Nine years had passed since the Dead ended civilization.  Darrell and his daughter crouched atop a hill thirty yards downstream from their riverside estate, watching the gray men destroy the only home their family ever had.  Formidable silhouettes flashed past the windows as the creatures swarmed through each room, upending furniture, smashing walls and doors with their slick, ashen fists, hurling treasured belongings through windows in their fury.  Darrell’s pained eyes followed a leather-bound medical text as it plummeted into the soft sand by the pilings at the back of the house.

His grip tightened on his only weapon, a spear-like pitchfork with the outer two tines broken off.  He longed to return home and confront the gray men, at least to try to reclaim everything he was losing... but Mary had died two years before, so there was no one else to care for little Lela, who was only four.  At least, he didn’t think anyone was still alive in the nearby town of Stantonsburg, North Carolina -- but he had felt unwelcome there for years, anyway.  His was the only black family in the area to survive That Day nine years ago.

Not twenty minutes before, he had been reading in the downstairs study when Lela cried out for him, prematurely awake from her nap.  He had raced up the worn staircase to find she had had a bad dream.  That’s what he thought when he saw her sitting bolt upright under her jungle-print sheets -- and then the front door burst in.

Lela froze at the sound of splintering wood.  The monstrous visitants of her nightmare were still fading from the corners of her waking vision, and the sudden onslaught of the gray terrors of the real world was too much for her to process all at once.  Her tiny fists clamped onto the blankets bunched around her feet when she saw the broken look on her father’s face -- for he was paralyzed as well, rooted in the doorway by the crushing realization that their home, their only haven, was about to be lost forever.

Yet Darrell and Mary had prepared for this rather acute possibility for years, so his torpor was short-lived.  Laying a delicate finger to his lips, holding Lela’s gaze with as calm a look as he could manage, he quietly closed the door to her room.  Just seeing him regain his composure was an immense relief to the girl, whose rigid body melted into trembling gelatin.  Abject terror faded into a too-familiar undercurrent of horror as she watched him creep across the floor to the window, putting in motion whatever daring escape he was planning.  This would not be the first time he saved them from the gray men -- though it was the first time the hateful monsters ever made it past the wrought-iron fence that ringed their two-acre property.

Darrell nervously wiped sweat from his shaven head, trying to decide how to proceed.  Panicky despair twisted like a knife in his chest as his gaze fell upon Lela’s child-sized bookshelves, filled with plastic horses, beat-up board games, and stacks of picture books.  When he and Mary had planned escape routes from every room in the house, Lela had only been a year old, and could easily be carried on their backs in a baby harness.  How had he neglected to reevaluate this crucial escape route as she had gotten older?  The weathered, bleached shingles of the back porch began directly beneath her dirty window, but she was now too big to be easily carried on such a slope, and too young to be trusted to keep her footing.

In the official plan, all he had to do was slide open the window and help her down to the rope ladder coiled atop the gutter ten feet below -- but now that the gray men were actually here in his home, this seemed grossly insufficient.  He could hear them moving about in the kitchen and study downstairs. 

Mary had called him morbid for his longstanding fascination with the creatures, but he couldn’t understand how anyone could pass up an opportunity to study the enemy.  He now found himself irrationally excited by the prospect of using the few bits of knowledge he had worked so hard to glean.  For instance, he knew that thick cataracts made most of the gray men nearly blind.  Even better, his and Lela’s ever-present scents in the house must have been overloading the creatures’ hypersensitive olfactories -- they had not yet come upstairs, after all.  Would he be utterly insane to retrieve his pitchfork from the umbrella stand in the front hall downstairs?  It was his only weapon.

He moved to the doorway to peer out, and Lela threw off her covers to bound out of bed.   He frantically motioned for her to stop, eyes wide.  She immediately stiffened, her only remaining motion that of her braided black hair sweeping across her back.   He smiled appreciatively, and she relaxed a little but remained very still.

