The Ghosts of Winter

by Christopher Coleman

  Emerson and Ryan were gone.

  “Emerson,” I whispered, immediately feeling my heart accelerate to a jackhammer’s pace.

  I walked quickly to the back door, my jaw agape in disbelief, my brain spiraling into panic, displaying images of what my world would look like in the next ten minutes when I couldn’t locate my two oldest kids, knowing every second that passed made their survival less likely.

  Charlotte was floating between the bedrooms, folding laundry and tidying up each inch of the place for the hundredth time since we’d arrived, manically distracting herself, seeming to have already begun the descent into fear and hopelessness. News of her missing children would send her into an uncontrollable panic.

  I stepped onto the porch and called Emerson’s name again, receiving only the disinterested chirping of sparrows. I dashed back inside and punched in the code of the gun locker, and when the light lit green, I spun the spoked handle and opened the safe, quickly reaching for the top shelf and the .357 magnum. It was one of three handguns in the locker, along with a pair of rifles, a shotgun, and a few other tactical weapons and supplies, all of which I had either collected or had been gifted to me over the years. It wasn’t an armory exactly, but it was enough firepower to create some space when the time came for us to go.

  I was back outside in seconds and down the porch stairs in two bounding steps. I sprinted to the pier, praying one of my kids would emerge from some place by the water that had been hidden from view. But the pier was flat, the immediate landscape at the beach barren; there was nowhere to hide.

  How could I have allowed them outside? The pier was close to the house, a stone’s throw really, but still, it was far enough that I wouldn’t be able to reach them in time if one of the Corrupted suddenly appeared.

  Splash!

  Emerson emerged from the lake like a breaching whale, breathing as if she’d just swum the English Channel underwater. A second behind her was Ryan.

  “Yes!” Ryan exclaimed. “I told you! You’ll never beat me!”

  Emerson continued to pant as she crawled to the shore, exiting the water in a shivering spasm before picking up a towel and drying her hair. “Whatever,” she answered, and then laid the towel across her shoulders.

  “Emerson!”

  Emerson shrieked and then stumbled three steps backward, her eyes bulging as she tried to catch her breath, finally finding and focusing on me. “Dad! What’s wrong?!”

  “What are you guys doing?” I barked.

  “We’re swimming. What...what do you mean?”

  I closed my eyes and lowered my voice, relieved “I told you lunch was coming.”

  “You said ten minutes!”

  I took a deep breath and turned, and then I began my walk back to the cabin. “Well it’s ready now. And after you’re done, we’re going to take a drive.”

  MY INTENTION WAS TO drive to Drew’s first, but as I buckled Ryan into his booster chair, I figured it best to head in the opposite direction, to the overlook where, historically, cell reception could be had. I hadn’t spoken to anyone outside the cabin—other than Lee at Drew’s—in almost four days, and, aside from the fact that we were all in the dark about whether the civilized world was still functioning, if things had stabilized and the world had been returned to some sense of order, I didn’t want anyone thinking David Willis and his family had been abducted and left for dead. Our car was gone, that was true, indicating we had left town of our own free will, but that didn’t necessarily mean we weren’t in one kind of trouble or the other.

  I veered left into the dirt lot of the overlook and parked, and my eyes instantly went to the gas gauge. Three-quarters. According to the monitor, that meant we had just under three hundred miles remaining, and I doubted there was a drop of fuel left in either of the two raggedy pumps in front of Drew’s.

  “I’ll be right back,” I said and then exited the car, walking the short distance to the edge of the low barrier wall. I paused a moment and stared out over the hillscape below me, across the waters of Lake Sloman to the lush shoreline on the opposite side of the lake. I looked to my right at the trailhead opening of Flint Trail, a twenty-three-mile hiking path that snaked through the Arkansas wilderness before eventually ending at a tributary of the Mississippi River.

