The River Kept Its Own

Trigger Warning: Violence, horror themes, undead/infected creatures, and life-threatening situations.

I crouched behind the rotted, moss-slicked trunk of a fallen white oak, with my fingers dug so deep into the dirt I could feel the damp pulse of the earth. Sweat poured down my face, ruining the brim of my faded baseball cap. Ten yards away, something tore through the mountain laurel.

It wasn’t a deer.

Deer didn’t make that wet, clicking sound in the back of their throats. And deer definitely didn’t drag one foot behind them with a heavy, rhythmic shhh-clack.

I shouldn’t have been here.

The thought looped through my brain, repetitive and mocking. When the grid went dark and the Grave-Rot swallowed the cities, the smart people stayed put or headed for open ground. Me? I was stubborn. Blindingly attached to the wilderness where I grew up, I made a run for my family’s old fishing cabin hidden deep in the ancient timberlands.

But I wasn’t running to save myself.

I was running to find Lily.

She was seven, with bright, untamed curls and her mother’s stubborn smirk. The last time I saw her, she was standing in our driveway clutching a stuffed rabbit with one ear hanging by a thread. She had tried so hard to be brave. I still remembered her waving through the truck window as they drove away, both of us pretending we would see each other again in a few days.

That was six months ago.

When the evacuation orders came down, her stepdad had panicked and driven her up into the ridge country to hide out. I didn’t even know if she was still breathing. All I had was a crumpled paper map with a red Sharpie circle around the cabin, a heart drawn in Lily’s messy handwriting, and a desperate, terrifying hope.

Now, I was stranded in the dense, suffocating undergrowth of a vast state park, sandwiched between a rising tide of the infected and a landscape that was slowly swallowing itself whole. I was thirty-two, starving, and armed with nothing but a rusted hunting knife and a half-empty box of matches. By all known laws of survival, I should have died three weeks ago on the asphalt of the highway.

The clicking grew louder.

The leaves rustled, and a face emerged from the green canopy.

It had once been a park ranger. I recognized the shredded remains of the tan uniform shirt, but the man’s jaw was entirely unhinged, hanging by a thread of graying sinew. His eyes were milky and ruined, but his head snapped directly toward my position, sniffing the humid air. His chest cavity was hollowed out, colonized by a swarm of angry, buzzing yellowjackets.

I held my breath until my lungs burned, my eyes locked on his rotted boots.

One step.

Two steps.

Then a sharp crack echoed from the ridge above us.

The ranger snapped his head toward the sound, let out a wet, rattling hiss that sent a cloud of wasps spilling from his mouth, and tore up the steep incline with terrifying, unnatural speed.

I collapsed against the dirt, letting out a trembling breath.

Wiping sweat from my eyes, I looked down at my pack. It was just an old canvas duffel, but inside, wrapped up like a sacred artifact, was my prized possession. A pristine, crinkled bag of Utz Old Bay potato chips.

I’d scavenged them from a smashed-open gas station two days ago. In this new world, salt was life.

But to me, they were everything.

They were Lily’s favorite snack. Back before the world ended, she would eat them until her tiny fingers were stained orange-red, licking the seasoning off each one before crunching down. I could still hear her high-pitched laugh as she threatened to wipe her salty hands on my clean shirts.

If I found her—when I found her—I was going to hand her that bag.

It was the only piece of normal life I had left to offer. It was my promise that something could still be okay again.

“Not today,” I whispered to the empty woods, clutching the bag through the canvas. “Not yet. I’m coming, baby.”

To understand why I shouldn’t have made it out, you have to understand the deep woods terrain. It wasn’t just the infected you were fighting. It was the mud. The river basin was a labyrinth of blackwater swamps, hidden creeks, and quicksand that could swallow you to your waist before you realized you’d stepped off the trail.

My goal was the river.

If I could find my grandfather’s old sixteen-foot aluminum skiff, I could row into the deep lake downstream, cut across to the northern bank, and reach the cabin trail by morning. Rotters couldn’t swim. Their waterlogged tissue made them sink like stones, where the river currents would clean their bones in days.

