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  "Yeah, I guess so — but we have to be careful."

  Across the highway from them, sitting by itself in a large parking lot, is a building that still has thin wisps of smoke rising through its badly damaged roof. Other than the one structure though, this area of the city looks untouched from the inferno that destroyed nearly everything on the opposite side of the Wishkah river. Although his view to the west is mostly obscured by the glare coming off of the filthy windows, he can still make out the silhouettes of the surviving brick and stone buildings that are towering over the ash and rubble around them — a lasting testimony to the early builders of the city, who were from a time when buildings were supposed to last more than a single generation. Taking up much of the historic downtown district, even most of those relics from the past have been devastated by the fires as well. The wooden interior floors and roofs have been gutted by the intense heat from the flames, making everything appear more or less unaffected from the street level, but otherwise useless when you look beyond the outer walls.

  The parking lot in front of the pharmacy is littered with trash, much like everywhere else. Before she was killed, Larry mentioned to his sister that the lasting impression of the human race will undoubtedly be the massive amounts of garbage that we've left behind — both below and above the ground. Still though, compared to the cities on the peninsula, the east end of Aberdeen appears to be relatively pristine. There are no broken windows or cars left in the middle of the road, and no doors that have been ripped off of their hinges by the hordes of infected that have ravaged many of the other towns in the state.

  Sitting on one of the benches from the waiting area, which she's covered with electric blankets and plastic table cloths from the 'Household' department, Christine waits for Larry to return with tonight's dinner — a meal that he's preparing on a miniature camp stove that he found in an abandoned house somewhere on the other side of the harbor. Although they've known one another for only a short period of time since first meeting in Grayland, she already thinks of him as sort of a father figure or uncle — someone that makes her feel at least somewhat safer during dangerous or tense moments.

  The sun is setting in the west, leaving the north-facing storefront already in the shaded darkness of nightfall. A propane lantern is on the floor nearby, quietly hissing in the background as it fills the back of the store with a crisp, white light.

  "What'd I tell you, huh?" Larry says, holding up two cans as he walks up to the camp stove that's sitting on the pharmacy counter.

  "What are they?"

  "Beef and cheese ravioli. I never thought I'd have these again."

  "Sounds delicious." she replies sarcastically.

  "It'll be hot, and it'll keep us alive — that's the important thing. We're lucky to have anything at all."

  "I know, I'm sorry. I'm just nervous about tomorrow."

  "I know, me too," he says, emptying the contents of the cans into a new pot. "I thought it would take some arm twisting for him to see us."

  "That's one of the things that worries me. It was too easy — we didn't even have to bring it up."

  Larry leans in over the stove, taking in not only the smell of the canned ravioli, but also the heat from the burner. He thought that the weather would improve once they came in from the cold coastal winds of the beach, but the climate of the harbor felt different, even colder somehow — like the dampness of the fog was permeating every pore of his skin.

  "Jake said he was a doctor," she says.

  "Maybe it's a different guy."

  "Either way, we have to be careful. We don't need him."

  "Agreed." He takes the pot from the single burner and sets it onto the counter, then dishes the pasta into two foam bowls, handing one of them to Christine. "Still, it would be nice to get some answers, especially if this guy has talked to people outside of the area."

  She takes a bite of the meal, nearly burning her lips in the process — but once it cools down she's reminded of how much she misses the taste of hot, semi-nutritious meals. "Do you ever think about home, and the way things used to be?"

  "I try not to," he says, as he sits beside her in the makeshift campsite and begins eating. "Sometimes I can't help it though, like when I wake up in the middle of the night and I forget where I am for a minute — then it all suddenly comes back to me."

  "I do that too sometimes. Did you get to say goodbye to any of your friends before the end?"

  "No, I never really had any to be honest — not any of them worth saying goodbye to anyway."

  "I did, I had a lot of them."

  "Did you get to say goodbye?"

  "Just one of them. My friend, Kelsie, who lived across the street from us. The last time I saw her was when she waved at me through the window, since neither of our parents would let us outside. She died a couple of days later."

  "I had to watch my…" He cuts his sentence short, listening to a thumping sound coming from somewhere close. "Did you hear that?"

  "Yeah."

  They both stop eating and listen to the noise, coming from somewhere above them. Soon it turns into obvious footsteps, and then a rough dragging sound that moves steadily across the ceiling.

  "Do you think it's Amanda?" Christine asks.

  "She doesn't make any sound when she walks — it's like she's a ghost or something."

  "Unless she wants us to hear her…"

  Larry sets down his unfinished bowl and stands up, then pulls his gun out and starts to slowly make his way to the other side of the store where the sound is headed — careful to stay inside of the dark shadows.

  Christine moves behind him, hearing another set of footsteps on the roof as well. "There's two of them," she whispers.

  "I hear that too… They're in the other back corner."

  Both of them freeze as they hear a loud banging noise, like a piece of steel being smashed with a hammer. After a minute or so of constant hits, the high-pitch creaking of a rusty hinge fills the empty store, echoing throughout the space — and then the footsteps continue, coming down a staircase somewhere in the back of the store.

