The Creepers Read online

  The Creepers

  Norman Dixon Jr.

  Text copyright © 2012 Norman Dixon Jr.

  All Rights Reserved

  To Jeanette always and still

  Table of Contents

  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

  BOOK II

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  BOOK III

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  EPILOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  “Come on, Bobby, I got something to show ya."

  Ryan ducked under the rusting fence. He wriggled his way past the crude spikes and razor wire, stopping once to relieve his shirt from a snag. He bounced up on the other side, grinning wide. “See? Nothing to be afraid of. Nothing at all." He waved wildly at his brother.

  Bobby froze. He looked back at the Settlement. Silhouettes of workers moved along the crest of the hill, finishing the day’s work on the farm. The guard tower poked the sky, a dark finger. It would be empty, briefly, for a shift change this time of day. “But we’re not supposed to be out there with the Creepers, Ryan. The Folks will be mad,” his voice quivered. In the light of the setting sun he looked even younger than his thirteen winters. Tears of doubt and embarrassment welled in his eyes.

  “Screw them . . . they’re not our real parents,” Ryan said smugly.

  Bobby balled his fists, pounded his thighs, took a deep breath, and made his way under the fence. His sandy, shoulder length curls forcing him to pause every few inches as they caught in the razor-wire. The smell of sweet grass fresh in his nostrils, he made it to the other side.

  Ryan slapped him on the back. “See, feels good doesn’t it?”

  “But the Folks, Ryan.”

  “Fuck ’em.”

  Bobby flinched at the word. He had heard it before, on the fields, spoken in anger by the older boys as they tilled the soil on a hot day. He never used it. The Folks simply would not stand for it. They made little Terry Miller work latrine duty for three months, and he didn’t even get the whole word out.

  “But, nothing." Ryan turned to the old, weeded over Still Water Road. It snaked down the right side of the mountain, dangerously steep. He stood on his tippy-toes and shielded his eyes from the sun. “You see that . . . in the old fields?" Ryan pointed off into the distance.

  Bobby strained to follow Ryan’s finger to the horizon. He couldn’t see anything . . . nothing at all. Then he did, just barely, shapes moving through the wildly growing fields, black blotches like the videos of animals in those old nature discs the Folks played in science class. Big shapes, vaguely human, hard to make out—but moving, foraging, hunting. Bobby swallowed hard.

  It was then, as Ryan skipped ahead, throwing rocks over the edge of the road, that Bobby realized this was the furthest he had ever been from the Settlement. He’d been further when he was an infant, but he didn’t count that journey, because he could not remember it. He looked back to the razor-wire fence, wishing silently he hadn’t followed Ryan. But at the same time, he couldn’t resist the temptation of breaking the rules. He was, after all, an outsider.

  “Check this out, Bobby." Ryan knelt at the side of the road beside a rusted out Ford pickup. He pulled the driver-side door open with a grunting effort.

  Bobby leaned over his shoulder. The driver’s skull looked at him, gleaming white and empty-eyed from the center console. He didn’t flinch, he didn’t run; he wasn’t afraid, he’d seen it all before. Death was nothing new . . . he’d seen worse. It wasn’t the dead-dead that you had to worry about. It was the Creepers you had to look out for, the Creepers you had to be afraid of. That was the first lesson the Folks taught them.

  The lesson was always at the forefront of Bobby’s consciousness, etched in the gray matter till death. He’d never forget it. How could he? The day of the lesson, now four years removed, played out every night in moments of waking terror, of piss and sweat-soaked sheets. The other boys teased him about it, laughed at him, but they hadn’t been that close to a Creeper, not a single one of them. They didn’t smell the fetid breath, the wretched stink of decay. They’d never felt those hard fingers gripping their flesh. Never heard the yellowed-teeth clack, not a single one of them.

  Bobby found his memories too intense to stop. He was back in the school yard. It was a cold December day. Steely-gray clouds, like ocean liners, drifted towards them, belching the first real snow fall of winter. The fifteen boys stood in a circle around the old flagpole. The tattered red, white and blue had been removed earlier that day in a ceremony. Ol’ Randy played something called Taps on his battered bugle. The flag and rope had been replaced by a long chain. At the end of the chain, a thick iron collar, and clasped tightly inside that collar, a neck, the rotting, flesh-torn neck of Bobby’s first lesson: a Creeper.

