Grayland Read online

  “Hey, stop!” He pushes Christine off to the side, hiding her from sight, then crouches down and aims his gun up the stairs. “We’re not going to hurt you, we just need a place to stay for the night.”

  “Is that the same person, or someone else?” Christine asks.

  “I don’t know, I think it’s someone else. It looked like an older guy.” There’s a long few minutes of silence, and then the sound of glass breaking, followed by a painful scream. George climbs the first few steps and then stops. “Listen, I’m coming up, don’t do anything stupid!” He climbs the rest of the way up, his side throbbing in agony, then motions for Christine to stay put. When he reaches the top he can see a man standing in front of a broken window, bleeding profusely from his forearm. He’s dressed normally, wearing a clean-looking winter coat and blue jeans.

  “Stay back!” the man screams.

  George aims his gun at the floor, but still keeps it in his grip. “We’re not sick, let us help you…”

  “Is someone else with you?”

  “My daughter, she’s downstairs.” He puts the gun into his pocket, then holds his hands up. “Can you let me look at that arm? You’re gonna bleed out if it keeps up like that up.”

  The man looks skeptical, but he takes a few steps toward George, and then the door at the end of the hall downstairs begins to rattle again, and the man hurries back to the window and forces his way through it, cutting his neck and leg in the process. George runs over to see if he can save him, but he’s already on the ground and hobbling his way across the highway in the direction of the church. Christine stands next to her father as they watch the man desperately try to run, but then he falls as the crack of a gunshot fills the air. Both George and Christine drop to the floor as they hear two more shots ring out.

  “What is that sound?” Christine whispers.

  George hears it too, a low scraping sound coming from the street. He slowly peeks up over the window sill, and sees the man being dragged across the street and into the church on the other side, his fingers hopelessly trying to grab onto the asphalt roadway to save himself. Once inside, there’s another gunshot, and then the door slams shut.

  “We can’t stay here,” George whispers.

  “Dad, you need to rest…”

  “As soon as the sun goes down, that guy is coming back — and there’s no door that’s going to stop him.”

  CHAPTER 6

  HIGHWAY 105: DAY 3

  As nerve-wracking and challenging as their boat trip to Grays Harbor was, Larry actually finds himself missing the freedom of the open waters. He was never really one for being cooped up in any one place for too long, and living in the cabin throughout this last winter was beginning to take its toll on him — especially when they were living so closely to a marina. The gathering missions that they’ve been on have helped, they at least got him out of the cramped conditions of the Lockwood’s place — but no matter where they went, no matter how far off the beaten path they searched, they still found themselves surrounded by the infected. Although he’s aware that each trip into the neighborhood is potentially dangerous, it still hasn’t stopped him from steadily increasing their frequency, if for no other reason than to eliminate his own boredom.

  Beth was handling the situation better than he thought she would, but he also knows that deep down she still hadn’t fully come to terms with Jake’s disappearance. He sometimes catches her staring down the driveway whenever she thinks that she’s alone, waiting for him to come back into their lives again, and at the end of each day she becomes quiet and distant, only to wake up the next day refreshed again. It’s a sad and monotonous routine that seems to be working for the time being, most likely due to Sarah’s thoughtful and subtle distractions. Both of them have suffered similar traumas — being separated from a loved one, and knowing there’s an excellent chance they’ll never know what really happened to them. Beth’s particular situation, however, is different in one important way — her husband is close-by, and has a map that leads directly back to the cabin.

  He’s hoping that this trip, however inconvenient that it may be, might break both of them from the mental and emotional rut that they’ve found themselves in — and as he maneuvers through the maze of broken down southbound cars and garbage on the highway outside of Grayland, he takes his eyes off of the road for just a second to glance over at Beth, who hasn’t talked since they left the cabin.

  “What are you thinking about?” he asks.

  “Nothing,” she replies, still staring out of her window at the ocean.

  “Okay, what are you looking at?”

  “Larry, please, can we just not talk for a while?”

  He looks over at her again, and notices a tear running down her cheek. “I’m sorry, but no, we need to figure some things out — like where in the hell are we taking her?”

  “Somewhere far away,” she says under her breath.

  “Well, we’re gonna need to be a little more specific.” He points toward the back of the car, and begins to whisper. “Just make sure you don’t say anything too loudly, Curtis thinks it’s best if she doesn’t know where she is. I think he’s probably right.”

  “I don’t think she can hear us in the trunk. Besides, she doesn’t have…” Cutting her sentence off abruptly, she turns around and looks behind them. “Stop the car!”

  After slamming on the brakes and looking in the rear-view mirror, Larry watches the road and waits for something to appear, but he doesn’t see anything. “What did you see?”

  “There was a house back there… I thought I saw a woman out front.”

  “We’ve been seeing a lot of them out in the daylight lately, it’s probably nothing.”

  “She was weeding.”

  “Weeding? As in gardening…?”

  “I think so.”

  Tempted to just keep moving, Larry looks back through the trees and brush and tries to get a good look at the house with the mysterious post-apocalyptic landscaper, but he can only vaguely make out a roof line towering above the pine trees about two-hundred feet back.

