Free Empire Of Salt by Weston Ochse

Philadelphia anymore. Only a few of the streetlights still worked, casting intermittent halos of sickly yellow light.
    A dark figure rushed across the street two blocks down.
    "There!" Derrick pointed.
    "Did you see who it was?" Carrie asked.
    Gertie shook her head. "Can't be Abel. That was too small."
    Derrick turned to Natasha. "Maybe it was Obediah?"
    "Could be, but why would he run?" Gertie shouted back towards the restaurant. "Maude, you make sure you call Will and tell him we have shots fired."
    Shots fired. Natasha had never heard those words said outside of television.
    Suddenly another figure, this one much larger, ran into the middle of the street, raised a shotgun, and fired in the direction the other person had gone.
    "Abel, is that you?" Gertie called.
    "Ms. Gertrude." Abel's voice was an octave higher than it usually was from the excitement and exertion. "I saw one of them things. I think it got my boy."
    "Things? We have things?" Frank asked.
    "Just leave it be, Abel Beachy. You're going to kill someone with that shotgun." Gertie shouted.
    Even from two blocks away, Natasha could see the whites of the man's teeth as he grinned and said: "That's the point, is it not?" He patted the gun, then took off.
    "What the hell?" Andy came out and peered down the street. "What's all the shooting?"
    "Abel had one of them things in his sights." Gertie glanced at Natasha and Derrick.
    "He did?" Andy's eyes widened and he took a step back. Then he turned and ran, staggering a little as he went, back towards his house.
    "What do you mean by things?" Natasha asked, remembering the thing she saw running between trailers earlier in the day.
    " Bad things," Frank replied, then giggled.
    Gertie stared at him for a moment, then shook her head in disgust. "Go back inside and keep these kids' father company. He can't even walk and we surely don't need him outside with Abel Beachy acting like it's an invasion of the Body Snatchers. We don't need no -" She glanced quickly at Natasha and Derrick "- new comer getting lost or hurt in these houses."
    Natasha smiled grimly, but beneath it she knew what Gertie meant to say was that they didn't need no drunk . As if to prove it, Gertie patted Natasha on the shoulder and told her everything was going to be okay. Then Gertie ordered her and Derrick to come with her and split the others who'd come outside to watch into three parties of three. Before they separated, Maude brought out flashlights for each group.
    Soon Natasha and Derrick were following Gertie, who strode into the darkness like a gunslinger. Her fearlessness was what kept the kids going, because as soon as they left the neon-lit front of the restaurant, all the bogeymen of their nightmares began to play across the possibilities of who they might meet, and what the thing was that had gotten the Beachy kid.
    Natasha wanted to press the issue. What were the things everyone was talking about? But she didn't want to do it in the dark.
    They entered a burned out hulk of a trailer through the space where the sliding glass door used to be. Most of the furniture had burned to unrecognizable black shapes. A single blue marble stood stark against the soot-stained floor.
    "Jessica Sullivan used to live here," Gertie said. "She collected those tiny stuffed animals. This must have been one of their eyes."
    "What happened to her?" Derrick asked.
    "Her son packed her up and sent her to an old fogies' home."
    "But he left her stuffed animals." Natasha pointed to where the blue eye rested.
    "Didn't matter to him. He just wanted her out of his hair." Gertie picked it up and put it in her pocket.
    "So what happened to the trailer?"
    "Vandals burned it like they burned most of the others."
    The three of them moved from one trailer to the other. Occasionally they'd come to one that was occupied. Sometimes Gertie would peer in the window, and sometimes she'd knock and have a few soft words with the occupants, but they never went inside.
    Down the street