by Sam Sisavath
He stood over Mike now, looking down at the blood-splattered face, wondering how he could still be alive with so much of his blood covering the long hallway. Mike’s lips quivered. Will wasn’t sure if he was trying to say something or if it was just muscle spasms. Large, gaping wounds ran along Mike’s neck and legs. His neck had been easier to get to, but in order to get at his thighs the ghouls had chewed through his pajama pants. It was a grisly sight.
Danny said, “Want me to do it?”
“No,” Will said.
He drew his Glock and shot Mike once in the forehead. The body went still on the floor as a thin trickle of blood dribbled out underneath Mike’s head, and gravity pulled it into a larger pool nearby.
They continued up the hallway, stepping through puddles of red and black blood, slick against the soles of their boots. He strained to hear, but couldn’t detect anything around the turn up ahead. There were two more turns, he remembered, recalling the facility’s layout in his mind, then the Entrance Hallway beyond that.
And from there, the Quarters on the other side of the facility.
Lara and the girls, after that…
They took the corner without encountering another ghoul, entering an empty hallway covered in as much blood as the previous one. This one also had a single shoe. A sandal. Turned on its side, the manufacturer’s name—Roxy—visible in bold black letters.
Rhonda’s.
They kept moving and reached the Control Room again. This time he stopped and peered inside with the shotgun. He knew what he was going to see before he saw it.
There were two ghouls inside, crouched over a pair of bodies on the floor. The greedy, thick slurping sound preceded the sight of them. He drew his Glock and shot the first ghoul in the back, and as it fell the other one lifted its head in curiosity. He shot out its right eye. It flopped to the floor, splashing tainted blood everywhere, and lay still.
He paused to look across the room, at Ben and Rick, their bodies laid out on the floor in awkward poses. He could only see the back of Ben’s head, the patch of blood where Kate had shot him. There was a hole in Rick’s chest.
Kate, what did you do?
Silent static played on the monitors along the walls, and he guessed it had something to do with the fire ax sticking out of the computer dashboard. The large button that opened and closed the Door was gone, destroyed into little pieces, wiring sticking out like innards. The biggest piece of the broken red button was underneath a shelf at the back, slightly hidden by a fallen chair.
Danny called from outside in the hallway: “We good?”
“Yeah.”
He went back outside to rejoin Danny.
“Ben inside?” Danny asked.
He nodded. “Rick, too.”
“How the fuck did she get the drop on Ben?”
“I don’t think he saw it coming. I didn’t.”
“I don’t think any of us did.” He shook his head. “Shit, Carly’s going to take it hard.”
“She’ll get through it.”
“You’re not the one who’s going to have to hear about it.”
“You’re all heart, Danny.”
“I know. It’s a curse.”
They continued up the hallway, sticking close together, avoiding as much of the blood on the floor as possible. They had already tracked bloody boot prints in their wake, like some kind of perverse follow-the-bloody-tracks game played by children. Sick and demented children.
He tried not to think too much about it. During battles, it had always been easy for him to shut out the gratuitous details and concentrate entirely on the work at hand. He did that now, though seeing the heavy concentration of blood ahead didn’t make it any easier.
They turned another corner, and as they did, Will froze.
Danny had done the same next to him.
The ghouls were stuffed into this section of the facility leading into the Entrance Hallway like pebbles on a beach. Possibly four dozen of them. Black, shrunken things perched on the floor, as if waiting their turn for some purpose.
As Will and Danny turned the corner, the first pair of dark black eyes shifted to greet them. Then the rest turned, almost in unison.
“Fuck me,” Danny whispered.
The first ghoul spun its thin body and started toward them, and Will blew it in half, pieces of the shotgun shell’s silver buckshot spraying two other ghouls around it. Even as those three fell, there were already ten scrambling over them.
They opened fire, backing up, and ghouls slobbered the floors and ceiling with black blood. Will fired, racked, fired, and racked again. He was moving on pure muscle memory, and the target environment in front of him was so rich he didn’t even have to aim.
Still, the sheer number pushed him back.
This must be what it’s like trying to hold back the ocean.
Each time one fell, five more took its place. There were too many of them, and more were coming every second, drawn to the fight by the loud crash of shotgun blasts.
More ghouls came around the corner, and because it was impossible to pass the thick mass already in front of them, the newcomers leaped onto the walls and ceilings, running on top of each other’s heads, until there was no grayness left. It was just black—a flood of tainted, black death.
Will shouted, “Go go go!”
Danny fired his final shot and turned and ran, Will right behind him. He loaded as he ran, shoving shells into the long shotgun, but it was a difficult task, and he managed only two shells before the Control Room appeared in front of them, its door invitingly open.
“Control Room!” he shouted.
Danny was well ahead of him and already making a beeline for the steel door.
Will was halfway to the Control Room when he could feel them almost on top of him.
