Grayland

by James Bierce

  Amanda, herself drenched from the downpour of rain that’s soaking through her winter coat, is standing next to a car beside the road. She recognized it as belonging to a friend of her father the moment she saw it, and she assumes that it’s his partial skeleton still slumped over the steering wheel. Unlike most of the cars along the highway, this one had the passenger side door wide-open to predators, and the remains of his wife and newborn infant are scattered across the pavement only a few feet from the vehicle. Feeling the raw ache of hunger pains in her stomach, she quickly searches through the car, hoping to find something that’s at least halfway edible. After finding nothing but clothes and mildewed diapers, however, she climbs out of the car and walks to a nearby house instead, her eyes constantly scanning the loose gravel in the driveway for signs of recent activity.

  When she opens the door, the strong scent of mold and decay brush past her face and escape into the outside air — an unfortunate consequence of the house being closed up and unheated for several months. She stays on the porch and looks inside, but sees nothing but a darkened room full of furniture and knick knacks. The cold air against her bare skin makes her shiver as she steps inside.

  The place isn’t all that messy, but it’s cluttered, and the walls are covered nearly floor to ceiling with someone else’s memories, the faces in the photos staring back at her and leaving her with a strange feeling, as if all of them were watching her every move. She obviously knows that it can’t be true of course, these people are probably already dead, or at least will be soon enough — but she can feel their eyes following her as she walks further into the house, their glares becoming even more menacing if she gazes at one of the pictures for too long.

  Her breathing becomes even more difficult the further inside she goes, which isn’t surprising considering the amount of mildew and black mold that’s covering the curtains and rugs in the living room. She turns around and takes another look at the front yard, making sure that she’s alone before continuing further.

  The small two-story house sits right at the edge of the dunes, only a stone’s throw from the Pacific Ocean — and although the neighboring homes look as though they’ve never been properly cared for, it appears that at one time someone took great care of this place. She can tell that the siding and trim were once painted bright white, something only the brave or foolish would attempt in the wet climate of the Pacific Northwest coastline. Today, however, wild evergreen blackberries are encroaching onto the meticulously crafted pathways and flowerbeds that lead to the entrance of the home, and the once manicured lawn is overgrown and full of weeds and rotting leaves from the maple trees above. This wasn’t a summer home, this house was well cared for year-round by someone who clearly isn’t around anymore.

  Stepping over the threshold and into the living area, she sees a thick layer of dampness on everything, and smells a horrible, thick aroma hanging in the air. The antique hardwood floors are buckled and warped from the moisture that’s accumulated, and the houseplants lay withered and dead on the tables by the back door.

  Through the partially open window on the back of the house she can see the ocean beyond, the waves crashing high with the incoming tide, and she realizes that she can’t hear anything except for the sound of her own heartbeat pounding in her ears.

  For most, the atmosphere of the beach is filled with the rich sounds of crashing waves, screeching seagulls, powerful winds that seemingly never stop, and of course the melodic tunes of countless wind chimes hanging from every house and shop along the coast. It drifts in relentlessly through every door and window, open or not, and provides the tourists and weekenders with a level of calmness they can’t manage to find anywhere else.

  The natives who live here year-round, however, generally hear none of it — for them the sounds all blend together into a silent chorus of background noise that somehow disappears from their consciousness. It’s only after they leave the coast behind and head inland that they realize how silent everyone else’s lives really are.

  Looking out the window at the rising ocean, Amanda realizes that she no longer hears those soothing sounds of the world around her. Truth be told, she barely remembers what she’s trying so desperately to listen to in the first place. She can still hear people talking, hear their footsteps as they try to walk quietly through the woods, and she can still hear her blade as it rips through the clothing of her victims. What she doesn’t hear though, is life, the little things like the leaves and branches blowing in the wind, or the high-pitched chirps of the squirrels and birds in the woods nearby. Her world is suddenly silent, without distractions, and she wonders now if it will always stay that way.

  As she moves into the bedroom, she sees much of the same, an area filled with dead plants and moldy walls, and what appears to be the remains of a small dog lying on the bed next to a bulge in the covers. The girl walks up and tries to see who or what might be underneath, but the quilt is pulled clear over their head. She takes her kitchen knife and slowly peels back the covers, seeing a frightened face staring back at her, a face that’s still very much alive. As she stares at the woman’s sunken eyes and shriveled up lips, wondering whether the same thing might soon happen to her, she looks up at the window in front of her and feels her mind beginning to slip away into a trance — almost as if she’s falling asleep, but she can still see everything around her. Whatever it is, it’s happened to her before, and often at the most inopportune time.

  Noticing Amanda’s clear distraction, the woman slides a hand out from beneath the covers, and tries desperately to lift her fingers enough to reach the knife that the young girl is carrying — but just before she does, Amanda comes to again, and smiles coldly at the woman as she pulls her blade away from the bed.

