Grayland

by James Bierce

  Smelling the rich aroma of food cooking on the stove, he turns around and sees Sarah dishing macaroni and cheese onto paper plates, while Matt and Ben both work on setting the table for a proper meal. As much as he’d love for things to stay like this for a while, he also knows that it’s imperative that they distance themselves from people as much as possible. Sooner, rather than later, they have to find another place to hide, somewhere secluded enough to keep them isolated from the madness around them — and before somebody on the outside discovers them.

  “Dinner is almost ready,” Sarah says from the kitchen.

  “Okay, I’ll be there in a minute.” He goes back to watching a house just a few doors down the road, where someone has been standing on the rooftop and tearing off the metal panels that cover the house since the night before. A few more people are on the ground, ripping pieces of lap siding from the walls and tossing them into the street. He keeps expecting them to run out of energy or to lose interest, especially considering how little they’ve actually accomplished in all of that time, but they’ve been working non-stop for nearly eighteen hours now, and are showing absolutely no signs of slowing down.

  “It’s gonna get cold, Curtis.”

  “Yeah, I’m coming.” He sits down across from his wife and says a prayer before he begins dishing up his food, drawing a look of confusion from Sarah, since she’s never heard him sound the least bit religious in all the years she’s known him. He notices the expression on her face, and simply shrugs. “I don’t know why I did that — it just seemed like the right thing to do.”

  “I’m not complaining, we could use all the help we can get.”

  The meal is the first real food they’ve been able to eat for days, and might be the last decent thing they’ll be eating for some time. Besides the macaroni and cheese, Sarah also fixed corn, beans and beef stew, which were all prepared straight out of their cans and heated on the stove top.

  “What were you watching out there?” Sarah asks him. “You look worried.”

  “The same people down the street.”

  “You’re afraid they’re gonna find the hole in our roof?”

  “No, it’s not that. I mean, yeah, I’m afraid of that, but I’m not sure anything is safe anymore. I really think we should leave first thing in the morning if the road is empty.”

  “And go where?”

  “We need to find a place away from everybody, like we talked about — away from any town or neighborhood where people might have survived, like a farmhouse or something.”

  “We can’t take all of this food.”

  “No, but we can take some of it — enough to last us for a while if we ration it.” He can see the doubt in her eyes as she starts picking at her food instead of eating it. “We just can’t stay here forever, it doesn’t even have a decent source of clean water.”

  “I know, but we’re safe, and comfortable — and I hate the idea of traveling without any protection, where we have no idea what to expect around the next bend in the road.”

  Curtis looks into the corner of the room, where the boys worked for much of the afternoon shoveling human remains off of the floor where they won’t trip on them. He wants to point out how incredibly low her threshold of ‘comfortable’ is these days, but he decides it’s probably best to keep quiet. “In three or four days we’re gonna run out of bottled water, and then we’ll have to either go search for more in town, or move locations and start drinking rainwater again. If we go now we’ll at least have some to take with us.”

  She nods her head in polite disagreement, still troubled at the thought of leaving themselves vulnerable to the world outside these walls.

  “We’ll stay away from the highway. There’s just too many people on it anymore, even in the daytime.”

  “That leaves what — the beach?”

  “There’s a swamp to the east, and woods on the other side of it. Hardly anybody lives out there, and I doubt anybody is out there now.”

  “Where would we sleep?”

  “There’s a few houses tucked back into the woods, or at least there used to be.”

  Sarah stops eating altogether and stares down at her half-eaten plate, her mind coming up with a thousand reasons why this is a bad idea. “I don’t like the thought of wandering around in the middle of a swamp, Curtis, not when those things out there are getting stronger.”

  “It’s either that, or we take the roads — and it’s for certain that we’ll run into people that way.”

  She looks at Matt and Ben sitting next to her at the table, knowing that whatever decision they come to will likely save, or kill, both of them. Despite having no appetite, she forces herself to continue eating, trying to savor what might be their last meal for a long while.

  “Did you hear that?” Matt asks, standing up from his chair and looking toward the front window.

  “I didn’t hear anything,” Curtis replies, following Matt across the room to the window with a limited view of the street.

  “I heard someone yelling.”

  Curtis gently pushes him away from the small crack in the plywood barricade, trying to see for himself what might be going on out there. He still can’t hear anybody talking, but he soon spots a young girl walking down the highway with a bag in her hand, aiming a gun at three men that are following her.

  “Do you see someone?” Matt asks.

  “Yeah, it’s a girl.” She starts to walk faster, then trips on some debris in the road and almost falls down. After she regains her balance, she drops her bag onto the ground and fires several shots at each of the men, then reaches into her pocket and slaps another clip into the gun.

  “What the hell is going on out there?” Sarah asks him.

  “Here, take a look…” he says, backing away from the window.

