by Sam Sisavath
And all she could think was, Ted is still out there. Ted is still out there!
Luke was on his feet, one hand clutching his Glock, the other gripping his stomach. He looked pale and was covered in sweat, clearly in immense pain. He was barely standing, using the edge of a big desk to stay propped up. She wanted to reach out and grab him, force him to sit back down, but she couldn’t move.
Carly had retreated into a corner, Vera gripped tightly inside one arm, her other hand holding a Glock at her side. The little girl pressed her own palms against her ears and buried her face in Carly’s chest.
Good, that’s a good girl. You don’t want to see or hear what’s about to happen. You’re a very smart girl, Vera.
The sisters were standing next to Lara, who lay on the floor, bleeding badly from a large gash in her right temple. There was a thick pool of blood already forming underneath her head, and Kate wondered how Lara could possibly be still alive after losing so much blood. Someone had put a towel underneath Lara’s head—it might have been white once upon a time, but it was red now, and getting darker with every passing second.
Will was loading shells into the shotgun, his ammo pouches bulging again. Danny’s pouches similarly replenished.
When did they reload?
It was hard to focus on what was happening around her. Her mind was everywhere and nowhere. In the hallway with Ted. At the back of the room with Luke, trying to stand despite the pain. In the corner with Carly and Vera, hoping for the best. With poor Lara on the floor, bleeding everywhere.
Danny took a familiar-looking box the size of a pack of cigarettes from his back pocket. She had seen it before.
Back in Houston. At the Archers warehouse store.
It was a C4 detonator.
Plan Z.
God, that’s such an awful name, Will. You should have changed it by now. I told you, you can’t sell people on a ‘Plan Z’. Why didn’t you listen to me? This is what I do, Will. I sell people on things. You should have listened to me…
Will and Danny were talking—she saw their lips moving but couldn’t hear what they were saying. She wasn’t entirely certain she could even depend on her eyes, because it looked like the wall around the door was actually pulsating, as if it were alive. Cracks began to spread along the length of the wall, originating from the edges of the door. First in small increments, slivers that sliced left and right, then increasing in size, expanding and widening, actually tearing, coming apart at the seams…
They’re coming in. The door isn’t going to hold. They’re going to take the whole wall down and they’re coming in.
Her sense of touch came back as fragments of the ceiling began pelting her. Small, misshapen pieces the size of pennies, tapping against her shoulders, disappearing into her hair.
The ceiling was shaking almost in sync with the pounding against the door, the widening cracks along the walls, the throbbing of the building around her…
Will was suddenly in front of her, saying something. She shook her head to let him know she couldn’t hear him. He put his arms around her, and she felt warm and wanted very much to just let herself be lost inside his arms, to be with him like this forever, the ghouls be damned. Who were they to say who she could or couldn’t be with on the last night of her life?
The ground underneath her began to tremble.
An earthquake? Texas doesn’t get earthquakes…
In the back of her mind she knew it wasn’t an earthquake. It was the C4s Danny had hidden around the strip mall, underneath cars in the parking lot, planting them in a wide, semicircle around the bank. The earthquake that shook the walls and floor and sent shards of the ceiling crumbling down on top of their heads was the C4s going off one by one, taking most of the parking lot and surrounding buildings with them in what was probably a huge sea of explosions, igniting the gas in cars, propane tanks, and just about anything else they found that could be ignited or imploded.
Plan Z…
She heard and felt the earsplitting results of Plan Z while wrapped in Will’s arms. She pressed against his chest as half the ceiling fell on them with a sudden rush of cold air as the room ventilated. Even before the sounds of the massive explosion had a chance to die down, she heard gunfire, and realized Will was gone, and she was crumbled on the floor alone, covered in pieces of ceiling and dust and specks of brick and mortar.
She looked up, inching her head slowly. Fire spat from Will’s shotgun as he fired at two ghouls leaping over the fallen wall.
Wall? What happened to the wall?
She watched in fascination as buckshots ripped ghoul flesh from their bones over and over again. The creatures fell like drops of water from the heavens, black blood splattering white floor tiles in a sea of tainted darkness, making for an oddly beautiful canvas.
She had lost her bearings. She didn’t know where the door was. Every inch of the room looked the same, and it became impossible to orient herself.
Danny appeared out of nowhere and sat next to her, reloading his shotgun. There were shotguns scattered all around them, and pouches, some with shotgun shells spilling out. So many pouches. So many shells. This was why Will insisted they keep making silver ammo, even though it slowed them down leaving the city. He knew they would need it. He knew, because Will always prepared for the worst-case scenario.
Danny was shouting at her— No, he was shouting at Will, who grinned even as he racked the shotgun and fired again and again, swinging it from left to right, right to left.
Seven shots. Those shotguns only have seven shots.
Danny was shoving shell after shell into his shotgun. When he was done, he grabbed a nearby shotgun and loaded that, too. It wasn’t until Will shouted something back at him that Danny started firing. Now it was Will who was reloading, grabbing handfuls of shells from the pouches spilled about them, loading one shotgun, then another.
The two of them were constantly moving, moving, moving.
