by Sam Sisavath
“You’ll find out,” she said.
“Kate, what’s in the trailer?”
“It’s a surprise. You still like surprises, don’t you, Will? You’re going to get a kick out of this one. It was my idea, you know. This town, this little city in the middle of nowhere, was becoming a nuisance.” The smile faded, replaced by something dark and dangerous. “Like a certain little island that should have stayed quiet. This is what happens when you stick your head out and get my attention, Will. I grab a hammer.”
The island. She’s talking about Song Island.
“Now pay attention,” Kate said. “This is where it gets really fun.”
He looked back at the man with red hair. There were others gathered around him now. Two dozen or so, mostly men, but a couple of women among them, all well-armed and loaded for bear. They had moved in a rough, jagged circle around the U-Haul, having emerged from the alleys and streets and buildings while he wasn’t looking. They stepped over the dead bodies, some going out of their way to move around the pooling blood. A few looked squeamish.
Only a couple of them seemed to notice the fading sunlight. The others, like the man with red hair (the leader), was too busy focusing on the trailer at the center of the death and destruction. There were bullet holes in the sides of the orange and white vehicle. Stray bullets, he guessed, during the gun battle.
The man with red hair pointed at the U-Haul. “I said open it.”
Look up, you idiot. Look up!
But the man didn’t look up. Instead, he took another tentative step toward the parked vehicle, clenching and unclenching his handgun, one of those fancy Smith & Wesson semi-automatics.
Look up!
Two men with assault rifles moved toward the trailer and one of them grabbed the lever at the bottom, twisted it open, then pulled at the door—but it didn’t budge. He paused and exchanged a nervous look with his comrade before slinging his rifle and grabbing hold of the lever with both hands and this time really yanked.
Nothing. The door refused to move.
“It’s exciting, isn’t it?” Kate said gleefully behind him. “It was such an easy sell, too. Give them something mysterious, something intriguing. They couldn’t leave it alone even if they wanted to. Look at them, Will. Most of them are so caught up with it they don’t even notice the sun is disappearing, little by little, by little….”
She was standing right next to him now. He didn’t know how she had done that.
This is her dream. She can do anything she wants.
They were standing in the middle of the group, people with rifles fidgeting around them, more than a few looking nervously at the darkening streets, some even glancing at the blackening sky. So some of them had noticed the setting sun. But not nearly enough, he saw.
“Harrison,” one of them said. A woman. Will recognized her from the basement last night. (Today? This morning?) “We have to go, it’s almost dark!”
Harrison looked conflicted. He glanced back at the U-Haul, then at the others.
He’s target fixated. He’s so focused on what’s in front of him, he doesn’t see the danger coming up behind him. Or…above him.
“Yes,” Kate said. “That’s the idea. Not bad for a civilian, huh?
“Harrison!” the woman shouted. “We have to go now!”
The others were backing up, their precarious situation finally dawning on them. Half of them looked ready to turn and run, but something was holding them back. They kept shooting quick questioning looks at Harrison.
He’s the leader and they’re scared of him. Even with night coming, death waiting in the wings, they won’t run. Not without his permission.
Idiots!
“Harrison!” the woman shouted again. When Harrison still didn’t respond, the woman whirled on the others. “Everyone head to the designated safe buildings! Go! Now now now, goddammit!”
They finally moved. Some of them, anyway, but a few still hesitated, waiting for Harrison’s orders, though they too looked on the verge of fleeing.
Then even Harrison turned and ran.
“Hurry, hurry, hurry,” Kate said in a singsong voice, and he swore she might have cackled. Or maybe he just misheard?
The two men who had been trying to open the U-Haul had also turned to go when the door flew open behind them and the trailer actually quaked against the truck connected to it as something—somethings—exploded with movement from inside.
There were two of them—no, four—coming out of the trailer.
Blue-eyed ghouls.
He recognized one of them instantly. It was the same one he had shot outside Ennis’s bar, who took the silver round and flinched but didn’t go down.
It didn’t go down.
The man who had been trying to open the trailer heard the vehicle squeaking and turned around. It was a mistake. He let out a piercing scream just before one of the blue-eyed creatures landed on top of him, pummeling his much larger frame down to the concrete floor. The ghoul bent and flesh tore and the man kept screaming as blood flowed.
The second man had made it almost out of the parking lot when he heard his friend’s howls. He spun around and let loose with his rifle on full-auto, shredding one of the blue-eyed monsters as it was almost on top of him. Blood and flesh were ripped from the creature’s skeletal frame, but it kept coming and seemed to smash into the man and drive him down behind a parked blue Chevy, where they both disappeared out of Will’s sight.
A woman stumbled and fell. She turned around on her back and was reaching for her sidearm when another of the blue-eyed things fell on top of her. She didn’t even get a chance to scream.
Then the ghoul was back up and running, its jaw slicked with fresh blood that was visible even in the darkness swallowing up whole sections of the streets. Gunfire exploded across the city, a continuous cacophony of gunshots and screams.
Then they came. The others. The black-eyed ones.