He twisted, and immediately the face of a ghoul was inches from his own. He struck out with the Remington and caught the creature across its face while it was still in mid-air, the shotgun’s stock nearly sinking completely into the ghoul’s cheek, cratering the brittle bone underneath and tossing the creature across the hallway and into the wall like a flesh-and-bone piñata.
He backpedaled and fired, wasting the two shells he had just managed to reload into the obscene, surging black wall behind him. He obliterated the closest five ghouls with one shot, then six more from the second wave that scrambled over them.
Danny screamed behind him, “Let’s go! You want an invitation?”
He turned and ran full speed, and because the shotgun was too heavy he tossed it aside. He could feel them almost on top of him again, made the calculations and leaped the last two meters.
He dove through the door like a human rocket and crashed into the fallen chair and slammed his back into the legs of the dashboard even as he skidded across the concrete surface. He heard the solid thoom! of the steel door slamming shut behind him and the ratcheting sound of the lever locking in place. But even as he came to a crushing stop against the dashboard, grimacing with pain, he could hear the simultaneous hissing above and behind him and knew that two of the ghouls had managed to follow him inside.
Almost instantly, the ghouls outside threw themselves against the door, raining repeated blows on it, one after another. But the steel door held as it was supposed to and didn’t budge an inch.
He scrambled up from the floor, eyes flashing around the room, before finally settling on the ghoul hanging from a monitor above him like some sort of monkey. Will slid the cross-knife out of its sheath and caught the ghoul in the throat as it dropped on top of him. He was driven back down to the floor, the ghoul’s sticky black blood dripping onto his chest. He lifted it off—it was shockingly light, almost entirely bag and bones—and flung it away with utter distaste.
He glanced over at the door, where Danny had grabbed the other ghoul by the throat and had jammed his cross-knife through its forehead, killing it on the spot. Danny stepped back, letting the creature slide down the wall, leaving a thick trail of splotchy,
dark liquid behind, before collapsing to the floor in a pile.
Danny looked over and managed a grin. “Well, that plan didn’t work.”
“No shit,” he said, catching his breath as he pulled himself up from the floor again.
“You got a Plan B? At this point, I might settle for a Plan Z. The girls aren’t going to last long with that door.”
“I’m thinking, I’m thinking…”
“Think faster.”
He pulled up Rick’s chair and sat down heavily on it. He wanted to sit for a few hours and gather his strength, but his mind was already racing through options. So many options, and most of them weren’t going to get them more than a few meters beyond the Control Room.
The continued pounding against the door didn’t help.
Danny, frustrated, kicked the steel door and shouted, “Shut the fuck up! The man’s trying to think in here!”
Will grinned.
He looked over to his left, at Ben and Rick’s bodies, the two dead ghouls he had killed earlier lying nearby.
“Well?” Danny said.
“Thinking, thinking…”
Danny sat down on the floor, the cross-knife dangling between his knees. He looked tired, covered in thick clumps of flesh and blood and sweat.
Will pushed himself back up on his feet. He always thought better on his feet. He looked over at the destroyed dashboard, then shook his head. “I’m open to suggestions.”
The ghouls at the door suddenly went quiet, and Will and Danny stared at it for a moment.
Danny got up and walked over and pressed his ear against the door. “They’re playing possum. I can hear them moving around outside. Smart fuckers.”
“How many?”
“All of them?”
“That’s not good.”
“Yeah, what I said.”
Will wiped the cross-knife against his leg and slid it back into its sheath. He walked around the small room, taking in every inch of it from floor to ceiling. There wasn’t exactly a lot of space, and it only took him twenty seconds to cover the entire room. As soon as he was done, the finality of it, the sudden lack of viable options, drew a disappointed sigh from him.
“I don’t want to hear that,” Danny said behind him.
“Thinking, thinking…”
He looked over at the shelf. Maybe he had missed something there. Ham radios, electronic parts, and a stack of manuals. A lot of things that couldn’t help him get to Lara and Carly and the girls right now. He turned away from the shelf and looked up at the ceiling. If there was nothing down here that could help, maybe he could find some possibilities up there.
Then he saw it.
He walked toward the back right corner and stood below it.
Danny said behind him, “What is it?”
“Harold Campbell designed the facility to be his own private bomb shelter. Built most of it to his personal specifications. But even he had to follow standard building codes, because they became standard for a reason.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
Will pointed up at a two-by-two foot metal grate on the ceiling, near the corner. “Ventilation ducts. They cool and warm the facility. And it runs all along the structure. Through every hallway, every room, and every living quarters.”
Danny walked over. “So what are you saying? We’re going to Die Hard our way over to the girls? We’re in the middle of a crisis, with thousands of blood-sucking ghouls outside our door, and you’re looking to an action movie from the ’80s as inspiration?”
“It worked for John McClane.”
“True enough,” Danny said. “Okay, assuming it works and we can get to the girls that way. Then what? How do we get out of here? There are still a lot of those fucks stuck in the facility with us.”