  “We can’t just ignore it,” Beth tells him. “If there’s even a chance of…”

  “I know,” he says, cutting her off. Checking the time on his watch, he places the car in reverse and begins backing up to the pitted and worn-out gravel driveway in front of the two-story light pink house. There’s nobody in the yard, weeding or otherwise, but the lawn and flowerbeds surrounding the home are in immaculate condition, complete with freshly pruned fruit trees and rose bushes.

  “This is where you saw her?”

  “Yeah, she was kneeling over the flowerbed next to the steps.”

  Larry pulls the car into the driveway, then makes his way slowly to a parking space in front of the detached garage which sits beside the house. As soon as the car stops, he can hear the subtle thumps of Amanda kicking against the lid of the trunk, a noise that he hopes doesn’t cause any trouble if it’s heard by somebody else.

  “I’ll check it out,” Beth says, opening her door.

  “No, we’ll both do it,” Larry says, as he shuts the car off and gets out. “How should we handle this?”

  “Knock on the door.”

  “With our guns drawn?”

  “Just keep it in your pocket.”

  Beth walks toward the front door, with Larry only two steps behind her, both of them looking around the yard carefully. As she makes her way up the steps and onto the porch, she can see movement in the window next to the door. Larry lifts his hand to knock, but Beth grabs his hand before he gets the chance and points inside. On the other side of the house, in what appears to be a kitchen, they can see a woman walking around quickly and conversing with someone seated at the table.

  “They look normal,” Larry whispers, still hearing Amanda’s incessant kicking.

  “Yeah, they do. Go ahead and knock.” He knocks a few times, but Beth doesn’t see any difference in their behavior. “Do it again, but louder — I don’t think they
heard you.” He knocks again, this time hard enough to rattle the door — but again, no reaction. The woman picks something off of the counter and places it into a wall oven, then stands at the sink.

  “Come on, lets go around to the back door,” Larry says, leading the way on a concrete footpath that surrounds the house. As he climbs up onto the back porch and approaches the kitchen window, he lifts up his hand to wave at the woman on the other side of the pane, but stops himself when he looks behind her. The man sitting at the table, the man that she’s been having a conversation with for the past several minutes, is nothing but a dried out corpse that’s been propped up in a chair and set in front of the counter. Larry looks back at the woman, who appears to be in her late-twenties or perhaps thirties, and notices that she’s washing a filthy pan in the sink, going through the motions of scrubbing it with a cloth — except there’s no water running, and no cloth in her hand. He freezes when she looks up at the window and gazes in his direction, but she looks right through him as if he doesn’t even exist.

  “Beth, let’s get out of here…” he says, backing up slowly before turning around. Beth is facing the ocean, with a look of horror on her face. “Beth, what’s wrong?” She points toward the beach, where around a dozen massive container ships and at least two naval vessels have run aground, one of them turned on its side directly on the beach. In the distance he can see more ships, up and down the coastline, all of them likely headed for the same doomed fate.

  “It’s really happening everywhere, isn’t it?” Beth asks, her voice shaken.

  Still nervous about the woman in the kitchen behind them, Larry walks down off of the porch and down the pathway to the top of the dunes, where they have a clear view of the scene in front of them. He takes the binoculars out of his pocket and looks at the ships one at a time, seeing no sign of any activity until he looks at one of the container ships. On the bow, he sees someone moving around, dragging their feet in an all-too-familiar gait — their body stark naked.

  “Do you see anything?” asks Beth.

  “No. Come on, let’s keep moving.”

  Hearing Larry and Beth get back into the car, Amanda stops kicking and curls up onto her side instead, her feet feeling sore and cold for the first time in months. She’s been experiencing the deeply buried feelings of regret that are slowly working their way to the surface with each passing day. Her mind, once clouded with confusion and tangled memories, is beginning to clear — even as the physical symptoms of the virus appear to worsen.

  She’s known for some time that she’s been inflicted with the virus, a fact that became all too obvious when she began coughing up blood shortly before meeting Curtis. Why she didn’t turn into one of the other lost souls wandering in the streets she still doesn’t completely understand, but she knows that her mind is finally beginning to focus again, and as it does, she’s left with the horrible reality that her actions have caused — and the mental anguish that comes with it.

  Her life, from her perspective anyway, has never been easy. She was abandoned by her birth mother at a young age, and still carries a resentment with her that shields her from any real emotional attachment to friends or relatives. It became even worse when she was enrolled in school, when she quickly became an outcast in a place that had little sympathy for tortured souls, and the bullying that ensued caused an even greater rift between reality and the delusions in her mind. In time, she unconsciously learned to show people the emotions they expected from her, even if it was only a facade.

  The memory of killing Diane, her step-mother, has never really bothered her, and to this day it still doesn’t — but the murder of her father, and the imprisonment of her brother that led to his untimely death, haunts her thoughts every night. Their deaths triggered a chain of events that have shaped her life ever since, and in ways that she couldn’t possibly have anticipated. She misses their presence, their support, and most importantly, their loyalty to her. If times were different, if the world still looked the same as it did a year ago, their deaths wouldn’t weigh so heavily on her mind. Today, however, she’s cold and hungry, and excruciatingly lonely. For that reason, and for no other, she regrets killing them — even if she doesn’t feel the least bit of guilt for doing so.

