The Fires of Atlantis

16 Keo

“Are we there yet?” Lorelei asked for the fifth time in the last three hours.

“Not yet,” Keo said.

“How long have we been walking?”

“Not long enough.”

“It feels like it’s been days since we stopped. Can we stop and rest again?”

“We’ve already stopped three times.”

“Yeah, but the last time was so long ago.”

“It was thirty minutes ago.”

“That’s pretty long.”

“We’re almost there.”

“That’s what you said two hours ago. Carrie, can we stop and rest a bit?”

“One more hour, okay?” Carrie said.

Lorelei groaned but said, “Okay.”

It took them most of the morning and parts of the afternoon, but after hours of walking and listening to Lorelei complaining, they finally reached the bridge he had seen on the map. The brown water below was part of a river, one of many that connected to Beaufont Lake, which would take him to Song Island. After that was the Gulf of Mexico and, if he was lucky, Santa Marie Island and Gillian.

Because you’ve been really lucky so far. Yeah, right.

Two lanes and fifty meters long, the bridge looked old and cracked. There were no helpful marinas (or boats inside them), but someone had put a trailer park next to the shoreline on their right, while the left had been converted for warehouses. A couple of wooden planks partially submerged in water was the closest thing to a dock he could find.

Keo glanced down at his watch: 1:16 p.m.

They had made better time than he thought, which was a miracle given that Lorelei was hungry every other hour. They had also spent time raiding a few convenience stores along the way, replenishing what little supplies they were carrying. Other than that, he was frankly surprised they had gotten this far in just half a day.

According to the map, there were lakeside homesteads five kilometers on the other side of the bridge. And where there were homes by a lake, there were boats attached to docks. That was the theory, anyway, one formed before he found out the ghouls’ human flunkies had been sinking boats up and down the lake. It all made sense. No wonder they sent two trucks and four men to scout the marina yesterday. A boat suddenly showing up, when they had been systematically sinking every one they crossed paths with, was a major anomaly in their world.

Still, all he needed was to find one boat, preferably a sailboat where he didn’t have to scout for fuel to run an outboard motor. What were the chances of that happening? Who the hell knew, but it beat walking the rest of the way to Texas…

As they crossed the bridge, the heat seemed to double down on them. Lorelei was drinking from another bottle of water, her third since this morning, but Keo didn’t bring it up. Lorelei eating or drinking meant the teenager was not complaining about something (her favorite topic being why they couldn’t find a working vehicle when there were so many just sitting around), or asking him to rest for a bit.

“What about those homes?” Carrie said, looking at the rows of trailers parked to their right. “Should we look for supplies in those?”

“No,” Keo said.

“You don’t think there might be anything worth salvaging? There’s an awful lot of them.”

“Nothing we couldn’t do without. Besides, we have enough on hand to get to Song Island. You still want to go there, don’t you?”

“Of course.” She gave him that earnest look again. “And thank you, Keo. For taking us there. I know you didn’t have to. You could have left us behind at the marina too, but you didn’t. I mean it. Thank you for bringing us along. Lorelei thanks you too, when she’s not stuffing herself.”

Lorelei smiled and nodded, but for once didn’t say anything. She actually blushed a bit before taking another drink of water.

“We’re not there yet,” Keo said.

“But we soon will be,” Carrie said. “Even if there’s no one there now, the fish in the lake aren’t going anywhere. We could stay there, Keo. If the creatures can’t cross the water, we could stay there indefinitely.”

“You think you can survive on an island by yourself? Just you and Lorelei?”

“You can learn to do a lot of things when you don’t have a choice.” She paused, then said, “Besides, it’s better than out here. And you could always stay with us…”

“I can’t.”

“I know. Texas.”

Galveston, he thought, but nodded instead. “Yeah.”

“What’s her name? Gillian?”

He nodded.

“She must be some woman.”

“She is.”

“I bet.”

“Hey, how much further, guys?” Lorelei said behind them.

Keo pulled out a plastic bottle of peanut butter. He had been saving it since yesterday’s raid at a Kwik-e-Stop convenience store. Keo held it out to Lorelei. “Here, have some of this.”

“Oh wow, peanut butter,” Lorelei said, taking the bottle. “I haven’t had this in ages. Thanks, Keo!”

“Here’s a spoon.” He handed her a titanium spork from one of his cargo pant pockets. “Wash it when you’re done. Thoroughly.”

“I will!” Lorelei drifted back a bit as she enthusiastically twisted open the peanut butter lid and dug in, sighing with pleasure at the smell.

“Is that peanut butter still good?” Carrie asked him with some concern.

“Should be good for up to a year.”

“You’ve been saving that up, haven’t you?”

He smiled to himself. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He heard the roar of outboard motors from a kilometer away, prompting him to dart out of the small two-lane road and into the sparse grouping of trees on the other side of the ditch to his left. There was nothing on the right except undeveloped land, dried marsh, and a never-ending sentry of ancient power poles.

