by Sam Sisavath
“Jesus, Danny,” she said.
“No, just Danny.” He stopped and crouched before reaching her.
“What are you doing?”
“Those other two—start stripping them.”
“What?”
“Their clothes. Grab them quick, before they come back.”
“Before who comes back?” Nate said behind her.
“Spider-Man and his amazing friends, who else?”
She glanced back at Nate, who was slowly lowering his rifle. She could just barely make out his soft blue eyes in the darkened store.
He met her gaze and shrugged. “I should have known he was too stupid to die.”
“I heard that,” Danny said.
“You were supposed to.”
The dead man closest to her was lying on his stomach, his head turned to one side so that the protruding breathing apparatus of a gas mask over his face was easy to make out. He had on a brown jacket, and a rifle lay next to him, within reach of his extended fingers. Gleaming brass casings surrounded him like a police chalk outline.
When she turned the dead man over onto his back, he had on a black uniform underneath. There was a name tag, but she didn’t waste the second it would have taken trying to squint out the letters. He was a collaborator—a dead one—and that was all she needed to know.
Nate moved past her and toward the second body. He crouched and pulled off the man’s jacket to get at the uniform underneath. He glanced back at her before the two of them looked over the counter at Danny on the other side. He was already unbuckling the third dead man’s gun belt while keeping one eye on the front door.
She followed his gaze, but couldn’t see anything out there.
“Danny,” she said.
“Less talk, more stripping,” he said.
“Is this going to work? The uniforms?”
He didn’t answer her.
“Danny…”
“Sure,” he said, his grin just barely visible in the semidarkness. “Put everything on. Uniform, gun belt, and gas mask—the works.”
She wasn’t sure if she believed him, or if he even believed it himself, but she turned back to her man anyway. Her fingers were trembling slightly as she pulled down the jacket’s zipper.
The collaborator was younger up close, probably in his mid-twenties, with short black hair and hazel eyes. There was a hole in the middle of his forehead, where blood pooled. His face looked frozen in a state of shock.
Better you than me, she thought, and pulled off his jacket.
*
THE PANTS AND shirt were a size too big for her, but she fixed both at the same time by tucking the hem of the shirt into her waistband and tightening the gun belt another notch. There was surprisingly little blood on the clothes. At least, in the darkness of the hardware store. It would probably look different in the morning.
If she was still alive to see morning.
Nate hadn’t been quite as lucky. His man had bled out so much he made a face the whole time he was pulling the shirt on, then zipped up a jacket over it. He picked up a gas mask from the floor next. “Is this really going to work?”
“I don’t—” she started to say.
Danny interrupted her, snapping, “Put them on now,” from the other side of the counter.
She glanced over, surprised by the edge in his voice, but something else drew her eyes past him, and she saw the silhouetted figures moving outside the store on the sidewalk, their emaciated forms like dancing shadows against the moonlight.
Ghouls.
She sucked in a large breath and pulled her gas mask on, then grabbed the dead soldier’s M4 she had laid on the counter. The ammo pouches around her waist were full again after combining the leftover magazines with the ones she had been carrying since this morning. She touched the butt of her Glock, just to make sure it was still in the holster along her hip.
Nate had wandered over to stand next to her, clutching his own stolen M4. His appearance, with his lengthening Mohawk sticking out above his gas-masked face, made for a menacing sight, like something out of a bad post-apocalyptic movie.
“Stay here,” Danny said, taking a step forward.
“Where are you going?” she asked, wondering if her voice sounded as odd as his did through the gas mask.
“Gotta let them know we’re in here, so they don’t come in for a closer look.”
“Danny…”
“Trust me.”
She sighed and clutched the rifle tighter, watching Danny walk toward the front of the store to stand about five feet from the windows. He had stopped in a pool of moonlight, as if presenting himself to the swarm of undead things outside.
God, Danny, I hope you know what you’re doing.
His presence didn’t go unnoticed, and the creatures surged toward the store seconds later. The sight of them rushing forward made her catch her breath, and it took everything Gaby had to fight the instinct to retreat. She didn’t, because there was nowhere to go. The only escape was up, back into the attic—and then what? Could they really survive up there all night?
“I think it’s working,” Nate whispered next to her.
The ghouls were pressing themselves against the glass panes, some sliding their bodies back and forth, leaving thick clumps of thick liquid in their wake. A bony elbow tap-tapped against another section of window, though she wasn’t sure if the creature was doing that on purpose or if it just couldn’t help itself because of its mangled arm. They hadn’t made any attempts to enter the store through the lone door yet, which was the best indication Nate could be right, that this might actually be working—
One of the creatures glared past Danny and straight at her.
Her legs might have wobbled slightly, and when her hands showed signs it might follow suit, she tightened her grip around the rifle to keep them busy. The sight of them rubbing themselves against the glass and peering in at Danny (and her) made her skin crawl. She willed the rest of her body to remain still, and slowly, very slowly, they obeyed.