  She thought she’d found the answer in Ben, who seemed more than willing to except her as family. Looking back on it, she feels foolish for believing that he ever cared for her, and the fact that she allowed him to escape back to his family is yet another regret that she feels compelled to do something about.

  Focusing once again on her surroundings, she listens closely to Larry and Beth talk as they pull out onto the highway once again. When the car hits a large pothole in the road, followed by a rough dip that nearly causes them to lose control, she’s comforted by the fact that they haven’t traveled all that far. She knows this road perfectly, and she knows they’re still north of Grayland.

  CHAPTER 7

  COHASSETT BEACH: DAY 3

  It’s late in the morning, and Matt can’t help but notice how empty and lonely the cabin feels without Larry and Beth there. They left early, with only a brief goodbye before they set off on their journey south with Amanda, a trip Matt was certain would end with their deaths. Ben had talked to him very little about what he’d been through, but his dad talked about Amanda as though she were the devil himself.

  During the few hours that he was around her though, Matt didn’t really get the impression that she was completely evil, she’d even giggled at some of his admittedly bad jokes. He had to remind himself how sweet and caring Clara Embree had been when they wandered into her home a few months back — a kindness that ended abruptly when she tried to kill both his mother and himself. His father says that both Amanda and Clara suffer from the same psychosis, and that it’s brought on by the virus, a theory he’s repeated on numerous occasions. Matt’s own belief, however, is that there was something wrong with Amanda even before the viral outbreak occurred. She had bragged to Ben about killing her family when Westport first started to evacuate, but she also claimed that her occasional symptoms were simply allergies, a condition that she’d suffered from her entire life. If everything she said is true, that would mean she murdered her parents and brother without any influence from the illness, a detail that makes her seem even more terrifying than before — if it’s true. It’s hard to trust a lunatic, especially one that’s trying to kill you.

  With his mom and dad both outside, it’s Matt’s job to keep an eye on Ben, to make sure he doesn’t do something foolish like wander off into the woods or wear down the batteries on the radio. So far though, all he seems to do since returning to the cabin is read comic books and old worn-out western novels that were left in the cabin from years ago.

  “Did you want to do something?” Matt asks him.

  “No, that’s okay.”

  “Are you sure? I’m getting kinda bored.”

  “What do you wanna do?” Ben replies, putting the comic down for just a second, before shoving his nose back into it again.

  “I don’t know. We could play cards…”

  Showing absolutely zero enthusiasm, Ben places his comic book on the bed and slumps into one of the chairs at the table, waiting wearily for his brother to get the deck of cards from the cupboard.

  As he shuffles the deck and tries to decide which game to play, Matt glances up at his brother and notices that the normal twinkle in his eyes has dimmed. He looks defeated.

  “Are you feeling okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m just tired. Why?”

  “You just don’t seem the same, that’s all.” He starts splitting the cards into two piles, figuring that a game of ‘War’ is probably mindless enough for an uncomfortable moment like this. Hearing no response, he asks… “Was Amanda really scary to be with?”

  “I don’t really wanna talk about it.”

  “That’s okay, you don’t have to.”

  The two of them play for several minutes, neither of them talking, just tediously l
aying the cards onto the table, paying no attention to the few rules that exist. Then, suddenly, Ben stops playing.

  “What’s wrong?” Matt asks.

  “You know how Dad said that everyone is probably dead…?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s not true.” He looks up at his brother, who’s looking back at him with a confused look on his face. “The city was full of people. Dad and I could see them across the water, doing awful things to each other.”

  Matt swallows hard. “All of them?”

  Ben nods.

  “They’re all like Amanda then?”

  He shakes his head, and in a frightened voice… “No, she’s worse.”

  Overwhelmed by the events of yesterday, and her mind still reeling from the mixed emotions of it all, Sarah sits on the front porch swing and stares down the driveway, still in shock that her family is alone in the world once again. In her opinion, which nobody has cared to ask, the entire disagreement between Curtis and Beth is a gray area, and neither of them are necessarily right or wrong in their thinking. There’s no doubt that Amanda is a ruthless killer, whose sole purpose in life seems to be destroying everyone that Sarah cares about, but she’s also a little girl, and the idea of murdering her, even in self-defense, makes Sarah sick to her stomach. Six months ago, back in the days of social services, hospitals, therapists, and medications — the decision of what to do with her would have been made by someone trained to handle such things, and it certainly wouldn’t involve her death. Those people, however, are all either dead or insane, and the burden of what happens to her now rests on the decency and morals of Beth and Larry. Curtis had brought up the idea of leaving the cabin after they left, which she was vehemently opposed to at the time — but as the night progressed, and she listened to the rambling mutterings of a young girl from the corner of the room, she finally convinced herself that protecting her family had to come before anything else.