  It’s not often that she manages to find another living person, sick or not, and when she does they’re usually in relatively the same dismal shape. The woman in front of her is no different. Lying in bed, barely breathing, soft incoherent whispers coming from her mouth, her eyes pleading with Amanda for help. She looks down at the woman and tries to pretend that she feels something for her, whether it be pity or empathy, or even rage — but the only thought that’s on her mind is finding enough food to ease the hunger pains. Feeling sorry for this woman won’t help her with that. The woman, probably in her fifties or sixties, it’s hard to tell for sure, raises her hand up when Amanda lifts the knife.

  “Don’t fight me.” Amanda orders her.

  The woman attempts to lift herself up into a sitting position, then quickly falls back to the mattress as she begins to violently cough. Amanda watches her for a moment, waiting to see if one of the gasps might be her last, but when she finally catches her breath the young girl thrusts her blade into the woman’s chest, then casually wipes the blood off onto the quilt covering her body. She waits for a few minutes to make sure that the woman actually dies, since she’s learned the hard way that sometimes they don’t — then she turns around and walks into the kitchen, somehow comforted by the fact that she’s the only person left alive in the house.

  It’s been over four months since Ben was reunited with his family and taken away from her, four months of trying to stay warm and scavenging for food alone while Ben enjoys the comforts of his family’s cabin. Her only solace is knowing that the weather is finally starting to improve, and the cold rains of winter have changed to the slightly warmer rains of spring.

  Active only in the day, she spends her nights hiding in different houses along the beaches of Cohassett, waiting for the sun to drive away the remaining people that still roam the area after dark. She’s not really all that scared of them, most of them are too slow and mindless to be of any real threat — but in the darkness of night they travel in larger groups, making them more dangerous than usual. With that constant worry on her mind every night, deep sleep has become somewhat of an impossibility, perhaps only an hour or two each night — and even then, with no one else to watch her back, it’s the only time she’s truly vulnerab
le.

  Her days are mostly spent watching the Lockwood cabin, looking for patterns in their activity, waiting for them to finally let their guard down long enough for her to make her move. She’s spent weeks thinking of almost nothing else, the perfect way to deal with the people who have hurt her the most. Killing all of them at once had crossed her mind, but she knows she can’t bring herself to do that, they deserve so much worse. She’s finally decided that they’ll die one by one, no more than one each day, and Ben will be the last.

  As soon as she opens the pantry door she remembers searching this house once before, and finding nothing but stale chips and crackers that were no doubt left behind by the Lockwoods. Why she never noticed the woman in the bed last time is somewhat unsettling, considering that she carefully checks every house she enters. Maybe the woman doesn’t live here, maybe she wandered in during the night and simply stayed — or maybe she hasn’t been as careful as she thought. Whichever the case, from now on she has to be more cautious.

  Still feeling the intense hunger pains, she starts dumping the contents of the pantry onto the floor, until she spots a half eaten jar of peanut butter hidden in the back. Ignoring the pull date, she unscrews the lid and scoops out a mouthful, gorging on it as she makes her way out of the house and down the driveway. When she reaches the mailbox she stops and lifts the flag up, a reminder that there’s nothing of any use inside anymore. She turns around, looking down both directions of the highway for any other mailboxes without their flags up, but there aren’t any, at least not in this neighborhood. Between her and the Lockwoods, they’ve pretty well cleaned everything out.

  With her knife tucked away under her arm, she continues to eat as she heads south along the highway, her steps slow and light, her feet barely making a sound on top of the fallen leaves and needles on the pavement. A few hundred feet down the road she stops and watches a house, noticing that the front door is wide open. Hearing voices inside, she drops the jar of peanut butter on the ground and walks down the driveway, slipping quietly through the open door.

  “I’m gonna check out back really quick,” Larry yells out from the living room.

  “Don’t go far,” Beth replies from the kitchen, hearing the sliding glass door open from the other room, and then the sound of crashing waves from the nearby ocean.

  This place wasn’t nearly as empty as some of the other houses they’ve searched. With fully stocked cupboards and no car in the driveway, Beth figures that whoever lived here must have left sometime after the outbreak, and apparently took almost nothing with them. Even though today’s goal was to find toilet paper and bleach, which were becoming scarcer by the day, they couldn’t pass up gathering everything else the place had to offer — in fact she even wondered if it might be a good idea for the group to move in here instead of the cramped cabin they’ve been living in for months, but she knew that would never happen. Curtis insisted that it was safer for them to live away from the beach where the sick seemed to concentrate, and that the cabin was in a perfect location, tucked back into the woods and out of sight from the highway. As much as she hated to admit it, he was right, the single bedroom shitty excuse for a house was probably their best chance of staying hidden from the rest of humanity, or whatever is left of it.

  She starts loading anything that might be useful into a laundry basket that she found in the bedroom. Dry pasta, boxes of cereal, canned goods, even a few utensils they’ve been lacking. Just as she opens another cupboard and looks inside, she hears a thump from the next room.

  “Larry?”

  There’s no answer from her brother, but the thump is followed by the sound of something scraping the wall between the kitchen and dining room next to her. The long, slow scrape almost reaches the doorway before it stops, then nothing.

  “Larry, is that you? This isn’t funny…”

  She knows that he wouldn’t joke around like this, not after everything that they’ve been through these last several months. She walks quietly into the dining room, noticing that the sliding door is still open in the living room — but both rooms are completely empty. Then she sees a mark about halfway up on the wall, where someone has sliced through the wallpaper, then gouged out a chunk of the drywall. She knows that wasn’t there when she searched the room only a few minutes before.

