
into the ceiling. “Like
her
.”

Three more had
fought their way through the tangle of feeding bodies. They were trailing after
Blue Eyes towards the office.

Lawson and
Sarah were straining away at the handle. “Gawdamn it, Cobe—give us a hand!”

Willem
scrambled back and allowed his brother room. Cobe took hold of the bar next to
Sarah and pulled, adding his strength to theirs. He felt something pop beneath
his fingers and a rush of cold air burst out along his feet blowing ash away
from the hidden opening. Lawson lifted the door until it clicked into place at
a ninety degree angle and stayed put. Cobe looked down into a seemingly endless
shaft with a single steel ladder running the length of it. A string of red
emergency lights flashed dully every ten or twelve feet.

Kay screamed
from the window. “They’re almost here!”

Jenny had
snapped out of her dream-like trance. “It leads down into mechanical.” She
picked Willem up and the boy wrapped his arm around her neck as she started the
descent. “We have to find something called the
nukebatt
containment area.”

Lawson went
last, slamming the door back into place above him. He called down to the cryer
already thirty feet below. “What the hell’s a nukebatt?”

“Our way
out…and the only option left that’ll kill
all
of these things.”

Cobe didn’t
care for the sound of that. He had the feeling anything capable of killing
two-thousand rampaging monsters would likely finish the seven of them off as
well. The red lights pulsed around him; it felt as if they were descending
through a main artery into the heart of the massive facility. He thought he
heard his brother yell somewhere below. Cobe paused on the rungs, stuck his
head out to the side and looked past Kay and Angel beneath him. Jenny and
Willem were out of the shaft. Sarah stepped on his hand and he continued down.
There was a bang from above, but Cobe didn’t stop to check again. He didn’t
need to look up to know the freshly revived cryers were climbing down after
them.

They dropped
into a space ten times bigger than the armory. Cobe couldn’t fathom how an area
so immense could exist under the earth without falling in on itself. Dozens of
gigantic steel columns ten feet thick grew up out of a maze of metal storage
tanks, control panels, and a hundred miles of snaking stairways.

Jenny started
down the first set of steps she found, and the others followed.

***

Lothair
Eichberg and Leonard Dutz had just finished descending down a ladder of their
own. They had left the control room on level
A
and given up on the stairs altogether when the crush of ABZE
clients made it impossible for them to enter the stairwell. A few of the more
mindless ones had pushed into the elevator shaft with them, but they no longer
had the reasoning skills to figure out how to climb rungs. They had plummeted
down around Eichberg and Dutz to their deaths eighteen levels below.

Lothair
stepped over their crushed corpses and forced the elevator doors open onto the
armory level. He pushed his way through the jam of flailing limbs and snapping
teeth into what remained of the weapons area, and beheld utter chaos. People
were feeding on their own kind in a smoking ruin of his creation.

I did this… I took their money and assured them
they would awaken to a better world…a better way of life…
O mein
Gott—what have I done?

A cold
realization dawned over him. There had been no need to release these men,
women, and children. He could’ve pursued the lawman to this point and killed
him with his bare hands without anyone’s help. Perhaps emotion
was
still driving him—a bitter desire
for revenge, a burning hate deep inside that an eternity of freezing couldn’t
possibly extinguish.

The Lawman made me do this.
He’s
responsible.

It didn’t take
him long to discover the lawman and his followers weren’t among the dead.

“Where’d they
go?” Leonard asked.

A woman with
long greasy hair crawled in front of them. She lapped up a spray of blood on
the floor near Lothair’s feet. He kicked her aside and started running for the
office on the far side of the room.
I should
have killed Edna along with Strope. She’s the only person left alive besides me
that knows how this place is powered—unless she shared the information with
someone else.
Vengefulness and hatred weren’t all Lothair was feeling. His
great-great granddaughter was leading them deeper into the Dauphin facility.
She was going to end
everything.

Lothair felt
fear.

Chapter 59

Cobe knew
there was no turning back. Even if every cryer suddenly dropped dead and they
had the facility all to themselves, he was certain they could never find their
way back up. Jenny had led them too far into the bowels of the earth, and
that’s exactly how Cobe saw it. The maze of pipes and bundled wires twisting
throughout the narrow, open corridors was similar to the intestines of a living
creature. Cobe had seen more than his fair share of spilled guts over the last
week; this mechanical level and series of sub-level innards was just as
unsettling.

Jenny stopped
halfway down a see-through spiral staircase and shut her eyes.

“Why does she
keep doin’ that?” Willem asked. They were standing next to a hundred foot high
cylinder with a strange image stamped on its side. He leaned up against his
bother afraid the great metallic thing would burst open at any moment and spill
out a thousand more hungry cryers.

“She’s keeps
losing her way,” Cobe explained. “She’s getting directions from her ma.”

Lawson could
see Blue Eyes and half a dozen like him running along one of the upper
stairways. They were gaining ground. “Well can she take directions any faster?
If we waste any more time we’ll have to split up and try and take them things
out one at a time.”

