by Sam Sisavath
What—?
The explosion (or was that explosions?) shredded the window, the barrier over it, and a large section of the house around them. Will dived to the floor as chunks of the wall and even the porch buzzed over and around his head, sharp pieces embedding into the floor inches from him. Debris rained down across the room and his ears were buzzing. He was sure he had gone temporarily deaf (Please let it be temporary), though that couldn’t possibly be the case because he could still hear continuous gunfire from above him.
Grenades? Did they just use grenades on the wall?
Jesus Christ.
He looked up from the floor, expecting the entire house to come tumbling down on top of him at any second. But it didn’t. Somehow, by some miracle, the second floor remained where it was—above him—despite the jagged, gaping hole across the room looking out into the moonlit yard. Absurdly, the door next to it had remained intact, as had the repurposed lumber they nailed over it. Smoke from the explosion poured out of the house, and he became aware of the chilly night air for the first time in the last few hours.
He managed to scramble to his knees, glad he hadn’t lost the M4A1 during his swan dive. Pieces of wood and glass fell off his shoulders and back and head, and there may or may not have been a trickle (or two or a dozen) of blood flowing down his face. His ears were still ringing, which made the sight of two figures, both in camo uniforms and gas masks, stepping through the hole in the wall and moving against the lingering smoke look like monsters in a bad dream.
He couldn’t hear his carbine firing, but he could feel it bucking against his hands.
The first man slumped forward while the second one tried desperately to track him in the smoke. His vision was likely blocked by the limited view of the gas mask.
Sucks to be you.
Will put a bullet into the second man’s right eye. He stumbled awkwardly before collapsing into a pile.
Will struggled to his feet. His equilibrium was off and he swayed left, then right, then left again. The coughing fits didn’t help him adjust any quicker as he reached out with his free left hand, got a grip on something solid, and finally managed to steady himself.
Or as steady as he could get, anyway. The room had begun to spin and he considered falling back to the floor, where it would be so much easier to regain his senses. The world had looked pretty stable from down there, and he didn’t remember coughing nearly as much, either. Up here, though, the smoke was everywhere, and it was hard to just breathe.
The wall he was touching shook, but he had a hard time tracing where the vibrations were coming from. Behind him? Above? Maybe from outside the house. It could have been more steady gunfire from the second floor. Gaby and Danny were still up there. So were Lance and Annie and the two girls.
What’s happening up there?
He made to turn back toward the stairs to go find out when he saw the shadows shifting once again out of the corner of his eye. He spun back around just in time to see a pair of blue slits glowing in the swirling smoke.
They were coming—launching—at him.
Will reflexively struck out with the rifle, because lifting it and firing would have taken more time—a second, maybe two, that he didn’t have. The M4A1 vibrated on contact, both his arms shaking long after he had swung from right to left, his body turning with his momentum.
It didn’t fall very far and it was back up on its feet even before Will could right himself. It attacked again, springing like an animal on all fours, barreling into his chest and knocking him back. He groped for the wall but couldn’t find it and briefly had a feeling of being weightless as he was thrust through empty air before crashing back down to earth.
He was in the back hallway, past the stairs leading up to the second floor. The door was farther behind him, invisible in the darkness. For a moment, he waited for another blue-eyed ghoul to break its way through that side of the house—
Concentrate! Focus!
The creature climbed up the length of his body and he felt (impossibly) cold dead fingers wrapping around his throat, over the plastic band of the mic. A pair of glorious gems in the blackness bore down at him even as thin, pencil-like lips curled into a smile. It leaned down until its face—the deformed shape of the skull obvious behind smooth black flesh—was inches from his own.
Will stared up at it, fumbling with his fingers for the cross-knife in its sheath along his left hip, cursing himself for losing the rifle. He hadn’t even remembered when he had lost it. Hopefully it was still somewhere nearby.
The rifle.
Lara called it superstition, but he called it habit.
She’s probably right. I am superstitious about the damn thing. I should tell her that when I get back to the island.
I love you, Lara, please forgive me for dying.
He couldn’t breathe. How long had it been since he took his last (smoke-filled) breath? A second ago? Two seconds? Ten? An hour?
The creature’s fingers were tightening with every erratic heartbeat he managed, and he momentarily rejoiced at the touch of the cross-knife’s smooth handle.
The brain.
Go for the brain.
Will pulled the knife out and swung it upward in a wide arc—
—but the sharp point never reached its destination. The creature’s other hand had intercepted his swing well short of its intended target.
Oh, shit.
“We know,” it hissed at him. “Didn’t Kate tell you?” It was holding his hand up in the air with hardly any effort. “We know what happened with the others. How it happened. You didn’t think we’d let you get away with it twice, did you?”
He could hear its voice, which meant he hadn’t gone deaf after all. Thank God.
“Don’t worry,” the creature hissed. “It’s not going to end that easily for you, Will. Kate made us promise her this time. I think she has big plans for you. Of course, she didn’t say anything about punishing you for what happened at Dunbar first.”
Its lips curled into a devilish grin.
