Coldwater: The Turned Beyond the Gates

The steel gate shut behind Jeff with a sound like a coffin lid dropped into place.

Its clang rolled down the narrow street, struck brick walls and rusted cars, then faded beneath the low churn of a generator somewhere deeper in Coldwater Downtown. Guards stood along the barricade with rifles tucked tight against their coats. Their faces had the flat, sleepless look of men who had spent too long watching a perimeter and expecting it to fail.

Jeff looked past them.

Coldwater Downtown had once been a city centre, or close enough. Now it was a fortified strip of brick storefronts and office blocks, every road choked with welded vehicle husks, concrete slabs, sheets of corrugated steel. Armed figures watched from dark windows above. The air smelled of old diesel, spent gunpowder, and the metallic stink that clung to places where people had bled and nobody had time to scrub it away.

A man in heavier gear detached himself from a knot of guards and came toward him. His hand rested near his sidearm. Dark eyes, steady posture, no wasted movement.

“Hold there,” he said. “State your name and your business, now.”

Jeff tightened the worn military jacket around himself against the cold. The crowbar in his hand was bare metal and ugly, but it had weight. Weight was useful.

He started toward the street beyond the gate.

The man’s expression hardened. “I asked a question, stranger. Coldwater has no place for silent shadows. Speak, or face the consequences.”

The guards shifted. Rifle slings rasped against coats. A few barrels came up by degrees.

Jeff stopped. “Mate, I’m hungry. I just want to get some food.”

The officer’s eyes flicked to the crowbar and back. Wind snapped a loose flap of canvas against a nearby barricade.

“Everyone’s hungry, stranger. Food isn’t given, it’s earned. Or bartered.” His voice was clipped, controlled. “The Coldwater Provisional Militia doesn’t run a soup kitchen. What’s your name? What can you offer?”

“Jeff.” He looked down the road, toward the stacked obstacles and the watchful windows. “I’ll go find food for us and the boys.”

For the first time, something moved behind the officer’s eyes. Not approval. Calculation.

“Jeff,” he said. “A mercenary, perhaps? This isn’t a foraging party, and we don’t send just anyone into the streets to find food. What makes you think you can succeed where others have failed? What makes you different from the other hungry mouths looking for a handout?”

Jeff had crossed bad country for less than a meal. He had watched men argue over a can of beans until one of them stopped arguing. The officer was trying to weigh him, decide whether he was trouble worth keeping or trouble worth putting back outside.

“Fuck off, mate,” Jeff said. “I’m on my own. I’m willing to go out and scavenge food, then come back with more. You’re being a bit of a cunt.”

The words hung in the freezing air.

The officer’s jaw tightened. One muscle jumped in his cheek. Around him, the guards took a pace forward, rifles shifting in their hands.

“Watch your mouth, stranger,” he said. “You’re not just insulting me. You’re insulting the people who keep this town from being overrun.”

Jeff glanced at the steel gate, the guns, the braced barricades. Protection, if they called it that. More like a toll booth with rifles.

“You want to scavenge? Fine,” the officer continued. “But you’ll do it under our terms, or you’ll find yourself outside these gates without the luxury of our protection. What’s it going to be? Rule of the Militia, or rule of the Turned?”

So that was it. They were not forbidding him from walking into the dead parts of the city. They wanted to make sure he understood whose ground he stood on, whose share they would take, and whose trouble he would become if he drew the Turned home behind him.

Beyond Coldwater Downtown lay the North Coldwater Suburbs, where early Holdouts had been swallowed during the Collapse. The Interstate Pileup lay farther off, a choked highway exit crawling with the dead. Either place could offer food, tools, fuel. Either could turn into a trap before he found so much as a dry packet of crackers.

Jeff let out a breath through his nose. Picking a fight at the gate would not fill his stomach.

“Mate, I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m heading to the North Coldwater Suburbs. I’ll find food for Coldwater.”

The officer studied him for a long moment. Then his shoulders eased by a fraction.

“Captain Elias Thorne,” he said, as if Jeff ought to remember the name. “You have a short fuse, Jeff. But you listen. This time, you listen.”

Thorne nodded toward the gate.

“Go to the suburbs. Find whatever you can. But understand this: anything of value you bring back, the Militia claims a share. For the town. For our survival.” His stare sharpened. “And if you draw trouble back to these gates, don’t expect us to open them again.”

