by Sam Sisavath
The sight was still surreal to him, like watching the creature’s entire being simply come unglued at a molecular level, flesh falling away from skeleton and leaving behind nothing but a pile of white ash and pale bones to mark its passing.
“How many does that make?” Lara asked.
“Five,” he said.
“I thought you said they were smart.”
“They can be pretty damn stubborn, too.”
The ghouls in the room didn’t look particularly disturbed by the death of one of their own. In fact, none of them even moved or made any indication that they noticed the dead ghoul. There were piles of bones all around them now, turning the Green Room into a kind of ghoulish cemetery where the bodies weren’t properly buried.
Lara said, “Are you sure Danny and the others made it back to the Control Room?”
“That’s the third time you’ve asked me that.”
“Is it?”
“Yes.”
“Sorry.” She paused. “It must be the UV lights. It’s too damn bright.” She paused again. “How did you answer the last two times?”
“I’m sure they made it.”
“Are you absolutely sure?”
“Yes.”
“Oh.” Lara lifted her head and blinked at the bright lights above them. “Maybe we can turn down the lights a bit. How am I supposed to get any sleep with those things on all night?”
“Give it a shot.”
She leaned her head back on his shoulder. “Why did you tell me you loved me?”
He was unprepared for that question. Admittedly, it stunned him when she made the declaration in the air ducts, and he hadn’t really known what was happening when he said it back to her later on. Maybe it was the heat of the moment. He remembered saying it to only two previous women in his life, and one of those had been his mother. The other a high school sweetheart whom he never saw again after she went to college, although they had promised to stay in touch. Whatever happened to her?
“Will?” Lara said. “Should I take the silence as a bad sign?”
“I don’t know.”
“Oh,” she said, disappointment in her voice.
“I don’t know why I said it, but I meant it,” he said, hoping to salvage the moment. Lara didn’t answer right away, and he knew she was waiting for him to continue. “I know that now. I meant it, every word of it.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
She kissed him on the cheek.
“Not in front of the undead creatures, dear,” he said.
She chuckled tiredly and closed her eyes, and he held her hand as she drifted off to sleep.
He glanced down at his watch: 1:40 a.m.
*
The turbine went offline around 2:11 a.m., and the lights—all the lights—went off exactly eleven seconds after that.
As darkness swamped the Green Room, he heard scrambling as what must have been every ghoul in the room swarmed forward as one. But even before that it felt as if electricity had charged the air.
They knew what was going to happen before it happened.
Will stood up and stepped in front of Lara as the ghouls converged. He held the glow stick in one hand, illuminating their faces in garish green as they charged across the short distance like rabid dogs, some even moving on all fours.
Eleven seconds…
The first one reached him two seconds later…
Nine seconds…
He stabbed it through the head, then sliced the chest of another ghoul…
Eight seconds…
He kicked another one out of the way, then backhanded loose with his left fist the jagged teeth of another lunging for him…
Seven seconds…
Slashed the necks of two ghouls…
Six seconds…
One lunged for his leg, wrapped cold, bony fingers around his ankles…
Five seconds…
He stabbed it through the top of the head…
Four seconds…
Two fell out of the air duct to his left…
Three seconds…
A dozen surrounded him…
Two seconds…
More jostling for positions…
One second…
The lights came back on without warning, the large UV lamps on the ceiling snapping back to life. A ghoul only two feet from Will’s face let out a loud, surprised squeal as its skin turned into powder, and it fell to the floor in a twisted stack of falling bones.
There were at least fifty, maybe more, in the pool of bright light, and they didn’t fare any better. A fine white smog materialized in a matter of seconds and swirled around the back half of the room, covering Lara and him in a thick blanket, making them cough from the overwhelming odor. It was otherworldly and unnatural, and it got in their eyes and nostrils and mouth and hair.
The remaining ghouls stayed where they were at the edge of the UV halo. The small spaces in the room left by the dead ghouls had instantly been replaced by new ones from the hallway.
“What happened?” Lara asked, clinging to his shoulders.
“They got to the turbine, but the backup generators kicked in.”
“And they can’t get to those, right?”
“No,” he said. God, I hope not.
It took a while before Lara stopped shaking.
They sat back down on the floor.
He was exhausted, his body sore from the soles of his feet all the way up to his ears. He didn’t show it, because she didn’t need to know that right now. Besides, if he didn’t show it, he didn’t have to really acknowledge it.
Yeah, that’s the ticket.
“How much longer?” she asked.
Will glanced at his watch. “Too long. Go to sleep. I’ll wake you up if something interesting happens.”
“You’re out of your mind if you think I’m going to fall asleep in the middle of this,” she said. Then added, sheepishly, “Again.”
Thirty minutes later, she was snoring lightly against his shoulder.
*
Will let her sleep while he kept watch on the ghouls around them. He wiped the bloody cross-knife on his pants, and kept at it until he could see the glinting silver underneath again.