I pushed forward, keeping off the main hiking paths. The forest was thick with tulip poplars and massive sweetgum trees, their star-shaped leaves blocking out the midday sun. The air smelled of mud, decaying vegetation, and that sharp metallic tang that meant a horde of infected was nearby.

By mid-afternoon, the trees began to thin, giving way to sprawling yellow-green marshes. Water crept up through the reeds.

I stopped at the edge of a small clearing. A rusted pickup truck sat tilted in the mud, its doors wide open. Sprawled across the hood was a skeleton, picked clean by crows and time.

My stomach clenched with hunger. I hadn’t eaten since yesterday morning.

I sat in the shadow of a massive weeping willow, unzipped my duffel, and carefully pulled out the bag of Utz chips. I opened it with agonizing slowness, trying not to let the loud pop of plastic echo through the silent woods.

The scent hit me instantly.

Celery salt. Black pepper. Paprika. That sharp mustard tang.

It smelled like summer. Like backyard barbecues, sticky fingers, and Lily sitting on my shoulders, laughing as she tried to feed me a chip.

My throat tightened.

I wanted to devour the whole bag. My body screamed for the calories, the grease, the sodium. But I couldn’t. These weren’t my chips. They belonged to a little girl who might be sitting in a dark cabin right now, hungry and terrified.

I took one broken chip from the bottom of the bag, placed it on my tongue, and closed my eyes.

The crunch was deafening in my ears, the salty, spicy kick firing up my dormant salivary glands.

“God bless Hanover, Pennsylvania,” I muttered, a tear cutting a clean line through the dirt on my cheek.

Then I folded the top of the bag down, sealed it with a rubber band I’d found in my pocket, and tucked it away. Five seconds of comfort for me wasn’t worth taking one more bite from her.

Suddenly, the marsh grass behind me erupted.

Three of them burst through the reeds at once.

They were bloated, their skin a bruised, translucent purple from days spent wandering the brackish water. Their clothes had rotted away. Their limbs were coated in dark river mud and clinging weeds.

I scrambled backward, but my heel caught on a hidden sweetgum root. I hit the ground hard, knocking the wind from my lungs. The canvas duffel flew from my hand, landing five feet away in the mud.

The lead Rotter, a towering man who looked like he’d once been a logger, lunged.

I rolled left as the creature slammed into the earth where I had been lying. His teeth clicked together like rusty pliers, inches from my neck.

I drew my knife.

It wasn’t made for piercing skulls. The blade was short, thick, and blunt, designed for heavy work. But as the logger turned his milky eyes toward me, I didn’t have a choice.

I drove the blade upward, aiming for the soft underside of his jaw. The steel caught, sinking deep into gray, bloodless tissue.

The creature didn’t flinch.

He pressed his weight down, forcing me deeper into the wet earth.

My legs began to sink.

River silt.

The mud wrapped around my calves, pulling me down as I fought the dead weight above me.

“Get off!” I screamed.

With a desperate surge of adrenaline, I twisted the knife sideways, using the leverage to snap the creature’s cervical spine. The body went limp, its mud-soaked mass pinning me into the rising marsh water.

The other two infected closed in.

One was a younger woman in a shredded sundress, her face half gone, her exposed ribs blackened by decay. The other was a small, terrifyingly fast teenager.

My legs were trapped. The water was up to my waist now, cold and muddy. The river was rising fast. If I couldn’t get loose, I would either be eaten alive or drown in the basin.

And Lily would be left entirely alone.

I kicked frantically, but the suction of the mud was absolute. It felt like wet concrete hardening around my boots.

The sundress Rotter reached me first, bending down with a wet, gurgling howl.

I couldn’t reach my knife. It was stuck in the first creature’s skull. In a panic, my hand brushed against my duffel bag. My fingers locked around the only solid object left: the heavy cast-iron skillet I’d been carrying to cook with.

I swung it with both hands.

CLANG.

The sound rang across the swamp like a church bell.

The iron smashed into the side of the Rotter’s head, shattering her temple and sending her crashing into the reeds.

But the teenager was already on me.

He leaped, landing squarely on my chest, forcing my head beneath the muddy river water.

