by James Bierce
CHAPTER 28
Grays Harbor City: April 6th
Still half asleep, Rachel opens her eyes to almost complete darkness, feeling a cold breeze blowing right through the blanket that she's lying under. She looks across the room in the direction of the cold air, and after a few moments of her eyes adjusting to the light level, she finally sees the outline of the bedroom window, and the curtains flapping gently in the wind.
"Larry, are you awake?" she calls out quietly, remembering that he was sleeping on the floor when she went to sleep.
"I'm awake," comes a voice from right beside her.
Although startled at first, Rachel turns her head and sees Christine lying next to her. "Did you open the window?"
"No, it's freezing in here," Christine responds, pulling the blanket up over her nose.
"It must've been Larry…"
"Larry is always cold."
Rachel feels around on the nightstand beside her and finds the flashlight she left there, then shines it around the room, seeing the casement window swung wide open, and wet, muddy footprints leading from the window sill to the other side of the room.
"Shit!" She grabs the blanket and throws it to one side, then swings her legs over the side of the bed and quickly closes the window. "Christine, get up, somebody's been in here."
Seeing Larry still lying on the floor, with the footprints only inches from his body, she leans over and starts shaking him. "Larry, wake up!" she says, still semi-whispering. Finally, after punching him in the arm, she sees his eyes open and glance around the room, his face still a mask of confusion. "We need to stay quiet, but there's somebody in the house, and I'm not sure where Curtis and Sarah are."
All three of them are still wearing their clothing, including the sidearm pistol that accompanies them everywhere they go, day or night — but when Larry reaches down to his side to draw his out, he discovers an empty holster where his gun used to be. Noticing his predicament, Rachel pulls another one out of her bag and hands it to him, then follows the footprints with her flashlight to the open doorway and into the hall. With Larry and Christine following her, and the two boys still sound asleep in the large walk-in closet, she steps out into the hallway carefully, hearing the steady rainfall on the roof, and the gusty winds in the trees from the storm that's passing through. At the far end of the hall, sitting next to the staircase and facing the other direction, are Curtis and Sarah — but the rest of the corridor is entirely empty.
"Go warn them, I'll stand guard here," Larry tells Rachel, as he stands next to the only other door on this floor — a second bedroom that's been converted into a home office.
As Rachel sneaks past the office, she notices that there's no sign of any footprints past it — although they have been slowly fading away since she left the bedroom. She crouches down and then makes three quick clicks with her tongue — a signal that one of them is approaching in secrecy.
"Have you guys seen anybody?" she whispers.
"No, why?" Curtis asks her.
"The window in the bedroom was open when I woke up, and there's muddy footprints right behind you."
"Are the kids okay?" Sarah asks, suddenly alarmed.
"They're fine, they're still asleep, but whoever it is might still be in the office."
Curtis sees Larry waiting down the hallway, but as he stands up and takes a few steps in his direction, they all hear the creaking hinges from the front entrance downstairs, and the sound of the wind as it blows into the house and up the staircase. "Larry, check the office, make sure we're alone up here…" With a ninety-degree turn at the bottom, none of them can see the living room downstairs, even with a lantern illuminating the last few steps — but they can hear slow-moving footsteps on the hardwood flooring below them. Curtis aims his gun at the bottom landing as the noises become louder, watching as the flickering propane flame dances around in the breeze.
"Whoever comes up those steps, you need to shoot them," Sarah says quietly, standing right beside him with her own weapon drawn.
"You should go back and stay with the kids, just in case," he replies, feeling anxious about their two sons with only Rachel and a scared sixteen year old watching over them. After she disappears down the dark hallway, he hears Larry come out of the office and stand next to him.
"The office was clear, they must have gone back out the window."
"How the hell did they get up there?"
"The roof of the back deck comes right up to it."
"Shit, I should have thought of that."
"I think they might have snagged my gun too — I'm sure I had it on me when I went to sleep."
The footsteps, still moving incredibly slow, stop right before reaching the landing — and a beam of light suddenly appears, gradually working its way up the wall toward Curtis and Larry's location. They both back up as the beam flashes over the chairs that Curtis and Sarah were sitting in only minutes before — then it disappears completely, and the footsteps continue once again, this time heading toward the back of the house.
"Are they leaving?" Larry asks.
"It doesn't sound like it — they aren't heading back to the door."
Seeing Rachel exit the bedroom to join them, Larry looks down at Curtis' gun and notices that he has it gripped in his left hand, which doesn't really surprise him considering the damage that Amanda did to his other wrist. "Let me and Rachel take this one — you can back us up from the top of the stairs," Larry says, glancing over at Rachel to get her approval, which he does.
"I'm perfectly fine," Curtis answers back.
"How many rounds have you shot with that hand?"
"Probably not enough."
"Just hang back here, we'll take care of it." As Larry sneaks back down the hallway and listens at the top of the stairs, he feels a pull on his coat, and he turns around to see Rachel leaned in closely.
"Are you sure this is a good idea? Maybe we should wait until light to check it out…"
"They're not waiting that long — these things strike fast when they decide it's time. Just keep track of where I am, and shoot anything else that moves."