Route 410 was a long stretch of asphalt that ran through the countryside until it finally ended at the shoreline of Beaufont Lake, which was currently hidden in front of them though he thought he could smell the lake water already, and the air seemed a lot cooler than before.

They continued forward alongside the road, using the trees for as much cover as they would provide, which wasn’t very much at all. Every minute brought them closer to the loud motor, which was as anomalous a sound as you could get these days.

Keo saw doubt in Carrie’s face whenever he looked back. She was scared, and he guessed she had every reason to be after what she had been through. The idea was to stay clear of people — especially ones that were making so much noise — not walk right to them, which was exactly what they were doing now. Even Lorelei had gone completely silent, only occasionally picking at her nearly empty bottle of peanut butter.

After about twenty minutes of slowly walking toward the sound, they came across a group of old homes. That forced them to traverse one overgrown lawn after another, as well as skirting wooden fences with peeling paint. Most of the houses had boats in their backyards and some in the front, though the vessels didn’t look as if they could still stay afloat on the water, much less sail. Keo took mental notes of the houses they passed. There was a two-story yellow monstrosity that looked like a good last-minute option in case they needed a place to hide — or fight — from.

He glanced at his watch: 3:21 p.m.

He smelled the familiar scent of fresh lake water before glimpsing the sparkling surface of Beaufont Lake moments later, visible even in the distance thanks to the clear day. Where housing was sparse and individualized this far back from the shoreline, the ones that crowded the more expensive lakeside properties were large and inviting, with private wooden docks with boats tied to them.

Boats.

Say, brother, can you spare one of those?

The outboard motors they had heard before had begun to fade and were now moving south down the lake. There were men standing around on one of the docks, and Keo glimpsed figures moving inside a two-story red house at the end of the street. Two Jeeps were parked in the driveway, and a man with an M4 stood on a boat launch watching birds flying in a V-shape pattern high above him.

Keo counted six men in all, wearing camo uniforms similar to the ones he had killed back at the Lake Dulcet marina. And these six were just the ones he could see from his position, about a hundred meters from the shoreline.

Carrie and Lorelei leaned out from the corner of the house, and Carrie’s face turned noticeably paler at the sight of the uniforms. “Soldiers. They’re from the towns.”

“Do they all wear uniforms?” Keo asked.

“The ones I’ve seen recently, including those that tracked us down.”

Keo took out a pair of binoculars from his pack and focused on a man moving up the street toward the red house. Like the others, this one also had a patch of Louisiana on his left shoulder and a star on the right side.

“What are they doing here?” Carrie asked. “Is there a town nearby?”

“I don’t know,” Keo said. “But from what you told me, there’s not a lot around here that could sustain a population of any size for any length of time. You’d need plentiful food, supplies, and most importantly, water.”

“There’s plenty of water in the lake.”

“Not safe drinking water. You’d have to constantly boil it to kill all the microscopic organisms unless you want the entire population getting sick. That takes too much time to do by hand, which is what they’d have to do since, from what you tell me, they don’t have electricity in these places.”

“No. It’s sort of like going back to the old west. Everything’s done by hand, though they do use propane and gas to cook sometimes and I’ve seen battery-powered lamps in some of the buildings.”

“But no big machinery to treat the water. Those need electricity.”

“The town I was in definitely didn’t have electricity.”

“A spring well would be ideal. But I don’t see anything like that around here.” He shook his head. “No, this looks a lot like a staging area to me.”

“Staging for what?”

“Good question.” He thought about it for a moment, then took out the map and scanned it. “According to the map, Song Island is about fifteen miles south from here…”

“So you think there is something on Song Island after all?”

“I don’t know. It would be nice to know what these assholes are doing here, though.”

Keo put the map away and pulled back around the corner, Carrie following suit. Lorelei had retreated halfway to the end and was now searching for something along the weeds at her feet. Keo was amazed how quickly she could switch from the girl he thought at first was a mute to the chatterbox who couldn’t shut up, and now back again.

“What now?” Carrie asked in a low voice.

Keo didn’t answer right away. Things had gotten complicated. Again. First losing Zachary and Shorty, then finding himself straddled with two civilians. Now, running afoul of heavily-armed men in uniforms. Whatever happened to the guy whose biggest worry was living up to the motto of “See the world. Kill some people. Make some money”?

Damn. I really have gone soft.

“Keo?” Carrie said. She was watching him closely. “What do we do now? Are we still going to Song Island?”

“We need a boat for that,” he said. “I’m not sure we’re going to find another one down the shoreline. If they really have been sinking boats up and down the state, they’d keep just what they need. The ones out there might be it.”

“They’re not just going to give us one—” She stopped herself. “Oh.” Then, “You’re crazy. There are too many of them.”

“It wouldn’t hurt to ask.”

