Crawl (5 page)

8.

Her every movement was excruciating. Her remaining toes would dip down to touch the clay and snaps of heat lightning would shoot from her shattered feet up through her hips and into her back. She’d writhe until the wave subsided then start anew. The shackles around her wrist were cumbersome but didn’t affect her progress.

The thing in the woods seemed preoccupied with its meal. It might not even know Juliet was crawling away. Could it see her beyond the fire? She hoped not.

Right hand. Fistful of clay. Pull.

Left. Dig. Tug.

Even when her feet didn’t scrape the ground, a steady inferno sizzled her soles, as if she were walking on coals. The pain was like nothing else she’d ever experienced. She kept trying to tell herself that her body was built for pain, had been constructed to birth a child, that this pain was nothing.

Imagine trying to push something the size of a watermelon out of something the size of a lemon. Now get a move on, wimp!

This inner-cheerleader’s voice reminded Juliet of Colton, but not entirely. There was a bit of her in there, too. A stronger, bassier version of Juliet Harryhousen, formerly Juliet Langenthrope, daughter of Bethany and Martin Langenthrope, Christian missionaries. Martin had died in Zimbabwe after eating spoiled yams. The can had been swollen—a sure sign of botulism. But they’d been in the bush for three days without food, after being abandoned by their guides because of militia activities. Martin hadn’t been able to take it any longer. By the time Bethany found Martin, the can lay empty between his legs. “I knew he was dead then,” Bethany had told Juliet. “It was nine hours later they found us, but his stomach was already beginning to swell. Stupid man. Stupid, selfish,
stupid
man…” Bethany had collapsed into sobs at that point, and twenty-year-old Juliet could only sit next to her and rub her back.

Daddy didn’t make it. But you will. You’ll crawl to the end of that tunnel made of trees, and you’ll reach that light. Then, you’ll find help. In fact, do you hear that? Do you hear what I hear?

Juliet propped herself up on her elbows and went completely silent. Far off, she could hear the ebbing growl of an engine.

The light ahead could very well be a streetlight
, Juliet thought.
A streetlight that’s just out of sight, shining down on the exit/entrance to this road. It seems so bright because it’s so dark in here, under this canopy of trees.

Her mind made a hard U-turn, veering away from the motor sounds coming from beyond the light at the end of the tunnel.

What time is it?

She recalled the time on the Subaru’s display, just before the accident—2:53 in the morning. Though she had no idea how long she had been unconscious, she assumed it had been some time, more than an hour at least. And how long had she been crawling? Half an hour? An hour?

More like an eternity.

Truth was she’d only been yanking herself across this clearing for a little more than ten minutes. She hadn’t even reached the corridor of trees. That fact lurked in the back of her mind, but she pushed it further down, labeling it a fallacy.

Ten minutes? Surely, you jest.

Only ten, my dear Julie. And stop calling me Shirley.

She barked laughter, a throaty sound full of spit. She regretted losing even that much saliva; a thirst was growing in her that she tried her best to ignore.

It’s all that blood you’re losing. Better focus on that car engine, and forget about a Dasani break.

What Juliet had first assumed was the sound of a car moving away couldn’t have been that at all. She still heard it; the low, steady hum of a car engine. It dissipated every few seconds then grew loud once again. She found this sound familiar, but couldn’t put her finger on it. She closed her eyes and pictured the Subaru. She saw Colton, smiling behind the wheel, he waved at her. Juliet waved back. Vicky the dog sitter pulled her head out of Colton’s lap and into view, wiping at the corners of her lips. The home-wrecker waved. Juliet responded with a middle finger as the Subaru clicked and hummed. Idling.

Idling!

The car at the end of the road was sitting there, running. That was what she heard, the rise and fall of engine sounds as the motor idled. Maybe if she screamed, and screamed loud enough…

“Help me…” she croaked. Her dry throat clicked painfully. Juliet sucked on her tongue, whishing it around, collecting as much spit as she could muster, and then swallowed.

“
HELP ME
!”

Much better. She repeated those two words a total of six times before her throat would have no more of it. Her voice retreated like a scared animal. No matter how hard she tried, the most she could produce was a mouse-like squeak. Could someone break their voice? She thought she had.

Her only choice—

(I suggest you crawl)

—was to carry on dragging her ass across the ground.

