"Liz, Theresa! Get your asses into the station!" he bellowed.
He ran across the lilting ground and pounded on the door to their trailer.
It was a painfully long time until they appeared, and the world continued to rock, the gap between two trailers growing wider and wider. He eyed the gap with nervousness, knowing that at any moment, the dead would appear. Liz and Theresa finally appeared at the door.
"What's going on?" they asked, their eyes wide and filled with panic.
"Earthquake," he said simply. "We got a gap in the wall. The dead will be in here any second."
"Let's grab the food," Theresa said. Liz followed her inside, and the rocking suddenly stopped.
"We ain't got time for food," Mort said. The world was quiet again. He waited, being as silent as he could.
Inside the trailer, he saw Liz and Theresa throwing cans of food into pillowcases. He didn't say anything, didn't press them further, or pressure them to hurry up. He didn't want to make any noise at all, for fear of drawing the dead. He also realized that most of their food was inside Liz and Theresa's trailer, and unless they wanted to starve to death, they had better grab it now while they could.
Shit, firewood. If they all went inside the ranger station, and they left the firewood outside, they would freeze to death at some point.
"After you get that food, I need you guys to start bringing the firewood inside." As soon as he spoke, the first of the dead appeared at the newly opened gap between the two trailers. Liz and Theresa pounded down the trailer's porch, their round bodies running towards the ranger station.
Mort turned and approached the dead things as they came through the gap, his spear gripped in his hand. Another one followed it, and he knew he was going to have to be perfect in order to hold them off. He skirted around the tip of the fallen tree that had crushed one of the trailers. He was glad that no one had been inside when the tree fell.
The dead woman in front of him snarled, and he bent his knees and thrust the spear upward under her jaw, lifting her off her feet for a moment. Before gravity could fully take her limp body, he pulled the spear free and stepped back. The other dead thing came on as well, wearing a red sweatshirt and no pants, its tiny penis flopping from side to side. The sight made him even colder.
He did the same thing to the man that he had done to the woman. Its body fell in the snow, and two more were there to replace it. He tossed a look over his shoulder. He saw everyone running back and forth with logs in their hands. When he looked back, a third dead thing was crawling through the gap.
"Hurry up with that wood!" Mort called, before plunging the spear into the eye socket of one of the dead. Another of the dead reached out to him before he could pull his spear free, and he shouldered it away. He dragged the spear from the body and backed up. Another of the dead appeared in the gap, and he knew he was going to lose this fight. But he needed to fight long enough to keep the dead from attacking the women.
There were so many of them now. He didn't have time to count them. He focused on killing as many as he could. He went somewhere else, his instincts and body taking over as he repeatedly plunged the spear into frozen flesh. A line of the dead led to the gap between the trailers, but still more were coming. From behind him, he heard the squeal of a crying baby, and he knew that he was out of space and time. He hoped that whatever firewood and food they had collected would keep them alive long enough.
He turned his back on the dead and ran inside the ranger station. He slammed the door behind him, catching a brief glimpse of the dead that were following. There were too many of them. They would never get out of here. He pressed his body against the door. It shook in the jamb as the dead pounded upon it, the flimsy timbers holding together somehow.
****
Highway 26 was a crazy road filled with twists and turns. It had been blasted through mountain rock, built upon shelves that overlooked steep forested valleys. In the old days, it had been a trail used to transition from the warm Willamette Valley to the environs of the coast. From there, pioneers had used it to establish trade between settlements. But now, it was a dead snake of asphalt, blocked off by stalled cars. Most of its patrons were now of the deceased variety.
When the earthquake hit Oregon, many sections of the road stopped existing. Heavy with snow and stalled cars, all it took was one good shake of the road, and some sections dropped away, crumbling into the valleys as the Juan De Fuca plate submerged underneath the North American plate off the coast of Oregon.
The impact of the earthquake would be felt for hundreds of miles.
To the north of the ranger station, where the stalled cars stretched on for miles and the dead milled about like sleepy revelers at a tailgate party, the road would simply drop away. The dead rode this wall of asphalt and cars down the side of the
