by Sam Sisavath
It turned out Danny was right. They found the armory near the back of the destruction, where it was supposed to be. Although the room had been gutted, most of the weapons melted and the ammo expended in the fire, they found a big, ash-covered lump among the debris, a charred beam lying across it.
Danny pushed the beam aside with his boot and kicked the big lump. It didn’t budge an inch, but the kick knocked loose the ash that covered it. Evidence of a smooth, metallic surface shook free underneath. The safe. It lay at an angle, one very sharp metallic end pointing up.
“Can you open it?” Will asked.
Danny nodded. “The combination’s fire-resistant. So yeah, as long as I remember the combination.”
“Do you?”
“Probably. Give me a sec.”
It took them a while to clear away the burned chunks of the House that had fallen around the safe in order to access the combination lock and the latch underneath it. The safe was much too heavy to lift out of the ruins, and rolling it over was also impossible. Eventually, they found the ash-covered combination and latch. Danny crouched next to it and spun the lock right, then left, then right again, and finally left one more time. He grabbed the latch and twisted it, and the safe opened a crack, though it took both of them to pry it open enough for Danny to reach in for its contents.
The C4 looked like stacks of packaged modeling clay, each about the length of a shoebox, one inch in height and two inches wide. They were malleable plastic explosives, so users could twist and prod them into whatever shape was needed to do the job. The only way to set off a C4 explosive was to detonate a smaller charge. Danny knew all about that. He had served a stint with the Army’s EOD, the Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit, back in Afghanistan.
They stuffed the C4 into three heavy satchels that they carried back to the squad car and were back on the road again in minutes.
“Where to now?” Danny asked.
“Silver,” Will said.
“I don’t mean to pick on your fashion sense, but do you really think now is the time to start accessorizing?”
“I’m thinking more along the lines of silver bullets. Like the Lone Ranger. If the silver on those crosses can kill those things, what kind of effect do you think silver bullets will have?”
“Then let me be the first to say, hi-ho fucking Silver!”
*
They found a jewelry store not far from the SWAT house, in a strip mall along Highway 59.
It wasn’t hard to spot the big tan and brown building with the large Johan logo on top. Johan’s Galleria Of Jewelry was one of the bigger and more expensive jewelry chains in the city. Will was optimistic they would find everything they needed inside—if not under the displays, then in the back, where the inventory was kept.
As soon as he parked in front of Johan’s, he noticed the covered windows. The rest of the buildings in the wealthy area were also covered, reminding him that they were in enemy territory.
Just like Afghanistan all over again.
But this time they had an advantage—sunlight.
Or at least, that was their advantage out here. Sunlight had a way of disappearing when windows were closed and doors got shut, or hallways twisted and turned, which they invariably did the farther into a building you ventured.
He glanced at his watch as he climbed out of the squad car: 11:13 a.m. They had saved a lot of time by finding a Johan’s this close to the SWAT house.
“Johan’s sure has let itself go,” Danny said. “Look at those window displays. Talk about uncouth. Bleh.”
Will slipped the cross out of his pouch and looked down at it for a moment. He had cleaned the flesh and blood off it with water and rags, and the silver glinted like new under the sunlight. He couldn’t help but chuckle softly.
“What’s so funny?” Danny asked.
“How much do you think Uncle Sam spends to turn out one fully functional Army Ranger per year?”
“Do I look like someone who knows something completely random and pointless like that?”
“Guess.”
“I dunno. Five grand?”
“Conservative estimates have it between $250,000 and $500,000 per person. Obviously I’m in the latter camp.”
“Oh, obviously,” Danny said, rolling his eyes.
“Point is, all that money to train me, and this…” Will held up the cross “…is what it takes to keep me alive. God bless the United States Army.”
Danny held up his cross. “Mine’s bigger.”
“They’re the exact same size.”
“Keep telling yourself that.”
*
The ghoul looked confused, almost afraid, as Will rushed it head-on instead of retreating. He slammed the sharp end of the cross up into the bottom of its chin and drove the makeshift weapon straight up into its brain. His momentum sent the long length of the cross up too high, and even as life slipped from the ghoul’s black eyes in a rush of confusion, fear, and resignation, Will knew he was in trouble.
They were inside Johan’s, jammed in a hallway that led to the back of the store. The ghouls were waiting in the darkness, unwilling—and too smart—to come into the front of the store, where Will and Danny had stripped away the window coverings to allow sunlight to pour inside. Though not far enough, as it turned out.
They had already cleared out all the silver they could find under the glass displays. It had taken them about thirty minutes, and thankfully Johan’s kept boxes underneath the counters that they used to carry the jewelry outside to the squad car.
They knew the ghouls were inside the darkened hallway that led to the back room where the inventory was kept. A part of Will didn’t want to risk it, but the practical part knew it would be worth the effort. They might not find another place like this again, and time was not on their side.
So they went into the hallway where the ghouls waited and, as soon as Will stepped into the darkness, one hand on his tactical flashlight, the other holding the cross in front of him, the creatures swarmed.
