by Sam Sisavath
“So your biggest knock against them is that they look too much like cowboys?”
“That, and Danny says they have squirrelly eyes.”
“Hunh.”
“That mean something to you, too?”
“We had a CO in Afghanistan with squirrelly eyes.”
“So Danny tells me.”
She went quiet.
“What is it?” he asked.
“I asked one of the women about them. About the cowboys.”
“I’m guessing she didn’t have very good things to say.”
“She told me we should only trust them as far as we can throw them. Like into the lake. She thinks we should walk them at gunpoint to the beach and just shoot them in the back of their heads.”
“She said that?”
“Not in so many words. I inferred.”
“Hunh.”
“‘Hunh’? Is that all you have to say?”
“Did you tell Danny what the woman said?”
“I discussed everything with him, Carly, Blaine, and Maddie afterward.”
“What about Sarah?”
“She was busy in the kitchen.”
“A woman’s work is never done.”
“Tell me about it.”
He paused to think about what she had said. Then, “What did Danny say?”
“That we need to watch them closely.”
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Just ‘okay’? That’s it? I was hoping for something more profound. Or at least, more than ‘okay.’ What does that mean, exactly?”
“It means if they so much as look cross-eyed at you or Carly, or anyone else on the island, Danny will put a bullet in their heads.”
Lara went quiet on the other end.
“Lara?”
“I’m still here,” she said. “Would he really do that?”
“Yes.”
“Because of what Bonnie told me?”
“That, but mostly because Danny will do what he has to do in order to keep you and the others safe. Just follow his lead when it comes to the gunplay.”
“What about everything else?”
“Lara,” he said.
“Hmm?”
“Just follow Danny’s lead on the two cowboys.”
“Okay.”
He could hear something else in her voice, a slight hesitation. “What is it?”
“I miss you.”
He smiled. “I miss you, too.”
“Are there any hot women over there?”
“They’re not much to look at over here.”
“Meaning?”
“They’ve been hiding inside a hospital floor for the last eleven months. Think about it.”
“That bad?”
“The kids are straight out of Village of the Damned.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a movie. About this town where the kids are damned.”
“Oh.”
“You’ve never seen it?”
“No.”
“When we get back, I’ll bring over a Blu-ray and we’ll pop it into the TV and watch together.”
“You have a Blu-ray copy of a movie about creepy children in a village that’s damned?” He could hear the amusement in her voice.
“What, you don’t?”
She laughed. “I can safely say, no.”
“You’ll love it.”
“I’m sure I won’t.”
“Lara,” he said.
“What?” she asked.
“I love you.”
“You sound so serious.”
“That’s because I am.”
“You’re alone over there, aren’t you?”
“Of course not. There are a dozen guys just sitting around listening to me profess my undying love for you.”
“Good. Because for a moment there I thought you were only doing the lovey dovey stuff because you were alone.”
“What kind of guy do you think I am?”
“I know exactly what kind of guy you are. And I still love you, too.”
“That took a while.”
She laughed again. “I had to think about it.”
“Damn, lady, you really know how to hurt a guy’s feelings.”
“I’m just messing with you. I didn’t have to think about it for one second.”
“Better.”
“Okay, maybe half a second.”
“Hunh.”
“By the way, one of the newcomers is a computer guy. Danny and I were discussing how he might come in handy.”
“The hydro turbine back at Harold Campbell’s facility?”
“Exactly. Of course, we’ll need Jen’s helicopter. How’s it coming, anyway? Is your charm offensive going as planned?”
“I’m working on it.”
“Work harder. We need that helicopter.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
They spent another thirty minutes talking. By then, Greg, the guy whose job it was to monitor the radio, had returned from dinner, and he sat back behind a desk and picked up an old, heavily dog-eared novel he had been reading when Will first arrived.
“Be careful,” Lara said, when he told her about helping Mike with the Archers raid tomorrow. “I hate the idea of you doing that, Will.”
“It’s a goodwill gesture.”
“Like some macho male bonding?”
“Something like that.”
He imagined her rolling her eyes on the other end.
“Just don’t get dead,” she said. “Isn’t that what Danny would say?”
“Probably something like that. But then he would spell it out, and instead of saying d-e-a-d, he would spell it d-e-d.”
“And that makes it funny?”
“It’s Danny, Lara,” Will said. “Jokes don’t have to be funny when he’s telling them.”
*
Tap-tap-tap.
Tap-tap-tap…
It had been so long since he saw one up close, that watching it peering back at him from the darkness elicited a curious reaction from Will. He didn’t know whether to draw his Glock and shoot it, or engage the thing in a kind of macabre staring contest.
He wasn’t worried the glass window would give. Mike’s people had been here for eleven months, and the ghouls hadn’t gotten in yet. The fact that the creatures hadn’t even attempted to do anything beyond patiently tap-tap-tapping the glass told him they were aware of its unyielding strength.
