Page 18 of The Dead of Summer

We start slow. Impossibly slow. The library is only half a mile away, but the once-dead streets have resurrected into a warped mirage of town before the outbreak.

People, couples, families stroll through the fresh dark, but everything about them is wrong.

They’re demons now, horned with coral and bristling with urchin spines.

Or angels haloed in translucent bells of jelly flesh, swaying to their strange, spectral song as their eyes drip with lethal tears.

Weepers.

Clusters of them cuddle beneath the streetlights.

The rest glitter in the voids where the lights can’t reach.

I know they’re there because even beneath my soft armor I can hear them.

They sound, to my musician’s ear, upset—maybe even angry, after being awoken by the power surge.

But my ear also detects a gradual easing to their pain.

Rallentando , I think. They’re calming down.

“Now,” I whisper.

It’s only a matter of time—maybe minutes—until the weepers settle again and the night fills with their strange fog, and what then?

Even now, my heart ticks in my chest like a bomb, counting the seconds until the acid in my stomach explodes into a deluge of slime.

I take a deep breath and hold it. There’s no telling how many of those I’ve got left.

We proceed single file, Sam leading as I point the way. One step. Another step. I hold Bash’s hand and tow him along.

Keep going. Keep going.

My plan is to head to the bay, where it will be harder to get boxed in if we get swarmed.

We can get there through the wharf building, but first we need to get back to Main.

I turn us at the first corner, and the connecting street is blessedly empty.

We rush down it, sand crunching between our feet and the pavement.

I turn us again, and we’re back at Main, but now we’re passing Pizza Monster.

The windows are shattered, and a little old lady sits alone in a booth.

She glows like she’s caught in a moonbeam.

The glow comes from her skin, clear in places like a rash of invisibility revealing muscles and veins below.

Wisps of her hair cling to a skull that has buckled out in a bony accordion of ridges. I tug Bash onward.

Main is quiet. That’s a first. I almost find it funny. Then I see a single baby shoe. There are tons of other items thrown down, too. A sparkly purse, a mangled bike, cracked phones.

I tell myself everyone survived. People throw down all sorts of things when they need to run.

I look but do not find a blue wig.

We reach the wharf building. Through it, we’ll reach the ocean.

We pause at the gaping entryway to look down the corridor of shops.

No weepers in the flickering gold light, so we ease inside.

Some of the shops have already been raided, and some are untouched, but it’s clear we aren’t the first survivors to pass through here.

The building has three stories. I try not to think about all the places people might be hiding.

What if Gracie is here? What about Elisa?

We could be sneaking by them right now, but there’s no way to tell them we’re here without calling the weepers out, too.

At the center of the wharf building is a massive staircase that wraps along the walls in an open spiral.

It’s frosted glass at the top, and during the day it would fill the space with a vacant white glow, like my aquarium grow lights.

If there are any weepers in the building, they’ll be here.

We keep to the edge until something catches my attention.

I signal Sam and Bash to stop. I advance alone, holding my harpoon gun up. It’s the small kind, really just a speargun, but now I’m regretting not attempting to take along the one meant for sharks.

“What do you see?” Bash whispers. I raise a single finger. Hush. I haven’t seen anything. But I hear something distinctly human. I tug down my bandanna so I can listen better, and I hear it again. A child, crying. It’s coming from the wedge of black below the staircase.

“Hello?” I whisper. “Are you okay?”

The crying stops, just for a moment, and when it returns it’s not a single voice.

It’s several, then several more, then too many cries rising into a chorus.

A light rises with them, illuminating a flowing mass of coral below the stairs.

What stops me immediately are shapes within the growth. Shapes of a person I know .

A rainbow cuts across the monstrosity, at the height of a child’s face.

“Ollie!” Bash whispers to me. “Get back!”

In my memory, I watch a woman raise a little girl up so she can peek into Hail Mary’s windows.

The little girl is holding up her small hands to protect the rainbow painted over her tiny nose.

I see that nose now, over and over, the little girl’s face repeating across the coral formation.

Her eyes, too, and her lips frozen open in a cry.

It’s like she has echoed outward, her form rippling from a center that I suddenly need to see. I step even closer.

