Open Roads by Zach Bohannon

Maybe he’ll join us in a little while. Gabriel, too, if he has a change of heart. Have a seat.”
    Holly had saved a place for Will to sit between both her and Jessica. Holly patted on the ground beside her, inviting Will to sit down. He moved around the circle and plopped down onto a blanket which covered the mud.
    “You guys sit out here every night?” Will asked.
    “It’s just started to get cooler over the last few nights,” Claire said. “We’ve been trying to save most of the wood we’ve gathered for when it gets really cold, but this has been some really good bonding time for us over the last couple of evenings.”
    “There’s only so much you can do up here at night with no power,” noted Scott, the twenty-something year old guy who’d barely spoken a word up until now.
    “Do you guys plan to just stay up here?” Jessica asked.
    Charlie, Claire, and Larry all nodded.
    “Where else would we go?” Larry asked. “Me and the misses aren’t exactly built for travel, especially out there, from the way that Charlie, Claire, and Thomas have described it.”
    “We’ve only been into town and back,” Charlie said. “How bad is it out there?”
    Will looked down, grabbing a twig and twisting it in his hand. “Bad.”
    “You guys don’t want to go out there,” Holly said. “Trust us.”
    “We’d only thought about it a little,” Charlie said. “I think mostly we’d just like to try and find some answers about what the hell is really going on. About what’s causing this.”
    Will could feel the eyes of Jessica and Holly on him without even having to look up. He ran his hand under his sleeve and rubbed the wound on his arm again. He wasn’t sure if these people would believe him or think he was crazy, but he felt, with all the hospitality they’d shown, that they at least deserved to know what he and the others knew.
    So, he told them.
    He began with the experimental Empty at the hospital, explaining to them how the hospital’s survivors had run some test and been unable to find any trace of a virus or infection within it. He told them what he knew about how to kill the beasts, which they’d already found out on their own through trial and error. Then, Will drew in a deep breath as he prepared to drop the bomb on them.
    “We think the reason for the reanimation is supernatural. Something… demonic.”
    Charlie looked upon Will with a blank stare. He cleared his throat. “Demonic?”
    Will nodded.
    “You mean… like those things are possessed by demons?” Marie asked.
    The old man, Larry, chuckled. “And what on earth makes you think that?”
    Holly put her hand on Will’s shoulder and nodded at him, glancing down to his arm. Will sighed, then rolled up his shirt sleeve. He leaned in toward the light of the flames and put his arm out for everyone to see.
    There was a collective gasp as everyone looked down at the bite marks on Will’s arm; then they all seemed to turn their eyes up to Will’s.
    Charlie said, “You got bit?”
    Again, Will just nodded.
    “Don’t worry,” Holly said. “He’s not infected.”
    “How can you be so sure?”
    “Because I watched a man draw the demon out of him,” Jessica said, breaking her silence.
    The campground survivors looked at Will, their jaws dropped and eyes wide. They looked as if they didn’t believe Jessica.
    “It’s true,” Dylan said. “I was there, too.”
    Will explained all that he knew about what had happened. How he’d gotten into the car accident, then been bitten by a man they’d had a confrontation with, sparing himself the pain of explaining to them who David Ellis was. To the point, it was irrelevant. He moved on, speaking about how he’d been bitten, and then eventually blacked out. Not just blacked out, but passed on. Holly and Jessica listened just as intently, as this was the first time he’d spoken this in-depth about what it had felt like to have died. He had no recollection of being revived by Samuel, the