by James Bierce
After thoroughly searching the rest of the house, finding only a few batteries and a can of potato soup, he finally looks through the utility room last — and on a shelf, sitting next to the back door, he sees a radio hanging from a hook on the wall.
Placing the bat on top of the dryer, he grabs the radio and turns it on, surprised to see that it's still mostly charged. "Is anybody out there? Larry, Beth?" he says into it, feeling somewhat foolish. After hearing nothing in return, he turns it off and sticks it into his pocket. Opening the door next to him, he steps into the backyard and looks out at the ocean that sits not very far from the house. The structure might not look like much, and the yard looks even worse, but the view of the dunes and surf beyond are breathtaking. He watches for moment, then sees a woman walking along the water toward the south. She's moving exactly like the others they've seen — slow and uncoordinated, wandering in a jagged line as if she were drunk. As she disappears from sight behind some pine trees, Curtis looks back to the beach and sees a man walking quickly in the same direction, carrying what appears to be a large walking stick. The man, who's much older and walks with a surprisingly upright posture and steady gait, suddenly stops in his tracks and stares straight ahead. Only a moment later, two more people can be seen coming into view, dragging the woman through the sand by her feet, then dropping her in front of the old man. As she tries to scramble away, he takes the wooden stick and begins hitting her over the head with it, and the other two men simply stand back and watch.
Not wanting to be seen, Curtis drops to the ground and looks away as he hears the woman crying for help in the distance, and in only a couple of minutes the beach becomes silent once again, with only the sound of screeching seagulls perceptible over the howling wind. Getting to his feet again, crouching behind some brush along the path, he sees the older man continuing his walk to the south, with the younger ones following closely behind him, dragging the body of the woman with them as they struggle through the loose sand of the dunes. It's only right before they vanish from his sight that he notices her hands clutching desperately at the ground, and he realizes that she's still alive.
Feeling scared for the first time since arriving here, he stands up and looks back toward their new home, suddenly aware of the fact that they must have passed right by Sarah and the boys.
"Matt, don't bother chopping anything, just grab whatever has already been cut," Sarah says quietly to Matt, as she heads back to the house with her arms full of firewood, with Ben right behind her.
"What if we run out?" he replies, still holding the ax in his hands.
"There's enough wood there for weeks, just do what I asked — please…" As she turns around to face the house again, she stops quickly after hearing something across the yard from them, causing Ben to nearly run into the back of her. "Ben, go back to the wood shed, and tell your brother to stay quiet."
"What is it?"
"Now!" she answers, quietly but firmly.
She hears it again as she slowly sets the firewood onto the ground and starts to back up toward the shed again — a rattling sound that she recognizes as the front gate into the yard. It could be Curtis, but she has no idea why he would make so much noise when they're so close to town, and when she knows that he has a key to the padlock. When she enters the shed and hides behind the stack of wood in the center of the building, Matt crouches down next to her and points across the property.
"There's some bushes over there where you can see through the gate…"
"That's too far away — we need to stay together."
"What if it's dad, and he can't get in?"
Thinking of everything that could possibly go wrong with his plan, she listens closely to the gate still rattling in the background, and decides that he's probably right — Curtis could be in danger if the town is full of the infected, and he's trapped outside of the walls with them.
"You have to promise me that you won't go any closer than those bushes over there…"
"I promise, I'll come right back as soon as I find out who it is. Should I have the gun?"
"Absolutely not." He stands up and starts to walk away, staying low to the ground. "Matt…"
"Yeah?"
"Give me a thumbs up if it's your dad."
"Okay, I will."
Around the perimeter of the yard, just inside of the wall, there's a thickly planted bed of perennials and small trees, providing enough cover for Matt to sneak most of the way around the side of the house without being seen by anybody — including Sarah. When he reappears, she can see him lying down on the thick mulch, with a large, leafless decorative maple tree towering over the top of him. Almost immediately after he lies down, she sees him give an enthusiastic thumbs down, and then she hears another noise coming from the other side of the yard, from the gate they originally entered when they found the place. She motions for Matt to stay down, then pushes Ben to the ground as she peeks over the pile of wood at the other gate.
"What is it?" Ben whispers.
"Someone is at the other gate too."
Hearing a slight rattle from the chain, she watches as Curtis emerges through the opening and locks the gate behind him, and she quickly motions for Matt to return before waving her arms to get Curtis' attention. He crouches down when he sees her, then quickly makes his way to meet them.
"What's wrong?" he asks Sarah, who looks at an out-of-breath Matt that just returned.
"There's a man at the front gate," Matt says, breathing hard.
"An old guy?"
"No, he's young."
"Did you see someone out there?" Sarah asks.
"Yeah, let's get back inside."
