Aberdeen Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Prologue

  Chapter 1: Aberdeen

  Chapter 2: Grayland

  Chapter 3: Grayland

  Chapter 4: Aberdeen

  Chapter 5: Grayland

  Chapter 6: Grayland

  Chapter 7: Aberdeen

  Chapter 8: Grayland

  Chapter 9: East of Cohassett

  Chapter 10: Aberdeen

  Chapter 11: Aberdeen

  Chapter 12: East of Cohassett

  Chapter 13: Aberdeen

  Chapter 14: South Aberdeen

  Chapter 15: Aberdeen

  Chapter 16: Aberdeen

  Chapter 17: Aberdeen

  Chapter 18: Aberdeen

  Chapter 19: Aberdeen

  Chapter 20: Aberdeen

  Chapter 21: Aberdeen

  Chapter 22: Aberdeen

  Chapter 23: Aberdeen

  Chapter 24: Aberdeen

  Chapter 25: Aberdeen

  Chapter 26: Aberdeen

  Chapter 27: Aberdeen

  Chapter 28: Grays Harbor City

  Chapter 29: Copalis Beach

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  This book is a work of fiction. Any names, places, events or characters are from the author's imagination or fictitious in nature, and any resemblance to real places, events, businesses or people, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  ©2019 by James Bierce. All rights reserved.

  jamesbierce.com

  This product may not be reproduced, stored or transmitted without written permission from the publisher.

  Published by Grays Harbor Publishing.

  graysharborpublishing.com

  Cover design by Clayton Swim.

  Aberdeen (Grays Harbor Series: Book 3) First Edition

  PROLOGUE

  Westport

  Opening his bedroom door, seventeen-year-old Aaron Williams can hear the wind blowing through the front door as his father exits the house in search of his stepmother, Diane, who went missing earlier in the evening. He feels Amanda's hand reach out and hold onto his arm, pulling him closer, then she begins to whisper something to him. He wants more than anything to be out there with his dad, instead of searching the house yet again with his twelve-year-old sister — but as he bends down to listen to her, he can hear the fear in her voice, and he realizes how unfair it would be to her if she were to be left by herself in a house with no electricity, and no possible way to call for help.

  "It'll be alright, sis…" he says soothingly. "Dad will find her, trust me."

  "He won't find her — not out there."

  "Why do you think that?" Aaron is bent down, with his ear right next to her mouth, and he can hear the excitement in her voice as she slowly pulls away from him.

  "Because she's still in the house…"

  He looks down at her and sees a glint of shimmering light coming from her hand, and by the time he realizes that it's a knife, she's already plunging it toward his chest. Barely missing, she swipes the blade down across his face, slicing the skin open on his left cheek — and then she thrusts it into his coat, missing the flesh on his waist by only a fraction of an inch. Desperate to get away, he pushes her against the bedroom wall and runs out of the room, holding the door closed behind him.

  "Dad!" he screams, hoping that his father, Paul, will hear him and come running. "Dad, you have to help me!"

  "Aaron, open the door — I'm hurt," he hears Amanda say from the other side of the door.

  "Just stay put until Dad gets here." Feeling the blood running down his face, he reaches up and wipes some of it from his chin, as it drips steadily onto the carpeted floor below. Looking down the corridor at the front door, seeing no sign of his dad anywhere, he feels the handle on the door beginning to twist — at first gently, but then more forcefully as he struggles to hold it shut.

  "Check under their bed, Aaron," she says, rattling the door violently as she begins kicking it.

  "Knock it off! Just stay calm!" Surprised at his sister's strength, he wonders whether he can hold her back for very long. Then he looks behind his shoulder at the door directly across the hall — a thick, solid wood panel that leads to the full basement underneath the house.

  "She wanted to take us away from here, but I stopped her," she says, suddenly stopping her assault on the door.

  He hears a tapping on the other side, like she's slowly jabbing the tip of the knife into the surface of the door. He holds onto the handle tightly with both hands, using the wall next to him as leverage with his body as he waits for her to continue her attack — and after several seconds of complete silence, he feels a sharp, piercing pain in his arm as the blade of her knife slides through the gap between the jam and the door. Letting go of the handle, he turns around and almost falls down onto the floor, his stomach feeling queasy as he opens the basement door and escapes into the dark space beyond. As he shuts the door behind him, his fingers search desperately for any sign of a lock that might keep her from doing the same thing — and then he hears his bedroom door opening, and the delicate footsteps of his sister as she walks across the hallway and stands directly in front of him. He can feel his heart pounding as he holds on tightly to the handle, but instead of trying to open the door, she does something far worse — she locks it.

  "Aaron… Amanda…" he hears from the living room, recognizing his father's voice. "Are you guys in here…?"

  "Dad, help!" Aaron cries out, slamming his fists against the door as he hears the first gunshot, followed closely by another one. "Dad, can you hear me?" He beats on the solid door until his hands hurt, and then he listens closely as a slow, quiet set of footsteps echo faintly across the hardwood flooring in the living room. Soon the steps come closer, and he sees the shadows of shoes through the gap under the door.