Everything went brown and silent.

I opened my eyes to the murky sting. The teenager’s face was inches from mine, bubbles rising from his torn throat as he tried to bite me through the water.

My lungs screamed for air. The mud held my lower body in a vise.

This was it.

This was the moment I became another statistic, another ghost haunting the wilderness.

I was going to fail her.

Somewhere beyond these woods, a little girl was waiting for a promise I had made six months ago.

I’ll come get you.

If I died here, she would never know I tried.

No.

I refused to die in the mud. I refused to let the forest have me before I saw her face again.

With my left hand, I grabbed the teenager by his greasy hair and pulled his face down. With my right, I reached into my pocket and found the small, hard object I’d picked up from the shoreline earlier.

A jagged piece of river stone.

I rammed the sharp edge into the teenager’s eye socket and twisted with everything I had left. The creature stiffened, arms flailing wildly, before his body went still.

I shoved him off and broke the surface, gasping for air, spitting muddy water.

I was trembling. The water had climbed to my chest. I had minutes before I wouldn’t be able to keep my head above it.

I grabbed the logger’s shoulder and used the dead weight as an anchor, pulling until the suction around my right leg finally broke with a wet schluck. My foot came free, minus my boot. I did the same with the left, abandoning my footwear entirely to the silt.

I crawled onto the bank, panting, my bare feet bleeding from sharp marsh grass and gravel.

Behind me, the duffel bag was half submerged.

Floating near the surface was the shiny, crinkled bag of Utz chips.

I lunged for it, snatched it from the water, and cradled it to my chest like something living.

The outside was streaked with mud.

But inside, it was dry.

I hadn’t lost it.

The sun was beginning to set, casting long, bloody streaks across the wide river. The water was calm, reflecting the twilight sky like a dark mirror.

I limped along the shoreline, my bare feet torn and coated in dried mud. Evening brought a sharp chill off the water. Every step hurt. Every breath scraped. But the northern ridge was closer now.

Then I saw it.

Emerging from the phragmites was an old, weathered wooden dock. At the end of it, tied with frayed nylon rope, was my grandfather’s sixteen-foot aluminum Jon boat.

It was half-filled with rainwater.

But it was floating.

A ragged, disbelieving laugh tore out of me.

I stumbled down the dock, the boards creaking under my weight. Behind me, in the dark line of woods, I heard them gathering again: the clicks, the groans, the heavy dragging footsteps of the dead moving between the poplars.

I scrambled into the boat, grabbed an old plastic milk jug, and began bailing out rainwater. My arms burned. My hands shook. Still, I worked until the bottom was mostly dry.

Then I untied the knot, took the heavy aluminum oars, and pushed off from the dock.

With every stroke, the shoreline receded. The dark, terrible woods grew smaller, replaced by the vast, open safety of deep water.

When I was a quarter-mile out, surrounded by the place where the dead could never touch me, I let the oars rest.

Above me, stars appeared one by one.

Across the lake, the northern ridge rose black against the sky. Somewhere beyond that dark line of timber sat the cabin. Somewhere beyond that ridge was Lily.

I was alive.

I shouldn’t have been, but I was.

I sat on the metal bench and pulled the crumpled bag of Utz chips from my vest.

The plastic was scratched and stained with mud, but it had survived.

Just like me.

I didn’t open it. Instead, I ran my thumb across the yellow logo and set the bag carefully on the seat beside me.

Tomorrow, if everything went right, Lily would sit there.

Tomorrow, she would wrinkle her nose at the smell of the lake and complain about the cold.

Tomorrow, she would tear open the bag and get orange seasoning all over her fingers.

Tomorrow, she would laugh.

The thought hit me harder than any fight, any wound, any near miss in the swamp.

For six months, I had survived one day at a time. One mile at a time. One impossible step after another.

Now, for the first time, I had something better than survival.

I had hope.

The woods had tried to claim me.

The mud had tried to swallow me.

The dead had tried to drag me under.

But somewhere beyond the dark ridge, a little girl was waiting for her father.

I picked up the oars and pointed the boat toward shore.

I shouldn’t have made it out.

But I was going to make it home.