by Sam Sisavath
He was sure they both had second-degree burns, which was the best-case scenario. If they were unlucky, they were third-degree, which meant damaged nerve endings—probably why they couldn’t feel the pain at the moment—and hair follicles and epidermis, which was not going to be pretty. Assuming they survived the night, of course.
Again, more assumptions he had to take with grains of salt.
For now, he could still grip the shotgun, which was a good sign, even if doing so made him grimace with pain. The M4A1 had run dry an hour ago, forcing him to revert back to the Remington and their precious and dwindling shell count. He kept the rifles nearby, though. In a pinch, they made for decent blunting instruments.
He barely felt the cold rushing in through the opened wall despite the fact each breath he exhaled produced a small cloud of white mist. Maybe it was the thermals he had on, or the thick layer of ghoul blood that caked him, or possibly the nerve damage from the weapon burns.
Thank God for small miracles.
Or it could be the adrenaline. It was still coursing through his body, keeping him from feeling most of the pain, blunting the aches and throbbing in his joints, the stinging in his palms, and even the cold against his face. But it wasn’t going to last forever. And when it went, it was going to hurt like a sonofabitch.
Next to him, Danny kept one eye on the gaping wall across the room and the other on Carly and Vera, folded up into a bundle next to him, both snoring lightly. Every now and then, Carly woke up and looked at Danny, who smiled at her and nodded, and she then drifted back to sleep.
“I think they’ve retreated,” Will said softly after about an hour of sitting in silence staring at the wall.
“How long has it been?” Danny asked.
“Hour?”
“You’re not sure?”
“Probably an hour.”
“How many you think we killed? A few hundred? Thousand?”
“I lost count.”
“I know one thing: I killed more than you. But then again, I’ve always been the better soldier.”
“Yes, you are. The master of disaster.”
“Was that a joke?”
“Maybe.”
“That’s my territory, asshole.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t let it happen again.”
They sat quietly for a few more minutes, looking out at the pitch-black darkness visible beyond the pile of the dead.
“You saw Ted?” Danny asked quietly.
“Yeah.”
“I liked that kid.”
“Me, too.”
“Went out like a champ.”
“Yeah.”
“Would have made a decent soldier.”
“Probably.”
Will glanced at Luke’s still form. Danny’s eyes went there, too.
“Didn’t think the kid had it in him,” Danny said.
“He was tough.”
“That’s the way I’d like to go. Coming back as one of those things is not my definition of fun in the sun.”
“Make sure you save a silver bullet for yourself, then.”
“You and your sweet nothings,” Danny said.
Will chuckled. He was tired. He didn’t feel like moving. Talking was easier, and it kept them both alert and alive. Just in case the ghouls were still out there, playing possum, listening in.
Dead, not stupid.
“Kate?” Danny asked.
“Concussion, I think, but she’ll be fine.”
“She didn’t look so good back there.”
Will nodded. “I know.”
“What about her?” Danny nodded over in Lara’s direction. “I think I can see her chest moving.”
“She’s a tough one.”
“Can you move?”
“Barely,” Will said.
“Good. Cause I can’t move at all.”
“Cover me.”
“You wish.”
“No, seriously.”
“Yeah, seriously, you wish.”
He gritted through the pain and crawled to Lara, shuffling forward on all fours with the shotgun in one hand and one eye on the wall. Halfway there, he slipped and fell in a pool of black blood.
“Nice,” Danny chuckled behind him.
“Eat me.”
He picked himself up and kept going until he reached Lara. He kneeled behind the big desk and reached for her blood-covered hand, searching for a pulse. Weak, but it was there.
“How is she?” Danny called softly.
“Just barely.”
He grabbed a bottle of water lying nearby and found a clean shirt in one of the storage crates. He wetted the shirt and slowly wiped at the dry blood along her forehead and face. She had minor cuts along her cheeks and nose, but they paled in comparison to the gash on her forehead. He slicked back bloodied blonde hair from her face and was struck by how peaceful she looked, as if she had simply gone to sleep.
Her breath quickened a bit and she moved slightly, as if sensing his contact. He sought out her pulse again. It had gotten stronger, more determined.
Tough girl.
He pulled a compact first-aid kit from one of his pouches. He cleaned her wounds again, then applied a thin layer of antibiotic cream before bandaging them up. It wasn’t exactly first-rate corpsman work, but it would keep the wound from festering. He hoped. The only thing that killed soldiers faster on the battlefield than bullets was an infected wound.
Behind him, Danny said, “You through, loverboy?”
“Almost.”
Will finished up and leaned back against the wall. He took a breath and watched Lara sleep soundlessly in front of him. He wished he could sleep that peacefully. It had been a while…
The pain hit him like a locomotive flying out of a tunnel while he was standing on the tracks. He closed his eyes and grimaced. His joints were starting to ache, the throbbing in his arms and legs was asserting itself, and his palms were beginning to sting a little bit more. He felt like screaming out but got through it by clenching his teeth instead.