  I pulled my phone from my pocket, and, as I had with the fuel level in the Explorer, I noted the battery life of the Samsung, which displayed fifty-eight percent. That was sloppy. Stupid and careless. There was no excuse for my phone not to be a hundred percent charged. We still had power at the cabin, and electricity was an asset to which I clung incessantly now, almost minute to minute throughout the day; and yet here I was now, clutching a phone that was barely half-filled with the precious resource.

  But I also knew the phone was just a symbol. Having a working cell wasn’t going to make a difference when everything came crashing down. Electricity was what mattered. It was everything, really. The key to civilization (at least as far as America was concerned). It was a belief that seemed to come along in every newborn’s bloodstream nowadays, as if it were programmed into our DNA. It was a fact everyone wouldn’t admit to, perhaps, but that didn’t make it any less true. Electricity kept us warm and cool, fed and informed. It was the difference between culture and chaos.

  And the beginning of the demise was coming soon; I knew it without a doubt. The day was coming when the rooms in the cabin would suddenly go dark and the a/c compressor would exhaust its hiss of death; when the water pump and outlets, refrigerator and faucets, would fail as the power plants ceased sending voltage to the county’s transformers.

  And yet, despite my innate belief of the life-giving qualities of electricity, I had remained complacent. Every hour that passed with an electric current flowing into the cabin was one more that prevented me from going into full survival mode. As my hope for society’s resuscitation grew, my defenses dipped, and that was a recipe for death.

  I touched the name Lyle on my contact list, and at the end of the fourth ring, I hung up. Not unusual. My brother rarely answered his phone, and we hadn’t spoken in over a year anyway. There was no animosity really, just a drifting apart of two brothers who had little in common other than their parents, both of whom were dead.

  I called Joel next, my best friend, and this time I waited for the voicemail greeting to finish. “Joel, it’s me,” I said, trying to keep my tone steady. “I’m at the cabin. I’ve been off the grid since, what, Saturday, I guess? So...just...I don’t know, give me a call back and, uh, let me...let me know what’s happening.”

  I called three more names on my contact list and each went to voicemail without a single ring, at which point I decided that was enough. Service was out, that was all. The inability to make contact from an overlook in remote Arkansas didn’t mean the rest of the world had been wiped out. Maybe everyone was trying to call me, and the same thing was happening on their end.

  I turned back to the car, where all eyes were focused on me. I dipped my head, avoiding the stares, and then I turned back to the trees across the lake, gathering my senses. “It’s okay,” I said to myself. “Everything will be okay.” I raised my shoulders and turned to walk back to the car, and Charlotte suddenly appeared beside me like a phantom. “Jesus!”

  “No answer?” she asked, her tone knowing.

  I shook my head and frowned. “Nope.”

  “Did your texts come through yet?”

  I shook my head curiously, having not considered my text messages until that moment.

  “Mine just came in.” Charlotte heaved a sigh and then touched her fingertips to her lips, and a second later, two tears, one from each eye, began to drip down her cheeks. “It’s not good, David.”

  I cleared my throat. “When...when did the last one come through?”

  Charlotte pulled out her phone to check the time, and as she did, alerts on my phone started to sound, one after the other, indicating my texts were now beginning to arrive as well. I whipped out the mobile and stare
d at it. Seventeen unread.

  The first was from Charles, a co-worker. Yo D it’s Chuck. Despite the informality of the writing, there was a certain solemnness to the words; no exclamation point after ‘D’ or ‘Chuck.’ Wondering where you are. Lacy’s concerned...End of the world, right? The last sentence contained the type of hyperbole people often used when some event of global consequence occurred, but this time it felt true, as if Charles really believed it.

  Joel’s message was next, and this time I felt that seizure of anxiety in the top of my chest.

  Dave call me. I need your help.

  I scanned the rest, all of which were along the same lines as Charles’, and then I looked up to see Charlotte, who was watching me as I read and was now waiting for me to divulge the revelations coming through.

  “The first couple are...cryptic.” I shrugged. “I don’t know. Questions mostly. What you’d expect.”

