Final Panic

24

Rob was feeling a little better. He hadn’t really hit his head that hard. Instead, it had just been the shock of the accident that had somehow made his brain go all weird and fuzzy. He was annoyed and upset at himself. He felt like he’d been weak.

Jessica had tried to convince him that it wasn’t the case, but eventually she got annoyed of constantly trying to make him feel better, and they spent the next couple of hours walking together in silence back to the lake house.

The motorcycle had not been salvageable. So they’d just opted to leave it there along with the Subaru.

They’d taken what few items from the Subaru that might prove useful sometime in the future: some flares, a knife that had been in the glove box, two LED flashlights, and a couple of energy bars that Jim had apparently stashed by the spare tire years ago, forgetting about them. They were a few years past the expiration date, not that it mattered in times like these. They might end up tasting a little stale, but it’d still work for calories.

It was night now, the sun having set hours ago. There was a chill to the air. They walked along the roadside, and not a single car passed.

It was a dark night. The clouds were out, and they had to use their flashlights to see. But they didn’t keep them on all the time. Instead, they just flicked them on when they needed. This way, they’d preserve the batteries, and also make themselves less visible for whoever might be out there.

It was strange, passing houses that were completely dark. They should have been used to it by now, but they weren’t. Or at least Rob wasn’t. Jessica wasn’t talking, after all.

Jessica was good with directions, and she led them.

Finally, after what seemed like an entire day of walking, but had really just been several hours, they were getting close to the lake.

It felt good to almost be back. Rob’s legs were aching just from the walk alone. He couldn’t remember a time that he’d walked this much, let alone on so few calories.

Before the EMP, he’d been content to lounge on the couch, throwing back a couple beers, watching whatever happened to be on. He’d really liked watching nature shows, the ones where they show animals savagely devouring each other. Back then, the natural world had been something to marvel at, not something to participate in.

Now Rob and his friends were just like those animals. They were going to eat or be eaten. Not literally, of course. Well, so long as things didn’t get really bad. Not that Rob would ever do that. The idea repulsed him. But he wouldn’t put it past others. People were sick and messed up, no matter who they were or where they came from. Rob had known that for a long time. At every job he’d ever managed to hold onto for a couple weeks, he’d inevitably find that some normal-seeming coworker was, in fact, nothing more than a psychopath in disguise. Or, at the very least, someone with very serious problems.

And now all those people weren’t stuck at work. They weren’t stuck trying to make a living, trying to gather up enough currency to be able to pay rent and afford food and entertainment. No, now they were out in the wild, where their hard-earned money was no good, and they’d do whatever they could do to survive. Just like everyone else.

It was enough to give Rob shivers down his back, the kind that he used to get when he’d watched scary movies.

“Hey,” whispered Jessica, nudging him. “You see that up there?”

“Huh? Why are you whispering?” said Rob, speaking much too loudly.

“In case someone’s here. Keep it quiet, would you?”

Up ahead, there was something. It was something red, glowing.

“What’s that?”

“Fire?”

“Fire? But shouldn’t the lake house be right there?”

“Your guess is as good as mine. Maybe we got lost.”

“Let’s hope so, because it’s looking more and more like fire.”

The closer they got, the more it became apparent that it was fire. Or, more accurately, the end of a large fire. The flames weren’t intense, but those kinds of low, glowing flames you get when a fire had already consumed most of the material available.

“You think that’s the lake house?”

“Yeah. Look around you. That’s definitely the lake house. Don’t you recognize the trees? The driveway?”

“It’s dark. How can you see anything?”

“I guess you just have worse eyesight.”

“There’s no need to snap at me.”

“I’m not snapping.”

Rob shrugged it off. They were tired, and people got snippy when they were tired. Not to mention hungry.

He was more concerned about what it meant that the lake house had apparently burned to the ground.

They got closer now, close enough to feel some of the heat coming off the fire.

It was definitely the lake house they were looking at. Or its remains. The house had been completely consumed by fire, and the remains of the walls and ceiling had collapsed inwards. What was left was just a smoldering pile of wood, with flames lapping at the edges.

The smell was horrible, as if something unnatural had been burned, almost like plastic, but not quite.

“This isn’t good,” said Rob.

“Understatement of the year.”

“Do you think they’re…”

“Dead? Why not just come out and say it?”

Rob didn’t answer. Instead, he moved closer to the burning house, using his elbow to partially cover his face, trying to protect himself a little from the smoke.

