Where the trail straightened out again, a heavy-set man stood, his arms at his sides, his fists clenched. His mouth hung open; his lips formed a dark purple oval. Again the icy green skin; again the grey, dull eyes. Like the others, he had once been human but wasn’t anymore. He raised his arms and his fingers uncoiled, and he lurched hungrily toward Walker.

Walker heard his wife’s voice: “Run!”

Then again: “Run!!”

He wanted to turn and see what was happening behind him, but fear kept him focused on the heavy-set man. Each time the man took a step forward, Walker took a step back. The man’s hands hung in the air just inches from Walker’s face, fingers grasping. Walker tried to see a way around the man, but there was none: the trail was too narrow. To escape they would have to either go into the forest or go back. Or, Walker realized, they could fight.

Yes, Walker decided, adrenaline pumping through his veins, the pace of his breathing increasing. Now was the time to fight.

“Walker!” Jane screamed, now right behind him.

There was desperation in her voice; she seemed to be pleading with him. But he could not deal with her now. Reaching out with both hands, he grabbed one of the heavy-set man’s arms and swung him around toward the rock around which the trail had curved. The man moved easily, more easily than Walker had expected given his size, and he slammed hard into the rock with the entire front of his body. Now Walker could see the wound on the man’s back.

“Oh my god,” Jane gasped, also focused on the gap where a huge chunk of the man’s back had once been.

Unfazed, Walker used one hand to press the man against the rock, and with the other he grabbed a handful of the man’s hair and began to slam his face against the hard stone. The sound was sickening, and when a bone in the man’s face snapped, Walker thought he heard Jane gag.

Now, believing that the man must be stunned, Walker pulled him away from the rock. But the man seemed to have lost none of his energy, or his hunger. His hands leapt into the air, and he struggled to turn and resume his attack on Walker. Panicking, Walker rushed the man forward to the edge of the trail, where the slope down through the forest began, and he pushed him over the edge.

Breathing heavily, his skin glistening, Walker watched as the man tumbled away through the underbrush, narrowly avoiding several trees as he went. Their attacker vanquished, he allowed himself to feel satisfied, even heroic. But that didn’t last.

“Oh no,” Jane moaned, stepping up next to him. “Oh no, Walker. Ryan–!”

“What about Ryan?” Walker cut in, with more than a hint of annoyance. Only then did he realize that he couldn’t see his son anywhere. “Where’s Ryan?”

Unable to speak, her skin gone ashen, Jane pointed down the slope.

“I told him to run!” she cried.

***

They moved down through the forest several yards apart, slowly but with a sense of urgency, their eyes flitting through the shrubbery and behind trees, searching for any sign of Ryan. At the same time, they remained alert in case another creature should appear.

Walker felt angry and betrayed. What kind of sick joke was this? He had done everything in his power to keep his family safe and together, to separate them from the forces back home that threatened to tear them apart, only to run into this. Fate was going to enormous lengths to undermine his efforts. Apparently it wasn’t enough that they be fugitives, doomed to live their lives on the run. Only their complete annihilation would suffice.

From further down the hill, the unmistakable sound of gunfire. Jane froze, her eyes wide, while Walker broke into a panicked run, the underbrush ripping at his exposed calves, low-hanging branches beating his face and tugging at his clothes. When he saw the narrow dirt road and the figures standing on it, his pace increased: Ryan was under attack. But then he saw the camouflage clothing and the rifles, and he stopped dead in his tracks.

Soldiers.

A moment later, Jane joined him. When she started to speak, he quickly placed a hand over her mouth.

There were three soldiers: a recon team, Walker guessed. One of them was leading Ryan to the side of the road while the other two continued onward up the valley. Then there was the sound of approaching vehicles, what sounded like dozens of them, heavy machines that caused the air itself to vibrate.

Jane pulled Walker’s hand away.

“He’s alright,” she said, her voice weak, relieved.

“Not if the army takes him,” Walker said.

“But shouldn’t we go with them?” Jane asked. “Wouldn’t we be safer with them?”

An army jeep shot past, then another, then a convoy of troop transports. Ryan stood looking up at the vehicles, dwarfed by them, as a cloud of dust engulfed him. The third soldier left Ryan’s side and ran after the other two.

“In that case,” Walker said, “we might as well have just handed ourselves over to the police two weeks ago.”