  The boys shook from the cold, and from fear, some even wet themselves, but not Bobby, he was too curious to be afraid.

  Their teacher, the oldest of the Folks, Ol’ Randy, stood to the left of the Creeper. His dark denim overalls did their best to hide to the stains of dried blood from the slaughterhouse. Ol’ Randy stood well over six feet tall. His gray hair hung to the middle of his back and it was flecked with blood and bits of gristle. He held his trademark sledgehammer, Tilda, in his massive, arthritic-knuckled hands. His face was marked by a baseball-sized dent just under his right eye. The boys joked that he slept with Tilda once too often, caressing her steel head on many a lonely night. None of them would say this to his face. Truth is, nobody; not the boys, not the other Folks and maybe, just maybe, not even Tilda knew how Ol’ Randy came to bear the mark. Bobby suspected Ol’ Randy came by it in the First War.

  Decades removed from the First War, Ol’ Randy stood before them, measuring them, eyeing them, meeting each gaze, forcing them to look away, but not Bobby.

  “So, not afraid, little Bobby Carroll?" Ol’ Randy slapped Tilda’s head in his palm. He grinned, a broken smile like a rundown picket fence in need of repair. “Not afraid at all?”

  Bobby straightened himself like they taught him; arms crossed, shoulders straight, feet spread evenly apart, chin up, chin up boy . . . chin up. “No, sir.”

  “Really,” Ol’ Randy whistled. “We gon’ see bout that, son. Com’ere, boy.”

  Bobby strode with confidence, but after the day was out, Bobby would never be the same. He’d no longer walk tall, no longer look anyone in the eye. No, at the end of the day Bobby Carroll would be the little boy he was meant to be. They all would, but Bobby most of all. That was the point of the first lesson. It was more of a reality check than an introduction. Bobby stopped two paces from Ol’ Randy and the Creeper.

  He could smell it now as the wind stilled briefly. His stomach rolled. The lunch of fresh bread and vegetables rose in the back of his throat. He swallowed, forcing the raw beets and bile down. The Creeper wore a brand new orange jumpsuit, making it an easy target for the guards in the tower—every precaution had to be taken on introduction day.

  Bobby studied it. The Creeper’s exposed flesh was cut in places, and a swarm of bloated black flies buzzed around its head. The insects crawled in and out of its mouth and nostrils, but the Creeper did not care. Its shag
gy black hair hung over its face, obscuring its milky eyeballs like a dirty, greasy stage curtain. The Creeper moaned, begging for flesh while its useless tongue hung limply, a mound of rot incapable of coherent speech. It was said that no thoughts ran through their rotting minds, though, that was before they decimated the world. Something ticked in there, a driving force—a purpose. The foul smelling skin shone a dull brown like the belly of a cricket. Bobby was not afraid.

  The Creeper strained against the chain, clack, trying to reach Bobby. Ol’ Randy hit it in the gut with Tilda. The Creeper slumped forward, moaned louder.

  “Shut up ya’ puss bucket." After another blow from Tilda, the moans died off. “That’s better." Ol’ Randy spit a shiny black wad of chew at Bobby’s feet. “Now, little man, and th’rest o’you boys,” he waved Tilda to include them all, “this’n here be a Creeper.”

  Bobby stared into the Creeper’s vacant gray-white eyes. He wondered what the last thing it ever saw was. Did it see the rotten teeth of another descending onto its neck? Or did it see the ceiling of a room as it waited for its first death, feeling the Fection spread? Bobby would never know. That’s just how the world functioned. There was a lot of not knowing, and people just dealt with it.

  A stone smashed into the Creeper’s forehead, splitting the dead flesh and cracking the skull beneath. The Creeper rocked back and forth, arms stretched towards Bobby and the other boys, but the chain kept it in check. The boys snickered and another stone busted its lip wide open. There was no blood: only maggoty, sun-dried skin parting.