He somehow found the strength to look away from its face to his own hand, suspended in the air, the cross-knife (Go for the brain!) frozen in place. It didn’t even look like the ghoul was exerting any effort at all. It was so strong. So fast and so strong. What chance did he have against an army of these things? What chance did Lara and the island have?
Lara. At least I got to talk to her one last time.
Please forgive me for dying.
His vision was faltering and the creature’s fingers were still tightening, and Will swore he could feel cold bones cutting into the skin around his throat. Was that even possible? Who the hell knew? He didn’t. Right now, all he could do was lie on the floor and wait to die, wait to be taken, wait to be given to Kate…
BOOM!
The hallway trembled, as if it had been hit by an earthquake.
The walls, the ceiling, and even the floor underneath him quaked in the aftermath of the shotgun blast at such close proximity.
Will’s eyes snapped open because he could breathe again.
Air!
The creature was still perched on top of him, but it had turned its head and was glaring at something behind it. Chunks of its shoulder and neck were gone, and blood arced out of the ruptured flesh and splattered the wall next to it in a grisly shower of thick, clumpy black blood.
Will looked past the ghoul and saw a small figure standing at the mouth of the hallway, holding a shotgun.
Claire. It was Claire. The little girl with the FNH semi-automatic shotgun.
How’d she get down here?
Claire fired again—the massive BOOM! lighting up the hallway a second time.
The blue-eyed ghoul’s head jerked backward as buckshot tore into its face, shards of shiny white skull shattering and imploding in the air. Meaty globs of foul-smelling flesh hit Will in the face before he could turn his head in time.
Then his left hand was free and Will wrestled it loose from the ghoul’s grip, ev
en as the lifeless (again) body on top of him flopped sideways to the floor. The creature’s form was so much lighter now that Will found it difficult to understand how this almost feathery thing landing next to him was the same creature that had, just moments ago, smashed into him like a five-ton elephant.
He sucked in air like a drowning man, scrambling up from the floor, trying desperately to command his legs to work properly. Maybe it was the lack of oxygen, or the throbbing pain. Despite what the creature had said about promising Kate (What the hell did that even mean?), it sure didn’t seem to care that it was about to crush every bone in his throat.
Claire was standing in front of him, staring at the dead (headless) body resting in a thick pool of its own blood. She didn’t seemed to notice him as he finally got back on his feet and grabbed the wall to steady himself, the creature’s flesh and blood caking his face and clothes like a second layer of rotting skin.
Goddamn, it smells.
The continued loud clatter of gunfire from the second floor told him everything he needed to know—it wasn’t over. Far from it.
The gunfire snapped Claire out of it, and the girl rushed over and grabbed his waist with one hand—the other still clutching the shotgun—to keep him upright because, even though he didn’t realize it, he needed her help. She was a small, frail thing, but she gave herself up as a crutch so he could stand on wobbly feet.
“My rifle,” Will said, his voice coming out as a croak. “My rifle,” he said again, louder and clearer this time.
“I don’t know,” Claire said. Her own voice was strained but somehow still impossibly calm.
She’s going to make a great soldier…if we survive this.
“What are you doing down here?” he asked.
“They told me to run,” Claire said.
Gaby and Danny…
He clutched the knife in his left hand, thanking God he had held onto it all this time, and searched the darkness for his rifle, doing his best to squint through all the pockets of shadows. There were no traces of the carbine anywhere. Of course, there was so little light that it could have been right next to him, and if he didn’t step on it, he might never find—
Claire gasped.
Will looked up at a new pair of blue eyes piercing the darkened living room from the jagged hole in the wall. Its tall, elongated frame looked theatrical against the light of the moon splashing in behind it. Will couldn’t figure out if it really was that tall or if the angular shape of its body added to the preternatural deceit.
He reached down and pulled Claire’s arm away from him, pushing her back into the hallway. She went willingly.
The creature’s eyes shifted from Will to the dead carcass of the other ghoul lying on the floor behind him and Claire. What was it the creature was seeing? Was it the twisted body of its friend? Comrade? Maybe even a lover? Did they even love anymore?
“Kate made us promise her this time. I think she has big plans for you.”
What the hell does that mean?
Will reached for the holstered Glock at the same time the creature moved, but he only groped empty air. The Glock was gone. He hadn’t realized it until now, but he should have sooner. The gun belt felt lighter, but in all the moments of trying to survive, trying to just learn to breathe again, he had missed it.
He switched the knife to his right hand and prepared himself for the inevitable when Claire fired next to him. She was standing so close that he swore this time he really did go deaf from the noise of the shotgun blast. She didn’t stop with one shot, either.
The girl fired again and again, the self-loading gun allowing her to shoot without having to manually rack the weapon each time. She was so small she would never have managed it anyway, though Will was awestruck that she somehow held onto the shotgun after every shot. What was she, eighty pounds soaking wet?
The blue-eyed ghoul didn’t come straight at them. Oh no, it wasn’t going to make it that easy. Instead, it was running sideways—left, then right, then back again—like some kind of goddamn leaping animal. Buckshot from Claire’s blasts caught it in the sides, the thighs, and even took a big piece off its temple. The creature was almost on top of them when another blast hit it full in the chest, making a hole so absurdly wide that Will could actually see through it.
