The Creepers (Book 2): From the Past Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE CREEPERS: BORN IN WINTER

  “I highly recommend The Creepers to anyone looking for a well-written and exciting action/adventure story that also happens to be a fresh take on the zombie genre.”-Scott Whitmore Author of Devil’s Harvest & Green Zulu Five One

  “This book blew my mind!!! There are some parts that are so intense, I cannot remember a time when I have been so captivated by plot.”-Gwendolyn Wallace-Davis

  “If you’re a fan of zombie fiction, this is definitely a book you’re going to want to check out.”-Amanda Lee author of the Wicked Witches of the Midwest Series

  A Fox Pause Press Book

  The Creepers: From the Past

  Copyright © 2015

  By Norman Dixon

  All rights reserved.

  Cover art by Norman Dixon

  This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

  The Creepers

  Volume Two

  From The Past

  By Norman Dixon Jr.

  To Olive and Harley with all my love

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  EPILOGUE

  Pathos I – Traveling Historian of the Dead

  April 23, 2041

  Pathos I Journal Entry [7665]

  I look at him now in awe. Our future. I can’t help but feel a terrible sense of guilt. This boy, grown into a man, born from all of our faults, was raised on the archaic violence we accepted for far too long. I look at him and his family. I watch him interact with everyone in our group, watch the bond grow between him and our sometimes Mad Conductor. Yet, in the back of my mind, and when the light catches his eyes just right, I see it.

  Desolation. Death. The scars of violence. I bear my own, but somehow his seem worse by comparison, for it is all he knows. Even freed of the shackles that nearly took him from this world, it is all he knows. If there is a greater power, I’d like to ask why? Why would you force someone to endure so much?

  I imagine I’d hear the response: ‘Why have you?’ And to that I have no answer. All I can do is hang my head in shame. I could ask that question back throughout history, through all of the bloodshed, rape, and senseless murder. Did we do it because it was easy? Did we do it because it made us feel good? Did we even care? If it wasn’t directly impacting us, what did it matter? I don’t have the answers to those questions. All I know for sure is that I didn’t start to get in the way of history until it was too late. I spent too many years as an observer. Even after the fall, I spent my time as a chronicler of events.

  Until I met Bobby.

  Now I am an active participant in the course of things, and never again will I stand by idly while the world falls apart. There are so few of us who take the responsibility of rebuilding seriously. There are more of us who want what we used to have, but I now know that can no longer be. Somewhere inside I yearn to be with Siobhan again, to see a movie, to sit on the couch and watch television while the rain falls, but that world is gone, and in a lot of ways, good riddance. It wasn’t until I lost everything that I could truly see the cycles. In Siobhan’s death, in Bobby’s life, and in my own quest for . . . for what? Survival? Hardly. There is something. Some truth I’ve yet to discover. I can feel it slink across the surface of my brain. I know it, but I cannot identify it.

  I look at the boy who will herald our future. I look at the lack of innocence on his face, hear the seriousness of his words, his determination to change the course of things, and I know I’m in the right place. I’m finally home, so to speak, home aboard this train of dreaming fools, and together we’ll see it through, or die trying. Hopefully in some glorious fashion that will be written about by young Randal’s children, should the future be so kind as to grant such a boon, but most likely a horrible, unfair end.

  After all that I’ve been through, so many moments that I could deem pivotal, and the only one I keep going back to is Bobby sending that man into the depths of the quarry. The man that shattered his life. The man that nearly extinguished humanity's hope for a future. It is in that moment, that key, necessary moment, that I see there truly may not be an end to the cycle of violence.

  My ancestors, hell, all of humanity's ancestors, were unable to move beyond it. They needed it to conquer evil, to pave the way towards a better tomorrow, but no matter how hard some of us tried to move beyond it, to that higher state of being we often fantasized about, we could not. Defeated by the absolute requirement of violence. And that is the great question of the moment that haunts me.

  Is there any way, any way at all, to leave violence behind?

  My answer is still no, though I’ve been trying every night to formulate a yes. To date I have been unable to do so. I will not stop in my pursuit, just as my compatriots will not stop in their pursuit of a new world.

  I must leave you now, whoever you are, as my hands are tired and the dry desert air has my scars itching unmercifully. Should the dawn greet me tomorrow, I will continue our conversation. Until then…

  CHAPTER 1

  The tomatoes were beginning to flower and he could hear the buzzing of several bees from the zucchini plants. He didn't think he'd be around to taste them though. The stiff breeze had him pulling the starchy blanket tight about his shoulders. He pined for a better time, for a better place, for a saner world in which to abandon his son, but Gary Danielson was a dying doctor, not a miracle worker.