  “Quit that laughing . . . this lesson’ll save your life one day. Now pay ‘tention!" Ol’ Randy slapped its hands aside and gripped its lower jaw in his powerful hands. He held it firm like an old movie villain taunting the hero’s woman. The jaw cracked from the pressure and its graying putrescent tongue lolled over its busted lip. Ol’ Randy looked like a prize fighter with the big black glove on, but protection was necessary.

  “Listen well, boys, listen well. Never, ever want that Creeper juice on ya. No sir, be wary for the Creeper juice. It’s the main source of the Fection. Ya get it on ya and well, you end up limbless like Ted, or worse." Ol’ Randy pushed the dead thing away with the butt of his hammer. “Who here knows ‘bout the Fection?”

  Bobby raised his hand.

  Ol’ Randy looked past him.

  None of the other boys volunteered.

  Ol’ Randy shook his head. “Well, little Bobby, Mr. Superstar that everyone loves to hate." He spit another wad. “Always comes back to you. You other boys listen, and listen good, ya hear? You can’t go through life havin’ someun else do ya work for ya. Little Bobby here been the star pupil." He looked Bobby dead in the eye. “I been payin’ tention see. This ya’s first lesson wit me, but I been payin tention. You don’t wanna answer for yaselves, well then I’m-a let Bobby answer. Go ahead, son.”

  Bobby swallowed. He didn’t like the gleam in Ol’ Randy’s eyes, it spoke of something off, something not-quite-right. It smacked of wrong. But he had to speak up. After all, when one of the Folks asked you a question, you answered—simple as that. There were punishments for being silent. No individual thoughts, they could be dangerous. He readied himself to answer.

  “The Fection is a disease, sir.”

  “Tell me sumtin’ I don’t know, superstar." He nudged the Creeper aside.

  “We don’t know how it started—”

  “Damn Devil’s work,” he spat. “That’s how it started . . . go on, son.”

  “It’s a disease spread through contact, from bites mostly, but if you just touch the juice you get it. That’s why so many from the First Wars are missing parts. They had to cut them off to keep the Fection from spreading." Bobby shuddered as he remembered the pictures of the field hospitals: the piles of limbs on fire, the wounded, the blood, and the sheer enormity of it all.

  “Good men all. If it weren’t for their sacrifice you young-uns wouldn’t be here now. Good answer, son. I was gun’ have you all here spend some time wit this here Creeper. But,” Ol’ Randy dug the chew from his mouth, threw it on the ground, wiped his fingers on the orange jumpsuit, and continued, “but . . . seein’ as how you all wanna play silent types and let Bobby here do all the work. I’m gonna’ make it hard on him.”

  Here it comes, Bobby thought. The gleam had returned. It always seemed to happen like this. In every class he excelled, and in every class he paid for it with extra work, or worse. He didn’t fault the other boys for their lack of forwardness. They were afraid. Sure they picked their spots, avoiding the harsher punishments for the most part . . . and sure, they relied on Bobby to speak up, but he couldn’t fault them for it. He didn’t flinch while he waited to see what Ol’ Randy had in store for him. He wasn’t afraid.

  Ol’ Randy went to the flag pole, undid the chain, let it fall to the ground. “Kill it!”

  The Creeper stumbled forward.

  The boys ran every which way, screaming, but not Bobby. He stepped left, then right, and came up behind the Creeper. He searched frantically for a weapon. The Creeper was slow, but driven by hunger, it was relentless. It turned on a shaky leg and raked the air in front of Bobby. His heart thudded against his small ribcage. He darted to the side and tripped, tried to catch himself, but his momentum proved too great. His feet tangled with the chain and he fell on his side. He quickly rolled to his back.

  The Creeper shambled forward, tongue swinging back and forth like the shaft of a grandfather clock. It towered over him. Bobby looked around for help. The boys were gone, and Ol’ Randy laughed as he leaned on Tilda for support.

  It was then that something in Bobby’s young mind broke. For the first time he knew fear, but it was more than that, so much more. The sensation rocked his body, loosened his bowels, and came cascading over his defenses. He couldn’t get up, couldn’t will his limbs to move. He could only wallow in a pool of his own filth. He screamed. The Creeper fell to its knees, straddling him. It grabbed his shoulders and leaned forward. The fingers were hot points of pain that felt like molten steel being pushed into his flesh. Oh, did Bobby scream.