He steps down off of the first step and hears a slight creak from the wood underneath the carpet, but the rest of the way down he stays completely silent, hearing more footsteps from the living room as another door opens up. As he turns the corner on the landing and creeps into the living room, he just catches a glimpse of a figure vanishing through a doorway — a door that was locked when they first arrived at the house.
"Let me go first," Rachel says, stepping beside him. "I won't make as much noise across the floor."
He steps aside and waits for her to take the lead, then watches the front entrance that's still wide-open and waiting for anybody to walk through. There's several sounds of footsteps coming from the other door, sounding as if someone is descending down another flight of stairs and into a basement — then a loud sound of metal crashing against the floor echoes throughout the house, and Rachel begins firing her gun rapidly at the doorway, stopping only when the pistol runs out of ammunition. Seeing her back away and lower her weapon, Larry stands in front of her and sees a flashlight sitting on the basement floor below, part of it shining on a person sprawled out on the bottom tread.
"Larry, watch out!" Rachel screams at the top of her lungs, pointing behind him toward the kitchen, where another man is aiming a gun right at his head.
Larry instinctively grabs for the pistol as the first shot is fired, dropping his own gun in the process, and sending the bullet into the front wall behind them — then as he wrestles the man to the floor, another shot rings out and hits the sleeve on his coat, but just barely misses his flesh. The man eventually drops the gun when Rachel starts stomping on his hand, but he still manages to scramble to his feet and pull a knife out of his pocket. For a moment, all three of them just stay still, with the man standing over a defenseless Larry, and with Rachel holding an unloaded pistol in her hand — but then another shot is heard, followed by several m
ore, and they see the man slowly crumple to the ground as Sarah steps down from the staircase landing and into the living room.
Larry immediately scrambles to his feet and finds his gun, then looks down into the basement where the man is still lying in the same spot — this time with blood pooling up on the floor next to him.
"Are you sure he's dead?" Sarah asks from behind him, looking at the man she just shot.
"Yeah, they both are," Larry answers, still looking down at the basement. "Rachel, why don't you go check on the others — tell them we're fine."
"Shouldn't we all go upstairs?" Sarah asks, as Rachel exits the room.
"I didn't want her to see this."
"See what?" Larry steps aside and shines his flashlight down the staircase, where she sees the man lying dead on the floor, surrounded by a stockpile of survival supplies. "Do you think he was healthy?"
"We've never seen the infected store anything like this." He steps just inside the room and looks around at the rest of the basement, making sure that nobody is hiding in a corner somewhere, then he walks to the front entrance and closes the exterior door. "I'm gonna find something to cover him up. If she asks, he had bruises all over his body — okay?"
"Yeah, okay. What about the other guy?"
Larry stands over him with the light, and they both cringe when they see the grotesque condition of his face. You can only scarcely tell what he looked like before the infection — his darkened eyes and gangrenous wounds effectively concealing those features from them. What they can tell, however, is that this is definitely the same man that's been following them since Aberdeen — they recognize the long beard, which he clearly had for some time before the outbreak.
"Is this what happens to all of them?" Sarah asks.
"The unlucky ones I suppose."
"You've seen others like this?"
"Yeah, even worse." He pulls a blanket from the back of the couch and throws it over the man, then reaches down and picks up his stolen gun from the floor. "Here, give this back to Rachel, it came from her pack," he says, handing the other pistol to Sarah. "You should try to get some sleep before morning, we really shouldn't stay here another night."
Waiting for her to leave the room, he grabs a rug off of the floor and then heads down the staircase and into the basement, where he finds a homemade calender on the wall with some the dates crossed out. The last day marked was March 21st, which could mean that this is either the 20th, 21st or the 22nd, — or possibly none of them if the man was delusional. The group lost track of the date over the winter months, when the endless days of non-stop rain and wind merged each day into the next — but they do know for certain that they're in the month of March, so the timing seems about right.
The man didn't have any weapons, only a flashlight and a wallet — the latter of which contains a photograph of a family, including a husband, wife, and three kids. While there are no clues as to what happened to the others, he does find it rather strange that the man wasn't armed with some sort of defense, and it makes him wonder whether this area might actually be relatively safe. Unless he was a prepper beforehand, no sensible person would ever stockpile the amount of food he sees on the shelves in front of him, because no single person, or even small family, could possibly consume all of it before it spoiled. Wheat, for example, will last practically forever when left whole — but when you grind it into flour, you reduce its potential shelf life to a matter of months. On the floor, under a neatly organized shelf of commercially canned fruits and vegetables, sits multiple sacks of flour, of all different sizes and brands — much like the rest of the inventory. To Larry, it appears as though Mr. William Pirkola lived through the viral outbreak — then spent the last several months of his life gathering all of the food items in the neighborhood. The fact that he was taken out in a case of mistaken identity is certainly tragic, but that's not an uncommon thing these days. Every house they pass by, and every car, business, or pile of bones they come across, they all have a tragic story behind them — and the only difference between this story and all of the others, is that they've been here to witness the conclusion of his.
