by Sam Sisavath
“Holy shit,” Blaine said. “Is that what I think it is?”
“It is,” Will said.
“Is it the same one from last time?” Maddie asked.
“Maybe,” Will said. “Gaby, what do you see?”
“Helicopter,” Gaby said.
“But what do you see?”
“Looking.” Then a few seconds later, “White.” He could hear frustration in her voice. “That’s all I got, Will, sorry. It’s still too far away.”
“Okay. Keep your finger on the trigger.”
“Will do.”
Will slung the Remington and pulled the M4A1 free. Blaine did the same thing with his M4.
There were no doubts about it; the helicopter was moving in their direction. If it was armed and had hostile intentions, they were pretty much out of luck, even if they could make the Jeep.
The helicopter began to slow down as it neared them, its tail turning slightly as the pilot eased up on the controls. It was close enough now that Will could see it was a civilian chopper. Best of all, there were no signs of a shooter leaning out of the open side door.
“What should we do?” Maddie asked.
“Don’t shoot unless it shoots first,” Will said.
He walked past the Jeep and watched the helicopter hovering for a moment, as if the pilot was trying to gauge the reaction to its presence. Eventually, it started lowering itself to the ground forty meters from him.
“That’s a good sign, right?” Blaine shouted after him.
Hope for the best…
Will covered his eyes at the swirling storm of dust and dirt biting into his exposed face and neck. “Stay here!” he shouted back at Maddie and Blaine.
They took up positions behind the Jeep, shielding their eyes from the debris.
Will waited for the helicopter to fully touch down, its landing pads rocking slightly as they settled on the uneven earth.
A click in Will’s right ear, then Danny’s voice: “Nice ride. You gonna bring it over so we can all go for a spin, too?”
“Looks pretty friendly.”
“I can’t see anything but a white bird. A big-ass white bird.”
“It’s civilian, and no armaments as far as I can see.”
“That’s a good sign.”
“But just in case, stay frosty.”
“I’m so frosty, Gaby’s catching a cold over here.”
“Oh my God,” Gaby said. “I don’t know what Carly sees in you.”
“I go places where other guys don’t dare, or can.”
“I think I just threw up in my mouth,” Gaby said.
Will tuned them out and walked toward the helicopter. He saw only one person inside the cockpit, a ponytail whipping behind her as she pulled off her helmet and climbed out of her seat.
The helicopter had blue stripes and sported a big, round number 3 inside a red circle, along with the letters KTBC. The Bell 407, a popular helicopter brand with news channels, looked weathered from time and the elements.
The woman climbed out wearing khaki cargo pants and a sweat-stained white T-shirt. She moved across the flat land toward him, careful to keep her hands at her sides, just far enough away from a holstered sidearm—and the black pistol inside it—but still close enough to go for it if everything went to shit.
“Don’t shoot,” she called. “I come in peace.”
Now that she was closer, he guessed she was in her early thirties, with an athletic five-eight frame. He slung his rifle and saw her let out a noticeable sigh of relief.
Will met her halfway and stuck out his hand.
“Jen,” she said, shaking his hand.
“Will.” He pointed back at the Jeep. “Blaine and Maddie.”
“They’re not gonna shoot, are they?”
“Hopefully not. You took a risk coming down like this, alone.”
“Yeah, well, end of the world and everything, what’s a little risk, right? Besides, you folks are the first moving things on two feet I’ve seen in days.”
“Can you use that thing?” he asked, nodding at her holstered sidearm.
“Haven’t had any reasons to use it yet.”
“You’ve been lucky, then.”
“Really lucky, yeah.” She looked past Will, across the lake, and at the Tower. “You folks from the island?”
“We are. Why didn’t you go straight there?”
“I didn’t see any safe landing zones when I made my passes three months ago. Overgrown grass, lampposts, and palm trees everywhere. There was a beach, but that’s always risky. Plus, I saw a lot of people with guns outside a house farther down the shoreline. What happened to that house, anyway?”
“I burned it down.”
“Ah.” She waited for him to continue, and when he didn’t, “Got a reason, right?”
“Yes.”
He got something back that looked halfway between an amused smirk and a grin.
“A man of few words; I can dig it,” she said. “By the way, where did you people get palm trees in Louisiana?”
“I have no idea. We found the place like that.”
A click and he heard Lara’s excited voice: “Danny said the helicopter came back?”
Will let Jen know he was keying his radio. She nodded and waited, as he said, “I’m speaking to the pilot now.”
“What does he want?”
“She. And I haven’t asked her what she wants yet.”
“Maybe we can do some kind of a trade,” Jen said. “I don’t have much inside the helicopter, but if you need medicine, or medical equipment, I have a hospital.”
“How much of the hospital?” he asked.
She grinned. “How’d you know?”
“Hospitals are big places. You’d need an army to hold all of it. Do you have an army?”
“No army, and we only have the top floor.”
“Maybe we can work something out. We happen to be running a little low on medical supplies these days.”
“Should I ask why?”
