Walking Alone

by Bentley Little

  Only sheep.

  That was the other weird thing. There seemed to be sheep everywhere, as though the fence of a nearby ranch had been breached and all of the animals had escaped. There was one standing on the sidewalk, two walking down the middle of the road, one actually lying on the front stoop of a closed hardware store.

  Hayfield was small. Two main streets and four side roads were pretty much all there was. The buildings were in good shape, he noticed as he turned down the largest cross street, but the two cars he encountered both seemed to have fallen into disrepair. Tires were flat, windows covered with dust, and neither model was newer than ten years old.

  Whatever was going on here, he didn’t like it, and he cursed Lee for sending him out on this road trip.

  Louis walked slowly up the block, looking around. Hayfield gave every appearance of being a ghost town.

  The paranoia from those radio rants he’d heard on the road must have seeped into his brain because he started wondering if the people in town had just disappeared, like characters in some Twilight Zone episode.

  He tried his phone again.

  Nothing.

  Maybe everyone was gone. Maybe he was the last person in the world and once he fixed his flat tire, he would be doomed to wander from empty city to empty city, searching for another survivor.

  His flat tire.

  That’s what he needed to focus on. There had to be a garage here or an auto parts store. If he could just find the right-sized tire, or even a wrong-sized tire, anything that would fit on his car, he could get the hell out of here and be on the road again. He was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with Hayfield, and the sooner he could put this creepy town in his rearview mirror, the better it would be.

  He walked up to the next street, turned left, and at the end of the block saw what appeared to be an open garage. A sign identified the building as Cook’s Auto Repair.

  Thank God.

  He was hot, the laptop bag in his hand was getting heavy, and he desperately needed a drink of water. Picking up the pace, Louis strode up the street. He crossed the asphalt lot in front of the building and poked his head into the open garage door. “Hello?”

  He didn’t see anyone, but a Dodge pickup was parked in the bay to his left, while directly in front of him, some sort of 1960s muscle car was up on a lift.

  “Anyone here?” he asked.

  No one answered, but he heard a sound from the darkened rear of the garage, behind the pickup, and made his way back. “Excuse me,” he said. A shadow separated itself from the inky space between the wall and the truck.

  A mechanic?

  A sheep.

  Louis let out a small cry, startled.

  The animal looked at him. It should have been startled, too, but somehow it wasn’t, and Louis slowly backed away. He was not comfortable around animals. He didn’t even like dogs, and being so close to a big wild animal like this (wild animal? Okay, farm animal), made him extremely nervous.

  The sheep continued to look at him in a way that made him think it knew something. That was ridiculous, of course, but he could not shake the feeling that there was awareness in those black eyes, that what should have been a blank animal countenance possessed a sly cognizance.

  He emerged from the garage back into the sunlight, wondering where he should go next, what he should do.

  “Hello!” he yelled as loudly as he could. In a movie, his voice would have echoed through the empty town, but it died instantly here, reaching no farther than the other side of the road.

  First things first. He needed to find something to drink. He had never been so thirsty in his entire life. Before he’d turned down this street, he’d seen a small grocery store on the main road in the direction he’d been heading. Even if this were a ghost town, even if he had to break a window to get in, he should be able to find something there.

  He walked back the way he’d come, turning left at the corner. Even before the grocery store, there was a brick library on the right side of the street, and the door to the building was pulled open as if in invitation. Public buildings always had bathrooms and drinking fountains. As long as the facilities were working, he should be able to get some water, although with the way his luck had been going today, it seemed far more likely that he would encounter nothing but dry drinking fountains, dusty sinks and empty toilets.

  Stepping through the doorway, it occurred to him that this might be a trap, that lawbreaking hillbillies might be lying in wait, having taken over the empty town for criminal purposes. But at this point he was too thirsty to care, and he advanced through the half-lit room past the circulation desk to an alcove containing not one drinking fountain but two! Reaching out, he twisted the silver metal knob, and water bubbled up, arcing into the air and hitting the grated drain.

  It was working!

  The water was cool, fresh and delicious. His grateful drinking, a series of slurps and swallows, was startlingly loud in the empty library, but he was so thirsty he hardly noticed.

  He drank until he felt full, then straightened up and wiped his mouth. Ghost town or not, someone had to have paid the water bill, he thought, and he looked around, wondering what the hell was going on here. To his left, movement caught his eye, and he turned. Behind the same circulation desk that moments before had appeared empty and abandoned, a large sheep was standing on its hind legs, front hooves resting on top of the counter.

  The animal stared at him and loudly tapped its right hoof three times on the wood.

  A chill raced down Louis’ spine. This was not only impossible, it was wrong. Sheep couldn’t stand. Keeping his eye on the animal, he sidled slowly toward the doorway through which he’d entered. The sheep watched him, remaining upright, woolly head turning to follow his progress. He was almost past the front counter when the animal let out a low bleat. It seemed somehow threatening, and was accompanied by another three taps on the wood.

  Was the sheep smiling? Maybe, maybe not, but from this angle, the corners of its black-lipped mouth appeared to be turned up in a malicious grin.

