by Sam Sisavath
There was fresh blood on the floor where Donna had fallen. Smith tracked the drips to the girl herself, lying nearby on the carpeted part of the store where the gym equipment was. She was squeezed in between two treadmills and looked unconscious. There was a big bundle of bandage around her left shoulder; not the best-looking field tourniquet Smith had ever seen, but apparently it did the job.
“She okay?” Smith asked.
“She’ll live,” Clark said.
He was a big, strapping guy, probably over six feet tall, and even broader in the shoulders than when Smith had seen him from afar. He had the kind of square jaw Smith had only seen in comic books, not to mention piercing blue eyes.
Right now, those eyes were narrowing in Smith’s direction. “You shot one of them.”
Smith nodded. “That’s why I’m in here with you and not out there. I don’t think they’re going to look too fondly on me shotgunning one of their guys in the face.”
“No, I don’t suspect they would,” Clark said. He turned to Margo. “A couple of them made a run for the door, but I sent them scurrying back.”
Margo nodded and peered above the counter at the parking lot. Smith walked over to join them.
The parking lot would have been pitch-black if not for the bright moonlight above it, allowing Smith to see the vehicles sprinkled out there, along with black head-shaped objects peeking over or around them. The combination of nightfall and mists made it difficult to make out how many bobbing heads were looking back at him. They were also keeping a respectable distance, which didn’t help.
Farther back in the wide open space of the lot were ghostly silhouettes. Those would be the attackers’ horses, grazing on the grass alongside the street. Smith couldn’t get a firm number on the animals, either. Half a dozen? A dozen?
“How many are out there?” Smith asked.
“Ten, I think,” Clark said.
“Ten?” Margo said, looking over at Clark for confirmation.
The man nodded. “Around there.”
“That’d be all of them.”
“Yup.”
“Shit. I was hoping it wouldn’t be all of them.”
“Yeah, me too,” Clark said.
The disappointed look on Margo’s face, coupled with Clark’s regretful tone, made Smith think they had some inside baseball knowledge about the attackers that they weren’t sharing with him. He waited for them to do so, but neither did.
Smith said, “Is that ten more, or they came here with ten, and are now down to eight or so?”
“The former,” Clark said.
Ten or more. Dammit. Maybe I chose the wrong team.
After all, even though he’d told Clark that the gang outside wouldn’t welcome him with open arms after he had killed one of theirs, they didn’t necessarily know that. Smith was well aware of that fact himself and had only mentioned it to convince Clark that he wasn’t a threat.
Maybe it wasn’t too late to change rosters…
“Hey,” Margo said. Then, when Smith looked over, “I need you to find out how those two got in here. There has to be a back door.”
“Pretty sure there is,” Smith said.
“You were here before us. Where is it?”
“My guess would be somewhere in the shoe area. I was on my way there when you opened up on me.”
“I need you to find out for sure and deal with it.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Smith said, probably with a little more sass than he had intended. “Anything else you’d like me to do while I’m doing that, ma’am?”
Margo narrowed her eyes. “Just that for now, smartass.”
Smith grinned before jogging away from them. He didn’t mind securing the back—it was the first thing on his mind anyway. In fact, he was surprised that whoever this Freddy was, he hadn’t sent more people in through the same rear exit. Maybe he thought Margo and Clark would have been ready for it after the first attempt.
He darted around still-standing racks and through aisles to reach his destination faster. A few seconds faster, anyway. The left side of the Archers was still in one piece, unlike the right half, which had taken a pounding from gunfire and, well, a lot more gunfire.
Smith reached the shoe section and slowed down, then cautiously picked his way between shelves toward the back.
There, an open door into an employees only room.
Smith peeked into the hallway, then spent the next thirty or so seconds listening for sounds of more attackers in the area. When he couldn’t pick up any, he went inside, then cleared two rooms—an employee lounge and a small bathroom. There was a metal door at the end with a sign marked exit on top of it. Smith hurried over and shoved the deadbolt into place, then just to be sure, dragged a vending machine out of the break room and pushed it against the door. That solo effort took a lot of sweat and made a lot more noise than he would have liked, but he got the job done. The machine wasn’t going to stand up against a sustained assault on the door, but it would last long enough for him to run over and defend it in case of an attack.
That done, Smith headed back. On the way, he tried to remember if there was another way into the Archers. A second rear entrance/exit? A side door, perhaps? He’d been through his share of Archers, but he’d never really combed every inch of them. They were just too vast. Maybe not as big as a Walmart, but they weren’t convenience stores, either. And while most of the outlets he’d visited in the past shared almost identical layouts, there was always the possibility of a variation in the blueprints…
He made a mental note to be sure, later. For now, his hunger was killing him, and his stomach growled loudly as he approached Margo and Clark. The duo had split off and were hiding behind separate counters, with open space between them and the doors in front.
Margo glanced over as Smith approached her. “What was all that noise?”
“I barricaded the back exit,” Smith said.
“Could you make more noise?” Clark asked.
