CRYERS (35 page)

Chapter 62

Dust had never
run so fast and so far in less than a minute. Even carrying the combined weight
of Lawson and Trot, the horse was still pulling ahead of the others. The lawman
counted backwards in his head the best he could. He’d started at ninety and was
now down to twenty. His timing might’ve been off so he risked a look back. The
pile of rocks they’d climbed out of was still there, but getting smaller. Big
Hole’s crater wall didn’t seem as high. There were low hills ahead of them to
the west. He dug into Dust’s sides and hollered for the horse to run faster.
Dust did as he was told.

Willem’s face
was buried in horse hair. Cobe had shoved the boy’s head into the horse’s mane
and told him to hang on. It had been the only thing he’d said to his brother
before riding off. He couldn’t say anymore if he tried. The air was pushing
into his face too fast, forcing him to breathe through his nostrils. Dust was
pulling ahead of them. Cobe did as he saw the lawman do, and kicked his heels
into the horse. They started making up ground. Sarah and Kay were racing up beside
them on the right, Jenny and Angel to their left.

It had been
more than two minutes, Lawson was sure of it. He started counting back again
from sixty. Dust was beginning to slow, all of the horses were. By the time
Lawson had counted back to thirty, they were into the hills. When they’d
reached the top, he had hit zero again. Dust had come to a stop and the lawman
didn’t force him another step further. The others caught up and gathered around
them. They looked back over the plains and waited.

“Maybe it
malfunctioned” Jenny said. “Maybe I don’t know shit about nuclear phys—”

A blast of
cold wind from the west sucked the air out of her lungs. It rushed around them,
whistling in their ears, and pushing against their backs. Cobe shoved Willem
back down into the horse’s mane and held him there by the neck before the boy
could be lifted away. Cobe’s ears made an uncomfortable popping sound. He shut
his eyes and felt his stomach lurch.

The wind
ceased.

Cobe opened
his eyes and saw that the distant rock pile had vanished. The crater wall was
gone. An immense, gaping absence of everything had swallowed up most of the
plains below them.

Big Hole had
become a whole lot bigger.

***

They had
traveled at a considerably slower pace for the rest of the day, stopping finally
along the shore of some nameless lake where the water wasn’t too tainted to
drink. The last bit of orange sun sank behind another set of distant hills.
Willem deposited an armload of branches next to his brother and fed a piece
into the flames. He grinned at Angel sitting next to him and winked at Cobe.
“Nice night for a fire, hey brother?”

Cobe didn’t
think it was particularly so. The air was cold and howlers were crying
somewhere off in the north. But it was the safest he had felt since leaving Burn.
They had plenty of guns and ammunition, and Jenny had caught two rabbits for
them to roast. If Kay was sitting next to him instead of Angel he may have
answered his brother differently. He nodded glumly. “It’s alright.”

Kay and her
mother were sleeping soundly a few feet away in the grass. Trot was sitting on
the other side of the fire re-telling the story of how he’d single-handedly
reined the horses in and fought off a hundred screaming cryers. The tale became
greater every time, but no one seemed to mind. He had saved all of their lives,
and he could tell the story any way he wanted. Jenny was seated next to Trot,
staring intently at Cobe with her green glowing eyes.

Two girls
liked him—one uglier than a roller dropping, the other not quite human. They
were both orphans, like him and his brother, but he wasn’t attracted to either.
The girl he liked still had parents.

He looked away
from the fire and saw Lawson standing by the water’s edge. The big gun Cobe had
taken from the tank rested heavily in the holster at the lawman’s side. He was
smoking one of his cigarettes, listening to Trot and other sounds in the
evening. Cobe went and stood with him.

Lawson exhaled
smoke and grumbled. “Don’t go wanderin’ off.”

“Just
stretching my legs.”

“I mean don’t
go off with yer brother again. You seen what’s out there… It ain’t safe.”

Cobe buried
his hands in his pockets and kicked a stone into the water. “I’m sorry for all
them things I said about you being responsible for our parents dying… I know
you cared for Ma, seeing how close she was to Sarah... and what Sarah means to
you.”

Lawson replied
after his cigarette was done. “We’ll keep headin’ west first thing in the
morning. I know this old trail we can start followin’ just over them hills.
It’s a hard ride where we’re goin’… long stretches of dry plains, and plenty of
high mountains between. And I got this feelin’ in my gut we ain’t seen the last
of Lothair Eichberg’s kind. We woke somethin’ bad and it sounds like there’s
more
Big Holes
planted in the
ground.” He hitched a thumb back at the others around the fire. “Help me along
with that bunch and we’ll make it to Victory Island. We’ll be safe there.”

Cobe nodded.
It was what he expected the lawman might say. “I reckon we will.”

Chapter 63

“I did good,
didn’t I?”

“You did well,
Leonard. You did
very
well.”

“I ran fast
like you told me. I carried you in my arms and ran up the hole. I ran across
the ground and kept you safe.” He grinned up at Lothair. “Now you can carry me.
We can run across the ground and catch that old lawman…Which way did he go?”

