by Sam Sisavath
Will grinned back at him. “You wanna live forever?”
“Kinda, yeah.”
“So do it.”
Danny slung his shotgun and pulled a mustard-covered square object from one of his pouches. It was the size of a cigarette box, with a fat black antenna at the top and a lever on one side.
Plan Z.
“Fire in the hole,” Danny said calmly before closing his palm around the device.
Kate heard a click, then her world threatened to come apart at the seams. For a brief, terrifying second, she was sure the ceiling would collapse and kill them all.
But it didn’t.
The initial explosion was tremendous, and tossed an unprepared Luke to the floor, while Ted had to grab at the nearest wall to stay upright.
The sofa underneath her shook, and Carly grabbed Vera, pulling the little girl into her chest in a protective bubble. Vera put her hands over her ears and squeezed her eyes shut but didn’t scream or cry.
Brave girl. What a brave girl…
Will and Danny had been prepared for the explosion and held onto the walls as the building around them moved and trembled and did its best to cave in on itself.
It was just the beginning.
A moment later, a series of smaller explosions ripped through the building, and Kate remembered watching Danny and Will setting up the C4 explosives—small strips of plastic that looked like molding clay, with small black charges attached to them—and propane tanks around the store, strapping them to the huge struts that held up the ceiling.
Will had explained that the explosions were set up in a pattern that would keep the resulting damage from reaching the employee lounge, but would do maximum damage to the rest of the store. If all went well, the C4 would detonate the propane tank, and the two combined explosions would cave in most of the Archers, creating a thick, impregnable semicircle of brick and mortar and concrete around the employee lounge.
That was the idea, anyway.
She didn’t know if that was what was happening outside, but as the last explosion shook the lounge like the hand of God and aftershocks followed, she marveled that they were still alive and the room was still standing, even though cracks had appeared along the walls and pieces of the ceiling had peeled off and fallen down around them.
But it held!
She didn’t know when she had started clutching onto the cheap plastic upholstery of the couch. She listened to the loud groaning as the building fell around them, before slowly beginning to settle.
Will and Danny slumped down on the floor in front of her, both exhausted, and grabbed bottled water out of a box beside them. They splashed their faces and gulped down the rest. They had prepared for this with boxes containing supplies scattered about the room and inside the powerless fridge near the back.
Will looked over at Danny and began laughing. Danny joined in. They looked like frat boys having fun at a sleepover, wet faces and mischievous eyes clear as day against the LED lanterns.
They’re insane. Both of them. They’re insane.
But they did it… We’re alive!
“What’s the grade?” Will asked after they had stopped laughing.
“We’re still standing,” Danny said. “B-plus.”
“Good enough.”
The building creaked in the aftermath, and rubble continued to fall outside the employee lounge. She wondered how much of the store was left. There would be unforeseen damage, things that even Will’s Plan Z hadn’t accounted for.
She felt exhilaration that they were still alive, and horror that they had actually blown up a building to save themselves.
As the building continued to settle, they heard noises from the other side of the door. Shuffling movements. Will and Danny didn’t seem disturbed by it, but she and Luke looked up. It sounded too close.
“What is that?” Luke asked. “Can you guys hear that?”
“Ghouls,” Will said. “Some would have made it through before Danny boy hit the switch.”
“Can’t be too many,” Danny said. “Probably a hundred or so.”
“Around there,” Will nodded.
“Can they get through?” Luke asked, concerned.
“I doubt it,” Danny said.
There were three quick thuds against the door, then silence.
Then another series of pounding.
She knew Danny was right. The creatures would never break down the door. They were fast and they relied on numbers, but they didn’t have the strength. As proof, the pounding grew weaker and weaker by the minute.
She looked back at Will and Danny. They were opening more bottles of water and gulping them down and washing more blood and skin off their faces. Their boots were caked in thick black mud that they had tracked all the way through the store and into the lounge.
No, not mud.
Blood…
“Get some sleep,” Will said. “We have a long day tomorrow.”
*
She fought against sleep, beating it handedly for the first few hours, drinking water and eating chips and more beef jerky than was probably healthy. She hated the taste, but the jalapeno kept her alert.
By ten o’clock she started to feel drowsy, and in a perverse way the constant drumming against the door started to lull her to sleep. A part of her was afraid of what would happen, and what she would find when she woke. If she woke at all.
Will and Danny were convinced the door would hold. They were probably right. It had held without so much as a crack for the last three hours.
Luke and Ted sat on the other couch, trying hard to stay awake, but Ted eventually gave in around eleven. Luke lasted until midnight, but was dozing a few minutes later. Carly and Vera, curled up on the couch next to Kate, had fallen asleep long ago, with Vera wrapped tightly against Carly’s chest.
She stood up to get another bottle of water. There were five left. She drank it while Will and Danny sat on the floor, backs against the wall with the door between them. They had drank a half dozen cans of Red Bull and didn’t seemed any closer to sleep.
Danny was telling jokes again.
