The members of Gramps' family sat in Abby's car, the windows all rolled up, the doors locked.​    

     They were on the side of the road. Alison and Cathy's cars were parked behind Abby's.

     "Turn on the radio, see if there's anything on the news about any of this," Cathy said.

​     "No!" Abby snapped much louder than she needed to seeing as how they were all sitting there with each other. "The last thing we need to do is run the battery down."

​     "I'll check the net," Alison said, pulling out her phone.

​     Someone knocked on the window of Abby's car.

​     The four of them just about jumped out of their skins.

​     It was a woman in her mid sixties. She wore, like, six layers of clothing, and her hair was gray and long and tangled. She had a dirty face. The patch of road they'd chosen to park along was one of the few in that part of the state that hadn't yet been developed. It was a bit of a wooded area. The woman looked like she kind of, more or less, lived in those woods.

​     "We need you to drive us somewhere!" she yelled at them through the window. "We need to get into town!"

​     "Who's we?"

​     They came out from between the trees then, four of them. None of them looked like they'd shaved or bathed in quite a while. One of the four men had a pot gut. The other three were rail thin, like maybe they only ate every couple of days kind of thin.

​     One of them smiled, and Cathy saw but a single, blackened tooth in his head.

     He carried a stick as big and thick as a baseball bat.

​     Again, they were dirty in a way that gave Alison the crazy idea that they might actually be part of the surrounding forest, were in the process of ​becoming the forest.

     The four men stood in front of Abby's car. Cathy's car was right behind hers, so Abby couldn't back out that way.

​     "We need to get into town," the woman at Abby's window said again.

​                                                   CONTINUE