“But things have changed,” Jane pleaded. “What’s happening now, these people–”

“Eventually this will end,” Walker stated, with a confidence he did not feel. “In the meantime, we will take care of ourselves.”

Walker moved away from his wife and down to the edge of the road. Now just a few feet from his son, barely concealed by the leaves of a low, thin shrub, he watched and waited until one last troop transport passed and the road went quiet. Hearing other vehicles approaching, knowing this was only a gap, Walker moved quickly to his son’s side.

Ryan looked up at him, startled.

“Let’s go,” Walker said sternly, clutching Ryan’s arm.

“There’s a rescue team coming…”

“Let’s go!”

Out of the corner of his eye, Walker saw the front grill of another jeep as it rounded the corner. Quickly he pulled Ryan away from the road and into the woods. They fell to the ground in the shadows.

“Don’t move,” Walker warned. “They’ll see us.”

The jeep passed, and then another. Just when it seemed that the previous pattern was going to repeat itself, a pair of army ambulances roared into view. These were followed by another convoy of troop transports, but instead of soldiers inside, these were filled with men, women and children dressed in civilian attire. They looked forlorn and weary, most sitting with their eyes pointed downward at the bed of the truck. The few who were looking outside seemed to be staring at nothing in particular, their eyes glazed by fatigue and the trials they had endured.

An evacuation, Walker realized as truck after truck rolled by, the number increasing until he was sure that civilians outnumbers troops by at least three to one.

The convoy ended as it had begun, with a pair of army jeeps, their soft tops up, the soldiers inside them only hazily visible. Once the sound of vehicles had vanished entirely, Walker led Ryan up the hill to where Jane was sitting on the forest floor.

Jane grabbed Ryan and pulled him down to her, embracing him urgently. It seemed desperate and regretful, and more for her sake than for Ryan’s, but still, it was a real hug. Back in Seattle, Jane’s displays of affection for her son had been rare and hasty.

“From now on, we’ll stay off the trails and the roads,” Walker said. “It’ll be rougher going, but these creatures seem to be wandering the trails, and the army’s all over the roads.”

Ryan gently pushed away from him mother and rose to his feet. “They’re in the woods too,” he told his father. “That woman on the road, she came out of the woods.”

“Nothing’s certain, of course,” Walker said.

“Are we still headed to Bern?” Jane asked.

“Yes, we’re going to Bern,” Walker said. An evacuation, an empty city. Only these stupid creatures to deal with. “Get on your feet and let’s go.”

***

Moving slowly through the forest, avoiding the trails and roads, it took them the rest of that day and part of the next to reach Bern.

On the way they didn’t encounter any more creatures — and ‘creatures’ is now what they had settled on calling the beasts that had upended their Swiss seclusion. There had been no discussion, no agreement. Walker had been the first to say it out loud, and Ryan and Jane had taken the word on as their own. It was a way to set aside the confusion the creatures inspired, by appearing human when in fact they could not have been, at least not anymore.

“The man from the trail,” Ryan told his father during the night, when they stopped for a few hours to rest. “They shot him three times before he finally went down.”

“They’re tough, these creatures,” Walker said, his eyes searching the shadows for any sign of movement.

“It was more than that,” Ryan said. “I saw he’d been hit. In the face, then in the neck. But it was like he didn’t even notice.”

“Maybe he didn’t,” Walker said.

He glanced over at Jane, curled up in a ball at the base of a tree. Unlike her husband and son, she had managed to find enough peace to sleep. How, Walker could not imagine. Had she forgotten that this was all her fault?

“You were brave back there on the road,” Walker told his son. “I was worried about you after what happened at the house, the way you screamed and just stood there.”

Ryan knew what his father meant, but to him the difference had been in the situations. On the road he’d had time to think. If he once again found himself torn from his slumber by a creature crashing through his bedroom window, he wasn’t sure he wouldn’t just stand there and scream as he had before.

“I need some help here,” Walker went on. “Your mom’s not going to be any help, and I can’t take care of all three of us by myself.”

Walker reached out and placed his hand firmly on Ryan’s shoulder.

“Can I count on you to do what needs to be done?” he said.

“Sure, Dad,” Ryan said. “Sure.”