And yet it kept coming.
Will waited for Claire to fire again, but she didn’t. Or she couldn’t. The FNH had seven shots. Had she fired all seven?
Fuck it.
He launched himself forward at the oncoming creature. He saw its radiant blue eyes widen, registering shock a split-second before he hit it straight in the chest with his entire body, catching it while it was still in the air. He thought he might have heard a grunt from the undead thing, or maybe that was just air wheezing out of the gaping hole in its chest.
Something wet and thick slathered across Will’s face, joining the remains of the first dead ghoul, as he tackled the creature. They both fell to the floor in a heap, but Will had the momentum and he was up first. He shoved his left arm against its neck to pin it to the wooden floorboards, putting every ounce of strength he had into it. Even so, it was already getting back up, its strength unimaginable for something so sickly looking.
It was hissing at him. He couldn’t be sure if they were words or just guttural sounds. He didn’t give a damn. Its eyes bored into him. It didn’t quite look so amused or smug anymore, and for a second—just a split-second—Will allowed himself a momentary surge of triumph.
But it wouldn’t stop moving against him. Of course not; what was he thinking?
It had managed to pull its head up from the floor and its hands were reaching for his throat when Will slammed the cross-knife into its temple. He didn’t stop pushing down down down until the guard smacked into the bone and the end of the knife pierced the floorboard on the other side of the thing’s head.
The creature went slack almost instantly under him.
“Will!” Claire shouted.
He looked back at Claire, shoving shells from the pouch into her shotgun, her hands fumbling with the ammo because her eyes were elsewhere. He followed her gaze to the hole in the wall, knowing full well what he was going to find out there.
He wasn’t disappointed.
There were hundreds of them crowding around the ragged opening, and those were just the ones he could see. But there was something wrong with the way they moved. Or didn’t move. They weren’t pouring inside the house even though there was nothing to hold them back. Instead, they were peering tentatively at him.
No, he was wrong; they weren’t looking at him.
They were looking at the creature under him. The dead blue-eyed thing he was crouched over was the center of their universe. It, and only it, as if he didn’t exist at all. They weren’t running, or charging, and there was none of the rabid intensity he was so used to.
“Will, what should we do?” Claire shouted behind him.
“Don’t move,” he said.
“But—”
“Don’t move.”
Will looked down at the creature lying still, dead (again), on the floor. Blue eyes, not quite as bright as before, stared accusingly back up at him. He pulled out the knife, then grabbed as firm a grip as he could on the smooth, oozing black skull and lifted it up.
The mass of quivering figures outside the house seemed to go absolutely still as one. He saw something in them, in their responses, that he hadn’t seen in a while. Since that night back in Harold Campbell’s facility. And he could smell it, too. It wasn’t the two dead creatures’ flesh and muscle and blood that drenched him from head to toe.
No, this was coming from the hundreds (thousands?) of undead things that gathered outside the house.
Fear.
They were afraid.
Will looked down at the blue-eyed ghoul, then, getting a better grip on the smooth head, began sawing the neck with the cross-knife.
“Oh God,” Claire said behind him just before he heard retching, follow
ed by the smell of vomit.
He kept sawing…
CHAPTER 34
GABY
SOMEONE WAS SCREAMING inside the bedroom, but it was impossible to tell if it was Danny, Milly, Claire, or Annie. She guessed it had to be either Milly or Annie, though it was a stretch that Milly could produce that kind of ear-splitting sound. It couldn’t be Claire, who was as strong as a rock. And she knew for a fact that it couldn’t possibly be Danny, because she had never heard Danny scream in his life. At least, not in fear like this.
Not that she could have done anything to help them anyway, because the blue-eyed ghoul was right in front of her, grinning like a madman. There was something amazingly human about its expression—a twisted, nightmarish version of what a man would look like if he simply gave in to all his base animal urges.
She pulled the trigger on the M4 again and got off another three-round burst. Just a lone silver bullet found its target this time, snapping a piece of flesh off the creature’s shoulder blade as its body slid to the right to dodge the other two rounds. Then, without missing a beat, it was moving forward with that same unnatural fluidity that shouldn’t be possible.
Impossible. All of this is impossible.
It grabbed the rifle by the barrel and yanked it out of her hands. The move was so effortless that for a moment it took her breath away. She staggered back, unsure if she even had control of her legs anymore. She reached down to her hip for her sidearm and drew the Glock as the creature watched her, head cocked to one side, eyes glowing magnificently in the semidarkness of the narrow hallway.
She aimed for the head—
“Remember: shoot them in the head,” Will had said.
—and fired.
It flicked its head to one side, and the bullet sailed harmlessly past it and hit the master bedroom doorframe at the other end of the second floor.
“Remember…”
She fired again.
It moved its head left, and again the bullet disappeared up the hallway, but this time it vanished into the darkened bedroom. She prayed she didn’t accidentally hit Danny or one of the girls.