She stared at him in silence for a moment. “Are you being serious right now?”

A sharp zip! made him look back toward the corner.

Carrie opened her mouth to say something, but he quieted her with a finger to his lips. Behind her, Lorelei physically snapped her mouth closed, and her entire body started trembling noticeably.

Keo gripped the MP5SD and moved back over, then slowly leaned around the corner of the house. He wasn’t sure what he was expecting, but it wasn’t one of the “soldiers” standing with his back to them just three meters away, pissing into a dying garden. How the hell had the man crept up on them, unnoticed until now?

Sunlight bounced off the man’s smooth and completely bald head, and he was humming some pop song Keo vaguely remembered as being popular before radio stations stopped broadcasting entirely. He was swaying a five-ten body from left to right and spreading a generous stream of urine over the shriveled flowers at his feet.

Keo leaned back and reconnected with Carrie’s anxious eyes. He shook his head and slipped the submachine gun behind his back, then reached down and pulled the Ka-Bar knife out of the leather sheath strapped to his left hip.

Carrie tensed while Lorelei groped for her hand and held on.

The crunch-crunch of heavy boots on brittle grass sounded from around the corner. The noise was coming toward them, a realization that struck Keo a second before the man actually walked by while still zipping up his pants.

Either Lorelei or Carrie must have let out a gasp, because as soon as the man appeared next to them, he spun around, right hand abandoning his zipper and reaching for his holstered sidearm.

Keo lunged, and he didn’t have all that far to go before he could shove the very sharp point of the Ka-Bar upward. The knife pierced the man’s chin, slicing through a generous layer of fat, and kept going until it penetrated the bottom of the soldier’s mouth and sliced through his tongue. The seven-inch blade didn’t stop its momentum until the knife guard banged against skin.

Keo slipped behind the falling man, grabbing the pudgy figure around the waist. He caught the body as it went completely slack and lowered it to the ground before leaning the man against the wall of the house.

The girls had stepped back, Lorelei with her hands over her mouth to fight back a scream. Carrie looked stunned, but fine. At least, until Keo pulled the Ka-Bar out of the man’s head—“Lewis” was written on his nametag — and there was a surprisingly loud slurp as blood poured freely out of the skewered chin.

Carrie made a gurgling noise before throwing up into the grass.

There were houses along the shoreline, and from what he could tell, the soldiers were only staying at the two-story red building. So he made the decision to move sideways with Carrie and Lorelei instead of retreating back up Route 410 and found a house about 300 meters from their last spot (and the dead body currently occupying it).

It was a small white house, quaint compared to its neighbors, with a dirt driveway and an old red pickup parked up front. They hurried across the backyard and entered through a sliding glass kitchen door. Keo went in first with his MP5SD, Carrie and Lorelei following close behind.

He was surprised the women hadn’t put up more of a fight when he suggested this course of action. He was almost sure they would battle him tooth and nail, the idea of sticking around in a place filled with soldiers almost as deplorable as being captured by them again, but they hadn’t. Keo wasn’t sure if that was because they trusted him (go figure) or if they were too shocked by what he had done to the soldier to think straight.

Either way, he was glad for the lack of drama. Working behind enemy lines was nothing new for him, but he preferred a quiet area of operation when possible. He had been doing this, in one form or another, since he was twenty-one. The organization paid good money for people who were willing to throw their lives away for a hefty paycheck. It wasn’t as if he was good at anything else.

“See the world. Kill some people. Make some money.”

Like its exterior, the inside of the house wasn’t much to look at. The kitchen was tiny, as were the living room and a single bedroom on the other side. A wooden rickety dock extended from the side of the house into the lake, so walking on dirt was entirely unnecessary. There was nothing attached to the end of the dock, though he did find two fiberglass paddles leaning against the wall next to the side glass door.

Carrie and Lorelei were searching the cupboards in the kitchen for supplies when he returned. “Anything?” he asked them.

“Nothing worth taking,” Carrie said. She stopped what she was doing and looked out the glass window. “What are we doing here, Keo? Shouldn’t we be running?”

“Run where?”

“Away from here.”

“There are only two directions to go — here or back up the road. Once they discover the body, and they will sooner or later, they’ll launch a full-scale search. When that happens, they’ll spot us from a mile away. There’s nowhere to hide out there, Carrie. No place they can’t find us before nightfall.”

“And here…?”

“The less shitty of two really shitty alternatives.”

He glanced at his watch: 4:16 p.m. Keo unclipped the radio he had taken from the dead man. It hadn’t squawked yet, which meant the body was still undiscovered. He was surprised it was taking so long. Apparently the soldiers weren’t nearly as organized as he had thought.

“Why did you take the radio?” Carrie asked.

“They’re going to start communicating when they find the body,” Keo said.

“So this way we can listen in on them. Find out what they’re going to do.”

“Yeah.”

“Smart.”

He smiled. “I’ve had recent experience dealing with assholes trying to kill me.”

