by Sam Sisavath
She walked down the hallway, listening to her own footsteps echo up and down the concrete world around her. Sometimes she felt like a ghost, unable to distinguish her dreams from her waking world. Who’s to say which one was real?
Mandy, one of the little girls in the facility, appeared in front of her, leaning around the corner like an apparition. She was six years old, with a chipmunk face and cheeks that always looked rosy. Kate had seen her around often during the night, because Mandy liked sneaking out of her room to run around by herself. Kate supposed her mom didn’t mind the girl being out here alone. After all, where was she going to go?
“Hi,” Mandy said, her cheeks flushed red as usual.
“Hi,” she said back.
Mandy reminded her of Vera. When Carly came to see her, she never brought Vera along, which Kate didn’t mind. She hardly knew what to say to Carly, much less to Carly’s little sister.
Mandy pulled her head back behind the corner and ran away, soft footsteps fading.
She walked quickly past the Cafeteria, because there were sometimes people in there, even at night. She could hear them now as she walked past the always-opened doors.
Chattering. Endless chattering.
About what, she couldn’t imagine. What was there to talk about? Did they really think they were going to be safe down here for the rest of their lives? Even if that was the case, did they really call it living? It was almost comical how they were fooling themselves.
She had become used to the hallways, all of their nooks and crannies and turns, and no longer had to consult the maps along the walls. She had gotten lost often during the first month, each hallway looking exactly like the previous one and the one just around the corner. Especially in the Quarters area, with its three-finger-like design. That didn’t happen anymore.
The irony of Harold Campbell not having made it to his precious “bomb shelter,” as Luke liked to call it, helped to push her forward, steeling her resolve to do what she had to do. Will wouldn’t agree. Will would try to talk her out of it, but failing that, would he stop her some other way? She didn’t know. Despite all those days and nights and weeks on the road together, did they really know each other all that well?
For God’s sake, she didn’t even know his last name!
She didn’t know when she had crossed over from the Quarters area of the facility to Operations, but suddenly she turned a corner and saw the metallic glint of the steel Armory door at the end of the hallway.
How did I get here so fast?
She stopped for a moment to get her bearings. Her mind was wandering more and more these days, ever since she started dreaming about Mabry and his opaque white skin. Her mental fog used to be confined to her dreams, but Mabry and the confusion he brought in her dreams were starting to bleed into her waking life.
Mabry.
“What’s the point?” he asked her over and over again in her dreams.
There was no one around, but she waited and listened, checking to make sure anyway. She didn’t want to get caught in the Armory.
When she was sure no one was in the hallway with her, she hurried to the Armory, grabbed the door handle, turned it, and slipped inside.
The door was never locked. None of the steel doors in the Operations area were locked. Not that it mattered. Most of the people in the facility were already armed with handguns, and the kids were strictly forbidden from playing in the Operations area, though Kate had seen Mandy and the Steven boys wandering over here every now and then.
She stood in the middle of the room and took inventory.
The Glocks had their own separate rack. She was used to a Glock, though these looked a bit bigger than the one Will had chosen for her all those months ago. Not that much bigger, and it was still a Glock. She would recognize the same look and plastic feel of it even in the dark. She picked one up and held in her hands, and found it a little heavier than she was used to. Not by much. Most of the difference was in the width when she tried to put her fingers around the grip. It was a little wide, but she could still reach the trigger, and that was all that mattered.
She found a box of bullets, took out the magazine and began to load it. She didn’t bother with a second gun or magazine. One should be enough.
She had given up her own Glock a while back, during one of those dark weeks when she almost never came out of her room, even at night when no one was around. It was Will who had asked if she still wanted the gun, and when she said no, he had been eager to take it away.
She was feeling better now, much better. The realization of this new world—this “living”—gave her a clarity she hadn’t known in a while. She had Mabry to thank for that. He pushed her, cajoled her, until she accepted and embraced his question.
What’s the point?
She tucked the Glock in her back waistband and made sure her shirt draped over it. Most people carried guns around the facility, but even so, she wanted surprise on her side. Everything depended on surprise.
She opened the Armory door a crack and peered out, made sure no one was outside before going out and closing the steel door shut behind her. She walked briskly up the hallway, thinking about all the steps ahead of her, turning them over and over in her head.
It was a solid plan. She had been thinking about it for a while now, planning every little detail.
It was a good plan. It was a great plan.
And most of all, it was a logical plan. There was nothing emotional here. It was all logic. Sanity prevailing over insanity.
Order over chaos…
*
Ben had what she needed, so she walked back to the Quarters area to find him, seeking him out in his personal quarter. He wasn’t there. Opening the unlocked door, she found an empty cot in the corner. Ben was not very tidy, and the place looked heavily lived in.
He wasn’t in the Cafeteria either.
She suspected he was probably back in Operations, where he spent most of his time. She found him in the first place she looked—the Control Room.
Serendipitous.
