Grayland

by James Bierce

  Ready to move on once again, and mere miles from the coastline, Christine sits in the hayloft of a massive old barn that’s perched on the side of a hill overlooking the valley below, her legs dangling out of the loft. The fog is already forming over the pastures, hiding the remnants of what must have been a horrible ordeal for the community, and filling the air with the salty smell of saltwater from the bay just to the west of here. She can barely make out the piles of corpses scattered across a nearby field, most of which are only skeletons now, picked apart by both wild animals and the formally domesticated pets that are now left to fend for themselves. The fog also hides something else, something far more sinister than coyotes or wild dogs, and she can already see the mist moving as they make their way out of the buildings and into the fields not far from where they’re staying.

  “You should close the door,” she hears her father say from behind her.

  “I know, I was just about to.” She stands up and closes the two wooden doors, then looks back at the dimly lit area they’ve been living in for the last few days, wondering if she’ll miss it once they leave. The place has everything they could ask for — water, canned and dried food, a dry place to sleep, livestock still roaming the fields. Everything they could possibly desire in this new world is here — except for safety. Even now, hidden in a barn behind two locked doors, her dad still has to nudge David every time he starts to snore for fear of alerting someone to their presence — and the dust from the broken bales of hay he’s sleeping on doesn’t help. The people around here tried so hard to keep the chaos of the outside world from entering their small town, and ironically, they ended up trapping the chaos inside.

  Hearing David coughing in his sleep on the other side of the loft, she sits down on the floor next to her dad and puts her head against his shoulder.

  “His coughing is getting worse,” he whispers to her.

  “He’s fine, it’s just the dust.” She looks up and sees the worried look on his face, and the fear in his eyes. He’s right, David has been coughing more lately, but then he’s always had a problem with allergies, and the mixture of barn dust and the extreme moisture outside has also caused her sinuses to flare up. “There’s a lot more people outside tonight, I was thinking we should probably leave tomorrow.”

  “I was thinking the same thing.” With the skies finally dark outside, he looks at the loft doors and sees the orange glow coming through the cracks and knotholes, something they first noticed several nights ago, apparently coming from a large fire in the west. “We should probably go around the towns from now on, maybe find a farm like this out in the middle of nowhere — and one that isn’t on fire.”

  “…and doesn’t have any of them, right?”

  “At least not more than we can handle.”

  “Yeah.” She lifts her head off of his shoulder, her body tensing up. The idea of killing another person, even if they were trying to kill her, seemed wrong to her on some level — but she also knows that the day is coming, and she knows that’s exactly what he’s getting at. “Do you think it’s like this everywhere?”

  He pauses for a moment, not really sure how to answer it. “I don’t know, I really don’t.”

  “I think it is. I’ll bet there’s people just like us all over, waiting for everyone else to just die and get it over with. There’s probably somebody in Japan right now, thinking the same thing.” She can feel the revolver in her pocket, pushing into her side, a constant reminder that it’s there. “I really don’t want to kill anybody, dad.”

  He can hear her start to cry. “I know, I wish you didn’t have to.” He reaches over and gently pulls her chin toward him, looking directly into her eyes, his voice suddenly stern, but still somehow comforting at the same time. “…but you have to sweety, it’s either them, or it’s us.” She looks down and nods, the tears still running down her face. “You should get some sleep, I’ll wake David up in a little bit.”

  She stands up and makes her way to the loose hay where David is sleeping, finding a soft place to lie down just a few feet away. He’s moaning a little bit, which isn’t unusual for him, but she can hear a slight ticking sound every time he breathes, which is something that she’s never heard from him before. She listens to it for a few minutes before she starts to drift off, wakened only momentarily by the sound of the barn door downstairs rattling from someone trying to get in. A moment later she falls asleep, her mind unconcerned by the attempted intrusion. They do it every night.

  Christine wakes up in a panic, her heart about to jump out of her chest. She can hear somebody downstairs, inside of the first locked door, yelling and throwing things around. She looks around, trying to see her dad or David, but the only light visible is the bright glow of firelight that’s seeping in through the siding.

  “Dad!” she whispers in a frightened tone.

  “Shh, I’m right here.”

  She looks to her right, toward the door that leads to the stairs, and sees the outline of her father standing beside it with his gun drawn. She carefully stands up and starts to walk forward.

  “Stay there, he might hear you…”

  “Who?” She waits for an answer, but she doesn’t get one. “Dad, where is David?”

  She starts to move forward again, then she hears footsteps coming up the steps, each of the old floorboards creaking loudly as they get closer to the top. George reaches out and pulls her to his side against the wall, placing himself between her and the doorway.

  He whispers quietly into her ear. “The door was open when I woke up, and David was gone. He’s been screaming and trashing everything downstairs, yelling something about a noise — that’s when I locked the door again.”

  “What are we gonna do?”

  “I don’t know, I think he still has his gun.”

