He swallowed, still tasting bile, and then he threw open the curtain. The bathtub was full of water. Floating face-down, still wearing a diaper, was the body of a baby. The skin already turned blue. A toy dolphin floated in the water and bumped against a limp leg. Ethan pushed back the urge to cry.
He closed the door behind him and turned towards the last door. Certainly, whatever the woman in pink had done to her family couldn’t be worse than what he had already seen. It was.
The room was a nursery. Mounted on the wall over the crib was the crucified corpse of a child. She was perhaps six years old. Her hands and feet were nailed to the wall, and her head was missing and replaced by a dog’s head. The headless remains of the family pet were laid in the crib, the girl’s head laid next to it.
Ethan felt all of the life leave his body. This was far worse than the visitor center. This was slow, deliberate, evil. His mind flashed back to the sight of his sister smearing blood on her face and neck. Ethan imagined her doing something like this. He was ashamed to admit that it wasn’t that difficult to imagine.
He closed the door behind him and went back down the stairs. The knife hung limply from his hand.
He didn’t want to stay in the house, but a glance out the window showed that the sun was setting. It was going to be dark outside. Though he knew he should be moving on in case that woman returned, or the raider, he also knew he was safer in the house. At least for one night.
He closed and locked all of the doors and turned off all of the lights. The TV still showed the newsroom, but the screen only showed an empty chair and desk. He didn’t know what happened to the woman with the swollen eye or why she wasn’t talking to the camera any longer.
Ethan plugged the charger into his phone and was relieved to see it was recharging. After rinsing out his mouth, he held the knife in his lap, sat on the couch, and waited for his phone.
CHAPTER SEVEN
A few minutes passed before there was enough of a charge for him to use his phone. As soon as the screen came on, he saw multiple attempts to call and text him. His mother, one of his grandparents, and even a couple of his friends, had tried to contact him.
Most of them were nothing more than ‘Are u OK?’ or ‘What’s going on?’ But his messages from his mother read as more frantic, more desperate. He called her immediately and held his breath as the phone rang. He wasn’t sure which would be worse, that she didn’t answer, or she did.
After several rings, her phone picked up, but it was a voice mail greeting. It was the same one she had for years. She recorded in on a good day. She was feeling good then, happy and sober.
“Mom? It’s me, Ethan. Are you OK? Please call me. I’m in a house. A different house. I’m going to come home. But…it may take me a few days. Just call me when you get this, so I know you are OK. I will be home soon. I love you.”
He hung up the phone and left in in the kitchen to charge fully. Hopefully, she would call him back. But maybe the cell towers weren’t working? He couldn’t know that. He had to assume she would get the message and wait for him.
He wanted to be ready to go as soon as the sun came up, so he explored the house more. He went into the garage and discovered camping equipment. It wasn’t as good as what he had at home, but it would make traveling easier.
Ethan found a flashlight, a couple of plastic water bottles, and a small first aid kit, which wasn’t much more than just band-aids. There was a pair of binoculars, which Ethan thought would help him see dangers far ahead.
There was a tent, but it was family-sized and not something he could carry. He found a small backpack, not much more than what he used to carry his school books in. But it was sturdy enough to carry supplies and, with the help of some bungee cords, he was able to strap a sleeping bag to it.
He found a small hatchet, which looked like it had hardly been used. He swung it a couple of times but found it to be too heavy to wield as a weapon. He liked the knife better, so he put the hatchet into the backpack. He filled up the backpack with as much food as he could, bringing only what did not need to be cooked.
He set his gear down by the front door and laid down on the couch. The TV still showed nothing more than the empty desk, so he checked more channels. He found more were off-air than before. He didn’t see any more channels related to selling cheap jewelry, but the reality TV shows were still playing. None of the news channels were back on-air and, eventually, he settled back to the empty news desk.
When he closed his eyes, the image of the corpses in the rooms above him came to mind. He didn’t like leaving them there. But he didn’t want to see them again. Then he thought about the master bedroom, mainly the nightstands next to the bed. He knew his father kept a gun in his nightstand, a Glock 1911. Ethan wondered if this father did the same thing.
He sighed as he got up and went up the darkening staircase. He left the lights off when he entered the bedroom. The dim light hid much of the horror on the bed. Ethan went to one nightstand and found a dildo and a black blindfold. But the other nightstand held what he was looking for, a nickel-plated .357 revolver and a box of ammo.
He gun was heavy and loaded. Ethan felt better just holding it. A gun like this was power, and with it, he would not have to run so much. He took it downstairs and set it on the coffee table next to the couch where he laid, watching an empty desk until the comfort of the couch and the food in his stomach smothered him in sleep.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Ethan dreamed.
He dreamed of the ride in the SUV with his father and sister. She sat in the front seat because she demanded to be close to their father, who looked straight ahead and not responding to Emily as she made idle chat with him.
Ethan couldn’t hear what she was saying. She sounded very far away, though the smile on her face seemed happy. Ethan leaned forward in his seat and saw that half of his father’s face was blown out from a bullet.