“Two secretaries are in the employee lounge, bitching about their respective bosses, when one of them says, ‘You won’t believe it, but he tried to grab my ass again.’ The other secretary sighs and says, ‘Oh, why don’t you just give in, it’ll make life so much easier. Trust me.’ The first secretary guffaws and says, ‘I can’t! People are still laughing at his last secretary behind her back.’ To which the second secretary says, ‘Wait, I was his last secretary.’”
“You already told that one,” Will said. “And it wasn’t funny the first time.”
“Bullshit. When?”
“Stan. When that sniper had us bogged down outside Kabul for seven hours.”
“Oh yeah. I forgot about that. He got Daniels in the ass that time, right?”
“That was outside of Bagram. And it was another sniper.”
“Really? I could have sworn it was the Kabul thing…”
They continued all night. Sometimes the jokes were funny, and she smiled with them. Other times they were horrendous, and she groaned along with Will. They didn’t seem to notice her, and kept going back and forth, arguing about something from Afghanistan, then reminiscing about one of the guys on their SWAT team.
Listening to them jawing back and forth had a strangely calming effect on her. If they weren’t scared, if they could carry on like this for hours and hours, then things might not be that bad. They wouldn’t be joking if it really was dangerous, would they? She hadn’t known them long enough to know for sure, but listening to them chatter on about nothing made her feel better anyway.
By two in the morning she was drifting in and out of sleep, each time opening her eyes to the sound of Danny telling another filthy joke, and Will either laughing or critiquing. The ghouls had stopped banging on the door hours ago, perhaps realizing it was fruitless, or they were just tired. Did they get tired? She didn’t care either way.
&nb
sp; Just die already…
Sometime around three in the morning, she opened her eyes to Danny, sounding very far away, telling another joke.
“These two high school sweethearts have been dating for two years, but they’ve never had sex. The guy keeps waiting for the right time to make his move, but it never seems to happen. One day, he decides enough is enough, and sneaks into his girlfriend’s bedroom window ready to take her cherry. Instead, he finds her already in bed with some guy. He’s shocked, but not as shock as the sight of his girlfriend riding the guy like a cowboy, whoopin’ and hollerin’. He lunges into the room and yells, ‘Baby, baby, what are you doing? Please tell me, what are you doing?’ The girlfriend stops riding the guy, rolls her eyes and says, ‘See? I told you he was stupid.’”
“I don’t get it,” Will said.
“Because she’s been telling this guy how stupid her boyfriend is, and he goes, ‘Please tell me, what are you doing’ when he sees them doing the horizontal mambo. Get it?”
“Not really.”
“You get it.”
“So he’s not really stupid, is that it?”
“Fuck off.”
“Hey, I’m just trying to understand. It’s not my fault your jokes suck so much you have to explain them.”
“I got yer explanation right here,” Danny said.
Kate smiled, just before sleep completely overcame her and she closed her eyes and drifted off.
*
She woke up to the cold, cheap fabric of the couch underneath her and pieces of the ceiling in her hair and clinging to her clothes.
Will, Danny, and Ted were talking briskly in front of her, with Will banging his fist against a wall. There was a buzzing in her head that prevented her from understanding what they were saying.
She glanced at her watch. 7:12 a.m.
Morning. They had made it through the night.
We’re alive!
She pushed herself up from the couch and yawned.
Will glanced over. “Look who’s up.”
“Did you guys sleep at all?” she asked.
“A couple of hours, on and off.”
She heard snoring and looked at Luke, asleep on the other couch, the handle of his sword sticking out from behind him. Next to her, Carly and Vera were also still asleep, entangled in each other’s arms. The two of them combined didn’t make as much noise as Luke.
She looked back at Will. “So how are we getting out of here? Through the door?”
“There are ghouls on the other side of that door.”
“They’re still alive?”
“Definitely,” Ted said. “You can still hear them moving around.”
“We’re not going through the door,” Will said. “That’s why explosions master here is going to blow a hole in this wall.”
“Making doors where none previously existed is a hobby of mine,” Danny grinned.
“Will that work?” she asked doubtfully.
Danny shrugged. “It’s entirely possible I might blow us all up in the process. Or cave in the already fragile roof above our heads. Or collapse whatever’s left of the Archers down on top of us. Basically, kill us all while we wait to suck in the sweet taste of fresh morning air behind this wall.”
“You’re joking, right?” Ted asked with concern.
“Maybe.”
“He’s joking,” Will said.
She couldn’t tell if he was or not. It was hard to tell with Danny and Will.
“I guess we don’t have any choice,” she said.
“Oh, there are lots of choices,” Danny said, “but none of them are nearly as fun as this one.”
They woke up the girls and Luke, then moved to the back of the room. They stacked the couches on top of one another, then took the door off the refrigerator and put Carly and Vera behind it, while Kate, Luke, and Ted squeezed in behind the main bulk of the fridge.
Danny was taping strips of C4 against the far wall, but he was using smaller pieces than when he had rigged up the store. After a while she realized he was making a jagged door-shaped sketch with the explosives. He had a backpack full of the stuff, and the pieces he was using to blow the wall barely made a dent in the backpack’s bulge. When he was done, he got behind the couch with Will. They had angled the furniture so it would cover their heads from any blow back.