"Stay here," he whispered.  "I’m going downstairs.  It’s important that you be as quiet as you can while I’m gone."

"I can do that," she whispered fervently.

He gave her a brief smile, then eased the door open and slipped into the hall.  He knew by heart the location of every creaky floorboard, so his sock feet swept silently over the faded and scratched hardwood floors.  Lela’s last glimpse of him came as he crouched at the head of the front staircase.

She let out a small gasp as he descended out of view, but clamped her hand over her mouth.   He had asked her to be quiet, and it was most important to do what he said when the gray men were near.

The gray men tramped noisily about downstairs, but she couldn’t tell which rooms they were in.  She couldn’t hear her father at all.  Her faith in him was total, yet still her hands trembled as she perched on the edge of the bed.  He hadn’t told her his plan, so she had no idea how long he expected to be gone.  As her wait stretched on, her restless imagination began to twist his daring raid into terrifying scenes of ambush.

A loud crash sounded somewhere below, followed by a ragged, animal snarl.  She yelped as more crashes followed, along with the sound of breaking glass.  A series of sharp thuds, like a cleaver slicing through meat into a chopping block, echoed up the rear stairwell.

All was silent.

Darrell stepped into the bedroom a few moments later, the sleeves of his fine white shirt rolled up, a grim expression hardening the lines of his dark face.  A thin gray dust coated his clothes and skin, itching at his neck inside his loosened collar.  He clutched his pitchfork in one hand, while several overlarge cloth bags hung partly filled in his other.  He noticed Lela’s rigid posture.  "Are you all right?"

"Are they gone?"

His gloomy appearance didn’t brighten.  "Yes, honey, the two that broke in are gone.  But there are a lot more coming."  His gaze was piercing, full of meaning she couldn’t quite understand.  "Help me gather everything you want to take."

Minutes later, and here they were, watching from the hillock as the second wave of gray men swirled through their home, ripping to shreds everything they touched.  Dark forms had made it upstairs now -- Darrell started as a flannel-wearing figure hurtled out of Lela’s window, trailing shredded pastel curtains behind.   It quickly lost its balance on the steep roof and tumbled to the sand far below, flailing its arms in fury. 

He watched their activities in horrified wonderment.  Nine years studying them, and he still wasn’t able to answer his most basic question: why did they behave as they did?  What possible benefit could they derive from attacking the living or destroying property?   These were not the flesh-eating ghouls of legend -- the gray men killed quickly and efficiently, then moved on.  To Darrell, his lack of knowledge seemed a gross deficiency.  If only he had known more, he might have been able to divert this attack.

At this point their home was clearly lost, yet he had no idea where to go next.  He still possessed a sliver of hope that the situation was not as bad as it appeared, even though he kept seeing flashes of faces he knew.   It was hard to be certain from this distance, but it looked as if most of the seventy-odd gray forms filling his house were men and women he remembered from Stantonsburg.

Lela’s small voice shook him from his dark reverie.  "There’s nobody left in town to help us, is there?"

Sometimes it was eerie how in tune she was with him, as if she could read his thoughts right off his face.  "No, honey.  I don’t think there is."

All the same, he couldn’t stop his eyes from shifting to the broken steeple of Stantonsburg First Baptist, hardly a mile away.  It was all he could see of the town over the trees, but it was enough to send a cold spike through his chest.  He really wasn’t sure who was still alive in town; ever since Mary was killed there, he hadn’t been able to bring himself to go back.

Lela gave a forlorn sigh, watching his reaction, realizing that he didn’t yet know what had happened.  "The people in town all died this morning."

This took Darrell by such surprise that for a moment he was speechless.

"What are you talking about?" was all he could think to ask when he recovered.

Lela flinched at the unexpected incredulity that filled his tone, but nevertheless plunged on, certain he needed to know.  "Daddy, I saw it in my dream."  Yet as she tried to explain, the full force of the horrifying memory came back to her, and her tongue seemed to congeal into a bloated piece of rubber.