  “I can hear you in there talking!” David screams from the other side of the door. “Open the door, George.”

  “You know I can’t do that, I’m sorry.”

  David hits the door with a closed fist, rattling the heavy rusted hinges that look at least as old as the barn. “Christine can, can’t you darling?”

  “David, listen to me, you’re sick — you have to know that.”

  “Christine…” he pleads, his voice suddenly gentle. “I’m not sick, I just panicked, that’s all. Christine, they’re coming, they’re getting closer…”

  “Who’s getting closer?” asks George.

  “I opened the door, for just a minute, and now they’re inside. Christine, you have to let me in, they’re coming up the stairs!” His voice is panicked and desperate.

  “Dad…” whispers Christina. “It’s David, we can’t just leave him out there.”

  “Shh, listen… Do you hear anybody on the stairs?”

  She listens closely, but aside from David beating on the door, it sounds silent.

  “Open up, I’m not lying!” David screams as he begins kicking the door.

  George can see that the barrel bolt that’s holding the door closed is starting to come loose — David’s kicking is tearing the nails right out of the wall. He barricades himself against the wood, trying to hold back the blows, but then he feels a sharp pain in his stomach just as David stops his assault. Immediately he senses something warm and wet running down his abdomen and leg. Then he sees the knife blade still sticking through the slats of boards in the door, and realizes that he’s been stabbed by his best friend, the man he grew up with. He takes a step back as David starts beating against the door again, then he aims his gun at the door and fires it three times, hearing a thud from the other side only a moment later. George falls to his knees, in shock at what just happened.

  “Dad, are you okay?” Christine asks as she sits next to him, trying to see the wound on his stomach.

  “Quiet — I hear something.”

  Christine can hear it too, the unmistakable sound of creaking steps, coming up toward the door.

  CHAPTER 4

  COHASSETT BEACH: DAY 2

&nb
sp; The night before, after everybody else had gone to sleep, Sarah had talked to Curtis about leaving the cabin and heading deeper into the wilderness. Having Amanda lurk around was bad enough, but Westport was also infested with people, or at least something that vaguely resembled people, and from what Larry and Beth had seen during their travels along the water, the other towns in the region were likely suffering the same fate. She knew that society as they once knew it was gone, and the perverted fragments that remain are wasting away and destroying what little is left. The only answer that she could come up with is to distance themselves from it completely, to live in one of the few remote places still untouched by humanity — but that also means ending their reliance on scavenging for food and supplies, which is something that none of them have been prepared to do. The houses around the outskirts of Westport have been their one and only source of sustenance for months, and although they’ve been stockpiling any usable goods they come across, all of them are aware that it won’t last them forever. Sometime over the next several years, virtually every piece of canned food will become inedible, and the raw ingredients like flour and yeast will expire long before that — especially after being exposed to the dampness of the coastal air.

  Curtis had to admit to Sarah that coming to the coast might have been a mistake in hindsight, considering that the climate isn’t exactly ideal for growing crops like corn and wheat — but he was still against the idea of leaving an area that had kept them alive for this long. He explained that what it does have is an abundance of seafood and wildlife in the forest, which is a combination that worked well for the native tribes that once inhabited the area — long before we became reliant on the supermarkets and restaurants of the modern age.

  They were planning on bringing all of this up to their sons today, and to Larry and Beth. Sarah wanted to argue that moving further south later in the spring, into the slightly warmer weather of the southern beaches of Washington or Oregon, would make it that much easier to plant a garden or harvest fruit and nut trees.

  That conversation, however, never took place.

  Larry and Beth had taken off on another scavenging trip early in the morning, and when they came back, it was clearer to her than ever that moving was now essential.

  “Where were you during all of this?” Curtis asks, his tone more scolding than he meant it to be. He’s looking right at Larry, who’s sitting on a bed next to an obviously shaken Beth.

  “I was out behind the house near the dunes, I couldn’t hear anything.”

  “How long were you out there?”

  “Apparently longer than I should have been,” Larry snaps back, before regaining his composure. “I went out to have a quick look around, and then I saw a trail of blood on the pathway, and I guess curiosity got the best of me.”

  “What was the blood from?”

  “It was a cat that we found this morning — we had it in a carrier on the front porch. I guess she must have used it as a distraction, or maybe she just decided to kill it, I don’t know.”

  Curtis turns to Beth, who looks tired and afraid. “Then what did she do?”

  “She left. She said that you had to die first, and that she would kill me later, and then she walked out.”

  “She said Curtis had to die first?” asks Sarah, who’s been sitting on the other bed and trying to distract their sons, but has now spun around to face Beth.

  Matt and Ben, still keeping up the facade that they’re not paying attention by flipping through an outdated magazine, finally turn around as well.

  “Yeah, she said we’ll all die in order, with Curtis going first,” answers Beth.

  “Did she take your gun?” Curtis asks, seemingly unshaken by Amanda’s threat by proxy.