Harrison’s people were scattered—in buildings, alleyways, some poor souls trying to escape in the streets—and their cries filled the air along with the endless pop-pop-pop of automatic weapon fire.
“You wanted to know,” Kate said.
“You were here last night,” he said.
“No. But I have a strong link with the others.”
“‘Others’?”
“The other blue-eyed ones. Our bonds are stronger, and I can communicate with them over greater distances. Of course, even if I knew you were here, I couldn’t have come anyway. Like you said, Will, Mabry has me very busy these days.”
He heard slurping and looked behind him at a blue-eyed ghoul perched over one of Harrison’s locals. The man’s eyes were open and he stared up at the dark sky, mouth quivering as the ghoul suckled rabidly at his neck. The creature looked in a state of frenzy, like a man about to orgasm.
“You did this,” Will said. “You planned this…massacre.”
“Most of it. But I admit, I didn’t expect them to attack so fast and so ferociously. What’s that saying you soldiers have? No plan survives contact with the enemy?” She smiled. “Are you impressed, Will?”
“Yes…”
“There’s a reason Mabry chose me. He knew my potential.”
“The same reason you chose Josh? Because of potential?”
“The young ones are always the most malleable. But yes, he’s a lot smarter than many of these…” she looked around at the dead soldiers, the ones he had come to call Josh’s men, “…cannon fodder. This is what they’re good for. Josh and the other young ones will keep going. What’s that saying, Will? The children are the future. So true. So true…”
Will stared at the bodies spread around the parking lot. So many. Soldiers and locals. Spent bullet casings by the thousands. Pools of blood everywhere. And still, the shooting went on and on, along with the screams.
The screams…
“What now?” he said, turning back to face her.
But she wasn’t there anymore, and he was no longer standing in the street
s of Dunbar.
Instead, he was in Ennis’s bar, the same one he and Danny had used as their last stand before escaping through the basement door. He was sitting on one of the stools at the counter, which wasn’t covered in dust and time like it had been earlier.
This is her domain. She can do anything, because none of this is real.
She’s not really here.
Right?
That didn’t explain how she was sitting on the stool next to him, wearing some kind of formal evening gown. It was bright outside the windows, and the sun glinted off her exquisitely long neck as she saluted him with a small glass of brandy. “To your health, Will,” she said, and took a sip.
“I didn’t know you cared.”
“You don’t think I worry about you? Running around out here? Trying to stop the inevitable? It’s like watching a child standing on the tracks trying to hold back a runaway train. You don’t hate the child, Will, you feel sorry for him, because you know the train is going to run him over. All you can really do is try to reason with him, get him off the tracks before then.”
“Is that what I’m doing, Kate? Standing on a train track?”
“What do you think, Will?” A bottle of brandy, the liquid inside brilliant orange against the glow of the sun, had appeared on the counter between them. Kate picked it up and poured him a glass. He wasn’t sure where the glass had come from, either. “Drink up, Will. We should talk.”
“What about?”
She poured with precision, another skill he didn’t know she possessed. Or was that the dream? Kate could do things in dreams that were impossible in the real world. But was this his dream or hers?
Or…theirs?
“What about? You, me, this world,” she said.
He stared at the glass. Was that real cognac inside? It smelled like it.
“I almost had you in Harvest,” she said, pinching her fingers together. “Missed you by that much.”
“You tried to kill me.”
“Don’t be silly. Death doesn’t mean what it used to anymore. You of all people should know that by now.”
Will picked up the glass and took a sip. The taste was sweet, followed by the familiar warm aftermath.
“The towns, the pregnancies,” she continued. “They’re all just the beginning. In ten, twenty years, you won’t recognize any of this. In a couple of generations, man will have forgotten they were ever in control of the planet.”
“Is that the long-term goal?”
“You say that as if there is a short-term one, Will. There isn’t. We’ve shed the mortal coil. Time is no longer the enemy. Days, months, years, even centuries. They mean nothing anymore. You have no idea how long they’ve been preparing for this.”
“So there are more than just Mabry.”
She smiled mischievously. “I meant him.”
“You said ‘they.’”
“Did I?”
“Yes.”
She shrugged. “Maybe you misheard. This is just a dream, after all.”
She said ‘they’…
“You sound very confident,” Will said. “Is that why you haven’t attacked the island?”
“Ah, the island,” she said almost wistfully. “Lara shouldn’t have sent out that broadcast. Why did she do that, Will?”
“I don’t know…”
“I was content to leave you alone. As long as you left me alone. Because of what we’ve been through, because of my feelings for you. But then your little pre-med doctor had to send that broadcast, blabbing about the silver to the whole wide world.” She sighed. “That complicated things, you know. It’s too bad.”
She nursed her glass of brandy while watching their reflections in the big mirror behind the bar. That mirror had been broken when he and Danny came through before—when was that? Last night? A day ago?
He was losing track of time…
Kate smiled again. That strange emotion that was at once so human and at the same time so…wrong.
“What are you going to do, Kate?” He felt anxious for the first time in a long time, and he tightened his grip on the glass without realizing it. “What are you planning?”