Jessica was at his side.

“If there’s anyone in there, there’s no saving them.”

“What do we do?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“Why? Do you?”

Not knowing what to do, not knowing what had happened to the others, and knowing that there was no way they could salvage anything useful from the house, they retreated back to a clump of trees.

They huddled up, getting close to the trunk. They sat back-to-back, but even so, they were shivering in the cool air. Rob could feel Jessica’s back as she shivered, and it unnerved him. It was hard to viscerally feel that she was cold, and it was hard to know that Jessica, who always seemed to have everything together, who always seemed to know what to do, was at just as much of a loss as he was.

Sitting there in the dark, Rob felt hopeless. The idea was to keep an eye out. If the others had lived, they’d hopefully return to the house hoping to meet up with Rob and Jessica.

“You think they died?” came Jessica’s voice in the darkness. It sounded hollow and scared.

“No,” said Rob. “Come on. There’s no way. We don’t know what caused the fire, but whatever it was, they would have had time to leave the house, right? It’s not exactly big. It’s definitely no mansion.”

“Yeah,” said Jessica. “But if that was the case, wouldn’t they have just put out the fire?”

“Uh, I guess. Maybe they couldn’t, though?”

“Come on. If it was a candle or something, they could put it out. Hit it with a rug, pour some water on it, whatever it takes.”

“Then what do you think happened?”

“Some kind of fight.”

“A fight?”

“You know, a home invasion. Something like that. They swoop in, kill everyone, and burn the house down.”

The thought gave Rob those chills again. Chills of fear. After all, it was a real possibility.

He might never see Jim or Aly again.

The two of them fell into silence, and, gradually, the night wore on. The hours passed, and nothing happened. No one showed up. There were no noises, other than the noises of animals. No cars drove by, and no lights shone.

They remained almost in the same position until morning.

Jessica had fallen asleep, and Rob had felt like it was his duty to stay awake and keep watch. She’d been kidnapped after all. And possibility tortured. She hadn’t told him what had happened to her, and he hadn’t asked.

Rob had been running through the options in his head.

Meanwhile, he’d been observing the fire, watching as it slowly died, leaving glowing embers mixed into the rubble of the house.

He realized that once the sun came up, there’d be no choice but to start searching through the rubble for the remains of his friends. Bones would certainly remain, and possibly more. Rob didn’t really know, but he knew there’d be something.

Of course, if they did find human remains, what did that mean? They’d be hard-pressed, most likely, to identify those remains.

But it would give them something. Some information.

And if they found no one? No remains? Well, that’d be good. They’d have to wait around by the lake for a few days, to see if Jim and the others reappeared. And if not? Or if they found the remains of three people in the house?

Then it meant Rob and Jessica were on their own.

It was a possibility that Rob didn’t want to admit to, but he knew that he had to. He very well might have to face it.

It was a terrifying prospect. He’d always known that he relied on Jim, but he’d never quite realized just how much. Even before the EMP, Jim had always been there for him. To give support. Or simply doing nothing more than drinking a cup of coffee silently with him when things weren’t going well for either of them.

“Jessica,” whispered Rob, poking Jessica as gently as he could with his elbow. “Come on. The sun’s out.”

Saying that the sun was out was a bit of an exaggeration. It was upstate New York, after all, and the sky was heavy with the usual clouds.

“What’s happening?” mumbled Jessica. “Where’s the coffee?”

She clearly didn’t know where she was, and it would have been funny if she wasn’t about to realize what had happened to the world, and that not only did she not have any coffee waiting for her, there wasn’t much food either.

“Come on, Jessica. Let me help you up.”

He took her hands and pulled her to her feet. She turned sleepily and saw the house, and Rob could see on her face that it was all coming back to her.

“Shit,” she muttered.

“My thoughts exactly.”

Rob explained what he’d thought about all night, and she agreed, for the most part, with his plan.

They didn’t bother with breakfast, except to drink some water from the lake. They didn’t have bottles, so they just cupped their hands together and drank water from them.

“I hope this is clean,” said Rob.

“Clean as we’re going to get now.”

And it was true.

Next, they checked the house.

Overnight, what had been left of the flames had died down. The house was gone. Completely. It was just a pile of smoking rubble, all blackened.

Everything was still hot to the touch, but they were able to walk over the rubble. Of course, they had to be careful.

“Let’s hope we don’t find any bodies,” Rob was mumbling, more to himself than to Jessica.

