Ray awakes gasping for air, sucking it greedily into his lungs.
The light, so bright it is blinding.
He does not know anything; it is like being born.
Mysterious dark shapes coalesce into normal things. A television set. A bookshelf packed with books, knickknacks and a bowling trophy. A table lamp. A large picture window covered in smeared handprints, making the world outside appear shrouded in gray fog.
He closes his eyes and tries to return to those warm currents, but his curiosity betrays him, forcing him up into a sitting position. Throbbing pain at the base of his skull makes him groan. He looks at his dirty hands and remembers how he got here.
I’m supposed to be dead. How long have I been on this couch?
The light outside—Christ, it’s the sun.
He survived the night. The Infected are gone. He touches the monster in his side, now just a raw, achy swelling covered in flaky skin. His touch ignites a horrible itch inside the growth, which scratching just makes worse.
Fine. Itch all you want, you little bastard. I beat you. I won. I’m alive.
His body rejected the growth, or perhaps the growth rejected him. Too much smoking or drinking, who knows. He never heard of someone becoming infected by a hopper and surviving it. Then again, after Infection, Ray’s world got a whole lot smaller. Maybe people survive it all the time in Colorado. Maybe California has no epidemic at all. He wouldn’t know.
The floor is covered with empty bottles and jars of food and multiple sets of muddy footprints. People brought him food and water while he slept. His mouth tastes like raw sewage and his teeth feel mossy. His pants are crusted with his own waste. The ammonia smell of his piss makes his eyes water. Something is not right here. How long have I been out?
Feeling frail and shaky, he peels off his clothes, hardened to the consistency of cardboard, and retches at the sight of his waste caked in his pants and clinging to his ass and thighs. It feels good to be naked, however; the house is hot and his body is covered in a slick sheen of sweat.
After gaining his feet, he plods into the kitchen, half expecting to see his ghostly mother doing dishes in the sink, and pulls a squat, ugly looking steak knife from a drawer. Safety first. The window is still open and the outside air smells fresh and clean. He finds a bathroom and spends several minutes examining himself in the mirror with blunt surprise. A gaunt lunatic stares back at him. His acne-scarred cheeks are sunken. His handlebar mustache is now part of a beard. His shaggy hair has grown even longer, greasy and lank, a full-on Jesus mane.
Has he been here for days, weeks? Who was feeding him this whole time?
I’m alive, says the leering lunatic in the mirror.
Dude, you are seriously fucked up.
His caregivers left him two buckets of water. He’s not sure if these are any good for drinking but they look all right for washing. Squatting in the tub, Ray soaks a toilet scrubber with tepid water and liquid soap and scrubs his body until the water turns black and he feels somewhat clean. He scrapes his mossy teeth with his fingernails, gargles and spits the mess into the sink.
Upstairs, he finds a T-shirt and jeans that fit, and puts them on. His STEELERS hat is riddled with charred holes and stinks like old grease, but he puts it on anyway. He checks out the neighborhood through a window. A car is parked at an angle across both lanes of the street below, all of its doors open. The asphalt glistens; it rained recently. The lawns and bushes on the other side of the road look overgrown. Beyond, the bridge invites him back to its scenes of horror. The eastern horizon is no longer blackened by the fires of Pittsburgh, but still shimmers with a polluted brown haze. A flicker of movement down in the street grabs his attention.
A large woman dressed in a filthy halter top and sweatpants limps past the car with her hands clenched into fists against her breasts, one of which sags out of her shirt, scratched and bloodstained. Ray watches her, wondering who she was before the bug turned her into a violent maniac. He feels like he understands Anne a little better now; this woman is no longer human, but a malicious, mindless organism wearing the face of a human, like a mask.
The woman pauses, doing the odd jittery neck roll favored by the Infected. Her head, jerking, turns to the window to look right at him, and tilts to the side, like a dog’s.
He leaps aside, his heart hammering in his chest. He expects to hear feet slapping against the asphalt, the rasping bark, the door crashing open, the pounding on the stairs. His eyes take in details of the bedroom, searching for a hiding spot or a weapon.
Nothing happens. Fighting to control his breathing, Ray glances back at the road. The woman is gone. He snorts.
Maybe I look so bad she thought I was one of them.
He trudges downstairs and puts his boots on, still heavy with dried blood, and walks onto the porch. The abandoned houses stand in silence, bugs buzzing in their overgrown lawns. A deer browses in a garden until bolting across a driveway into someone’s backyard. A light breeze dries the sweat on Ray’s face. He closes his eyes and savors being alive.
There is just this. Nothing else. And that makes this good.
He finds his rifle on the side of the house, wet and spotted with rust, and inspects it. He considers finding some oil and a toothbrush and trying to clean the weapon, but decides to leave it in the grass. Cleaning it would take a long time, and besides, it only has a few bullets. With just a few hours of daylight remaining, Ray feels an overwhelming urge to get moving. He was lucky here, but he has the strong feeling his luck has run out. The open road beckons. His steak knife will have to do until he can find better. The road will provide.
Ray checks out the few cars and trucks abandoned on the streets and writes them off as well. He can fix just about anything with wheels, but none of the vehicles he inspects have keys in their ignitions, and, despite his checkered past, he has no idea how to hotwire a car. The idea exhausts him; the only thing that inspires any energy is getting the hell out of this ghost town as soon as possible.
Guess you’re walking, bro. This is going to take a while. You can hit some houses along the way for some supplies. But it’s time to get moving.
Sticking to backyards, he emerges from town to the north and decides to circle through the woods along Route 22, heading west. Back to Camp Defiance.
He pauses as a foghorn booms close, a vibrating sound he can feel deep in his chest. The sound ignites a flock of birds from a tree, black shapes darting through the air. A distant foghorn answers, then another and another, for miles around it seems.
Ray closes his eyes and listens as if they are communicating something he might understand. For the next few minutes, the air becomes filled with the melodic song of the monsters, a symphony of sounds like tubas and didgeridoos, plaintive and hopeful. Ray smiles, tingling from the vibrations. Their song speaks to him.
We are not alone, it appears to be saying. We are afraid and we may die, but we are not alone.
♦
Shucking his Army surplus backpack heavy with cans and bottles, Ray tramps through a garden eating raw peas and any tomatoes spared by the insects. Unable to eat more, he stuffs his cheek full of Copenhagen dip and lets out a satisfied sigh. He has twenty miles to walk, which will take him two, maybe three days in his condition and carrying the weight of the pack on his shoulders. Climbing over a barbed wire fence, he angles west and starts marching through the trees, knowing Route 22 is about a hundred yards on his left. At the base of an old sawtooth oak, he picks up a good walking stick, a long wizardly staff that helps him find a steady hiking rhythm.