Part 5: The Dead Fields
They moved like ghosts.
Twelve of them, trudging through ankle-deep sludge that used to be Gold Beach’s back roads, now just a graveyard of rust, salt, and broken plastic. Every step was a guess. What lay beneath might be soft loam, or it might be barbed wire, or bones.
Walter Briggs led the line.
He held a walking stick in one hand — the same axe handle his father had carved out of ashwood in 1951 — and Nathan’s elbow in the other. The boy was too proud to lean on him, so Walter made it look like a partnership.
It wasn’t.
Nathan needed him.
And, for the first time in years, Walter was willing to be needed.
The others followed.
Melinda carried Annie in a sling made from school curtains. Kara helped Bo keep pace, while Tyler pushed an old shopping cart loaded with what little gear they had left: duct tape, wet crackers, canned peaches, and a flask of moonshine Walter had found in the principal’s desk.
The sky hung low.
Pale as a bruise.
No birds. No flies. No wind.
Only the sucking sound of boots in wet earth, and the distant growl of a sea that wasn’t finished yet.
By noon, they reached the cornfields.
Or what remained of them.
Walter had worked this land decades ago, when his knees still bent without screaming and his son David was just a boy riding in the back of the pickup with a coonskin cap and a pellet gun.
Now the fields were a wasteland.
Stalks ripped clean. Soil turned over like it had been chewed. A torn-up scarecrow lay face down in the mud, one arm raised like it had tried to warn them and failed.
Nathan stared at the land, then at Walter.
“This was yours?”
Walter nodded once.
Then kept walking.
They passed the remains of Cal Avery’s barn, or what the neighbors used to call “the red prayer box.” Cal had painted Bible verses across every wall after his wife died in ’94. Now the verses were gone, and the only color left was gray.
Something moved in the rubble.
Chief, the old dog, barked twice and ran ahead.
Walter tensed, reached for the rusted revolver he kept in his coat. He hadn’t fired it since the Fourth of July two years ago — squirrels in the attic — but his hands still remembered the weight.
Bo called out, “Wait! Don’t shoot!”
A figure sat up behind the collapsed beams.
A woman.
Mid-thirties, blonde, covered in mud. Her arm was twisted at an unnatural angle.
Chief circled her once, then sat beside her like he’d known her all his life.
Walter lowered the gun.
Melinda rushed forward.
They pulled the woman out carefully.
She didn’t scream, just whispered through chattering teeth: “My daughter… she was in the house…”
They found the house fifty yards down.
Only the chimney remained standing.
Nathan knelt beside a soaked doll and a pink shoe.
Walter touched his shoulder and didn’t say a word.
They buried the shoe.
It was all they could bury.
Then moved on.
The woman’s name was Lena Callahan. She was a teacher from Brookings, visiting her father’s farm. Now her arm was broken, her daughter was gone, and she walked with them like a sleepwalker in hell.
Melinda splinted her arm using broomstick pieces. Lena didn’t thank her. Didn’t blink. Just walked.
Sometimes Walter glanced back at her and saw his daughter-in-law’s face. The same empty eyes after David’s funeral. The same silence.
Some grief doesn’t scream.
It just settles in the body and waits.
Around 3 PM, they stopped to rest near an overturned water tower.
Walter climbed the side to scout the valley.
What he saw made his gut clench.
The ocean had carved new rivers through the earth — deep gashes of black water threading eastward like fingers searching for something. And in the center, where the old cemetery used to be, the ground had opened.
Not eroded — opened.
A sinkhole? Maybe.
But it looked… deliberate.
Like something had pushed up from below.
He climbed down fast.
“We take the ridge,” he said. “No valley paths.”
Tyler frowned. “But it’s longer.”
Walter looked him dead in the eye. “You wanna bet your life on shorter?”
No one argued.
By evening, they reached Stillwater Grove — a patch of tall pine trees untouched by logging. The forest floor was firm. The air smelled clean. The group collapsed in a circle beneath the trees.
Nathan built a small fire.
Walter cooked something from a dented can labeled “HAM PRODUCT – 1992.”