  Larry quickly heads back to their supplies and grabs a rifle and an extra pistol, handing the smaller gun to Christine — then the two of them position themselves behind an aisle that has a clear shot of the double doors that lead to the back.

  "Whatever comes through those doors, we kill them, understood?" Larry asks her.

  "Yeah, I understand."

  Both of the intruders can be heard crashing down the stairs and into the area of offices and storerooms, and then they pause just on the other side, their breathing audible even from halfway across the store. When the doors slowly begin opening, Larry looks through the scope of the rifle that's already aimed in that direction, and then fires several shots the moment he sees both of them come through the doorway — hitting at least one of them with a direct head shot. With both of them now on the ground, he stands up and motions for Christine to follow him.

  "The closest one is still moving, Larry," Christine warns him, as they carefully approach the two people.

  Firing another round into each of their heads, Larry walks up to each of them and uses his foot to roll them over, revealing their faces. They're both younger men, probably in their twenties or thirties — both of them with horrible scars on their faces and arms. Even the clothing that they're wearing has areas that have either been burned or melted.

  "Are they dead?" Christine asks.

  "Yeah, they're both gone."

  "However they got in, more could follow them."

  "I know. I'll stay up and take watch until morning, and then we'll pack up some of this stuff and leave at daybreak."

  "Are you just gonna leave them lying here?"

  "I'll cover them with something. Go back and finish your dinner, even if you're not hungry — you're gonna need your strength for tomorrow."

  As Christine walks back to the campsite, Larry feels the cold air blowing in through the double doors that are now e
xposed to the outside air. He knows that more people might follow, but he's not really concerned about any of the infected. His only worry is that a young girl might find her way into the building, and that as quietly as she moves, she might already be inside.

  CHAPTER 2

  Grayland: March 27th

  Awaking in a strange room, and seeing the light gray clouds moving across the sky outside of the window, Curtis sits up in bed and smells the scent of something cooking in the other room. For a moment he almost forgets where he is and why they're here, and why he's lying down in someone else's bed. As he swings his legs over the side though, he sees the makeshift beds on the floor where Matt and Ben spent the night, and he remembers watching them fall asleep as he took the first shift, wondering whether he and Sarah would ever be able to sleep alone in the same room again. For the time being, however, he wouldn't have it any other way. They're all new to this area, and it was somewhere around here that Larry and Beth disappeared from radio contact — and last they heard, they still had Amanda with them.

  He stands up, feeling the fatigue in his legs from the last few days setting in, then he walks to the window and looks out at the beach to the west. Fog is rolling in heavily from the surf, which is nothing unusual for the area, but he had plans to search some of the neighboring homes today for more supplies, and fog could make it more difficult to spot any people that might be lurking in the shadows around town.

  Hearing the voices of his family downstairs, sounding relaxed for the first time in months, he goes across the hallway and enters another bedroom, this one with a much less picturesque view of the town. As much time as he spent on this coast as a kid, for some reason they never really went to Grayland for anything, so his knowledge of the town is limited at best. It was always a place they simply passed through on their way to Cohassett to the north. He remembers seeing the cranberry bogs just off of the highway, the flooded fields overflowing with red berries ready for harvest in the fall. Other than that, his only real memory of the area was after his parents both died, and his Uncle Brian stopped at a local cafe to buy him a hamburger. It was also the last time as a child that he visited the Washington coast.

  Looking out at the town now, he can see the building that used to be a cafe in the distance, although he's fairly certain that it became a laundromat in more recent years.

  "Curtis, are you awake up there?" Sarah asks from the floor below.

  "Yeah, I'll be down in a minute," he replies back, still looking at the highway that sits between the property and the beginning of town. The streets look empty, but he can see broken windows in several of the buildings, which he knows could be an indicator that they're not alone.

  He walks down the stairs and sees Sarah in the kitchen, cooking something on the gas stove top as the boys sit in front of the living room window and look out at the ocean beyond.

  "You slept a long time," Sarah says.

  "What time is it?"

  "Almost eight. Are you hungry?"

  "Yeah, starving." He sits down in a bar stool on the opposite side of the counter from her, and she sets a bowl down in front of him and then comes around the corner and sits with him. "Is this from the cans we brought with us?" he asks, seeing a variety of soups that have been mixed together.

  "No, I found these in the pantry, along with a few other things." She sips at the hot soup, looking out at the wall in the front yard that blocks the view of the town from the bottom floor. "Are you still planning on going out today?"

  "Yeah, I don't wanna get too low on food."

  "Just you?"

  "Unless you want to go…"

  They've had this discussion several times in the past, but last night they came to an agreement that one of them would always be with the boys, and that Matt and Ben should never be separated from each other again. They also decided that it was probably safer for the entire family if Curtis were to hunt for supplies alone, instead of potentially risking all of their lives against an army of the infected — a problem that seems to be growing more dangerous as each day passes.

  "No, we'll stay here. See if you can find a radio though — if we're gonna split up, we should at least have a way of reaching one another."

