Chapter 16

New clothes, junk food, soda, and shelter. It was hard leaving the motel, but after a week of healing, removing parasites, dealing with the rash-like toxin, and clearing my mind, I had no choice. Vending machine food wasn’t enough, and the first heavy snow would probably bring the roof down. I had to move on.

I said a few apologetic words to the owners and pillaged anything I thought was useful, including two knives from their small kitchen. Above the reception hall was an apartment of sorts, with a bedroom and valuable supplies such as spices, rope, and garbage bags that I stuffed in my backpack. Carpeted walls lined the main living area, and corduroy pants from the seventies filled the dresser. The room and wardrobe hadn’t changed in nearly sixty years, which was impressive.

Old pictures of familial faces hung on the wall, and a photo album laid beneath the coffee table’s glass top. Although it was pointless to do so, I opened the album and flipped through images that dated to the fifties.

Weddings, birthdays, graduations, and toddlers in diapers. A lifetime stored in a single collection. A story captured one image at a time. The world was over; the people inside were deceased, and I held their photos closer to me than the few memories I still had. A book of strangers—dead or long gone—broke the walls that dammed my eyes. My chest was hollow, and I didn’t know how to fill it anymore. I wanted to feel human again, and I hoped they could help.

I hugged the album one last time, brought it to the owners, and placed it on the woman’s lap. The couple chose the chairs as their final resting spot, so I wouldn’t move their bodies. But as thanks, I left them with their memories. If an afterlife existed, they could carry the best of their years on the journey.

After one more pass through the reception area, I slipped into my new parka, pulled the straps to my backpack tight, and stepped onto the stone-topped roadway towards my next stop.

Thankfully, the motel had maps. Tourist destinations, local attractions, and delivery numbers—a torturous number of restaurants delivered at one time. A Chinese restaurant offered sweet and sour chicken with pineapple fried rice and a soda for $9.99. I read their menu’s throughout the week and imagined each item’s flavor while resting my eyes to clear the concussion. Every escape to the past meant less time in the present, and I needed the escape.

The couple loaded the service binders for the rooms with information, including details on possible survival sites.

The cave system with an underground waterfall only 25 miles from the motel had potential. Winter would arrive before the next breach, and the frigid air wouldn’t affect a cavern that deep. Massive beasts wouldn’t be able to enter either. But caverns had their own problems.

If the cave system had no electricity, it’d be impossible to grow food or see underground. Mutated bats were also a possibility, and I didn’t know where the traffickers based themselves, so despite being so close, I decided not to go. I hadn’t heard of the government converting caverns into shelters while on the base, and even if they existed, they would be small. I didn’t want to find myself locked hundreds of feet below the surface, surrounded by a tight-knit community who had nothing to eat.

If the reports were accurate, the Albany fortress had food, electricity, and enough space for 5,000 people. The construction began after the second breach, and the reinforced rock-face was indestructible. Probably all lies. Still, I tried to stay optimistic about the Albany fortress, even if I had no faith in anything else.

According to the motel's map, I was less than 60 miles away from New York's capital, and I finally left the mountains for flat land, towns, and human confrontations. There was no way to say for sure where people collected during the lull, so I had to act cautiously. Anyone still alive would need resources, and fighting over supplies was possible wherever stockpiles existed—namely stores in urban zones.

Most cities were destroyed and abandoned, but it wouldn’t surprise me if tiny warlords built bases in towns they thought were safe to control food. Some areas had underground bunkers, fallout shelters from the cold war. Although I didn’t know how many people they held, 100 or more wasn’t out of the question. A shelter that size was large enough to start their own little armed force.

The military had a list of fallout locations, but I never memorized it. I had a terrible memory, anyway.

Thankfully, I didn’t need to remember the stops on my way south. The motel’s binder helped with that, and I carried it with me. But it wasn’t as complete as I wished. The binder had no information on shopping outlets or stores in the area’s largest town.

Considered a city by the region’s standards, Glens Falls was more like a large village on the edge of the mountains. I had a dorm mate from there, but the only thing she ever said was her town had a lot of factories. Her father owned a medical equipment plant, and he decided on her career path from the moment she hit high school. Earn a degree in business and take over the company. She was a good friend. They all were.

After an hour on the unpaved road, I came to a county route flanked by golden trees. Autumn was in full swing, and I had no time to take in its beauty. I found myself on the outskirts of Glens Falls two miles after stepping on the blacktop. The view didn’t surprise me.

The city—like everything else—laid in ruin. Beasts leveled 100-year-old, three and four-story brick buildings like an air raid carpet-bombed the region. Rusted sheet metal and blocks of concrete rubble surrounded each foundation, with squashed cars and traffic lights filling the streets. Even the air was dead.