They ate in silence.
Lena finally spoke.
“When I was a kid, I dreamed of waves. Not oceans. Just waves. Big ones. Crashing over houses. My mother used to say it was just because we lived on the coast.”
Walter stirred the fire.
“My son dreamed of sandstorms. In the desert. He said they whispered names.”
“Did you believe him?”
“I didn’t then.”
Walter looked up at the sky.
“But I do now.”
That night, Walter had the dream again.
The same one since the first wave.
David, standing in the cornfield.
Alive. Young.
Wearing that stupid coonskin cap.
Saying nothing.
Just holding a shovel.
Digging.
He woke up gasping.
Chief was beside him, growling low.
The fire was out.
But the radio — the one they’d packed from the school — buzzed faintly in the dark.
Walter reached for it.
“Briggs… the ground is not dead… it remembers.”
Then static.
Then silence.
He looked around the camp.
Everyone still asleep.
Except Nathan.
He was sitting alone, staring at the shovel they’d pulled from the red prayer barn.
“Did you hear it too?” he asked without turning.
Walter sat beside him.
“What do you think it means?” Nathan asked.
Walter shook his head.
“I think… I think some things we buried didn’t stay buried.”
In the morning, they would head into the Ash Creek foothills, hoping for higher ground and clearer skies.
But for now, in the grove of trees that had outlived presidents and wars, Walter sat beside his grandson, staring into the ashes of the fire.
The past was waking up.
And it wasn’t coming quietly.
Coming next: “The Fire After the Wave” — When a survivor’s secret ignites tension in the group, Walter faces a truth he long buried.
Part 6: The Fire After the Wave
The morning broke hot.
Not warm — hot. The kind of heat that didn’t belong to the Pacific Northwest, not in late July, not after a week of rain and flood and coastal storms. The air had a crackle to it. Dry pine needles snapped underfoot like old bones.
Walter Briggs felt it in his skin first.
The sweat came fast, even in the shade of Stillwater Grove. But it wasn’t just the temperature.
Something had shifted.
The smell was wrong — like burnt metal and ash.
And the silence?
It was heavier than usual.
The group packed slowly.
Nathan limped but refused the crutch. Melinda checked Lena’s bandages. Kara helped Annie braid her tangled hair with a piece of twine. Tyler and Bo were quiet — too quiet.
Walter walked perimeter.
When he reached the east end of the grove, he saw it.
A wisp of smoke.
Rising thin and steady beyond the treeline.
His chest tightened.
“Campfire?” Melinda asked.
“Too clean,” Walter said. “Too steady.”
Nathan stepped beside him. “You think it’s them?”
Walter nodded. “Or something worse.”
They debated — stay in the grove and risk fire, or move and risk being exposed in the open.
Walter made the call.
“We move.”
No one argued anymore.
By 10:00 AM, they were deep in the Ash Creek foothills, following the old game trails that twisted between brush and sandstone. The heat climbed. Birds returned — but only crows, dozens of them, wheeling high above like they were waiting for something to fall.
Nathan carried Annie’s pack. Chief scouted ahead, panting but loyal. Lena kept pace, but her eyes stayed hollow. She hadn’t said a word all morning.
Then Bo stumbled.
Hard.
Walter turned fast. “What happened?”
Bo looked up, lips cracked. “I… I’m sorry.”
Tyler knelt beside him, peeled back his sock.
Melinda gasped.
Bo’s foot was blistered black, streaked with purple veins.
Infection. Fast-moving. Possibly gangrene.
They laid him on the slope and gave him water. Melinda did what she could with peroxide and gauze.
But everyone saw the truth.
Bo wasn’t going to make it far.
“I can stay,” Tyler said quietly. “If someone gives me a radio—”
Walter shook his head. “No. We don’t split. Not anymore.”
“Then what?”
Silence.
Then Lena spoke.
“I’ll carry him.”
Heads turned.
She stepped forward, pale and shaking, her broken arm in a sling, the other still trembling from exhaustion.
But her eyes?
Alive again.
“I’ll carry him as long as I can.”
