by Sam Sisavath
The creature fell and lay still.
Danny pulled his cross-knife out of the ghoul and hurried over to Carly. “You okay?”
Carly nodded, her face frozen in horror. “It came out of nowhere,” she said between gasps.
“They must have opened another grate in one of the rooms between here and the Control Room,” Danny said. He unslung his M4A1 and crab-walked to the front. “I’m taking lead from now on. Stay behind me.”
Danny started off, Carly behind him, and the girls followed, walking hunched over.
Will came up behind her, reloading his shotgun. He grinned, his expression oddly innocent in their merging halos. “I think we’re slowing them down. Couldn’t be more than, oh, a few thousand at this point.”
She smiled back at him, and before she realized it, she blurted out, “I love you.”
It caught him by surprise, but he quickly gathered himself and flashed her a huge smile. He took out an extra X-marked magazine. “One shot per ghoul. Go. I’ll be right behind you.”
She turned and followed the others up the air duct, reloading her Glock as she went. She hadn’t gone more than a few feet when she heard Will’s shotgun bellowing behind her again.
Once, twice, then silence before the loud, solid sound of the shotgun racking.
As long as she continued to hear that sound, she would know he was doing okay.
Up ahead, Danny’s was firing his M4A1, the staccato effect of the weapon discharging creating a weird universe that made her think they were stuck in a disco of some kind, instead of squeezing their way through an air duct that was quickly becoming infested with ghouls at both ends.
Danny’s right, they’ve found another way in.
Suddenly there was a bright shaft of light in front of her, and it took her a moment to realize they were now moving directly over a lit-up room, and the lights were coming through another grate. She risked a look down through the grate and saw the Green Room below her, troughs filled with fresh dirt and growing plants. Pools of blood, but no bodies, indicated that whoever had sought salvation down there hadn’t found it.
At the sound of Danny firing she looked up the air duct, the same staccato flashes in front of her, surreal and hypnotizing.
Behind her, Will’s shotgun thundered, getting closer. She was surprised to realize that even this close to Will she had somehow managed to tune out the massive crashing, earsplitting carnage of the shotgun. Or maybe she had just lost most of her hearing, but that couldn’t be right, because she heard Will just fine a few minutes ago, when she had told him that she loved him.
God, had she actually said that?
That question was still echoing inside her head as she moved over the grate to get to the other side. She put a foot down and felt something strange—wide-open space—and suddenly she was falling through the air, pinwheeling and crashing into the side of one of the troughs in the Green Room. The impact knocked the breath out of her, and the Glock clutched in her hand went flying and clattered across the room.
Pain lanced through her entire body as she came to rest in a pile on the cold hard floor, between rows of troughs holding dirt and plants and fruits. A shadow immediately fell over her, and she looked up to see a ghoul standing on a trough nearby, holding a blood-encrusted grate with long, almost elegant, bone-white fingers no longer sheathed in flesh. How long had the ghoul been fighting with the screws that held the grate in place, literally shredding its fingers to the very bone, before it finally got it free? There was a small trowel at the ghoul’s feet—had it used that to twist the screws?
Dead, not stupid.
She pushed all of that out of her mind, because it didn’t matter. There was something familiar about the ghoul—in the way it moved, the way it looked at her. What was it doing here in the Green Room, all alone? Lara stared into dark black eyes and remembered.
Rose. The Green Room’s Rose.
Even in death, she refuses to leave this place…
Lara gathered her wits and looked around the room. There, her Glock, ten feet away.
She scrambled to her feet and ran for the weapon. The ghoul that used to be Rose leaped across the room and landed on her back. Lara stumbled and fell, the extra weight driving her down, and she slid across the floor, splashing into a pool of something wet and sticky. She tasted blood—it wasn’t hers—and felt its wetness covering her face.
She fought to regain her footing and was grateful her fall had dislodged the ghoul at least. Her eyes darted around the room again, searching, searching… The Glock was just three feet away.
She ran for it, and the ghoul gave chase once again. She felt it coming, the sudden rush of air against her skin as the creature took flight and the Glock was still two feet away.
She lunged headfirst to the floor at the very last second, and the ghoul sailed over her head. Her chin scraped against concrete, and blood—this time definitely hers—gushed freely in her mouth.
Did she just lose a tooth?
While the pain was loud and clear and demanding, it didn’t trump her survival instincts, which thrust her forward in the direction of the Glock. She got her hand on the weapon and, still on her stomach, shot the ghoul in front of her as it scrambled back to its feet. She only had to shoot it once. The creature toppled sideways and lay still, its eyes staring back at her.
Robbed of life for a second time, the ghoul looked more like Rose. The face seemed to soften, and light returned to those dark black eyes, though it could just have been her imagination running wild.
Rose. Poor Rose. I’ll miss gardening with you. Your grandmotherly stories. Goodbye, Rose.
She heard it—footsteps approaching fast. It was so distinct—bare feet moving quickly against hard, jagged floor. Her senses were heightened, enhanced by raging adrenaline, and there were so many of them that the patter became almost like stampeding hooves, impossible to miss unless she were completely deaf. Which, despite being stuck in the air duct with Will and Danny firing away mere feet from her, she wasn’t.