There was much debate of whether to stay longer in the Pirkola house, considering the amount of food and clean water that was available — but in the end, none of them truly felt safe behind those walls, or any of the other houses in the area for that matter. The location was just too close to the cities of Aberdeen and Hoquiam, and too far away from the easy harvest of shellfish along the sandy beaches of the Pacific. The next morning, they gathered what supplies would fit into two wheelbarrows, and set off down the highway once again, all of them determined to reach their destination by sunset.
By the time they reach the coast, where the highway turns to the north and heads into the Olympic Peninsula, the sun has only started to peak in the overcast sky overhead. The only lengthy stop they made was where the picturesque Humptulips river crossed beneath the road, dumping vast amounts of water into the harbor right before it flows into the ocean. It's also home to countless salmon that breed just a short distance upstream, although none of them could see any while they were there.
Over the last several miles, after passing by several individual houses and a few small communities, they still haven't seen any sign of life anywhere — infected or otherwise. Even the road is vacant, with no cars or scattered bones along the way.
"What's that way?" Matt asks his father, pointing at a road that heads south toward the opening of the harbor. The two of them are walking together side-by-side, each pushing a wheelbarrow as the others walk slightly ahead of them.
"That's Ocean Shores," Curtis answers.
"It looks like there's smoke coming from it."
"It might be from Westport on the other side — they sit across the bar from one another," he says, glancing back at the thin wisp of smoke that's moving quickly in the stiff wind. He can't really tell where it's coming from exactly, but from this angle it appears that Matt could be right — it certainly looks like it's coming from Ocean Shores.
"It might be healthy people, like us," Matt says, still looking back at the long road behind them.
"Yeah, it could be. If they're still around in a few months, we might have to check it out."
"Do you really think it's safer where we're going? I mean, truthfully?"
"I don't know, son — but there were fewer people over here even before the virus hit, so it stands to reason there'll be fewer infected." He points at a house they're coming up to, taking the boy's attention off of the town behind them. "The driveways are a good sign too."
"Why is that?"
"They all have cars parked out front, and the houses look like they've been empty for years. You know what that means?"
"That the people are dead?"
"It sounds horrible, but I think it's a good thing."
In many ways, this section of coastal highway looks similar to the roadway between Westport and Grayland, with thick stands of pine, alder, and Douglas fir trees on both sides of the pavement, and very few places where the ocean is actually visible. Although they've remained dry for their entire walk up to this point, the skies suddenly open up as they reach the southern edge of Copalis Beach — a town that seems every bit as empty and deserted as the other places they've seen throughout the day.
Most of the structures that they can see from the highway are small rental cabins and seasonal homes, none of which were likely to have visitors when the virus struck nearly seven months ago. They're also the reason the group chose to come to this location, because the permanent population is so incredibly small. Having said that, it's the larger homes that the group is most interested in checking out, houses that might be stocked with essentials, like food and water, and possibly even weapons — but these are also the places that pose the most danger. The infected are an obvious cause for concern, especially the kind that they found living in Grayland — but even those that are healthy present a substantial risk.
After crossing
over the Copalis river, and past several vacant campgrounds, they eventually come to a large, two-story house on the outskirts of town. It has visibility on all sides, and shutters on the windows that are already secured into place, something that gives them all pauses as they approach the front door.
"Should we knock?" Larry asks, noticing the two cars that parked under a carport next to the house.
"Go ahead, it probably wouldn't hurt," Curtis says, as the group huddles together underneath the roof of the porch, trying to stay out of the downpour of rain.
He knocks on the door, then patiently waits for a response — feeling strangely awkward at the same time. After a few seconds he knocks again, then he wiggles the door handle quietly and finds that it's locked.
"Larry, I don't think anyone is gonna answer — there's a dead cat on the window sill," Sarah says, looking inside at what appears to be a living room.
The front door has a small, oval window with textured glass in the middle of it, which Larry quickly breaks out with a rock from a flower bed. He then reaches in and opens the door, and is surprised to be met with the smell of fresh air coming from inside the home. Their first impression is certainly mixed, with miscellaneous trash and clothing thrown onto the floor, and open cans of food and dirty dishes stacked everywhere in the kitchen — the smell of which is being washed away by the open windows and door beside the kitchen table.
It takes Sarah a few minutes to take everything in, as they try to decide whether the place looked like this before — but then she picks up an open can from the countertop and looks inside. "This chili has been opened recently — probably within the last day or so." She looks at some of the other cans, and sees a mixture of old and new scattered around the room. "Somebody is living here."
"There's some graves in the backyard," Larry says, standing in front of the back door and looking out at two mounds of soil, each with a crudely made cross on them. "They look pretty new."
He turns and looks down a hallway beside the kitchen, an area they haven't checked yet, and sees at least three open doors down the length of it. As he places his hand onto his pistol and takes a couple of steps forward, someone jumps out of the last room and fires a few shots directly at him, then runs down to the end of the hall and disappears around a corner.