Jenny opened
her eyes. “We’re
not
splitting up, we
stay together…. I know the way.” She stared up at the image on the cooling
tank. A corroded radiation symbol, twenty feet high and wide, stared back at
her like a great bloodshot eye. Beneath it were the words:

DANGER

RADIOACTIVE MATERIALS

RESTRICTED AREA

AUTHHORIZED PERSONEL ONLY

She wasn’t
sure if the warning applied to someone like her—a person frozen for centuries
and thawed into something no longer human—but she did care for those with her
now. There was nothing else she could do, nowhere else to leave them. Jenny
continued down, calling back to the others as they went. “I’m sorry.”

Lothair saw
them heading down the spiral stairs. There were more cryers after them less
than fifty feet away.

“They’re gonna
get to ‘em before us,” Leonard whined. “They’re gonna eat ‘em first!”

“Do you
remember how we hunted down those rolling creatures on the plains, Leonard? Do
you remember how fast you ran?”

Leonard nodded
and smiled. He remembered especially how big and juicy the eyeballs had been.

“We’re going
to run like that now—we’re going to run
faster
.”

Leonard didn’t
need it explained any further. He was already flying down the next set of
stairs.

Jenny had to
stop again five minutes later. They had come down a long, narrow corridor lined
with heavy pipes and wrapped cables. Bundles of colorful wire drooped from the
ceiling like clusters of veins causing the lawman to stoop over. That choking
sensation took hold of Cobe once again. The walls were closing in with every
passing strobe of red light. The pipes and the cables and the wires were
starting to move, writhing and twisting towards him like snakes. They would
wrap around his chest and squeeze the air from his lungs.

Kay shook him.
“Are you alright?”

“I’ve…been
better.” The walls were back where they belonged.

Angel pushed
Kay away from him. “Keep your hands off him, he’s
my
boyfriend.”

“Jenny!” The
lawman shouted. “Which way?”

They could go
left down another set of long stairs with a dozen more radiation symbols along
the walls, or they could go right towards a big steel door thirty feet away.
The blue-eyed cryer was coming at them down the corridor they’d passed through.

“My Mom—she
isn’t talking to me anymore. She’s gone! I-I forget whe—”

Lawson shoved
her to the right. “Then we’ll try the door. I’m sick of gawdamn stairs.” He
looked behind one last time and saw the cryer fall head-first into the corridor
floor. Something was on its back, tearing through the flesh with its teeth. It
looked up when the creature beneath it was dead, and Lawson saw the grinning,
bloody face of Leonard Dutz. A set of pink eyes appeared behind Leonard.

“You’re next,
Lawman,” Eichberg said. He lunged past Leonard, and Lawson went left for the
stairs. “Run, Lawman! Run as fast as your feeble old legs can carry you! It
will make no difference. When I’m done with you, I’ll go back for the others!”
Lothair continued yelling as he ran down the stairs. “I’ll eat their brains—as
distasteful as that is to me, I’ll do it! I’ll eat their fucking brains and
watch as Leonard rapes my great-great granddaughter.”

The stairs
seemed to go on forever. The emergency lights cut off suddenly and Lothair was
plunging down into darkness. He slowed his descent. “Nice try, Lawman, but I’ve
lived the majority of my life in pitch black. You’ll have to do better than
that.”

Lothair could
hear the tap of his shoes on the concrete steps. He continued down. A dull
square of dirty yellow light appeared before him. The stairs ended and he was
standing in front of a door. He peered through the little glass window and
twisted the handle.

“Lawman?”

He was
standing in another corridor. The pipes and bundles of cable were gone. There
were no radiation signs posted along the concrete walls.

There were
only doors.

One of them
opened and a little girl stepped out. “Hello, Dr. Penzig. I’ve missed you.”

“Nicole.” He
remembered
all
of his patients’
names.

She took two
of his fingers into her black-scabbed hand and pulled him into the room. It was
one of his operating theatres beneath the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
He’d performed hundreds of surgeries here in another life. And there were
hundreds of dead children in there with him now. They were packed along the
walls and sitting up along cabinets. Every square inch was filled with long
somber faces and accusing eyes. The only thing not covered in filthy grey
clothes and blackened skin was the surgical table sitting in the center of the
room.

A small boy
with his fingers missing along the first set of knuckles pushed through the
others. He stared up at Lothair.

 
“Anatoly? I saw you with your parents…in the
playground. They took you away. They took all of you away.”

“I came back
for you, Doctor… We all did.” He took Lothair’s other hand and they led him to
the table.

A woman’s
voice spoke up behind him. “Didn’t see this coming, did you?”

Eichberg
turned and saw Edna standing in the open doorway. “You bitch… You lying,
traitorous bitch.”

“Don’t swear
in front of the children.”

A dozen little
hands were pulling him onto the cold surface. “You tricked me—got inside of my
head…”

“You know
you’re not really here, don’t you, Great-Gramps? You’re not back in Germany during
the war. You’re writhing on a stairway, shitting your pants, deep in the ground
halfway around the world a thousand years later.”

Their fingers
were poking into his mouth and tugging at his nostrils. Cold teeth bit into his
shoulder. “Make them stop! Make them stop!”

“You know what
children are like—full of energy. They never get tired. Just go with it… Let
them play.”

She slammed
the door shut and Lothair started to scream.