She scrambled back on her feet and made the calculations in her head. She was thirty yards from the Green Room door, and it would take her at least five seconds to reach it, but even as she made the calculations, the first ghoul appeared in the open doorway and made the decision for her.
Lara shot it in the chest and it fell, but even before it hit the floor, two more ghouls were already inside. She fired again, the bullet punching through the first ghoul’s chest and hitting another one behind it. Even as they fell, five more were already leaping over them.
She stumbled backward and kept firing, counting down the bullets, knowing it wouldn’t be long now before—
A shotgun blast ripped two of the ghouls apart.
Lara threw a quick look over her shoulder and saw Will moving toward her. “Hurry!” he shouted.
She turned and ran past him and leaped onto the trough. He fired behind her—racking and firing, racking and firing…
As long as I can hear him shooting, I know he’s fine.
She leaped up and grabbed at the air duct opening, painfully aware that Will’s shotgun had a limited number of shells, that even fully loaded it only had seven shots.
And Will had already fired four…
Three left.
She swung around and looked back. Will had drawn his Glock and was firing it as he backpedaled toward her. Ghouls stumbled and fell as he fired, over and over and over. Left and right, center, left and right again. He was an excellent shot, every bullet finding its mark, some finding two, sometimes three.
But like the shotgun, the Glock had a limited number of bullets. Then what would he use? The knife. The cross-knife he always carried with him, like Danny.
Then what?
Will glanced over his shoulder at her hanging from the opening of the air duct. He looked dumbfounded, then angry. “Lara, Goddammit, go, now!”
The ghouls were almost on top of him, and for every creature he shot down, three or four took its place. H
e kicked at a ghoul lunging at his legs, then kneed another one in the throat. It went down, but sprang right back up, even though three other ghouls stumbled over it in the rush to get at Will.
Then she saw them—the large, industrial lamps hanging from the ceiling around her, each one of them turned off. They were hard to miss, their size dwarfing the smaller halogen lights between them that were currently lighting up the room.
What had Rose said about those large lamps? “They’re supposed to mimic the sun…”
Lara glanced around the room and located them on the wall to her left—two big button light switches, their fat size making them hard to miss even from this distance. One was switched on, the other still in the off position.
She jumped down, landing on the trough below her.
Will must have heard her landing because he glanced back and looked even madder than before. “Lara, Goddammit, get out of here!”
“Hold on!” she shouted back.
She launched herself into the air and landed on another trough nearby, and continued hopping from trough to trough, aiming for the wall with a determination she hadn’t known she possessed.
Half of the ghouls in the room immediately broke away from Will and surged in her direction. She ignored them. It was hard to do, but she pushed them out of her mind and kept her legs churning.
Will’s Glock fired once, twice—then there was silence.
She couldn’t help herself and looked back, as she ran, at Will with his cross-knife in hand stabbing a ghoul as two more swarmed on him. He fought one off, backing up the entire time, and stabbed another one through its neck. Then three of them were on him and pushing him to the floor with their weight.
She turned and lunged across the final trough and reached out toward the light switches. There were two big switches, but only one had “UV” stenciled underneath it. That was the one she slammed her fist into, right before she crumpled to the floor in a bruised heap.
The big lamps on the ceiling hummed to life almost instantaneously and the areas around the troughs were bathed in ultraviolet light, so much brighter than the regular halogen light bulbs that for a moment it looked as if the sun had risen inside the room. The ghouls caught inside the rings of blindingly bright circles seemed confused by what was happening.
Then suddenly one of them let out a loud shriek as its flesh turned hard and brittle and peeled off at the bones. Then two more ghouls shriveled into nothingness without a sound.
The rest figured it out and tried to flee the lights, but it was too late.
She lay on the floor watching it all. She felt like laughing.
She hadn’t been sure it would work. But she hadn’t forgotten all those conversations with Rose (Poor Rose) over the last three months that she spent in here. She knew nothing about plants, or gardening, but Rose didn’t mind. Rose enjoyed her company, and Lara couldn’t get enough of the Green Room’s serenity.
Bye, Rose, thanks for everything.
Will, buried underneath a thick layer of ghoul paste, scrambled to his feet, spitting the powdery remains of the dead creatures from his mouth and nostrils and shaking it out of his hair. Fleshless bones rattled off him, sticks of femurs and fibulas, ribs and deformed skulls.
The remaining ghouls crowded around the pool of UV light, looking uncertainly at it. A couple of ghouls entered the light tentatively and fell apart, which seemed to be enough to convince the others to stay out.
She ran back to Will, making sure to keep well inside the UV light. The ghouls glared after her, and one risked exposing itself to the light and turned into bones a foot inside the pool of light. The rest stopped moving forward.
Lara grabbed Will’s hand. “What did you do?” he asked.
“Ultraviolet light,” she said, pointing up at the lamps. “It’s supposed to have all the properties of the sun, to help the plants grow. I wasn’t sure if it would actually work, but…”
“Yeah,” Will said, grinning back at her. “Can they get to that light switch?”