Lothair looked
at his ravaged face. The torn scalp and bite marks would heal quickly enough.
He wasn’t sure if the eyeball would grow back. Lothair could barely stand, but
he realized there was no other way around it. Leonard no longer had feet. Or
legs.

“He went
west.”

Leonard kept
grinning.

“It doesn’t
hurt?” Lothair asked.

“Nope, can’t
feel nothing.”

Lothair
touched Leonard’s thigh. He ran his fingers along one of the smooth grey stumps
the outer edge of the collapsing black hole had cut off. Both limbs would grow
back, but Lothair couldn’t wait. His great-granddaughter’s mind attack had left
him lost for hours. Too much time had been wasted sitting in the dirt
recovering his thoughts and listening to Leonard go on, and on, and on. He had
a grandson to meet, and a cowboy he wanted to kill.

He sat on
Leonard’s chest and choked him until he was dead.

Lothair
Eichberg stood up and started walking towards the hills where the last streaks
of pink were surrendering to the darkness above.

“He went west.
Where all cowboys go… riding off into the sunset.”

The
End

Thank
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Other Books and Stories by Geoff North:

Live
it Again

The
Last Playground

An excerpt from

 
Children
of Extinction

Available in July 2014

I wasn’t born a monster. That came
later, when the thing got inside my head and started to twist. I used to be
normal. I cared for people and I had friends. The more it took over, the more
twisted I became. What you’re about to read will sicken you. You will say I was
a monster and that I deserved to die. But read on before you judge too quickly.
Try and understand I was as much a victim as anyone else. I didn’t ask for
this.

I should’ve written earlier, before
things got really messed up. Maybe then I could’ve read the words back and seen
what I was becoming. Better yet, I could’ve blown my brains out before things
got too out of hand. But I was too much of a coward. It would’ve found someone
else. Besides, once you got a whiff of the thing, it was in your head for good.
And nobody could get it out. You wouldn’t want it to. At least not in the
beginning.

That smell was awful. The only way
to describe it was like cat piss and black pepper. Have you ever stuck your
face into a bag of extra-salty, extra-vinegary potato chips and inhaled deeply?
You know that feeling when your chest forces your throat to lock up from the
sharp fumes? You try it, you cough and laugh, then you finish your chips and
forget about it. But this smell stayed with me—it stayed with all four of us,
I’m sure—for seven years, three months, and a handful of days. It was like a
big old bag of extra-pissy, extra-peppery chips that just kept on giving.

Abraham Feerce found it first.

Abe was my best friend back in
2009. We were hanging out at his parents’ farm one afternoon that summer, two
seventeen-year old kids listening to
Eminem
and the
Black Eyed Peas
in the
backyard, drinking beers from the fridge in his dad’s workshop. We were kicking
a rubber soccer ball back and forth between sips.

Abe’s twin sister Sheila heard it
first.

She paused the music halfway
through
I Gotta Feelin’
and told us
to listen. There were a lot of pretty girls in Birdtail High but none of them
came close to Sheila. I hung out with Abe a lot those days. He wasn’t the
brightest kid but you didn’t’ have to be a rocket scientist to figure out why I
was there all the time. He didn’t accuse me of anything or treat me any
differently. They weren’t identical twins—that would’ve been a bit weird, I
guess. All they had in common was the black hair and fair skin.

Sheila’s friend, Rebecca Turnbull
was with us that day. Sheila called her Becky but me and Abe called her
Tubby Turnbull
behind her back because
she was kind of on the chunky side. He would never admit it, but I think Abe
had a thing for her. Tubby may have been bigger than Sheila but she was just as
pretty.

Becky said it sounded like
something buzzing.

Abe went up the steps of the porch
where the girls were to unpause the music and told them it was probably a
hornets’ nest.

Sheila insisted we find it.

I followed her into the woods south
of the farmhouse. And why wouldn’t I? She was all jiggle and wiggle. Abe
trailed after Becky, bouncing his cheap rubber soccer ball where he could.

The buzzing got louder, like a hum
and a lot more intense. It hurt our teeth and gave us all gut aches. We
should’ve stopped right then and there. We should’ve turned back, went back to
the yard, finished that case of beer and got good and drunk instead. Maybe
things would’ve turned out normal for me and Sheila. Maybe our relationship
wouldn’t have got so sick. But we kept going, deeper into the brush, further
and forever away from carefree summer afternoons, sipping beers and staring at
your best friend’s sister’s tits.

Abe made a choking sound when we
came across it.

I tore my eyes from Sheila and got
my first look.

It was the size and shape of a
kitchen stove. That’s where all similarities with anything made on Earth ended.
It was grey and streaked with dull swirls of purple. The color moved, like
smoke trapped on the surface, clinging and creeping. It was disorienting to
look at for too long and I wanted to shut my eyes—like you want to when looking
down from high up. That square cube thing just sat there, one corner stuck in
the ground on an angle, an opposite upper corner snagged on the branch of a
poplar tree.