Tucked in the corner where the stairs meet the floor is a body.

I follow the rainbow band to where it crosses the features of a tiny, petrified face tipped back in a silent cry.

The coral hasn’t just colonized the little girl; it’s built itself off her, stealing her features, her shapes, even the colors of her rainbow face paint.

A breeze dives through the wharf building, the air passes over the mouth. Mouths . And the night unravels with utterly small screams.

Before my own scream breaks from my throat, Sam catches me and drags me onward.

“We’ll go another way,” he whispers.

As the moon rises, so, too, does a light within the many coral growths.

They give off a blue-green luminosity, but with an otherworldly, aquatic chill.

At least it’s easy to see where we need to avoid now.

The coral growths are mostly tiny—clusters of mellow-yellow straws waving from lampposts, organ pipes in fuchsia softly eating the roots of a tree—but there are larger growths ahead.

Astoundingly large, and shapes I have never seen in any of the aquariums I’ve pressed my face up against. Human shapes that ripple outward, like the little girl.

“Eyes,” Sam orders softly. I stop looking at a pillar of coral growing up through a bench, at the base of which I am sure I see a dog.

Keep going.

Keep going.

We continue like a school of strange fish, swimming slowly through the quiet wreckage of town.

Then Bash accidentally kicks a bottle, and the silence is shattered by a loud ping of glass bouncing on concrete.

The light around us ripples as the millions of glowing polyps shiver in reaction, and gradually the air thickens with a hum.

We cover our ears, as if the song might infect us, too.

A figure lurches into the road ahead of us.

The flash of blue around their head causes me to almost cry out, but as they dance closer I see it’s only antlers of aquamarine.

We hurry toward them—we have to, because the next break in the buildings is coming up—and slide away just in time.

I don’t glance back, because I know I will see Gracie again, just for a second.

I’ll see her in every weeper we pass, if I look hard enough.

Standing at the edge of the water, with eyes trained down the beach on either side, we check on one another. I can feel the adrenaline frying my nerves, and my mouth is sour with dehydration, but I can still breathe. I can still see.

Bash is breathing hard. Too hard. I drag him into a hug until the panic passes.

“The fog is coming,” he groans. “We’re not going to make it.”

“We’ll make it. Come on.”

I lead now, Sam by my side.

“Do you think the library is safe?” Sam asks me.

“Yes.” This isn’t a lie, but it isn’t the truth. Hope is often a thing in between, I’m discovering.

Sam looks at Bash trudging behind us. “Is he good?”

“Good? In this economy?” The meek joke doesn’t even register with Sam. “He’s good,” I say quickly. “Just traumatized. Don’t say anything, though, it’ll make it worse.”

“You got it.”

While Bash has been fraying these last few days, Sam’s quicksilver has cooled into something sharp and solid.

He guarded us, and found us food, and stood up for us against the lawyers.

I can’t imagine doing this without his steady focus, but I wonder what he thinks of Bash and me.

Are we naive kids to him, or his only hope?

Maybe we are both. I just know I couldn’t do this without him.

“I’m glad you’re here,” I tell him. He nods, eyes dead ahead.

We reach a jetty of stone flocked in algae.

There’s nothing glowing within it so we pull one another up and over as the tide gushes in the cracks below.

I glimpse crabs and snails, and a few barnacles, but the normal kind.

For the first time I remember the beached leatherback sea turtle.

Suddenly, walking alongside the ocean feels like a terrible mistake.

Maybe I’ve known all along this ocean concealed a hideous secret.

I think of my mom and the darkness that hid inside her bones, a disease I am now certain was born from this sand, this water.

Gracie. I pick her up, out of my thoughts, and throw her far, far away from Anchor’s Mercy. She is safe. She is hiding. She is with Willy somewhere, or Elisa, or Bash’s family, and they are waiting for us to find them.

We have to keep going. No matter what.

We reach our planned reentry point: the yoga studio parking lot bridging the bay with Main Street. The library is only a few blocks farther, but as we close in on it, we slow down. Then stop.

Unlike several buildings around it, the library is dark.

There’s no sign anyone is there. Even worse, the front door of the building is completely grown over in barnacles the size of traffic cones.