She glanced back at the switch on the wall. It was well within the pool of UV light. “I don’t know…”
Several ghouls tried to lunge for the light switch, but each stumbled and fell and became nothing but clattering piles of bones and white mists in the air well short.
“No,” she said. “I guess not.”
“Good. Then all we have to do is wait them out.”
“What about Danny and the others?”
“They should have made it to the Control Room by now. Once Danny gets the grate back up, they should be fine.”
She glanced at her watch and frowned. “Five hours before sunup.”
He shrugged. “I wanted some free time with you anyway.”
They watched a dozen more ghouls desperately trying to get to the light switch, only to die. The rest finally took the hint and stopped trying. She thought she could hear them growling deep in their throats. An intense, piercing universe of dark black eyes looked accusingly at her, and only her—but maybe that was just her imagination still running at a feverish pitch, fed by the adrenaline pumping through every inch of her.
There had to be hundreds of them squeezed into the Green Room, so many that they stretched all the way out the doorway and beyond. They didn’t move, and seemed content to watch and wait…for something.
Will squeezed her hand tighter. “Hey.”
“What now?”
“I love you, too.”
Lara didn’t take her eyes off the ghouls for even one second, but she smiled and squeezed his hand back. Suddenly the pain coursing through every inch of her body didn’t hurt nearly as much as a second ago.
Then she saw it. A figure standing near the back, just outside the opened door, among the ghouls.
But it wasn’t like the rest. It stood tall, almost human, and it had blue eyes.
The sight of it made her simultaneously joyous and terrified. That raw instinct doubled when the creature turned its head and stared at her across the distance, over the heads of the other ghouls.
She shivered.
It sees me. And it wants me to know that it sees me…
The blue-eyed ghoul broke their contact, turned and walked away, moving through the wave of endless creatures. It struck her just how different the blue-eyed ghoul was, like some kind of royalty among its subjects.
As it walked away, she saw a second blue-eyed ghoul looking across the room at her.
This one also stood taller than the rest, but it looked much more feminine than the first one, though gender was hard to decipher with the creatures. The second blue-eyed ghoul looked across the room, and it smiled at her, before turning and following the first one through the tightly packed space.
Kate…
CHAPTER 44
WILL
Being locked in a room with a few hundred ghouls introduced a smell that was hard to ignore. It was acidic and pungent, like rotten eggs boiled in filth and trash for an obscene amount of time before someone decided to add vinegar. It stung his eyes and made swallowing repellent. It was all he could do not to vomit.
They sat on the floor, backs against the wall, making sure they were well within the heavy flood of UV light. There were a good thirty meters between them and the closest ghoul, though it felt much closer. Twice now the creatures had tried to come down through the air duct opening, only to evaporate almost instantly as they were exposed to the lights, leaving only bones behind.
Lara sat next to him, her head resting on his shoulder. He held the cross-knife in his right fist. Covered in a thick coat of black blood and gooey flesh, its silver still glinted brilliantly against the light pouring down above them. It felt like sitting in the sun without sunscreen. He couldn’t fathom how Rose had survived this onslaught day in and day out.
“What happens to the lights if they find a way to destroy the turbine?” Lara asked. She hadn’t taken her eyes off the ghouls. Neither had he.
“Backup generators,” Will said.
“Can’t they get to those, too?”
“They’re in a basement behind a steel door. Without the codes, Ben’s pendant is the only way in, and Danny has that.”
“If Danny’s still alive,” Lara said.
“He made it.”
“How can you be sure?”
“I just am.”
Lara sighed. “So we wait them out?”
“I’m open to suggestions.”
“You have that knife…”
“Uh huh.”
“How many of them do you think are stuck in here with us?”
He had stopped counting about an hour ago—at 200—when he could no longer keep track of the blackened and shrunken forms. There were more than that in this room alone, and even more outside in the hallway. He and Danny had killed over a hundred since the siege began, and they hadn’t made so much as a dent. It made him wonder if his original plan was even still viable.
He glanced at his watch. 1:33 a.m.
Five more hours until sunup…
“A lot,” he finally answered.
“That’s not very scientific,” she said.
It had been almost an hour and a half since Kate opened the Door and the ghouls flooded inside the facility. It seemed like a lifetime ago.
Kate…
What had happened to her? Had the ghouls gotten her? Lara swore she saw Kate at the door, though she didn’t look like Kate anymore. She looked like a ghoul, except Lara said this new Kate had bright blue eyes, like the blue-eyed ghoul he had seen at the bank.
“I swear it was her,” Lara said. “It was the eyes. Not the color, but the way she looked at me. It was her, Will.”
“I believe you,” he said.
And he did believe her. After everything he had seen and lived through, the idea that Kate had become another blue-eyed ghoul was the least unbelievable thing thrown at him.
There was a movement above them, and a second later another ghoul dropped out of the air duct and landed on a trough nearby. It was turning to face them when the UV light reduced it to ashes.