by Sam Sisavath
“We good?” he asked, just loud enough for Danny to hear.
“Getting good,” Danny said. A window opened and there was a brief silence for about five seconds, then, “You waiting for an invitation?”
Will turned around and ducked under the open window and stepped out onto the metal catwalk. Danny was already racing down the stairs below him, toward the familiar back alley of Gaine’s Meat Market. Will knew it was getting darker from the second-floor window, but actually being outside and underneath the blackening skies told him he had underestimated the approaching nightfall.
Shit. This is gonna be tight…
He had been hoping they could hole up inside Gaine’s until morning. It wouldn’t have been an ideal situation, but given the gunfight outside and the need to find Gaby, who was probably still in the city somewhere (he hoped, anyway), leaving Dunbar now wasn’t in the plan.
All that was out the window now after being discovered.
And now the sun was almost gone. What else could go wrong?
Cutting it close. Way too close.
A flicker of motion caught his attention just before a shadow appeared over one of the handrails down the hallway. Will flicked the M4A1’s fire selector to semi-auto and waited patiently.
One second…
…two…
…three…
A head appeared up the stairs, peeking out curiously.
Will shot the man square in the forehead and watched the body disappear back down the stairs, the thump-thump of a full-bodied adult male sliding his way down each step until he finally landed at the very bottom.
“You coming?” Danny called from below.
Will slung his rifle and raced down as Danny pulled security in the alleyway. From back here, the only path was forward into the street. Will hopped the last few meters and landed behind Danny.
“Took you long enough,” Danny said.
“Great view, I was just enjoying myself.”
“Yeah, well, save that for your own time, buddy.” He glanced at his watch and his face darkened. “Gotta be scootin’, scooter. We’re gonna be SOL in a few minutes unless Mister Sun decides to stay put.”
“That ain’t gonna happen.”
“Way to be optimistic.”
“Fuck optimism,” Will said, slipping his rifle free, and together they moved toward the mouth of the alley.
The snap and pop of gunfire from up the street continued, though they were now coming at a much slower pace. Will imagined whoever was in charge of the locals were caught at two fronts—he and Danny down the street, and Josh’s soldiers further up. The fact that they had only sent, as far as he could tell, three men was proof of that.
Then again, you know what happens when you assume…
Danny peeked his head out and scanned the street while Will looked back up at the catwalk behind them. There was still one more man up there, though it was probably a fifty-fifty chance he would continue onto the second floor alone. The smart move would be to backtrack and wait for reinforcements. He wondered how smart (or suicidal) the man was.
“Anything?” Will said.
“Looks clear,” Danny said.
“You sure?”
“Pretty sure. Well, mostly sure.”
“Good enough.”
Quick movement as a head poked out of the window above him. Will fired, but the man pulled his head back inside just in time, and Will’s bullet harmlessly chopped loose some pieces of brick.
Suicidal, then.
“That’s our cue,” Danny said, slipping out onto the sidewalk.
Will followed and they turned right, moving away from the fighting.
“We need to find shelter,” Will said.
“Thanks for that suggestion. And here I was gonna run around like a moron for the next thirty minutes. What would I ever do without you?”
“I’m glad you finally realize that.”
“It’s Lara’s fault. She’s been filling my head with how great you are and shit. Frankly, I think she’s delusional.”
Danny turned left and darted across the empty street, then skirted around a large six-wheel gas tanker with “Shell” written across its side parked in the middle of the road. Will was following him when—
Ping! A bullet ricocheted off the side of the tanker and disappeared into the wall of a coffee shop.
“Incoming!” Will shouted, ducking and sliding behind the large vehicle for cover.
“Ya think?” Danny said.
Bullets slammed into the other side of the tanker, the ping ping ping! ringing out one after another after another. More rounds missed the vehicle entirely (how that was possible given its size, Will couldn’t fathom) and slammed into the sidewalk and street around them instead.
Danny dropped, hugging the road, then peered underneath the small space that separated the gas tanker and asphalt.
“How many?” Will asked.
“Three,” Danny said, rising back up.
“How far?”
“Sixty meters, give or take. Now would be a good time to flex some of that mush you call brain muscle.”
Will was about to do just that when he realized that his shadow was gone and the suffocating heat had lessened noticeably. He didn’t have to spend a precious second or two looking at his watch, either. An inky black coating had fallen over the streets and the last trace of sunlight had dissipated almost entirely.
Ah, shit…
“We gotta get out of the streets,” Will said. “Danny—”
“Bar,” Danny said, nodding at a building called Ennis further up the sidewalk. “They always have basements in bars, right? To store the beer and kegs and peanuts and all that good stuff?”
“You better hope so. Go!”
Danny went first and Will followed, ignoring the persistent ping ping ping! from behind him.
Ennis looked intact, and the door opened without a fight. The tables and counters had been put to use recently, and Will guessed the beer tap was either empty or had gone bad. Old bags of peanuts were scattered about the place, and someone had been using the custom-made coasters as Frisbees.