The one staring back at him now looked as if it had once been a woman. There were small bumps on its chest where breasts would have been. It was impossible to tell its age, and it had turned so long ago its skin, pruned and hairless, looked like plastic surgery gone wrong. Its eyes were dark and hollow, like two black voids staring back at him against the moonlight. Its upturned nose sniffed the glass pane.
There was a knock on his door.
“Come in.”
Mike entered, a pool of dimmed LED light from the hallway splashing across the window. The ghoul turned its head toward the door, regarding Mike with similar muted curiosity.
“Don’t let them get to you,” Mike said.
“You’re used to this? Seeing them out here every night?”
“Eventually, yeah. Come on,” Mike said. “I got just the cure for insomnia.”
*
Back in Mike’s room, the former lieutenant opened a cabinet and took out a full bottle of Wild Turkey. He grabbed two plastic cups and pointed to an empty chair near the rebar-reinforced window. An LED lamp turned on low in one corner lit the room up just enough to navigate by.
Will sat down and watched Mike open the bottle and pour out a generous amount into both cups. Mike looked somehow even more weary than this afternoon, which was quite a feat.
“I had four of these the first week we came here,” Mike said. “I’ve been steadily draining them for the last year. Finished the third bottle last night. I thought, hell, I’ll save the final bottle for something special. I
guess this is as good a time as any.”
“Cheers,” Will said, and touched plastic cups with the former officer. He took a sip of the bourbon and grimaced as the bitterness washed down his throat. It had been a while.
Mike smiled knowingly. “Not a bourbon man, I take it.”
“Hard to afford them on an enlisted man’s salary.”
“Amy said you were a corporal. Where did you serve?”
“Afghanistan.”
“I never made it in-country, even though I was supposed to go. After OCS, they gave me a second lieutenant commission and I spent most of my time waiting to pack my bags. Never happened, for some reason. After a while, my CO got pissed that I kept pestering him about it.” He smirked. “Turns out, I didn’t have to go overseas to see action.”
“How’d it go down that night?”
“I was at the Lafayette army base doing field training exercises. At first we thought it was some kind of pandemic. No one knew what was happening. I tried getting orders from the higher-ups, but they didn’t have a clue. No one did. I don’t know how, but we managed to organize enough people at the base to make a stand, but by morning…” He shook his head. “All those people, jammed in there at night, gone. Just gone. Like that, it was a ghost town.”
“How many men did you bring with you?”
“A couple, including Park. The rest scattered, went looking for their families in the city or out of town. Can’t blame them. If I had family, I would have done the same thing. They might still be alive out there somewhere. Who knows? There were some good, very capable men in the bunch.”
Mike looked out the window, as if expecting a ghoul to be there. There wasn’t, though Will could still here the soft tap-tap-tap from other parts of the hospital.
They’re probing for weaknesses. Relentless. Night after night.
Dead, not stupid…
“How active are they?” Will asked.
“They’re erratic. Sometimes there are waves of them, so many you can’t see the city in the background. Other times, it’s like this—they show up, look around, and then disappear just as quickly.”
“They’re smart.”
Mike nodded. “They would have to be, wouldn’t they? To pull off what they did?” Mike refilled their cups. “Down the hatch,” he said, and drained his in one swallow.
Will winced for him, then sipped his. “Are you sure you want to hit that Archers tomorrow?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“You said you were running out of supplies. Can you last another month without replenishing?”
Mike thought about it. “Maybe. But why should I do that? You said it yourself, I can’t just put everyone into our cars tomorrow and drive down to Beaufont Lake. I need supplies until that happens.” He grinned at Will. “Unless you’re telling me you’ve changed your mind?”
“Not yet. Sorry.”
“I understand.” He leaned back. “Look, you have a good thing going there. Forty extra bodies is a lot. If I was in your position, I’d do the same thing.”
“How are you handling who goes and who stays?”
“I was thinking about sending the kids and women first. We have a couple of fifty-somethings that would probably benefit from the fresh air. And they’ll be able to contribute right away. One’s an engineer, another’s an electrician. Of course, you’ll have to take their families, too. The electrician, Darren, has a fourteen-year-old girl, and the engineer, John, has a wife. I think she was a real estate agent, in case you were thinking about selling the island.”
He chuckled. “Probably not.”
“Well, I tried.”
Mike took another emptying swig of the plastic cup, then quickly refilled it.
*
The next morning, Will learned how Mike and his people left the hospital for supply runs when they couldn’t access any of the lower floors. Mike led him and Gaby up to the roof at an hour past sunup, and if Will thought Mike looked terrible last night, the man could have passed for a scarecrow in the morning light.
A few of Mike’s people followed them up to the rooftop carrying large nylon bags, two of them wearing hard plastic shell helmets. Will heard clinking noises as the men tossed the bags down near the edge of the north tower and began pulling out rappelling equipment.
“Where’d you get these?” Will asked.
“Jen,” Mike said. “When we realized we were essentially trapped on the tenth floor, we used her helicopter to make trips down to the streets for supplies. That wasn’t going to work forever, though. Too much fuel and time. So we raided a surplus store and grabbed these. It’s a pain in the ass, but it has an added benefit.”