  He was almost to the doorway and was quickening his pace in an effort to get out of the library when the sheep screamed at him. Louis jumped at the sudden sharp shriek, stopping in his tracks to look over at the circulation desk. The ear-piercing cry devolved into a series of bleats that seemed to vary in rhythm, duration and emphasis.

  Almost like a language.

  He needed to get the hell out of Hayfield. Even if it took him a day to get back to the highway and another day to reach a real city, he was not about to spend another second in this bizarro town.

  He walked quickly out of the library—

  —and was confronted by a gigantic herd of sheep that had massed in front of the building. Between fifty and a hundred animals stood before him on the street, with more coming in from both directions, all of them no doubt responding to the cries from within the library.

  Every animal was staring at him.

  Louis didn’t know what to do. Try to run through them? Around them? Go behind the building and see if he could escape that way?

  “Shoo!” he shouted, waving his arms. “Get out of here! Shoo!”

  The sheep, staring, did not budge. He continued shouting and waving, but the tactic was completely ineffectual, and he quickly gave it up.

  How was he going to get out of here?

  As if in answer to his thought, a passage opened up in the middle of the horde, directly in front of him, sheep backing off to create a clear path through which he could walk. Louis didn’t even pause to think about it. He sprinted forward, hoping to be able to make it through the opening to the other side, so he could keep on going and run right out of Hayfield. (Could a person outrun sheep? They were slow animals, weren’t they?) But less than a yard in, he saw the space in front of him closing, heard the bleating of the sheep as they spoke to each other, felt the softness of wool brushing against the backs of his hands.

  And then he was trapped.

 
; He tried squeezing between the animals, but they pressed themselves closer together to keep him from getting through. One nipped at his fingers, drawing blood. He cried out, dropping his laptop case and lifting his arms high in the air.

  For a moment, everything remained static, then the herd was moving, pushing him along with it. He was nudged to the left, shoved to the right, and it was all he could do to remain on his feet. He had no idea where they were headed or if they were headed anywhere, although he was acutely aware of the fact that he was probably one loud noise away from being trampled in a stampede.

  As they progressed up the street, the open space around him grew, the sheep giving him more room to walk, although his route was still being determined by the movement of the herd. Eventually, it became clear that the animals were driving him toward an open field behind the town’s small elementary school. He was marched across the parking lot, around the side of the rectangular one-story building, through a small blacktop playground. Ahead was the field, which, at first, he thought, local residents had been using as a makeshift dump since there appeared to be garbage scattered over the grass.

  But those weren’t pieces of garbage, he saw as he drew closer.

  They were body parts.

  Instinct took over. The sheep were taking him out to the field to kill him, the way they had the people of Hayfield. He didn’t know how, why or when it had happened, and at this point, he didn’t care. All he wanted to do was get the hell out of here, and as he was shepherded past a jungle gym, he jumped up, grabbed one of the bars and clambered up to the top. He was not remotely athletic and probably hadn’t moved that quickly since he’d been in elementary school, but this was his life, and an instinct for self-preservation supplied him with a strength and coordination he had not known he had.

  Sheep could not climb, even if they could stand on their hind legs, so he knew they would not be able to reach him up here, but there were scores of them and they could definitely wait him out. His sudden departure from their midst seemed to have thrown them, however, and without a leader to tell them how to respond, they milled about, confused.

  This was why unthinking followers were called “sheep.”

  Taking advantage of the temporary disorder, he jumped off the jungle gym, over the heads of the animals, and grasped the long bar at the top of the swing set. The sheep were too tightly packed to be able to maneuver rapidly, and only a slow wavelike motion of the gathering offered any indication that there was even an attempt to react to his defection. The animals immediately around him had started bleating, but the combined volume of their cries blocked out any hope of hearing a response from any leader, and before that could change, he pulled himself hand-over-hand the length of the swing set until he reached the opposite end. A crossbar in the center of the triangular support frame gave him a place on which to stand, and Louis quickly noted that he was nearing the edge of the herd. The sheep were not packed quite as tightly here, and he took a chance and jumped to the ground, landing on his feet and zigzagging between animals until he had cleared the crowd.

  There was a fence on his right, the school building behind him, and the sheep massed on the playground to his left. The only way out was through the field ahead, so he started running, hoping his theory that sheep were slow would hold true. He didn’t look back—it had always seemed stupid to him when characters in movies wasted time and effort doing that—but plowed forward, feet pumping as fast as they could go. On the grass were rotting pieces of men, women and children. He ran past a half-eaten leg, stepped on a severed hand, almost tripped over a little girl’s head.

  At the far end of the field was a continuation of the same fence that had prevented him from escaping through the side of the school, only here it was working to his advantage. In the center of the chain-link was a single open gate that led to what was apparently a park behind the school. He would be able to run right through that narrow opening, but the sheep would have to file through one at a time, which, hopefully, would give him ample time to get away.

  The bleating had stopped but the air was filled with an ominous lowing, a noise so substantial and pervasive that it seemed to be coming from all directions. Was it? Could whichever animal had coordinated the animals’ actions have directed some of them to backtrack, swarm around the school and try to head him off?

