Gutierrez swore upon seeing the mutilated body and spun on her heel in a mix of fury and shock. O’Donnell covered his mouth and quietly wept. Matsuda stood a short distance away, gun out and watching the woods. Wil had already returned to the jeep after he finished vomiting, and he looked at Gutierrez as she stormed back.

She kicked a nearby tree over and over again, to the point that Wil thought she might be about to break her toes. Then she started hitting the tree and he hurried forward and put a hand on her shoulder. She spun on him, grabbed him by the shirt, and shoved him back against the jeep.

“Whoa! Hey!” Wil said and put his hands up. Gutierrez had her fist drawn back and her eyes were shiny with tears. She let Wil go and turned away. “I’m sorry.”

“What the fuck are you sorry for?” she asked.

“Sorry that…I’m assuming Jacobs…is dead,” he replied.

“You didn’t know him.”

“No, but you did. And I’m sorry you lost him.”

“He’s not ‘lost.’ He’s spread across the ground like fucking butter!”

“I know, I just…”

Gutierrez sniffed. “It doesn’t matter. At least he’s not moving around like Sandoval. Dead is better.”

Wil didn’t say anything but he definitely agreed. If it wasn’t for Naomi, he’d probably have taken one of the several guns they had and done himself in already. Anything to keep from turning into one of those black-eyed things.

“We should go,” Matsuda said as he walked back to the jeeps with O’Donnell. The ranger was dabbing at his eyes and sniffing. 

“I knew him for fifteen years. Knew his kids,” he said. “Shit, they’re…they might not even be alive either.”

“Whatever killed him wasn’t injured,” Matsuda said. “It could still be around.”

“How do you know that?” Gutierrez asked.

“His gun was still in its holster,” Matsuda said. “So was his mace. Whatever got him was quick and strong enough to  rip through the fence and kill him before he could get a shot off.”

All of them glanced around the woods.

“There’s no reason to waste time or effort with the radio antennae,” Matsuda continued. “We should be on our way. It seems to be getting dark quickly and being in a dense forest with things that can kill a man like that doesn’t seem like the best idea.”

“Yeah. Hell,” Gutierrez said and spat. She got into the jeep and waved at Wil to follow her. He did, and she was already pulling away from the shack before he had finished closing the door behind him.

“Hey, gimme a sec,” he said.

“Just wanna get out of here,” Gutierrez said as she drove back down the mountain. She turned the jeep’s headlights on to illuminate gray-green twilight of the forest as it closed in around them. Beyond a couple hundred feet, the reddish-brown of the pine tree trunks turned to dark gray and then black in the coming gloom. They stopped looking like trees and more like prison bars. Maybe they were. They were all locked in the park with things that could splatter you into paste, gore you, turn you into a shambling, unliving husk…

Wil took a breath and checked the mirror. O’Donnell and Matsuda were behind them, their own headlights shining. 

“Maybe we should let Matsuda and O’Donnell lead. The old man was the one who spotted the logging trail,” Wil said. Gutierrez just nodded and pulled along the side of the trail once they had reached the bottom of the mountain. She rolled her window down and waved at O’Donnell and he gave her a brief wave as he and Matsuda passed and drove on.

There were a few false stops along the way. There would be a break in the trees, what O’Donnell or Matsuda thought was the logging trail, but wasn’t. Eventually, they got it. A trail covered in pine needles and with a few hardy saplings growing out of it led away from the ranger trail and deeper into the woods. A pair of pines had grown up close around the entrance and almost blocked it from casual observation, but a wary driver would be able to see the clear line of a trail easily enough.

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“Looking good so far,” Gutierrez said as she followed O’Donnell.

“So we take this, and let’s say we get extra lucky and the highway is relatively open and we can make it to Portland. What then?” Wil asked.

“I go check on my family,” Gutierrez replied. “What else?”

“I mean do we all go with you? Do we check on your family first, or my girlfriend, or——”

“I don’t care what you do, but nothing is stopping me from finding my folks and my brother and sisters. That is job number one. Come with me or go, but I’m not doing anything else until that gets done,” Gutierrez said.

“Right. Gotcha,” Wil said and frowned. He’d have to find some other way to get to Naomi. If getting Gutierrez to her folks was an easy enough thing to do, he could wait a little bit longer. But if it was some massive under-taking, he’d have to leave.  

And he wasn’t leaving without a real weapon. 

They had at least two extra pistols and enough ammo for triple that. Plus the shotguns and rifles. He figured he could take his pick and they’d be fine regardless. 

Wil started making a mental list of basic supplies he should take with him if he needed to bug out. He rested his forehead against the window and watched the gloomy trees pass by.

A flashlight for sure, and batteries. 

