3 - Berlin

He slung the rifle over his shoulder, careful with the strap. It wasn't a big one—just a .22, looked like—but it was clean, oiled, cared for. Roy must've checked it regularly. Probably used it for coyotes, maybe the occasional drunk hiker giving him trouble.

Eli figured it wasn't much in the grand scheme of things. Not if the world was really gone. But out here, even a little could tip the balance.

He took a slow lap around the cabin, keeping close to the walls, scanning the tree line. Still nothing. No footprints in the dust. No drag marks. No boot scuffs. If anyone had come through, they hadn't left a sign. Or they hadn't stayed long enough to leave one.

The air smelled like sun-warmed wood and pine needles. It could've been any year—any ordinary afternoon. That illusion held for a few moments, until he looked back toward the tower. The silhouette rising quiet and alone above the ridge.

He wasn't going back. Not yet.

He stepped inside again, rifle brushing the doorframe.

There was more to check. Maybe some batteries. A first aid kit. Anything Roy might've left behind when he vanished—on purpose or not.

Eli moved slow. Room by room. Careful not to let hope get ahead of him.

The back room was darker—no windows, just a thin strip of light under the door. Eli pushed it open with his foot, the wood dragging against the floor. Inside: shelves, crates, some old maintenance gear. It smelled like oil and paper and dust.

He crouched by a storage bin and flipped it open. Maps, rolled tight with rubber bands long since cracked. Spare gloves. A rusted flare gun with two cartridges. He set it aside. Might still work, but he didn't trust it.

Another crate: nails, rope, a folded tarp. Underneath, a fishing rod. No tackle. Still, he set it next to the flare gun. Options.

In the far corner, a plastic tote with faded duct tape across the lid—"SPARE - DO NOT TOUCH" scribbled in thick black marker.

He pried it open.

Inside: a utility knife, extra socks sealed in plastic, and a small black pouch. He unzipped it.

Ammo. For the .22.

With that, he packed slowly, methodically, careful not to waste space or energy. The gun he slid into his bag last, wrapped in a balled-up thermal shirt to keep it from clattering. He counted out the rounds again before zipping it shut. Not many—less than a box—but enough to make noise if he had to. Enough to scare something off, maybe. Enough to hurt if it came to that.

In the front room, he took one last pass through the desk. Found a few protein bars tucked behind a pile of laminated incident reports, their wrappers faded but sealed. He pocketed them with a grim sort of satisfaction. Roy always hoarded food. Said it was an old firefighter habit. Just in case.

Eli stood for a moment in the doorway, glancing back at the cluttered little ranger hut. The papers. The jacket still hanging by the door. The extra cot where Roy had napped during fire season. It looked the same. Everything looked the same.

But it wasn't.

He shut the door behind him and stepped down onto the trail, gravel crunching under his boots.

The wind had picked up again—soft through the trees, carrying the scent of pine and something faintly sour beneath it. He adjusted his pack and started downhill, skirting the ridge until the old trailhead came into view.

Still quiet.

Still normal.

The birds chirped. A squirrel darted across the path. A branch creaked overhead.

But the further he went, the more the silence beneath it all settled in. Not absence, exactly—just something missing. Like a song half-remembered or a word on the tip of your tongue.

Eli didn't like it, but he didn't stop either. His legs moved on their own, down the slope and toward the highway bend where Roy's truck used to idle on supply runs. The lot was overgrown now. Weeds pushing up through cracks in the pavement, grass climbing over the faded paint lines. No sign of the truck.

No sign of anything.

He followed the access road another half mile until the first sign of civilization eered through the trees—just a sliver of a roof, the tip of a weather vane, and something else tucked behind a bend in the road.

He crouched low and crept closer, heart hammering harder now, not from exertion but from instinct. Whatever was waiting beyond that bend wasn't far.And it hadn't moved in a long, long time.

He inched forward until the trees thinned enough to give him a view.

The thing he'd spotted wasn't an animal.

It was a body.

Half-sprawled in the ditch just off the shoulder of the road, caked in dirt and stiff like it had been there a while. Clothes faded and torn. No movement. No breath. No birds picking at it, either, which somehow made it worse.

Eli didn't move right away. He scanned the edges—tree line, pavement, broken guardrail, the rusted out shell of a sedan down the embankment—but nothing stirred. The only sound was the wind. The world still pretending to be normal.

He moved slowly now. Stepped off the road and into the brush, giving the body a wide berth. It didn't look fresh, but it didn't look decayed enough either. Like time had paused on it.

Like whatever happened to it hadn't come from hunger or cold.

He didn't want to know what had, but at the same time he knew he'd end up like it if he didnt.

So he kept walking.

The road curved gently through the woods, the pavement cracked and furred over with moss. Every few yards, tufts of green burst through the asphalt like nature had gotten tired of waiting. He passed an old mailbox, half-collapsed, with no house behind it. Just trees.

Eli moved slower now, more cautious, not just from fatigue but from something deeper. A growing awareness that each step took him further from the world he remembered—and closer to whatever was left.

The wind came in fitful bursts. He caught whiffs of something rotten. Something burned. But the breeze always shifted before he could place it.

An hour passed. Maybe more. He didn't look at his watch anymore. Time didn't feel right out here anyway.

That was when the trees began to thin, their trunks giving way to low brush and cracked roadside fencing. Up ahead, the forest opened into something else.

Not a town—not yet.

But a hint of one.

A faded highway sign tilted into the ditch on the right. The top read Berlin — 5 Miles, the bottom scorched black like someone had tried to torch it and gave up halfway.