When Ethan looked back at his sister, she spoke a strange guttural language and wearing a crown made of fangs and claws. Fresh blood dripped from her face.
Then Ethan was hiding under a car. He was five years old. Monsters lurked around him, eating anyone who got too close. He cried for his mommy, but no one came to help or comfort him.
Ethan’s view shifted over the Texas landscape until he dove into the pit, surrounded by monsters. Darkness and screams filled the hole. He could not see, but he could feel he was diving deeper and deeper into a place where time moved slowly.
Ethan was with his brother. They were on the hunt. The winter was especially long and cold, and his son may not live much longer if they did not find game. Ethan nocked an arrow into his bow. He had crafted both bow and arrow in the manner taught to him by his father and his father’s father. He pulled the buckskin hide tight around him to keep out the wet snow that drifted down from the gray sky.
His brother hefted a spear made of oak and flint and led their way into a dark cave. They knew that game would sometimes hide in caves to shelter from the cold. Perhaps they would find a boar and kill it in its sleep. Ethan licked his lips at the thought of fatty meat that would last through the winter.
His fur-wrapped feet moved cautiously and quietly over the stone floor of the cave. His eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness. They dared not light a torch, only relying on the light seeping into the cave to guide them.
There was movement, quick and violent. A scream, and Ethan could no longer see his brother. Something moved in the darkness of the cave.
A hand, scaled and clawed like a lizard’s but bigger than a man’s, reached out of the darkness and grabbed at Ethan’s shoulder. He wrenched away from the hand, losing part of his buckskin shirt, but keeping his freedom.
Yellow eyes appeared in the dim light, and then a face, wet and scaled. Ethan screamed in terror at the sight. The shaman was right! Ethan ran from the cave, leaving his brother behind.
Ethan walked through a city, but not one he recognized. It was empty of life but covered in it. Nothing
stirred in the towering buildings but birds. Trees grew out of empty windows and doorways. He searched for someone, but he knew he would never find her. She was long since dead. But still, he searched anyway.
Children surrounded him, but none of them were his own, though they called him Father. They carried bows crafted in the manner he had taught them. In the heat of the harsh sun, they wore little in the way of clothing, old clothes crafted by dead hands. The children hunted for food, for water, for prey. Ethan hunted because he knew nothing else.
Ethan heard a shuffling, a sniffing. It came from someplace far away. Ethan was in danger, but he could not warn himself. Then Ethan realized the shuffling was nearer than he thought. He remembered the concept of a window, of a house, of a couch.
CHAPTER NINE
Ethan slowly opened his eyes. The shock of seeing someone moving along the back porch of the house drove the memory of the dream from his mind, and he never thought of it again. He laid there and looked around in the dark. The TV was turned off. The power must have gone out while he was asleep. That’s when he saw the raider move past the window, peering inside.
Ethan watched as the raider passed by the windows as he paced back and forth on the porch and peered into all of the windows. There were no lights inside or outside the house. The moon had not even risen yet.
The dark house was the only thing that prevented the raider from seeing Ethan on the couch. He knew that it was a raider by the large, muscular silhouette that he cast against the starlit sky.
Ethan only moved his eyes to follow the man, who looked like an animal pacing inside a cage, but it was Ethan inside the cage.
He remembered the gun on the coffee table next to him. He wanted to grab it, if for no other reason than to feel the comfort of its powerful weight in his hand. But he didn’t dare move, not unless he had to. He just laid still and watched, hoping the raider would move on.
The raider disappeared behind the door then. Ethan waited and listened. He wondered if the raider had moved on or if he was coming around to the front door or trying a window.
Ethan didn’t blink, and his eyes focused on the window closest to the door, desperate for any sense of movement to signal where the raider was. He cautiously inched his hand towards the revolver.
The doorknob rattled loudly as the raider tried to open it. Ethan’s hand moved faster. The door shook violently as the raider slammed his body against it. Ethan grabbed the revolver and cocked back the hammer, not worrying about being seen or heard now. He sat up and aimed the barrel of the gun over the back of the couch and at the center of the door, ready to shoot anything that came through.
Ethan’s heart pounded in his chest as he contemplated killing a person. The closest he ever came was playing a first-person shooter video game, but no game was ever like this. His breath quickened as he watched the door shake the door frame with each violent slam.
But then it stopped. Ethan glanced around at the windows. He wondered if the raider had given up or if he was checking another way inside. He waited a moment, and then another. There was no sound, no movement.
Then Ethan heard scratching at the door. Not like a dog scratching to come inside, nor like a wild animal trying to get at its prey. The scratching was a sound familiar to Ethan from years of sitting around a campfire. The raider was carving something into the wooden door.
Ethan waited in silence, gun pointed at the door. The scratching continued for a few moments, and when it stopped, he heard the sound of the raider walk away from the door and off the porch. When he heard the crunch of the raiders’ footsteps receding, Ethan felt safe enough to move. He crawled over to the window and peeked over the sill. He could barely see the raider, alone and walking away from the house, deftly flicking a long, curved knife in one hand.