Keo went into the living room and sat down with his back against the wall, both eyes focused on the glass side door. Lorelei sat silently across from him, knees pulled up against her chest. She had reverted back to the frightened girl from yesterday morning at the marina. He thought he would be grateful for the quiet, but after a while he found himself missing the sound of her voice.

The radio finally squawked about five minutes later, and a man’s voice said, “Lewis is dead.” Keo picked up a lazy Southern drawl. “You should see him. Goddamn.”

“What the fuck happened?” another man asked.

“Hell if I know,” the first one said. “He’s got a big hole under his chin where someone shoved a knife up into his face.”

“Fuck.”

“What I said.”

“Everyone, sound off,” the second man said.

Keo listened to three other voices calling out on the radio as ordered.

One of them was a woman, who said, “You said Lewis is dead? How the hell did that happen? I just saw him taking a piss about twenty minutes ago.”

“Yeah, well, someone clocked him while he was taking the whiz probably,” the Southerner said. “His fly’s still open. Luckily, he shoved his little Lewis in before they took him out. Thank God for small miracles.”

“Ouch, what a way to go,” someone else said, and there was laughter.

I guess Lewis wasn’t the most popular guy in the group.

“Shut the fuck up,” the second man snapped.

Must be the leader of this little sideshow.

“Everyone get back to the OP until we can figure out what happened,” the leader said.

“Travis,” the woman said.

“What?” This was the Southerner.

“Lewis’s radio. Does he still have it?”

There was a brief moment of silence before Travis finally responded. “No, it’s gone. Shit.”

“What?” the leader said. “What’s going on now?”

“Lewis’s radio is gone,” Travis said. “Whoever killed him has it.”

“That means they might be listening in on us right now,” the woman said.

Looks like there’s at least one with a working brain cell in the bunch. So why isn’t she in charge?

“Fuck,” the leader said, annoyed. “Everyone, get back here. Now. Until then, no one uses the radio.”

The radio went dead after that. Keo waited to hear more, but they had completely shut down on him. He assumed they were going to switch radio frequencies as soon as they met in person, which, again, meant they weren’t nearly as stupid as he had originally thought.

Carrie came out of the kitchen where she had been watching the back window and, probably, listening through the open door. “They found the body.”

“Uh huh,” Keo nodded.

“What now?”

“They’re probably going to start looking for us once they meet up and come up with a plan.”

“Then we should go before they get here.”

He looked out the window at the empty dock. “We’re not going to walk the rest of the way to Song Island from here, Carrie. And I’m not getting to Santa Marie Island without a boat.” He gave her his best reassuring smile. “Besides, there’s only five of them left.”

“Only five?”

“Five’s better than six. I’ve seen worse odds.”

“Really? Where?”

“Have you ever been to Kabul in the spring?”

Carrie started to answer when he held up his hand and tilted his head to listen.

“What is it?” she said instead.

“Outboard motors.” He looked back out the window. “They’re coming back. The boat that left earlier.”

“How does that help us? Doesn’t it just mean the bad guys will have more people looking for us now?”

Keo smiled.

“What are you smiling at?” Carrie asked, annoyed.

“The guys at the house are meeting in person to change their radio frequency so I can’t listen in on them anymore, remember? The ones on the boat don’t know that.”

“How can you be sure?”

He held up the radio. “I’ve been listening. There’s no way the guys on the boat know about what’s happening here. Besides, this thing has a max range of two miles.”

“I still don’t know where you’re going with this.”

“We need a boat. There just happens to be one coming toward us right now. The question is, do you trust me?”

She stared at him and didn’t answer.

“Carrie. Do you trust me?”

She finally sighed and nodded. “Do I have a choice?”

“Daebak.”

“What?”

“It means let’s get us a boat.”

It was an all-white twenty-footer with three guys inside. One stood behind the steering wheel in the center while the other two sat on a long plastic seat behind him, both cradling M4 rifles. They looked like men who had been on a long but uneventful trip and were glad to be back. The outboard motor was a Yamaha, about 200 horsepower from the sound of it, pushing the boat through the calm Beaufont Lake surface without any trouble.

It took the three men exactly fifteen seconds to spot Carrie standing at the end of the dock, waving her hands frantically over her head at them. It took them another ten seconds to slow down before he saw one of them on a radio, no doubt trying to reach someone at the house. He knew that was the intention because the radio he had picked up from Lewis squawked softly (he had turned down the volume) and he heard a male voice asking about “the woman.”

Of course no one answered, because the men at the two-story red house had already switched frequencies, though he figured they could probably hear the boat coming right about now. How long did he have before the leader switched back to the old frequency to warn the returning soldiers? Ten seconds? Twenty? This entire plan was already tenuous enough, but it was going to go straight to hell as soon as someone from the house realized what was happening.

