by Sam Sisavath
Night is their ally. But it’s not ours.
“Will?” Gaby said. “What now?”
“We get ready for nightfall,” Will said.
*
“How are you for silver bullets?” he asked Gaby as he handed her a box of ammo from one of the two technicals.
“I’m out,” Gaby said. “I used everything up in Lafayette when me and Nate got caught in the pawnshop.”
“I’m sorry about that.”
Gaby nodded. “He was a nice guy.”
“Yeah. He was a good soldier, too. We could have really used him at the island.”
“I don’t even know what happened to him, Will. Not really, anyway.”
Gaby was looking at Claire, standing across the yard from them, watching the road. Will had given her the FNH shotgun and it hung across her back, its thirty-nine inches just a foot shorter than her entire frame. A large pouch bulged against her hip, stuffed with extra shotgun shells. She had learned surprisingly fast when he showed her how to load and fire the weapon less than thirty minutes ago. The girl was a natural, which again reminded him of Gaby.
“Are you sure about that?” Gaby asked.
“Not really,” Will said. “Fact is, if we need her to start shooting, we’re already in trouble.”
“Just don’t give Milly one of those, okay?”
“I don’t think you have to worry about that.”
Gaby followed Will back to the house. He glanced up at Danny, watching the roads from one of the open second-floor windows. He had chosen a spot that gave him a clear view of both sides of Route 13. Lance stood next to him with binoculars, peering left, then right, then back again every few seconds.
“We should have brought Tommy’s rifle,” Danny said down at them.
“Shoulda woulda coulda,” Will said.
Danny made a gun with his fingers and said, “Pew, pew,” up at the road.
“Who’s Tommy?” Gaby asked.
“A kid we met in Dunbar,” Will said. “He had a sniper rifle. He was pretty good with it, too.”
“What happened to him?”
Will shook his head, recalling Tommy’s decapitated body in the hallway outside the bathroom in the Dunbar Museum. The next morning, it was gone.
They take the dead. Why the hell do they take the dead?
They walked up the rickety steps to the front porch and stood underneath the awning. It was old and cracked and there were holes up and down its length, but it still provided a welcome respite from the heat. They stood in the shade and looked back out at the yard, Claire’s tiny figure standing sentry, the sun-drenched road beyond.
“Everyone’s dying around us, Will,” Gaby said quietly.
“Not us.”
“What makes us so special?”
She peered out at him through the broken nose and bruises around her face. Even with all of that—and all the cuts and scratches from the helicopter crash, if he looked closely enough—Gaby was still just the eighteen-year-old girl he and Danny had molded and trained to be a killer on the island. He guessed she would never outgrow that image in his head.
“We’re not,” Will said. “We’re just well-prepared. And we have something to live for. Don’t underestimate the importance of that.”
“The island,” Gaby said.
“No, not the island. The people on it…”
*
“You radioed Song Island yet?” Danny asked.
“Not yet,” Will said.
“What’s keeping you?”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Good news and bad news. Good news, we found Gaby. Bad news, reunion time won’t start until tomorrow. Don’t tell her we’ll probably die tonight, though.”
“Good advice, Danny.”
“That’s what I’m here for.” Then, “Sunset at 6:30, give or take.”
“Yup.”
“They got us by the balls.”
“Does it hurt?”
“Kinda, yeah. And itchy, too. Is it supposed to itch?”
“When was the last time you bathed?”
“You’re asking me?” Danny sniffed him. “You smell like week-old cabbage. No, I take that back. That’s giving week-old cabbage a bad name.”
Will smiled. Pouring bottles of water over himself took away some of the stink, but it wasn’t nearly enough. “I’ll shower when I’m dead.”
“So soon, then?”
Will smirked. “Captain fucking Optimism.”
Danny chuckled. He was leaning on one side of the open window across from Will. The main bedroom on the second floor gave them a perfect view of Route 13 and the soldiers at both sides of the road. With only one vehicle parked across the lanes, it was less a barricade and more of an invitation. Will knew a fake opening when he saw one, and he was looking at two right now. Danny had come to the same conclusion.
“Maybe we should give it a shot anyway,” Danny said, alternating between looking out the window and finishing a can of SPAM with a steel spork. “Give them what they want. You know me; I’m a people person.”
“We’d never make it. Even with the M240s on each truck. A machine gunner out there is a sitting duck. We proved that.”
“Maybe we can move it inside the cab.”
“How?”
“I dunno. I’m just throwing out ideas. That’s me. The idea man.”
“We’d never make it,” Will said again. “Not with the girls and the kids.”
“When did you get to be such a Debbie Downer all of a sudden?”
“I’m just being practical. The ones along the ditches are the problem. They’ll pick us off because we’ll be sitting ducks in the middle of the road. Before we know it, the ones on the other side will flank us, cut off our retreat.” He shook his head. “No, there’s no way around that. And they know it.”
“I hate sitting and waiting. Did I tell you that? They used to call me Action Danny back in college.”
“So I hear.” He glanced down at his watch again. 5:31 P.M. “It’ll be dark soon, and they’re still out there.”