They glow a deep, dreamy purple. Vaguely, I can make out human shapes crushed together in the monstrous growth, and it’s not hard to imagine people rushing the door during the outbreak.

I shudder, realizing the coral has fused them together into a living reef.

“Weepers,” Sam says.

I hold my breath on instinct. I was so fascinated by the door, I didn’t even look at the lawn. Weepers huddle in the grass, some of them still holding up big, angry signs advertising the apocalypse. The doomsday people, vindicated in their marine zombification.

“We should go back,” Bash whispers.

“You know we can’t,” Sam says.

The road behind us has gone blurry as pearlescent fog seeps over the pavement. In previous nights it’s appeared heavy, only rising up to the knees of the shambling weepers, but tonight there are drifts that could easily wash over our heads.

“What else is near here?” Sam asks, and I hear him starting to panic. “There’s got to be another place to hide. You guys know this place, right?”

What I know is that we’re trapped. We either get fused into the zombie reef of the library doors or run into the fog. There’s nowhere to go, and the weepers are looking at us with their wide, wet eyes.

“We need to hide, we need to run.” Bash starts to cry. “We’re dead. We’re so dead. We’re going to end up like that little girl.”

Sam finally loses his cool. “Would you shut up? Now is not the time.”

I cover my ears to block them out. My mind grabs at images of places nearby—Scuttlebutt’s, maybe?

The Lebanese caf é ? Sunkin’ Donuts? But each one quickly blossoms into visions of destruction and gore.

We need to get out of town, but would we do any better in the forest?

The dunes? We don’t have food. We don’t have water.

All we have is a harpoon gun and a pizza paddle and two boys about to flip out while I hammer my temples for ideas.

Sam shakes my shoulders. “Where are we going, Ollie?”

I twist one direction, then another. The fog gushes toward us in slow motion. I feel my nose begin to tickle.

“This way!”

The voice comes from the sky. Suddenly, the library’s lawn lights come up, full brightness.

“Keep to the path!”

The lights of the path lead right to the wild mass of barnacles at the front door.

The doomsday weepers are intrigued now, babbling incoherent prayers as they crawl toward us, but right when one reaches the path, there’s an earsplitting crack!

The weeper goes down, their shoulder exploded by a bullet from above.

The blood that sprays from them bounces like beads of jelly across our shoes.

“Hurry! Side door!” the voice orders.

We don’t question it. We dash down the path, ducking as more shots drive the encroaching weepers away. The lights blind me, but I still catch a glimpse of the barnacles against the door. They dilate at our approach, and beaks of bone white snip out, hissing and hungry.

“Turn! Now!”

We pivot, following the path around the side of the library, to a side door hidden by tall shrubs. It opens right as we arrive, and a second later we’re huddled inside a dark stairwell. Then we’re looking into the beam of a flashlight.

“Don’t breathe.”

It’s the same voice as before. It’s a voice I didn’t dare let myself think about, because even though I recognized it, I couldn’t trust my desperate hope. But now I need to know.

“Willy?” I ask the dark.

“Wendy at the moment, but yes. It’s me.”

I want to rush forward, but then I hear the cocking of a rifle.

“It’s good to see you. All of you. But we need to be sure.”

“Sure of what?” I ask.

A small figure emerges from behind the light, completely mummified in plastic bags and duct tape. They hold out three plastic cups of water on a tray. Using kitchen tongs, they extend a cup to each of us.

“Spit,” Wendy orders.

We follow her orders, spitting into the cups.

“Swirl.”

We swirl the cups. An eternal minute passes.

“Dump ’em.”

I’m scared and I’m confused, but I trust Wendy. I dump the precious water on the floor. Sam and Bash copy me.

“Good. Very good. Get out of those clothes and leave them down here. We’ll get you new ones and bring you fresh water to wash up.”

“Can … can we come in?” Bash asks.

“You’re already in. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a mutiny to settle. We’ll catch up in a bit. Welcome aboard.”

Wendy climbs the stairs, leaving us with the plastic mummy person. They wrestle off their face covering but stay far away from us. Still, I recognize that moon-bright smile.

“I knew you guys would see the signal,” Elisa says. “Come on. Strip. The Suds have some major work to do here.”