But for some reason, no one had responded by the time the boat slowed down as it neared Carrie, who had lowered her hands to her sides and was watching the vessel approach. The two men on the seat had stood up and were clutching their rifles as they scanned the area, looking wary of an ambush.

You have no idea, boys.

He was impressed with Carrie. She had to have nerves of steel to just stand there as the boat came straight toward her. It was either insane courage, or she was too terrified to do anything else. He couldn’t see her face from his position, but he guessed it was probably a mixture of both.

The boat slowed down as it sidled up to the dock. One of the men had moved toward the bow, one hand on the gunwale to keep from toppling over. The soldier behind the tall, clear plastic windshield at the helm fixed Carrie with a hard look, hands carefully manipulating the vessel with surprising deftness.

“Don’t move!” the man behind the steering wheel shouted. “Stay right where you are!”

Carrie didn’t move or say anything back.

The third soldier had started to let his guard down. Maybe it was the sight of Carrie in her jeans and sweat-stained T-shirt, with no signs of a weapon anywhere on her. It was hard to look at the woman and think she was dangerous, especially the way she hardly moved.

Nerves of steel. Or suffocating, mortal terror.

Either/or works for me.

Keo was lying in the grass at the end of the dock, almost completely hidden among the two-foot-tall yard that grew around the house and up and down the shoreline. He watched the boat sidling alongside Carrie’s still form and the man at the bow leaping out, landing on the wooden planks in front of her.

The third man slung his rifle and threw a line to the first one, who wrapped it around a wooden post. When Keo saw the man finish wrapping the rope and pull it tight, then straightened up, he pulled the trigger and shot the man in the back.

Even before the soldier went down, Keo was already scrambling up from the warm ground.

It took the two in the boat a few seconds to realize what had happened. Keo didn’t blame them. They hadn’t heard anything — the suppressor on the MP5SD had done its job. The fact was, they had a better chance of seeing the bullet casing ejecting (if they had been looking in his direction) instead of hearing the actual gunshot.

Keo didn’t give them a chance to gather themselves.

He was on one knee, using the higher angle to aim and put the second round into the driver’s chest. The shot shattered the protective screen at the same time. The soldier stumbled back and into the third one, and the two of them went down in a tangled heap. The boat rocked but was held in place by the line.

Keo was on his feet and racing forward, shouting, “Get down! Get down!”

Carrie dropped and flattened herself against the dock as Keo ran up at full speed. He hadn’t taken his eye or the submachine gun’s red dot sight off the boat the entire time and was waiting patiently for the third man to pop back up.

One second…

…two…

There, finally.

Keo shot him once in the chest, then put a second bullet into his forehead as he was falling back down.

He reached Carrie a second later, stepped over her prone form, and checked on the first man. Dead. He swept the boat, making sure the other two weren’t going to get back up anytime soon, either.

“Lorelei!” he shouted.

The teenager burst out of the house before he even finished screaming her name. She was carrying their supply bag, which probably weighed almost as much as her. She didn’t seem to feel the extra weight, though, and he guessed that was thanks to a combination of fear and adrenaline.

Carrie scrambled back up and Keo helped her into the boat. “What about the bodies?” she asked.

“We’ll toss them later,” he said.

She looked as if she was about to throw up again but thankfully managed to keep it in this time.

The boat moved under them and Carrie had to grab at the rail for support, almost stepping on one of the dead soldiers. He waited for Lorelei, then helped her onto the boat, too. She wasn’t quite as lucky and actually stepped on the driver’s open palm.

“Oh God,” she whispered, her face pale.

“Later,” he said.

He turned, grabbed the rope, and was untying it when the first volley of gunfire sliced through the air and pelted the dock around him, the already-rotting wood disintegrating inch by inch against the barrage.

“Keo!” Carrie shouted.

He looked across the lake and at another dock seventy meters away as uniformed men fired in his direction. Bullets zip-zip-zipped past his head and sliced into the water, and more than a few drilled holes into the boat’s fiberglass side.

More men were running along the shoreline toward them, assault rifles and legs pumping wildly as they sprinted with everything they had.

Keo tossed the line back into the boat and jumped in after it, landing between Lorelei and Carrie, both crouched behind the gunwale amongst the two dead soldiers. Keo moved behind the steering wheel and grabbed the throttle and pushed it up, doing his best to ignore the fact he was standing on a dead man’s arm. It couldn’t be helped. There was only so much space inside a twenty-foot boat, especially around the cramped space around the steering console.

The boat roared to life, drowning out the sound of gunfire. Even so, he could hear the buzzing noise of bullets zipping past his head.

“Stay down!” Keo shouted.

Not that he had to. Both women looked permanently stuck against the bottom, Lorelei with her hands thrown over her head and Carrie doing her best not to look at the face of a dead man staring back at her with lifeless eyes.

