The Last Good Summer - Part II

The fire burned for three days.

By the fourth, Brookline Elementary was a memory. The kids watched the smoke fade from the ridge, and none of them said a word. Their faces were raw from heat and ash, but the silence between them was heavier than the smell of burning plastic. It wasn’t grief anymore. It was a realization.

The world didn’t end clean. It dragged out.

They buried their school the way you bury a body. Quietly. Without prayer.

Frankie led them west, following the messages the Boy had left behind. The red paint. The Polaroids. The whispers on the radio that shouldn’t have been possible now that the generator was a melted shell. Every night they made camp along the broken interstate, sleeping under gas station awnings and overpasses, the stars watching like eyes too distant to care.

It had been eight days since they’d seen another human. Nine since food came from anything sealed.

Tyler joked about that once. “End of the world and I’m still eating canned peas. Guess God really did leave us behind.”

Frankie didn’t respond. She hadn’t said much since the fire.

Something in her had gone cold, but not dead.

That was the thing about her; she didn’t break, she calcified.

Liam pushed the group forward each day, a walking fortress of quiet strength. Mira and Cody started writing things down, a crude diary on torn notebook pages. Becca hummed less now. She had started whispering to her dead mother instead, like she could barter memories for sleep.

And Jax… Jax had changed the most.

He’d always been small, restless, fast with his mouth and his hands. Now his eyes looked hollow, older than they should. He was the first to see the shapes at night, the shadows moving just beyond the glow of their fire.

When he told Frankie, she believed him instantly.

“What kind of shapes?” she asked.

“Tall ones,” he said. “And they don’t walk right. Like their bones are remembering how.”

Frankie told him to keep watch with Liam.

They never spoke of the sound that followed—the wet, dragging rhythm just past the light.

By the tenth day, they reached a ghost town called Cross Hollow.

A single street, a diner, a few old stores, and a church sitting crooked on a hill.

The sign outside the diner read: HOME OF THE BEST PIE IN COLORADO. The windows were shattered, the tables overturned. The smell inside was rot and sugar, like someone had left desserts to die.

Frankie sent the twins to scout the back. Tyler searched the register. Becca looked for food.

Jax fiddled with the old jukebox in the corner, somehow still plugged into a solar rig someone had set up long before the plague. When it sparked to life, it played a warped version of “Stand by Me.”

No one said anything.

The irony was too thick to touch.

They found what passed for food—old candy, jerky, a single unopened bottle of Coke. Jax opened it and took a swig. The carbonation hit his throat and made him cough.

“Still burns,” he said, grinning through the pain. “Guess that’s something.”

Frankie smiled, just barely.

They camped inside the diner that night. The jukebox hummed quietly. The windows glowed with dying daylight.

When the sky turned black, Liam said what everyone was thinking.

“He’s not just a boy.”

Frankie nodded slowly. “I know.”

“Then what is he?”

She looked out the window. “A messenger.”

“From who?” Tyler asked.

Frankie didn’t answer.

Because in her dreams, she already knew.

The next morning, they followed the old rail line that ran behind Cross Hollow. It led them through the foothills, where the wind cut sharp through the pines. The higher they climbed, the more the air smelled wrong—burnt, metallic, alive.

Then they saw it.

A symbol carved into a tree.

A red circle, with a black handprint at the center.

It wasn’t paint. It wasn’t blood. It shimmered like oil.

Mira stepped closer, eyes wide. “It’s warm.”

Frankie pulled her back. “Don’t touch it.”

Tyler kicked the dirt. “What is it?”

Liam said, “A warning.”

But Frankie knew better.

“It’s a mark.”

They made camp in an abandoned ranger station halfway up the mountain. The air was thinner, colder. Every sound traveled.

Jax couldn’t sleep. The wind kept whispering his name.

He got up, stepped outside, and saw something glowing in the distance—farther west, across the next ridge.

A fire.

And around it, silhouettes. Dozens of them.

They stood in a circle, heads tilted back, like they were watching something descend from the stars.

Jax froze.

He could hear them chanting. Not words, not language, just rhythm.

Then one of them turned.

And though he couldn’t see its face, he saw its eyes. Black as a pit. Reflecting the fire.

He ran back inside, gasping.

Frankie sat up immediately.

“What did you see?”

He pointed toward the window. “There’s more of them. A lot more.”

“How many?”

“Too many.”

They left before sunrise, cutting off the main trail, hiking through brush until their legs bled.

By noon, they found what Jax had seen.

The clearing was empty now, the ashes still warm.

At the center of the circle, someone had built a cross from two road signs.

The top read:
WEST CLOSED

The bottom read:
DETOUR – FOLLOW THE WALKER

Pinned to the cross was another Polaroid.

The Boy Who Walks, standing beside a man in a tattered black coat. His face hidden by shadow.

But they all knew that posture.

Even if they didn’t know the name.

Becca picked up the photo. “Who’s the man?”

Frankie’s voice went quiet, reverent. “Randall Flagg.”

