Free The Creepers (Book 2): From the Past by Norman Dixon Page A

not safe. Another reason he
had to get out.
     
    Jennifer thought she was in control
behind him. She thought she had the upper hand with the rifle, but she was
right where Howard wanted her. He slowly led them towards what used to be home,
but he took a route that would end in a familiar place, a dark place, a part of
the old city cracked open and exposed, and it was in that place he would show
her that all was not as it seemed.
     
    He knew she would go for the rifle. She
couldn’t keep her eyes off it while she paced. She tried to keep him busy with
her words, but that nervous energy from the rush of the encounter gave her
away. Howard let her play that hand to see how far it would go. It ended at the
weapon. Not a very good hand at all.
     
    His father told him once that the whole
city would sink into the ocean. He hadn’t believed it for the longest time,
even with the shocks coming regularly, but after the big one came he’d never
doubt the old man again.
     
    He was twelve. There were still women
around back then, he remembered, as he led Jennifer towards the place from his
past. The shocks came in low rolling waves. Little jitters, Lem used to call
them. They made his feet tingle, and if you looked at the glass in the
buildings it looked like water for a second. By that time, he had already
started clearing the city. He was getting good at it, and it helped to have the
others around, though the killing affected them on a different level than it
did him.
     
    He felt a profound sorrow. He felt those
thoughts. The last gasps. The loop of feedback imprints left on the human
brain. It always sounded like they were talking directly to him, but his father
was adamant that what he heard were nothing more than leftovers. Recordings
left in the brain. Howard never wanted to believe his father, and even to this
day he still had reservations. The voices were too intense, too real to be
discounted as such.
     
    The others felt nothing but fury. Their
world had ended because of the Creepers, but ending them did not ease the
torment. It never did. Howard felt their human emotions just as he felt the
throes of the Creepers, but he could not use his gift to help them beyond
making easy targets of the dead. They smashed head after head in, cursing as
they went, carving a path through the enemies that held them in check for so
many years. They tore through them, through the day, and then it happened.
     
    Howard could still feel it. The wobble
at first, then the terror as the world lifted beneath his feet, rising up and
down and up before slamming him down again. The metal of the great buildings
groaned like an enormous god that had awoken from a long slumber. He could see
the glass giants twist. Strange reflections of the sunlight fell like golden tears
before the windows shattered, showering them, shredding them. One of their
group, Tim Panders, was cut in two. Creepers littered the weeded streets, parts
of them twitching reflexively.
     
    He recalled the Creeper he’d landed next
to. Thin yellow face, a mouthful of broken teeth, tongue poking through a hole
in its cheek. Its thick eyes darted back and forth but its body was gone. All
that remained was the torn base of its neck. It kept biting, biting nothing. In
Howard’s mind, he heard it growl, but he knew it was impossible. There were no
lungs left to create it, but that sound was so ingrained in him, he couldn’t
help but hear it. He wanted to put the thing out of its misery, but he never
got the chance.
     
    The world opened up before him, taking
the head and a large chunk of the city street with it. Dust shot into the sky,
blocked out the sun, and the roars filled Los Angeles. The death throes of a
once great city. Buildings cracked in half, sliding into the darkness below in
explosions of decayed infrastructure. The earth moved, reminding him there was
always more to fear in the unpredictability of nature. Without man to keep pace
with her, nature sought fit to wipe the