  "Yeah, okay, I'll keep an eye out for a set. You guys might wanna gather up some firewood from the shed out back — it can get pretty cold at night when you're right on the beach like this."

  "Hey dad," Matt says uneasily, as the two brothers approach their father. "We haven't seen anyone on the beach all morning."

  "You say that like it's a bad thing…"

  "There aren't any bodies either."

  At first Curtis is confused at the observation, disturbed at the idea that his son is even noticing something like that — and then the full gravity of the situation hits him. Since last September, early in the days of the outbreak, they've seen bodies on every beach that they've come across. Most of them came in on the tide, washed up from who knows where, and some of them were more local, likely killed by the other infected and left on the beach. Sand dunes that are clear of the rotting corpses that litter the other beaches in the area could be an excellent sign, that this part of the coastline is truly deserted — or it could mean something else entirely, a sign that the town isn't as abandoned as it appears.

  "Just keep watching, if anyone is around, they'll show up on the sand eventually."

  Waiting for the boys to go back to the living room, Sarah leans in a whispers… "They're worried about something else, they just don't want to say it."

  "I know, I've been thinking about her too."

  "Matt thinks that she killed Larry and Beth, and that she's still out there somewhere."

  "He's probably right."

  "I know, but we can't have them thinking that she's waiting around every corner…"

  He stands up and sets the bowl in the non-functioning sink, then kisses his wife on the forehead. "It might not be her, but there probably is something around every corner."

  Deciding that it's probably best to stay off of the highway until they get to know the town better, Curtis walks down a pathway along the edge of the dunes, winding past damaged beachfront homes that have been battered from the storms of the past few months, and some by years of neglect by the looks of them. In many ways, Grayland looks almost identical to Westport, at least from the ocean anyway. Both of them have mostly older homes that are surrounded by blackberry vines and other imported vegetation, all of them nuisances that constantly threaten to overtake and conceal the properties. One difference, however, is the spacing between the lots. Grayland doesn't really have a dedicated residential or commercial area, since it's not actually an incorporated city. Instead, the houses, businesses and small developments are widely scattered between the ancient dunes along the Pacific, and the wetland bogs that rest at the bottom of the coastal hills to the east.

  As he approaches the neighboring home, which sits only a few hundred feet to the south, the first thing he notices about the older single-story house is the broken window next to the back door, and shards of glass that are still lying on the porch below it. Stepping onto the wooden planks of the porch, he sees that the door is actually open slightly, and when he pushes it with the baseball bat that he's carrying, the stench of the air nearly knocks him over. The kitchen on the other side of the door is a mess, with trash covering the floor and cabinets ripped from the walls and thrown haphazardly around the room. In the distance, he sees what he can only imagine are the former residents of the home, their bodies lined up in a perfect row across the floor of the living area.

  He really doesn't want to go any further inside, but the most reliable source for weapons that they've found so far are in the homes where suicides have taken place — and as far he can tell, this certainly looks like one.

  Careful not to step on anything overly disgusting, he makes his way through the kitchen and toward the source of the rotting smell, trying not to look directly at the people as he searches around them for any gun tha
t might have been used. Seeing nothing that resembles a weapon of any kind, it suddenly occurs to him that there's something missing — blood. There's none on the carpet, or on their clothing for that matter — and although their bodies are too decomposed to tell for sure how they died, from the looks of their twisted limbs and the wounds on their torsos, it appears that at least a couple of them were horribly mutilated before they were placed here, as if pieces of their flesh were carved away from the bone.

  Whatever this was, it was certainly no suicide.

  Desperate to get out of the house, and for the smell of fresh air, Curtis leaves the house and looks back at their new, temporary home next door, and considers going back to his family before he ventures even further away. The bodies that he just found, however cruel their deaths might have been, obviously happened months ago though, and he left the .38 revolver with Sarah for protection. He closes his eyes and breathes in deeply, trying to shut out everything except for the sound of the ocean waves and the seagulls in the background, and reminds himself that his family are better off staying exactly where they are. With his nerves a little more calm, he keeps walking down the path toward another house, this one in shambles and covered in decades worth of brush and rusty wind chimes — the latter of which are filling the air with a hectic sound that's more chaotic than soothing.

  The place is surrounded with a simple welded wire livestock fence, with one gate that's fastened with a padlock. The fencing looks as though someone has tried climbing on it, but Curtis can't tell for certain whether it's recent or not — or whether it was possibly an animal that did it.

  Grabbing onto one of the metal posts, he steadies himself and climbs easily over the wire, then walks up to the front door slowly, careful not to make any noise as he makes his way up the half-rotten wooden steps. Through the windows, he can tell that this place is different than the last, with a relatively clean interior despite the wretched upkeep that the outside has received. The handle is locked, but with a gentle tap with the end of his bat, he breaks the built-in window in the door and exposes the small living room beyond. The inside of this house is musty, much like every other place they've been to recently, but it shares other similarities as well. There's virtually no food in sight, aside from a few open packages of dry pasta and stale cereal — and there's a body that's not much more than a skeleton, falling halfway out of the bed and onto the floor.