“Everyone keep their heads down,” Danny said. “I’m not responsible for shrapnel through eyeballs, decapitations, or other assorted bodily injuries. We clear? I don’t wanna hear from anyone’s lawyers after this!”
No one answered, probably because no one could really hear him through the earplugs Will distributed to everyone earlier. She had wondered what the earplugs were for when they were packing the boxes.
Squeezed in behind the fridge, Luke was on her right and Ted on her left.
Luke was grinning at her. “I told you we should have stayed at the pawnshop. Last time I checked, there wasn’t a crazy dude with explosives trying to blow us all to hell.”
She grinned back.
Danny screamed, “Fire in the hole!”
Even with the earplugs, the massive blast left Kate’s ears ringing. The ground under her feet seem to come unglued, and she held on to the fridge as Luke and Ted pressed in even tighter around her.
After a while, the world settled again.
The blast had done its job—destroying the far wall completely and caving in half the ceiling. Sheetrock and jagged, hard pieces of brick showered down on the floor around them. She felt the ground tremble with every large chunk of brick that peppered the asphalt parking lot outside, because Danny had directed the blast to blow out, not in.
A white coating instantly covered the room and got into their hair and eyes and clothes. She heard a distant noise. It was someone coughing, but with her ears still ringing she couldn’t be sure if it was her or one of the others, or if she was mistaking the ringing for coughing. It was hard to tell, but it cleared up a bit when she shook off the thick white layer of dust and stood up.
Luke and Ted, similarly covered in a blanket of white powder, looked as if their ears were also ringing.
Ted shouted, “What?” at her, but she shook her head. She hadn’t said anything. Had she? He looked just as confused.
She helped Carly and Vera up from the floor. They were both fine, but like the others, covered in white and looked lost. Carly’s bright red hair had turned a strange shade of pink. Kate had to suppress a slight giggle.
She felt a tap on her shoulder. Will stood next to her. He pointed at the bright parking lot beyond the rubble, then nudged her in that direction. She stumbled over piles of brick, wooden beams, and what was left of the ceiling and wall.
She could smell sunlight, and it kept her going until she finally staggered out into the parking lot and the bright, warm sun. Away from the Archers, away from the swirling white and red mist.
When she turned back and saw what remained of the store, it took her breath away.
More than half of the building had collapsed in on itself, leaving a huge pile of rubble in its wake. It reminded her of those old film reels of cities devastated by carpet bombing during World War II. In a sense, she guessed bombs had hit the Archers store, except these had been controlled explosions masterminded by Danny. The cave-in had created a jagged wall around the back section, where the employee lounge was located.
Will appeared behind her. “Danny can be a real painter when he puts his mind to something!” he shouted.
“Too bad he doesn’t put in as much work on his jokes!” she shouted back.
He grinned.
“What now?” she shouted.
He glanced at his watch, then shouted back, “We have ten hours of sunlight left! Let’s make the most of it!”
Danny and the others fumbled their way out of what was left of the employee lounge behind them.
“Everybody good?” Will shouted at them.
Danny gave him a blank look. “What?”
“Everybody goo
d?” Will shouted again, louder this time—if that was possible.
Danny shook his head and shouted back, “I can’t hear a thing you’re saying! But if you’re asking if I’m good, then fuck, yeah!”
Vera stuck out her thumb and smiled, apparently agreeing with Danny.
It made Kate laugh. It felt strange, but at the same time, so deliriously fantastic.
CHAPTER 18
LARA
LARA SAT UP and looked toward the covered window across the room. It was dark inside the travel agency, but what she couldn’t see wasn’t as important as what she had felt or heard.
“Did you hear that?” she whispered.
Tony was sitting half-asleep on an armchair across from her, but she knew he had been dozing on and off despite his best efforts to stay awake. It was hard not to with the stillness of the city around them at night.
“What?” he said, trying to sit up straight.
She stood up and tip-toed quietly to the window, careful to keep her voice down. “I heard something. It sounded like an explosion.”
“I didn’t hear anything.”
“I felt the ground move, too.”
“I must have dozed off…”
She peered out the window, careful not to move the curtains. She couldn’t see very much in the darkness, but there seemed to be a slight brightening in the distance. It quickly faded as she tried to adjust her eyes to make out more detail.
“What is it?” Tony asked behind her.
“I’m not sure.” She tried to pick up the light again. “It’s gone now. It was there, just for a brief moment…”
From the corner of her eye, she saw movement and quickly stepped away from the curtains. Shadows flitted past the window, moving too fast to see their silhouetted outlines properly. But she knew what they were.
One, then two, then a dozen. They seemed to be moving in the same direction.
Toward the explosion…
Tony was watching her from across the room, the golf club resting across his lap. Her roommate Tracy played on the University of Houston’s golf team, and they found her golf bag inside her closet. When they had decided to leave the city, they had armed themselves with Tracy’s golf clubs. Neither one of them knew anything about guns, and the steel clubs seemed both dangerous and innocuous enough.
