As his pursuers drew nearer, Alvin climbed onto the chair, careful to keep his feet on the metal frame instead of on the frayed webbed seat. Nerves formed a small pit in his stomach. He knew he didn’t have the strength to keep running if the window was locked. He gritted his teeth as he pushed on it hard. The latch was resistant, but it gave. Alvin forced the window open and, with his last measure of strength, pulled his body inside the trailer.
He landed on an orange shag carpet at the foot of a bed. Alvin closed his eyes, took a deep breath and then dragged himself to his feet. Just as he grasped the top rail on the window, a pair of blanched hands lashed the sill. The hands were followed by the head of a young man, no more than twenty years old, with messy blond hair and a pierced nose. One side of the boy’s face was caked with dirt and dried blood. He snarled at Alvin, revealing two missing teeth, and then reached for him. But before the boy could grab hold of him, there was a sound of tearing fabric and he disappeared.
Alvin took one last look outside. The boy thrashed on the ground, the lawn chair having closed around his legs like the world’s most benign bear trap. Relieved, Alvin closed the window and engaged the latch.
As he surveilled the room, he discovered the body of a middle-aged woman in the bed. On the nightstand beside her sat an empty pill bottle and a half-finished fifth of Jim Beam. The body twitched and Alvin jumped back knocking a framed photo off the wall. He stared at the woman, waiting for something else to happen, but nothing did. Nerves, he thought.
Alvin stepped into the hallway and softly closed the door. He scanned the trailer. The home was minimalistic, either by choice or financial circumstance. There was a kitchen with a small table and two chairs. In the living area, there was only a worn-out couch sitting in front of an old boxy CRT television. No people, thankfully.
Alvin checked the front door, making sure it was locked. The windows were all out of reach from ground level, but he made sure they were latched as well in case any of those things were smarter than the ones he'd encountered so far. After the place was secured, Alvin rifled through the kitchen cabinets until he uncovered a bottle of Tennessee Williams whiskey. He plopped onto the floral-pattern couch and took a few pulls from the bottle before passing out.
Alvin was awoken the next morning by a distant thumping sound. He blinked at his surroundings. Nothing looked familiar. More thumps sounded in slow succession, and it was then that he remembered what happened the day before. As Alvin stood up, the bottle of Evan Williams fell off his lap spilling whiskey onto the carpet. He stared down the hallway.
Thump… thump… thump.
Alvin swallowed the knot in his throat. He crept down the hall, stopping outside the bedroom, and put his ear to the door. As if the woman could sense his presence, she slammed against the door hard enough to jar his head. Alvin fell back against the wall, cracking the wood paneling beneath his weight.
The woman in the bedroom let out a slow, undulating moan that caused every hair on Alvin’s body to rise to attention. It suddenly occurred to him that he hadn’t locked the bedroom door the day before—wasn’t sure it even had a lock. If the woman simply turned the doorknob, she would be right on top of him.
Alvin flew out the front door of the trailer. The sun was yet to rise, but it was light enough to see more than a dozen of those things lumbering in between homes and on the gravel drive. Their heads perked up, alerted by Alvin’s noisy exit.
He ran to the overturned fishing skiff and righted it in an instant. Alvin pushed the boat into the water and a shrill screech sounded as the aluminum hull scraped against rocks and roots. The noise attracted the attention of every corpse in the trailer park, and they all began to swarm. The fresher corpses seemed to move faster than the elderly couple he’d encountered on the yacht.
The young man with missing teeth had apparently escaped the chair-trap and reached the riverbank. He stumbled down the incline and landed headfirst on a rock. Alvin stared, expecting him to get up, but, for some reason, he didn’t. As more dead drew close, Alvin moved to the bow and dragged the skiff into the water. He pulled the boat to the edge of the sandbar and jumped inside.
The old woman from the yacht pushed her way to the front of the mob. She stumbled down the sandbar and managed to grab hold of the transom with one hand. Alvin sneered. This woman was his curse. He climbed into the stern.
“Leave me alone!” he said as he stomped on her hand.
He crushed the tips of her index and middle fingers, and with that she lost her grip and sank into the canal. Alvin sat down on the stern seat, never taking his eyes off the ripples that marked his stalker’s disappearance.
The current carried Alvin several miles downstream before he was driven ashore by hunger. He managed to eke out a few weeks in a cabin along the riverbank, but there was little food. Alvin threw his fate back to the will of the canal, which eventually carried him parallel to the Barnes’s home. Alvin had climbed through a drainage ditch that ran under the road and tried to get into the house across the creek from Noah’s.
“But there were more of those ghouls inside.”
“The Fitzpatricks,” Noah interjected.
“Huh?”
“The ones chasing you—they were my neighbors. I thought they might have turned. Checked their
