Sam locked the door behind him and started walking down the gravelly staircase outside the apartment. He took every step with caution; he had no clue what was going on or what was out there. She said she was going to that sandwich place. But I have no idea where that is. Fantastic. Sam took his phone out, but he remembered that he had no connection to the internet outside of the apartment. So he put it back in his pocket.
He saw someone on the street, and for a split second he thought about going over to ask them for directions, but then he remembered what the first reporter had said: do not approach anyone on the street. So, instead Sam walked as quietly as possible past the person and into the direction he had seen the people running away from. He would have taken the car, but between him and his sister, they only had the one. And Wanda had taken it. On the other side of the street, Sam saw another person running. They weren't screaming like the others he had seen, but they were running. Away from the direction Sam had decided to walk in. As he saw when he looked out the window in the apartment, if someone was running, they were usually accompanied by whatever those things were some feet back. So Sam veered off of the sidewalk and behind some shrubs that reached halfway up his chest.
Sure enough, one of those - could he even call them humans? - people followed behind the man who had run by. He crouched behind the shrub and continued on his way. I just need to find Wanda, and then everything will be okay, Sam thought. I'll find her and everything will be fine. We'll just go back to the apartment and it will all be okay.
He didn't know anything about what was going on since the news stations had kept cutting out. But he did know one thing: whatever was happening was definitely not good. And the one reporter had said something about an explosion. A four car pile-up, Sam recalled, in downtown Athens. Oh god, please don't let anything bad happen to Wanda.
Sam kept thinking about the message his sister had sent him. It only had two words, but those two words were beyond enough to send Sam into a great panic. As he continued down the street, with his cover behind the shrubs, he had started to smell gasoline. The farther he walked, the stronger the smell got. In the distance, Sam could see a developing, dark smoke cloud that loomed over a fair amount of space. He walked further until the smoke started stinging his eyes to the point where they watered. Christ, is this where the car wreck was?
He peered over the hedge. What he saw confirmed that this was, in fact, where the four cars had caused an explosion. Two cars had burned up completely to the point where it was just the frames of the cars, one of the cars had flipped over and the bottom of it - the part that now faced upward - was still flaming. The last car wasn't burned too badly; whoever drove the car must have swerved out of the way at the last minute to have sustained the least damage from the wreck. But they still were part of the explosion.
Sam's heart dropped into his stomach. He could still see some of the coloring from the car that had been least damaged. It was a four-door, silver sedan. The car that belonged to him and Wanda was a four-door, silver sedan. He tried to take a deep breath, but his breath caught in his throat. He looked around the scene of the car wreck. There was nobody there who could help the people who had been in the explosion. No police, no firefighters, no ambulance, no anything. But there were people outside of the cars. There were damn near twenty of them. And they were throwing themselves at these cars, these burning cars. Just . . . banging and clawing at them.
How are those people doing that? Sam was dumbfounded. Those cars were either on fire or had burned until the fire subsided. More importantly, he thought, how am I supposed to see if Wanda is over there with those people over there? The thought of Wanda being over there left him despondent.
Tears had welled in his eyes from the smoke that hovered in its little cloud above the scene of the wreck. Though his vision was blurred, he could see that enough of those . . . things . . . surrounded the sedan. He couldn't go over there, not with them there. If they could feel no harm or not even flinch when they touched the burning vehicles, Sam assumed they were some of the "un-human" things that the one news reporter had mentioned. So he didn't close the gap between him and them. He looked at the car for another minute, and then turned back around to go to the apartment. His sister was dead, there was no way he could save her from the car, much less with those creatures there.
When he started walking, an actual person ran screaming past the hedge he took cover behind. She didn't seem to notice Sam as she ran, but she sure as hell noticed the twenty-something creatures that lurked around the cars. The woman stopped running, but screamed even louder. Her face showed such utter fear and horror at the sight of those things, which had almost all turned around and started walking towards the woman who was screaming at them. Her legs must have froze in place, because she didn't move from where she had stopped running. The creatures were nearly upon her, but she still didn't move. She only screamed impossibly louder. Sam pressed his hands to his ears to block out the woman's ear-splitting screams.
The malign creatures had reached her. The first ones to get to her had bitten her, and they were . . . No, that's crazy, Sam thought. Why would they be eating her? Whatever they did had shut the woman up; she was dead. Then the rest of the creatures got there and they all tried to eat some part of her corpse, too. Sam felt like he was going to throw up, so he didn't watch any further. He ducked so that he couldn't be seen from the other side of the hedge and he hightailed it out of there. But hey, at least seeing a woman get eaten right in front of him had taken his mind off of Wanda for a few minutes.
Sam got back to the apartment. He walked up the staircase to the front door, unlocked it, and opened it. After he stepped back inside, he closed the door and pressed his back against it. He pressed his eyelids down and kept them shut. Wanda was gone. He had seen another woman eaten alive a few feet from him. It would be very much of an understatement to say that today was a confusing and stressful day. After a minute, Sam took his backpack off and opened it. He took out the picture of him and his sister, looked at it, smiled sadly, and put it back in the bag.
Sam's parents lived in Macon. He had nowhere else to go now. If all of the craziness that had unfolded today only happened today, he would still be going to Macon. He only went to the University of Georgia because Wanda wanted them both to, but, as sad as it was, there was nothing keeping him in Athens anymore. So he would go to Macon, and he would be with his parents.
He walked into the kitchen and started putting food and water into his backpack. He would have to walk to Macon because the only method of transportation he had, had been in a wreck with three other cars that had become engulfed in a fiery mess. And Sam had no idea how to hotwire a car. The last time he and Wanda drove to Macon, it had taken nearly two hours to get there. Sam would have to be walking for a long, long time. He tried checking how long it would take to get there on foot, but the internet wasn't working. Sam guessed it would take him around thirty hours or so, and that's if he didn't stop at all.
Sam remembered that he and Wanda had driven on a single road to get to Macon, and he also recalled which road it was: US 129. He would just have to stay on that road and not try to get eaten like that poor woman had been. Then Sam would find his parents and everything would be okay. The news stations - while they still worked, that is - never mentioned anything about Macon, did they? If they did, Sam didn't remember hearing it. Regardless, he was going.