  Beth nods and starts to speak, then Larry interrupts. “We looked around for it, but she must have taken it.”

  Curtis walks to the window and pulls back the curtains slowly, looking out at the gray sky and damp ground from the nearly constant rain over the last week. He knows that she’s probably out there somewhere, waiting for him. “We have to kill her, we don’t have a choice anymore.” He looks around the room, trying to gauge everyone’s response to his solution.

  “We’re not going to hunt down a little girl,” Beth manages to blurt out through the mixed emotions welling up inside of her.

  “She pointed a gun at you, she threatened to kill you! You’re actually defending her?”

  “She didn’t pull the trigger.”

  “Because I’m first, right?” Curtis shakes his head and looks at Larry, who now has his hand resting on Beth’s shoulder, his face red with anger, more at the situation than anything — but he says nothing.

  “I’m not an idiot,” Beth says quietly, trying to control the tension. “I saw her, I saw how insane she is. I know she’s capable of…”

  “You have no idea what she’s capable of,” Curtis interrupts, trying to calm himself. “She’s pure evil, and I’m not talking about the normal everyday psychopathic evil — that virus did something to her, it made her into something a lot more dangerous than the rest of them. Did you know she murdered her entire family? She told Ben all about it, every gruesome detail so that he wouldn’t even think about leaving her.”

  “Yes, Larry told me about it, but…”

  “There’s no but… She’s out there right now, plotting our deaths, and she’s smarter and more sadistic than any of us.”

  “Why didn’t she kill me when she had the chance? I was right in front of her…”

  “Beth…” Larry says, finally breaking his silence. “She was toying with you.”

  “She’s a young girl, she’s not Hitler or Manson…”

  “Look, I’m not saying we should kill her…” He looks up at Curtis, and sees him looking back disapprovingly. “…and I’m not saying we shouldn’t either, but Curtis is right, there’s something seriously wrong with her.”

  “So what’s your idea? How should we deal with her?” Curtis asks him.

  “Maybe we should move on, try to lose her on the way.”

  “No, that’s a bad idea, the last thing we should do is move from here. We haven’t had a single incident in weeks.”

  “Why is it a bad idea? What’s keeping us here?” Beth asks.

  Curtis looks over at Sarah, who he knows feels the same way, then he looks back at Beth. “Do you honestly believe that there’s something better out there? Do you think there’s some city or town that wasn’t obliterated by this thing?” He pauses for a moment as he hears something moving outside, then sits down at the table when he realizes it’s only the wind outside. “We’re it guys, we’re all that’s left — and until all those things outside are gone, I think we should stay exactly where we’re at.”

  “I realize that we might be alone, but I’m not so sure that this is the safest place for us,” Beth says. “Besides, I still have a husband out there.”

  “Yeah, a husband that won’t be able to find you if we move.”

  “We’ll leave a note.”

  “Another one? You already left him one in Aberdeen.”

  “Guys…” Sarah interrupts, looking out the window. “We still have to get wood in before it gets dark, and none of us are going out there alone — not anymore.”

  Curtis steps out of the cabin and into the pouring down rain with Larry by his side, and as they begin walking down the driveway toward the woodshed, he hears a click as Sarah locks the door behind them. He keeps his hand on the grip of his pistol, watching for any sign of Amanda lurking behind the bushes or trees that surround the property.

  “You guys aren’t really leaving, are you?” he asks Larry.

  “Eventually I guess, I mean we can’t stay here forever. This cabin is getting smaller by the day.”

  “We should stay together though, at least close enough to help each other out.”

  Larry nods in agreement as they reach the woodshed, the inside of which is already too dark to tell if they’re alone or not. Curtis briefly t
urns on a flashlight, conscious of the fact that there’s now a limited number of batteries available, then they each start loading pieces of wood into a wheelbarrow when they see that they’re the only ones there.

  “You’re gonna need more wood before next winter,” Larry comments.

  “I know.” Curtis looks at the dwindling stack in front of him, and the even less-impressive pile of cedar kindling next to it. “We’re going through a lot more than I thought we would. A lot of this stuff was half-rotten when we got here.”

  He throws another piece into the wheelbarrow, then both of them stop moving when they hear a sound coming from the direction of the highway. It’s the sound of someone walking through mud puddles, and not being very quiet about it either. Curtis quietly steps halfway out of the shed and peeks around the corner, and sees Amanda trudging down the deeply rutted driveway, still wearing the same dress that’s so torn and worn out that he’s amazed it hasn’t fallen off of her by now. He hasn’t seen her in months, and the time hasn’t been kind to her. Her face is gaunt and sunken, and her skin is pale, with an almost a blue tint. She looks dead, or at least her appearance does — her actions though, the way she walks, look as strong as ever. He ducks back into the shed and finds a crack in the wood paneling where he can still see her, then he reaches into his pocket and pulls out his radio, speaking into it as softly as possible.