The plastic moving crates filled with their expendable supplies were in the back of the trucks underneath heavy tarps. Their main supplies, like weapons, ammo, and enough food and water to last a month, were back at base.
They drove the Ford Rangers back to the Miller Hill House, where Vera and Elise were waiting outside on the front curb amidst a pile of backpacks, carry-on luggage, and a pair of red crates with their emergency ration of food and water. The girls were dutifully clinging to a pair of ammo bags, each one weighing almost as much as them put together.
Carly and Lara came out of the house with more carry-on luggage as they pulled up to the curb.
“Silverware?” Will shouted over at them.
Lara held up one of her luggage bags and jingled it. “I cleaned the place out. The Millers will be super pissed when they get home.”
“It’s a good thing they’re all dead.”
“Sucks to be them,” Danny said.
They turned right off Main Street and headed south on Route 69/US 287, and before long, Grime, Texas, faded into their rearview mirror. Will drove the black Ranger up front with Lara in the passenger seat, while Danny followed in the blue Ranger with the girls. They kept twenty meters between them in case Will had to make an emergency stop.
Months after the end of the world, there were signs other survivors had begun using the roads again. They saw it in the dwindling cans of non-perishables in store shelves, empty boxes of beef jerky, and suddenly empty store refrigerators that used to be piled high with warm drinks. There were also more obvious signs, like cars recently pushed to the sides of roads or old pile-ups untangled in order to get big vehicles through.
Lara was engrossed with the ham radio in her lap. She was making minor adjustments to the dial, honing in on the familiar Federal Emergency Management Agency frequency, where they had first encountered the looped message. She stopped only when the soothing female voice drifted through the speakers. Like all the other times, they found it while the message was in the middle of its pre-recorded loop:
“…Song Island in Beaufont Lake in Louisiana. We are broadcasting on the FEMA frequency to any survivors out there. We want you to know there is hope. There are survivors on Song Island. We have food, supplies, electricity, and protection against the darkness. If you are receiving this recorded message, we encourage you to make your way to us. I repeat: we have food, supplies, electricity, and protection against the darkness.”
There was a pause of a few seconds, then the message resumed from the very top:
“Hello. If anyone can hear me out there. This is Song Island in Beaufont Lake in Louisiana. We are broadcasting on the FEMA frequency to any survivors out there…”
The message was broadcasted day and night, every day. It was unchanged from the time they had originally picked it up four months earlier. It was probably appropriate that Elise had been the one to discover the message while showing Vera how to work the ham radio. Elise had, after all, come to them because she was playing with a ham radio.
Beaufont Lake was not on Will’s radar, but finding it on a map was easy enough. It was about twenty-five kilometers from the Texas-Louisiana border, past Sabine Lake and close enough to Interstate 10 that they would be able to take the long stretch of road once they joined it off Route 69.
They were traveling cautiously, like they always did, with the Rangers moving at a steady thirty miles per hour — sometimes forty if they were feeling especially brave that day. Speed was not an option here.
Slow and steady survives the darkness.
And besides, Song Island was advertising safety and protection. If it really was safe, the island would still be there a week or a month from now. And if wasn’t, then it was never as safe as the people broadcasting claimed in the first place. Either way, Will wasn’t going to be hurried. Not now, not with so much at stake.
Lara turned the radio off and put it back down on the floor. “Is it possible? Can an island be that safe?”
“It could be. We’ve never thought about ghouls and water. Maybe they can’t swim.”
“Why wouldn’t they be able to swim? Nothing about their physiology indicates an adverse reaction to lake water. I think they might even float better than us. They’re mostly just skin and bones.”
“Why do they melt in sunlight? Why do they fold up and die if you prick them with a little bit of silver?” He shrugged. “Eight months later, what do we really know about them?”
“You’re right,” Lara said, and she leaned back against her seat. “We should know more about them by now. I should have discovered more. I feel like I’m the one dropping the ball here.”
“Take it easy. You’ve done pretty well for a third-year medical student.”
“Ah, to be a fourth-year medical student,” she said wistfully, and allowed herself a rare smile. “I wonder how Song Island is broadcasting the signal?”
“There could be a radio tower on the island or nearby that they’re bouncing their signal off. It doesn’t have to be that strong of a signal. Without all the usual traffic, you could probably contact someone on the other side of the world these days and get a perfect connection.”
“It has to be someone who knows about the FEMA frequency.”
“That makes sense. Maybe military, or ex-military. A former government official. They did promise protection, so maybe they even have a standing army on the island. Or a civilian army of some type.”
“That would be nice, wouldn’t it? An army?”
“I wouldn’t mind one.”
“Maybe you can finally make captain,” she teased.
“I’ve always wanted to be a captain.”
“Why stop at captain? How about General Will?”
He laughed. “I’ll settle for major.”
It was a body in the middle of the road, and Will almost ran over it.
He was maneuvering around a beat-up Jeep parked in his lane when he saw it, popping up out of nowhere not much farther up the road. It looked like a big lump of road kill rotting in the sun, but he had seen bodies before — too many to mention — and he knew instinctively it was a man.
Will jammed on the brake and fought the steering wheel. Lara let out a shocked gasp as the seatbelt clenched against her body. Will quickly glanced at this side mirror and saw Danny pulling up behind him. If he had been going any faster than thirty-five, he would have easily run the body right over.
Slow and steady survives the darkness…
Will put the Ranger in park and grabbed the M4A1 resting against his seat. “Stay here and keep low.”
“Be careful,” Lara said, catching her breath as she pried the seatbelt free.
He hopped out of the truck but stayed behind the open door. He heard another door opening behind him, then Danny’s voice from his vest radio: “Don’t tell me you almost got us into a wreck over a squirrel.”
“Body,” Will said. “Make that bodies.”
There was a second body nearby, closer to the side of the road. An older man, face up, sun-beaten white face staring at the bright, cloudless sky. Congealed blood underneath his head, and the telltale signs of a bullet hole in his left temple.
“Dead?” Danny asked.
“One for sure. The other one undetermined.”
“Well, let’s determine it, then.”
Will scanned the areas to his left, then right. The highway had four lanes, with the north- and southbound lanes separated by walls of trees to both sides. He instinctively flashed back to the early days after The Purge, when they had been caught in a road ambush.