  She waited for more from me, and when I gave her nothing, she said, “I got one from Tammy.” Charlotte’s sister; she and her husband lived a hundred fifty miles west of us. “It says, ‘They made it here.’ That’s...that’s all it says.”

  The context was incomplete yet sinister. I tried to sound hopeful. “Meaning...what? They—Tammy and Eric—made it here?”

  Charlotte shook her head slowly. “No, David. It says, ‘they,’ not ‘we.’

  There was no way to know who ‘they’ were—not for sure—but we were both assuming the same answer. “They?” I asked anyway.

  Charlotte shrugged. “I don’t know. That was all she wrote. No punctuation. No emojis. Written like...” Charlotte turned her back to the car and hugged herself as if she’d gotten a sudden chill. I wanted to put my arm around her and bring her close, but I resisted, assuming the kids were still watching and would begin to worry even more than they already were. “It was written like she was in a hurry.”

  “Don’t...don’t read too much into it, Charlotte. You know how texts can be.” And then, “Did you text her back.”

  Charlotte scoffed. “Of course.” She paused and stared out to the lake, shaking her head. “Why did we wait so long to call?” It was a passive aspersion, an indirect way of making me liable for our sudden isolation from our friends and family. I didn’t argue, but I also wasn’t to blame. I never said we shouldn’t come to the overlook; Charlotte could have come at any time. It was a tacit decision, one we had made together.

  “What do you want to do, Char?”

  Charlotte shook her head. “I don’t know,” she whispered.

  “If you want to go see about Tammy, I’m—"

  “No!” She snapped. She swallowed and wiped a tear away quickly, like she was angry at it. “No.”

  “Okay. Okay, you’re right. I agree with that. For now, anyway. But Charlotte, at some point we’re going to have to find out what’s happening.”

  “We have kids, David.”

  I hung my head and sighed as if I hadn’t considered that point. “That’s right. Damn, I forgot about them.”

  I looked up for the smile on Charlotte’s face, but there wasn’t one, only a wide-eyed portrait of disbelief.

  I turned my attention to the sky, considering a plan, and then I said, “Okay, let’s worry about tomorrow tomorrow. Right now, since we’re already out, let’s go see if Drew’s still has anything left. I know we were just there a couple days ago, but...I would just feel better knowing.”

  Charlotte breathed for what seemed like the first time in five minutes, and then she nodded. “Yeah.”

  I began to walk back to the car, but before I took my second step, Charlotte, who was still standing at the edge of the overlook, said, “And David?”

  I stopped and turned. “Yeah?”

  “Let’s agree on one thing now, before we reach the point where there’s no time to discuss it.”

  I nodded. “Sure.”

  “No matter who comes, we don’t let them in.”

  3: The Store

  Drew’s had been abandoned. That much was clear.

  There were no specific signs that the Corrupted had been inside, but the store was a model of demise and destruction. Not entirely looted—I could see loaves of bread and candy and other convenience store items from our position at the front of door—but it had certainly been cast into disarray. The three rows of shelving that lined the small establishment had been toppled to the floor, the cash drawer had been opened and emptied, and a cleaned-out cigarette case welcomed all visitors as they entered the retailer. It could have been the roving mutants from Maripo, I supposed, but from what little I knew about them, that type of organized bedlam didn’t feel right. This was the sign of anarchists, opportunists.

  Charlotte held Nelson close to her thigh as we all stood huddled inside on the welcome mat, staring in disbelief at the mayhem of the store we’d patronized a hundred times before.

  “Jesus, David.”

  “What happened, Dad?” Ryan asked, his voice more indicative of confusion than fear.

  “It looks like they were robbed.”

  “But where are the police?”

  I looked to Charlotte and frowned. The question was telling as to the state of the world.

  “And where is Mr. Lee? Or Mr. Drew?”