Through a kind of impossible slow-motion haze, Kate saw that the ghouls weren’t coming through the door. No, it still held, the latch had done its job, even though the walls around it were badly cracked and torn and chunks of it were falling free.
No, the door was safe. The creatures were coming through one of the walls that had opened up in the explosion. A sea of dead, unmoving black things covered the floor and rubble, like an extension of the darkness outside in what remained of the parking lot, or the dark, swaying trees or the quiet, pitch-black highway in the distance.
Plan Z…
The only thing keeping the darkness at bay were the LED lanterns screwed into what was left of the walls and the ceiling, and a couple resting in corners on the floor behind them. Would it be better if she couldn’t see what was happening? The end was coming, and she’d rather let it all end in the dark. It would be more merciful that way.
Hands grabbed her and she was pulled back toward another section of the wall. Will’s face appeared above her, but she still couldn’t hear what he was saying. She found herself marveling at the way thick black pools of blood clung to his temple and chin and cheeks. Not his blood.
Across the room Luke bravely shot at the mass of ghouls pouring in through the wall, but it was like firing into an ocean of pudding. They simply absorbed his bullets and kept coming. He had to know that, didn’t he?
As she watched, horrified, Luke stopped shooting and she realized he was out of bullets. She groped for her own gun, screaming at him to take hers, but he didn’t hear her. Had she really screamed at all? Was it only in her head? Her mouth was dry and clenched tight, and she didn’t have the strength to open it.
Luke smiled at her but before she could respond one of the ghouls seemed to swallow him up and he disappeared down to the floor. Suddenly they were all over him, and she tried to dig out her gun.
Here, Luke, take it!
Her hand swung limply at her side even as Will dragged her across the room.
No, stop! Luke! We have to save Luke! Can’t you see?
He needs us!
The ghouls on top of Luke evaporated before her eyes as buckshots tore into them. But it was too late, she realized. Too late.
Luke…
Will shoved her against the wall, where she sat awkwardly, looking across the room as more ghouls raced through the opening, slithering on black blood as they persistently climbed over growing piles of their dead. Kate felt like laughing at the sight of slipping and sliding ghouls, but when she parted her lips to do just that, no sound came out. Or maybe she did laugh. She wasn’t sure, since she couldn’t hear a thing and hadn’t been able to hear for a while now.
The ghouls didn’t get far into the room before their skin was shredded by silver-coated buckshots. The shotgun blasts, as Will fired next to her, barely a foot away, had become mere soft pop-pop-pop noises, felt rather than heard.
Will and Danny took turns shooting and reloading. More machine than men. Whenever Will stopped shooting to reload, Danny was instantly shooting. Three empty pouches lay on the floor, and there seemed to be more spent shotgun shells around them than flooring.
As the pain and numbness started to take her, something made her look out through the hole in the wall. Past the never-ending ghouls trying to crawl in, stumbling on the increasingly large hill of dead.
There was something out there. In the darkness. Standing on top of a large, rising rubble in what was left of the parking lot.
It was a man.
No, not a man. It stood like a man, but she knew, without having to think about it, that it was one of them. A ghoul…and at the same time it wasn’t.
There was something about its eyes, something intense and unnatural in the way they seemed to glint against the inky blackness of the night. They were cold eyes. Cold and blue and they bored their way into her very soul.
It sees me. The undead thing with blue eyes sees me.
And more…
The creature’s lips moved, forming an expression she hadn’t seen before in the creatures.
Not a frown, but anger.
It was simmering with anger.
Then the blue-eyed ghoul turned and slipped away into the night, and she saw only black clouds and a moonless sky high above them.
Overwhelming calm and sleep tugged at her, and she didn’t bother to fight them. Even shotgun blasts and an M4A1 firing on full-auto a foot from her ear faded into the background. But she didn’t turn her head to make sure, because it didn’t seem to matter all that much.
Will and Danny were still fighting. They weren’t going to give up. Not them. Not Will and Danny. They never gave up. They would fight on, and fight on and fight on until they couldn’t fight anymore.
She didn’t know why they bothered.
What does it matter? What does any of it matter?
She closed her eyes, and there was only serene blackness.
CHAPTER 27
WILL
THEY HAD MAYBE ten shells left between them. That was the optimistic guesstimate, anyway. A couple were scattered about the room, hidden among the sea of empty shells, that he made mental notes of over the course of the night. But ten shells sounded about right. It was why he had switched back to the M4A1 sometime during the night while Danny kept firing with the shotguns. While the Remington gave them the coverage at close range that the rifle couldn’t, silver bullets were still silver bullets.
Will took tally of the dead and dying:
Luke was dead. He knew that much. The kid hadn’t moved in two hours. The top part of his head was gone, a dead giveaway that he wasn’t waking up anytime soon. The kid had saved a bullet for himself and actually went through with it. Will wasn’t sure when that had happened, because he lost track of Luke during the chaos. His field of vision had been limited to a half-dozen meters around him, and Luke somehow got lost in his blind spot.