That night, Ethan slept in the girl’s room upstairs, the gun lying next to his right hand.
CHAPTER TEN
Ethan woke up when the morning sun peeked through the curtains and hit his face. The sounds of birds singing outside made him forget for a moment where he was or what had happened to him the day before. But rolling over and seeing a girl’s doll lying next to him reminded him of where he was and what had happened to that girl and her family.
Solemnly, he got up and took the gun with him downstairs. He did not go back into those rooms. He checked the TV again and discovered that the power was still out. There was no more news. The fridge was a little cool, and he risked eating some of the lunch meat and cheese inside.
He wanted to load up on as many calories as he could before he started walking. He learned from backpacking in the Boy Scouts that if he ate more in the morning, then he could walk farther during the day.
He put on his backpack and adjusted it as best as he could. Though it wasn’t designed for long hikes, he was going to have to make it work. He tucked the barrel of the revolver into his belt and instinctively tried to hide it under his T-shirt. Then he remembered that no police officer was going to see him and he wasn’t going to get into trouble.
Then he got curious. He wanted to see what was scratched on the door the night before. First, he peeked out the window to see if anyone was watching the back of the house. Perhaps the scratch meant nothing, and it was just a trick to see if anyone was home. But seeing no one, he opened the back door.
In the center of the wooden door, the raider had scratched a symbol about a foot in size. It was three vertical lines, each topped with a small triangle. Under the vertical lines was another, larger vertical line topped with a large triangle. Ethan stared at the symbol for a moment. It didn’t look like anything he had seen before. It certainly wasn’t a Native American pictograph like he saw on his trip to Seminole Canyon State Park.
Ethan remembered that trip. It was one of the last family trips before the divorce. He enjoyed it. He wondered at the images drawn onto the limestone walls of the canyon and who put them there and why. Emily just complained about the bugs.
Ethan closed the door and locked it behind him. He didn’t like the idea that one of the raiders might return. He just had to hope that one of them wouldn’t jump through the window.
He checked his phone again, and there was a voice mail message from his mother! She must have called during the night. Why didn’t he hear it ring? He listened to his mother’s message, her voice slow and slurring.
“Ethan? Where are you? Come home, sweetie. Things are…bad here. I keep hearing screaming and shouting. The news doesn’t say anything. I tried calling your father, but I don’t know why I bother. He never answers. I don’t know what to do. Please, come home, sweetie.”
Ethan’s heart raced as he listened to the message. She was OK, or as OK as she could be in these circumstances. She forgot that he told her about his father, but she forgot things sometimes. He was used to reminding her.
He called her back, but the phone rang multiple times until it went to her voice mail. Rather than use what little battery power he got before the power went out, he turned off his phone and secured it in his backpack. Standing at the front door of the house, Ethan saw another hilltop a short distance. With a renewed determination, he walked towards it.
Please, come home, sweetie.
The hike to the hilltop was rather uneventful. He stayed away from roads and open fields and used the natural vegetation and landscape to keep hidden. He did not see or hear any signs of raiders or people who had changed.
He walked quickly, wanting to cover as much distance as possible. The climb up the hill was rather easy because he risked using the road. The day was already rather warm by the time he reached the top.
Once there, Ethan took out the binoculars and scanned the surroundings. He realized he deviated a little farther than he thought, but he could still see the highway off to his left. It was a long, winding line of smashed and parked cars, dotted with pillars of black smoke. Black vultures circled in the sky above. And though he could not make out any details, he could see bodies along the road.
He scanned ahead and saw more hills. Occasionally, there was a small house or shed. But otherwise, the path ahead of him was clear. He saw another distant hill.
“As long as I can keep the highway within sight, then I can follow it and get to Austin,” he said to himself as he thought out a plan. “I just have to stay far enough away from the road so I don’t run into any more raiders or…other people.”
He wasn’t sure what would happen once he got to Austin. If San Antonio had fallen to chaos, then Austin was likely just as bad. But he decided he would deal with that once he got there.
Please, come home, sweetie.
The rest of the day was much the same. He was able to stay hidden by staying away from roads and open areas. Traveling like this had the added benefit of staying in the shade, which kept him cool, so he drank less water.
Occasionally, he would come across a building or a house. He stayed away from those, though he was tempted to go inside an old trailer that looked abandoned. He thought he might be able to restock on supplies or water, but he decided that he had all that he needed now, and the risk of running into someone like the woman in the pink robe wasn’t worth it.
He continued from hill to hill, using his binoculars to check the path ahead when he reached the top. He did see a large column of black smoke in the distance, but the hills blocked the cause of it. When he finally got to the top of a hill, he saw that a convenience store was burning.
It was a Buc-ee’s, one of those huge stores that catered to tourists and truckers. There were over a few dozen gas pumps, all of them were on fire. The entire store and much of the parking lot was engulfed in a massive blaze.
All of the trucks and cars parked there were either on fire or burned-out to scorched metal frames. Ethan could feel the hot air rising up from the store even where he stood at the top of the hill.
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