The brisk northern wind didn’t make it into the city, leaving a dusty haze over the destruction. A giant flock of crows perched themselves on the few remaining brick walls over 20 feet high and cawed a warning to anyone who dared enter. Combined with dark skies threatening to open, the entire sector came across as an abandoned cemetery that left a haunting impression.

No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t imagine what the town looked like at one time: gas stations, hardware stores, diners, and banks. I knew the city must have had those at one point, but I couldn’t see it. The beasts destroyed the world, then picked off their weak before hibernating, leaving us behind until the next round came.

I placed the rifle on an old log with thick, peeling bark and scanned the town for anything resembling a trap. There were no standing shops from what I could tell, and nothing screamed danger other than the grim atmosphere. I could avoid the city altogether, I had a backpack full of candy bars and cinnamon buns, but my body craved something more than sugar highs and crashes.

Even if beasts crushed the stores and scabs came through, a town that size couldn’t have been picked clean. A day or two of digging through the debris might provide enough supplies for the five or six-day trip south and make it easier to avoid other towns along the way. But my legs betrayed me. It was hard not to be afraid. Every time I entered a city or village, something horrible happened.

I took a deep breath and slowed my thoughts. I wasn’t the same person. Over the last two months, I learned how to protect myself. I knew what to look for, and I could strengthen my body. Even though I wasn’t strong, I wouldn’t be so easy to kill with the weapons I carried and the equipment I wore. My soul hadn’t fully recovered, but using my ability wasn’t a problem. I wasn’t the same person, and I needed to survive. This wouldn’t be the last town I’d need to enter.

After searching for movement one last time, I squeezed my wrist and clenched my chest as a final reassurance. I wasn’t the same person.

With my body crouched as low as my stiff vest allowed, I darted from one pile of rubble to the next, only stopping to catch my breath, using flipped cars and concrete walls for cover. I slowly made my way towards the town square until two pings went off in my helmet. Soon after, I heard talking.

I dropped to the ground and momentarily froze behind a rusted sedan. Two people approached, but I didn’t understand what they were saying. I peeked around the rear of the car and saw nothing other than bent metal traffic lights and the remains of a crushed fountain. A moment later, a grating noise left me quivering.

Glass shards scraped over concrete and sounded similar to raking broken pottery over a tile floor. With each scratch, my heart rate dropped, then spiked, and my body tingled in the same way fingernails across a chalkboard made me cringe. From my head to my toes, a spiky wave rippled across my skin as they sorted through the crushed bricks.

I crawled to the other side of the car and slid the rifle underneath. It wasn’t an ideal view, but after a few seconds, I found them. No uniformed clothing and no organized process for searching. They picked through the rubble just as I had planned; they were scavenging like me.

A teenage boy wearing a dark hoodie sifted through the mess while a girl my age pointed at anything that caught her eye. Fashionably dressed in the apocalypse. She wore black, straight ripped jeans tucked into mid-calf boots and a light gray turtleneck with a cloche to match. As if the end of the world came, and nobody let her know.

They weren’t loud, but they definitely argued with each other. Family for sure, and neither one was powerful. The pair were both weaker than I was, which was worrisome. They picked through the rubble carefree; they couldn’t be alone, not unless there really was a shelter in the town, and they survived the hordes from within the bunker. There had to be someone with them.

The two continued fighting without noticing me, the girl mostly looking disinterested and the boy raising his arms above his head in frustration. She didn’t bother searching through the wreckage as they moved from one pile to the next. I couldn’t see exactly what they collected, but it looked like they found cans. Canned food, most likely. The kind I was hoping to find for myself.

They didn’t look like the people I saw in Lake George. At least, it didn’t seem like they were roleplaying as soldiers. But they might have been picking for the fake military. Even if they weren’t, they were still a problem. Starting fights with other survivors over food was a surefire way to end up dead. And I didn't have a team to back me up.

Strength in numbers. That’s what the military told us, but I was sure that only applied to the army. A group of untrained people was just as easy to capture as a single person. Perhaps easier if you scared enough of them. Even if I wanted to meet them and ask the girl where she found her clothes or talk about anything they had seen over the last few months, I didn't know how. I didn't know how to approach them.

I slid the rifle back and rose to my knees. The toxin rash itched, bringing me to my own worries. There were plenty of other places to explore. I placed the strap over my shoulder and turned to leave. Unfortunately, when I turned, the end of a gun barrel greeted me.

“Move one more inch, and we’ll test that helmet of yours.”

A deep voice, flannel jacket, bristly blonde beard, and no ping in the helmet’s alarm system—he was trouble, and my plans to avoid them vanished just as quickly as I made them.