“You feel that?” Danny asked. “Adrenaline’s going. It’s gonna hurt.”
“Try not to cry out like a little girl.”
“We’ll see who cries for their momma first.”
Will grinned back at him through the pain.
*
They were both still awake when the sun finally showed up at 6:35 a.m., flooding the hole in the wall with a great big yellow splash that looked as beautiful as anything he had ever seen in his life.
The familiar and stinging acidic smell waffling through the air attacked his nostrils with a vengeance. He watched with morbid fascination as the sun swamped the bodies piled across the mouth of the caved-in wall, the sea of dead looking strangely spectacular in the daylight. Ghoul skin sizzled and evaporated into white powder. Bones clattered as the flesh that once held them sloughed off, literally dissipating into listless clouds of fine, white mists. The hundreds (thousands?) of bones, suddenly finding themselves without something to hold them in place, tumbled from their piles, making the kind of racket that would have woken even the dead.
The sun finally reached Danny and covered him from head to toe. “God bless you, sun, you magnificent bastard!” he shouted at the top of his lungs, spreading his arms out as if he could actually embrace the heat.
Black blood clinging to Danny’s face turned dry and brittle and cracked, falling loose like a facial treatment gone wrong. Will half expected to see a new face appear underneath the second layer of crackling skin, but it was still just Danny.
The same happened to the blood on the floor, on the walls, and splattered against the ceiling and rubble. Sunlight hardened it on contact, and soon it was fracturing like clay, literally coming undone before his eyes. It turned into hazy sheets of vapor that seemed to get sucked out through the hole, into the bright sky outside.
The only blood that remained where they were was the red kind. Luke’s, Lara’s, and theirs.
Danny was crouching in
front of Carly and Vera, shaking them awake by the shoulders. Vera opened her eyes first, and seeing the sun spread across Danny’s face, scrambled out of Carly’s arms and into his. Danny grabbed her, grunting with the pain of contact, but trying not to show it.
“Feeling all right there, sport?” Will grinned at him.
“Just fine, thanks,” Danny grunted back, wincing in pain.
Carly opened her eyes and smiled at the sight of Vera clinging to Danny. “You look like shit.”
“Feeling good, babe. It’s morning.”
“Yay for morning,” Carly said, sitting up from the floor.
Will got up and walked across the room. He felt like a dead man in purgatory, strolling through a cemetery, with bones unearthed from coffins to block his path. Having to climb the mountain of bones meant stepping on them. Arms and legs and even skulls crunched underneath his boots. He blocked the terrible sounds out. It couldn’t be helped. They were just everywhere.
He managed to climb to the very top, found some stable slabs of brick to stand on, and looked down at the parking lot.
Or at what was left of it.
Will glanced back at Danny. “Hey, master of destruction. Job well done.”
“How does it look?”
“Like a masterpiece. Come see for yourself.”
Danny gave Vera back to Carly and climbed up the mountain of bones to stand beside Will. He looked out at the parking lot and nodded. “Not bad. If I do say so myself.”
“You do, you do.”
“A-plus?”
“Give or take. You’re a poet, man.”
“I should open a school. Danny’s Academy for Blowing Shit Up and Stuff.”
“Sign me up. Do I get a discount?”
“What makes you so special?”
The entire parking lot had caved in, dropping two—and in some places, three—meters deep, as if a giant sink hole had opened up and swallowed it, taking anything, and every undead thing, that had been standing on top with it. A sea of skeletal remains—legs and arms and fingers—jutted out of the debris like blades of grass, gleaming bones underneath the sparkling sun.
It was impossible to count how many ghouls had perished in the parking lot, trapped by the rubble at night and silenced permanently by sunrise. Will guessed it had to be in the high hundreds, maybe thousands. And there were probably more buried underneath that they couldn’t see. At least the bulk of the ghoul army, he guessed, gathered to kill them last night were dead before they even made it into the bank.
Even after Danny’s C4 reduced the parking lot to nothing, taking a huge chunk of their number, they had continued to attack through the caved-in wall. For a while, anyway. Will found that oddly impressive.
Last charge of the dead brigade…
*
It took them most of the morning, but they dug Ted out of the rubble and buried him, along with Luke, in a patch of soft dirt about 150 meters behind the strip mall, on a slightly raised hill that had been used to plant a giant billboard advertising the mall’s businesses. They found shovels at what was left of Ned’s, and by the time they were done, the fresh bandages around his and Danny’s hands had turned a sooty gray, forcing them to clean and re-bandage.
They took inventory of their ammo and had exactly seven shells left between them, not the ten he had optimistically estimated last night. There wasn’t a single magazine of silver bullets for the M4A1, which wasn’t good. But at least they still had the equipment they used to make silver bullets. Now all they needed was more silver…
Kate regained consciousness first, but her motor coordination was shot. Will couldn’t tell if it was due to her injuries or something else. The latter worried him. He told Carly to keep a close eye on her.