The boat shot forward, fighting against his control. He got it turned around and pointed it down the lake even as bullets continued to zip-zip-zip around him, punching into different parts of the boat and vanishing into the brown water. He pushed the throttle up as far as it would go and the boat rocked, the bow lifting dangerously into the air as the motor poured on the power and the stern dipped, threatening to go under the lake’s surface.

Keo finally allowed himself to duck down into a crouch, still tightly gripping the steering wheel above him with one hand. Thank God the lake was wide enough that he didn’t have to worry about driving them right into the shoreline.

He threw a quick look back at the soldiers as they finally reached the dock he had just abandoned. A couple of the men were still firing, but the boat was already a good sixty, seventy meters away and putting more space between them with every passing second. Keo couldn’t even hear the sound of gunshots over the motor anymore, even when a bullet snapped off one of the windshield fragments in front of him and disappeared into the dashboard.

Close, but no cigar.

Soon the soldiers faded into the background, and Keo finally stood back up to take full control of the steering wheel. Carrie was rising next to him, looking back at the house. Lorelei was still on the floor, apparently having decided not to risk it, even if she was lying across a dead man’s legs.

“You okay?” he shouted at Carrie.

She nodded back. “You?”

“One piece.”

“Do we have enough gas to get to Song Island?”

He looked down at the gas gauge. It was almost at “E.”

Carrie frowned. “We’ll never make it!”

Keo nodded at the skinny trolling motor latched to the bow. “We’ll get there. It just might not be as fast as we want.” He looked up at the darkening skies and could feel Carrie tightening up next to him. “We’ll make it.”

She gave him a pursed smile. “If you say so.”

“I promise,” he shouted. “And I always keep my promises, even if it might take a while.”

17 Will

“Kate.”

“Hello, Will.”

“What are you doing here?”

She smiled at him. “I could ask you the same thing.”

The Kate he remembered smiled rarely. Which was how he knew all of this was a lie, even if it did feel, sound, and even smell real.

“You’re not really here,” he said.

“I’m not,” she said. “I know it’s hard to believe, Will, but I have things on my mind at the moment other than you.”

“Mabry’s keeping you busy.”

“I’m always busy.”

“Are you still in the state?”

“Maybe. But then, when has distance ever stopped the two of us? Whether you want to admit it or not, there is something that ties us together, you and I. A bond beyond the physical that you’ll never have with Lara.”

Lara…

Stop it. She can read your mind.

“Oh, Will. You still think you can keep things from me. Haven’t you learned by now? When I’m with you, I know everything. I know things you don’t even realize you know.”

“How are you in my head right now, Kate?”

“There are ways. So many ways that you can’t even imagine. What’s that saying you love so much, Will? ‘Know thy enemy’? You’ll never know us. Never really know us. Which is why you’ll never win.”

They were still in Dunbar. He knew that much. Night was falling around him, but for some reason he wasn’t anxious at all, which didn’t make any sense. Every inch of him should have been tingling at the moment, itching to get indoors. Darkness was not his friend. It hadn’t been for almost a year now.

But of course, it was just a dream. Or a figment of his imagination. Or whatever the hell Kate did when she invaded his head.

Trying to make sense of it — any of it — was pointless.

She was wearing a long white dress. It was silk or gossamer. One of those. Almost see-through, though it played tricks with his mind, the hem billowing as if it had a life of its own. She looked radiant, long black hair glimmering under the falling dusk. He couldn’t have looked away even if he wanted to, and he didn’t want to.

“You always were a charmer, Will,” she smiled.

She’s in your head.

He forced himself to look away from her, to take in his environment instead. Occupy his mind with other thoughts that weren’t so dangerous.

Hide his secrets…

The street looked familiar, and it took him a moment to recognize the strip mall where the soldiers and the U-Haul had taken up residence earlier in the day. Except most of the men in uniform were dead, their bodies spread around the white and orange trailer in an almost semicircle. The gunfight he had listened to with Danny was over.

This is yesterday. Why am I seeing a day that’s already happened?

A man with red hair, wearing a military vest, stood over one of Josh’s soldiers. The injured man was lying on the parking lot looking up, one bloodied hand raised in some kind of meek defense. Neither one of them seemed to noticed that Will was watching them.

So this is what it feels like to be a ghost.

The man with red hair shot the soldier in the head with a 9mm handgun. Then he calmly ejected the magazine and put in a new one before looking over at the U-Haul nearby. “Open it,” the man said.

Big mistake, Will thought, though he didn’t know why.

He heard giggling behind him and looked back at Kate. She stood a short distance away, hands clasped in front of her, a wicked, knowing grin spreading across blood-red lips.

“What’s in the trailer?” he asked her.

“You’ll find out,” she said.

“Kate, what’s in the trailer?”

“It’s a surprise. You still like surprises, don’t you, Will? You’re going to get a kick out of this one. It was my idea, you know. This town, this little city in the middle of nowhere, was becoming a nuisance.” The smile faded, replaced by something dark and dangerous. “Like a certain little island that should have stayed quiet. This is what happens when you stick your head out and get my attention, Will. I grab a hammer.”