They tied a makeshift stretcher from a tarp and two fence posts. Tyler and Lena alternated carrying. Bo drifted in and out, murmuring about baseball and peanut butter sandwiches.
Walter took up the rear.
And that’s when he smelled it again.
Smoke. Closer.
He crested the ridge and saw it.
Not a wildfire.
A burning vehicle.
Military-grade. Black. Same make as the trucks from Crooked Pine Ridge.
Its windows blown out. Doors warped. Ash rising in a slow spiral.
Beside it, a body.
Walter didn’t shout.
Didn’t panic.
He just motioned for the others to stay low.
He approached carefully.
The man was face-down.
Burned badly. But a badge still clung to the uniform: Coastal Contingency Unit Four.
Walter turned him over.
And froze.
The man had been shot.
Not burned alive.
Shot clean through the chest.
“Walter!” Nathan called from the ridge. “Come look at this!”
Walter stood slowly, walked up to the trail.
And saw three more bodies.
Scattered.
Civilian clothes.
Also shot.
One had a pistol still in his hand.
A stand-off.
But over what?
Kara found the satchel first.
Inside: dry rations, a filtered water canister, and a small radio — the hand-crank kind, with a faded FEMA sticker on the side.
Nathan cranked it.
Static.
Then a voice.
“…confirmed breach near Sector Twelve… ash plume visible… evacuate all survivors east of 5,000 feet…”
Then a second voice.
Lower. Calmer.
“No more warnings. Let nature finish the job. We’ll clean what’s left.”
Melinda gasped.
“Did they just say…”
“They’re leaving us,” Walter said flatly. “On purpose.”
Lena picked up the pistol from the dead civilian.
“Then we don’t wait for help.”
They moved on, faster now.
Toward a ranger outpost Walter remembered near the Rogue River line. Higher ground. Stone construction. Solar power if they were lucky.
The sun baked the hills.
Flies circled Bo’s stretcher.
By late afternoon, the heat became unbearable.
Walter called for a break in a gully lined with smooth stones.
That’s when Kara pulled Walter aside.
“I need to tell you something.”
“What is it?”
She glanced back at Lena.
“It’s her. Lena. She didn’t just ‘find’ us. I saw her before.”
“Before what?”
“Before the first wave.”
Walter narrowed his eyes.
“She was arguing with a guy in a truck. He had a clipboard. Like those agency men. She was yelling about ‘data leaks’ and ‘the wrong targets.’ I didn’t understand it then.”
Walter stared.
“You think she’s with them?”
Kara nodded. “Or was.”
Walter stood slowly.
Walked to Lena, who was kneeling beside Bo.
He crouched.
“What were you doing in Gold Beach the night before it hit?”
She met his eyes.
And didn’t lie.
“I was supposed to be in Astoria,” she said. “I worked for a private firm. We handled logistics. Recovery planning. Contracts with the government.”
Nathan stepped forward. “You knew this was coming?”
“No,” she said. “Not like this. But I saw things in the data. We had models showing anomalies. Tsunami behavior that didn’t fit earthquakes. Then the Russian event happened. We warned them.”
Walter said nothing.
“They didn’t listen. Then they told us not to talk. To stand down.”
“And you didn’t.”
“I leaked what I could. I ran.”
She looked at Bo.
“I didn’t expect to survive this long.”
Walter looked at her a long moment.
Then said, “Keep carrying.”
That night, the fire was smaller.
Tensions thicker.
Even Annie felt it, clinging closer to Nathan than usual.
But Walter kept watch.
Not for Lena.
Not for soldiers.
But for the sea.
And the fire still moving behind them.
Slow.
Relentless.
In the dark, the radio came alive again.
“Briggs. You have one more ridge.”
“The mountain waits.”
“But you must choose.”
Walter stared at the stars.
He thought about the shovel.
The bodies.
The fire.
The quiet sound of Bo breathing slower now.
He didn’t know what he was being asked to choose.
But he knew this much:
If the mountain waited,
He’d meet it standing.
Up next: “The Town That Vanished” — The group reaches the next town on the map… only to find it erased from the world.