Ted was also gone. Somewhere in the hallway beyond the office door, lost behind a pile of debris, probably. Will’s last sight of the big former security guard was watching Ted fight off a dozen ghouls falling through a hole in the ceiling. The creatures had used an air conditioner to break their way through, just like with the car against the lobby wall. Different objects, same principle.
Not stupid. Dead, but definitely not stupid.
They would eventually have to dig Ted’s body out of the rubble. There couldn’t be very much left of the hallway after the explosion. Will wasn’t looking forward to that. Best case scenario was that the explosion killed Ted before the ghouls got to him, before they could turn him.
Yeah, that’s the ticket.
Kate lay on the floor next to him, breathing in long, regular breaths. He reached over and ran his fingers along her temple. One of the fragments from the falling air conditioner had hit her on the side of the head, and he could feel a big bump there. She was going to feel the effects of it for days. But maybe that wasn’t really the problem.
He remembered the look on Kate’s face as they retreated into the office. She was dazed and confused, fixing him with the thousand-yard stare he was so familiar with. He had seen it from soldiers after a hectic firefight. Mostly the rookies, the new kids that hadn’t been in-country for longer than a few weeks, but veterans got it, too. He would have to watch her closely.
Lara was alive, which had to be some kind of miracle. Her prone body lay behind the big desk to their right, hidden in a corner and somehow spared from much of the falling wall and ceiling, shielded by the expansive tabletop. She had bled profusely from the nasty gash on her head, thanks to a projectile dislodged from the wall by the impact of the ramming car. The bleeding had mercifully stopped.
She’s a lot tougher than she looks.
Will turned his head too fast and flinched involuntarily. Broken ribs for sure, from the same fusillade of bricks and mortar that had knocked out Lara. His thigh was bruised—he knew that much without having to see it. Half his body was probably purple and black underneath his thermal clothing, but there would be time to take inventory later. It wasn’t like they were going anywhere anytime soon.
His eyes went back to the hole in the wall across the room. The door was still intact, which was another surprise. The steel bar had done its job. Barely, but it held. Most of the ceiling was still where it was supposed to be, though large globs of it had collapsed before the ghouls abandoned that part of their assault to focus completely on coming through the caved-in wall.
It was impossible to tell where the skeletal corpses of the ghouls stopped and the room began. They were everywhere. Hundreds, possibly thousands, piled on top of one another, in places reaching as high as the ceiling. There were probably more spread outside the building, and he imagined a bridge of the dead leading directly to the hole in the wall. Ironically, it was the dead ghouls that saved their lives. After a while, it became impossible for the creatures to reach them without first having to climb over their own dead. That slowed their progress tremendously, and made defending the wall easier.
The nearest dead ghoul was barely a meter from Will’s boots, lying on its stomach, head twisted awkwardly. He stared down at the creature’s lifeless eyes. There wasn’t much of a chest left after he shot it point-blank with the Remington. What remained of the ghoul’s insides were spilled out on the floor. Or at least, he thought those were insides. It was hard to tell…
Almost every inch of the once-white tiled floor was covered in a shimmering black pool that looked like the surface of a calm pond made of dripping thick tar. The inky color gave off an almost radiant glow underneath the LED lanterns still hung from the remaining ceiling and walls. What must it look like from the outside, looking at the bank from a distance, with the LED lights pouring out through the hole…
Probably like some kind of glowing radioactive chamber. Warning, warning: don’t get too close!
Their clothes were stained black, as were most of the walls and big swaths of the ceiling. The same black goop clung to parts of his face, hair, and over one eye. Danny, sitting nearby, was in the same boat; he was almost complet
ely covered from the cheeks down, and there were thick chunks of clumpy flesh in his hair.
Will glanced down at his watch, but saw only ghoul blood. He wiped it against a clean part of his pant legs, and stared at the time: 3:14 a.m.
Three more hours…
The good news was it didn’t look like any more ghouls were coming. There had been less and less of them as the hours dragged, as he and Danny ran lower and lower on ammo. Until finally, the ghouls had just stopped coming. He hadn’t heard or seen any signs of movement at all for at least thirty minutes now.
Still, he took that assumption with a grain of salt. They could be playing possum right now. He wouldn’t put it past them.
Dead, not stupid.
He looked over at Danny again. Like Will, he had wrapped pieces of a shirt—one of many scattered about the room, loosened from the crates during the fight—over both his hands. Their weapons had overheated from repeated use. The heat generated by the non-stop firing had turned every inch of the M4A1s and shotguns into burning metal, and their palms were bright red and covered in welts as a result. It would have been worse if they hadn’t switched between six shotguns, giving each weapon time to cool down. Not enough time, as it turned out.
He was sure they both had second-degree burns, which was the best-case scenario. If they were unlucky, they were third-degree, which meant damaged nerve endings—probably why they couldn’t feel the pain at the moment—hair follicles and epidermis, which was not going to be pretty. Assuming they survived the night, of course.
Again, more assumptions he had to take with grains of salt.
For now, he could still grip the shotgun, which was a good sign, even if doing so made him grimace with pain. The M4A1 had run dry an hour ago, forcing him to revert back to the Remington and their precious and dwindling shell count. He kept the rifles nearby, though. In a pinch, they made for decent blunting instruments.