  Young Howard was a man by pre-war standards. Even so, Doc Danielson had a hard time slipping away. He was nearing sixty and the Santa Ana winds let him know it. He shivered, watching the flocks of pigeons bank and bend like massive nets cast between L.A's shattered buildings—those that still remained standing after nearly thirty years of quakes and neglect. He liked being up here.

  He thought of Tina, how brave she was after she'd been bitten, how amazingly brave while giving birth to Howard. The boy had her green eyes and her thin frame. It broke his heart every time he looked at his son. The perfect model of a post First War family—a broken, dysfunctional disaster. Eighteen years. Had it been that long? Doc Danielson shuddered. The monument to the greatest women the world would never know taunted his tired eyes. The tears came freely and soon the guilt followed.

  They were all gone now. The mothers, their children. He hoped the babies made it, but he'd never know. The men, too, were gone, taken by the same guilt that ate at him night after night. He hung on for Howard. If he only had more time, a bit more time, and perhaps, just maybe, a better set of lungs, he'd be able to leave this place with his son. The rattle in his chest kept him rooted in reality. Now wasn't the time for fantasy. He had to think this through. Time was short.

  The sun began to set and a pervasive quiet settled over the city. It was new, this quiet. For years, Doc Daniels
on had learned to live with the millions of undead inhabitants. They'd moan and scratch and scrabble, creating the music of monotony—a dirge from a different time.

  But the dead were all but gone from the city now.

  The door creaked open behind him.

  “Thought I'd find you up here,” Howard said.

  “Your mother and I would do this a lot in the early years. The birds hadn't returned yet, but it was still something to behold.”

  "I finished clearing grid 467." Howard grimaced, flexing his hands. "It doesn't get easier. You said it would get easier, Dad.”

  “How many this time?” Doc Danielson coughed. He tasted blood in the phlegm.

  “I don't know.” Howard leaned over the railing.

  A coyote cried out from somewhere below.

  “Howard.” Doc Danielson wanted to reach out to his son, but that approach wouldn't work.

  “Dad, you don't hear them. You don't kill them,” Howard whispered.

  “They’re already dead. You’re simply removing the host so the virus cannot spread farther. What you hear, or rather what you think you hear, are nothing more than imprints on decaying matter.” Doc Danielson tapped on the stalk of a tomato plant, vibrating the flowers. In the old days, before the bees returned, it was the only way to pollinate them.

  “How can you know that? You don't hear them, you don't hunt them, drawing them in and ending them. How could you know,” Howard cried.

  “Howard,” Doc Danielson pleaded.

  “There was this woman.” Howard hooked his legs over the edge, just as Doc Danielson had seen him do countless times over the years. “She kept calling for her daughter, Pipa, Pipa, Pipa, and the fragile, blonde-haired image would flash over and over. A little girl in a pink dress smiling in the sun. Pipa, Pipa, Pipa. I tried to get her to come to me but she couldn't, and I couldn't see through her eyes. Either she was trapped somewhere or her eyes were gone. Pipa, Pipa, Pipa.”

  “Howard.” This time Doc Danielson did reach for his son.

  “No!” Howard screamed, smacking his father's frail hand away. “Pipa, Pipa, Pipa. It took me hours to find her. For hours that's all I heard, playing to the image of that little girl in my head. Over and over and over. I found her apartment, and I found her daughter. The little girl was nothing but bones in a corner. All her little furniture was piled against her closet door. Pipa, Pipa, Pipa.” Howard turned to his father with tears in his eyes. “Damn you, Father. Damn you for making me hear them.”

  Doc Danielson trembled. He had not the words. His heart fell to a million pieces as a new, far more profound guilt entered him. He tried to internally justify everything with simple words: it was to save us all. But looking at his son, he saw his own stress—eaten face staring back at him. He dropped to his knees and began to cry. The blanket fell from his shoulders.

  “My son, I'm so sorry.” Doc Danielson clawed at the dirt-covered roof. “We just wanted a better life for you all. She didn't ask for it. She just...” He began to tremble uncontrollably.

  “Father, there’s no one left. How is that better? There’s no one left. Nothing but a bunch of unmarked graves, a billion little tragedies, just like us. One big fucking aftermath.”

  “There are others like you.”

  “Don't you dare,” Howard hissed. He ran from the roof without another word.

  Doc Danielson coughed into his hands. When he pulled them back, he wished he hadn't. The blood was now overtaking the phlegm. “Not good, old man. There is still so much he doesn't know.”

  * * * * *

  Howard felt them as soon as he entered the sewer.