  "Aaron, are you there?" asks Amanda.

  With his legs suddenly feeling wobbly, Aaron turns around and sits down on the steps, crying uncontrollably as he listens to Amanda giggling on the other side of the door.

  "By the way, you left your flashlight out here. If you stay quiet and do what I say, I might give it back to you."

  After hearing her walk away, he sits down on the stairs for a while, his mind racing in circles as he tries to comprehend what just happened. With his legs still feeling numb and unsteady, he stands up and tries the handle again, hoping that she might have unlocked it before leaving — but as he attempts to turn the handle and push helplessly against it, the sound of something being dragged across the floor in the master bedroom and into the hallway causes him to scramble down the stairs in fear, hiding in the corner of the dark room once he reaches the bottom. When the door opens and fills the room with light, he can see at least two rats scurrying back into the darkness in the opposite corner, and Amanda's silhouette holding a gun at the top of the stairs.

  "Don't try anything stupid," he hears her say, as she turns around and pulls something onto the stair landing.

  He steps out into the open, figuring that he might be able to plead with her. "Amanda, listen…" Before he gets a chance to say anything more, however, he looks up and sees something tumbling down the staircase, landing only inches from his feet. He glances up just as she exits the room, closing the door behind her once more — but the last thing he sees before the light disappears completely from the space around him, is the tortured look on his stepmother's face, staring back at him from the lifeless corpse that's now lying at the foot of the steps.

  The last time he looked at his cell phone, right before the battery finally went dead, it said that he'd been trapped in the basement for nearly three days — and that was at least a day ago. Like clockwork, every evening around dinner time, Amanda shows up at the door with something to eat — and every ti
me, just before leaving again, she spits on the food and then kicks the plate down the staircase. The fact that most of it lands on Diane's body doesn't really bother him much, since he has a hunch that the meal might be poisoned anyway. So far, his only source of food or liquid has been a jar of canned peaches that was probably forgotten on a shelf long ago, and because he's been rationing the contents carefully, he can start to feel himself becoming weaker.

  His pleas for help have mostly gone unanswered, although one evening she did talk to him for a long time about what was going on in the neighborhood — a conversation that was entirely one-sided.

  Amanda's mental state had never really been all that stable, especially after their last visit with their birth mother. She seemed to take her rejection out on everyone, except for the person who truly deserved it. Their mother was a drug addict and a drunk, and had disappointed both of her children more times than Aaron cared to remember — but while his attitude eventually turned indifferent and detached, Amanda's remained forever loyal to a parent that viewed her as nothing more than an unwanted responsibility. As much as he'd like to blame her latest behavior on the virus, which he can't even be certain that she has, his instinct tells him that her sudden turn toward violence is merely another progression in her psychological collapse — one that he'll be lucky to survive.

  As he huddles into the corner beside the stairs, out of sight from the landing above — he can hear the rats somewhere in front of him, gnawing on either the food his sister has left for him, or on Diane herself. Annoyed at the sound of it, he stands up quickly and throws an empty glass jar across the room at them, shattering it into thousands of sharp pieces on the floor. For a minute he stays still, hoping that the noise didn't anger Amanda, but then he spots something on the other side of the room, a speck of light shining back at him from the far wall. Hearing nothing coming from upstairs, he stumbles across the floor until he reaches the source of the light, feeling around on the wall until he grabs onto a doorknob. He nearly drops to his knees as he remembers that the basement has an outside entrance, something his father said was once used to load coal into the basement — a discovery that would've been much more useful three or four days ago when he was still strong enough to break a door down. When his hand grips the knob and turns it, he's surprised when the door slowly swings open and reveals a set of double doors above him. He can see daylight coming through the spaces in the boards as he climbs up the steps ahead of him, and a single bolt latch that's locking the doors in place. As carefully as he can, with his hands shaking from low blood sugar, he manages to squeeze two fingers through the tight space between the doors, unlocking the latch and releasing the half-rotten wood that stands between him and freedom.

  Unsure of what time of the day it is, he opens the doors quietly and steps out into the dim light of downtown Westport, breathing in the fresh air that's coming from the ocean only a short distance away. Although it's overcast, he can tell from the brightness over the harbor that it must be early morning. He turns around and closes the doors again, not wanting his sister to know that he's gone, then locks the latch again before walking north toward the shops of the retail district.

  Once he's out of sight from the house, he stops on the sidewalk and sits down on a bench, his body tired and sore from the endless hours of sitting and sleeping on the concrete floor. He tries to focus his mind on where he can hide — someplace that preferably has a comfortable place to sleep, and a source of food and water that will get him by until he can think of something more permanent. Fantasizing about the apocalypse in the past, he always thought that the first place he would go would be the Peterson Bar & Grill — but unfortunately, he also told Amanda about it on numerous occasions. He decides instead to walk down the street to a small gas station that also doubles as a mini grocery store for the neighborhood.