  Looking through the narrow field of vision, Sarah sees the girl walking down the road in front of their house. Suddenly, she stops in their driveway, looking ahead at the people tearing the neighboring house apart. She expects to see her try to go around the place, especially when it becomes obvious that the people on the ground have spotted her. Instead, she stands in a shooting stance in the middle of the highway and begins firing rounds at them, being careful and deliberate with every shot. After unloading one clip, she reloads and fires two more before holstering the gun again and continuing on. “She just killed those people down the road.”

  “The people on the house?”

  “Yeah, she even got the one on the roof.”

  “Does she look sick?”

  “I don’t know, I can’t tell, but she looks dangerous.”

  Sarah steps away from the window and sits back down at the table with Curtis and Ben, while Matt continues to watch the girl until she disappears from sight. “We should catch up to her, she might be able to help us…” Matt says.

  “From now on, it’s just the four of us — no exceptions,” Curtis says.

  CHAPTER 30

  HIGHWAY 105: DAY 10

  Throughout her young life, Christine can’t ever remember a time when she complained about being alone. She’s been an introvert since she was a little girl, preferring to spend time in her own company instead of spending it with anyone else, which is a trait that used to worry her parents when she refused to make friends at school. Whether she was shut inside of her room at home, or in some quiet corner of a coffee shop in town, she had always thought of herself as being completely alone in those moments — but until right now, she never realized how wrong she was. It didn’t really matter if she actually communicated with the people around her or not, subconsciously she still felt their presence. She could listen to their conversations, feel their footsteps, she could even hear the sounds of lawn mowers and airplanes in the distance and know that people were nearby.

  Today, however, as she sits on a park bench eating a package of stale processed cheese and crackers, overlooking the dark waters of Grays Harbor, she feels entirely and utterly alone for the first time in her life. She can
see the ruined remains of Aberdeen and Hoquiam on the other side of the water, the buildings blackened and crumbling to pieces after the massive fire that spread throughout both cities. Unlike when Larry saw it last, there’s no smoke visible anywhere, which she figures is probably because there’s really nothing left to burn. Although she’s too far away to see whether there’s any people across the harbor, she can’t imagine that anyone survived the inferno.

  It’s been three days since she’s seen another person, and that was nearly ten miles away after leaving Cohassett. After staying much of that time at a gas station alongside the road in Markham, waiting for the torrential rainfall to ease up enough to walk, she thought it was only a matter of time before one of the infected residents of the area would come along, looking for something to kill or destroy — but nobody ever came, and the road after that has remained empty ever since. Since both of her parents are dead, along with David, Beth, and likely Larry by now — every single person that she’s ever known appears to be gone — and she’s wondered more than a few times during the past couple of days if she might be the last surviving person in Grays Harbor, but something in her mind keeps pushing the bleak thought from her consciousness.

  Glancing down at her watch and realizing that the sun will be down in a few hours, she grabs her bag and heads down the road again, studying the map of the area that she swiped from the gas station. Larry had told her to bypass Cosmopolis, but the only way to do that is to cross the river and head straight through the heart of Aberdeen. She considers the idea of staying on this side of the bridge for the night, then crossing over into what’s left of the city in the morning — but it takes her less than an hour to make it to the crossing, giving her plenty of time to find something on the other side.

  Approaching the entrance to the bridge over the Chehalis River, she can smell the scent of something burning on the wind, and as she climbs to the top of the road, she can see the true scope of the devastation to the city. Because of prevailing wind, the south side of the harbor was spared any of the ash from the fire, but the north side of the bridge is still covered in large clumps of slick ash, dampened by the rainfall of winter. She can see burned out cars everywhere, and a few of the buildings in downtown that have collapsed entirely, but most of the older brick and stone structures are still standing — or at least the outside shell is anyway. Several skeletons are scattered on the streets and sidewalks too, but all of them have burn marks that suggest that they’ve been here for quite some time.

  Unlike the last crossing, which looked relatively untouched by the fire, the two bridges over the Wishkaw River in the center of the city appear to be severely damaged by the intense heat. After looking over the first one, and seeing that large sections of the roadway had fallen into the river, she decides to take her chances on the next one — despite the fact that the metal structure shows signs of twisting on the western end. She stays close to the railing along the side, seeing a few small places where the asphalt has given way on this one as well. Ahead of her, most of the buildings appear to be in far better shape, and the first building that looks even somewhat livable is a drug store shortly after the bridge.

  “Hello?” Christine yells out, after pushing the unlocked front door open. “If anybody is in here, I have a gun, so don’t try any shit with me…” She steps through the door, leaving it unlocked just in case she needs to make a quick exit, then takes out her flashlight and aims it around the store, seeing no sign of anyone around. After making a check of the perimeter, she goes ahead and locks all of the doors in the front and back, then closes the security gates that cover the windows along the street as well. Sitting down behind one of the check stands, she props her sore legs and feet up onto the counter, then closes her eyes and begins to drift off — but then a thought crosses her mind, one that she should have been paying attention to if she weren’t so exhausted. She opens her eyes again and looks around with the flashlight, and sees aisle after aisle of merchandise still sitting on the shelves. Forcing herself up again, she walks down each aisle of the store, her frazzled mind trying to keep track of what she can carry with her. There’s food, personal hygiene products, batteries, extra flashlights, and more medication than she could ever use in a lifetime. As she throws a blanket down on the pharmacy waiting bench, then opens a candy bar that she took from the snack aisle, she wonders why a place like this wouldn’t be picked clean by either survivors like her, or even the infected scavengers that tore every other town apart. Eventually she starts to nod off, keeping her gun and flashlight close to her side as she listens to the rain start to fall on the roof once again. If another storm is coming in from the ocean, she can certainly think of worse places to have to stay.