The island. She’s talking about Song Island.

“Now pay attention,” Kate said. “This is where it gets really fun.”

He looked back at the man with red hair. There were others gathered around him now. Two dozen or so, mostly men, but a couple of women among them, all well-armed and loaded for bear. They had moved in a rough, jagged circle around the U-Haul, having emerged from the alleys and streets and buildings while he wasn’t looking. They stepped over the dead bodies, some going out of their way to move around the pooling blood. A few looked squeamish.

Only a couple of them seemed to notice the fading sunlight. The others, like the man with red hair (the leader), was too busy focusing on the trailer at the center of the death and destruction. There were bullet holes in the sides of the orange and white vehicle. Stray bullets, he guessed, during the gun battle.

The man with red hair pointed at the U-Haul. “I said open it.”

Look up, you idiot. Look up!

But the man didn’t look up. Instead, he took another tentative step toward the parked vehicle, clenching and unclenching his handgun, one of those fancy Smith & Wesson semi-automatics.

Look up!

Two men with assault rifles moved toward the trailer and one of them grabbed the lever at the bottom, twisted it open, then pulled at the door — but it didn’t budge. He paused and exchanged a nervous look with his comrade before slinging his rifle and grabbing hold of the lever with both hands and this time really yanked.

Nothing. The door refused to move.

“It’s exciting, isn’t it?” Kate said gleefully behind him. “It was such an easy sell, too. Give them something mysterious, something intriguing. They couldn’t leave it alone even if they wanted to. Look at them, Will. Most of them are so caught up with it they don’t even notice the sun is disappearing, little by little, by little….”

She was standing right next to him now. He didn’t know how she had done that.

This is her dream. She can do anything she wants.

They were standing in the middle of the group, people with rifles fidgeting around them, more than a few looking nervously at the darkening streets, some even glancing at the blackening sky. So some of them had noticed the setting sun. But not nearly enough, he saw.

“Harrison,” one of them said. A woman. Will recognized her from the basement last night. (Today? This morning?) “We have to go, it’s almost dark!”

Harrison looked conflicted. He glanced back at the U-Haul, then at the others.

He’s target fixated. He’s so focused on what’s in front of him, he doesn’t see the danger coming up behind him. Or…above him.

“Yes,” Kate said. “That’s the idea. Not bad for a civilian, huh?

“Harrison!” the woman shouted. “We have to go now!”

The others were backing up, their precarious situation finally dawning on them. Half of them looked ready to turn and run, but something was holding them back. They kept shooting quick questioning looks at Harrison.

He’s the leader and they’re scared of him. Even with night coming, death waiting in the wings, they won’t run. Not without his permission.

Idiots!

“Harrison!” the woman shouted again. When Harrison still didn’t respond, the woman whirled on the others. “Everyone head to the designated safe buildings! Go! Now now now, goddammit!”

They finally moved. Some of them, anyway, but a few still hesitated, waiting for Harrison’s orders, though they too looked on the verge of fleeing.

Then even Harrison turned and ran.

“Hurry, hurry, hurry,” Kate said in a singsong voice, and he swore she might have cackled. Or maybe he just misheard?

The two men who had been trying to open the U-Haul had also turned to go when the door flew open behind them and the trailer actually quaked against the truck connected to it as something — somethings—exploded with movement from inside.

There were two of them — no, four—coming out of the trailer.

Blue-eyed ghouls.

He recognized one of them instantly. It was the same one he had shot outside Ennis’s bar, who took the silver round and flinched but didn’t go down.

It didn’t go down.

The man who had been trying to open the trailer heard the vehicle squeaking and turned around. It was a mistake. He let out a piercing scream just before one of the blue-eyed creatures landed on top of him, pummeling his much larger frame down to the concrete floor. The ghoul bent and flesh tore and the man kept screaming as blood flowed.

The second man had made it almost out of the parking lot when he heard his friend’s howls. He spun around and let loose with his rifle on full-auto, shredding one of the blue-eyed monsters as it was almost on top of him. Blood and flesh were ripped from the creature’s skeletal frame, but it kept coming and seemed to smash into the man and drive him down behind a parked blue Chevy, where they both disappeared out of Will’s sight.

A woman stumbled and fell. She turned around on her back and was reaching for her sidearm when another of the blue-eyed things fell on top of her. She didn’t even get a chance to scream.

Then the ghoul was back up and running, its jaw slicked with fresh blood that was visible even in the darkness swallowing up whole sections of the streets. Gunfire exploded across the city, a continuous cacophony of gunshots and screams.

Then they came. The others. The black-eyed ones.

Harrison’s people were scattered — in buildings, alleyways, some poor souls trying to escape in the streets — and their cries filled the air along with the endless pop-pop-pop of automatic weapon fire.