“It’s a long story.”
“Does it have anything to do with that house you burned down?”
Will smiled. “Maybe.”
CHAPTER 2
LARA
LARA WATCHED THE helicopter swoop over the island, with Maddie peering out from the cockpit passenger seat, before angling toward a makeshift landing zone Will, Danny, and Blaine had carved out of the hotel grounds. It had taken about an hour to chop down three trees and saw two lampposts within the 100x100 feet square box in front of the two pear-shaped swimming pools.
The kids—Elise, Vera, and Jenny—stood next to Carly and Lara on the raised, open patio outside the front doors of the Kilbrew Hotel and Resorts. She couldn’t blame them for being excited. It wasn’t every day you saw a helicopter at the end of the world. As the helicopter landed, its rotor blades threw around a healthy chunk of grass and dirt, some landing on the roof of the unfinished hotel behind them.
Jen, the pilot, climbed out with Maddie.
“Oh, great,” Carly said. “She’s blonde, hotter, and taller than us, too.”
“Hey, I’m blonde, too,” Lara said.
“But she’s taller.”
“Don’t worry, you’re safe. Danny likes ’em young.”
“Well, I’m good for a few more years, then.”
Danny had gone back to pull overwatch in the Tower, on the eastern side of the island behind the hotel. That left Will and Blaine to greet Jen and walk her over to the patio.
“Time to put on the hostess hat,” Carly said. She adjusted her bright red hair a bit, then jogged over to meet the group.
The girls ran after Carly, passing her by to get a better look at the helicopter. Carly led Jen over, stopping every few seconds to point out something around the island. Jen looked impressed.
Will climbed up the patio and leaned against the railing next to her. “What do you think?”
Lara reached over and flicked at flecks of dirt, grass, and what looked like dried mud
and flakes of concrete clinging to his brown hair. “You need a haircut.”
“About Jen.”
She looked back at the pilot. “Given how fast we’ve been going through our medical supplies, it’d be nice to re-stock. That, or we could just stop getting shot and blown up.”
“Now what would be the fun of that?”
“I forgot who I’m talking to. If you could stop getting into trouble, you wouldn’t be, well, you.”
“I’m not sure that was a compliment.”
“It wasn’t.”
“Ah.”
“But I love you anyway. Even if you do smell like rotten cabbage.”
He sniffed himself. “Yeah. It was pretty rank down there.”
She looked toward the shoreline, where she imagined the tunnel entrance was—not that she could see even a little bit of it from here. “Have you figured out why they spent all these months digging their way back in there? Could they have eventually gotten through the shack and onto the island?”
“I don’t think so. The shack’s solid steel with reinforced brick walls. Nothing’s getting through that.”
“So what were they doing down there?”
Will shook his head. “I haven’t a clue. Waiting, maybe.”
“For what?”
“Orders would be my guess. They’re foot soldiers. Have you ever heard the phrase, ‘Hurry up and wait’?”
“Is that a joke?”
He smiled. “Just something soldiers say.”
“You think she’s still out there, don’t you? Kate.”
“I know she’s out there.”
“So why hasn’t she attacked? It’s been three months.”
He looked toward the shore, and she could tell he had been turning the question over in his mind for some time now, too.
Why haven’t they attacked yet?
She remembered those anxious first few days on the island after the fight. Waiting—and fully expecting—every single day for an attack that never came. Everyone was hurt. Danny, Gaby, Maddie, even Will. She was hurt, too. Everyone.
And they waited, and waited…but it never happened. Instead of relief, each passing day without an attack was suffocating, as if they couldn’t breathe because of their own overwhelming anxiety. Or at least, it felt that way to her. Will had kept them afloat, never resting, always moving, doing everything until Danny was back on his feet. Gaby had been instrumental in those first few days and weeks, and Lara couldn’t recall a day where the teenager wasn’t stuck to Will’s hip like a devoted little sister.
“I don’t know,” Will said finally. “This island, us… What are we, in the larger scheme of things? Insignificant would be my guess. What’s a handful of stubborn humans compared to what’s going on out there, in the rest of the country? The world?”
“What is going on out there?”
“I don’t know. That’s what bothers me.”
Lara reached over and took his hand, then leaned against his shoulder.
“I thought I smelled like rotten cabbage?” he smiled.
“You do. But I’m used to it by now.”
“Okay, now I know that wasn’t a compliment.”
She laughed.
*
LARA WATCHED JEN tear apart a thirteen-inch white bass, gobbling up the meat and sighing with so much pleasure that Lara felt almost guilty about not appreciating the never-ending dishes of fresh fish more than she did.
They were inside the hotel lobby watching Jen indulge her amazing appetite. A flurry of dirt blew across the marble flooring, pushed through the wide-open spaces by a sudden breeze from the open windows. The lobby was aired out against the heat, and she couldn’t imagine how much hotter it would have been without the black marble that covered the mostly finished portions of the hotel. Thank God it would be cold soon, with November and December on the horizon. But then they would have to worry about heating…
“These are insane,” Jen said.