Tyler frowned. “Who?”

Frankie looked at him like he’d just failed a test.

“The man who smiles when the world ends.”

That night, everything broke.

They built a fireless camp under the slope of a highway overpass. It was the only shelter from the wind. The silence was heavy enough to choke on.

Mira and Cody had stopped talking entirely. Tyler had grown meaner. Becca was crying in her sleep now.

And Frankie was starting to hear things too.

It began as whispers in the trees.

Then laughter.

Not the kind you hear when someone’s happy. The kind you hear when someone knows something you don’t.

Liam kept guard, his pipe in one hand, flashlight in the other. His knuckles were bleeding from earlier, when he’d hit a tree for no reason except that it felt good to feel something.

Then he saw it.

A figure at the edge of the light.

The Boy.

Barefoot. Grinning.

“Leave us alone,” Liam said, voice shaking.

The Boy tilted his head.

“He’s already with you.”

Liam swung the pipe. The Boy vanished. Just gone. The sound of laughter followed, echoing between the empty road and the forest.

When Liam turned, the others were awake.

Frankie’s eyes were wild. “What did he say?”

Liam hesitated.

“He said… He’s already with us.”

The group fell silent.

Jax whispered, “What if he’s right?”

Frankie looked at each of them. Her gaze lingered on Tyler.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Tyler barked.

“You’ve been off since we left the school.”

“Yeah, no kidding, Sherlock. We lost everything. Sorry if I’m not skipping down the trail singing show tunes.”

Liam stepped forward. “Let her finish.”

Frankie stared at Tyler’s hands. They were shaking, not from cold, but from something crawling under his skin.

“Show me your arm,” she said.

He laughed. “What?”

“Show me your arm.”

When he didn’t, Liam grabbed him. Tyler struggled, but Liam was stronger. They tore up the sleeve.

His forearm was covered in black veins. They pulsed, faintly, like worms under glass.

Becca screamed.

Mira started praying again.

Frankie took a step back.

“He’s in you.”

Tyler’s eyes filled with tears. “I don’t know how. I swear.”

Frankie lifted the bat. “You should have told us.”

He dropped to his knees. “Don’t.”

Jax grabbed her arm. “Wait. Maybe we can fix it.”

Frankie didn’t move.

The veins spread up Tyler’s neck. His voice changed.

“He walks, Frankie. He walks west. He’s waiting for you.”

Then he smiled; too wide, too wrong.

Liam didn’t wait. The pipe came down. Once. Twice. Three times.

Silence.

No one moved for a long time.

When they did, they buried what was left of Tyler near the highway, under a sign that said KEEP RIGHT.

No one said a prayer.

No one cried.

They just kept walking.

By the time they reached the next town, half the group was coughing. Not the sickness—the other kind. The kind that came from breathing ash and fear for too long.

Frankie’s voice had gone hoarse from giving orders. Liam had stopped talking altogether. Becca was pale.

Mira and Cody still whispered their twin prayers, though one night Frankie swore she heard them whispering to something else. Something answering back.

The town was called Shady Elm. It had one gas station, a motel, and a church built into an old movie theater. The marquee outside read: COMING SOON – THE WALKER RETURNS

Inside the church, candles burned. Hundreds of them.

The pews were full.

Not of people, but of mannequins.

Each had black glass eyes glued into their sockets.

And behind the pulpit, the Boy stood waiting.

“Welcome, children,” he said. “He’s almost here.”

Liam raised the pipe. “Where is he?”

The Boy smiled. “Everywhere.”

Then the candles went out.

Darkness swallowed the room.

When the first scream came, it wasn’t human.

The air filled with the sound of wings, or something like wings. The mannequins moved. Not fast. Just enough.

Frankie swung the bat, the sound of wood hitting plastic echoing like gunfire.

Jax pulled Becca toward the door, but it was gone. The wall had shifted. The aisles stretched longer.

The Boy laughed.

“You can’t run from a dream,” he said. “And the dreamer’s awake.”

Something grabbed Mira. Cody screamed. Frankie turned, but it was too late. The twins were gone.

Liam charged forward, swinging blind. He hit something soft, then nothing.

When the lights came back, only three of them were left.

Frankie. Jax. Liam.

The Boy was gone.

So were Mira, Cody, Becca.

They stumbled out of Shady Elm at dawn, their eyes red from smoke and horror. The world felt emptier, even more than before.

Frankie didn’t cry. She couldn’t.

She looked west, toward the open desert.

Liam’s voice was quiet. “What now?”

Frankie wiped blood from her cheek. “We keep walking.”

“Toward him?”

She nodded.

Jax looked between them. “You think we can stop him?”

Frankie tightened her grip on the bat.

“I don’t know. But he sure as hell won’t stop us.”

They walked into the sunrise, small shapes against the dying land.

And far behind them, in the church of mannequins, the candles lit themselves again.

A single voice spoke from the darkness, calm, patient, familiar.

“Let them come.”

A pause.

Then, almost a whisper:

“They’ll believe soon enough.”