  The proprietors of the store were nowhere to be seen, and at my son’s question, my eyes automatically flashed to the small ‘Employees Only’ door behind the counter. I wondered if they were inside currently, huddling in fear from whatever band of terror had ravaged their store. That didn’t fit them though, particularly not Lee, who, though friendly enough, always seemed to be bubbling underneath, as if hoping for any reason to let the steam of his rage free.

  “I don’t know.” I reached for the magnum at the small of my back, only touching it to ensure it was still there, and then I quickly moved behind the counter, pausing at the employees’ door for a moment. I considered knocking, to let anyone inside know we were there for business, or to help if we could, but I quickly decided against it and instead began to search the area around the counter and register.

  “What are you looking for dad?” Emerson asked.

  “The switch to activate the gas pumps. Or something. Not really sure how it works, honestly.”

  “Really?” It was Charlotte. “I thought you said there wouldn’t be any gas left.”

  “I didn’t think so, but now that we’re here—and no one else is—it’s worth a shot, right? I mean, if this place was ransacked right after...” I looked at Ryan, who was focused on my words, his lips slightly parted, anticipating. “...right after news of the accident broke—or even yesterday—maybe there wasn’t time for a run on fuel. I mean, how many people come down this road daily under normal circumstances? Not many, I’d guess.”

  I wasn’t familiar with the interior fuel pump switch, but I had my wallet on me, and I figured if I swiped my card in the reader per usual, that could work. “Gather what you can from in here. And not just chips and processed stuff. Those refrigerators look to be working, so we should see what we can salvage from there first. Might as well make use of the stuff while we can. I’m going to fill ‘er up.”

  “We can’t just take this stuff, David.”

  “Why not?”

  “Without paying?”

  I resisted a roll of my eyes and pulled out my wallet, and then I removed two twenties and laid them on the counter. “You’re right. There. Make sure we get our money’s worth.”

  With the interior plan in place, I exited the store and pulled the Explorer to the further of Drew’s two pumps, which, at first glance, was still functioning, as indicated by the digital black numbers on the display. I pressed the Credit button and slid my Mastercard in and out, and within seconds, fuel was flowing from the ground tank and into the one fastened to the undercarriage of my SUV.

  I took a breath and closed my eyes, allowing my mind to drift for a moment to more existential thoughts, examining the fragility of life and how quickly everything could unravel. People seemed
to understand the potential for cataclysm from a viral pandemic or an asteroid strike, or even a nuclear meltdown, but to limit our vulnerability to those few disasters was almost wishful thinking on our part, naïve and ignorant. The truth was: it took very little—a single occurrence—to turn a society upside down, even one as large and complex as America. The accident that resulted in the siege of Warren and Maripo Counties was barely a story when it first happened, and even when the images of the Corrupted first appeared, most viewed the situation as little more than a sideshow, something on the fringes of the culture that would never truly impact them. Perhaps it made people a bit more circumspect—or less, depending on the individual nature of the person—and reminded them that their time on Earth as healthy, cognitive humans was finite and precarious. But no one really believed the creatures from the parking garage would one day appear on their front stoop, or that the only thing they could rely on to last another day was their own instincts for survival.

  And yet, there we were, David Willis and his family of five, only three days since the military had lost control of their perimeter, scavenging for food at a roadside dive in rural Arkansas.

  As the tank filled, I sat in the driver’s seat and turned on the radio. Static. That wasn’t unusual for that area, but I had driven the stretch of highway between the store and the cabin enough to know that reception could be had. It was Arkansas, after all, not Antarctica. I turned the tuner all the way left and started from the beginning of the FM cycle, scrolling slowly through the frequencies, clicking and pausing on each of the tenths digits, allowing a moment at each stop for the signal to arrive. 87.9. 88.1. 88.3. Just a steady stream of pops and white noise, airwaves of nothingness.

  And then I found it, at 94.9, confirmation of the terror that had descended and would be arriving at any moment. No emergency alerts had come through on our cell phones yet, but the local EMS was clear.