by Sam Sisavath
They didn’t leave, they went inside.
Smaller buildings, like the auto body shop she had stayed in last night, seemed to be free of coverings…
“One of them tried to get me around sunup,” Luke said. “I could tell it was psyching itself up, ready to just go for it, when the sun came out and it took off. I never saw anything move so fast.”
“Where were you?”
“I was in this small shop, looking for supplies. When sunlight started coming in through the windows, it took off for the back room and never came out. Like it was scared or something. I don’t know why. I guess they don’t like sunlight.”
“The attacks…they didn’t start until nightfall, I think.”
“I noticed that, too. I guess it makes sense.”
Sense? Nothing about this makes sense. There’s no order here, just chaos.
She drove on in silence.
The gas station he mentioned hadn’t been of any use to them. There were sheets thrown over the windows, keeping out the sun. To use the gas pumps, they needed to go inside to turn them on first, and neither of them were too excited about that idea.
“You work in an office or something?” he asked after a while.
“Why do you ask that?”
“Your clothes.”
She was suddenly very aware of her appearance: the tear along the skirt, the missing buttons at the bottom of the blouse draping off her waist. At least it wasn’t the buttons near the top which would have left her bra visible. Still, she felt half-naked sitting next to him.
“I do,” she said. “Work in an office. I was leaving work when it happened. What about you?”
“I was eating pizza with some guys about three blocks from here.”
He stared out the window, and Kate noticed that his hand had wandered back over to the taped handle of the bat.
“What happened?” she asked.
“These things just started appearing everywhere and attacking everyone.” He shook his head. “It was crazy, like something out of a movie.” He shifted in his seat. “One second I was talking to Mark and Steve, and the next they’re down on the floor bleeding all over the place. It was unreal. The guy behind the counter had this bat—for security, I guess. He was trying to hit one of them with it, but he kept missing. They got him, and he dropped the bat, so I picked it up. I guess I was better with it than he was.”
“How did you survive after that?”
“I don’t know. I just took off. I don’t think they were chasing me. They don’t do that. When they get someone down, they just…you know, you’ve seen it.”
“Yes,” Kate said, remembering Jack and Donald again.
“Did you lose someone?”
“Some friends…”
“What’s happening, do you know?”
He sounded so young. Like the kid that he was, trying to understand the bigger world, turning to the first adult he saw for answers. In this case, her. She felt embarrassingly ill-equipped.
“I mean, where are the cops?” he asked. “Shouldn’t there be cops all over the place? Or soldiers? Do you know what happened?”
“I don’t know,” Kate said. “Nothing makes sense.”
“Where’s the government?” he asked, as if she should know.
I don’t know.
“Where’s the military?” he went on. “When I woke up and didn’t see anyone on the streets—no tanks or helicopters or anything—I think that’s what really freaked me out. I always thought, you know, the government would send in troops if something like this ever happened. But they haven’t, have they?”
“No.”
“Did you hear anything on the news? It would have been on the news, wouldn’t it? How does something like this go unreported?”
“I didn’t hear anything.”
He looked thoughtful. “A lot of kids didn’t show up for school yesterday. That was pretty crazy. They even let us go home early because of it.”
“How many?”
“What?”
“How many kids didn’t show up for school?”
“I don’t know. A lot. I think like sixty or seventy, I wasn’t really paying attention when they announced it. It was enough for them to send us home early, anyway. That’s never happened before.”
“There was nothing on the news about that.”
“No?”
“No,” she said.
There was nothing on the news. Nothing that warned of this, anyway. There had been something about a police action in some building near Downtown, but that was it. News about that many kids across the city not showing up for school would have been a big deal.
“Maybe it’s happening all around the country,” Luke said thoughtfully. “That would explain why the government isn’t doing anything, right?”
She nodded. Like most citizens, she was conditioned to accept the government responding in cases of emergency.
So where were they? Where the hell were they when they needed them the most?
She drove in silence, feeling the anger boiling inside her.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t look okay.”
“I’m fine,” she snapped. Then, in a softer, apologetic tone, “Look for another gas station. This car can’t keep running on ‘E’ forever.”
“It just occurred to me that finding a gas station is probably not going to help.”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s no power.”
“What?”
“There’s no power to pump the gas,” he said. “The lights. They died after midnight. You don’t know?”
“I…”
It dawned on her that she had been driving in a daze all morning, oblivious to the fact that the street lights weren’t working.
She stopped the Buick and put the gear in park. She felt tired, helpless, and a part of her wanted to just sit back and wait for darkness and get it over with.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, looking worriedly over at her. “Are we out of gas?”
“Not yet. But I don’t think we’re going to find a gas station without those things inside. How many have we already passed so far?”
“We can always just get another car.”
She looked over at him. “Another car?”