The first ghoul he killed didn’t make a sound; it slid to the floor and lay still. As he stepped over it, stabbing a second one in the chest, a third leaped over the others, but he had expected it and took a step back. The creature landed in front of him and he ran toward it, his momentum sending the cross all the way up the ghoul’s chin and into its brain.
As he scrambled to pull the cross out of the impaled head—the ghoul’s body was slack, sliding to the floor, and pulling the cross and Will with it—two ghouls emerged out of the darkness, surging forward.
Danny stepped in front of Will and stabbed one of the creatures through the chest, then swiped at the second one, sending it hopping backward, just out of reach.
Will grabbed the dead thing by the head and finally pried the cross free using his boot as leverage. He took another step back, hands and much of his shirt covered in black blood. Danny stepped back with him, their flashlights illuminating pale, shriveled faces, dark black eyes, and crooked, chipped teeth moving in the shadows.
Danny was out of breath. “You take me to the best places, Kemosabe.”
“I aim to please.”
“How many you think are in here?”
“You still wanna find out?”
“You?”
“It’ll probably be worth it.”
“Probably, huh? Not exactly a world of confidence there, chief.”
“We can always go back.”
“We could,” Danny said, “but where’s the fun in that?”
Danny took a step forward and Will followed, the two of them moving side by side. The silver crosses flashed, blood splattered, and haggard breaths labored within the tight confines of the hallway.
*
It took them another twenty minutes of slowly, methodically moving up the hallway, taking the enemy territory inch by inch, killing as they went. They reached the end, walking over and around dead ghouls in their path, and stepped into the store’s tightly packed back room.
/> There were five more waiting inside, but they were staying well within the shadows and away from pools of sunlight that blistered the room from small, high windows. Will felt almost sorry for them.
They dispatched the remaining creatures quickly, and with most of their clothes now soaked in thick, pungent black blood and what looked like severed, wrinkled skin and layers of gooey muscle, Will and Danny sat down on a crate to catch their breath.
Will looked down at the cross in his hand. He couldn’t see the silver anymore, and wondered if he had been wrong, that maybe it was the cross and not the silver. Was that possible?
“What?” Danny said, looking over at him.
“Hmm?”
“You got that look.”
“What look?”
“The ‘I’m thinking of something super deep right about now’ look.”
“I was just thinking…”
“What?”
Will shook his head. “Nothing. Forget it.”
He stood up on tired legs and scanned the inventory with his flashlight. They were surrounded by crates, stacked high along the walls, and shelves filled with bagged jewelry in a row along the back. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of items. Some were silver.
“Jackpot,” Will said. “You wanna grab something pretty for yourself, too?”
“Don’t mind if I do,” Danny said.
CHAPTER 11
KATE
“Listen!” Luke said.
He sat on the hood of the Jeep, the baseball bat tapping anxiously at his legs, when he froze and looked off in the direction of the I-45.
Kate sat in the driver’s seat behind him, trying to get as comfortable as she could behind the steering wheel. It was the first vehicle they had found with a full tank of gas with the keys on the driver’s side floor. The Jeep felt too rough, even uncivilized, to her, but it had gotten them almost to the I-45 before they lost the police siren. It was there one moment, then gone the next.
That was two hours ago.
Now they could hear it again, but this time coming from their left. For a while, it sounded as if the siren was circling around them. Now it was back—except on their other side.
“Do you hear it?” Luke asked. He glanced excitedly back at her. “There it is again. It has to be the same one.”
“It’s moved,” she said. “Why did they turn it off a couple of hours ago?”
“I don’t know, but it’s back. We should get going.”
He climbed off the hood and into the front passenger’s side. He moved like a bundle of energy, the way kids get when they have their sights set on something that can’t, and won’t, wait.
Kate started the Jeep, stepped on the gas, but wasn’t prepared when it shot forward like a rocket, surprising both her and Luke, who had to grab the dashboard to keep from banging his head into it.
She quickly stepped on the brake and slowed down, giving Luke an embarrassed look. “Gas pedal’s a lot more sensitive than the Buick.”
She eased them up Fanning Street, slowly at first, then picking up speed. She had to maneuver around a couple of trucks that had rammed into each other, leaving their front benders twisted and tangled up. They looked like bulls with locked horns.
She could see the I-45 up ahead and the multitude of vehicles on top and below it along the feeder roads. Abandoned cars stretched in all directions, every single one rooted in place since last night. She didn’t have to get near the congestion to know they were never getting through it. Instead, she turned left onto St. Joseph Parkway, and drove parallel to the raised 45 structure to her right. She glimpsed the roofs of cars pressed up against the concrete dividers.
How many people? Thousands? Tens of thousands?
She had almost joined them last night, but had turned right instead of left. That simple, seemingly arbitrary decision had saved her life.
“Why are there so many cars here?” Luke asked, looking over at the highway.