***

The next morning, as they continued their slow descent, Walker gave some more thought to the situation they were walking into. If the army wanted the hills, let them have them. Even if Bern was crowded with creatures, all Walker and his family needed was a single room, preferably higher than street level, with a sturdy front door and a back way out. If they were quiet and careful, the creatures wouldn’t even know they were there.

And there would be supplies. At the moment, the only supplies they had were the clothes they were wearing and the few items in the packs on their backs, which included very little food. The army had of course taken a great deal with them, and certainly there had been looting, but surely something remained. Not much perhaps, but enough for the three of them.

The only real unknown was the cause of all this. Had the army evacuated Bern because of the creatures, or because of what had made them creatures in the first place? Was Walker leading his family into ground zero of a viral epidemic, or a biological attack?

He couldn’t know, of course, and in the end he refused to let a complete unknown drive his decision. He knew the army was in the hills, and he knew they couldn’t survive in the forest without supplies. So the city it had to be.

***

That afternoon, they entered Bern from the west.

The road they had been traveling alongside — cautiously, keeping to the shadows — abruptly widened, and above it arced what looked like freeway ramps. The sight of so much road made the lack of traffic sounds conspicuous, a haunting absence.

Moving forward now would leave them fully exposed, a trio of figures moving through the glare of the bright afternoon sun. Walker kept his family back in the shadow of a large tree as he surveyed the scene.

A sign on a nearby lamppost read Papiermühlestrasse, white reflective letters on a green background. Behind it a low wall partially concealed a sprawling cemetery. Stepping away from his parents, Ryan peered over the wall at the headstones, row after row of granite, several different shades of grey. None of the graves had been disturbed. Whoever had been buried here was still buried here.

“It’s an overpass,” Walker was saying. “A terrible place to get trapped, but we’ll have to cross.” He turned to his son. “Ryan, you keep watch behind us. You see anything, don’t take your time letting me know.”

They crossed the overpass in a line, Walker in front, Jane in the middle, Ryan at the rear, walking backwards with his eyes on the road where they’d just been. As they moved over the freeway, he peered down at the four lanes of empty blacktop, instinctively expecting a car or truck to whoosh into view at any moment, then reminding himself uneasily that the world was empty now. All the cars and trucks had been set aside, their engines stilled.

“Behind us, Ryan,” Walker ordered.

Quickly Ryan refocused on the tree-canopied road they’d just moved down and the cemetery he’d briefly gazed into. He only averted his eyes again when the overpass crossed a pair of railroad tracks. In the middle distance was a station, its platform empty, and the rumble of a passing train was added to Ryan’s inventory of missing sounds.

On the other side of the overpass was a large intersection, beyond which the road again became tree-lined. Walker ushered his family quickly to where the trees began, forgetting caution for the sake of attaining partial concealment. Across the road was a large grassy field, which on any other sunny afternoon would have been filled with people at play. On this side of the road, where the trees began, loomed a stadium. Stade de Suisse, Ryan read, his ears full of the absent roar of several thousand spectators.

They kept to the trees as they continued, hiding themselves as well as they could among the trunks while still moving forward. But as far as Ryan could tell, their caution was unnecessary. There was no one; the city was empty. The capital of Switzerland. Population: three Americans.

The road sloped downward and curved to the left, and the sidewalk opened up into a wide path. Down below they could see the heart of the city, a sea of steep burgundy roofs, broken up by the occasional church steeple or clock tower. Benches along the path facing the cityscape stood empty.

A wide river curved around the city’s near edge, it’s flow uninterrupted by whatever supernatural catastrophe had taken place. At the bottom of the road they were traveling along, Ryan saw an ancient bridge, a bridge they would have to cross if they intended to enter the city. It was shorter than the overpass, but also narrower. And although it had the river below it, it was too far down to jump into if they became trapped.

Sure enough, when they arrived at the bridge Walker stopped and took a moment to scrutinize it. Nearby was a large circular pit surrounded by a waist-high wall. On the opposite side was a structure with windows that had been designed to mimic a castle in miniature, with two narrow towers on either end of a crenelated parapet.

Apparently in the process of being renovated, aluminum scaffolding peeked up out of the pit, and a construction crane loomed overhead. On a nearby fence, a sign announced, in slightly awkward English, “Here the new BärenPark Bern is being built, park for bears and humans.” Ryan moved cautiously away from his parents to the edge of the pit.

