by Sam Sisavath
“You’re persistent. Resilient. A born fighter.”
His strength was sapped, his mind spinning, and just standing was a chore. He raised a hand and leaned against a wall to keep his legs from giving up on him. He couldn’t shut out the pain because that would mean paralyzing himself, and he couldn’t do that.
Not now. Not now…
“You would have made such a fine addition.”
He had never felt more human since his transformation, and he didn’t know if he should be exhilarated or alarmed by the sudden realization. He had blocked out all the sounds from behind him, where the hallways connected to the tunnel. Keo and Danny and Gaby. They were still back there, somewhere. He longed to turn around and go save them.
But he couldn’t. He couldn’t…
“Maybe I always knew it would end this way. Even back then, in that nothing town outside the bank. Do you remember?”
Yes, he remembered. He didn’t even have to dig very far. He recalled that night in that small town, inside the bank. A chaotic twenty-four hours as he and Danny fought for their lives, and the lives of their friends. One of many times they had been forced to rely on everything they had while praying to an unseen God that neither one of them actually believed in.
Yes, he thought, pushing his response into the hive mind. I remember.
“There you are. It’s good to hear your voice again. You’ve shut me out for so long.”
Enjoy it. It’ll be the last thing you hear.
Mabry laughed inside his head.
He glared at the metal door up the hallway. There was nothing between him and it now, and it beckoned him like a siren.
“You’ve come this far, so finish the journey.”
He gripped the knives and began walking toward the door.
“Welcome home…my son.”
30
KEO
“WHAT THE FUCK! Where did Frank go?”
“Did anyone see him?”
“Holy shit!”
“What the fuck do we do now?”
“What the fuck do we do now?”
There was too much smoke and pulverized concrete trying to get into his eyes and nostrils and mouth, despite having the mask and NVG on, for Keo to pinpoint who was shouting out what questions. It could have been one or two or all of them at the same time. His ears were still ringing from the blast, so that didn’t help at all. Behind the lens of the night-vision goggles, the thick mist on the other side of the tunnel looked like a living thing with tendrils reaching out for him.
Frank had disappeared into the expanding clouds, his dark shape there one second and gone the next. Keo struggled to see even with the artificial assist, though breathing was easier thanks to the mask. He was stumbling backward, trying to regain his footing because he swore the ground was still trembling in the aftermath of Danny’s C4. The only thing he was certain of was the pounding headache inside his skull, reminding him of all the punishment his poor head had endured the last few days.
Right. Like I needed the reminder!
But Danny had done his job—he had carved a hole in the wall for Frank to go through without bringing the entire structure down on top of them. The problem was that Frank had gone without them.
What the fuck, Frank? This wasn’t the plan!
A warm body pushed against his back and a familiar voice (Gaby) shouted very close to his ear, “Keo! Will’s gone! What happened to Will?”
“He went inside!” someone answered. Male. Danny. “That dumbass! We were supposed to go in together!”
“Inside? Inside where?” Gaby asked.
“Where do you think, kid!”
“Why—” Gaby started to ask when someone opened fire, the brap-brap-brap of a machine gun like a series of thunderclaps slamming off the dripping walls around them.
“There goes the neighborhood!” Danny shouted.
“Back, back!” Keo shouted. “Get the fuck back now!”
“Oh, ya think?” Danny said, sounding very dangerously close to laughing.
They came out of the smoke—thin figures slightly hunched over, obsidian eyes like polished gems against the green field of his NVG. They were moving fast, racing through the sludge, some actually clinging to the walls and a few of them were on the ceiling, but how was that even possible? When had they learned to do that? Could they always do that?
A red laser dot flashed across the first wave of ghouls as the brap-brap-brap continued to rain death and bodies fell, plopping into the water one by one by one. But if Keo thought that was going to stop them, he was sadly mistaken, because more of them rushed out of the swirling smoke, like nightmares coming to life before his very eyes.
“Back, back!” Keo shouted again, flicking the fire selector on his MP5SD to full-auto with one hand while turning on the laser pointer attached to the bottom of the barrel with the other.
“Wait, which direction should we go again?” Danny asked, and this time he really was laughing. “I’m so confused!”
Keo couldn’t help himself and grinned behind his mask. He didn’t know if he liked the ex-Ranger or was this close to turning around and kicking him in the face.
He was still deciding when he squeezed off a burst and three ghouls flopped into the thick sludge. With the NVG and the silver rounds going exactly where the laser pointer directed them, he couldn’t miss, and neither could any of the others shooting to the left and right of him. Their bullets punched through weak flesh and hit one, two, sometimes three bodies behind the first target.
It was the literal definition of a shooting gallery, except this one was endless and each falling creature only opened up a new space for the one behind them. They kept coming, like rabid dogs splashing the sewage filth that threatened to swallow up their tiny forms. Keo swore a few of them actually disappeared under the water where they were trampled by the others. Bodies began floating around them, looking more like unreal papier-mâché than beings that were, once upon a time, men and women.