  Hearing a loud rattling, Christine wakes up to a pitch-black room, and for a moment she forgets where she is. She sits up and grabs her gun, then listens for a moment as the rattling continues. Then the noise stops, leaving the store completely silent except for the rain. She tells herself that it must be the wind, but deep down she knows better — the wind was blowing even harder earlier in the evening, and yet it didn’t make a sound. Getting to her feet, and leaving her flashlight turned off for the moment, she walks quietly down one of the aisles, then freezes as something crashes in the front of the store. She continues, crouching down low as she peers around the corner and aims her gun toward the noise. Standing at one of the front shelves, someone with a light is flipping through a selection of chips and candy, stuffing some of them into their pockets. When they turn around and start shining their light down each of the aisles, Christine steps into the open and aims her pistol at their chest, the way her father had taught her.

  “Don’t move! Put your hands up where I can see them!”

  The person drops a bag of chips onto the floor, then places their hands up. “You know, you might wanna make sure the door actually locks before going to sleep…”

  Christine instantly recognizes the voice, and shines her flashlight onto his face just to make sure. “Larry? Is that really you?”

  “Yeah, it’s me, what’s left of me anyway. Can I put my hands down now?”

  Placing her gun back into the holster, she runs and nearly knocks him down as she wraps her arms around him.

  “Whoa, easy now, my hip still hurts like hell,” he says as he hugs her back.

  “Oh, sorry! There’s a bench in the back that’s pretty comfortable…”

  “I think I’ll just sit for a while.” He pulls a chair out from behind a check stand as Christine sits down on the counter. “I was afraid I wouldn’t catch up to you.”

  “I got held up for a while.”

  “Have you seen anybody in the city?”

  “No, not a sign of anyone.”

  “I saw one — a light up on the hill.” He gets up and limps to the front of the store, where they can barely make out something illuminating the fog on the top of the hill to the west. “I’m pretty sure it must be the hospital.”

  “You mean the one where Jake was?”

  “Yeah, it’s the only one in the area.”

  “Jake told me he killed the doctor there, right after the guy saved his life.”

  “Well, someone is living there.” Larry hobbles away from the window and heads toward the back of the store, picking his bag up along the way. “You said there’s a bench back here?”

  “Yeah, back by the pharmacy. You don’t look like you’re getting around very well…”

  “No, I’m not, and all of this damn walking doesn’t help it any.” He sits down on the bench, then grimaces as he swings his feet onto the other side. “What about you?”

  “I’ll sleep on the floor — there’s a bunch of lawn chair cushions for sale on aisle eight.”

  “Lucky for you that the apocalypse happened during the summer, huh?”

  Christine smiles, thankful that he can find humor in all of this misery. “Larry, I’m really sorry about Beth, I feel horrible about what happened.”

  “Thanks, but it
’s not your fault, it’s not anyone’s fault.”

  “I should have just killed him when I had the chance.”

  “Try not to dwell on what could’ve been. Trust me, it’s just a waste of your time.”

  “Thanks.” She hugs him again, and then sits down in an uncomfortable chair next to the bench. “Maybe we should stick around here for a while — let your body heal up before moving on.”

  “Is there water?”

  “Tons of it.”

  “What about painkillers?”

  “In this town? There’s gotta be.”

  Larry laughs, for the first time in a long while. “You’re not even from around here, are you? That doesn’t say much about Aberdeen.”

  “I’ve never actually been here before, but when we left, my dad talked about coming here. He said the world ending could only be an improvement.”

  “Well, I’m sure there’s something to like about it,” he replies sleepily.

  “Larry, are you still awake?”

  “Yeah, I’m still awake.”

  “My dad told me that most of the cars won’t run because of the explosion — is that true?”

  “You mean the EMP? Yeah, that’s probably true. I also saw some older cars that were ruined by some of these infected assholes though.”

  “But some of them run, right?”

  “Some probably do, but most of the roads are blocked anyway, so they’re probably not worth the trouble. Why?”

  “I’m just tired of walking, that’s all.”

  Larry laughs again, then turns over onto his side. “That makes two of us.”

  After listening to him begin to snore, Christine hears something faint coming from his bag. When she bends down to unzip it, a loud static buzz startles her, and sits Larry straight up on the bench.

  “…on this midnight check. It’s been three days since your last contact — is everything okay over there, Shelton?”