Then, one by one, the creatures pried themselves from the windows and raced off up the street. The sight of them, simply pulling back and disappearing one by one by one, leaving thick films of brown and white (and yellow?) liquids behind to mark their presence, made her breath quicken even more so than when they were staring in at her.
“Sonofabitch,” Nate said breathlessly next to her.
Danny turned around and began walking back to them. He looked calm, as if he hadn’t just been playing who-will-blink-first with a swarm of ghouls, with just a thin wall of glass between them a few seconds ago.
“I can’t believe that worked,” Nate said.
“Oh, ye of little faith,” Danny said.
“It must be the uniforms and gas masks. They’re using them as some kind of identifying markers. Like dogs.”
“Like dogs?” she said.
“That’s what they are, when you get down to it. Just animals. Not any smarter or dumber. And it’s pretty easy to trick an animal, even one that runs on two feet.”
Danny finally reached them and pulled off his gas mask.
“I never doubted you for a second,” she smiled at him.
“Not even a second?” he smiled back.
“Okay, maybe just a pinch,” she said, pinching her fingers in front of her.
Danny grinned, and from the look on his face, he probably had a clever comeback ready, but he was interrupted by a loud squawk that blared across the store, followed by a muffled voice from somewhere in the darkness.
“Come in, Perkins,” the muffled voice said. “You still there?”
“That’s a radio!” Nate said, dropping his voice to almost a whisper for some reason.
“Find it!” Danny said.
Nate searched behind the counter while she looked on the other side, and Danny went through the aisles, scanning the floor.
“Anything?” Danny called.
“Nothing,” she called back.
“It’s n
ot back here,” Nate said.
“Keep looking!” Danny said.
Another squawk from somewhere in the darkened store, followed by, “Perkins, come in.”
The voice sounded clearer (and closer!) this time, and she hurried toward a corner, feeling like a blind man groping for a clue.
There!
She snatched it up from the floor, said, “Got it!”
Nate and Danny hurried over as the radio squawked again, and this time a new voice said, “If they’re not answering, it means they’re dead.”
“All of them?” the first voice asked.
“What do you think, genius? If the others are still around, they’d answer, wouldn’t they?”
“What now?” a third voice asked. “Do we go in after them?”
“We don’t even know where they were when the shooting started,” the second man answered.
“Somewhere in the middle of town,” the first said, though he didn’t sound entirely convinced.
She knew leaders when she heard it, and there wasn’t one among the three they were listening to now. There was too much doubt in their voices and too little certainty. You couldn’t hope to lead men with that kind of wavering. She had learned that much just watching Will at work.
“Can’t go in there now, not with all that activity,” the second voice said. “Nightcrawlers are all over the place like fucking cockroaches in heat. They must be chasing something big. I don’t wanna get in the middle of that.”
“So what, just leave them in there?” the first one asked.
“It’s risky, that’s all I’m saying.”
“We should wait till morning,” the third man said. He was trying to sound confident, and failing. “We’ll get reinforcements then. That’s assuming whoever’s in there is still alive after tonight. That’s a big if.”
“Yeah, I like that idea even better,” one of the other two said. She was losing track of who was who; there was a mechanical distortion through the handheld radio that made the voices start to blur together.
“Tomorrow,” someone else said, clearly relieved.
They waited to hear more conversation, but the radio remained quiet.
After a while, Danny grinned at her and Nate and said, “See? Told you. Easy peasy.”
Then he let out a big sigh.
*
JUST IN CASE the dead soldiers’ friends decided to risk entering the town anyway, they dragged the third body behind the counter and deposited it in a pile with the other two. They left the attic door open with the rope connected to the ladder dangling down, in case they needed it in a hurry. She didn’t like the idea of being cornered up there again—the brief but hellacious gun battle from earlier still fresh in her mind—but it was preferable to facing the snake pit of ghouls gathered outside the store at the moment. She could still see them occasionally moving back and forth across the store’s glass walls.
Danny had locked the front door just to be safe, not that any of them thought it was going to do a hell of a lot of good if the creatures decided to assault the building anyway. The glass windows weren’t going to hold for very long, at least not between now and morning. The lock was more for the benefit of any humans that might be poking around. If nothing else, it would provide them with an early warning.
They crouched behind the counter with the bodies a few feet behind Gaby. She did her best to ignore their presence, which was difficult because it seemed like her boots squeaked on their blood or she kicked a stray brass casing whenever she moved. Nate was on the other side of the back counter, and Danny had taken up position in the middle. Danny sat against the back wall now, another one of the dead soldiers’ M4s in his lap. His recently acquired jacket was zipped up all the way to his neck, and he looked like a turtle with its head stuck out of the opening.
They had all removed their gas masks for the sake of comfort, though at the moment, with the stink of the bodies nearby, she was having second thoughts.
“What happened?” she asked Danny. She wasn’t quite whispering, but she kept her voice low enough that she could be heard and still hear anything approaching the store.