It was as if all the stars were aligning, presenting the two things she needed to accomplish her plan in one place. Of course, it would have been nice if she had gone straight to the Control Room, instead of looking for Ben elsewhere. It would have saved her some pointless walking, if nothing else. But that was nitpicking.
Rick was also there. He sat in a chair, looking at the rows of monitors that showed the clearing above ground. It was dark, but the moon was full and she could see black shapes moving in the clearing, darting in and out of the woods.
What were they doing out there? Did they know?
Of course not, she chastised herself. How could they know? She had thought about it and thought about it, but she hadn’t even known she was actually going to do it until just an hour ago.
She stood quietly in the Control Room doorway and listened to them talking, oblivious to her presence. She smiled. She had become good at this.
“Is it me or are there more of them tonight?” Ben asked.
“I don’t know,” Rick said. “How can you tell?”
“It just feels like there’re more of them out there. Maybe I’m just seeing things. Gut feeling, I guess.”
Rick seemed to consider it, before shrugging it off. “I can’t tell.”
She glanced at the big LED clock on the wall above the monitors. 11:45 p.m.
Ben finally looked over his shoulder. He looked surprised to see her. “Kate. Is something wrong?”
“No,” she said and smiled. “I couldn’t sleep, thought I’d go for a walk.”
“Eleven at night?” Ben asked.
“I like the quiet,” she said and smiled again, hoping this time it was more believable.
It might have been, because he seemed to relax a bit. Or maybe he just lost interest. It was hard to tell with Ben. He was so much like Will in that respect.
“I don’t usually come to this part of the facility,” she said, feeling the need to kee
p going, to explain her presence. “What are you guys still doing up?”
“Couldn’t sleep, either,” Rick said.
“Did Will tell you about what he found in Dansby?” Ben asked, his attention already back on the monitors, on the ghouls darting in and out of shadows. They looked like children, playing a game of hide-and-seek with adults.
Did the ghouls know?
“No,” she said.
She hadn’t, in fact, heard about anything in Dansby, though from the sound of Ben’s voice, it was something alarming, maybe even important. Maybe that explained all the excited chatter in the Cafeteria. Many of the facility’s residents usually chattered on pointlessly about something or another, but she noticed they were distinctly more animated tonight.
“What did he find?” she asked.
“Lots of people. Alive. The ghouls are using them in some kind of blood farm. We’re going back there tomorrow to try and bring back as many as we can. If we can. There’s something about them being in a coma that might cause some problems.”
“There are a lot of them, you said?”
“A few hundred.”
“Will said over 500,” Rick added.
“That’s a lot,” Kate said.
This world is theirs. We don’t belong here anymore. Why can’t anyone else but me see that? We’re the intruders now, not them.
“Yeah, that’s a hell of a lot,” Ben said. “Is there something else I can help you with, Kate?”
She could hear it in his voice. Not dislike exactly, but maybe indifference. She heard it in some of the other survivors, too. They didn’t like that she spent all her time in her room and rarely, if ever, interacted with them. They had become suspicious of her. Of course, most of them didn’t know that she did come out, just not when they were awake. She didn’t bother to correct them. What was the point? They could keep on thinking whatever they wanted. It didn’t really matter to her at all.
What’s the point?
She had actually considered seducing Ben and Rick separately to reach her two goals. She was reasonably certain it wouldn’t have taken much to get Rick to do what she wanted, even in her current condition. She was far from the old Kate, the one who could pick up men in bars with a smile and a little leg. She wasn’t that woman anymore, but she was still a woman and they were still men, and that still mattered. Probably even more so now.
But seducing Ben would have been tricky, and she was glad she had ultimately decided against it. One wrong move would alert him—alert the others—and she couldn’t afford that right now. She was too close.
She said, “I’m sorry, Ben,” and was surprised that she actually meant it, even as the words came tumbling out of her mouth.
“What?” he said, turning around again. She guessed he was going to say something else, but he never got the chance.
She took out the Glock and shot him in the right temple. He was so close to her that it wasn’t a very difficult shot at all. His blood splattered the control dashboard in front of Rick, who screamed and jumped out of his seat.
That was easy.
It was a lot easier than she expected. Shooting ghouls was one thing, but shooting a human being who was still alive was another matter entirely, and she was genuinely shocked that it had been so easy to take Ben’s life. One moment he was there, standing behind Rick, and the next he was lying in a crumpled heap on the floor. There was just a little bit of blood dripping from the bullet hole in his right temple. Most of the blood was now splattered against the dashboard, along with a generous amount of brain matter.
She looked over at Rick.
He was barely sixteen, still just a kid, and just a little older than Luke had been when he died. She considered not shooting Rick in the brief two seconds that it took her to turn the gun slightly and shoot him in the chest.