Her fingernails, caked with clay and throbbing, refused to dig anymore. Juliet pressed up on her elbows and army-crawled some more. Her legs seemed to have gained weight, especially from the knees down, and holding her feet up became an impossible chore. Her lower legs flopped down, striking the clay with such ferocity that her entire body convulsed. Juliet spat and shrieked, like a cat with its tail in a mousetrap, flopping from side to side. Her hands made to reach for her legs, but she willed against them. She wouldn’t even allow herself to look upon her ripped and crippled feet, didn’t want to know the extent of the damage. Though her mind conjured a rather nasty image, she refused to give credence to her thoughts by verifying the atrocity below.

When the pain became bearable again, Juliet used her elbows like climbing hooks. She laid her cheek against the cold clay, jabbed her elbows into the ground, and shoved up and forward. The resulting froggish leap landed her over a foot farther along than she had been. She judged this to be true because her left breast now rested in one of the last holes she’d dug with her tired hands.

When her subconscious registered the fact that she could no longer hear the thing in the woods
gnaw-gnaw-gnawing
on the teenager, her conscious mind told Mr. Subconscious to go fuck himself. She didn’t want to think about that right now. Being devoured by some corpse-ravaging monstrosity was last on her to-do list, which she treated like Colton’s Honey-Do Sheet—meaning, if it ever crossed her mind at all, it’d be a cold day in Hades.

Now if she could ignore the sensation of her feet being continuously dipped in concentrated acid she might make it out of this nightmare.

She creaked out another lackluster “Help me,” to whoever would listen, before elbow-launching forward again. This time she cracked her chin against the soft-packed ground and bit her tongue. The taste of pennies rolled around inside her mouth. She’d crushed her boobs, too, which was only slightly less agonizing than the lacerated tongue.

She hauled herself onto her elbows again. Not wanting to risk breaking a rib or cracking her sternum, she eased up, pushed forward, and rolled onto her forearms.

There, that’s better.

Her right elbow tore open as she moved from the clearing to the road. The fresh wound leaked thick blood onto the clay and spread, like ink on glass. Whimpering, Juliet rolled to her side and fingered the wound. It wasn’t more than an inch long and not too deep, but it bled as if she’d hit an artery.
Superficial wounds always bleed the worst
, she recalled reading in one magazine or another.

Juliet rested. Whether or not her weakness and lack of motivation stemmed from blood loss, she couldn’t have said, and didn’t really care, either. The world had become a blurred spectacle of muddy white light. It pulsed and thrummed. And behind it all, the wax and wane of someone’s car engine, set to idle, mocking her, driving her hazy mind mad with frustration.

“Come down here and get me or go the fuck away, you lousy shit,” Juliet croaked. She flopped over onto her back and laid her head back on the cool earth. She tried to find the stars through the boughs above, or maybe the first hint of approaching dawn seeping through the branches. Neither greeted her. The space between the entwined branches was dark; an unceasing, uncaring blackness. A void. Her hopes died there.

“
Fuuuuuuuuuuck
!” she wailed, drumming the balls of her fists at her sides. “
I can’t die like this
!”

Her head lolled to the side as she wept, wallowing in her own weakness. Blissfully aware that she no longer felt her split feet and sure that cold death now circulated through her veins instead of warm, life-sustaining blood, Juliet closed her eyes and prayed for the end.

“Just don’t lemme suffer, okay?” she asked God in a small, pitiful voice. “Lemme fall asleep and not wake up. Let it be like that”—her voice hitched with emotion—“okay, God? Okay?
Please
?”

The idling engine revved. Juliet heard the transmission shift with a clunk, and then tires crunching gravel.

They (
who?
) were coming. Juliet realized this in the middle of an inhalation of air. She choked on that breath as she rolled over and pushed up on her hands. A black shape blocked the lower half of the ball of light pouring in from the end of the tunnel of trees. No headlights. Not that they were needed, what with the grand illumination behind the wide-bodied car. The vehicle rolled along slowly, as if it still only idled, and a spike of fear drove into the space between Juliet’s breasts.

“It’s him,” she said, with the utmost certainty, not really seeing him but quite clearly
picturing
the red priest grinning over the Merc’s steering wheel.

The evil son of a bitch is coming back to see if I’m still alive. How nice of him. I wish I had a .357 Magnum and a shovel with which to properly thank him for being so attentive.

Another voice, this one sounding a lot like the husband she’d lost track of, entered her thoughts.
Julie? Julie, babe? You think you might wanna hide? Maybe he’s coming back to finish what he started, and you shouldn’t be around to find out how he plans on doing that.

Hide? Hide where?

The scrub.

But there’s something bad in there.

You don’t know if it’s real. You know the red priest is real. Really real.

But the sneaker—

Fuck the sneaker, Julie. Get your ass into the scrub!