He and Danny had buried Luke before Kate woke up, so she had only his freshly dug grave to say her goodbyes. It was for the best. He hadn’t wanted her to see Luke with a hole in his head. In her state, it might just push her completely over the edge.
When it came time to visit Ted’s grave, Danny took Carly and Vera himself while Will stayed behind with Lara. She had woken up at 8:05 a.m., and he had given her water until she couldn’t drink anymore. She looked better, but then again, the last time he saw her she was covered in blood. The cuts along her cheeks and nose had started to redden, and by tomorrow they would scab over. In a few weeks, they’d be gone, though one or two may linger as a reminder.
He was surprised by how well she took the news about last night. Maybe it was her nightmarish time with the Sundays, but she seemed to have an easier time digesting the deaths, the firefight, and even her own near-death experience. He kept a close eye on her to make sure it wasn’t just an act.
They sat on what was left of the sidewalk in front of Ned’s. They had changed into whatever clothes they could pull out of the rubble. It wasn’t much, but it was unbearable to spend any more time in their ghoul-blood-soaked clothes. Even with much of the blood flaked off in the sun, the heavy, pungent aroma of the ghouls lingered long after.
She touched the bandage over her forehead, like a kid unable to leave the scab alone. She winced at the contact.
“You probably should refrain from doing that,” Will said.
Lara gave him an annoyed look. “Yeah, thanks, doctor.”
“I’m just saying.”
“I’m the third-year medical student here. If anyone’s dispensing barely credible medical advice, it’ll be me.”
“Fair enough.”
She gave him the briefest of smiles, and he returned it.
“You don’t want to go say your goodbyes?” he asked.
She seemed to consider it, but then shook her head. “I wouldn’t know what to say. I barely knew them, and I don’t want to intrude.”
“Okay.”
“I shouldn’t go, right?”
“Not if you don’t feel comfortable.”
She shook her head again. “I shouldn’t…”
They sat in silence for a moment, enjoying the heat beating down on their faces. It would get cold again soon enough. And after that, nightfall.
Nightfall was always waiting in the wings…
“I almost died last night, didn’t I?” she said after a while. It wasn’t really a question.
“You came pretty close, yeah.”
“They used a car.”
“Yup.”
“I didn’t even know they did things like that.”
“They adapt. They’re very good at that.”
“You were right. They are smart. They tracked you, but they didn’t attack until they had reinforcements.”
“It seems that way.”
“You knew it was going to happen.”
“I didn’t.”
“The guns in the bank manager’s office, the ammo on the floor…”
“I like being prepared. Just in case.”
“Like the Boy Scouts?”
“Something like that. Dead, not stupid.”
“What?”
“The ghouls. They’re dead, not stupid. Just keep that in mind and act accordingly.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” She paused for a moment, then said, “I was a liability last night, wasn’t I?”
“You did good.”
She frowned. “Will, I don’t even know how I’m still alive after last night. All I heard were gunshots, then I remember feeling blood on my face.” She touched the bandage over her forehead and winced again. “Some help I turned out to be.”
“You did fine,” he said.
“Complete and utter bullshit.”
“You did fine, for a first-timer. But I’ll expect more next time.”
“Yes, sir,” she said and gave him a mock salute.
He grinned back.
“What were you in the Army?” she asked. “I mean, what was your rank?”
“I was a corporal. Officially E-4. Which is lower than a sergeant but higher than a private.”
“How long were you in the Army?”
�
��Eight years.”
“And you only made corporal?”
“Yup.”
“Does that mean you sucked at being a soldier?”
He smiled. “Probably, yeah.”
“But at least it sounds cool. Corporal Will. Okay, probably not that cool. What’s your last name?”
“Does it matter?”
“Not really.”
She was staring at the parking lot, at the skeletal remains of the dead ghouls.
“What is it?” he asked.
“This thing,” she said. “It’s like nothing I’ve ever studied. It’s not in the history books, Will. It’s been hiding all this time, somehow managing to escape scrutiny for God knows how long.” She was talking more to herself than to him, he realized. “And the infection itself… How far does it go? Down to the DNA? What happens there? I have so many questions. What about the sun turns them into that? What do you call that?”
He shrugged. “Paste? Mist? Vapor?”
“The UV rays of the sun completely destroys their cells, breaks them down until there’s nothing left. I’ve never seen anything react that way to sunlight in my life. There are allergies that can cause someone to break out in rashes or even blisters when exposed to sunlight. But to do that? I’ve never seen anything like that before, Will. It’s fascinating, isn’t it?”
“It’s something, all right.”
He could see her mind churning, digesting the information before her. He let her roll the questions and theories around in her head for a moment.
After a while, he said, “What happened to your hand?”
Lara held up her hands. “My hands?”
“Your other hand.”
She looked confused for a moment, then understood what he meant. She laughed. “Oh, that hand. I think it’s back in the bank somewhere. We should find it.”
He grunted. “I’ve already changed these bandages once already. I’m afraid you’re on your own when it comes to the digging.”
CHAPTER 28
KATE