She wondered idly if his parents called him Richard. Or Ricky. Or just Rick. Regardless of what they called him when they were alive, Rick stumbled back against the control board, looking very stunned, before collapsing to the floor. He grabbed at the chair for support, and overturned it as he went down.
The gunshots echoed up and down the facility, like cascading thunder, and she knew they would be coming soon. No one could have heard the gunshots and not know what they were, especially Will and Danny. She didn’t have a lot of time.
Kate quickly crouched next to Ben’s body and found the string around his neck, the one with the pendant that controlled the Door. She pulled it out of his shirt and slipped the loop over his head, careful to work around the wet blood matted against his forehead and chunks of brain clinging to his hair. She slipped the string necklace around her own neck and straightened up.
She walked over and opened the “In Case of Emergency” box next to the door. She took out the ax, spending a moment to familiarize herself with the long curved handle. It weighed a lot more than she had anticipated, but she wasn’t exactly a wallflower. Those weeks of fighting alongside Will and Danny as they left Houston had toughened her up enough so that the ax didn’t feel as unwieldy in her hands as it would have before The Purge.
She took the ax back to the dashboard and located the center console marked MAIN DOOR SWITCH, and below it, a simple red button underneath a glass display. There were no other buttons on the dashboard that looked even remotely like it. It controlled the Door. This and Ben’s pendant, now around her neck.
She glanced up briefly at the bright LED clock on the wall: 11:51 p.m.
Her eyes moved to the monitors, to the ghouls outside. There seemed to be some urgency to their movements, and there were definitely more of them now than when she had looked a few minutes ago. They seemed to be converging on the Door. At first it was hard to pick them out, because they were so dark and almost invisible against the pitch-black woods, but slowly her eyes adjusted, and their numbers stunned her.
How many were out there? Hundreds? Thousands?
Did they know?
But how? How could they know what was happening down here?
Of course they didn’t know, she decided. She was being silly. How could they?
She turned her attention back to the console, back to the matter at hand. She changed up her grip on the ax a bit, lifted it high over her head, took a big breath, then brought the ax down and heard the solid, satisfying crunch of its metal blade digging into the dashboard a few inches from the button.
She was rewarded with sparks.
She had to pry the ax free. It came out grudgingly, but came back out it did. She lifted it over her head again, took another big breath and lowered it once more with a loud grunt.
More sparks.
Almost there…
CHAPTER 40
LARA
GUNSHOTS.
She knew they were gunshots almost instantly, the sound traveling along the concrete walls and floors of the facility, standing out against the quiet hum of the turbine in the background. For a moment, she remembered how all of this started for her—waking up to the sound of gunshots and discovering that the world had changed while she slept.
She opened her eyes in time to see Will pulling himself free. He was already stepping into his pants somewhere in the semidarkness of the room by the time she sat up on the small cot. “I heard gunshots…”
“Two shots. From Operations.”
“Glock?”
He glanced at her, pleased. “Sounds like a Glock, yeah.”
She smiled proudly back at him. “I’m learning.”
“Yes, you are.”
Will slipped on his shirt as she climbed out of bed and looked for her clothes. Found her pants nearby and quickly pulled it on, but the large T-shirt was nowhere to be found.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“One shot is an accident, two is on purpose.” Will grabbed his gunbelt from the nightstand and slipped it on. The silver shape of his cross-knife gleamed in the semidarkness. Will opened the drawer and pulled out a fistful of spare magazines and two radios, hand
ing one to her. “Don’t lose it.”
“I won’t.”
“Keep it turned on at all times.”
“Okay.”
“I have to go.”
“Be careful.”
He moved with purpose to the door, put his hand on the lever, but didn’t turn it.
“What?” she asked.
“I forgot something.”
“What is it?”
He walked back to her, slid one hand around her waist, pulled her against him and kissed her hard on the mouth. Her bare breasts crushed up against his chest, but she adjusted quickly and kissed him back.
Finally, he pulled away and looked at her. “That.”
“Good call,” she said.
He let go of her and quickly left the room, but not before looking back one last time. She smiled back, and for a split second she wanted to grab his hand and tell him to ignore what was happening out there, to stay with her instead, that they could be happy here, just the two of them.
But she didn’t, because she knew this was what Will did. He ran toward danger, didn’t shrink from it.
She stood alone in the darkness for a moment, trying to decide what to do and feeling a little flushed. It had been a while since she felt this way about someone. Will was so different from all the other men she had ever been involved with. In another life, they would never have met. When would she have ever come in contact with a guy from Harris County SWAT? Or an Army Ranger?
She pulled herself out of her thoughts. She felt silly, like a teenager in love for the first time. She was too old for that, she reminded herself, and began looking again for her T-shirt on the floor. She finally found it crumpled up near the foot of his cot and pulled it open. She found her shoes farther back toward the door and slipped them on one by one before stepping out into the brightly lit hallway.
She heard footsteps behind her and turned to see Danny rushing toward her. He was still buckling his gunbelt. “Will?” he asked.
