To read more about the Great Florida Outbreak, check out Hargood and the End.
As he retraced his steps to leave the beach, Marcus spotted a man in his 50's kneeling in the sand. He was some distance from Marcus - a hundred yards, maybe - but his posture intrigued the art student. The man was sitting calmly. Marcus would have assumed he was dead but his shoulders rose and fell with steady breath. As Marcus drew closer, he noticed the man's eyes were clear (unlike the bald woman and others he'd encountered that day) and he was unscathed. Oh, there was blood on him, of course, but not his own, as far as Marcus could tell.
"This is the end," he muttered as Marcus approached.
"Looks that way," replied the younger, unsure of what else to say.
The man neither moved nor looked up to see Marcus' face. He remained kneeling and his shoulders continued to rise and fall steadily.
"How long have you been out here?" asked Marcus.
"Since it started," was the man's answer.
Marcus nodded, trying to make sense of what the man was saying. He looked around at their surroundings. Bodies lay around them, motionless and decayed. Glancing from these bodies to the man's raw knuckles, and back, Marcus realized it was he who felled them all. This man was a fighter, a survivor who'd seen more than his fair share of death that day.
"Do you have a home?"
"Wisconsin. My wife and I came down for our twenty-fifth."
The man shifted his hands slightly, his first real movement, and Marcus noted the glint of his silver wedding band. He wondered where the wife was now. Was she one of these corpses? Had he been forced to do the unthinkable?
"What will you do now?"
No answer.
"Well..."
Marcus was still fishing for words when he felt the first rain drop. He looked to the sky and glared at the darkness rolling in. Was it 3:00 already? He usually looked forward to this part of the day, but it just didn't seem right today. Were things not bad enough already that Hell still demanded its hour of wrath upon the earth? The man did not flinch or move at all in response to the accumulating rain, but Marcus turned with his exhaust pipe to leave.
"I'm going now," he said to the man. He almost asked "are you going to be okay," but the question was lodged in his throat. He didn't want to know the answer, if there even was an answer.
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