“All those cars out there,” he said, nodding outside the window. “I don’t think their owners are going to care if we take them.”
She smiled. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
“You would have, sooner or later,” he smiled back.
“Maybe.”
“I should probably tell you that I don’t know how to drive.”
“You don’t?” she said, genuinely surprised.
“I’m fourteen,” he said defensively.
Even younger than I thought…
“Then we better find a car that I’ll like driving,” she said. “Something smaller this time.”
They climbed out of the Buick. Luke had his bat gripped tightly in his right hand, and he swung it around, even as his eyes suspiciously razed the street and buildings around them. The whip-whip noise of the bat making circles in the air was the only sound for blocks.
Kate looked over the hood at him. “I guess we should find a car with keys in it.”
“Unless you can hotwire a car?” he grinned.
“I can’t. Can—”
“No,” he said before she could finish. “My parents were teachers, and I grew up in the suburbs. So no, I don’t know how to hotwire a car. Just in case you were wondering.”
“Like I said, we better find a car with the keys still inside, then.”
They started up the street, but didn’t get more than a few feet before Luke froze and looked over at her, eyes wide with excitement. “Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“Listen.”
“I am.”
“No, listen.”
Kate stopped moving and listened. Really
listened.
She heard the silence. The sounds of tossed-aside newspapers moving along the streets around them. A flock of birds in the sky.
Then, from nowhere, a new sound. A familiar sound.
Police sirens!
They were very faint, but she would recognize that very distinct wail anywhere.
It was coming from their left, from the other side of the I-45…
CHAPTER 10
WILL
They spent a few hours collecting as much ammunition and weapons as they could find, digging among the squad cars parked outside the Wilshire Apartments and spread along West Dallas Street. Civilization seemed to have vanished, leaving behind dried bloodstains and discarded, bloody clothes on the sidewalks and streets to mark their passing.
The SWAT van yielded new batteries for the Motorola radios, extra comms systems, and more ammunition and weapons than they could carry. They tossed everything into one of the few squad cars that wasn’t covered in blood. All the battery chargers were electric, which made them useless if the power stayed down.
If the city looked and felt deserted from a window, it was like stepping into another universe once they were outside. The hush around them was disturbing, and Will was reminded of it every time the soles of his boots squeaked, he dropped something, or closed a car door. After a while, he found himself moving as quietly as possible.
He tried the police radio in the car, but couldn’t raise anyone. Static became his new enemy, at once irritating and omnipresent. By the time Danny returned from his foraging, Will had given up on the radio.
Danny put a couple of Remington 870 tactical shotguns into the trunk, then slid into the front passenger’s seat. He tossed a plastic grocery bag that crunched as it hit the floor. “Anything?”
“Static. Lots of static. Cell towers are probably down, but I should have still been able to reach someone with a radio.”
“Sheriff’s Department?”
“Nope.”
“Government?”
“Nothing on the emergency frequencies.”
“That’s disturbing.”
“Uh huh.”
“Statewide, and probably nationwide, is that what you’re telling me?”
“That seems to be what I’m telling you.”
“Hunh,” Danny said. “That’s not good.”
“Nope.”
“All of that in one night?”
“It looks like it.”
“Damn. That’s kind of impressive. I mean, it sucks, but you gotta admit, that’s really impressive.”
Will nodded. It was impressive.
His mind kept going back to last night, mulling over the way the creatures fought. He recognized the intelligence, the organization, the discipline. And most of all, the planning.
“Well, at least the vending machines still work,” Danny said. He upended the contents of a Funyuns bag into his mouth. “What now?” he asked with a mouth full of crumpled yellow bits.
“I’m open to suggestions.”
“Go back to the House, see if anyone made it through the night?”
“Captain Optimism,” Will smirked.
“Worth a shot. Even if no one else made it, there are those C4 in the armory we can liberate. You can’t have a Plan Z without C4.”
“When did you suddenly buy into Plan Z?”
“Who says I’m buying? I’m just saying, we can’t have one without the C4.”
“So, the House, then?”
“Unless you got some other place to be.”
“Not at the moment, no.”
Will put the car in gear and started down West Dallas Street, back toward the I-45. He could see the Downtown skyscrapers beyond that, colossal sentries over a city stuck in repose.
He drove slowly. There were too many cars and debris in the streets.
“You drive like an old woman,” Danny said.
“You wanna drive?”
“Pass.”
“Then sit back and shut up.”
Will’s mind was already elsewhere. He had noticed them as soon as they began moving up the street. There were a few of them at first, but the numbers increased until he couldn’t look out the car windows and not see them.
“You see it?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Danny said.
The windows. Blinds and shades were squeezed shut, curtains pulled in tight. And where there were no blinds or curtains to close, blankets and furniture had been piled over the windows from inside the buildings. Store fronts, offices, and homes.
