by Sam Sisavath
He stumbled backward into the hallway, even as he pulled the trigger and the first wave of ghouls flopped to the floor and stopped moving. As soon as that happened, more jumped over the fresh corpses and into the living room.
There was a second or two as Keo debated the merits of trying to nail Blue Eyes—it remained standing at the door, fearless—in the head, because that was all it would have taken. Kill Blue Eyes, and the rest would retreat. He had seen it happen before; it was a proven tactic, time and time again. Without a commander, someone to control them, to point them at a target, the black eyes were almost like lost drones, unable to process the loss of their CPU.
But he never got the chance, because they were coming, flooding into the house, and Keo thought, Jesus, where did they come from? Where have they been hiding all this time?
He pulled the trigger again, swiveling the submachine gun from left to right, the whirring of gunfire and the clink-clink-clink of bullet casings hitting the floor, overwhelming every one of his senses, including the awful stench of undead things as they clogged up the big room.
He was in the hallway when he ran out of bullets. There was no time to reload, so Keo slung the MP5SD and drew the SIG Sauer, and still backing up, fired into the nearest ghoul. It was barely two feet away from him when his round pierced its chest, the creature’s desiccated form no match for the powerful bullet that sliced through it and struck the two ghouls directly behind it.
Unlike with the suppressed H&K, there was nothing to hold back the loud boom! of each pistol gunshot. The narrow corridor he was squeezed inside only seemed to double (Triple?) the blasts, and just like that, the pounding headache he thought he had gotten rid of was back but even more ferocious than before.
When it rains, it pounds!
But he had stopped caring about making a lot of noise, especially with all the banging the blue-eyed ghoul had done while it was breaking down the door, and Keo fired again and again, all the while backing up.
It broke down your door, Henry! Should have installed a heavier one, pal!
Even as three—then five—more ghouls dropped in front of Keo, three and five and ten more filled the narrow hallway in their place. It had been such a long time since he’d had to face so many of the undead things at one time that the sight of them, pushing forward without any semblance of self-preservation, took his breath away. They wanted him—they wanted to get to him—and it didn’t matter what he threw at them or how many of their kind died doing it.
They kept coming, and coming, and coming.
And because there wasn’t enough space for them to all squeeze through at the same time, they began crawling over one another, creating stacks, but at the same time clogging up the hallway.
Keo squeezed the trigger again and again.
There were so many and in such close proximity he didn’t even have to aim. Everywhere he fired, one—two—sometimes four of the creatures flopped dead…only to be almost instantly stepped on by the stampeding herd of child-size monsters.
He could feel the weight of the 9mm dropping even as he drained the magazine when he finally reached the bedroom and stepped through, then grabbed the door and slammed it shut. The deadbolt hadn’t snapped into place before the creatures crashed into the wooden slab on the other side, the thoom-thoom-thoom-thoom! like machinegun fire. The bedroom door wasn’t nearly as heavy as the thick oak one in the living room, so the pounding sounded noticeably louder.
Keo stumbled back, reloading first the SIG Sauer, then the MP5SD.
Thoom-thoom-thoom!
He had two more mags for the submachine gun in his pack in the corner, and he hurried to it and grabbed them, shoving them into his pocket.
Thoom-thoom-thoom!
A loud whinnying sound from behind him, and Keo looked over to find Horse at the window, facing him while its hind legs kicked back repeatedly at bony hands trying to pull at the burglar bars. There was a dozen of them out there that he could see, but many, many more fighting each other to get to the window, to be the first one in.
Thoom-thoom-thoom! from the other side of the room.
Keo turned back to face the door. He hadn’t felt it before, but now that he wasn’t retreating for his life, he remembered the wound in his side and grimaced as pain lanced through him. He pushed through it as best he could.
Thoom-thoom-thoom!
Louder and more insistent, but the door was holding because the ghouls were weak creatures and it didn’t matter how long they struck it; the bedroom door wasn’t going to buckle.