The creatures seemed to know that the sun was creeping up on them. He thought he could sense them starting to fidget uncomfortably amongst each other, though it was hard to tell—they were so thickly packed into the room it was difficult to know where one ended and another began, much less if they were actually moving or just swaying against each other accidentally.
They looked like one big, giant black blob.
He was waiting, too. At sunup, he expected to hear the Door start to open again. That would be the sign that Danny had in fact made it to the Control Room.
Despite what he told Lara, he wasn’t sure if Danny really had made it. He was relying almost purely on gut instinct and, more importantly, Danny’s abilities. The Green Room was close enough to the Control Room that Danny hadn’t needed to go much farther to reach safety. The good news was he heard Danny’s M4A1 firing in the air ducts long after he jumped down into the Green Room.
Of course, after that, he didn’t hear anything else.
Four more hours, and he would know for sure, one way or another.
Come on, Danny boy, don’t let me down…
*
At 4:13 a.m. the ghouls started to actively move around, nervously and visibly jostling against each other.
He had never seen this behavior before, and he didn’t want to be the only one to witness it, so he woke Lara up.
She was as surprised as he was. The ghouls looked clearly agitated, and the mild jostling started to give way to overt panic. There was also a low rumbling rising from the masses that he thought was coming from the creatures’ throats. It wasn’t language, it was more primal, instinctive.
Fear.
Lara stared for a long moment. “They know it’s coming. The sun. And they’re scared. They do
n’t know what to do.”
The ghouls were trapped inside the facility, the darkness quickly dissolving outside, something that, if they indeed had the hive mind he thought they possessed, would be relayed to them by the other ghouls topside.
And it scared them. It scared the shit out of them.
He smiled. He liked seeing them scared.
At that moment, he wished he still had his radio. It was gone, lost somewhere in the air ducts during the chaos.
“You still have your radio?” he asked.
She looked down at her hip. “I must have lost it in the ducts.”
He grinned. “How many times have I told you, Lara? Keep your radio on you at all times.”
“Funny. Where’s yours?”
“That’s not the point.”
She rolled her eyes. “So what now?”
He glanced up at the air duct entrance.
Lara saw where he was looking. “What are you thinking?”
“I need to get in contact with Danny.”
“How?”
“There’s only one way.”
He stood up and climbed onto the trough directly underneath the air duct.
Lara followed. “You can’t be serious.”
“It’s the only way.”
“Will, there are more of them up there.”
“Maybe,” he said.
“Will, don’t go…”
“I have to get in contact with Danny.”
“If he’s even there…”
“He’s there.”
“You can’t be sure of that.”
“He’s there.” Then, with as much confidence as he could muster, he added, “Trust me.”
“I do trust you. I followed you all the way here, didn’t I?”
“Yes, you did. So trust me again.”
She sighed. “Do I have a choice?”
He took his last glow stick out of his pouch and cracked it, then tossed it up through the hole and heard it land inside. The opening instantly glowed green and revealed the square-shaped metal above him. He waited to see if something would grab the glow stick, but the light never shifted.
He walked back to Lara. She was about to say something, but he kissed her first, catching her off guard.
Then he quickly pulled free. “Stay here.”
She gave him a wry look. “Gee, okay. Good strategy.”
He place the cross-knife between his teeth and leaped, grabbed the edge of the air duct entrance, and pulled himself up partway.
He was halfway up when he scanned both directions, saw nothing in the green halo, then pulled himself the rest of the way up. He took the cross-knife out of his mouth and picked up the glow stick. He waved it in front of him like a magic wand, looking forward, then back, then forward again.
Lara called from the Green Room: “Will?”
“Yeah?” he called back down.
“Be careful.”
“I’ll be right back.”
With the cross-knife in his right hand, he moved along the air duct.
He got four meters before he felt the rush of movement and braced himself as it leaped out of the darkness in front of him, slamming him in the shoulder and knocking him down. He instinctively dropped the glow stick, reached up, and got the ghoul around the throat with his free hand before it could clamp down on him with brown-stained and cracked teeth. Hissing air escaped through those awful monstrous teeth, and it thrashed about before he drove the cross-knife through its chest, meeting almost no resistance.
The creature sagged against him, then went still.
He pushed the ghoul off and sat up in the green halo, catching his breath for a few seconds. The cross-knife in one hand and the glow stick in the other, he began moving forward once more.
He knew he was near the Control Room when he came across three ghouls crouched around a shaft of light. His glow stick got their attention, and they turned, almost in unison.
The first one lunged at him without making a sound, reaching for his throat. He slashed it across the chest and watched it careen sideways out of his path. Even before the first one landed, the other two were already rushing. He got the second one in the face—just barely, but enough to draw blood with the silver-tipped edge, enough to send it shrieking for a few seconds before it settled down and stopped moving. The third one was tougher, stronger, and it crashed into him with great force, surprising him with its speed and strength, and succeeding in driving him back.