The only thing that saved them from being overrun in the very first seconds of the hole’s creation was the size of the tunnel. Not that he had ever been down here before—or, thank God, any place even remotely similar—but Keo was surprised by how roomy it was. But maybe roomy was a matter of perspective, because for the endless horde trying to get at him, the man-made cavern wasn’t nearly wide or tall enough, and the black eyes were starting to slam into each other and the walls as they surged forward all at once.
Keo continued to backpedal, not wasting a second to glance back to check where he was going and trusting everyone else to keep moving. Then he was past Hanson, who had stopped firing his M249 for some reason.
“Keep firing, Hanson!” Keo shouted.
Hanson shook his head and dropped the machine gun, then unslung his carbine. “I’m out!”
“Whatever happened to the magic ammo box?” Danny shouted.
“No such thing!” Hanson said.
“Now you tell me!” Danny said as he backed up on the other side of Hanson while firing nonstop with his M4A1.
Keo squeezed off a long volley into the oncoming tide of blackened creatures and watched a group of them drop and vanish into the water, but their sickly forms weren’t nearly heavy enough to cause them to sink and they simply floated back up…only to be crushed under by a new wave of ghouls trying to get by.
There was no order, no semblance of control with the monsters. The sight of them vomiting forth out of the dark tunnel without end should have terrified Keo, but instead it made him chuckle to himself.
A girl. You know that, right? You’re here because a girl asked you to.
Man you’re getting soft!
“I’m out!” Keo shouted, and ejected the magazine and scrambled for a new one.
“You want me to reload for you?” Danny shouted. “Go go go!”
Keo turned and ran, kicking up filthy water over his clothes, and some got high enough to splash his mask, but he was beyond caring or even aware of the smel
l at that point. He reloaded as he ran while Danny and Hanson and Gaby fired into the throng behind him.
A new round of gunfire, these coming from in front of him, made him look up.
Angie, James, and Blaine were retreating toward him, firing into a new wall of ghouls surging from the other side of the tunnel.
“Fuck me,” Keo said under his breath.
Blaine either heard him or sensed him, and glanced over his shoulder while fumbling to reload his own weapon. “They’re behind us!”
Gee, thanks for that newsflash, Blaine.
Keo wanted to laugh, but he raced forward and took Blaine’s place in the middle of the trio and unloaded his new magazine into the twisting sea of bodies and jet-black flesh and eyes instead.
Angie was firing to his left, a sewage-covered bandage wrapped tightly around her right hip. If she was in any pain, Keo couldn’t see it on her face as she backed up and shouted, “I’m out, I’m out!”
Blaine had snapped a fresh magazine into his M4 and begun firing again, standing to Keo’s right. “What happened?” he shouted. “Where’s Will?”
“He’s gone!” Keo shouted back.
“Gone? What do you mean, gone?”
“Poof! Gone! We gotta get to the platform and get the fuck back to the surface!”
“There’s no fucking way we’re getting to the platform now!”
“Fuck!” Keo shouted.
Keo couldn’t even see where the platform was anymore. There was just bodies. Moving and twisting black bodies as ghoul after ghoul scrambled up the tunnel, trampling and climbing and crawling over one another.
“Back up!” Keo shouted. “Back the fuck up!”
Angie and James reappeared to his left and right, Angie hobbling on her bad leg. But she gritted through it and shouted, “Go! Go!”
Keo and Blaine turned and went, reloading as they did while Angie and James covered their retreat.
Behind him—now in front of him—were Danny, Gaby, and Hanson, the flashes of their weapons lighting the dark tunnel in staccato flashes, each one giving Keo a good view of a sea of crooked and butchered teeth and gnarled flesh. The creatures were still coming, but slowly, their advance hindered by their own vast numbers and the quickly forming piles of bodies of their dead that began soaking up the sewage water, creating a sickening wall of bloated corpses that slowed their progress.
Jesus Christ, if I never have to see anything like this again in fifty lifetimes…
The ghouls were slowing, but they weren’t stopping. Which was a problem because Danny, Gaby, and Hanson were backing up toward Keo and pretty soon they were going to be pressed up against him and there would be nowhere to retreat.
Ten meters…
Nine…
Danny stopped shooting and backpedaled away from Gaby and Hanson to reload. He threw a quick glance over his shoulder, and Keo saw that he had removed his mask. “Let me guess: The exit’s no good?’
“Yup!” Keo shouted back.
“Well, that sucks!” He finished reloading and pulled back the charging handle. “Man, Carly is so going to kick my ass when they find me down here covered in shit! Talk about being in double-deep shit!”
Danny spun around and opened up on the fresh wave of incoming horde, even as Gaby stumbled past him, trying to reload and run at the same time, only to discover that there weren’t a lot of places for her to run to. The look on her face as she saw what was back there was one of pure horror, and for a split second she locked eyes with Keo.
Then someone screamed, and Keo turned back around in time to see James disappearing into the mass of limbs. The ghouls flowed over him as if he were little more than a speed bump, and Keo watched helplessly as Angie, instead of retreating, ran forward and began hitting the closest ghoul with the stock of her rifle.
Keo wanted to shout You idiot! Get back here! but he never got the chance. Instead, he watched with almost morbid fascination as an undead thing’s head caved in under Angie’s brutal assault. But the creature didn’t go down, and instead its hands grabbed Angie and pulled her in like a mother would a child for an intimate embrace.