Danny looked over. “When?”
“After you jumped down.”
“I shot them.”
“All three?”
“I got lucky. It was dark and they were preoccupied with trying to pinpoint where you and Nate Dogg were up in the attic. That, and they probably didn’t expect me to jump down the way I did. You know, all idiot-like.”
“You fired two more times after that. What were those for?”
Danny’s face changed slightly, from relaxed to something she hadn’t seen in a while, not even when they had discovered that their expedition to Harold Campbell’s facility was for nothing.
It looked like…uncertainty.
“Danny…”
He shook his head. “I don’t think you’d believe me if I told you, kid.”
“After all we’ve been through? After last night in the hangar?”
He grinned, though she could tell he didn’t quite have his heart in it.
“What was it, Danny?” she pressed.
“Remember back at the farmhouse?”
“What about it?”
“The blue-eyed ghouls?”
“Wanna play?” the creature had asked her, the sound of its voice burying itself so deep into her soul that she would never be able to forget it for as long as she lived.
“What about them?” she asked.
“One of them was here tonight. Earlier.”
Nate’s shadowed outline stiffened at the other end of the counter. She should have reacted the same way, but she was surprisingly…calm. Maybe it was the last few days, or last night back in the hangar at the Larkin airfield, but for some reason she couldn’t quite summon the fear that should have been natural when told there had been a blue-eyed ghoul inside the store with them earlier tonight.
“What happened?” she asked.
“I can’t explain it,” Danny said.
“Try.”
“It told me to put on the uniform and gas mask. Told me they would work to keep the ghouls out.”
She didn’t reply. Neither did Nate. How do you respond to something like that?
“Jesus, Danny,” was all she could manage.
“I told you you wouldn’t believe me,” Danny chuckled. “Hell, I still don’t believe it, and I actually lived through it. Unless, of course, this is all one big dream, in which case where are the bikini-clad girls? In my dreams only, you understand, so don’t be running off half-cocked and blabbing that last part to Carly without proper context.”
“You said it told you the uniforms would work?” Nate asked.
“Uh huh.”
“Why would it do that?”
“I haven’t a clue, kid. Not a clue.” He paused, then added, “There was something weird about it…”
“You mean besides the fact that it was a blue-eyed ghoul and it was talking to you, while simultaneously not trying to kill you?”
He grinned. “Yeah, that too.”
“What was it?”
“I don’t know. Something…” He shook his head again. “I don’t know how to explain it. Hell, I might have just imagined the whole thing. It was pretty danky up there in the attic with you two. Lots of bad BO going around.”
Despite the jokes, she could see it on his face: Danny was at a loss for words, something she couldn’t say with any regularity. But whatever had happened before she and Nate came down the attic, it had struck him speechless. More than that, it had left him confused and unsure of himself.
“I’m still not convinced this isn’t a dream,” Danny said.
“It’s not,” Gaby said.
“You sure?”
“Pretty sure.”
“Ditto,” Nate said.
“Well, shit,” Danny said, “if I can’t trust you, who can I trust, Nathaniel Ramsey? You are, after all, a war hero.”
“I still don’t know
who that is,” Nate said.
“You should pick up a book sometime. Books, in case you crazy kids and your wacky Internets don’t know, are these heavy things made of paper and bound into a big boxlike object that you can also employ as a rat beater. Very useful.”
“Did it, uh, say anything else?” Nate asked. “This…thing?”
“Nope. It said to put on the uniforms and gas masks, then to show myself to the looky-loos outside.” He shrugged, and Gaby thought he might have reached down instinctively to clutch the M4 in his lap just to be sure it was still there. “Figured, what the hell. The damn thing had me by the balls and it tells me how to save myself, then just runs off? Didn’t think I had much to lose after that.”
“Jesus Christ, Danny,” she said again, unable to think of anything else to say.
“Yeah,” he said, and stared into the darkness again.
She wondered if he was replaying the moment with the blue-eyed ghoul over and over in his head, still unsure of everything he had seen or heard even now, long after the creature had gone. God knew her own encounter with one of those things had been traumatic enough, and hers only wanted to kill her. This one wanted to…save them?
And here she thought things were finally starting to make some sense. Returning to Texas had completely undermined that belief. First, there was the insanity at the airport hangar, and now this. Whatever “this” was. She still wasn’t entirely sure, and judging by the continued confused expression on Danny’s face, neither did the ex-Ranger.
We should have stayed away. We should have stayed out of Texas. God, why did we ever come back? For lights?
They didn’t say anything after that for the entire night. No one knew what to say. Not Danny, not her, and not Nate. Instead, they sat in silence and watched the shadows with suspicion, and waited for an attack that never came.
In the morning, it was a different story.
CHAPTER 27
KEO
HEY, FRANK, YOU out there? Someone was looking for you last night. Give me a call back when you get this, pal. We gotta have a nice, long talk.
“You’re looking thoughtful,” Jordan said.