He managed to get his feet underneath the ghoul and kicked out, literally pinning the creature against the ceiling. He stabbed upward and got the creature in the chest. It let out a soft gurgling sound that he had never heard before. It died, black blood dripping down on him in thick clumps like wet rice.
He pushed the ghouls out of the way and continued up the air duct, crab-walking as fast as he could. Thinking about Lara back there alone in the Green Room got him moving even faster.
He finally reached the grate and peered down through the holes, relieved to see Danny pointing his Glock up at him.
“Holy shit,” Danny grinned. “You’re still alive.” Danny glanced over at someone in the room with him and said, “I told you he was too stubborn to die.”
Carly appeared below him under the grate. A look of relief flooded her face. “Will! You’re alive! We thought you might have…” When she saw he was alone, her happiness quickly dissipated. “Where’s Lara?”
“She’s fine,” he said. “We got stuck in the Green Room.”
“She’s not up there with you?” Danny asked.
“No. But I need to get back to her as soon as possible.”
“So what’s the plan?”
“You still got Ben’s pendant?”
Danny produced it from his pocket. “Do bears shit in the woods?”
“I have another idea.”
“Is it better than your last idea?”
“I dunno. It’s a long shot.”
“And the other idea wasn’t?”
“What do we have to lose, right?”
“Oh, nothing. Just our lives.”
“That all?” Will grinned back.
*
Will crab-walked back to the Green Room and counted himself lucky that only two ghouls were there to block his path. He killed them both easily enough—they seemed to lack conviction and looked almost hesitant to attack when they saw him in the green light of the glow stick.
Eventually, he saw bright lights up ahead.
He dropped down from the ceiling, landing in a crouch, unprepared for Lara’s leap into his arms. “You stupid man. Don’t ever, ever do that to me again, do you understand?”
He kissed her. She smelled great and tasted better, and he forgot for a moment that there was a room full of undead creatures staring at them, and that the stench of rotting cabbage was all around them.
“Stupid?” he said, raising a furrowed brow.
“Promise me,” she said, on the verge of tears.
Guilt washed over him. “I promise,” he whispered softly. “I’ll never leave you again.”
*
They sat and watched the ghouls inside the Green Room as their nervousness became restlessness, then restlessness gave way to primal fear. Will could feel their terror, rising from the mass of inhumanity before him, like some physical thing that drifted then condensed in the air and just kept growing.
Lara could sense it, too—she began squeezing his hand. It wasn’t something they saw every day, and it was utterly fascinating and at the same time chilling. After fighting them, killing them, and fearing them for so long, to see them now revert back to something so humanlike made him rethink everything he thought he knew about them.
Lara said, “Can you feel it?”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t think…” She didn’t finish.
“Yeah,” Will said.
Then he heard it: the sound of the Door opening, the loud rumble coursing through the entire facility as the gears worked, powered
by the emergency generators. Could they generate enough power to fully open the Door? They had to.
He glanced at his watch: 5:45 a.m.
They waited. He silently counted down the seconds in his head, watching the ghouls for signs.
There, there it was. The message must have been relayed through the hive mind, because soon the ghouls began moving in waves toward the door, then through it, flooding back out into the hallway in streams.
“Oh my God, it’s working,” Lara said.
“I told you.”
“Remind me never to doubt you again.”
“And you’ll listen?”
She smiled. “Of course not. It’s my job. As your girlfriend.”
“I like the sound of that,” he smiled.
Soon the room was empty, and stampeding footsteps echoed down the hallway, moving farther and farther away from them.
The Door had been opening for twenty seconds.
He stood up and, cross-knife in hand, raced forward, making a beeline for the door. The entire time his eyes were fixed on the open door, waiting, expecting ghouls to come back at any second.
Dead, not stupid.
Dead, not stupid…
He reached the door, grabbed it with one hand, and swung it, still not daring to even breath, until the door slammed shut with a loud, satisfying sound, and he quickly cranked the lever up ninety degrees to lock it.
He finally took a deep breath and stepped back, as Lara came up behind him. “What if they come back?”
“They won’t.”
“How can you be sure?”
“We just gave them the opportunity to survive, and they took it. Dead, not stupid, remember?”
*
The hallways were eerily quiet, but the ghouls left plenty in their wake. Blood, the bright red and thick black kind, covered the floors and walls and even the ceiling. There was clothing and shoes, but no signs of the victims themselves. The twisted carcasses of dead ghouls, hidden from sunlight but ripped apart by bullets and buckshot, formed makeshift obstacles every few feet, around every corner.
He glanced at his watch: 7:05 a.m.
They had given it an extra thirty minutes after sunup before emerging from the safety of the Green Room, just to be sure. They had kept the Door open to let sunlight in.
Lara, weaponless, stayed close behind him. His only weapon was the cross-knife, and he ached to get his hands on something that could be used more than a meter in front of him. They were halfway to the Armory when Danny appeared out of the Control Room with his M4A1, Carly and the girls tailed close behind him. He guessed by the way Danny was holding the rifle, almost as a club, that he didn’t have any silver bullets left in it.