  His little torch revealed nothing beyond a few feet. Black mold coated the narrow walls. Rats scurried along the gutters. Finger-length cockroaches scattered in the flickering flame. He nearly tripped over a rust-eaten tricycle. This relic of what was crumbled from the contact.

  Howard paused. He looked back at the cone of light behind him, suddenly afraid. He wasn't getting any images, but the Creepers he channeled didn't give him the sense that they were blind or trapped in the dark. Something else was blocking his view. His mind drifted to the woman from yesterday, to the little bones, the toys stacked against the door. He chased the thoughts away, or rather he put something else on top of them.

  The dead little girl was the first child he'd seen in a very long time. Not since, he tried hard to remember, he was around ten. There was a time when there were others. Not just kids but adults too. People busy all through the buildings, people coming and going from all over. They would come, meet with his father, the others, and they would leave with some of the babies. Back then he couldn't have understood the implications, but now he understood them all too well. And now, after years of watching the men die through slow grief, watching his father die, watching all they battled for crumble away, he’d come to the great crux of his life.

  His father always told him it was for the future, his future, but what kind of future was this? he thought, as he rounded the bend with hammer in hand.

  Techno cult.

  Those two words reverberated in his head. His father's voice recounting the early years, when there were still pockets of survivors throughout the city, and not all of them hell bent on fixing humanity.

  “Son, you have to understand that blame was something thrown around carelessly. It didn't really matter what had actually caused the event, which we now know as B2retrogress7. That didn't matter. What mattered was who or what they could blame it on. They still thought they would come out of it shinning bright, but how wrong they were.

  “The religious nuts came out of every basement and back alley, and no one knows who started it. Society was nearly gone at that point, but they proclaimed technology the root cause. All of our gadgets and advancements paved the road to hell. Beyond their bizarre prayer rituals, heard over loud speakers while we still retained power, and the shouting vigils after we lost it, we didn't really see them, but they were out there, and in some cases are probably still out there.

  “We'd run into the aftermath of their rituals though, and I'll never forget them. Your mother called them thunder domes. I don't know what possessed them.” His father’s voice echoed through the halls of memory.

  Howard dropped the torch. The area around the bend opened wide, cracked by the angry earth some time ago. A long jagged scar revealed the gray sky and the rain pattered and plopped through the opening. What had been a junction, when the world was sane, was now a massive amphitheater open to the elements. Rivulets of water sluiced over the edge of the crack. It was almost beautiful.

  The horror dominating the center of the opening pushed any semblance of beauty from his mind.

  “Thunder dome,” Howard whispered.

  His father had tried hard to impart the images of the old movie to him, but it wasn't among the few films in their collection. He doubted what he saw now carried any similarities to the film. There were no words. Even an archaic association meant to convey an image wouldn't do it justice.

  The rudimentary dome was constructed of scrap metal: shopping carts, fencing, rebar, chain, bike frames, and plenty of other metal objects he couldn't identify. They carried decades of rust, yet they held sound, strengthened by the wires that kept it all together. As Howard approached it, he thought it looked more like a hand than a dome, as if some giant automaton, perhaps the hand of their god, crashed through the road above to scoop up the souls of the damned.

  Heavy shadow enveloped the center of the dome, but Howard didn't need the light to know the trio of Creepers were entombed at its center. As he stepped closer, the wind changed direction and the rain whipped at his eyes. He was too in awe to care.

  He could feel them strongly. Their hunger practically screamed at him to slake it. He tempered them with measured breathing, fighting the hammering of his heart. He’d learned a lot from clearing the city over the years.

  They were as his father described them all those years ago.

  “They are always in
threes. It holds an obvious significance to their belief structure, but I venture none have studied it. Not too many of us left after all, them either. I've seen three such structures in my days and we destroyed all three. Your mother could not stand them. The thought of those things trapped like that... Virus or not, they were once human, and they deserved better. I'll never know how half this shit gets into human DNA. Sorry, son. It's just you want to know and I'm telling you, but one day you'll truly know and I weep for that moment.

  “They hang two upside down from the top of the domes and the other is crucified between them. But they do not kill them. They bind them in wire, then they place devices over the eyes—cell phones, monitors, whatever bit of technology is handy, sometimes jamming circuit boards directly into the flesh. I guess it’s their way of exacting revenge on the objects they blamed for it all.”

  There were three: two held in place by loops of frayed cable and thick chain. A flat panel monitor covered one of the faces. Howard was thankful for that. The wires keeping the equipment in place were so tight that bits of hair still poked out between. Bare skull gleamed above and below. The thoroughness of the work spoke of great anger. A violence like nothing he'd encountered before, and this was the aftermath.