  Despite his previous reluctance to turn around, Louis hazarded a look back.

  Was the horde smaller?

  Maybe they were planning to flank him.

  His leg muscles were starting to hurt, but the necessity of getting out in front of this gave him a renewed burst of energy, and he sped across the field, through the gateway and into the park. He looked around, saw trees, grass, a sandlot. What direction was he facing? He wasn’t sure. Being driven through Hayfield in the center of that multitudinous gathering had left him unable to get his bearings, and he had no idea which way he needed to go to get out of town.

  He opted for the trees. At least they offered him some cover.

  From the corner of his left eye, he saw movement—white movement—and when he glanced to his right, he saw more movement: individual sheep entering the park.

  He was right.

  They were trying to head him off.

  Louis wasn’t sure how good the animals’ eyesight was, but they were still somewhat far away, and he crouched low, keeping close to bushes and trees, moving forward, until he reached the end of the park and a narrow lane. There were no sheep here, but it was only a matter of time, and he chose the direction that seemed to head away from the school. Staying on the edge of the road, close enough to jump into the brush and foliage on the side if it became necessary, he hurried past an empty Baptist church, and two houses that seemed unusually close together for having such big front yards.

  Were the houses’ occupants lying out there in the school’s field?

  He didn’t want to think about that.

  Having misjudged the direction in which he’d been heading, he quickly found himself back in the center of town as the lane emerged between a burnt-out building and an abandoned feed and grain store. Poking his head around the corner of the feed and grain, he could see the full length of the main street and its intersections with several side roads.

  There were sheep everywhere.

  Where was that tornado when he needed it?

  The animals were not moving in one big herd or even in packs but seemed to be searching for him individually, and though he knew one bleat would send the others running, at least he had a sporting chance. The shadows were getting long, the light in the sky a yellowish orange. It was late afternoon, and it occurred to him that if he waited until nightfall, he might be able to sneak out of town unseen.

  In the ruins of the burnt building to his left, he spotted a blackened alcove in an extant section of wall with a skinny charred door resting next to it: what must have once been a closet. Not thinking, again acting purely on instinct, he stumbled over the rubble, grabbed the sides of the sooty door and leaned it in front of him as he hid in the alcove. He ducked down, silent, and moments later heard one of the sheep bleating close by. Another answered from somewhere near.

  Did sheep have a good sense of smell? Louis wasn’t sure, but he didn’t think so. He hoped not. Although, even if they did, the powerful smoke residue should definitely be able to hide his own scent.

  He waited.

  Thankfully, neither animal detected his presence. They wandered off, continuing their search. Over the next few hours, as the sky darkened, other sheep occasionally passed by, but none of them stopped or gave any indication that they suspected he was here.

  Eventually, it seemed, they gave up, and while he couldn’t be positive that was the case, the fact that he hadn’t seen or heard anything in quite some time emboldened him to step out.

  Hayfield seemed deserted. There was a full moon and no clouds, so he was able to see the buildings and the streets, but he perceived no other presences besides himself. They were h
ere, he knew—somewhere—and that made him leery of passing through the town to get back to his car. He was much closer to the opposite side of the community, and he thought that if the main road continued on, past the town limits, he could follow it and see if it led to another city.

  Of course, that would be even further away from the highway.

  Maybe he could strike out across country, walk over to the land parallel to the highway and eventually work his way back.

  He’d have to play it by ear. Moving stealthily, Louis slunk through the shadows away from the center of town. The buildings, already sparse and far apart, were replaced by open space. There was still no sign of any sheep, and he paused for a moment to get his bearings, hoping to see headlights off in the distance that would let him know where the highway was.

  He saw no headlight beams, but there was radiance in the darkness off to his right. A cluster of stationary lights.

  Another town.

  Thank God! Louis felt like weeping. Never before in his life had he been so thankful for something so simple, so mundane, and the prospect of seeing other people again made him feel almost overwhelmed. Heedless of any possible danger, he began running down the center of the road toward the far-off town.

  Nothing chased him, nothing tried to stop him, and other than a squirrel who ran crazily from one side of the asphalt to the other and then back again, he saw no animals.

  As soon as he got out of this, he was hightailing it back to New York and never leaving the city again. Fuck Lee. Even if the manager fired him and Louis had to get a job as a janitor, he would be grateful. He had survived the inconceivable hell of Hayfield, and anything after that was gravy.

  Of course…

  If he could somehow steer Lee out here, convince him that Hayfield was an untapped potential market in desperate need of his particular knowledge and special touch with customers…

  Louis smiled to himself.

  He had no real conception of time, but it had to be well over an hour before he reached the other town. He didn’t mind, though. Alone and unpursued, with his goal directly in front of him, always visible and getting larger by the minute, the time flew by. Amazingly, the first building he came to was a sheriff’s office. Grateful that he’d be able to tell someone in authority about his ordeal, thinking of how a posse would go back there in the morning and blow the hell out of those beasts, shooting every last one of them, he bounded up the steps, pushed open the glass double doors and walked inside.