God, I hope it doesn’t buckle.
But the black-eyed ghouls outside in the hallway right now weren’t what Keo was worried about. It was Blue Eyes. Sooner or later, it was going to appear and push the black eyes aside and knock down the bedroom door, and there wasn’t going to be a damn thing Keo could do to stop it. If breaking the front door was nothing to it with three deadbolts, then what chance did this flimsier wood with its lone lock have?
Nothing. Not a snowball’s chance in hell.
Keo willed his breathing to slow down, then tune out the whinnying of Horse behind him as the animal continued to assault the ghouls trying to reach inside the room. He lifted the submachine gun and took aim at the door, placing the red dot sight on the spot where a slightly tall human male’s head would be if there wasn’t a door in the way.
Thoom-thoom-thoom!
He tested the trigger, then blinked at a bead of sweat stinging his right eye.
Thoom-thoom-thoom!
The pounding seemed to be working in sync to the thrumming from his temple, which only added to the annoyance.
Thoom-thoom-thoom!
But at least the pain in his side had subsided. Thank God for that.
Thoom-thoom-thoom!
Keo waited.
He didn’t move. He didn’t dare move even a little bit for fear of lowering his aim because it was coming. He had no doubts about that whatsoever.
Thoom-thoom-thoom!
Once in the head. One bullet in the head, and it would be over.
Easier said than done.
Thoom-thoom-thoom!
Another bead of sweat, dripping into his left eye now. Christ, where was all the perspiration coming from?
Thoom-thoom-thoom!
He risked taking his hand off the trigger and wiping his forehead with his long shirt sleeve, then quickly slid the forefinger back into the trigger guard.
“Come on, you bastard. Come on. Don’t keep me waiting.”
Thoom-thoom—
It stopped. The pounding stopped.
What the hell?
Keo listened. He didn’t move a muscle and barely breathed, and he just listened.
Nothing.
He couldn’t hear anything happening on the other side of the door.
Not just in front of him, but there was nothing from behind him, either. Zilch. Nada.
Horse had stopped whinnying, but Keo couldn’t risk the second or two it would have taken to glance back to find out why. He could hear the clop-clop of the horse moving around on the hard floor, which meant it was fine. Probably.
Then, out of nowhere, a loud boom!, like dynamite going off, coming from outside the house.
Keo spun around and looked toward the window. The ghouls had abandoned it.
A second boom! tore through the quiet.
Shotguns. Those were shotgun blasts!
Keo was still processing the new information when another one— boom!—shattered the night outside, except this time it was coming from the direction of the front door. Just when Keo thought whoever was shooting had moved over to the other side of the building, he was proven wrong, because there was another thunderous boom!, this time closer to his window.
More than one shooter!
He hurried toward the back of the room, glass crunching under his boots as he neared the window. He stayed far enough away that a ghoul reaching in couldn’t get its fingers on him, but close enough to be able to see out just as
orange and red flames stabbed out of a shotgun somewhere in the house’s front yard with another resounding boom!, temporarily lighting a figure wearing a mask that covered only the lower half of his face.
The man wasn’t alone; a second figure was with him, their backs pressing against one another as they both fired, racked their shotguns, then fired again. Keo recognized well-trained discipline and mutual trust in how the two men operated, as flames, like dragon’s breath, spat out from the long barrels of their pump-action shotguns over and over again.
Keo thought it had to be the most beautiful sight he’d laid eyes on in a long time.
Horse looked over at him with a questioning look.
“Hey, don’t ask me. I didn’t invite them, either, but I’m damn glad they showed up.”
Horse lifted his head in agreement. Or Keo thought he did, anyway.
Outside the house, one booming shotgun blast rang out after another, and another, and another, and it was all music to Keo’s ears.
THIRTY
“MAN, YOU’RE ONE LUCKY SOB,” Lam said.