Just as he said it, he spotted a body. It was in the corner of the house.

He’d tried to mentally prepare himself for the sight during the night, but what he’d imagined in his head was very different from what he saw now. He’d imagined some charred bones, maybe a skull. Something out of some scary movie, almost cartoonish in nature.

But what he saw shocked him.

It wasn’t a skeleton.

Instead, it looked more like a bloated doll, some grotesque representation of the human form. And it was all completely blackened, the way a marshmallow gets when you hold it too long over the flame.

Rob stood there, frozen, staring at it. In all likelihood, it was one of his friends.

“Jessica,” he whispered. “You’ve got to see this.”

“What?”

Jessica arrived at his side, saw the burned corpse, and immediately vomited. She leaned down, bending over, vomiting out what little was left in her stomach.

It wasn’t really solid, more like some off-color gunk, something you might find at the bottom of an old swimming pool.

Vomiting was an understandable reaction, given what they were looking at. Their pre-EMP lives hadn’t prepared them for such sights. No amount of scary movies with Hollywood effects could have prepared anyone for this.

“You OK?”

“Fine.”

“You see any more bodies?”

“No.”

There wasn’t any point in looking for identifying characteristics of the corpse. Everything was burned beyond anything Rob had seen before.

They kept looking, combing over every inch of the rubble.

There were no more corpses.

“So this must mean that…”

“Let’s not bother with that,” snapped Jessica. “We don’t know who that is over there. Let’s not make any assumptions that are going to hinder what we’re going to do now.”

“Fair enough. And what is it that we’re going to do now?”

“Look for the others.”

“Where?”

“I thought we talked about this. You’re the one with the plan.”

“Yeah, but…”

“Don’t let the corpse affect you. We’ve got to keep on going.”

After a quick trip to the lake, so that the dehydrated Jessica could get another drink, they set off down the road that led, more or less, around the lake.

The plan was to search the area for their friends. Or any sign of them. Before leaving the burned house, they decided they needed to leave some sort of message, in case the others were alive and returned.

They tried carving a message in a piece of bark, but it was harder than it seemed to actually write out words. In the end, they settled for “J+R, BRB.” It was internet or phone slang, and Rob knew that Jim, having worked on so many broken cell phones, would know what it meant.

They set off down the road, not feeling like there was much hope at all. Rob tried to keep his growing despair hidden from Jessica because he knew that it wouldn’t be helpful. But he did wonder if she wasn’t doing the exact same thing as he was.

They hadn’t gone very far when they spotted an RV parked just off the road. Two wheels were on the road, and two were off.

“Is that…?”

“That’s the RV I saw with Jim. The exact same one.”

“You sure?”

“Pretty sure.”

“The one with the creeps?”

“The exact same one.”

“Should we check it out?”

“What choice do we have?”

With their guns drawn, a shotgun and a handgun respectively, they knocked on the door. Jessica hung a little back, in case something happened. Something like a shotgun blast to the door.

Rob waited, then knocked again.

“No answer?”

“You’d have heard it, wouldn’t you?”

“There’s no need to get snappy with me.”

“What should we do?”

“What are you waiting for? Go in.”

Rob shrugged and tried the handle. To his surprise, it was open.

It was a little darker in the RV than it was outside, but there was still plenty of light to see by.

At this point, after what he’d been through, he’d thought that nothing would surprise him. But as he took in the scene inside the RV, his jaw dropped.

There were four bodies on the floor. There was blood on the ground. Blood all over, really. It had pooled up here and there, and run across the floor, which was at a slight incline.

Two of the bodies he recognized.

They were Jim and Aly.

“Rob? Everything OK?”

Rob was choking back tears as he said, “There’s nothing to see in here. Don’t bother coming in.” He wanted to spare Jessica from this sight. He wasn’t exactly sure why. It was just an instinct. It was just what came to him.

But she ignored him, of course.

“What the hell?” she exclaimed.

Suddenly, one of the bodies stirred.

Someone wasn’t completely dead.

Rob leveled the shotgun at the body.

“What are you doing?” shrieked Jessica. “That’s Jim!”

Rob had reacted instinctively and quickly, too tired to actually realize he was pointing the shotgun at his best friend.

“Shit,” he muttered, rushing over to Jim, stepping on one of the other bodies as he did so.

“What’s going on?” came Jim’s voice.

His voice was hoarse and he sounded strange. But he was alive.