“Everyone was trying to get out. It’s human instinct. Fight or flee. Most people flee when creatures start trying to eat them. The first place people go when they’re trying to get out of a city is the highway.”
“Was that where you were headed, too? Last night?”
“It was, at first.” She shook her head. “I changed my mind.”
“Lucky, then.”
“Yeah…”
Up ahead, she saw the big intersection where Highway 59 met the 45, joining the parallel highways for the first, and only, time. From there, they would take the 59 until it became the Southwest Freeway. She was almost certain that was where the police siren was coming from. It sounded so close now, that at any moment she expected to see the squad car parked in front of her, red and blue lights flashing.
As they got closer to where the two highways converged, the roads grew congested again. She was forced to lower the speedometer to thirty-five, then thirty, and finally twenty in order to avoid all the obstacles suddenly in her path. Eventually she came to a complete stop. Putting the Jeep in park, she stood up in the driver’s seat and looked forward at the thick sea of cars clogging up the lanes in front of her. There was no getting around them.
“We’re going to have to go around,” she said. “The long way.”
“I can still hear the siren,” Luke said.
For now, she probably wanted to reply, but didn’t. The worry in his voice was obvious. He was afraid they might lose the siren again. She was, too, she realized.
“Let’s hurry,” she said.
She did a full U-turn and headed back toward Crawford Street, where she turned left. She was rewarded with noticeably less vehicles along the feeder lanes, though she still had to drive slowly, zigzagging her way through the bottleneck, and at one point had to drive up the sidewalk before she could find a path underneath the I-45 and finally onto the other side of the highway.
“Kate,” Luke said suddenly, breathless beside her.
“I know, I know,” she said.
She could hear it, too: the siren was fading again…
*
They drove up Crawford Street for a while, hoping to catch another whiff of the police siren, but it was gone.
Either it had gone too far ahead of them—which meant it must have really been speeding dangerously given the conditions on the streets—or it had been turned off. Maybe the people in the police car got tired of hearing the siren. Or maybe they had crashed.
There were a lot of possibilities, but there was one certainty: the siren was gone.
They were driving aimlessly now. Kate eased her foot off the gas pedal and brought the speedometer back down to twenty-five miles per hour just to be safe. The number of abandoned vehicles on the road had become unpredictable. One long stretch could be almost empty, then without warning become too dangerous to drive more than ten miles per hour on. She had thought that the farther she left Downtown behind, the more the traffic would thin out. It did…until it didn’t.
She glanced up at the sky and began counting down the hours before it would get dark.
They own the night.
Goddamn short, late November days…
Luke had all but given up. All his energy expended in the chase, and now that they had lost the siren again, he stared listlessly at the buildings around them. As with the Downtown districts, the buildings, stores, and houses out here were almost completely covered up, signs that the creatures slept—or bided their time—inside. Kate found that depressing.
“Can you hear them?” she asked Luke, though she already knew the answer.
“No. Not for a while now. I think they’re gone. Do you think they turned it off?”
“Maybe it means they found where they were going and decided to turn off the siren. It’s loud. It can be pretty annoying.”
He nodded, but she could tell he didn’t buy it. She didn’t blame him. She didn’t buy it, either. She had to remind herself that Luke was just a kid. He had survived the night, and he certainly knew how to swing that bat, b
ut in the end, he was still just a fourteen-year-old kid.
She kept driving, because there was nothing else left to do. Eventually, she turned left onto Richmond Avenue. Richmond was one of the busier roads in the city. If there were any survivors left out there at all…
She drove in silence, Luke sitting quietly next to her, his head turned away. The wind rushing against her felt good, and she wondered why she had never gone for a Jeep before. It had stopped feeling uncivilized tens of miles ago, and the freedom, the sensation of being out in the open while driving was contagious.
Luke suddenly jolted up in his seat.
Kate, startled, jerked at the steering wheel and almost swerved into an overturned car before somehow managing to regain control. “What, what?” she shouted.
“We have to stop!”
She braked hard and brought the Jeep to a complete stop in the middle of the street. “What?” she repeated.
“Look.”
He pointed at a pawnshop in a strip mall to their right. The big parking lot contained a Wallbys Pharmacy and an old Blockbuster up front, along with a dozen other smaller businesses in the back, including a Dairy Queen. The pawnshop sat in the very center.
“The pawnshop?” Kate asked.
“Yeah. See it? Bars on the windows.”
She could barely make them out from a distance. “What about them?”
“Burglar bars, Kate, and there’s nothing covering the windows on the inside. You know what that means, right?”
She nodded. “They’re not inside.”
“Yeah. And the bars on the windows.” She didn’t know where he was going with it, and he saw it on her face. “Bars, Kate. They couldn’t get through the bars. We might not find whoever is running around with that police siren, but that place… We could be safe there. We wouldn’t have to fight them off. The bars would do it for us.”
“If they couldn’t get in, how are we going to? Those bars are on the windows for a reason, Luke.”
“I can get us in.”
“How?”