“What’s that?”
“It keeps people from wandering outside the building.”
Mike picked up a harness and stepped into it with practiced ease. Two men Will recognized from last night as Paul and Johnson were already doing the same thing. They slipped heavy-duty nylon webbing harnesses between their legs, then around their waists. There was nothing comfortable about the rigs, but they would hold.
Mike’s people had drilled a half dozen anchor points along the rooftop about two meters from the edge, each one attached with a carabiner. The system had a three anchor point redundancy in case one of the anchors gave way. Not a bad idea. Will had seen plenty of rappelling falls, and they were never a pretty sight. Mike’s people had also set up a pulley system where the group that rappelled down could later be pulled back up. He guessed that explained the presence of two muscular guys standing behind them, watching the show. The designated pullers.
“Strap in,” Mike said. “You’ll need to take off your belt.”
Will unslung the M4A1 and took off his gun belt. He handed his rifle to Gaby and his belt to another one of Mike’s men, who put it into a duffel bag already stuffed with supplies.
Gaby picked up one of the harnesses and offered it to him. “You sure you wanna be doing this, boss? Looks like a pretty steep drop.”
“It’s not too bad,” Mike said. “Thirty-six meters, give or take.”
“How much is that in feet?” she asked.
“Each floor is about twelve feet,” Will said. “So ten floors is…”
“One hundred and twenty feet,” Gaby finished. “That’s a long way down. I would totally still respect you in the morning if you change your mind.”
“I’ve rappelled from higher.”
“Off the side of a hospital?”
“Once or twice.” Will slipped on his harness and took a proffered shell helmet from one of the pullers. “How many supply runs do you do in a month?” he asked Mike.
“Two, three times, depending on what we need,” Mike said. “We try to limit it. The creatures aren’t the only problems out there, but you already know that.”
“And you’ve never run across collaborators before?”
“Not yet, just your standard marauders. As far as I know, there are two, maybe three, other groups out there in the city, trying to take the same things we are. I lost a couple of men to them over the months, but I took a couple of theirs, too.”
“We saw plenty of those kinds of people,” Gaby said.
“It’s inevitable,” Mike said. “There will always be people trying to take advantage of a desperate situation.”
Gaby handed Will his rifle, then a pair of leather gloves which he slipped on. “If you fall and break your neck, can I tell Lara I at least tried to stop you?”
He smiled. “Permission granted.”
Will slung his rifle, made sure the gloves were tight, then joined the others taking their positions along four of the anchor points. Mike stepped off the edge first and Will followed, then Paul and Johnson dropped down after them.
It had been a while since he rappelled. Most of it was from his Army Ranger days, but there hadn’t been nearly as much rappelling during his tour with Harris County SWAT. Still, as he went down the tenth floor, passing by a rectangular window, it all came rushing back. Controlling his desc
ent was the hardest part, but muscle memory kicked in around the seventh floor, and the rest was easy.
He landed back on earth between some bushes and overgrown grass. They were at the front of the hospital, with the parking lot on one side and the lobby behind them. Will instantly detached himself from his rig and unslung his M4A1.
Mike did the same thing, unslinging a Mossberg 590 tactical shotgun. Will wished he had brought his Remington from the island. The spreading power of a shotgun always made clearing buildings so much easier.
Paul and Johnson came down on Will’s right. Paul was a big man, and he landed with a loud whump, as if he were out of breath. Johnson was lighter on his feet, probably helped by the fact he was carrying fifty less pounds than Paul. They both unslung AR-15 rifles.
When they were sure there was no one to greet them but dead cars in the parking lot and empty streets to the left and right, Mike looked up and whistled. The men above lowered their weapons bag, tied to a rope.
Out of curiosity, Will moved toward the lobby’s dirt-smeared glass windows and peered into the darkness on the other side. He couldn’t detect very much, but there was the unmistakable hint of movement. The ghouls were creatures of habit, and though they were rarely active in the day, they could be easily awakened to movement.
“Can you see them?” Mike asked from behind him.
“I see some movement.”
“There must be hundreds, maybe thousands, of them in there. It’s a big building. Nine floors’ worth of space.”
“If they ever get onto the tenth floor…” Johnson said, but let his voice trail off.
“Enough chatter,” Mike said. “Gear up. I want to be back here by noon.”
Paul opened the duffel bag and pulled out their gun belts. Will slipped his on after prying himself from the harness. He always carried the cross-knife, and Mike and his people had their own recently made silver-bladed weapons in makeshift sheaths around their waists.
Will tossed his harness back to Paul, who stuffed it into the same bag. When they had all the rappelling equipment inside, Paul stood up and whistled, and the bag was pulled back up to the rooftop by a half-hidden figure high above them.
Mike unzipped his backpack, pulled out four empty gym bags, and handed them out. “For supplies.”
A shadow fell over Will and he glanced up, saw Gaby looking back down at him over the edge. “Don’t get dead!” she shouted down.