Danny flicked on his flashlight. He had slung his rifle and drawn his Glock, moving cautiously toward a back hallway. Will kept pace behind him, keeping his eyes on the front door. He could barely see the street anymore with the gloom that had fallen outside.
“The best laid plans of mice and men…”
The locals had stopped shooting, probably realizing Will and Danny were no longer at the gas tanker. Either that, or they had taken a look at the sky and realized for themselves what was about to happen. You didn’t survive for this long without knowing when to run and when to stick around, especially in the evenings. More than he and Danny, it was entirely possible the locals had simply lost track of time. Anything and everything was possible during the heat of battle, and the locals had been fighting Josh’s soldiers for a few hours straight now.
There was a metal door at the end of the hallway, the smooth surface glinting against Danny’s flashlight. “Nice,” Danny said. “Looks like a tough little hombre.”
“Does it open?”
“Of course it opens. Why wouldn’t it—” He grabbed the lever and twisted it, but the door didn’t budge. “Aw, shit.”
“No?”
“Locked.”
“That’s not good.”
“I’d say it’s fucking awful myself, but ‘not good’s’ good too, I guess.”
It had gotten even more miserably dark in front of Will, and in the same instant he noticed that, he also heard a sudden burst of gunfire and something else. Something loud and sharp, like a knife slicing through the heart of the city.
Screaming.
“You hear that?” Will said.
“I got ears, so yeah,” Danny said, his voice dropping slightly.
Will scanned the hallway and saw two rooms. One was marked “Office,” the other “Bathroom.” He moved toward them and tapped on the office door. Solid wood,
which was good. He knocked on the bathroom door and got back a dull, satisfying thud.
Metal. Much better.
“Bathroom,” he said, and pushed the door open just as he caught movement coming from the front of the bar out of the corner of his right eye.
Will spun and squeezed off a burst as the first ghoul lunged at him. He shredded it, but even as it collapsed, he was already opening fire at the dozen (two dozen?) that followed it inside the building, little more than moving black silhouettes coming in through the windows and doors, scrambling over chairs and tables because that was apparently faster than running around them.
“Shenanigans!” Danny shouted just before he opened fire next to Will, the loud blasts of his Glock just a bit too close for comfort.
Their silver rounds tore into the creatures, ripping through yielding flesh and shattering the windows and pecking at the walls in the background. The last of the ghoul wave fell in front of them, caking the floor with flesh and bone and black, oozing blood.
Will quickly ejected the magazine and slapped in a new one. Danny was reloading the Glock behind him. They moved on instinct, without thinking.
Then he saw it: a pair of bright blue eyes staring at him from outside the bar.
It stood tall, like a human, outside in the falling night. He thought he would have gotten used to the sight of them by now—or, at least, not be as surprised to see them anymore. That wasn’t the case, though, because they were such an anomaly. In a world overrun by undead things, these blue-eyed bastards remained freakishly supernatural in his mind.
There was something different about this one. The second he saw it, Will knew that it wasn’t Kate or even Mabry, the only two blue-eyed ghouls he had ever seen. No, this was another one entirely, which prompted him to think with more than just a little bit of dread. Jesus Christ, how many of these fuckers are running around out there?
It stood proud and tall while the other ghouls flooded across the streets and up the sidewalk and crouched and kneeled around it like children worshipping at its holy feet. There had to be hundreds of them outside now, but since the initial attack, the rest hadn’t come into the bar yet. They were forming a wall, their gathered mass blotting his view of the streets entirely until the only thing he could see was pruned black flesh moving under the growing darkness.
Will moved fast—faster than he had ever moved before, faster than he thought even he was capable of moving. He snapped the rifle up and squeezed off a single shot without the benefit of aiming—
—and hit the blue-eyed ghoul right in the shoulder.
It flinched at the impact, turned slightly, but it didn’t go down.
It didn’t go down.
Instead, it just grinned back at him.
Then the wall of black-eyed ghouls came unglued as the individual creatures broke into a run. They vomited through the windows and doors and moved like one single black entity, indistinguishable from the hundred others around them. They were not the least bit slowed down by the shards of glass clinging to the window frames that ripped into their flesh, or the bodies of the dozen or so dead already caking the floor in front of them, or even the furniture in their path.
“Aw, man, this isn’t fair,” Danny said behind him.
“Go go go!” Will shouted.
Danny pushed his way through the bathroom door as Will backed up and fired, putting ten rounds into the surging blob before he heard gunfire coming from behind him. Danny, firing, but not at the horde in front of Will—he was shooting into the bathroom.
Will knew what that meant even before Danny shouted, “No go! Bathroom’s a no go! They’re coming through the windows!”
He continued backing up, firing into the sea of ghouls. There were so many that their number suddenly became a problem as they tried, like rabid animals, to all jam themselves into the narrow passageway at the exact same time. The first creature that somehow managed to get through slipped on the congealed blood of the previous dead and flopped to the floor. But then it quickly righted itself and was moving up the hallway again, bringing more behind it.
Danny was backing up and firing beside him as the bathroom door, now in front of them, flew open and skeletal figures poured out of it. These new ones were quickly swallowed up by the unrelenting tide already pushing through the limited space. That, more than anything, was what held the creatures back, taking away their one superior asset: their sheer numbers.
