by Sam Sisavath
“Stay with us, Peeks,” Will said.
Peeks gave him a quarter-nod, but didn’t open his eyes.
“Peeks doesn’t look so good,” Will said to Danny. He kept his voice low, though he probably didn’t have to. He wasn’t sure Peeks could even hear anymore.
Danny looked over at the still figure sitting on the floor in the darkness. “Week-old tuna doesn’t look so good. He’s past that point.”
Will nodded. He felt bad for the guy, because he’d always liked Peeks.
Danny saw the crosses. “Don’t tell me. You’ve found Jesus.”
“I found something.” Will handed Danny one of the crosses.
Danny stared at it. “I appreciate the matching set vibe, don’t get me wrong. It’s very bromance, which makes me a bit uncomfortable, but never mind that for the moment. What exactly am I supposed to do with this? Sing gospel tunes?”
“The bottom’s pretty sharp. I cut my finger on it.”
“You want me to blow on it for you?”
“Maybe later.” Will opened one of the empty ammo pouches on his belt and slipped the cross inside, pushed a bit until the sharp point stabbed through the leather at the bottom. “Last resort.”
“What exactly do you think the knife on my left hip is for, cooking?”
“These are heavier. You can use it to bash their heads in.”
“You’re nuts.”
“Really? We’ve been running from things that won’t die even when we shoot them in the head, and you think this is nuts?”
“Good point,” Danny said and pushed the cross into one of his own empty ammo pouches. “Looks expensive.”
“Two hundred, tops. They probably got a discount for the matching pair.”
“When did you become a jewelry expert?”
“That time when you were asleep and I snuck away to do some reading.”
“Ugh. Reading. No thanks.”
Danny had gotten three boards free from the window, but the others remained stubbornly in place. Will ran the flashlight over the nails of the remaining boards. They were surprisingly well-spaced.
Organized and disciplined. Keeping the windows covered was important to them.
But why?
He reached through the slit and pushed aside the blanket, doing his best to avoid the various dull-colored stains that pockmarked the fabric. Revealing dirty glass windowpanes—then beyond that, the city.
He was immediately struck by the quiet. The Wilshire Apartments was located in an unimportant, non-descript section of the city, but even so the emptiness of the world outside the window threw him for a loop. It was a heavy silence, the kind of calm filled with dread and promises of sudden violence. Like standing in the eye of a hurricane. It was uncomfortable and strangely, unnervingly soothing.
Will glanced down at his watch: 9:43 p.m.
He realized how isolated they had been, fighting for the last four hours from the twentieth floor down. What was happening in the city? Maybe that explained why SWAT Command wasn’t trying to send help.
He stood up on tiptoes and looked down toward the street. Police vehicles scattered along West Dallas Street, but there were no cops in sight. The SWAT van was still parked directly across the street. It looked unattended, which was never a good sign. A SWAT van had a lot of expensive and dangerous equipment inside. You didn’t leave something that valuable idling at a corner without supervision.
Will pressed the Push-To-Talk switch dangling from his radio. “SWAT Command, come in. SWAT Command, come in if you can hear me. Is anyone out there? If anyone can hear me, please respond.”
He waited for a response through the earbud in his right ear, but there was none. Just like the last five times he had tried to reach them.
Where is everyone?
Not just the cops. The civilians were gone, too. There had been a dozen lookyloos when they showed up this morning. That number usually ballooned by the time word got around that SWAT was in the neighborhood. He spotted the sawhorses from earlier, blocking both sides of the street. News vans were parked just up the curb, color logos visible underneath the halo of street lamps. Channel 2, Channel 11, and even Channel 26 had shown up, but there were no clues as to the whereabouts of their owners.
There were a couple of tenement buildings across the street, with lights on in a dozen or so apartments. He thought he caught a glimpse of something small and thin flashing by one of the windows, but when he looked again, it was gone. A pair of stores, including a Valero gas station, looked deserted, bright lights lit up along the pumping stations. Empty cars waiting in line for gas.
