Aberdeen

by James Bierce

  "He's running across the backyard!" Curtis yells, aiming his gun through the open door.

  "Wait, hold your fire!" Larry says, placing his own gun back into the holster. "The little asshole just has a BB gun."

  "Did he hit you?"

  "Yeah, but I think they lodged in my coat."

  "How old is he?" Rachel asks.

  "I don't know, a little older than Matt maybe." Outside, hiding behind a fence at the edge of the dunes, he can see the boy crouched down and staring back at him. "Wait here, I'm gonna check that room out."

  "Be careful, he might not be alone," Rachel warns.

  As Larry walks slowly down the hallway and aims his gun into the first room, he hears something from further down the corridor, like someone sniffling. He checks each of the rooms as he passes by, with Curtis right behind him, but when he quickly moves into the last doorway and aims his gun inside, he almost drops the revolver onto the floor. A girl, who can't be any older than seven or eight, is standing in the middle of the room and clutching a blanket with both arms, her eyes filled with terror as she stares at Larry and Curtis.

  "Was that your brother back there?" Larry says softly, as he holsters his gun and drops down onto one knee. After the girl shows absolutely no reaction, he looks at both Rachel and Sarah and waves at them to come down the hallway.

  "I'll watch the boy," Curtis says, returning to the kitchen.

  Sarah steps in front of Larry and enters the room slowly, causing the girl to back up against the far wall. "It's okay, we're not gonna hurt you…"

  "Does she look sick?" Larry asks, from outside the room.

  "No, she looks fine — she's just scared," she says, sitting down on the floor just inside of the room. "Do you have a name? My name is Sarah…" The girl says nothing at first, but even after a few minutes of just sitting there, Sarah can see her anxiety start to lessen little by little.

  "Tina…" the girl says, almost whispering the name.

  "That's a pretty name, Tina — and what's your brother's name?"

  "His name is Albert."

  "Are you two hungry by any chance? We have plenty of food…"

  Tina nods her head. "I am, but Albert won't eat anything."

  "Why is that?"

  "He's sick."

  CHAPTER 29

  Copalis Beach: September 15th

  Sarah is looking out at the surf, watching as her two sons attempt to catch their first fish from straight out of the ocean. This isn't their first attempt — she's lost track of how many times they've been out here getting cold and soaked to the bone, all to catch something that's relatively easy to find in the stream beside their house. Still though, she's impressed at their determination to accomplish something that isn't easy — knowing that sooner rather than later, they're going to face a situation where even the most basic of necessities will seem impossible or out of reach.

  It's been over six months since they've seen a human being outside of their group, and while the warmer months of summer provided them with greater comfort and a chance to settle into their new homes, their experiments in gardening and beekeeping have been nothing short of disastrous. They knew that raising vegetables along the coast would be difficult, especially so close to the beach itself — but they really had no idea how many hurdles to expect. The cold, wet weather of spring was their first problem, not allowing the seeds to properly germinate — then once it did actually warm up, the insects and fungus annihilated much of what was left. Their only saving grace was the variety of mature fruit trees and berries throughout the neighborhood, which provided them with just enough food to supplement the canned goods they've stockpiled, a supply that was stressed with so many people depending on it. With the warm weather now slowly diminishing, however, and replaced with the brisk nights of mid-September, Sarah worries about the coming months of winter, which seem to last forever in this harsh environment of endless rain and wind.

  The local sustenance that they've all been enjoying, including fruit, seafood, and small game — is starting to show signs of mildew and rot without the proper refrigeration or canning necessary to preserve it, and the bitter reality of survival without modern conveniences is finally starting to sink in.

  It was only a few weeks ago that they finally decided to split their group into two neighboring houses — the Lockwood family in one — and Larry, Rachel, and Christine in the other. The hardest thing was deciding where to place Tina, but in the end she made the choice for them, and informed Sarah that she would be living with them. The fact that Matt and Ben are so close to her brother's age was probably a factor, but as the weeks and months passed by, she talked less and less about the boy who once meant so much to her.

  Tina was right about Albert being sick, but it wasn't exactly in the way that they imagined it would be. He didn't have the virus, since he had no bruising or congestion to speak of, and exhibited no strange behavior. He was simply wasting away, little by little, from a disease that was never figured out by any of them, and never responded to the medication they tried. The information that could be found in the homes around the area didn't exactly help, since medical books and encyclopedias disappeared years before the outbreak began, and were replaced with an Internet that no longer existed. The health clinic on the outskirts of Ocean Shores provided them with medicine and emergency supplies — but it too had little in the way of printed literature. He died in early May, at the age of only fifteen. Curtis speculated that it might have been some form of childhood cancer that took him, or possibly another long-lasting form of the virus that killed their parents months before — but in the end, none of them really knew what happened, and the memories of her family were beginning to slowly disappear from Tina's young mind.

  As much as Sarah worries about their future food supply, she's also grateful that the horrors of their past seem to be gone, at least for the time being. The constant stress of being overrun by the infected had all of them at their breaking point, and most of them still find themselves waking up in the middle of the night from a panic attack, or hearing a knocking sound that doesn't actually exist. Over the past several weeks, their days mostly consist of cutting firewood for the coming winter, and trying to figure out how to ration food and toiletries to make them last as long as possible — but they also keep an eye out for other things as well, sometimes in secrecy for fear of looking foolish. Among them, only Rachel has given up on the survival of humanity. The others still look for contrails in the sky, or boats on the water, or listen to their hand-crank radio as they fall asleep at night. They've waited months for a sign — but so far, they haven't seen or heard anything that gives them even the slightest bit of hope.

  "Have they caught anything?"

  Sarah turns around and sees Curtis walking down the path toward her, carrying a pair of binoculars in his hand as he sits down beside her on the sand dune.