“Really lucky SOB,” Willis said.
“I’ve been luckier,” Keo said.
“Not this lucky.”
“Definitely not this lucky,” Lam said. “If we hadn’t shown up, you would have been ghoul food, my man.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Keo said, but he grinned back at the two men because they were right. “What do you want, a kiss on the cheek?”
“That would be nice,” Willis said.
“Maybe plant one on the bum,” Lam said.
“You guys practice this?” Keo asked them.
“Nah, I’m just naturally charming,” Willis said. “Lam’s just naturally annoying.”
“Ouch,” Lam said.
They stood in the front yard of Henry’s house, looking at the twisted and black pruned skin corpses surrounding them. Half of the creatures were shredded by buckshot and were missing limbs and large portions of their heads. A few had gaping holes that Keo could have shoved his fist through and still had leftover room for the rest of his arm.
Lam and Willis hadn’t been Keo’s only saviors—two others had shown up with them: a woman named Chloe and another man named Oliver. They were also both slayers, wearing bulletproof vests with half-masks hanging around their necks by straps.
Chloe walked over to them now, holding a bloody machete in one hand and a severed ghoul head with a big chunk of its skull missing in the other. The creature’s eyes were wide open, and Keo could almost believe it knew what was about to happen just before it did, and the fear was frozen on its face when it died (again?). But he knew better, because the black eyes weren’t capable of fear. They were primal beasts that survived on the basest of instincts.
The blue-eyed ones, on the other hand…
Was it hunting me? Was it the same one from outside Jonah’s?
Keo might have shivered thinking about that possibility, but luckily Lam and Willis were too busy looking over at Chloe to notice.
“What’re you gonna do with that?” Lam asked her.
The girl—she couldn’t have been more than twenty or so, which would have made her a teenager during The Purge—grinned back at him. Blond and beautiful, if a bit on the short side. She reminded Keo of another blond teenager who would have grown into a twenty-something young woman by now. A gorgeous one at that.
“I dunno. I might use it as a decoration,” Chloe said. She placed the skull on her shoulder and did a pose. “What do you think?”
“I think you’re gonna need another one to balance it out,” Oliver said, walking up behind her.
“Everyone’s a critic,” Chloe said. She tossed the skull into the air, then kicked it like a soccer ball when it came back down. It flew into the darkness and disappeared somewhere into the woods beyond Henry’s yard.
“Nice kick,” Keo said.
“First Team All-District,” Chloe said.
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It means she was a really good soccer player in high school,” Oliver said. He was in his late twenties, and the way he stood protectively next to Chloe told Keo they were a couple. “So what’s going on here?”
“What do you mean?” Keo said.
Oliver took out a rag and wiped the thick ghoul blood off his machete. The slayers had charged into the fight with shotguns, but once they’d emptied their weapons, instead of reloading, they had switched to their knives. It probably helped that they’d taken out the majority of the threats by then and were just finishing off the few that remained.
After it left. Blue Eyes. It left its minions behind to occupy the slayers while it fled.
Smart fucker.
“The only time I’ve seen this many ghouls in one place was about four years ago up in Nebraska,” Oliver said. “The ones that didn’t do The Walk Out. Since then, it’s been nothing but small nests and a few ghouls here and there, nothing one slayer couldn’t handle. But this…” He looked around at the bodies. “This is new. This is coordination.” Then, back at Keo, “So what’s going on?”
Keo walked over to the porch and sat down. All the activity had left him winded, and he’d had to grab two more pills from his stash just to stay upright. The meds were just starting to have an effect (Think positive!) as he leaned back against one of the foundation poles and looked around at the chaos.
It was a bloodbath, not that he could see any “blood” out here. What liquids he could make out over the shadows were all black, some gathering in thicker puddles than others. The creatures had swarmed the slayers to no avail. But there had been a lot of them, Oliver was right about that. Morning sunlight would give him a more exact count, but Keo thought there had to be at least thirty bodies out here.
