by James Bierce
"What about Amanda?" asks Ben.
"She's outside somewhere, don't worry about her."
"And the two men, what about them?"
"They're both gone."
"Where are..."
Curtis cuts him off mid-sentence. "Shh, no more questions for now. You need to get some rest."
He watches Ben for another couple of minutes, and as soon as he falls asleep again, Larry motions him to the other side of the room.
"Look outside."
Curtis looks out the rain-spattered window at the street beyond, where he sees a couple of dozen people gathered near the bodies of the two men.
"You shouldn't have tried to shoot her, it made too much noise." Larry whispers.
"I wanted her out of our lives."
"I thought you said that she saved both of you..."
"Its complicated. There's something seriously wrong with her."
"Yeah, well, its too bad. She made a mess out of those two guys she killed. Someone like that could come in handy."
They watch the small crowd of people outside as they move slowly around one another, all of them soaking wet from the wind and rain. Only a few of them are wearing jackets. One of the men kneels down in front of the corpses and just stares at them for a moment, looking at one and then the other, his body rocking back and forth. Then he places his face to the middle of their torso and just stays there. Almost immediately the others do the same, their hands ripping at the men's clothing.
"Are they doing what I think they're doing?" asks Curtis.
"We saw a bunch of them eating a dog in Sequim. There was nothing but bones when they were done." Larry replies, turning around to face the room again.
"Did you ever see them do that to one another?"
"They don't seem to discriminate. They eat whatever they can find."
Curtis watches them for a while, horrified and curious at the same time, until he sees one of them look up with blood covering their face and arms. Then he turns around and faces his son, who at the moment seems to be the only glimmer of hope he has left.
"Any idea what you're going to do after this, where you'll go?" Curtis asks.
"Not a clue. Somewhere quiet I guess — if there is such a place."
"You could come stay with us at the cabin if you want. It'd be nice to have someone else around to help out with things."
"I appreciate the offer, but it would be a little crowded, wouldn't it?"
"There's an old house on the next property, I doubt its occupied." Curtis looks across the room at the window that faces Aberdeen, and notices that the fires in the city are casting an orange glow on the window sill. "Those fires must be getting worse over there." He waits for a response, but gets none. "Are you sure you want to go there tomorrow? You could come back with us in the morning, we could be there by evening."
"Would you leave your son behind if you knew he was over there?"
"No, I wouldn't." Curtis turns back around toward the street, seeing that only a few people are still on the ground eating what's left of the bodies. If this is what its like in a small community outside of town, he can't imagine what it must be like in the city itself. "Can I at least draw you a map of where to find the cabin?"
"Sure, that'd be great."
Staring out at what's left of the cities across the harbor, Larry wonders whether or not Curtis is right about the dangers of crossing over the bridge. He can only see a small portion of it from the store window, and every once in a while he spots a group of people walking across it, most of them heading south in his direction. The streets, alleys and buildings in Aberdeen must be crowded with them, their deranged minds now seemingly filled with nothing but anger and violence.
He glances back at the table behind him, where Curtis and his son are sound asleep, and he feels both relief and sadness at the same time. It was only a couple of months ago that he and his wife were discussing having a child of their own. They hadn't planned on it when they first got married, but as time went on both of them felt as though their lives might be incomplete without one. Looking at Curtis and Ben, however, he wonders if the opposite might actually be true. While he realizes that the most important things in Curtis' life are his children, the added pressure and stress of having to protect them in whatever is left of the world seems overwhelming. It might be true what they say, that its different once you have them, that some profound paternal instinct takes over and gives you whatever strength is necessary to keep going — or perhaps it only serves to deepen your desperation. Either way, Larry doesn't feel it, and he's fairly certain he doesn't want to.
He looks back out the window at the amber reflection in the water from the fires, telling himself that he needs to get some sleep if he's going to make the trip tomorrow — whether it be across the bridge, or back to Cohasset with his new friends. He stands up from the stool and starts to look for a decent place to lie down, then he hears something from the other side of the room — the sound of radio static. As he crosses the room and heads toward his bag next to the front door, Curtis sits up and whispers to Larry.
"What is that?"
"Its my radio, I didn't think it still worked." replies Larry. He unzips the bag and pulls out a handheld radio that's still damp with saltwater.
(radio) "Jake, are you there? Please answer me... I'm worried about you..."
"Who is that?" asks Curtis.
"Its my sister. Jake is her husband." Larry responds, his voice filled with excitement as he answers the radio. "Beth, can you hear me?"
(radio) "Jake, is that you?"
"No, its Larry. Can you hear me?"
(radio) "Yes, I hear you — where are you?" she answers, her voice filled with tears and emotion.
"I'm on the other side of the bridge. Where are you?"
(radio) "I'm in the hospital up on the hill."
"Okay, I'm going to come and get you, but I have to wait until morning — its too dangerous at night."
(radio) "Jake went out to lock the door a couple of hours ago, and he hasn't come back — and now there's people all over the hospital."
