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.