  "No, nothing yet. It's probably mussels for dinner again tonight," she says, looking back at the ocean where Matt and Ben are still casting into the incoming tide.

  "We'll go back to the river again tomorrow — we should be able to snag whatever the hell is sitting under the bridge."

  "I think they're steelhead."

  "Well, whatever they are, they'll look better in the bottom of a frying pan."

  "Do you remember what we were doing exactly a year ago today?"

  "Yeah, we were packing the truck for the drive north, right?"

  "Not in a million years did I ever think it would get this bad."

  "It could be a lot worse — we could still be in Grayland, or Westport."

  "Have you thought about the fact that Matt and Ben's best and only prospects for marriage would be a little girl, a bratty teenager, and a grieving widow that's older than we are?"

  "I hadn't really thought about that, no," Curtis says, laughing at the idea of it.

  They both sit in silence for a while, listening to the perpetual rushing of the ocean current as it moves further inland against the settin
g sun. Sarah glances down the beach, where she can see several houses lined up along the shore, and where every night at this time she half-expects to see lights come on from inside the homes as the sunlight disappears from the sky. She looks back at the ocean, and sees a flash of light suddenly appear in the fog ahead of them, then it disappears again after a few short bursts.

  "Did you see that?" she asks, pointing slightly to the south.

  "No, what was it?"

  "It looked like a…" She's interrupted by another series of dim flashes, only this time red instead of white. "There, did you see that?"

  "Yeah, it's the lighthouse…" Curtis says, dumbfounded.

  "Which lighthouse?"

  "The one in Westport."

  EPILOGUE

  Westport: September 15th

  Closing the door of the lighthouse behind him, Aaron turns around and faces the pine trees that are blowing in the breeze, then begins his nightly routine of walking along the pathway through the dunes and onto the streets of Westport.

  Although it's been weeks since he's seen another person, and several months since he's seen more than one at the same time, he still stands in the shadows every evening and watches closely for any sign of movement between the park and his new home. After the smoke appeared in the south, he saw crowds of the infected following the highway out of town, with just a few stragglers left behind — most of them too injured or weak to move very far. Since then, he's had the town mostly to himself, seeing only a dozen or so of them returning after the fires settled down sometime in April.

  Hearing a couple of dogs barking in the distance, he places his hand into his pocket and grabs onto a pistol, then relaxes when he finally realizes that they're only coyotes. Twice in the last week alone, he's faced a growing pack of wild dogs that have settled in Westport over the summer. In that short span of time they've managed to wipe out virtually every cat and rabbit in the area, and the scarcer their food supply becomes, the more willing they are to take on bigger prey — like himself. Still feeling spooked, he begins jogging the last two blocks to his house, and is relieved when he turns the final corner and sees an empty road between him and the front door.

  After the infected left, he could choose any house in town that he wanted — but most of them had already been trashed and picked over by the time he started searching them. One was the Regency Hotel, a place he'd only seen from the outside while passing by in a car, despite living in town his entire life. He spent one night there, attempting to sleep in a room that looked untouched and perfect — but he woke up in the middle of the night, hearing strange noises and slamming doors echoing down the long corridors. When he left the next morning, he was surprised to find the doors still locked, and figured that the people who kept him up all night must have been there since he arrived.

  There were only a handful of houses that had been unoccupied from the beginning, and the one he chose to live in was the closest to the beach. It's an older, single-story ranch house that had been deserted since the beginning of the evacuation. His parents actually knew the owners, and he found their car sitting in the middle of the road not far from the hotel — and what was left of their bodies still lying in the front seats.

  Sliding the key into the lock, he turns the handle and steps inside, locking the door behind him as he takes his coat off and starts to place it on the hook — but then he freezes, and simply stares straight ahead when he sees another coat hanging in its place. Feeling his heart pounding, he reaches inside of his pocket and fumbles around for his gun, then hears a voice coming from the living room behind him.

  "Don't bother with the gun…"

  Still holding the coat in his hands, he spins around slowly, and sees his sister sitting in a chair next to the fireplace, which has already been lit. She has a gun in her hand that's aimed in his direction, and a knife in the other hand that's resting on the chair cushion.

  "I thought you were dead, Aaron," Amanda says, her voice cold and without emotion. "I thought you were still lying in our basement, starving to death…"

  "No, I got out," he says, stammering as he looks at the back door in the kitchen.

  "Aren't you glad to see me?"

  "Yeah, of course I am," Aaron answers back, his voice shaking with fear.

  "I feel bad for what I did to Dad, I really do. I even feel bad about Diane — but I'll give you a choice I never gave them."

  "What choice is that?"

  "Do you want your death to be quick — or slow?"

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I'd like to thank everybody again for continuing to support this series, your words of encouragement (and sometimes nagging) have really meant a lot.

  My next book, which I've already started, is titled 'The Regency', which tells the story of the hotel that was featured in 'Westport'. A few people have asked me whether it's based on a real-life place, or completely made up — and I suppose the honest answer is both. There was a grand hotel in Cohassett Beach before WWII, and they would actually pick people up at the docks and transport them by stagecoach to the front entrance. It all was quite fancy for the Grays Harbor area, but there were investors at that time that were convinced that Westport could be a place where people of high society could vacation and spend their money. Needless to say, things didn't work out in the way they'd planned. That real-life place, which didn't survive for very long after the war, was the inspiration behind my own fictional hotel.

  After an additional stand-alone book later in 2019, book 4 of the Grays Harbor Series should be ready for publication sometime in early 2020.

  As always, you can find updates on my website, jamesbierce.com, along with information on where you can find my books for sale.

  Thanks again for reading — and be sure to tell your friends about it (unless you didn't like it, in which case silence would seem the appropriate response)

  Sincerely,

  James Bierce