"Are you someplace safe?"
(radio) "I think so."
"Okay, turn your radio off until morning, you have to save the battery."
(radio) "What about Jake?"
"We'll find him when I get there. Don't leave whatever room you're in, okay?"
(radio) "Okay, I won't." Then her voice turns to a whisper, barely audible. "I have to go, someone is outside my door again."
Larry listens to the radio static, his mind filled with every conceivable scenario that ends badly. Then he switches the radio off, knowing that the batteries have to be nearly drained.
"We'll wait for you." says Curtis. "We can all leave together the next morning — if that's what you want..."
Larry looks to be in shock, not responding at first. Then finally he faces Curtis. "You don't have to do that, you should get back to your family."
Curtis glances down at Ben, who's still asleep. "He's in no shape to travel anyway, he needs at least another day to rest."
"Thank you, you have no idea how much I appreciate this."
"You need to get some sleep, you have a pretty good walk ahead of you. I'll keep first watch."
Larry nods, then places the radio back inside of his bag. Before he lowers himself to the floor, he takes another look out at the street, expecting to see the same people wandering around — but they aren't there. Instead, he sees a single person facing the store, a young girl in a blood-stained tattered dress and black coat, and a large kitchen knife held tightly in her small hand.
Sarah slowly makes her way across the living room and down the hallway, leaning on Matt as she looks through the open doorway of the bedroom. Lying on the floor in nothing but a t-shirt and underwear, covered in filth and grime, with his hands and feet tied with rope and his mouth taped shut — is the withered body of an old man, his eyes frightened at the sight of strange people. Sarah takes a glove that she
found in the kitchen out of her pocket and slips it onto her hand, then reaches down and pulls the tape off of his mouth.
"Can you talk?" she asks him. He starts to speak, then coughs so badly that he begins to choke. "Matt, give him a little water — carefully."
Matt reaches down and pours a small amount of water from his bottle, just wetting the man's mouth.
"Thank you." the man manages to say.
"What's your name?"
"Carl, Carl Embree."
"Embree? Is Clara your wife?"
The man nods, then sits up and rests his back against the dresser behind him.
"Did she do this to you, tie you up like this?"
"Yes."
"Why would she do that?"
"I wish I knew the answer to that, I really do."
"So you're not sick?"
"No, I'm not sick." He looks down at the floor, and a deep sadness takes over his face. "She's dead, isn't she?"
Sarah looks down at Carl's arms, and notices several large bruises on his forearms — then she notices the same type of bruises on his legs just below the knees. They look like defensive wounds. "Did she do that to you? Did Clara hurt you?"
He nods, then looks Sarah in the eyes. "Is my wife dead?"
"I'm afraid so."
He looks back to the floor again, then shifts his hands around to make the ropes tying them together more comfortable. In the dim luminescence of the flashlight, Sarah can see red bands under the ropes where the skin has been scratched off and replaced with raw flesh. "How long have you been locked in here?"
"Four days."
"And you've been without food and water this entire time?"
"Yes." he replies, nearly choking once again.
Sarah suddenly feels awful for knowing that he was in here this entire time, and yet she did absolutely nothing about it. She also wants to be cautious of his story though, and take whatever he has to say with a grain of salt, but she also realizes that there must be other people like her and Matt out there, people that for whatever reason have never contracted the virus. To allow one of them to simply perish feels wrong on every level.
"Are you well enough to walk?" she asks, wondering the same thing about herself. The pain in her leg is excruciating.
"I don't know, I can't really try with my legs tied together like this."
She holds out her hand to Matt. "Give me the gun, then cut his ropes off with a knife from the kitchen." She then looks down at Carl with a menacing look as Matt hands her the revolver. "If you try anything, I'll put a bullet in your head — understand?"
After freeing Carl of his restraints, and finding that he could barely walk with the assistance of a cane that once belonged to his wife, Sarah and Matt return to the living room while Carl cleans himself up in the bathroom with half of their drinking water. As much as Sarah hated the idea of having only a liter of water once again, she also couldn't imagine spending time around Carl with the smell of filth so heavy in the air. When he finally comes out of the bathroom with clean clothes on and most of the grime removed from his body, he glances into the corner where the body of his wife rests, then quickly looks away after realizing what he's looking at. He finally sits down in a chair on the other side of the room.
Sarah and Matt spin the couch around to face him, then she sets a burning candle on a small table between them, more as a gesture than anything else, considering she can already see the first sign of light coming through the window curtains.
"Do you know who the person in the other bedroom is?" Sarah asks him.
"That's our son, Samuel."
"Did you know that he's..."
"Dead? Yes, he died a few weeks ago."
"I'm sorry, I really am."
"Thank you."
Sarah can tell that he's exhausted, and she can't imagine the stress that he's feeling, but she needs answers before she feels comfortable letting her guard down. Even Clara seemed somewhat reasonable for a short while. "My name is Sarah by the way, and this is my son, Matt."
