Page 6 of Them

The man walked in slow silence. He knew that his pace could be quickened, but it seemed tiring to do so. At night, nothing chased him but time, and even then, the man liked it best when time hurtled forward and lapped him. He was in no rush to get to the Chesapeake, nor to discover what might be waiting there.

Or what might not be. What probably disappeared long ago.

He had no plan for his arrival. There would be ample hours to craft one, though he doubted he would even bother. A plan would be company, a new stranger with distracting concerns in his ear, shielding his senses from what his eyes should be seeking in the darkness. Drag marks. Corpses. Purple snakes of dung.

Or sounds to his ears; they were louder in the dark. Running water. Clink-clink-gash. Voices strained through heavy metallic cords.

A plan would poke at his moon shadow and make the man dumb. So he just walked.

Sometimes he made lists. Lists were quiet. Backpack: canned food, water, lighters, ammunition, WD-40, AA batteries, multi-tool, frayed toothbrush and expired toothpaste, a battery-operated voice recorder with playback function. Jacket pockets: compass, one canteen, leftover dried turkey, a Ziploc bag of deer shit, flashlight, pocket knife. Wrist: watch. Waistband: pistol. Head: his hat.

Florida had signs of life, stockpiled food present but not plentiful, as if the titanium locust plague had swept through within the past two years or so. That was two winters ago now.

Then he walked to Georgia and South Carolina, where people had been dead for a little longer. Less time to consume. North Carolina was a quiet place. The man would not predict Virginia. Predictions were as loud and wrong as the people who made them.

Scorpions: bigger, faster, replicating, armored, packs, cannibals, predators, water, rocks, daylight, death.

The man: small, slow, alone, fleshy, scavenger, prey, water, nocturnal, maybe lonely, alive. Alive. Yes, the man thought, alive. When everyone else was not. What’s the difference?

The bunker, the man considered, but he knew that was an easy answer. Plenty of people in plenty of places had bunkers, but plenty of folks had been dug from the ground like night crawlers, their shelters pried open like cans of the Jolly Green Giant’s corn by jolly black beasts. He’d seen the metal and concrete frames torn out of the ground. Eviscerated like dog toys.

Add to the list: can dig, can penetrate, can smell. Can smell, with something. The man didn’t know where their olfactory glands were. He didn’t know about their ears, either, but they could definitely hear. Why else would they sing those horrible sunrise songs that somehow harmonized with the birds, stupid birds who seemed to have no idea that the world was dead?

No, not dead, just… different. Theirs now. We had our slice of millennia. Never learned to share.

The gaping brilliance of their eyes, each like a thrusting whirlpool, told the man that the Scorpions preferred one sense above all else: sight. So the bunker was not the difference, but it helped. Perhaps it was because he’d sought shelter the day after New York burned, when the southernmost monster sightings were in Kentucky. Did they smell his cowardice and leave him be? Or maybe it was because he had stolen his safety, left the bunker’s owner to rot into a distraction. A decaying decoy to keep them busy. But the man had long decided that the only difference was he came out alive and everyone else was dead.

The night following the stay in Mr. and Mr. North Carolina Farmhouse’s bed was full of nothing. The sole disturbance was the audible trickle of a running creek somewhere to the east. The sound of water babbling over rocks and falling onto itself was as faint as a whisper, but refused to disappear.

The man’s steps slowed, both in thought and out of caution. Plans had a time and place, he supposed, but they came easiest and quietest when coupled with immediate need. So, he would wait. He would walk and wait.

The overhead moon was waning. This was good. This reassured the man. The world moved faster in total darkness. The earth dug its oars deep into tar-black water and paddled forward, toward pink skies and glassy waves, eager to escape the absence of Brother Moon.

We lose. We really lose. That sticks with me. When I began reading, I looked up online lists of best books. Objective declarations of them. It’s not like I had anyone to ask. I found Faulkner. Morrison. Shakespeare. Jackson. García Márquez. War and Peace and Moby-Dick. I loved a few, enjoyed most, but some were slick things. Slick things that didn’t hang their hats on my head or stay for a cup of joe. Nothing that challenged the fear I held over myself. I learned to doubt myself, yet couldn’t find the courage to see the man in the mirror as anything but large and frightening. As a soldier.

But we lose. Mice-people clinging to fake words forged from radio static, because what else do you do when you lose? We lose and three-pronged plagues sleep in my bed and cook me breakfast because I gave them my one and only spare key.

The man eventually came upon another house, one largely untouched by the elements.

This time, there was a note on the front door. He cupped a hand around his lighter, shielding it from the wanting forest beside the property, and read:

Izzy, we going to Uncle Glen’s. Not safe here. Cell phones not working anymore. Sorry to leave last minute. Remember to drive at night. See you soon. We love you, Mom & Dad.

The unseen creek had begun to speak louder as the man walked farther north, and he could hear it still from the porch of the house. Water was dangerous. He had no map and knew that discovering one detailed enough to show graphite-thin county cricks was a pipe dream. If the creek’s path crossed his own, as echoes suggested, then he did not know how far west it might stretch or how long it would take to circumnavigate.

He’d come across this same dilemma before, but only when he was traveling through suburbs or cities. Places with tall bridges that easily concealed the step-by-step crawl of a 190-pound man.

Or was he 180 now? Surely. Seventies, probably. Could it even be sixties? He knew he’d lost weight. Canned food was plentiful, but it wasn’t a cafeteria, and the meaning of “plentiful” had evolved, as many words had.

He went about his usual sweep of the house, drawing his pistol and checking room to room, though now the pack remained on his person, the ritual altered.

As he searched the house, he weighed his options. To circumnavigate the creek ahead or to find a way over it. To walk the safe and inexorably slow path or jump a pool of sharks that could sprout tripod legs and give chase. If there even were any. There may not be.

Upon ensuring that nobody was home, the man left his belongings in the bedroom and returned outside. He lifted his gaze skyward; the moon was now a paltry thing. He had little knowledge of lunar cycles other than what had been required of him in high school science classes. It waned to nothing and waxed to full. Tidally locked. One half in eternal sunshine, the other in some forever night. Or maybe it just rotated at the same pace as Earth. He wasn’t sure.

The man was suddenly grateful for belonging to a planet with an axis of rotation. What happened in Alaska? Where it could be day for days and night for weeks? The bunker’s Wi-Fi hadn’t lasted long enough for him to find out.

What did they think of the cold? Could it be safe in the Arctic reaches? If they were blue-blooded beasts who sunbathed? There had to be a safe place somewhere. The man thought he might like to find one of those.