Darrell’s disbelief melted into concern at the sight of her distress, and he gathered her up into his arms, stroking her soft black hair, whispering soothing platitudes.   She buried her face in his shirt.  The heat of her ragged breath cut through the lightweight silk.

"It was just a dream," he repeated over and over.  He knew how vivid her nightmares were, and it pained him that she had to grow up in a world that was every bit as dreadful as her worst imaginings.

"It was not just a dream.  I saw everyone... burning."  A sob bubbled out of her.  "Daddy, they were on fire and they died.  They were leaving town when I woke up.  Now they must be here looking for us!"

Darrell drew back in shock.  "Whoever gave you that --"  But she hadn’t been in contact with anyone except for him since Mary’s death.  For her to suddenly imagine something like this was more than a little disturbing.   "Where did you get an idea like that?"

She couldn’t see why he didn’t understand.  She routinely witnessed events in town through her dreams, and this was something she took completely for granted.  She assumed he knew of her ability -- that he and everyone else shared it, in fact -- so she was baffled by his confused disbelief.  To her it seemed he was suddenly doubting her truthfulness.  Her voice rose shrilly.  "I saw it.  Daddy, there’s something terrible in town."

"Keep your voice down," he whispered harshly, unaware of his daughter’s internal struggle.   He glanced toward their home, but the gray men were making enough noise that they appeared not to have heard.  The creatures seemed convinced that he and Lela were still hiding somewhere inside -- but he knew that wouldn’t last.  Once the gray men left the house, they’d be able to pick up their scent again.

He took a breath.  "We’re not going back to town ever again, Lela.  I don’t think anybody was on fire -- that was just a dream.  But I do think the gray men must have got in and -- and hurt everybody.  With so many people all living so close together, it only takes a few gray men to start a chain reaction that no one can escape.  Your mother and I always knew it was just a matter of time until it happened, and that’s part of why we lived out at the house.  But now we’ll have to go somewhere else."

Lela wrinkled her nose.  "Another town?"  She shuddered at the idea.  The only people she could remember ever having met had been in her dreams of Stantonsburg and its surrounding wilds.  And her dreams were rarely pleasant.

"I don’t know."  Darrell clenched his pitchfork with both hands, as if he could strangle it into providing the answers he was searching for.  "I don’t know if there are any other towns anymore, Lela.  I don’t know who else survived these past nine years.  I don’t know what it’s like outside Stantonsburg."

Her eyes widened.  She suddenly realized he wasn’t just talking about going somewhere until the gray men left their house alone.   He was talking about leaving forever.

"But it will be okay," he added hastily, seeing her expression.  He did his best to sound encouraging despite the despair tugging at every muscle in his body.  "We’ll find another house."

Sensing his anguish, Lela tried to give him an encouraging smile.  But he was staring over her head at their house.  She turned, and saw the gray men were knocking down the walls, as if determined to leave nothing but a pile of rubble in their wake.  She didn’t doubt they would succeed.  Her emotions were too mixed up for her to react too strongly to this just yet.

Darrell’s voice was quiet.  "It’s time to go."

He took her by the hand, and they made their way solemnly down the pitted hillside, following an erosion crack through the weeds and wildflowers.  Their canoe was waiting at the water’s edge at the bottom, the half-empty cloth bags from the house sitting in back.  Lela flopped down on the floorboards between the two seats and wrapped her arms around her knees.  Her cheeks glistened with fearful, angry tears.

Darrell situated himself on the front seat and shoved off, guiding the craft out to the middle of the twenty-foot-wide river.  Leaving their home behind tore at him more deeply than he had ever expected it would, but he did his best to remain outwardly calm for Lela’s sake.  Where they were headed, he had no idea.