He glanced to his left and had to strain to make out the I-45 stretched in the far distance. Too far to really see anything except a long, black slab of raised concrete. Even so, he should still have been able to spot luminescent streams of white and red lights flashing along the north and southbound lanes. Instead, he saw unmoving white and red dots scattered all along the highway.
Will had the very odd impression of peering through a window and seeing the world at a very specific point in its existence, frozen forever in time.
*
The ghouls finally remembered they were still alive around ten. For a while, Will thought the creatures might have simply forgotten that they existed, but he quickly dashed that idea for another one: There had been something else occupying their time.
They’re organized and disciplined.
Will and Danny heard footsteps moving outside in the hallway. The creatures were quiet, but in the absence of any other noises inside the building, the ghouls might as well be wearing clogs. Will crept closer to the door, while Danny leaned back against the wall on the other side, his ear against the dirty wallpaper.
They had finally removed the boards from the window behind them, and moonlight streaked through the dirty glass windowpanes. It provided enough light for Will to see Danny and Peeks without the need of a flashlight. Peeks didn’t look any better in the moonlight, though. If anything, it gave him an odd, preternatural glow that made Will slightly uncomfortable.
He turned his attention back to the door and the footsteps on the other side.
Danny lifted three fingers in the semidarkness. Will nodded.
Three ghouls outside.
Will flexed his grip around the hilt of the combat knife in his right hand, warming to the familiar sensation of the plastic handle. With his ear against the wall, he listened to them moving outside.
The tap-tap of bare feet against soiled carpeted hallway floor.
Three.
Will glanced at Danny, adjusting his grip on his own knife. He looked anxious, which had to be a first.
Suddenly the ghouls outside the door began moving quickly, loudly…and away from Apartment 1009.
He looked at Danny for confirmation. Danny nodded back and pulled slightly away from the wall. Will allowed himself to relax, slowly releasing blood flow back to the fingers gripped around the handle of the knife.
Danny grinned at him. “So, this father took his son fishing one morning while the wife was busy shopping—”
A loud explosion, followed by shards of glass spraying inside the room like long, jagged bullets, cut Danny off in mid-sentence. They looked over in time to see a ghoul crashing through the window and smashing into the floor. The creature seemed to roll, like an out of control ball of flesh and bones, until it finally came to a stop and began unfurling itself, the grating noise of bones and joints snapping back into place. A thick shard of glass jutted out of the creature’s right cheek, though it didn’t seem to notice.
Danny was already rushing across the living room with great big strides. He barreled into the ghoul as it was straightening up and carried it across the room, ramming it into the wall next to the window. The ghoul might have caught its breath, though it was hard to tell. Did they even breathe?
Peeks, on the other side of the window, might have opened his eyes for a moment, before drifting back off again.
The ghoul glare
d back at Danny and let out a guttural shriek, a sound that came from the very pits of its stomach. It surprised Will. He hadn’t heard them make that kind of noise before.
Danny drove his knife through the ghoul’s forehead with an overhead swing, the force of the blow so vicious that all seven and a half inches of blade pierced flesh, then bone, and kept going until it embedded itself into the wall behind the creature’s skull with a solid thunk! The wall trembled slightly, and Danny staggered back as black clumps of liquid spurted out of the point of penetration in the creature’s forehead.
Will stared with disbelief as the creature tried to dislodge itself from the wall by jerking its body forward. But it was hanging five inches off the floor, and it had no leverage. It quickly gave up that approach and wrapped slender, bony fingers around the handle of the knife and tried to pull it out.
Behind Will, the door shook and trembled as creatures crashed into it. He took an involuntary step back and tightened his grip around the knife handle.
“What now?” Danny shouted.
“Shoot it!” Will shouted back.