"Yes, I heard you introduce yourself to Clara last night. I wish we were meeting under different circumstances."
"How long had she been sick?"
"She first started showing symptoms shortly after Samuel passed away."
"What kind of symptoms?"
"Just strange behavior at first, and then she developed a cough a couple of days later."
"Why didn't you leave?"
"She's my wife, I couldn't just let her die."
The room falls into an uncomfortable silence, and then Matt finally speaks up.
"Did your TV work before the power went out?"
"Yes, why?"
"Did you see anything about the rest of the country?"
The question surprises Sarah. She wasn't even aware that he wondered about such things, let alone worry about them.
"The last thing I saw was a report from New York. They said the city was being overrun."
"With what?" asks Sarah.
"They didn't say exactly. I assumed they meant the sick — you know, the ones who don't die."
As the words leave his mouth, the doorknob on the back door begins to jiggle, and Sarah quickly aims the gun at the doorway. All three of them hold their breath as they watch the door, expecting at any moment to see it open — but it never does. Eventually the doorknob settles down, and the person on the other side of it apparently moves on.
"The man that unlocked the bedroom door earlier, do you know him?" Sarah asks.
"His name is Jacob, he's the neighbor's son."
"Does he have a key?"
"His mother did."
"I assume he's sick?"
"I thought he was dead for a long time, he came down with the virus early on."
Sarah knows in her heart that she only has two options — either kill Jacob, or somehow try to get back to the cabin where she was hoping to find Curtis and Ben already waiting for them. Getting there, however, was the problem. There's no way in hell she can walk that far, and the road out front is completely impassible due to the cars lined up for miles. The only alternative left is the beach.
"Do you have a car that runs?" she asks him.
"There's one out front in the driveway."
"Does it run?"
"It should, but I haven't tried starting it for a while."
"Do you mind if we borrow it?"
"As far as I'm concerned you can keep it — as long as you take me with you..."
Sarah starts to say something in response, and then they freeze as they listen to the front door open once again. All three of them drop to the floor, and Sarah keeps an eye on both the entryway into the room, and on Carl behind her. She still doesn't completely trust him, and now would be the perfect time to try something. They wait another couple of minutes, and then they hear the sound of the door as it closes — and then silence.
"Is he gone?" whispers Carl.
"No, I can hear him breathing."
"Curtis, wake up..."
Curtis opens his eyes and sees Larry standing in front of him with a duffel bag in his hand. The room is dimly lit from the sunlight outside, telling him that its either very early, or the skies are heavily overcast. He glances down at Ben, making sure he's still asleep, then carefully rolls off of the table and walks to the other side of the room.
"Are you taking off?" asks Curtis.
"Yeah, its light enough out that those people should all be indoors."
"Any sign of Amanda?"
"No, I don't see her anywhere."
Curtis holds out his hand, and the two men shake before Larry turns around and heads for the door, neither one of them knowing what else to say. Then, right before he opens the door to exit, Larry turns around. "If I'm not back by tomorrow morning, consider me dead. Take Ben and find the rest of your family."
Curtis nods, then watches him walk out the door.
Having already spoken to Beth shortly after leaving the general store, and finding out that things at the hospital
were still more or less the same as last night, Larry steps onto the bridge that spans the Chehalis River and begins his trek into the heart of Aberdeen. The fires to the west of town, where the city borders Hoquiam, have grown overnight, and the thick black smoke emanating from them has now enveloped large sections of both cities.
As he passes by the dozens of abandoned cars along the bridge, the scenes inside of them seem eerily similar to the ones that Curtis told him about in Westport. While many of them are empty, others contain horrible sights of rotting corpses inside, both human and animal — and all of them well decomposed. He wonders at first why someone would allow themselves to die like that, why they wouldn't at least try to walk to safety — and then he notices the locked doors, and the fingernail scratches on the outside of each of the cars. Someone, or something, was trying desperately to get inside. He figures that he'll likely never know exactly what happened here in those first few weeks after the infection, and if the scenes in front of him are of any indication, he'd rather keep it that way.
As he reaches the other side of the bridge and starts up the hill toward the hospital, he notices through the smoky haze that the streets are filled with broken glass and litter, but very few bodies. Only the occasional skeleton lying in the gutter or an alleyway can be seen, and even those have been picked clean of any trace of flesh. The entire town looks like a wasteland — dead and defeated. Looking up the hill, he can't help but recognize how much the buildings ahead of him look like massive gravestones in a crowded graveyard — even more so with the smoke rolling through town and obscuring the streets below them. He can't imagine how many of the infected are inside each of them, waiting for darkness to encroach the city.
About halfway up the hill he walks into the massive plumes of smoke coming from the fires, each one filled with an ungodly mixture of horrid scents and limited visibility. He covers his nose and mouth the best he can, but he can't do a thing to protect his eyes from the burning gasses. Finally, with the hospital only a block ahead of him, the smoke begins to dissipate, leaving him a clear view of the front entrance. Both of the glass doors are wide-open.