The gate groaned apart just wide enough for Jeff to pass.

He went through without another word.

It slammed shut behind him.

The noise of Coldwater Downtown vanished quickly.

Outside the wall, the cold felt different. It had space to move through. It crept under Jeff’s jacket and settled against his skin, carrying damp earth, rot, and the sour tang of old decay.

He walked along cracked asphalt between skeletal trees. Houses crouched behind overgrown lawns, their windows broken or blacked out. A child’s bicycle lay in a ditch, its front wheel bent into an oval and its red paint blistered away in flakes.

Far off, a thin thread of smoke rose into the grey sky. Somebody else was alive out there. Or somebody had been, recently enough to leave a fire burning.

The wind whispered through broken glass. Somewhere beyond the homes came a low, distant moan, too drawn out to belong to a living person.

Jeff chose the nearest house.

Its front door stood ajar. Paint peeled from the siding in long, dry strips. One upstairs window had been smashed clean through, leaving a dark square open to the weather. He eased inside with the crowbar ready.

Stale air met him. Dust, spoiled food, and something organic that had long since gone beyond useful identification.

The place had been torn apart in a hurry. Furniture lay overturned. Kitchen drawers had been yanked free and dumped across the floor. Cupboards stood open, empty except for a few mouldy cans. In the corner of the living room, a child’s plastic toy poked from beneath plaster dust.

He searched anyway.

The kitchen pantry had been picked nearly clean, but behind a loose shelf he found a small bottle still sealed against the years. Antibiotic pills. Jeff turned the bottle in his hand, checking the cap, then pocketed it.

Not food. Not much. Still better than walking away empty-handed.

A faint scratching came from deeper in the house.

Jeff stood still.

Scratch. Scratch. Scratch.

The rhythm was too deliberate for wind against wood. Too soft, he thought, for a Turned. He moved through the hall toward the master bedroom, putting each boot down carefully over debris.

The bedroom door stood half-open. Inside, the mattress was gone. A stained box spring sagged naked on the frame, and the dresser drawers hung open like broken jaws. Dust lay over every surface except for several thin dragging marks leading toward a collapsed heap of blankets and clothes in the far corner.

The scratching came from there.

A tarnished wedding band sat on the bedside table. Jeff looked at it for a second, then searched the table drawers. Nothing but old paper, grit, and a dried-out pen. He checked under the box spring, expecting perhaps a taped-up handgun or a forgotten knife.

Dust. Mildew. Nothing else.

The scratching stopped.

A soft scuttle sounded inside the wall.

Jeff nudged the heap of blankets with his crowbar.

A rat burst from underneath, large and half-starved, its bare tail whipping behind it. It squeaked once and vanished through a crack in the wall.

Jeff swore under his breath. Beneath the rat’s nest lay a rusted screwdriver, the handle wrapped in frayed electrical tape. He picked it up, weighed it, then tucked it away.

No gun. No food. A bottle of antibiotics and a screwdriver. He had carried worse days.

He went out through the back door.

The screen door complained on its hinges. Dead weeds filled the yard, tangled with thorny bushes that clawed at his jacket. The fence along the property line had collapsed in two places. Anything could have come through it. Anything could still be in the neighbouring yards.

A garden shed leaned against the far fence. Its tin roof was pocked with rust, and its door hung slightly open.

A moan rose from several streets away.

Jeff froze, listening.

The sound faded, then came again, guttural and slow.

He crossed the yard and pushed the shed door wider. It revealed rusty shovels, a broken rake, seed packets gone soft with damp, and dirt packed hard across the floor. The place smelled of dry rot and metal.

He searched every corner.

Nothing useful except a half-empty can of WD-40, dusty but sealed.

Jeff slipped it into his jacket. He could use it on a lock, a hinge, a jammed mechanism. If he lasted long enough to find one worth opening.

The distant moan seemed closer when he stepped back out.

Across the street stood another house, larger than the first. Most of its windows remained intact. A torn curtain fluttered from an upper floor. On a leaning mailbox, a child’s drawing had been taped beneath a film of grime, its crayon colours washed almost white by weather.

Jeff crossed through dead grass and dry leaves. The front door was closed but not latched. He pushed it open.

The click of the latch carried farther than it should have.

