After a fruitless 20 minutes picking through the debris in and around the gas station, they came away with a few bags of chips and five bottles of water, all buried in the back of the building under a heavy desk and a foot of mud.
Two bags of chips had been punctured and reduced to a soggy mess. The other three bags they opened and ate.
"Boys, we’re going to have to be real careful with the water," Jo said as they continued their progress inland. "Whenever we find a source of water, we need to all stop, rest, and drink our fill."
"Look around," Ben said, hopping in a circle on his crutch. "You see any buildings or houses? Everything got washed away! We’re on our own, guys," he warned.
"Come on, now," Reese soothed, “let's keep it together, guys. We literally just got here. I'm sure it’ll get better the further inland we go."
"But how much further inland do we have to go?" asked Ben.
Reese shrugged. "How should I know? Let's just keep moving. We'll see what we see when we see it."
"Nothing gets past this guy," Jo said, jerking a thumb at Reese.
They walked on in silence, stumbling over bits of trash and debris in the road, helping Ben pick himself up from the ground after tripping over his crutch several times. After an hour of walking in near silence, they came to a pileup of cars.
Reese called a halt, and everybody took a break, sitting on tree trunks crossing the road at an intersection. The water had piled up cars three and four high in a jumbled mess that roughly ran northwest to southeast. Most of the cars had bits of trash plastered to their sides as the water receded, and several had long strands of slimy seaweed hanging over side view mirrors.
Almost every single one suffered broken windows. Reese cleared his throat. "Should we check them?”
Jo sighed, resting her elbows on her knees. She removed her hat and swished it in front of her face, squinting up at the sun. "I suppose we have to, just to see if there's anything in there we can use—but I sure don't want to."
Reese stood. "I'll do it.”
Feeling like a man walking to his own execution, Reese purposely took one step after another, his shoes crunching on the gravel until he drew even with the first car in the pileup. Before he could even reach the door handle, a strong smell, carried on the slight breeze, overpowered him. It wasn't the rotten smell of petrifying death that he expected—the odor that hit his nose was sweet and light. Like…
Reese frowned, concentrating.
"Baby lotion." Reese leaned forward and peered through a broken window to see several sodden boxes ruptured in the back of a little four-door sedan. Bottles of baby lotion floated in foot deep water in the back seat. A diaper bag lay crumpled in the front seat next to a large car seat that had been adorned with a cloth screen, printed with cartoons of elephants and giraffes.
Reese turned, his stomach roiling at the thought of what he'd find if he opened the door. He fell to his knees and dry heaved in the mud and gravel.
After a moment to collect himself, he stood, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, cast one last look inside the car, then turned and staggered back to the group. He collapsed on the trunk next to Jo, defeated.
No one said a word.
"Yeah…” Ben muttered after a long moment of silence. "I'm good on water. I say we just keep pushing inland. What do you guys think?"
Crows cawed in the distance, a few dozen of them flapping through the air on black wings as they headed toward the coast. Reese looked up at the birds cackling to each other, and back at the pile of cars. He shook his head.
"We’re not gonna find anything here. Let's go." They walked in silence by the Hancock County Bar Harbor Airport. The entire length of the little regional airport had been stripped bare, down to gravel and tarmac. Not a single structure remained. The breeze whistled across the still, open space, tarmac steaming in the afternoon sun. To the east, almost half a mile away, Reese spotted a jumble of shining metal glinting in the sunlight. Pieces of planes, wings, and propellers had been piled up at the edge of the far runway where the airport property ended and the short slope down to the coast began. He shook his head and continued moving forward.
"Not gonna find anything here, either."
They walked on in sullen silence. Following Bar Harbor Road, they moved slowly past the remains of house after house, all set back tasteful distances from the road. Every now and then they found one that had more than three walls standing, but in only one instance did they see a house along the road that still had its roof.
It was an hour after they left the remains of the airport when they saw their first body.
Ben had spotted the lumpy shape in the middle of the road, some distance off. Reese suspected what it was long before they reached the corpse, but that knowledge didn't prepare him at all for seeing a woman in her 30s laying face down on the ground. Her skin was a sickly pale blue, creased with dark spider veins which covered her exposed arms and most of her back. Her clothes had been shredded—whether as a result of her drowning or as her body was tumbled by the retreating waters—and mercifully she lay face down, her head shrouded in a soggy mess of curly hair. One foot still wore a fancy
