Page 2 of Them

Please come inside and rest with me. I mean no harm. —Larry

The ink looked like it’d been left out in the rain, even though it had been dry for the past week. He’d felt a flutter in his throat, burning with the desire to sit down and look someone in their human eyes and shake their hand. That’s all. Just shake their hand. Anyone’s. Anything but more skeletons. Let him meet anyone but a skeleton, just once.

Yet the alternative to a skeleton was not a living person. No. It was decomposition. Skin and flesh shedding. The alternative to a shakable hand was Larry’s maggot-teeming digits that still lazily gripped a burgundy-stained knife. The alternative to eyes or empty sockets, the foul secret option, was the slick jelly drip protruding from Larry’s drooping head. The nectar of the dead.

It reeked like rotten eggs cooked in desperate hunger, forgotten gardens of putrid cabbage and garlic, the crawling insects that had slowly made their way into the house and into Larry’s pores. Yes, the man preferred the outdoor skeletons—or almost anything—to that.

Larry’s final note, weighed down by a large candle on a nearby coffee table, spoke nothing of boats or hope. It was near indecipherable, save for a lone repeated word that the man could make out etched onto the paper:

THEM

He ripped himself away from the awful memory and turned back to the farmhouse to perform his usual ritual, setting his backpack down on the porch so the goods within wouldn’t rattle around. A pistol slipped out from his waistband as the other hand reached for the door. It was unlocked.

He entered and swept the first floor, though with little caution. Next time, more likely than not, the man wouldn’t bother leaving his pack outside. There was never anyone to hear him anyway.

He found what he expected: dust and rubble disturbed only by his own footprints. He retrieved his pack and ventured out to the backyard, where he located a well-water pump. The spigot required a rusted reminder that not everyone who needed it was gone, but the man had learned how to jog the ancient contraptions awake. Without a word, he refilled his canteens.

Yet his mind wandered. How much ground had he covered during the night? How many miles in the last month? Since he first got up and walked away from the flattened ruins that used to be a small Florida college town? He wasn’t at all sure.

“Enough that I,” he muttered to himself with slow, indecisive words, “have almost forgotten how to speak.” Like a frail pup incapable of balancing its own immense weight, the sentence limped away into the night. No echo returned.

The sound of his own voice surprised the man. The fact that anything beyond coughs and yawns came out at all surprised him, but he didn’t want to admit that to himself. It was too cliché. Of course, he thought, of course I don’t talk when I’ve no one to talk with. He didn’t want to become a trope, a character clinging to a tattered paperback yarn.

Next to the pump was an overturned bucket. The letters and logos had long since faded, but the faded orange color suggested it might have been a Home Depot original once upon a time. He kicked it away for seemingly no reason.

He didn’t know when he’d find the next working pump. He could talk to wells, yes, but he wasn’t very good at it. Rust is a romantic, deaf to all suitors but time.

He returned to the house and checked for whatever supplies remained. When the man first began his nightly walks, he’d been shocked to find that canned goods were not a scarcity. He didn’t have to grapple with harriers or get into shoot-outs with other desperate scavengers. He simply walked in, took what he needed, and slept until nightfall. He was never a bother or a burden because there was never anybody home.

As was most often the case, this house’s pantries were replete with a decent bounty. After news from Bangor broke, people hoarded everything imaginable, waiting for… what was it? All this shit to blow over? Some luck they’d had with that. Most didn’t last long enough to dig into their treasure troves. What came for humanity was too fast. Too exponential.

As had become his routine, he stored what he could fit inside his pack and left the rest to tick away toward their inevitable expiration. His haul came out at three cans of spinach, two cans of tomatoes, and a large tin of honey-roasted peanuts. Wasn’t much, but it was enough. He never sacrificed space occupied by water for food.

Besides, there would be more along the way. There always was.

The house was the sum of wooden planks woven together long ago. The man imagined that once upon a time it had looked neat and well made, but the passage of years and weather had warped the walls. Curdled them into the arched spines of ghosts in the crawl space.

The wind whipped between the boards, yet the house itself stood still and steady. The man, however, was perfectly aware that nothing could stand still. Everything was always turning. Earth always rolling.

Daylight drew closer.

And daylight was death.

That was the one rule above all others. The beasts, in all their obsidian splendor, seemed to fear the dark; they never ventured out from their nests once the sun had fallen. He didn’t know why, and he didn’t care. The man knew only that he was more afraid of them.

From his backpack he produced a small crimson multi-tool. He used its miniature hammerhead to strip loose nails from the flimsy living room floorboards. The man collected a few of the fragile planks, then stacked them, four in total, atop one another. He took a fifth board and leaned it against the wood pile. In a practiced motion, the man hopped onto the middle of the leaning board, snapping it in two. He repeated this process until he had ten half pieces.

There was a flashlight in his pack, but the batteries could have been dead, for all the man knew. He had a suspicion that all batteries might be dying soon, their shelf lives far from infinite. Not that it much mattered. He’d become a nocturnal thing now, and the stars and the moon lent him more than enough light on clear nights.

He went out back again and returned with scraps of dead leaves and twigs, and then once more, this time to collect a mound of loose dirt with the bucket he’d kicked. The man spread the dirt into a pair of tidy piles on the tile floor and fashioned two small log cabins atop the soil, stuffing them full of kindling. The man found two pots—every house had pots—and filled them with water from the spigot out back.

One last trip from the backyard and he set the pots down atop the cookers. From his backpack’s zipper pocket, the man retrieved a Bic lighter, one of many he’d grabbed from a derelict 7-Eleven just over the Georgia line.

The man held the translucent red object in his right hand. He flicked it on and off. On and off. The flame jumped to life each time. He studied it for a moment, watched the shadows in the room begin to swim and waver in tune with the lighter’s miniature blaze.

He felt like hugging the warmth. Dancing with it. The motion and the heat and the rhythm. The flickering flame made him feel like there might actually be someone else in the room with him. A ridiculous thought, but the man allowed himself the occasional ration of irrationality. After all, a bit of insanity a day keeps the past away, but today the gaseous woman with all her warm and welcoming curves that lived inside his lighter wasn’t enough to distract him.

Especially from the memory of that 7-Eleven.