Inside, the furniture remained upright beneath white sheets. The covered chairs and tables made the living room look occupied by a gathering of pale, silent figures. Somewhere deeper in the house, water dripped with patient regularity.

Jeff shut the door behind him and followed the sound of the dripping through the hall.

The master bedroom was mostly untouched. A made bed sat under a dust-coated patterned duvet. A dresser faced it, its mirror catching the flat daylight from the window. The closet door remained shut.

He checked under the bed first. Then behind the dresser. Then each bedside drawer.

Old letters. Reading glasses. A half-empty bottle of prescription pills. No weapon.

The room smelled faintly of old perfume, trapped in curtains and fabric long after whoever had worn it was gone.

Jeff looked at the closed closet. Looked at the door behind him. He left the closet alone.

The drip continued from the bathroom next door as he retraced his steps through the sheet-draped living room. At the rear of the house, a sliding glass door opened onto a small yard.

Unlike the first yard, this one had once been cared for. The shape of garden beds still showed beneath the dead grass. A dying oak stood at the far end, its branches scraping the sky. Beneath it sat a weathered wooden shed.

Its door was locked with a rusted padlock.

No fresh tracks crossed the brittle lawn. No signs that anyone had opened it since the Collapse.

That meant nothing. It could hold supplies. It could hold a corpse. It could hold a Turned sealed in the dark, waiting with more patience than a man ought to trust.

Jeff approached anyway.

He tested the lock. Corroded, but firm.

“Course it is,” he muttered.

He wedged the tip of the crowbar into the shackle, braced one boot against the door, and put his weight behind it. Rust groaned. The wood creaked.

Then the lock broke with a sharp crack.

The sound tore across the still neighbourhood.

Jeff flinched at it. It had the clean report of a gunshot in a place built to carry noise.

The shed door opened under his hand.

Gasoline and old fertilizer thickened the air. Bags of potting soil had slumped in the corner. Tools lay scattered across a workbench. Jeff searched fast, eyes flicking over every shelf, every shadow where a firearm might have been tucked away.

No gun.

But near the back wall, beneath a folded camping chair, sat a small propane tank. Mostly full, by the weight of it.

Fuel was worth more than gold to people who had no use for gold.

Jeff grabbed it.

From the street came a low moan.

He held still, listening.

Dragging footsteps scraped over asphalt.

Another wet, gurgling sound followed, close enough that he could hear saliva working in a ruined throat.

“Fuck.”

He swept the shed one last time. No pistol. No shotgun. Nothing but spades, rust, and broken rubbish.

Jeff ran.

The propane tank knocked against his thigh, cold and awkward in one hand. The crowbar dragged his other arm down. He burst from the yard and caught sight of the Turned at the end of the street.

It wore tattered clothes, perhaps an old work shirt and dark trousers. Its head hung at an angle no living neck would tolerate. When it heard him, it turned sharply toward the sound.

Its mouth opened.

The moan that came out of it was wet and eager.

Jeff sprinted.

He cut between two rotting sedans, boots crunching through glass and discarded rubbish. Behind him, the Turned shuffled faster than it had any right to. Its feet dragged, but the sound kept coming nearer.

A split-level house stood across the road with its front door partly open.

Jeff hit it at speed, shouldered through, and slammed the door shut behind him.

The old wood groaned in its frame.

A moment later something struck the other side with a wet, sickening thud.

Claws scraped down the door. A snarl vibrated through the timber, low and mindless.

Jeff pressed his weight against the door until the first burst of effort went out of him. His breath tore at his throat. The propane tank rested against his shin. The crowbar stayed raised in his hand.

The thing outside clawed again.

He backed into the living room, keeping his eyes on the door.

Through a grimy front window, he watched the fogged street between the trees. The house was quiet except for the scratching at the entrance. Too quiet otherwise.

Then he saw movement far off, beyond the rooftops and skeletal branches.

Coldwater General Hospital stood somewhere in that direction, a blocky dark shape on the horizon. Around its outer perimeter, figures were gathering.

At first Jeff thought it was only one or two Turned wandering through the fog. Then more shapes slid into view. A cluster became a larger knot. They moved slowly, steadily, converging toward the hospital grounds as if pulled by something he could not see.

The North Coldwater Suburbs had felt empty when he entered them.

Now they looked like a dead end closing around him.