  It's raining lightly on his soiled jacket as he passes the intersection that leads to the public access road, and as he looks around at the houses lining the street, he's amazed at how empty and abandoned the town looks now. Amanda had mentioned to him that nearly everyone was gone, but looking at it now, he'd swear that there was nobody left at all. Smelling the wet pavement under his feet, and the fresh smell of pine trees that are blowing in the wind next to him, he walks up to the doorway of the gas station and pushes against the door — relieved when it swings open without any resistance.

  "Is anybody here?" he asks quietly, hoping that he doesn't receive an answer. Looking behind him first, to make sure he wasn't followed, he reaches down and locks the door, then grabs a bag of spicy potato chips from a shelf next to the register. Walking down the main aisle, which is lined with mostly empty shelves, he grabs more snack items that were apparently unpopular with the panicking evacuees — then finds some equally undesirable sport drinks before sitting on the floor in the back. He's exhausted from not sleeping for days, and sick to his stomach from the sudden overindulgence of sugar-filled junk food, but he finds an office in the back of the store with a couch in it, and decides to lie down for a while until the nausea goes away — oblivious to the fact that someone is staring at him from the other side of the glass windows.

  Aaron wakes up suddenly, startled by a loud noise that's coming from the back door beside him, and surprised at the relative darkness that's now filling the room. Someone is slamming their fist against the door, trying to twist the locked doorknob in an attempt to break in. With no window to the back of the building to see them, he gets up from the couch and sneaks quietly into the front of the store. It's almost nighttime by the looks of the faint daylight still visible, and as he approaches the windows along the entrance wall, he quickly drops to the floor and hides behind a magazine rack as he spots two men standing outside, their faces pressed up against the glass as they peer inside. He recognizes one of them as the owner of the store, and he doesn't know whether to be frightened or comforted when he sees him reach for the handle of the door — but any hope of comfort vanishes completely when he watches the man struggle with it, despite having a set of keys clearly hanging from his belt. The other man looks directly at Aaron, then starts hitting the glass with his elbow. Aaron moves across the floor and away from the window just as the guy arches his back and screams, then drops to the ground, grabbing desperately at his side.

  Standing casually behind him, with a bloody knife in her hand, is Amanda. She turns toward the owner of the store and takes a few steps forward, then thrusts the blade deep into his stomach as he tries to back away from her. Once he's down on the ground, still scrambling to get away, she slices the blade furiously at his hands, then shoves it into what Aaron can only guess is the man's throat. Next, she calmly reaches down to his side, grabs the keys, and opens the front door.

  Aaron is frozen with terror as he watches her wipe the blade onto her white dress, then walk up to the counter and take a package of black licorice from behind the counter. She starts to walk out, then turns around and slowly looks the store over. Afraid to even breathe, Aaron prays that she doesn't notice the wet shoe prints that are still visible from when he entered the building earlier — but instead, she opens the package of candy and leaves the store, not bothering to close the door behind her. He watches as she disappears into the fog in the distance, then he closes the door once again, knowing that when morning comes, he'll need to find another place to hide.

  Grabbing another bag of chips, he heads into the back again and begins to close the office door for more privacy — and then he notices some movement outside. Through the fog and misty rain, he sees shadows moving through the night — and the longer he watches, the more of them appear.

  He wonders how many of them out there are like Amanda, and how many people, innocent or otherwise, that she's already killed.

  CHAPTER 1

  Aberdeen: March 27th

  Larry glances over at Christine, who's sitting next to him in a plastic lawn chair behind the pharmacy window — then he stares out at the city of Aberdeen again, where a glimmer
of sunlight is stretched out across the parking lot and nearby buildings, contrasting with the dark clouds that are still directly overhead. They're both trying to wrap their heads around a radio conversation they just had, talking to a man that claimed to be living at the hospital on the other side of town. He said that his name is Mike Garrett, and that he was a nurse before the viral outbreak began — but after that things became rather confusing. He never asked whether or not they were sick, or had any symptoms at all, or even where they'd been for the past several months — and he was also vague about any of his own personal details. Some privacy and skepticism on his part was fully expected, but he wouldn't even go so far as to tell them how old he is or what he looks like.

  The strangest part of the entire conversation, however, was his invitation to a face-to-face meeting, despite knowing hardly anything about them. He seemed eager to meet them in person, and told them to arrive at the front entrance of the hospital shortly after daybreak the following morning. After a conversation in which almost no information was shared, it ended with an almost desperate plea for a visit, which left both of them questioning his possible motive.

  "Do you still wanna go?" Larry asks Christine, who's been mostly quiet since the radio call ended.

  "I don't know — what do you think?"

  "It could be a trap, or it could answer a lot of questions — I don't really know what to think."

  They'd been up for most of the night talking about whether or not they should be going, or even if the man would allow for a visit to take place, but neither of them thought that the invitation would come so quickly and easily.

  "If he were anyone else, I would probably leave him behind — but the fact that he's a nurse kind of changes everything, doesn't it?"

  "I guess someone like that could come in pretty handy. So, we're still going?"