For a long time they saw little except mostly-dead trees and the early-afternoon sun.  The river snaked through the empty, swampy forest for what felt like hours.   When there was finally a break in the trees, Darrell found himself looking out across a heavily overgrown golf course.   His skin prickled at the sight.  Thick brambles and twisted bracken had overtaken the carefully manicured greens and fairways.  The lone sand bunker on the nearest fairway was encrusted with pine needles and appeared to be the entrance to some animal’s lair.

The blackened remains of expensive houses slumped in a row along the far side of the course.   He was almost desperate enough to check these foreboding ruins for refugees, but then he saw glistening, grayish forms staggering through the charred wreckage.  Somehow, he wasn’t feeling so fascinated with them anymore.  He had already tried and failed to solve that riddle.

He propelled the canoe onward without comment, but Lela’s eyes were locked onto the distant monsters.   One of the females was wearing what Lela thought was a very pretty yellow dress, despite how dirty and torn it was.   She felt a little sad for that particular gray woman, though she didn’t know quite why.

Past the golf course, the trees again closed in for a while.  The afternoon sun wore on.

The farther downriver the canoe traveled, the more conscious Darrell became of just how much they had lost.  Their house had been a solitary point of civilization in a vast landscape of wilderness and ruin.   Now they had few possessions, and even less time.  It was early September, and winter would arrive within two months at the latest.  Their chances of finding real shelter before then seemed incredibly small.  And how would they reliably obtain clean water without their well?  What would Lela’s diet consist of in a few days?  The raw greens they had eaten at lunch were fully a fifth of their food stores.

Lela’s worries were of an entirely different nature.  It was the first time she could remember being anywhere but her family’s property.  Her anxious eyes scanned the desolate scenery whenever they floated out of the safety of the woods, taking in the many shattered houses, the occasional abandoned storefront, the networks of crumbling, empty streets.  Cars, which she had previously only seen in her dream-visions, were scattered over the roads and driveways, smashed and useless.  The bridges they passed were all out.

The significance of this last observation didn’t escape Darrell’s notice.  Not even the gray men, lurking in and around all the ruins they passed, would have been able to break through the thick concrete that formed most of the bridges.   The structures largely seemed to have been blasted with explosives -- refugee humans must have destroyed them, having realized that would bar the gray men from crossing the river.  Yet another perplexing behavior Darrell had observed: the gray men were unwilling to stick so much as a single sickly toe into water. 

The mossy state of the rubble seemed to indicate that the destruction of the bridges had happened long ago.  Darrell’s spirits sank a little further.  For all the broken-down buildings and roaming gray men they had seen today, there had not yet been a single sign of contemporary human life.

The last light of dusk was fading behind the old factory on the hill.  Darrell’s heart leapt at the sight of firelight flickering in one of the corroded building’s upstairs windows.  It was the first spark of hope he’d felt since abandoning his home that morning.  His dark hands trembled as he rested the oar across the gunwales of the canoe.

He tore his gaze away from the factory.  Lela was sleeping fitfully in the dried muck and leaves between the canoe’s seats.   He longed to caress her, to calm her, to make her believe that everything was all right, if only for a little while.   But instead he had to wake her.

He placed his hand on her shoulder, and her eyes opened immediately.  She gazed up at him with an intense intelligence that made him simultaneously proud and sad.  No four-year-old should have to look so wise.

The first thing she noticed was the bleary fervor of his expression, the sagging skin around his mouth, the fading gleam in his eyes.  He looked exhausted and scared.  The next thing she noticed was that night was quickly falling.  Her voice quavered.  "What’s going to happen?"

He motioned to the factory, which she had not noticed.  "I don’t know if these are the first refugees we’ve passed, or if we only found them because it’s coming on night and they’ve built a fire."

"Are we going to --"  She hesitated, shrinking back.  Looking up at the factory gave her an unpleasant sense of deja-vu.  "Maybe we should keep looking."

Darrell guessed that she was simply nervous about meeting unfamiliar people.  "Any place fit for us to stay will have other people there, honey.  Otherwise the gray men would have broken in."