It was about ten feet deep, and in the center was a stack of rectangular stones, placed irregularly, with tall grass shooting up out of the cracks between them. Between the stones and the interior wall was a dirt path, about four yards wide, that ran around the pit’s circumference. Ryan looked for bears, but there were none; apparently because of the construction they’d been moved elsewhere.

A long moment passed before Ryan realized that he was being watched, that a face was peering at him from around the opposite edge of the stones. He held his breath, and the face ducked away, only to reappear a moment later, slipping slowly — cautiously, Ryan thought — into view. Ryan clutched the top of the wall and tried to determine exactly what it was he was looking at. Was it a human? Or was it one of them?

“Dad,” Ryan said without turning. “Dad, come here.”

A moment later Walker was at his side, Jane standing just a few feet behind him, her arms crossed. She looked jumpy, unable to focus. Ryan supposed she needed a drink.

“What is it?” Walker asked, but then he saw for himself why Ryan had called him over. “Is it one of them?”

“I don’t think so,” Ryan said. “He seems afraid.”

“Hello!” Walker called out.

He raised a hand and waved, which apparently was all the reassurance that was required. When the creature pulled itself out from behind the stones, leaning against them to compensate for the leg it was missing, every trace of apprehension had vanished. It had been replaced by the look of all-consuming hunger that Walker and his family knew so well.

Ryan made a move to back quickly away, but Walker stopped him with a hand on his back.

“Don’t panic,” Walker said. “He couldn’t get to us from down there even if had both his legs.”

“Horrible,” Jane said, now standing at the pit’s edge next to Ryan. Her lips were dry, cracked.

The creature’s lone leg twisted awkwardly, its hands lost their grip on the stone, and it fell bluntly to the ground, raising a cloud of dirt. Quickly it pushed itself up and over into a sitting position, then it raised its hands toward them, its fingers grasping. It gnashed its cracked and blood-stained teeth, as if anticipating the taste of their flesh.

“Horrible,” Jane said again.

“Let’s go,” Walker said.

And then it happened. The creature in the pit opened its mouth wide, a dark morbid hole, and let out a howl that seemed to rip the air itself apart. Ryan had heard these creatures make a number of sounds, growls and grunts. But none like this one. None that seemed so possessed of purpose.

A warm breeze cut across the three of them, tousling their hair and tugging lightly at their clothes, and carrying with it an acrid stench. Together they turned toward the road they had just walked down, their eyes on the steep, grass-covered hill that loomed above it. The grass was tall and wild, and rich with green, and it swung and snapped in the wind.

Then a dark shape emerged from the grass, rising unsteadily to its feet. Then another, and still another, all seemingly answering the call of the creature in the pit. They had been hiding, Ryan realized. They had concealed themselves in the grass, and only now that they knew it was safe were they revealing themselves. What threat had driven them into the grass, Ryan didn’t know. He only knew that he and his family were clearly not it.

There were now perhaps twenty of them moving down the hill to the road and toward them. Then more appeared, lumbering up a road that led down to the river, their arms outstretched. Then movement to his right caught Ryan’s attention, and he turned his head to see another group of creatures hobble out from where they had been hidden by the mini-castle across the pit.

Ryan and his parents stood frozen in disbelief. How many were there now? Forty, fifty? And how many more were as yet holding back, skulking in the shadows, still unsure that they were safe from harm? And what was it that had taught these creatures fear?

Walker put a hand on Ryan’s shoulder and grabbed Jane by the arm, leading them quickly away from the pit back to the street. Looking across the bridge they saw no shapes, no movement at all, just a narrow stone road curving up into the city. Perhaps on the other side, among Bern’s narrow streets and closely-packed buildings, they would be safe. Or perhaps not. But given what was developing on this side of the bridge, the heart of the city was quickly turning into their only option.

As they ran across the bridge, Ryan chanced a glance down at the river. Turquoise, he would say its color had been, when at last there was someone to tell. And it looked like flowing granite, he would add, its surface smooth save for the occasional shudder, the odd tremble.

If he ever saw Michelle again, that’s what he’d tell her. He’d tell her about the one beautiful thing he’d seen in the midst of all this horror. And he’d tell her that it had reminded him of her.