  Ol’ Randy continued to laugh.

  He stared into its gaping mouth. The graying meat of the tongue missed his face by inches. Did he have any minute cuts on his face, any openings, what about his eyes, his nose? He clamped his mouth shut. The Fection. Bobby’s vision blurred with tears. He made tiny fists and beat the Creeper’s chest. The thing groaned, trying to work its broken jaw into a bite. The cruel bony fingers dug deeper. The Creeper tilted its head, dead eyes inquisitive, and then . . . then its head was gone. Evaporated. The spray of blood, bone and brain matter hung majestically for the briefest of moments then rushed past Bobby’s face and splattered on the green grass behind him. The echo of the fifty caliber shot rattled his mind back to the present.

  The skull on the center console shouted, “Hey, asshole!”

  Bobby did a double take. No. Not the skull, Ryan.

  “Hey, Bobby, what the hell?" Ryan punched Bobby in the chest. “You went all loopy for a second. Did bones get ya all scared?" Ryan picked up the skull and the lower jaw. He made its teeth clack in Bobby’s face. “Hey, Bobby, Bobby, the Creepers got me. Yessir they did." Clack. Clack. “Bobby, gimme a little nibble, just a taste, I haven’t had a bite to eat in ages. Come on, come-onnaaaahhhh.”

  Bobby slapped the skull out of Ryan’s hand. It shattered on the weather beaten blacktop.

  “Stop it.”

  “I was just playing, Bobby. You freaked me out for a minute. You slipped back again didn’t you?" Ryan ran his fingers through his hair.

  “Yeah." Bobby kicked a piece of skull under the car. “But it doesn’t matter. It’s getting late. What if we get caught?”

  “Well if you weren’t taking all day we’d have been there by now. Help me open the trunk." Ryan pulled a faded blue ball cap from his back pocket, and put it on to keep his stringy black hair from his face. He whistled through the gap in his front teeth.

&nbs
p; Together they managed to lift the rusted trunk. Bits of flaked metal twisted in the light of the oncoming Colorado winter. Bobby almost expected to find another corpse. Instead, he found himself looking at Ryan’s secret stash: one battered and dirty rucksack, a chestnut-stocked .22 carbine, a hunting knife, and a long-barreled revolver.

  “You take the revolver,” Ryan said handing it to Bobby.

  Bobby accepted the weapon in shaking hands. When that cold steel touched his palm the shaking stopped and his training took over. He looked down the road clogged with the rusted vehicles of refugees from the First War. He wondered how many of them wished they had had a firearm before the Creepers final rush came. So much death. All down the road bleached bones poked from their final resting places, dead flowers on forgotten graves. Bobby flipped open the chamber, fully loaded, he snapped it back. He tucked it into his belt. And to think the Folks had caused their deaths. He wished he didn’t know the truth.

  “You’re not going to believe this, Bobby." Ryan slung the rifle over his shoulder and did the same with the rucksack. “You always asked me where I was all those times before lights out. You’re about to find out. Come on." Ryan headed down the road, kicking rocks as he went.

  Off in the distance the forms moved aimlessly over the fields. Bobby forced one more glance at the Settlement before following Ryan down the old Still Water Road.

  CHAPTER 2

  The wind whistled into the valley, a breath from winter. Bobby zipped his thin windbreaker as far as it would go. The iron sight of the revolver dug painfully into his back. Sweat stung his eyes and burned icy-hot on his brow. Winter wouldn’t be too long off now, a week or two at best. Ryan stood on a gently sloping bluff overlooking the field. Bobby trotted up beside him.

  “We’re here, Bobby boy." Ryan rummaged in his rucksack and pulled out a pair of binoculars. He pressed them to his eyes and looked off to his right.

  Bobby followed Ryan’s line of sight to a large wooden structure. The boards that made up its outer shell sagged from the weight of many winters. The rough beams were darkened with age and the windows long since blown out. The roof had collapsed in on itself, the black peaks at either end, a pair of charred hands reaching towards the heavens for salvation. Bobby shivered as he fully laid eyes on the Tenenbaum Schoolhouse.