“‘They’?” Danny said.
“Yeah. They.”
“Oh. They.”
The other two blue-eyed ghouls. They’re out there somewhere. Waiting for nightfall.
Always waiting…
“Maybe we got lucky and they’re not around here anymore,” Danny said. “Maybe they went home. They have homes, don’t they? Maybe when you put down the other two, they got scared and ran off.”
Will didn’t say anything.
“Of course not,” Danny said. “When has anything ever been easy with you around?”
“You blaming all of this on me?”
“I thought that was pretty obvious.” He shoved another chunk of SPAM into his mouth. “We need a new plan.”
“We already have a plan. Sit and wait and see what they do, and react accordingly.”
“That’s a sucky plan. Come up with a better one.”
“You know what they say about plans.”
“That yours suck?”
“No plan survives contact with the enemy.”
As soon as he said the words, he thought about Kate. She had said the same thing back in Dunbar. In the dream. The nightmare. One of those.
He looked out the window and scanned the flat empty landscape around them.
Are you out there, Kate? Are you pulling the strings right now?
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Danny said.
“What’s that?”
“Contact with the enemy. The real enemy. The last time that happened—” he touched his broken nose “—I got just a little bit uglier. I mean, sure, I’m still male model material compared to you, but a guy can only take so much abuse before he starts losing gigs, ya know?”
*
Gaby, Lance, and Annie were downstairs hammering the closet doors they had pulled off the rooms on the first and second floor over the windows as well as the front and back doors. They had found everything they needed from the
shack on the property, including buckets of rusted nails. Lance, who didn’t look as if he had ever picked up a tool in his life before The Purge, handled a hammer surprisingly well, while the girls, Milly and Claire, pitched in as best they could.
Will had no illusions that the barricades were going to hold, but putting them up gave everyone something to do and took their minds off what was about to happen in less than an hour. It was either this or watch them staring off into empty space, waiting for the inevitable darkness to fall.
Gaby glanced over when he came down the stairs. “We’re almost done. What about the upstairs windows?”
“Three windows—main bedroom and two additional rooms in the back,” Will said. “We’ll save the rest of the doors for them.”
“What if we run out?”
“We’ll pull the floorboards. There’s just dirt under them anyway.”
The house was old and the stairs groaned. The wallpaper was peeling, and the floorboards were real wood that could be easily ripped free with the proper tools, like a hammer or a prying bar. Everything moved and creaked as they walked around.
Lance sat down on a couch and drank deeply from a warm bottle of water. His clothes were soaked, his was face flustered, and his tired, hollowed eyes sought out Will. “They’re not going to hold. You know that, right? I told you we had them up at the other house, too. They broke in after a couple of hours.”
Gaby and Annie didn’t say anything. Even the two girls seemed to greet the matter-of-fact comment with subdued acceptance and were paying more attention to the heat. The temperature had been tolerable earlier, but now with the windows covered, it had become insufferable.
“We don’t need them to hold,” Will said. “They just need to keep them out for a while.”
“And then what?” Lance said.
“Then we make our stand on the second floor.”
“What about the basement?” Gaby asked. “Those have always worked for us in the past.”
“Against the black-eyed ghouls, it’s a no-brainer. But not with the blue-eyed ones around.” Images of Dunbar and the basement under Ennis’s flashed across his mind. “They’re too smart. Even if they couldn’t get through—and that’s a big if—there are the soldiers to worry about. If we seal ourselves down there, we’re trapped with only one way out.”
“Like what we did to the other house,” Annie said softly.
“What did you do?” Gaby asked.
“We burned it down because we thought there might be creatures—the things you call ghouls—in the basement.”
“Did that kill them?”
“I don’t know. We never checked.”
“We’ll make our stand on the second floor,” Will repeated. He glanced at his watch again. “We need to finish up soon, so let’s get it done.”
Lance got up and held out his hand, and Annie took it and the two of them exchanged a private smile. Will thought they looked almost resigned to their fates as they walked past him and up the stairs. Claire and Milly followed, leaving him on the first floor with Gaby.
The nineteen-year-old stood next to him and looked after the others. “It’s going to be close,” she said, keeping her voice low enough that the others couldn’t hear.
He nodded. “So what else is new?”
“These blue-eyed ghouls… They can be killed?”
“Yeah, but you have to shoot them in the head.”
“Regular bullets or silver?”
“I don’t know. We’ll default to silver just in case. I stabbed one of them in the head with my knife and that seemed to work, too.”
She glanced down at the cross-knife at his hip. “I really gotta get me one of those.”
“I’ll make you a copy when we get back to the island. Deal?”
“Deal.”
They walked up the stairs together. Slowly, as if they had all the time in the world.
“So it’s the brain,” Gaby said. “Which would explain why you say they’re smarter than the others. They actually still have brains.”
“As good an explanation as any.”
Gaby smiled at him through her scars, bruises, and broken nose. “I thought you were dead after we split up in Harvest.”