Temporarily, anyway.
Danny was opening up with the M4A1 now, pouring silver rounds into the quivering mass alongside Will. The only source of light was the staccato effect of their nonstop weapons fire.
“Office!” Will shouted.
Danny spun around, but Will heard shooting behind him—again not directed up the hallway—before Danny shouted, “No go! More windows!”
Goddamn windows!
Will stepped into a pool of blood and stumbled over twisted bones that snapped apart under his boots. He ignored it, reloaded, and kept shooting.
They kept backing up, firing and moving, the creatures coming out of the office door in front of them now, too. They were so thin, their skin so weak, that the bullets punched their way through and hit one, two, sometimes three more of the undead things behind them.
But as effective as the silver ammo was, they still weren’t effective enough. At least, not against the sheer volume of cracked teeth and black eyes literally filling up the hallway, growing bigger and higher in a pile of writhing flesh and tangled limbs. The creatures stumbled and fell and stepped over each other. Blood splattered the walls and floor and even the ceiling.
And still they came, climbing over their dead.
Relentless. Murderous. Rabid.
Will emptied his magazine, shouting, “Changing!”
Danny stepped up and unloaded into the freight train of flesh and bone and brown and yellow-stained teeth. There were so many bodies now that the creatures had begun to pile on top of one another, threatening to reach all the way up to the ceiling.
“Changing!” Danny shouted.
Will resumed shooting as Danny moved behind him and reloaded. He hadn’t had time to look back to see just how close they were to the basement. A part of him didn’t want to know, because as soon as they reached it, it would signal the end, because the locked door would seal their fate.
This’ll teach me to run to the basement every time.
“Live by the basement, die by the basement.”
He almost laughed out loud. Almost.
Instead, he just concentrated his full attention on killing as many of the pressing monsters as he could. They were close. Too close. He oscillated his fire from side to side, shooting at almost point-blank range. There was a surreal quality to the sight of them toppling back one after another as they climbed up on the growing mountain of bodies. But as soon as one disappeared over the pile, another—five—ten more took its place.
Then, finally, Will felt it.
The harsh and brutal cold of the basement’s metal door pressing against his back, the chill seeping through his clothes and into his bones.
End of the line.
“Hey!” Danny shouted.
“Yeah?” he shouted back.
“You still wanna find out what’s in that U-Haul?”
Will laughed this time as he stepped back and grabbed a fresh magazine out of his pouch and slammed it into the carbine. “Hell yeah!”
Danny was laughing, too, before the sound of his M4A1 firing on full-auto swallowed up every noise in the back of the hallway, with the locked basement door at their backs and the growing cemetery of dead (again) creatures in front of them.
They kept coming and climbing, pushing the layers of their own dead forward.
Now I’ve seen everything.
Will waited for Danny to finish shooting when he heard a soft click-clack behind him. It was such a small sound that it was almost completely drowned out by Danny’s weapons fire, and Will wouldn’t have heard it at all if he weren
’t standing directly against the metal basement door.
He spun around, lifted the rifle, and saw darkness gaping back at him.
The basement door was open and he could just make out the top of a flight of metal stairs leading down. But there was nothing down there—just a sea of empty blackness.
Behind him, Danny shouted, “Changing!”
“Door’s open!” he shouted.
“The fuck?”
“Let’s go!”
“You first!”
Will hurried inside and turned, waiting for Danny to dart in before he slammed the door shut. He turned the metal lever and heard the lock sliding into place a split-second before the ghouls crashed into it from the other side.
The impact staggered Will for a moment, but the door held.
They smashed into it again and again, the thoom-thoom-thoom! ear-splitting at such close proximity. The metal door and the surrounding brick wall shook and trembled with every impact, but they, too, held.
Thoom-thoom-thoom!
Thoom-thoom-thoom!
Will turned around. Danny was already facing the stairs behind them with his rifle aimed down into the darkness.
Thoom-thoom-thoom!
Will stepped up beside him. “Anything?”
“I saw movement,” Danny said. He wasn’t quite whispering, but it was close.
Will could hear his own heartbeat racing in his chest, and Danny’s next to him, despite the nonstop banging coming from behind them.
Thoom-thoom-thoom!
“How many?” Will whispered.
“More than one.”
“Human?”
“I couldn’t tell ya.”
Thoom-thoom-thoom!
There was a click and a bright LED flashlight beam sliced through the darkness and down the stairs, illuminating a dirty concrete floor. Danny moved his flashlight left then right, up and down, until the round beam washed over the barrel of a rifle pointing up at them.
Thoom-thoom-thoom!
The figure standing behind the weapon was a woman in civilian clothes, and she wasn’t alone. Two other forms flanked her, both men, both armed. One of them, a familiar-looking lanky teenager, had an M40A3 rifle pointed up at Will’s chest. The second man was peering behind the iron sights of an M4, and Will couldn’t help but notice that the man’s forefinger was trembling slightly against the trigger.