Danny drew his Glock and shot the ghoul point-blank in the face three times. The first bullet shattered its right eye, the second destroyed the bridge of its nose, and the third obliterated a dozen teeth and slammed into the wall behind the back of its throat. The ghoul seemed to pause for a second, then it went back to trying to pull itself off the knife.
Danny glanced back at Will. “Any more bright ideas?”
Will put the knife away and reached for the cross. As he began pulling it out, he noticed the ghoul’s eyes darting away from Danny and over to him.
No, not to him. To the cross.
The ghoul became frenzied and thrashed its body against the wall, redoubling its efforts to free itself. Will pulled out the cross completely, and the creature let out a loud, almost involuntary shriek. When Will walked toward it, the ghoul’s agitated state seemed to double—then triple.
“What are you doing?” Danny asked.
“I don’t know,” Will said.
He was almost across the room when, with a last desperate lunge, the ghoul suddenly jerked itself free of the wall, Danny’s knife sticking out of its forehead, the handle like a plastic black horn. Will rushed forward and rammed the sharp end of the cross into the creature’s chest. The silver and bronze sank deep, the chest cavity giving way like papier-mâché, and the creature let out another wild shriek before collapsing to the floor.
Will reached for his knife, expecting the ghoul to get right back up.
But it didn’t. It stayed down. And it didn’t move.
He exchanged a look with Danny, saw his own flushed look of confusion, exhilaration, and apprehension reflected back in Danny’s face.
“What the hell did you do?” Danny asked.
“I stabbed it with the cross.”
“Why?”
“Shooting it didn’t work. Stabbing it didn’t work. I was going to bash its head in with the cross until it didn’t have a head anymore. I guess I decided to stab it instead at the last minute.”
“Oh,” Danny said.
“Yeah.”
“Assist us, O Lord our God…” a voice said from the darkness. They looked over and saw Peeks, suddenly wide-awake. His eyes were fixed on the dead ghoul in front of him, the cross lodged crookedly in its sunken chest. “… and defend us evermore by the might of the Holy Cross, in whose honor thou makest us to rejoice. Through Christ our Lord, Amen.”
Peeks made the sign of the cross with his right hand and almost as quickly, closed his eyes and seemed to drift off again.
“Makest?” Danny said.
“I haven’t been to a church since I was five,” Will said.
“Well shit, praise the Lord and pass the bullets.”
“You hear that?” Will asked.
“I don’t hear anything.”
“Yeah…”
He looked back at the door. The ghouls had stopped smashing into it. There was silence again, and the apartment, like the rest of the building, seemed to have settled down abruptly, the quick burst of violence and noise and chaos having dissipated into the ether. The only movement came from a soft gust of wind rushing through the broken window, fluttering the dirty curtains in its wake.
They know. Somehow, they know about one of their own dying…
CHAPTER 4
KATE
It was entirely possible she wasn’t afraid. Or maybe it was just adrenaline. There was a fine line between fear and courage and pure survival instinct, and at this very moment Kate wondered if she was more afraid of dying or of what would happen if she stopped moving for even a second.
After Jack and Donald, she had never made it out of the parking garage. When she finally reached the first floor, after what seemed like hours instead of the minute or so it had actually taken, there were already six cars haphazardly lined up at odd angles in front of the only exit gate that was still open after five o’clock. She imagined when the first car stopped, the other vehicles became stuck behind it, trapping everyone except the very last car from going forward or back.
There were no signs of the drivers, though the stench of blood filled her nostrils through the opened car window. She felt like gagging. Darkness had already fallen outside the garage, though Kate couldn’t see any cars along the usually busy Louisiana Street beyond.
So she sat in her car, the gear in park, behind the last car, a new-looking gray Mercedes with vanity plates (“S8UpFun”). Kate calmed herself, taking in slow, unhurried breaths, and tried to search for order out of the chaos.