Past the sign, the road widened slightly—just enough to remind him it had once served real traffic. Semi-trucks. Commuters. The occasional lost tourist trying to get out of the Whites before dark.

Now it served no one.

An abandoned rest stop sat just off the shoulder, half-sunk into the treeline. The roof had collapsed at one end, caved in under the weight of a long winter and no maintenance. He stepped inside anyway, cautious, boots crunching over broken glass and pine needles. Nothing but an overturned vending machine and a mummified squirrel inside.

Still, he sat for a moment on what used to be a bench. Let the pack slide off his shoulders. Drank from his canteen, even though he hated the taste—metallic from the boil, too warm from his bag. But it was water, and water was becoming precious.

He didn't rest long. Just enough to feel his knees again. Then he moved on.

The forest never fully disappeared, but the trees pulled back more now, revealing wider stretches of sky. Burnt cloudbanks hovered low over the mountains, giving everything a dim, bruised look. Berlin had to be close.

He passed the carcass of an old SUV, its roof crushed flat by a fallen tree. The doors hung open. No bodies, no blood. Just old moss spreading across the upholstery like it had claimed squatters' rights.

Birds chirped.

The breeze rustled leaves.

Nothing screamed at him to turn back—but that didn't mean it was safe.

He crested a shallow hill and saw the town at last, quiet and sun-dulled in the distance.

Berlin sat in the valley, pressed low along the Androscoggin River like it had crouched down to hide. Most of the buildings still stood, or at least their skeletons did—gray warehouses, flat-roofed shops, peaked houses with broken windows.

No smoke. No movement. No welcome.

He adjusted the strap on his shoulder and started down the hill.

The road leveled out as he reached the outskirts. Asphalt gave way to gravel, gravel to cracked pavement again, split down the center like old bark. Someone had tried to block the way once—a rusted-out pickup pulled sideways across the road, its windows shot through and sagging. The doors were gone. Inside, a mossy blanket and a child's shoe, turned upside down.

Eli stepped around it without looking too closely.

Berlin didn't feel abandoned, not exactly. More like it had been forgotten mid-sentence. A line of houses sat along the slope, porches caved in, mailboxes tipped forward like they were bowing. A few still had decorations nailed to the doors—faded wreaths, plastic sunflowers. One had a flag hanging limp in the wind, gray from smoke or rain.

He walked slower now, eyes flicking from window to window, watching for movement. The silence here felt deeper. Not ominous—just complete. Like it had settled in and made itself comfortable.

A store stood at the next corner. Or had been a store once—paint flaking off the wood siding, big windows smeared with soot and time. Letters above the entrance had fallen, leaving only S_A_L'S. He tried the door.

It opened with a groan.

Inside was dark, but not dead. Shelves had been picked over, toppled. Broken glass on the tile. A register pried open and empty. Some canned goods still lined the back wall, bent and covered in grime, like someone had been interrupted while looting and never returned.

Eli stepped inside. The air was stale, thick with the smell of rot and something sweet beneath it—like mold left to bloom in silence. He kept one hand near the gun tucked in his pack, the other on his flashlight, moving slowly between the shelves.

The light slanted differently here—muted, filtered through smoke-streaked windows and half-shattered skylights above. Dust drifted like fine snow in the stale air, curling in the wake of his footsteps. Every step made a sound, soft but foreign in the hush: a scrape, a click, the soft crumple of paper underfoot. He ducked low, weaving through tilted shelves and faded advertisements. An old radio sat on the counter near the window, half-split down the middle, wires curling from its gut like seaweed.

He didn't know why, but he clicked the knob anyway.

Nothing.

Of course.

Still, it made the silence feel less thick.

He slipped behind the counter and dropped his bag. His shoulders screamed in relief as the weight slid off. He sat down, just for a minute, listening to the wind brushing against the store's face like a restless animal. The roof creaked, slow and deep.

It had probably been groaning like that for years—but he didn't like the sound of it.

Still, he stayed seated, resting against the wall. For the first time since descending the mountain, his legs were still.

He didn't plan to sleep. But maybe just a minute.

That was when he heard it.

A sound from outside. Sharp. Brief. Nails on pavement. Then another. Softer. Paired.

He moved quietly, peering up past the counter, squinting through the smudged window.

One dog, at first—snout low, body lean and hungry. Then another padded into view. Then more, moving like they'd been there all along.

Eli went still.

They weren't barking. Just watching.

And they weren't going anywhere.

A whole pack.

They moved like shadows, tense and wired, tails low and flicking. Wild now—left behind when things got bad, maybe. Nobody had come back for them, and now they were living off what they could find. What they could take.

Eli watched one rear up and sniff the cracked glass of the storefront. Another paced just outside the doorway, head low, ears twitching.

They knew he was in there.

He stepped back, heart thudding fast. He thought about the gun in his bag. But using it here would draw more than just dogs. He didn't know what else might still be in this town—or how far sound traveled in the open air.

Instead, he crept to the aisles, found a half-split crate of old soda bottles, and rolled one out the back door into the alley with a flick of his wrist. It clattered down the pavement and out of view.

Two of the dogs snapped toward the sound.

But they didn't follow.

They just circled back. Sat themselves in front of the door like they had all night to wait.

Which meant he was staying, too.

Eli moved quick to pull a shelf down across the broken window, stacking boxes and busted-up panels to block any gaps. He wedged a chair under the doorknob. It wouldn't stop them if they really came for him. But it might buy time.

The roof above groaned once with the wind—loud enough to raise the hairs on his arms.

It wouldn't be a quiet night. But at least he had walls.

And for now, that would have to be enough.