Smith rolled his eyes, though he didn’t think Clark could see it in the semidarkness of the Archers. “Got the job done. Relax.”
“Relax,” Clark said. “Yeah, right.”
Smith crouched next to Margo and peered out at the parking lot. It was more lifeless now than the last time he looked out. If he didn’t already know there were men hiding behind the vehicles, he’d think it was just the three of them in the whole city watching an empty patch of concrete pavement. The clouds of mist had shifted again, taking away his vision of the horses.
“They still out there?” Smith asked just to be sure.
“Of course they’re still out there,” Margo said. “What did you think, they’re going to give up and run off?”
“I was hoping.” He glanced over at Donna’s sleeping form nearby. “How’s the kid doing?”
“We gave her some morphine for the pain and sedatives so she could get some rest. She’s okay, but she lost a lot of blood.”
“Is she your sister?”
“No.”
He waited for Margo to continue, but she didn’t.
Before he could ask another question, Smith caught a flurry of movement from the corner of his eye and glanced out at the parking lot just as a dark figure popped up from behind a truck and raced forward.
Clark stood up and fired twice at the man. He missed with both rounds but did send the figure scurrying behind another, closer vehicle.
Pop-pop-pop! as half a dozen rifles returned fire into the store.
Bullets pek-pek-pekked into the counters, most missing and disappearing into the darkness of the store behind Smith. Freddy’s men stopped firing after a few seconds, leaving glass to pelt the outer lobby. Smith was surprised there was even any glass left hanging off those frames to fall.
Then, when the last shot faded and the world was silent again, Smith said, “So. Who’s Freddy?”
“He’s an asshole,” Clark said.
“Can you elaborate on that?”
“He’s a fucking asshole
.”
“What I’m getting out of this is that Freddy is not your friend, Clark.”
Clark snorted but didn’t say anything else.
Smith looked over at Margo, crouched next to him, but she apparently didn’t have anything to add to their conversation.
She said instead, “Do you have a rifle?”
Smith shook his head and tapped the shotgun. “Just this and a pair of handguns. And I didn’t even have them until a few hours ago.”
Margo gave him a disbelieving look. “You’ve been walking around out there without a weapon until now?”
Smith thought about Allison and her “kids.”
He said, “It’s a long story.”
“I’m sure it is.”
“Probably not half as interesting as yours and this Freddy character, though.”
“No, probably not.”
Again, he waited for her to elaborate.
And again, she didn’t.
Like pulling teeth with these two.
Smith said, “You guys, uh, wouldn’t happen to have anything to eat, would you? I’m starving.”
As soon as he said it, his stomach growled again, this time longer and, if possible, louder.
“How long has it been?” Margo asked.
“Just a day,” Smith said.
Margo nodded at the horses loitering in the nearby gym area. “Supply saddles. Help yourself.”
“Don’t mind if I do,” Smith said, and started to get up.
“Don’t eat everything,” Clark said.
Smith nodded at Margo. “She said to help myself.”
“That doesn’t mean to eat everything we have.”
“What does it mean?”
“Eat until you’re not hungry anymore, then stop. We’re not made of food, John Smith.”
“That’s my name, don’t wear it out,” Smith said.
He walked over to where the animals were, his stomach growling again at the prospect of food. He passed Donna, who hadn’t woken up despite the additional gunfire. She looked even younger than Smith had originally thought, and couldn’t have been older than fifteen.
The horses fidgeted as he approached them, but they calmed down quickly. That wasn’t a surprise. They hadn’t run when all the shooting began, which probably meant they were used to being around violence.
Smith found a supply bag draped over one of the saddles and pulled it down. He had no idea if it was Clark’s, or Margo’s, or Donna’s, and he didn’t care. He was starving and found a bag of jerky. He could tell by the smell that it was deer meat. It was a bit hard on the teeth, but he tore it up and relished the taste.
He finished up the first one and was reaching for a second piece when he heard the sudden pop-pop-pop of rifles mixed with the bang-bang! of handguns. Smith reflexively ducked down next to one of the horses, until the realization hit him that no one was shooting at him.
The shooting was coming from outside, in the parking lot, but the rounds weren’t being directed at the store.
Now what?
Twelve
Smith was chewing on the second stick of jerky when he hurried back to the front of the store and crouched next to Margo. She was still looking over the counter at the parking lot outside. Smith could see muzzle flashes in the darkness, like firecrackers popping inside the thick, swirling mist, but he couldn’t tell what they were shooting at. A few stray rounds pekked against the brick-and-mortar wall outside the store, but it was clear they were accidental and not intended for them.
“What are they shooting at?” Smith asked.
“Ghouls,” Margo said.
Ghouls. Shit.
For some reason, Smith was surprised to hear that nightcrawlers had finally come out to play. But the more he thought about it, the more he realized it was an inevitability. Even if there were just a few of the undead things in Mist City, they would have heard all the gunfire and would be drawn to the hotbed of action like moths to flames.
But he asked anyway, “Are you sure?”