Winding their way around the corner of the house, careful not to be visible from either entrance into the yard, all four of them enter through the back door of the home, and into the brightly lit kitchen that's lined with windows that all face the front of the place. Seeing a brief glimpse of the guy, Curtis ducks down, then watches his family do the same as he sneaks up the staircase and into the spare bedroom.
"Boys, I want you to stay down on the floor — we don't know if this guy has a gun or not," Sarah says.
Standing on one side of the window, Curtis looks down and sees the man that's still trying to open the locked gate, and guesses that Matt is probably right, the man is probably barely out of high school. He's also seemingly unaware that there's a chain wrapped securely around the steel tubing and attached to the concrete wall next to it. It might be easy enough to climb, but there's little chance of actually breaking through the barricade.
"Curtis…" Sarah says from the other side of the window, pointing down toward the ground.
"Don't worry, he can't get in."
"I know, but look…"
He looks at the other side of the property, at the street just past the wall. Another two men are approaching the young man, both of them carrying iron pipes in their hands.
"Don't watch," he says, as he looks around at the rest of the town.
She sits down on the bed and looks up at him instead. "Why, what's going on?"
"I saw some men on the beach, hunting an infected woman."
"Are those the same men?"
"No, they're not — which means there's more of them around."
"Did they kill her?" Matt asks.
"No, she was still alive."
"What are they gonna do…"
"Enough, there's some things we don't need to know," Sarah says, cutting him off. Looking back up at Curtis, she recognizes the look in his eyes, a fear that she hasn't seen since that horrible night at the Regency Hotel in Westport. "What is it?"
"There's more people across town — a lot more."
CHAPTER 3
Grayland: March 28th
After a nearly sleepless, but otherwise uneventful night, Sarah wakes up in an empty bed and sees Curtis staring through the window at the town of Grayland beyond. She feels exhausted, having gone through yet another roller coaster of emotions over the last twenty-four h
ours. This house felt perfect, like an actual home, a place she might have only fantasized about in her former life. The fantasy, however real as it seemed when they first arrived, was now being taken away by the same violent and repulsive people that they were running from just two days ago.
She stands up and stretches, thankful that they've decided to stay another night and rest their sore bodies before continuing to the south. If the timing were right, they would still push forward, sore or not — but neither of them thought that it was a good idea to be on the road with murderers wandering the streets around them.
"Where are the boys?" she asks, looking down at the vacant sidewalk in front of the house.
"In the other room. Did you sleep okay?"
"No — I kept waking up, thinking that I was hearing somebody breaking into the house." The longer she looks around, the more people she can see going in and out of the buildings across the highway. One of them is a fire station, and several of the others appear to be small houses or mobile homes that are clustered together in a park. "Have you counted them?"
"The people?"
"Yeah, any idea how many there are in town?"
"They come and go too much to keep track of them. I've seen maybe a dozen or so at once, but there's probably at least two or three times that many."
"Are they sick?"
"Not like any that we've seen, but they definitely have something wrong with them."
She looks across the road at the driveway to the trailer park, and sees two of them dragging something behind them, like a deer or small livestock animal.
"They're hunting," Curtis says in a somber tone.
"Hunting what?"
"I think anything that moves. They're going door to door, pulling the infected out and killing them, then taking their bodies down that road."
"They're armed?" she asks, frightened at the idea that there could be a militia looking for them.
"No, just primitive things. Pipes and pieces of lumber, that sort of stuff." He points to the southeast, where there's a woman walking down the street with a shovel in her grasp. "See that woman, walking this way? Watch her for a minute."
Almost immediately, the woman drops the shovel and then bends down to pick something up. As she begins walking, she suddenly stops and turns around, then swaps the two items once again. Finally settling on the shovel, she continues her journey to the north, stopping occasionally to swing the shovel at figures that aren't there.
"She's crazy," Sarah says.
"They all are, they all do shit like that if you watch them for long enough."
Sarah sits down on the bed and tries to wipe the sleepiness from her eyes, hearing the sound of the ocean outside as the breakers crash into the outgoing tide. It's normally something soothing, a natural rhythm that induces sleep even when you're well rested — but her body is tense with anxiety, and the never-ending roar from the sea is beginning to eat away at her sanity.
"We never really talked about where we're going from here — we only agreed on going south," she says, her voice tired and defeated.
"We can't really say for sure, it depends on what we find when we get there."
"I know, but it would be nice to have some sort of a goal or a destination, even if we don't end up staying there."
"North Cove is the closest town, but I think we can pretty much assume that it won't be all that different. We need to go east, and find some abandoned farm or something."
"Why are we going south then?"
"Directly east of here is nothing but swamps and forests — we'd starve to death out there."
She stands up again and heads for the door, peeking into the other bedroom where Matt and Ben are watching the beach from the comfort of the king-sized master bed.
"Where are you going?" Curtis asks.
"I'm gonna get our bags ready. I figured I would raid the house of anything useful."