“Blaine!” Keo shouted.
The big man had finished reloading and immediately started firing into the very spot where Angie and James had disappeared. Keo couldn’t figure out if he was doing that to spare the two of them from being turned or—
“Blaine!” Keo shouted again. “Get back here!”
But Blaine didn’t move, and kept firing, even as the horde converged on him. Keo cursed under his breath and took one, then two steps back toward Blaine, determined to grab him and drag his ass back whether he wanted it or not, when Blaine’s legs seemed to give out from under him and he disappeared into the water. The last Keo saw of him was the barrel of his rifle sinking but still firing into the ceiling, bringing down chunks of the brick and mortar on top of the ghouls that had begun to overwhelm the spot he had been standing in just seconds ago.
“Blaine!” Gaby shouted, racing forward while firing her rifle.
Keo reached out just as she was about to pass him by and grabbed her by the elbow and yanked her back. She nearly lost her balance and fell, but he managed to keep her upright enough to begin dragging her back with him. “He’s gone! He’s gone!”
Gaby struggled against him, but Keo kept dragging her backward, even as she continued to squeeze off round after round into the trudging horde. There were now so many bodies in the water that every step the creatures took meant they had to push away a half-dozen dead ghouls blocking their path. Keo didn’t want to think about where James and Angie and Blaine were in that quickly growing graveyard.
“I’m empty!” Hanson shouted from behind him.
“Go!” Danny shouted.
Their voices were so close—much closer than Keo had expected—that it made him look back to be sure, and found himself staring right into Hanson’s NVG from less than a meter away.
“We’re fucked!” Hanson shouted at Danny. “We’re outta space!”
“Shut up and reload!” Danny shouted back.
Keo spun back around and put another burst through the nearest four ghouls, watching them fall and almost-sink before the next wave was on top of them. Gaby was free again and was unloading her M4 next to him, the plop-plop-plop of their bullet casings hitting the water echoing off the walls of the tunnel, which seemed to have constricted inward since the last time he looked.
He had been running back and forth with such wild abandon that there were clumps of things on his face and over the NVG lens, but Keo could still see and what he saw, as dirt-smeared as it was, wasn’t something he wanted to bear witness to in the last few seconds of his life.
He took a step back and sprayed, then did it again. Gaby was mirroring his movements, though he was pretty sure she wasn’t aware of it. Not that it did any good because there were simply too goddamn many of them.
So many that the water was rising as it became stuffed with their corpses, and despite the fact that every one of their bullets chopped their way through two, three, sometimes four of the damn things, there was such an unlimited number that it didn’t do any good at all. The only results were that they kept backing up, and Keo was very aware that Danny and Hanson behind him were doing the exact same thing, and pretty soon there would be no place for any of them to go.
“Keo!” Gaby shouted next to him. “What now?”
He snapped a quick look at her, but saw only the NVG tube staring back at him as she dropped her rifle into the water—it sank and didn’t come back up—and drew her sidearm and began shooting.
What now? Good question.
There was no what now. This was the plan. Get Frank through the wall and follow him under the HC Dome and finish off Mabry. They always knew Frank would have to do most of the work—he was, after all, stronger and faster than all of them combined—but they would assist him, because that was the plan.
Frank’s plan and Danny’s stupid name for it.
Plan G.
Oh, to have a backup plan.
Plan H? he thought, and wanted to laugh out loud, but of course he was too busy shooting and so was Gaby next to him, and Danny and Hanson were behind him doing the same thing.
There was no path forward and no road back. They had come to a complete standstill in the tunnel, somewhere between the platform in front of them and the hole in the wall behind them. Darkness was closing in from both sides, though the creatures had begun to slow even further because of the sheer number of dead bodies in their path.
“Fuck fuck fuck!” Hanson was shouting behind him.
“Get a new vocabulary, Hanson!” Danny said, laughing as he did so.
“Fuck you!”
“Sorry, already married! But if you wanna buy me dinner first, I might think about it!”
Danny laughed again, and for some reason Hanson joined right in.
Keo had switched back to semi-auto to conserve ammo. He didn’t need to know he was down to his last magazine. The lightness around his waist was all the evidence he needed. Pretty soon he’d be down to his pistol, just like Gaby, who had just reloaded a second time—
Click! as the MP5SD went empty.
Keo slung it instead of just dumping it into the water the way Hanson had done with his M249 earlier. After all, you didn’t find a whole lot of Heckler & Koches lying around Texas these days, and Keo was a man who appreciated good firearms—even if they were empty and were only going to be useful as a blunting instrument in the next few minutes.
Minutes? We’re being a little optimistic, aren’t we?
Try seconds, pal!
He squeezed the trigger on the Sig Sauer again and again, and though the handgun didn’t have a laser pointer, it didn’t matter because the ghouls had gotten so close that he didn’t even have to aim to take out one, two, three with a single shot. Another time and another place and the kill ratio per bullet would have made him a happy man, but right now all it did was open space for another one or two or five to take a fallen undead thing’s place.