“You shouldn’t have left the island, Will. That broadcast was a mistake. You should have stopped Lara from putting it out there.”
“You’re going to attack the island because of the broadcast?”
She shrugged and said nothing.
“It’s too late,” Will said. “Even if you burned the island down tomorrow, you won’t be able to put the genie back into the bottle.”
“Maybe I don’t care about putting the genie back into the bottle,” Kate said. “Maybe I’m just a spiteful bitch. Or maybe I’m just feeling a little jealous toward that little girl of yours.”
“Jealousy and vindictiveness are human traits, Kate.”
She laughed. It was almost lyrical. Almost…human. “Yes, they are, aren’t they? I guess I’m still more of the old Kate than we both thought.”
“What would Mabry say if he knew?”
“You’re assuming he doesn’t already know. Mabry knows everything, Will. Everything we know. It all comes from him, and it all goes to him. Haven’t you figured that out by now?”
She stood up from the stool.
“Kate…”
She didn’t seem to hear him and instead turned and walked away, the hem of her dress swishing around her legs. She wore high heels, the click-click of stiletto points like firecrackers in the emptiness of the city around them.
What happened to the locals? The soldiers? Where did everyone go?
It’s just a dream. It’s just her dream.
Or mine.
Or ours?
“Kate…”
He tried to get up in order to stop her, but he couldn’t move. Something was holding him down on the stool. An invisible force of some kind clinging to his arms and legs. He couldn’t even let go of the glass in his hand.
“Kate!”
She finally stopped at the door and looked back at him, and a ghost of a smile flashed across her ethereal face. “You shouldn’t have left the island, Will. It might not be there when you get back. If you make it back.”
She opened the door and stepped through. Daylight flooded inside and Will grimaced at the blinding brightness.
“Kate!” he shouted, but his words were lost in the wind, as if he had never said it in the first place. “Kate!”
*
“Don’t tell me, another trip to Deussen Park?” Danny said when Will opened his eyes from the dream.
“Shit,” Will said.
“The dream or our present predicament?”
“Both.”
“Then I’ll join your shit with my own shit. Talk about a double-shit burger.”
Three of the people they had met in the basement were asleep, dozing somewhere in the darkness. One of the faces visible in a small pool of LED light placed in the center of the room was the woman who had greeted them when they first entered, and who Will remembered from his dream (Nightmare?).
Her name was Rachel. The kid next to her with the M40A3 sniper rifle cradled against his shoulder like a comfortable blanket was Tommy. A third person, Milch, was somewhere to their right, still awake because Will could hear him moving against the hard concrete floor.
Rachel was clearly the leader of this group, and she stared across the room at him now, her AR-15 in her lap. Dirty black hair hung over her shoulders and she gave him the kind of look that was devoid of warmth. She wasn’t entirely unattractive. Late thirties, a face lined with hard living and surviving. Her people had taken his and Danny’s weapons and equipment when they surrendered less than—how long ago? A few hours.
At least they hadn’t taken his watch, and he looked down at the glow-in-the-dark minute hand, which ticked to five after midnight. He heard the ticking clear as day in the silence. The monsters had stopped banging on the door hours ago.
Dead, not stupid.
“Who’s Kate?” Rachel aske
d.
Did I say her name out loud?
“Someone I used to know,” Will said.
“Ex-girlfriend? Must not have left things in a very good place, the way you were moving around in your sleep, saying her name.”
“I shot her.”
She gave him a wry look, as if she was trying to decide whether to believe him or not. “Now that’s what I call a breakup.”
“The funny thing is? She didn’t die.”
“Just clipped her, huh?”
“No. I shot her in the chest.”
Rachel narrowed her eyes. “And she didn’t die?”
“Nope.”
“Whatever. Keep your little secret.”
Danny chuckled next to him. “She doesn’t believe you.”
“I guess not,” Will said.
Rachel looked annoyed. “You never told me what you two were doing in Dunbar.”
“We’re just passing through,” Will said.
“Bullshit. No one passes through Dunbar. It’s barely a blip on any map and we’re miles from the closest interstate. The only people who come to Dunbar are people who were coming to Dunbar.”
“That includes you?”
“I was born here. So were most of these guys. It’s our city. We’re not leaving.”
“Doesn’t sound like you have much of a choice anymore after last night.”
“Wrong.”
“Am I?”
“Tomorrow’s another day. We’ll start again.”
“With just the five of you?”
“There are more of us out there.”
“You hope.”
“I know.” She said the words with the right inflections, as if she actually believed it. “Harrison made sure we all knew where the safe houses were. There are other basements like this one around the city. We’re not the only ones left.”
Harrison was the man with the red hair, who Will had watched lead the locals to certain death last night. Probably dead now, like most of his people. There had been a lot of blood and bodies in the dream (memories?).
“You can always leave,” Will said.
“And go where?”
“Anywhere but here.”
She shook her head. “Dunbar’s our home. We’re not leaving tomorrow or the day after that.”
Will nodded. “You gotta do what you gotta do.”