There were two cars in front of the entrance side of the garage, and one of them—a slightly old red Chevy sedan—had crashed into the large metal slab that blocked access, the car’s front bumper crumpled up like paper. Smoke rose lazily from the badly damaged hood.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a shriveled, dark black head poking out of the open front driver’s side window of the Mercedes. She stopped breathing and sat perfectly still, watching as the creature turned its head slightly…toward her. Kate saw a face caked with blood, and dark black marbles where eyes should be zeroing in on her. Did its nostrils flare? Or maybe it was the garage lights playing tricks on her. She couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman—or whatever it used to be. It looked like an animal, small and primal, and the sight of it made Kate grip the steering wheel with vise-like desperation.
Then a woman’s head appeared in the same window, long blonde hair smeared with blood. She was young and attractive, a gorgeous oval-shaped, blood-red choker fastened around a long, elegant neck smeared with blood. The woman was trying to climb out through the window, trembling hands grasping for purchase along the door. She looked tired, as if she had been fighting for hours. The creature looked away from Kate, as if remembering there was someone else in the car with it. Kate watched in wordless horror as the thing put both hands over the woman’s head and pulled her back into the vehicle with barely any fight.
Kate willed herself to move, move, move. She numbly backed up the Mazda, spinning the wheel, and nearly ramming into one of the support columns behind her but managing to stop with barely an inch to spare. She headed back in the direction she had fled moments ago, hoping that the creature wouldn’t notice her, wouldn’t abandon the woman and come after her instead. She glanced in the rearview mirror, saw only a glimpse of the creature inside the Mercedes, its head bobbing up and down.
Kate turned left, onto the up ramp, and the Mercedes mercifully disappeared from her view.
I’m sorry, I’m sorry…
She passed the same half-dozen cars from ten minutes ago, the same patches of blood along windows and floors and splashed against open doors. The drivers were gone. Long gone. They were gone when she drove past the vehicles the first time, and they hadn’t come back since.
They were probably like Jack now…
Kate turned another corner and drove past the spot where she had last seen Jack and Donald. The
y were gone, and only a wide, bloody mess marked their passing. Then she was turning again, up to the last floor of the parking structure, with dark, cloudless skies opened above.
Kate slammed on the brakes and sat behind the steering wheel, feeling small and insignificant surrounded by empty concrete parking spaces.
Order out of chaos. Find the order out of the chaos…
She left the key in the ignition and climbed out of the Mazda and, out of breath for some reason, ran to the closest rooftop edge.
The clay-colored CenterPoint Energy Tower in front of her and the egg-shaped Trinh Real Estate building to her left. The Amegy Bank building, where she rented space for her ad agency, loomed nearby to her right. She saw flurries of movement through office windows of the buildings around her, but she was too far away to make out details.
She could see clearly now that the chaos wasn’t just inside the parking structure. It was spread out across the city. Everywhere. Nothing happened in Houston without touching Downtown, and nothing touched Downtown that didn’t eventually spread out to the rest of the city. She had learned that a long time ago.
Kate heard gunshots, screams, signs of life being chipped away, but they were sporadic and distant, little clusters of proof that she wasn’t alone. But the sound she expected to hear—desperately hoped to hear—was missing.
Where are the police sirens? Where are the cops?
Roaring engines filled the night before a Camaro blasted up Louisiana Street below her. She slipped her heels off her feet and hurried after it, racing along the edge, following the Camaro’s progress as it attempted to turn right at Bell Street. But it was going much too fast and sideswiped a Ford in the middle of the road. The Camaro somehow righted itself at the last moment and continued along Bell Street, heading toward Travis now. It was still traveling much too fast, and Kate eventually lost sight of it. Seconds later, there was a loud crashing noise, the unmistakable sound of metal grinding viciously against metal.
And then silence.
There were more cars along the streets below her, some parked defiantly in the middle, others along the curbs where vehicles usually littered Downtown like fleas during the day. She could see small two- and three-car pileups at nearby intersections, but there were no signs of their drivers, and she didn’t see bodies. The unnoticed streetlights blinked green, yellow, and red, then started over again.