“We just have to survive until morning.” He nodded at Ben’s pendant hanging from Danny’s neck. “Then we open the Door. Let sunlight kill as many as possible and we finish off the rest. As long as we can keep accessing the Armory, load up on the silver, we can hold out indefinitely. Or damn near close.”
“Is this Plan Z? I hate your Plan Z.”
“What happened at the bank? They gave up after we killed enough of them. We have a hell of a lot more ammo here, and every day we’ll be able to close the Door and whittle them down. We’re not the ones stuck in here, Danny, they are. We control access to the Door. We have the advantage.”
“Right. We have the advantage.” Danny didn’t look convinced.
Will grinned at him. “It’s just a matter of perspective.”
“What perspective? That you’re insane?”
“Shut up and look for rope. Or strings.”
“What the hell do we need ropes for?”
Will opened one of his pouches and pulled out a handful of glow sticks. “First rule of survival: stay out of the dark.”
CHAPTER 42
KATE
The fact that it didn’t hurt at all surprised her. She had prepared for this moment, expected it to be the most painful moment of her life. She thought it might be like giving birth—not that she knew what that was like—only more permanent.
She knew it would come to this, because she wanted it so. With her very last breath in the split second she heard Will shoot, she would press the button and it would be done. She would be dead, but not before she pushed the final pieces into place. Literally, in this case. Instead, she wasn’t dead—she only felt a mild sensation on the bullet’s impact. Then she pressed Ben’s pendant, and the gears cranked up and the Door behind her started to open.
The people in the facility treated the Door with a reverence that was justified. It was the one thing standing between them and what waited outside. The things that she had just let in…
She stumbled back and somehow ended up sitting on the bottom step. Danny appeared, suddenly standing in front of her and snatched the pendant out of her hand. She didn’t even realize Ben’s string necklace was gone until she saw Danny pressing it over and over again.
Danny, you know better than that, she wanted to say.
Or maybe she did say it. She couldn’t be sure, because everything looked slightly off-kilter and even surreal, and she felt as if she was looking at the world through a fog. Her perception became skewed and a feeling of floating on air, light as a feather enveloped her. She hadn’t planned for that.
One moment Will was there, looking at her quizzically, as if trying to understand what was happening, what she had done, and then he was gone. Danny was gone, too, and Lara, and Rhonda, and those two guys Kate had never made the effort to get to know. There might have been gunshots, but her senses were dulled, and she couldn’t really tell if the gunshots were new or if she was just replaying Will shooting her.
Where were Will and the others going, and why? But then remembered: Oh, right, the Door is opening…
She didn’t really hear them, because they never made a lot of noise, but she could feel them coming down around her, the rippling in the air, in response to their movements. There must have been a lot of them, and there was going to be more as the Door widened farther.
Even now, she could feel them gathering around her, flowing down the steps. Their numbers must have been something to see. She wished she could turn her head and look, but she couldn’t.
Or maybe she did. She didn’t really remember.
She only recalled a sense of finality, of, at last, tranquility. A job well done. A final task performed.
Doing things with her body was very hard. Probably because she was dying. Or maybe it was for another reason.
This is what happens when you die, right? Nothing becomes clear. Everything becomes difficult, muddy, even the simplest things like turning one’s head…or listening.
Or remembering. Or perceiving what was happening around her. Were the ghouls really passing her by without touching her?
Yes. That seemed to be the case, though she didn’t understand why. They didn’t even pay attention to her. She cou
ld see thin, clattering bony feet appearing out of thin air in front of her before disappearing again. They didn’t acknowledge her.
Now this is odd. I didn’t expect this, either.
She stopped fighting the ache in her arms and legs and leaned her head back against the steps. She felt the cold concrete, her first real exterior sensation in a while, press up against the back of her neck, and it sent goose bumps through her. She had forgotten what that felt like. She arched her neck some more and lay still, and looked up and saw nothing but cold, calm, soothing night sky above her.
The ghouls were still coming down, but they weren’t using the steps anymore. She could see dozens—hundreds—of them simply plummeting, like bats falling out of the night around her. Coming down from the moon itself, it seemed. Which made for quite a sight. They weren’t so ugly when you stopped being afraid of them.
They looked almost…poetic.
And they continued to ignore her, never once giving her a second look.
Where was Will at that moment? Will and Danny. There were loud, booming sounds throughout the facility. It took her a while to figure it out, but she eventually did.
Gunshots. They’re fighting back.
What’s the point? It’s over. They should just accept it.
It’s over…
She had accepted it. She wanted to tell them to stop wasting their time. This was their world now. They, the humans, were the intruders. All she had done was usher in the end sooner, that’s all. The inevitable ending that she knew was coming. They should thank her. Or at least, realize what she was doing and embrace it.
There isn’t any pain at all. I’ve been shot. There should be pain, shouldn’t there?
Something appeared above her, entering her line of vision and taking away a big chunk of the pitch-black night sky and the beautiful, round moon high above. It was a face. A thin, oval-shaped face. Near the center, under the forehead, were two very bright blue eyes.
The blue-eyed ghoul…