She glanced at the dark forest on the bank opposite the factory, and shuddered.  Perhaps there were worse things than this factory.  Her initial bad feeling had been so fleeting that it was past now, anyway.   "Okay, let’s try."

"Hide on the bottom of the boat, where no one can see you.  And you keep watch for me, okay?"

"Okay, Daddy."

Darrell picked up his one-tined pitchfork, casting a final look around at the trees and the still water, making sure the canoe was sufficiently far from both banks.   The factory loomed a hundred yards away like a black castle, lording over the surrounding fields and woods from its perch atop the tallest hill in sight.  He took a nervous breath.

"Hello up there!" he shouted.  "Can you hear me?  My daughter and I are from Stantonsburg, and we need shelter for the night!"

He paused, listening, but the factory remained utterly silent.  Lela shifted anxiously behind him. 

He had hoped to find refugees who took in others out of a sense of concern and decency, but he supposed, given the circumstances, he would settle for those who took in others out of self interest.  He sighed.  "I’m a doctor!"

A silhouette appeared in the fire-lit window.

"Hey!"  Darrell jumped up in excitement, rocking the canoe dangerously.  He quickly sat back down.  "Down here, on the river!"

The silhouette raised one arm in greeting and disappeared from view.  Darrell slid his pitchfork back into the bottom of the boat, careful not to hit Lela, and grabbed his oar.  He paddled furiously for the bank nearest the factory, each stroke churning the water.

"Any sign of the gray men?" he called back to her. 

No answer.   He glanced around and saw that she was shaking her head, her wide eyes fixed on the dense forest on the other side of the river.   He couldn’t stop himself from shivering at the spindly, dark pines that seemed to stretch on forever.  It was as if the water was all that held the wilds back from engulfing what few remnants of civilization were left on this side of the river.

"It’ll be okay, honey."  Though for the life of him, he couldn’t think how that could be true.

Her voice was small and distant.  "I know."

He scrambled out into the water as the canoe hit the spongy bank, grabbing the bow of the small craft and hauling it up onto the muddy shore.  Once it was up into the grass beyond the water’s edge, he hesitated.   A hundred-yard expanse of unkempt lawn stretched between them and the factory.  He wasn’t sure if he wanted to bring the cloth bags of their belongings with them.   If they were assured a place to stay for the night, there was no question he should bring the bags -- and perhaps the canoe as well -- but he just wasn’t sure.  He couldn’t help... remembering.

The crack of a rifle.  Mary!  No!  Her body slumped against the furniture store window, a pool of crimson spreading out from under her as a waxy gray pallor spread across her skin.  He tried to staunch the bleeding, tried to keep her alive, but nothing he could do made any difference.  So many years in medical school, and yet that made no difference now.  Two-year-old Lela stood at his side, unmoving, her mouth a rictus of shock.   The townspeople clustered nearby, their white faces even more drained of color as they gaped at Darrell’s shattered family.

Mary’s transformation was complete in moments, and she lurched upwards at him, alien rage obscuring the familiar features of her face.  He didn’t even try to resist her.  But a second shot rang out, making the crowd flinch, and she fell backwards again.   Black tendrils spread across her body from where the second bullet had stuck her, and her look of fury faded into blankness.   Her body quickly regained its normal complexion... but she was gone.  You bastards!

"Daddy?"  Lela put her hand on his arm, and he blinked.

He was standing by the canoe, looking vaguely up at the factory.  "It’s all right."  But his voice was unconvincing.  He squatted down.   "Let’s get going.  Hop up on my back."

She shied back a little.  "What about our things?"

"We’re leaving them, for now.  I don’t know if we’ll stay here, Lela."

She reluctantly climbed onto his back, and he started up the slope.  The one possession he took with him was the pitchfork.  Everything else was left in position for a hasty retreat, in case it came to that.