Before another bit of argumentative chatter could vomit forth, she felt herself rolling to the side, her feet slapping about like wet flippers. There was only a soft glow of pain this time, just enough to let her know it was there, and she had a fleeting thought that, if she made it out of this ordeal alive, she’d have a closet full of shoes she’d never get to wear again.

Juliet came to rest in a pile of leaves at the edge of the tree line. She hauled herself with tired hands through two bushes and into the woods she’d previously been too terrified to enter. She hid behind thick shrubbery, head propped on her uninjured elbow.

She had no idea if the red priest had seen her escape into the trees. Minutes passed like hours. Juliet found that, at some point, she’d started counting, and was now up to three-hundred-fifty. She stopped her tallying of the seconds and held her breath, listening for the telltale crunch and hum of trundling tires. She reached out, drew a thicket of tightly woven twigs apart, and witnessed the Mercury’s languid passing. The car couldn’t have been going any more than two or three miles per hour. She let out a blast of pent-up oxygen.

The red priest hadn’t seen her. Or at least Juliet assumed as much. If he had, she’d already be dead. Of that she was sure.

Juliet lay prostrate, her chest rising and falling with shallow breaths.

A few feet to her right, the dead teenager with the half-crushed-in face glanced around the trunk of a tree, waved, and disappeared again. Like a child playing peekaboo.

9.

Juliet pressed her hands down at her sides and edged back, dragging her legs out in front of her. She backed into a tree and sat trembling against its rough bark. She buried her feet in leaves so she wouldn’t have to see them.

Any number of things could have peeked around that tree trunk and scared Juliet less than the cold terror she felt now. There was no mistaking the dead ginger for a hallucination. He was there. This was true. But something about him didn’t seem right. His head lolled to one side, and even though his arm was extended and flopping around in a “Hello there!” fashion, his wrist was limp. Actually, everything about him looked limp. Even zombies had a bit of stability to them, didn’t they?

Actually, Julie, babe, zomb-zombs don’t exist.
Dawn of the Dead
is a piece of fiction, not a documentary.

“Then what’s that?” she asked. Her own words startled her, and she flattened against the tree, glancing left to right to find the source of the voice.

The dead teenager leaned out from the trunk a little more and waggled his head at her.

Then, he spoke.

“
Boogedy boo
!”

Juliet gasped, then frowned. “The fuck?”

She said this because the dead teen hadn’t truly spoken. Its purple lips hadn’t moved. The crooked jaw didn’t even flex. He hung there, jutting from the trunk, as animated as a sack of laundry. And that’s when she saw the filthy fingernails. Dirty fingers wrapped around the wrist supported the teen’s floppy hand. Soot-blackened digits were also dug in around the back of the neck. Someone was using the boy’s corpse like a puppet. Someone with hands. Someone human.

Now a new problem came to light. Who was she more scared of? The red priest or the unseen puppeteer? The devilish clergymen who’d kidnapped and nailed her to a post out in the woods or the sick Twinkie who had turned a dead teenager into a Muppet? This Sunday,
Sunday
,
SUNDAY
! at the Tree Dome: Evil Fuck versus Morbid Comedian!
GETCHER TIGGIDS
!

“
Boogedy boo
!” the macabre ventriloquist repeated. The dead teen was made to waggle his head at her again.

Juliet shuddered in disgust rather than terror. Her brain made the illogical conclusion that, because this asshole had a sense of humor, albeit a twisted one, he didn’t mean her any real harm. Sure, his actions disturbed her, but he wasn’t actively trying to kill her, as she assumed the red priest intended.

Had the chewing she’d heard really been fire sounds? Perhaps…

The teenager leaned out farther and slipped from the puppeteer’s grasp. The torso crashed onto the bed of leaves covering the forest floor. Juliet had just enough time to wonder what had happened to the poor boy’s legs before the thing with the dirty hands revealed itself.

It might have hands, Julie, babe, but that thing ain’t human. From my best guess, it never was human. Because those aren’t hands, Julie, babe, those are gloves. It’s wearing flesh like fashion accessories. And your brain isn’t making connections anymore, is it? Nope. You’ve lost it. You think this is actually Colton talking to you, Julie, babe, but Colt’s trapped under a million pounds of steel somewhere at the edge of the world. And you’re stuck here with a real life monster. A monster they don’t warn you about in storybooks. A monster made of other people. Made of Hell. Yes, Hell-with-a-capital-H. Because it has horns. Goat horns. And isn’t that red skin peeking through the flesh it wears? Yes, I think it is. Shiny, red flesh. And yellow eyes. Such piercing yellow eyes…