Margo nodded. “Saw a couple of them running across the parking lot.”
“How many?”
“A dozen. Maybe more. But not—”
Margo didn’t finish, because the shooting had stopped. The last shot echoed, then faded…and there was just the sound of the three of them breathing inside the Archers again.
Smith could just barely glimpse a couple of figures moving around in the mist, possibly dragging something on the ground with them. Were they moving bodies? And if so, were those human or ghoul corpses?
“Silver bullets?” Smith asked.
Margo nodded. “What idiot would run around out here without silver weapons?”
Smith grinned and thought, Me, for one, though of course that wasn’t the case before he ran across Allison at the Private Store-It.
But he kept that to himself and focused on the seemingly empty world outside. No, not really empty. There was still a hell of a lot of mist. Too much to see anything besides flashes of movement. Clark, nearby, almost fired a couple of times but always held back when the silhouettes vanished, only to reappear somewhere else.
Smith was thinking about the ghouls that had attacked Freddy’s group—and from the sounds of it, had been dispatched—when he glanced in the direction of the rear door that he had just barricaded.
“What?” Margo said.
“I was just thinking,” Smith said.
“About what?”
“Where you find one ghoul, you usually find more. And they love cities.”
“Yeah, they do.” She seemed to think about something for a moment. Then, “Is there another way into this place? Besides the one you already dealt with?”
“I don’t know. I was still searching the building when you guys showed up. I don’t think there is, but…”
“But what?”
“But I can’t be sure. Like I said—”
“You didn’t get a chance to go over the place before we showed up.”
“Yeah.”
“What’s going on?” Clark asked.
Margo shook her head at him. “Maybe there’s another way in. Smith’s right; if there’s one ghoul nest, there’s usually more. This is a big city. The ones that showed up can’t possibly be all of them.”
“You think more might be on the way?”
“Or already here.”
That prompted Smith to sniff the air, but there was nothing in the place that he hadn’t already smelled earlier: sweat, blood, and gunpowder.
But none of the rotting, garbage stench of ghoul presence. The creatures gave off an unmistakable odor, the kind of violating stench that once you got a taste of it you could never, ever forget.
And Smith didn’t detect that now.
Not yet, anyway.
“What is it?” Margo asked.
He shook his head. “Nothing.”
“All I smell is gunpowder.”
“Yeah, me too.” And the blood and the sweat, Smith thought but didn’t add. He looked past the front doors and into the parking lot and said instead, “Let’s hope however many of them showed up, they took a couple of Freddy’s boys with them.”
“Let’s hope,” Margo said, though she didn’t seem to have that much faith.
“Who is this Freddy guy, anyway?”
Margo didn’t answer, and neither did Clark across from them, even though he clearly had also heard the question.
“Look,” Smith said, “if I’m going to fight this guy, I should at least know something about him.”
Margo still didn’t say anything, and Clark seemed to be dead set on pretending he hadn’t heard any of Smith’s questions.
“Freddy—” Smith began.
“—will kill all of us and won’t lose any sleep over it,” Margo said, cutting him off.
Well, at least she’s talking now.
He said, “So you know him.”
“Yes,” Margo said.
“How?”
“We used to run together,
” Clark said.
Smith looked over at him. “Run together how?”
“There was a time when we depended on one another for our survival,” Margo said. “We watched each other’s backs. We fought together—against humans and ghouls.”
“So what happened?”
“Everything went to shit, is what happened,” Clark said.
“Can you be a little more specific?”
“No,” Margo said. She pulled her rifle off the counter where it’d been lying and sat down on the floor with her back against the display. “All you need to know is that he’s a vicious fuck and he didn’t come here to make friends.”
Jesus Christ, Smith thought, chastising himself for not hiding in the back room when the trio started exchanging gunfire with Freddy’s crew earlier.
Would that really have been any better, though? If he couldn’t find a way out, he’d still be stuck in the Archers once Freddy’s two shooters had taken care of Margo and her friends. He’d never know—
Wait.
…hiding in the back room…
Like a warehouse where inventory was kept. Those always had their own entrances and exits. There wasn’t always one—especially if it was a smaller Archers—but this one was just big enough…
Shit.
Smith got up. “I’ll be right back.”
“Where are you going?” Margo asked.
“There’s another back hallway behind the fishing gear. There might be a warehouse on the other side. I have to make sure either way.”
“Hey,” Margo said. Then, when Smith looked back, she drew her knife from a sheath and held it out to him grip first. “I’m guessing that knife isn’t silver?”
Smith took her blade. “No. And thanks.”
He took out the one in his sheath and put it on the counter, then slid hers in its place. Not a perfect fit, but it would do.
“What are you strapped with?” she asked.
“SIG Sauer,” Smith said.
“No, I mean, what caliber.”
He patted his hip holster. “Forty-five.” Then, patting the other SIG behind his back, “Nine mil.”
“I only have spare nine mils in my pack. You can have some of them when you get back.”
“Thanks again.”