Stepping inside the bedroom just long enough to grab a plastic grocery bag, she walks into the hallway bathroom and opens the door all of the way, trying to let as much light in as possible. She starts with the basics, like new bars of soap and toilet paper, but when she opens the medicine cabinet above the sink, she sees something unusual looking on the top shelf. Pushed to one side is a small stuffed animal, and attached to it is a single key with something written on it. Curious, she takes the key and the bag and goes back into the spare bedroom and stands in front of the window next to Curtis.
"What is that?" he asks.
She holds it up, showing him the label. "According to the tag, it's the key to the basement."
Curtis turns the key and hears the deadbolt unlock, then looks back at Sarah and the two boys. Matt and Ben have been told to stay upstairs while they search the room below, and after a bit of complaining at first, both of them shut up as soon as the stench of the basement air reaches their noses. The air is damp and mildewed, but there's something else wrong with it, a strange staleness that doesn't smell right. Curtis leads the way, holding both a flashlight and the revolver as he slowly descends down the staircase. He thinks it's likely a concrete slab covering the floor below them, but whatever is there has been littered with a mountain of miscellaneous items.
"It looks like a bunch of random crap," Curtis says, scanning the numerous piles scattered across the room, all of them filled with common household items like toasters and remote controls — but also various other things, like power tools and garden hoses.
"Was this guy the town thief or something?" Sarah asks, reaching down to pick up another flashlight that's lying on top of the closest heap.
"Why don't you ask him…"
She looks up and sees someone on the other side of the room, a rope wrapped tightly around his neck and hanging from the floor joists overhead. "That's not funny, Curtis."
"Well, it's not like he's gonna get offended, is he? Does your light work?"
She switches it on, illuminating the room even more than his does. "Look at all of this… We need to go through it all before we leave."
"I don't see any weapons though." He sifts through some of the stuff with his shoes, not wanting to touch anything that might be contaminated — then a thought occurs to him. "This guy wasn't the last one in here."
"Why do you say that?"
"Because the door was locked from the outside — there's no way to lock it from in here." He shines the light onto the staircase behind them, seeing the two boys looking back at him from the other side of the door. Then he sees a worn track down the middle of each step, the wood stained red with blood. As he follows the bloody pathway onto the floor and across the room, he stops when the light hits a neatly stacked pile against the far wall.
"Is that what I think it is?" Sarah asks, covering her mouth with her forearm.
"Yeah, it's bodies — it looks like dozens of them."
CHAPTER 4
Aberdeen: March 28th
With their bags filled with a wide variety of food and medications, Christine looks back across the parking lot at the pharmacy, its normally white exterior walls now glowing orange in the light of the sunrise to the east. Larry insisted on keeping watch the night before, and she's concerned that he might be starting to show the first signs of sleep deprivation. There were moments this morning when he would blank out, or sometimes even nod off while she was talking to him, but she's not the least bit concerned that it's the virus — those are all late-stage symptoms of the disease, and Larry hasn't shown any early signs of it. A sharp mind and a rested body would still be nice though, especially on a day like this.
As they cross back over the Wishkah river and into the heart of Aberdeen, she looks ahead at the remains of the city, where the fog has settled over most of the downtown buildings, giving the impression that many of them are still smoldering from the fire. According to Larry, the harbor to the south looks pretty much the same as it ever has, with only a few missing ships from the numerous docks along the shore.
The city itself, however, feels
different.
It feels dead.
Compared to every other city along the coastline of the Pacific Northwest, one might say that Aberdeen's history is rather colorful — with illegal gambling and prostitution attracting more attention from people around the region than even the harbor has. Even in the very early days, when its convenient proximity to calm waters along the ocean made it an important port for the logging and fishing industries, the burgeoning young town quickly developed a reputation for an immoral and oftentimes illegal nightlife. Known by many as 'The Hellhole of the Pacific', its name became synonymous with murder and debauchery to those living on the western side of the Cascade mountains.
Although the whorehouses have disappeared in more modern times, along with the underground casinos and serial killers that used to infect the city — much of its former reputation has stayed intact through the decades. Larry made the comment as they were leaving that he's never seen Aberdeen so peaceful, but he couldn't give her a single example of what's been wrong with the city in his lifetime. 'It's just an easy city to pick on', was the answer he gave her.
Regardless of whether Aberdeen still deserves its infamous notoriety or not, what Christine sees in front of her today makes her feel sorry for the place. She remembers learning about the bombed out cities throughout Europe and Asia after World War II, and she can only imagine that walking through them must have felt at least somewhat similar. As the wind blows in across the water, each gust seems to tear the buildings apart even more, sending more pieces of rubble onto the street beside them, the large chunks of burned brick and stone disintegrating into fine powder the instant they hit the pavement. Skeletons and badly decomposed corpses can be seen as well, their charred remains visible for several blocks in front of them.