Everywhere…
“One night,” Will said. “All of this in one night.” He shook his head. Saying it out loud didn’t make it any easier to swallow. “They must have planned this out for God knows how long.”
“You scared yet?”
“Just about.”
“Don’t tell anyone, but I’m already shitting my pants.”
“Thanks for sharing,” Will said.
“We need some music.” Danny leaned forward and flipped a switch. Loud, blaring sirens filled the street. “Just in case,” he shouted.
“In case of what?” Will shouted back.
“In case there are very attractive young women out there, waiting for us to come rescue them. Can you imagine how thankful they’ll be when they hear this and come running out to be saved? ‘Oh, Danny, oh Danny!’”
*
It took them longer to get back to the SWAT house than they expected. The culprit, like so many things in Houston even before last night, was traffic. The feeder roads around the highways were parking lots, awash with cars of every shape and size. Will was forced to use the small roads, and even so he kept running up against pileups and congestion, often forcing him to back up and find a new route.
They hadn’t found any survivors on the way, which surprised Will. Downtown was always thickly packed, even during the weekends. There were always people around. But the streets were empty, and all he could see were covered windows. Even the blaring sirens didn’t help, and he was sure they could be heard across the city given how absolutely soundless the world was at the moment.
The SWAT house was located away from the main hub of Sheriff’s Department buildings in the middle of the Downtown area, sitting on a small road a couple of blocks from Highway 59, which looped around Downtown.
Or at least, the SWAT house used to be there.
A fire had gutted the building, much of it probably fueled by the inordinate amount of weapons and ammunition stored inside. There wasn’t much left of the two-story structure but huge, charcoaled beams, leftover debris from the roof, and a fridge that Will remembered was inside the lunch room, near the back. The fridge, which had been painted over at least three times, the third and final time in throw-up yellow, was at least fifty meters from where it should have been.
They stood looking at the remains of the House, as stunned by the sight of the carnage as they had been by anything in the last two days. Danny had miraculously not yet run out of Funyuns despite the long drive, and he opened another bag now. With the sirens turned off, there was only the crunch-crunch of the onion chips.
“How many of those did you find?” Will asked.
“About a dozen.”
“Tell me that’s the last one.”
“Six left.”
“Jesus.”
“Want one?”
“No.”
Silence again.
Then Danny said, “C4 is probably still there.”
“In that?”
“If the C4 had gone up with the fire, there wouldn’t even be rubble. There would just be a big crater where the House used to be.”
“How much C4 was in there, anyway?”
“Enough to take out most of the neighborhood. Give or take. We just stocked up last month. Chief got it special ordered from Uncle Sam at a discount, and I was supposed to start training Ross and Jenkins on them next week.”
Will looked at the remains again. Could anything have possibly survived that?
But Danny was the expert here, so he would know. “Can you find it?”
“I don’t see why not.”
Danny poured the last few rings from the bag into his mouth, then crumpled and tossed it away. The wind snatched the bag out of the air and took it down the empty street.
“We kept the C4 in a safe,” Danny said. “It’s solid steel, fireproof. You’d need an explosion to open it, and this looks like a fire. A raging, destroy-pretty-much-everything fire, sure, but just a fire.”
“I didn’t know there was such a thing as ‘just a fire’.”
“There’s a lot you don’t know, Kemosabe. Like women. Kids. And how to avoid women with kids.”
Danny walked into what was left of the SWAT house, Will following behind. Burned wood and singed fabric crunched underneath their boots. They were halfway through the rubble when they came across a hand sticking out of the blackness, as if reaching for salvation and finding nothing to hold onto. The flesh had been burned clean off the bones.
They found other bodies in the pile, five in all. Nothing left but bone, and it was impossible to tell who they used to be.
Danvers has to be one of them.
Danvers had gotten left behind with a stomach flu when they rolled out yesterday. He wouldn’t have gone home, but would have stayed behind in the House in case they needed backup. Will wondered if Danvers had in fact gotten that backup call and rushed over to the Wilshire Apartments to help out.
They saw more charred remains scattered about the black and smoke. It was impossible to tell if they were wearing uniforms or civilian clothes. Or if they were wearing clothes at all. Will felt the same sense of loss, the overwhelming sadness in the pit of his stomach that he felt when Marker and the others died in the Wilshire Apartments.
He was sure one of the bodies was Caroline, the civilian secretary. She was always good at manning the phones when the team was out on calls. With the team out and Danvers sick, she would have stayed beyond her normal hours to keep him company. That was Caroline. Sweet, always dependable Caroline.
But who were the others? Maybe civilians that ran to the House for help. It would be the most logical place for people to go in times of emergency, and last night would have been a really big emergency. A SWAT house was like a police station, only with heavier weaponry. That would account for the extra bodies in the rubble.