  “Who’s in here? Come on out!” she yells out, hoping that Larry might hear her.

  Still facing away from the kitchen, she hears the cupboard door behind her close, and instinctively she reaches down for the gun in her pocket, but she stops when she feels something sharp poking her in the back.

  “Don’t try it,” says a small, frail voice. “Raise your hands, slowly.”

  Beth follows the order, then feels someone reach into her pocket and remove the revolver.

  “Turn around.”

  She turns around to see what could be an attractive young girl, wearing a filthy, tattered dress that’s nearly falling apart, and an oversized black coat. Her long black hair is tangled and dirty, and her face is covered in what looks to be specks of dried blood.

  “Amanda?” Beth asks her, trying to hide the fear in her voice. The girl responds with a wicked grin and soft giggle that makes her shiver, then Beth glances toward the front door that’s still open.

  “He won’t come,” Amanda tells her, pointing the gun directly at her face. “Don’t scream, you’ll only make it worse.”

  CHAPTER 3

  MENLO: DAY 2

  “There are two kinds of dead people, the ones that move, and the ones that don’t.”

  Christine’s father had recently told her this, hoping that the warning would make the fifteen-year-old think differently about the people now infected with the virus — and even though the young teenager realizes that he didn’t mean it literally, she’s seen enough of them herself to know the similarities between the scarcely living and the dead. The ‘moving dead’ are obviously still very much alive, but the people they once were, their personalities and memories, seem to be entirely gone. She’s watched people she once knew from her bedroom window, people from around the neighborhood, stumbling around at night and finding themselves trapped behind their very own unlocked gates. They were lost, and showed signs of being seriously ill, but otherwise they seemed harmless enough.

  There are others, however, who aren’t so benign. They move around with more dexterity, sometimes even in the daylight, acutely aware of their surroundings, and with an insatiable appetite for bloodshed and violence. Their existence alone has kept Christine’s family prisoners in their own home — terrified of being seen by someone who will follow them home, then relentlessly pursue them with an unnatural obsession, staying awake for days on end while the hunt was on. They’ve only seen a few of the stalkers around town, terrorizing neighboring houses and wiping out the few people around them that survived the plague untouched. What they saw, and what they heard, was enough to keep them awake at night, haunted by the unthinkable acts committed right next door to them.

  When the outbreak first began, they were in the small town of Adna, sheltered by the Boistfort hills in Western Washington, living only a short distance from the headwaters of the Chehalis river. In many ways it was an ideal place to start over — surrounded by forests, orchards, and rolling pastures that are filled with cattle, deer and elk. It also has memories though, many of them wonderful, but some far too painful to be reminded of.

  Her mother had been fighting cancer for over a year when news of the virus broke, and doctors had been optimistic about her chances of ultimately beating it. As the world started to disintegrate around them, however, and the hospitals and local clinics closed down, her mother’s treatment abruptly ended — and with it, so did any hope of curing the disease. Day after day, they watched her slowly slip away from them, dying from what was a treatable illness only a few months before. Her father, George, was devastated, slipping into a deep depression that nearly cost him his own life the day they buried her — saved only by the thought of his da
ughter being forced to live alone in this horrible new world.

  The virus came to the town in mid-September, spreading through the schools and retail businesses first, and killing nearly every resident in less than a week. Besides the two of them, the only person left in the area is their neighbor and friend, David — and after discussing it thoroughly, the three of them decided to leave their homes, headed for a destination without crowds or pavement, where they could catch their breath long enough to figure things out. After talking over the list of possible places, they came to the conclusion that the continually temperate climate of the coast, with its stark population and abundant food supplies, would be the perfect location to start over. They would move slow, only traveling on bright days under the safety of the sun, resting behind locked doors and gathering supplies as they made their way down fifty miles of highway on foot. A car was unfortunately out of the question due to the conditions of the roads, which are now littered with vehicles and debris from the panic that ensued after the initial outbreak. Almost all of the cars are useless anyway, crippled with either dead batteries or destroyed circuitry, making the task of stealing them all the more difficult.

  With the sun nearly gone over the horizon, and the darkness of night quickly approaching from the east, Christine watches as the last few rays of sunlight shine over the town of Menlo in the distance — the last few moments of peace before the madness begins once again.

  When they first came to the Menlo area only a few days before, it was immediately apparent that the town must have survived the virus longer than most, since this was the first time they had seen an attempt to rebuild what was left of their town. Houses that were evidently presumed to be contaminated were burned to the ground, as were their belongings — and the highway leading in and out of town was purposely blocked by heavy equipment, with deep ditches carved into the ground to stop anybody from driving around the barricade. As they moved in closer, however, it became clear that none of those protections worked. The virus was already in their community, killing nearly everyone except for the unlucky few who were driven insane by the infection. Nobody was around to tell the full story, but every town they’ve traveled through so far has suffered the same ultimate fate — quiet, empty, and almost tranquil in the daytime, and terrifying under the cover of darkness.