The door was wide open behind him, and there was a long line of more undead things stretching from it to the back hallway. Horse had come outside along with Keo, and the thoroughbred was grazing in the open, far away from the nearest dead ghoul or their blood. Like Keo, it was taking advantage of the opportunity to stand around in the night. Even the birds in the trees and the animals in the surrounding woods had returned to making noises now that the threat was over.
Keo noticed the slayers were watching him, waiting for a response.
“I have no idea,” he finally said. “I was trying to catch some Z’s when they knocked on my door.”
“And you’ve never seen them before?” Oliver asked. He didn’t sound like he bought Keo’s answer.
“These ones?” Keo shrugged. “One dead ghoul looks the same as another dead ghoul to me.”
“That’s such a living person thing to say,” Oliver smirked.
“I’ve been accused of a lot of things, but that’s a new one.”
“You Japanese?” Chloe asked. Then, before he could answer, “I was always into manga when I was a kid. Then I graduated to anime.”
“I don’t know what any of that is.”
“What kind of an Asian are you?”
“The kind that doesn’t know what manga or anime is, apparently.”
“I saw one of them staying away from the fight,” Lam was saying. He had said it so somberly that they all looked over at him. “It had blue eyes.”
“Yeah, I saw it, too,” Chloe said, serious again. “I don’t know when it took off, though.” She might have shivered slightly while doing her best to cover it up. “That’s the first time in a while.”
“A lot of first times tonight,” Willis said.
“I didn’t see it,” Oliver said.
“It was there,” Chloe said.
“I believe you. I just didn’t see it.” He looked back at Keo. “What did you see?”
“They’re right, it was here,” Keo said. He jerked a thumb at the door behind him.
“It did that?” Oliver asked. When Keo nodded, he climbed up the porch, took out a flashlight, and inspected the damage.
“What’re you guys doing back here?” Keo asked Lam and Willis. “I thought you were
dead set on committing suicide by heading into Houston?”
“We were,” Willis said. “Still might anyway. But that was before we ran into Chloe and Oliver.” To Chloe: “Tell him.”
“We were tracking them,” Chloe said. “The ones that attacked your place.”
Not my place, just some poor bastard who is probably dead, along with his family, Keo thought, but didn’t think the information was relevant, so he didn’t interrupt her.
“Like Oliver said, it’s been a while since we’ve seen this many in one place,” Chloe continued. “A literal swarm of ghouls. And they weren’t staying put. They were moving. We stumbled across their tracks outside of Kerry’s Mills, about ten miles from here. We were doing a job for the locals; three ghouls were snacking on livestock. Oliver thinks those three probably broke off from this group.”
Lam glanced back at the bodies in the yard. “That’s a goddamn lot of ghouls. You don’t see something like this every day. At least, not anymore.”
“It was definitely a blue eye,” Oliver said. He hopped off the porch and put his flashlight away. “I’ve seen those things take out whole buildings. Strong bastards. Fast, too.” He gave Keo what might have been a slightly impressed look. “And you survived it.”
I survived it again, he thought. Maybe.
“Barely, thanks to you guys,” he said instead.
“When did you get that?” Oliver asked, tracing one side of his face with a forefinger. “Before or after?”
“After.”
“Wanna tell me about it?”
“What are you, writing a book?”
“He is writing a book, actually,” Chloe said.
“The Ghoulish History of the World,” Oliver said, before shrugging. “It’s just a working title.”
“You got a publisher for it yet?” Keo asked.
“Still looking. You know anyone in New York who might be interested? I’d hate to end up in the slush pile.”
“Everyone in New York’s dead, as far as I know.”
“Dead schmead, as long as they know how to sell books,” Oliver said. “Speaking of dead, you mind if we bunk here for the night?”
“You’ve earned it,” Keo said. He stood up, before adding, “You’ll have to, uh, help me clean up the mess first, though.”