“You have Sarah to thank for that,” Lara said. “If it was just the rest of us, you’d be eating canned fruit, SPAM, or MREs.”
“We have boxes of those disgusting MREs at the hospital. The guys ‘rescued’ them from a nearby surplus shop a few months back. Before then, we were surviving on vending machine chips, sodas, and whatever else the cafeteria had in stock before we lost it.”
“Sounds like us in the beginning,” Carly said.
“How many of you are there?” Will asked.
Jen licked her lips and reached for another fish. “Twenty-six in the beginning, but over time we added two dozen more, so forty in all.”
“That’s a lot of people.”
“It’s a big hospital.”
“But you only have the top floor.”
“Correct. The hospital itself has ten floors.”
“And you’re just doing recon out here?” Will asked. “Like you were three months ago?”
Jen nodded. “We’ve been scavenging the areas around the hospital for food, but it’s becoming scarce.” She paused. “This may sound crazy, but some of us have a theory. We think the creatures have been purposefully sabotaging food near us so we can’t use it.” She looked at them over fish bones to gauge their reaction. “Sounds nuts, right?”
“No,” Will said. He glanced over at Lara, then Carly.
Jen picked up on the look. “What? Wanna share with the new girl in class?”
“What do you know about how they did all this?” Will asked.
“I know as much as anyone, I guess, which isn’t much. Why, you guys know more?”
Will told her about what they had managed to piece together. How the ghouls took over the big cities first during The Purge, using the population to grow their army exponentially. How they then moved into the countryside on the second night, conquering the smaller cities. When he got around to the blood farms, Jen listened intently and stopped eating. He told her about the collaborators, about the blue-eyed ghoul. Lara thought Jen might gag back up everything she had eaten in the last ten minutes.
“Jesus,” Jen said when Will was finished. “We’ve been hunkered down in the hospital for all these months, just trying to keep them at bay. If what you’re saying is true, we’re truly fucked, aren’t we? Are we just delaying the inevitable?”
“Not necessarily,” Lara said. “This island, for instance, is safe. There’s something in the water—the mercury content, maybe—that the ghouls don’t like. So there are three certain ways we know of to fight them. The sun, bodies of water, and silver.”
“What about silver?”
“Silver kills them,” Will said.
He drew his knife, the one that used to be a cross but that Will had sanded down into a double-edged bladed weapon. He handed it handle-first to Jen, and she took it carefully.
“What is this, some kind of cross?” she asked.
“It used to be,” Will said. “The silver on the outer edges is what’s important. Have you tried shooting them?”
“Of course.”
“What happens?”
“Nothing. They just shrug it off.”
“Not with this. They can be killed. You just need to use the right ammunition.”
“Silver,” Jen said.
He nodded. “Silver.”
Will drew his Glock. He pulled out the magazine and thumbed a bullet free.
Jen took it and turned it over between two fingers. “Silver bullets?”
“Hi ho, silver,” Carly said. “It sounds ridiculous, we know, but it works.”
“Ridiculous?” Jen said. “There are undead things crawling around in the darkness of that hospital, and every single night they try to break through to the tenth floor to get at us. Compared to that, silver bullets make perfect sense.”
Lara smiled. That was as good an answer as she had heard. “One question,” she said.
“Shoot,” Jen said, handling the bullet back to Will.
“What took you so long to come back? It’s been three months.”
“When are you due back at the hospital?” Will asked.
Jen glanced at her watch. “Tonight, actually, but now that I’m already down here, and you folks seem friendly enough—i.e., no one has shot at me yet—I guess I could stay the night. It’d be nice to sleep on a real bed again. You guys have any spare rooms?”
“Um, maybe one or two,” Carly said.
*
AFTER LUNCH, JEN was back inside her helicopter’s cockpit, talking on the radio with her hospital. Lara watched her from the lobby window, wondering what it felt like to be able to climb into something that could fly you away whenever you wanted. She could go anywhere, at any time, and not have to worry about the creatures that lurked in the darkness.
I need to learn how to fly one of those things.
She felt a pair of strong arms slip around her waist. Will slid his body against hers and kissed her neck. He had poured water over his face and changed clothes, but he still smelled of sweat and dust. They all did, these days.
She leaned her head to one side to give him better access.
“What are you thinking?” he asked.
“Isn’t that my line?” she smiled.
He chuckled.
I wish I could fly, she thought, but said, “That we could really use supplies from that hospital. We’re running dangerously low on everything.”
“I agree. That’s why I’m going back with her, to work out a deal with this Mike guy that runs the place.”
“I should go, too.”
“One of us has to stay here.”
“So you stay.”
“Right, that’s going to happen.”
“You don’t know what we need.”
“You can make me a list.”
“It’s not the same thing.”
“I’ll go back with her first, see if it’s safe over there. Maybe I can help them get some of the other floors back. Jen’s telling Mike about silver right now.”
“You sound as if you’re planning on being gone for a while.”