First aid.

Water and food, of course.

Any kind of map or compass.

A bag to carry it in, preferably a backpack.

His eyelids slid down as he made his list. He’d spent so much of the day terrified, that the rocking of the jeep, the hum of the engine, and the oncoming dark was lulling him into a warm and comfy slumber.

This is what he had wanted. This gentle drifting away. Out There was a host of problems, nightmares and blood-soaked death, and god knew what else. In Here, there was quiet, and dark, and the slipping away of all of it.

Away from the black-eyed things. He saw the attack in the lodge play out again. Sandoval, stretched out beyond his skin’s limit to contain muscle and bone, with new eyes and those black thorns all over himself piercing Birkin’s skull like a kid poking a straw into a juicebox. Then she had gotten up and attacked Mr. Stewart while the Sandoval thing had felled Mrs. Stewart and the daughter.

And then they had all sprinted after the jeep. Except Mr. Stewart, who had merely shuffled along.

And who had also been the only one who hadn’t been directly attacked by the Sandoval thing.

Wil snapped his eyes open as the jeep gave a sharp jolt and he snorted.

“Welcome back,” Gutierrez said.

“I was asleep?” he asked.

“Yeah. About twenty minutes. This trail goes on for a helluva long ways. We’re well past the main entrance by now,” she said. “If I had to guess, I’d say the highway is about a mile or two to our right, and we’ve been driving parallel to it for the last few miles. Just a guess though.”

“No trouble?” Wil asked as he blinked and rubbed at his eyes.

“No, which means we’re overdue,” Gutierrez said.

“Don’t even,” Wil replied. He checked his phone and then put it back as soon as he saw there was still no signal to be had. “Hey, I was thinking about what happened in the lodge.”

“I’ve been trying not to,” Gutierrez replied. 

“The ones who ran after us: Birkin, Mrs. Stewart and…the girl,” he said with a slight wince. He could still see her face in his mind. It had been twisted into a look of madness, agony, and fury that should have been alien to a child. “All of them had been directly attacked by Sandoval.”

“That wasn’t Sandoval anymore.”

“The thing that used to be Sandoval,” Wil corrected himself. “Mr. Stewart, he was slow and kinda goofy, like he was just learning to walk. Bi——the thing that used to be Birkin killed him.”

“So? Whatever this thing is, it makes women faster if it infects them? Takes them over? Whatever?”

“No. The buck was a male. And so was Sandoval.”

“Yeah. Okay,” Gutierrez said.

“So maybe it was diluted,” Wil said. “That big thing, it changed after Sandoval died, after he’d fallen into that rock or meteorite and gotten a face full of it. And it was…it looked very strong. It was big and fast and you shot it and it didn’t even flinch. Then it killed Birkin, and she was strong like the buck. Not as much as the big thing, though. Then Birkin killed Stewart, and he was just kind of shuffling along.”

Gutierrez drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. 

“I’m not saying you’re right, but it makes sense,” she said. “So if Stewart killed somebody…”

“Then maybe they’d be even weaker. Or maybe they’d just die and not get back up. I dunno. Not interested in finding out, but it just occurred to me.”

“Mm. Well, we know to stay away from that black shit,” she said.

“O’Donnell and Birkin both had it on their clothes. We both got a little on us fighting the buck. I thought it might be some kind of contagion when I cut the buck’s head off, but it only got on my shirt and a little on my arms.”

“O’Donnell said Sandoval fell face-first into the cracked rock. And when the big thing killed Birkin, it went straight into her skull.”

“The Buck didn’t die until you blew its head off,” Wil added.

“Damn, they really are like zombies. Kinda,” Gutierrez said. 

“Well, never seen transforming zombies with tongue whips that could crawl over a house like a spider, but the basics seem the same: infect by biting, headshot kills them.”

“We’ll need to tell O’Donnell and that old guy when we stop,” Gutierrez said.

“I’d be surprised if Matsuda didn’t already know.”

Gutierrez smirked and grunted. “Something’s up with that guy. I’m betting ex-military.”

“I guess,” Wil said. The old man was a curiosity, but all of his concern for other people was directed towards Naomi. If they could just get out of this damn park in a way that wouldn’t point them at the opposite end of the state, he might have a chance. She might have a chance.

“What’re they doing?” Gutierrez muttered as O’Donnell slowed down in front of them, then came to a halt. The ranger hopped out of the truck and shook his head. Gutierrez leaned out the window and shrugged. “What the hell?”

O’Donnell’s shoulders slumped forward as he jerked a thumb at the trees.

“Trees are too thick from here on out. This is as far as we go on wheels,” O’Donnell said. Wil groaned and thumped his head against the dashboard.

Of course.