He smiled back. “Someone once told me I’m too stubborn to die.”
“They’re probably right.” Then, she surprised him by hugging him in the middle of the stairs. “I knew you’d find me. I always knew you would.”
Will hugged her back and felt her body trembling in his arms. He decided she didn’t need to know that he was prepared to leave her behind, thinking she was dead, until he found out differently just a few hours ago.
Instead, he said, “There’s someone else who’ll be glad to know you’re still alive…”
*
“Gaby,” Lara said through the radio. She sounded breathless and happy. “It’s good to hear your voice again.”
“That’s funny, because I’ve been hearing your voice a lot these days,” Gaby said, smiling across the window at Will.
They were back in the main bedroom on the second floor of the house, with the portable ham radio sitting on the windowsill between them, its antenna sticking outside the open window.
“The broadcast,” Lara said.
“How did you know?”
Lara told them about other survivors who had reached out to her through the radio because of the message she had sent out into the world. People from Russia, the United Kingdom, and even some kid living on an island in Japan.
“Wow,” Gaby said. “That’s amazing. I didn’t know there were so many people still out there.”
“Neither did they,” Lara said. “I guess this is why Kate’s so pissed off. We unwittingly brought everyone together. At least, over the airwaves. People are starting to coordinate as a result. Guys in New York are talking to guys in San Francisco. Will, there are two groups in East Texas that we didn’t even know about until now.”
Gaby passed the microphone to Will. “All of that’s great, but I’m more worried about the island right now,” Will said. He sneaked a look outside at the darkening skies. “Are there any signs of an attack yet?”
Lara didn’t respond right away.
Will and Gaby exchanged a worried look.
“Lara,” he said into the mic.
“Do you trust me, Will?” Lara said finally.
“You know I do. Implicitly.”
She told him about some guy named Keo and the two women he had been traveling with. What they had seen back on shore, including more men in uniforms roaming Louisiana, and a staging area higher up Beaufont Lake. He listened and didn’t interrupt, absorbing everything she said, especially what she had attempted—and succeeded—with this Keo guy.
“I think it might have worked,” she said. “I guess we’ll know for sure tonight.”
“And everything’s ready just in case it didn’t?” Will asked.
“Plan Z…”
“Yes.”
“Everyone knows their roles,” Lara said. “I just hope we don’t have to use it.” She paused for a moment, then, “I knew you weren’t going to make it back today, Will. That’s why I made the choices I did.”
“You did the right thing, Lara.”
“Did I? Maybe I just made things worse.”
“Things can’t get any worse, babe. Besides, the island’s still there, isn’t it? You’re still safe. And the others, too.”
“Yes…”
“So you made the right choices.”
“I wasn’t sure…”
“Don’t doubt yourself. You’re smarter than me. Always have been.”
“You’re the one who kept us alive all these months.”
“Not by myself.”
“You and Danny…”
“Danny’s just a dumbass with a gun.”
“Hey,” Danny said. He was sitting on the big mattress behind them, cleaning his rifle. “Leave me out of this.”
Will ignored him and said into the mic, �
��We’ll be back tomorrow. Gaby, Danny, and me. And some other people, too.”
“You keep picking up strays,” she said. “Looks like we have that in common.”
He smiled. “I guess we just can’t help ourselves.”
He looked outside at the falling night again, at the soldiers milling about on both sides of the highway. The trucks had turned on their headlights. Waiting, just waiting, because they had all the time in the world.
They do, but we don’t.
And it seems to get shorter every day…
Will turned back to the radio. “It’s getting dark, and we both have a long night ahead of us.”
“Be careful,” Lara said. “You too, Gaby. I don’t want to lose you guys again.”
“What am I, chopped liver?” Danny said behind them.
Will held the mic toward Gaby, who said into it, “Get a glass of cold water ready for me, Lara. I also wouldn’t mind if someone went into my room and made the bed. I might have left it a little messy.”
Lara laughed. “Your highness’s wishes are my command.”
Gaby nodded at Will, then stood up and walked over to where Danny was, her way of giving Will some privacy with the radio.
“We’ll be home tomorrow,” he said into the mic. “Wait for me, okay?”
“Someone recently told me that home isn’t where I’m staying, but where the person I love is,” Lara said. “Come back to me, Will.”
“Tomorrow…”
“Tomorrow,” she repeated.
CHAPTER 31
KEO
“You think it worked?” Blaine asked. “Earlier today?”
“I don’t know,” Keo said. “Maybe.”
“We should have blown up that house. Or taken out one of those docks and the boats. Maybe if we’d stayed longer instead of running so quickly…”
“Then all three of us would be dead right now.” Keo shrugged. “We did what we could. If they’re smart, they’ll accept today’s losses and regroup.”
“And if they’re not that smart?”
“Look around you, Blaine. These people took over the planet. I’m not talking about the human puppets. I’m talking about the ones pulling the strings. The creatures that Lara called ghouls. They’re not stupid.”
Blaine nodded. “You’re right. Anyway, if they want this island, they’re going to have to take it over our dead bodies.”