The buzzing got worse. I wanted to
pull my teeth out and drive something sharp into my ears to make the itch stop.
That’s how bad it was. A dark opening appeared and a little figure started to
slip out.

What’s first contact
really
like?

Sheila puked on my runners. I felt
urine run down my leg. Becky started crying, and I think Abe shit himself. Or
maybe that was me. I can’t remember that part so well.

Its head reminded me of the
welder’s helmet my Dad used to wear. I hadn’t seen it in years—not since he
became a drunk and quit working—but that’s what this thing’s head was like. All
grey, no mouth, no nose. There was a four-inch horizontal slit where its eyes
should’ve been. We knew it could see us through that black line. It could see
us. It could smell us. It could hear us. I wanted to giggle because I suddenly
pictured one of those parking passes sliding out of the narrow space. Or a bank
card going in. Funny what your brain sees when you’re too terrified to move.

Its head vibrated, a fast
shaking—like it was cold, or scared. Or like it wasn’t quite all there, if that
makes any sense. Picture a guitar string settling after being plucked too hard.
That’s what it was like. The sound it made too. That low hum. That
buzzzzzz
. Its arms came out next. One
three-fingered hand clung to the opening, the other stuck to an oozing wound on
its narrow chest. But they weren’t fingers, not really. They looked more like
swollen worms without joints or knuckles. They were greasy wet and slithering,
with little black receptor-things growing out of the tips. It made me think of
those big rubber mats you see in store doorways, the ones with thousands of
tiny grip catchers formed to the underside. These ones moved though. They crept
along the thing’s wounded flesh and stuck to the surface of its strange craft
like insect legs caught to fly paper. The entire time its body continued to
vibrate and hum. It made it hard to focus in on the thing. I know that’s what
caused the buzzing sound in our heads and the aches in our guts.

This yellow stuff started to leak
out between the fingers on its chest and that’s when we smelled the cat
piss-black pepper stink. It dripped down and beaded off the surface of the
cube. Me and Abe puked next. Sheila and Becky were smart—they held their breath
after that first sniff and pinched their nostrils shut. The thing’s blood—gut juice,
puss, whatever the hell it was—hit the ground and started to spit and smolder.
Sounded like bacon sizzling in a pan, popping and smoking. The grass all around
started to turn white.

Abe wasn’t the brightest kid—I
think I mentioned that earlier. He acted on dumb, ignorant instinct. But that
ignorance may have saved our lives that day. It may have saved everyone. He
threw the soccer ball at the thing’s head. Its arms flailed defensively in the
air. The ball struck the chest wound and stayed. There was a sucking sound as
torn grey skin melded to the ball’s rubber surface. It was one of the grossest
things I ever saw.

With the ball held against its
chest, the thing waved us away with its free hand…and then it spoke.

Seriously, children…you don’t want this ball back.

It had no mouth to speak with but
that’s what we
heard
the thing say in
our heads, I swear. And judging from the ten-foot wide circle of white, dead
ground caused from a drop or two of its insides, we didn’t argue.

Becky’s hand reached for the cube,
as if her fingers were drawn to the streak of alien goo. What the hell was she
thinking? She touched it and moaned. Abe grabbed her arm and pulled. It looked
as if he’d touched an electrified fence. He stepped away from her and the two
just stared at each other for a few seconds. I’ll never forget that look
between them—like they’d been let in on a little secret.

Abe started running. He ran right
out of the forest and into a crop of wheat. Smart move for a kid that may or
may not have shit his pants and couldn’t hit an alien in the head with a soccer
ball from a dozen feet away. Becky took after him a few moments later.

We should’ve done the same. I felt
for Sheila’s hand instead without looking. Her fingers were cold and sweaty.
The little creature talked in our heads again.

It’s hopeless kids. Once the seal breaks, you’re all…fucked.

The words buzzed and itched in our
brains like mosquito bites you couldn’t scratch. It was real bad when that
thing spoke to us, and it said a whole lot more over the years. Horrible things
that change the way a kid thinks and grows. Abe and Becky were lucky to run
when they did. Well, at least we thought so back then. We haven’t seen them
since but have a pretty good idea where they ended up. And I thought we had it
bad.

Seems so long ago. Sheila and I are
living in the Feerce farmhouse now. Her family is gone. Mine’s all dead. The
thing is still out in the woods holding that cheap soccer ball against its
chest. I’ve done things I should be ashamed of. But I’m not. I don’t know what
shame is anymore. I don’t have a shred of decency in me.

It’s raining hard outside. Lots of
thunder and lightning. That used to scare me when I was a little kid. I always
thought the
Bogey Man
was waiting out
there when it rained this hard. He would make the lightning flash and the
thunder boom just to frighten me. I like the rain these days. The noise too.
Where’s the Bogey Man now? Where is he in all this grey? Maybe he’s planning
some bad shit. Just like I’m doing.

I’ve talked to a
lot
of people. I’ve made them do things
they didn’t want to do. Now I’m heading out to talk to
one
more.

And when I do, things will change.
Something bad will happen.

Something
really
bad.

Here’s what it is…