“You wanted to know,” Kate said.

“You were here last night,” he said.

“No. But I have a strong link with the others.”

“‘Others’?”

“The other blue-eyed ones. Our bonds are stronger, and I can communicate with them over greater distances. Of course, even if I knew you were here, I couldn’t have come anyway. Like you said, Will, Mabry has me very busy these days.”

He heard slurping and looked behind him at a blue-eyed ghoul perched over one of Harrison’s locals. The man’s eyes were open and he stared up at the dark sky, mouth quivering as the ghoul suckled rabidly at his neck. The creature looked in a state of frenzy, like a man about to orgasm.

“You did this,” Will said. “You planned this…massacre.”

“Most of it. But I admit, I didn’t expect them to attack so fast and so ferociously. What’s that saying you soldiers have? No plan survives contact with the enemy?” She smiled. “Are you impressed, Will?”

“Yes…”

“There’s a reason Mabry chose me. He knew my potential.”

“The same reason you chose Josh? Because of potential?”

“The young ones are always the most malleable. But yes, he’s a lot smarter than many of these…” she looked around at the dead soldiers, the ones he had come to call Josh’s men, “…cannon fodder. This is what they’re good for. Josh and the other young ones will keep going. What’s that saying, Will? The children are the future. So true. So true…”

Will stared at the bodies spread around the parking lot. So many. Soldiers and locals. Spent bullet casings by the thousands. Pools of blood everywhere. And still, the shooting went on and on, along with the screams.

The screams…

“What now?” he said, turning back to face her.

But she wasn’t there anymore, and he was no longer standing in the streets of Dunbar.

Instead, he was in Ennis’s bar, the same one he and Danny had used as their last stand before escaping through the basement door. He was sitting on one of the stools at the counter, which wasn’t covered in dust and time like it had been earlier.

This is her domain. She can do anything, because none of this is real.

She’s not really here.

Right?

That didn’t explain how she was sitting on the stool next to him, wearing some kind of formal evening gown. It was bright outside the windows, and the sun glinted off her exquisitely long neck as she saluted him with a small glass of brandy. “To your health, Will,” she said, and took a sip.

“I didn’t know you cared.”

“You don’t think I worry about you? Running around out here? Trying to stop the inevitable? It’s like watching a child standing on the tracks trying to hold back a runaway train. You don’t hate the child, Will, you feel sorry for him, because you know the train is going to run him over. All you can really do is try to reason with him, get him off the tracks before then.”

“Is that what I’m doing, Kate? Standing on a train track?”

“What do you think, Will?” A bottle of brandy, the liquid inside brilliant orange against the glow of the sun, had appeared on the counter between them. Kate picked it up and poured him a glass. He wasn’t sure where the glass had come from, either. “Drink up, Will. We should talk.”

“What about?”

She poured with precision, another skill he didn’t know she possessed. Or was that the dream? Kate could do things in dreams that were impossible in the real world. But was this his dream or hers?

Or…theirs?

“What about? You, me, this world,” she said.

He stared at the glass. Was that real cognac inside? It smelled like it.

“I almost had you in Harvest,” she said, pinching her fingers together. “Missed you by that much.”

“You tried to kill me.”

“Don’t be silly. Death doesn’t mean what it used to anymore. You of all people should know that by now.”

Will picked up the glass and took a sip. The taste was sweet, followed by the familiar warm aftermath.

“The towns, the pregnancies,” she continued. “They’re all just the beginning. In ten, twenty years, you won’t recognize any of this. In a couple of generations, man will have forgotten they were ever in control of the planet.”

“Is that the long-term goal?”

“You say that as if there is a short-term one, Will. There isn’t. We’ve shed the mortal coil. Time is no longer the enemy. Days, months, years, even centuries. They mean nothing anymore. You have no idea how long they’ve been preparing for this.”

“So there are more than just Mabry.”

She smiled mischievously. “I meant him.”

“You said ‘they.’”

“Did I?”

“Yes.”

She shrugged. “Maybe you misheard. This is just a dream, after all.”

She said ‘they’…

“You sound very confident,” Will said. “Is that why you haven’t attacked the island?”

“Ah, the island,” she said almost wistfully. “Lara shouldn’t have sent out that broadcast. Why did she do that, Will?”

“I don’t know…”

“I was content to leave you alone. As long as you left me alone. Because of what we’ve been through, because of my feelings for you. But then your little pre-med doctor had to send that broadcast, blabbing about the silver to the whole wide world.” She sighed. “That complicated things, you know. It’s too bad.”

She nursed her glass of brandy while watching their reflections in the big mirror behind the bar. That mirror had been broken when he and Danny came through before — when was that? Last night? A day ago?

He was losing track of time…

Kate smiled again. That strange emotion that was at once so human and at the same time so…wrong.

“What are you going to do, Kate?” He felt anxious for the first time in a long time, and he tightened his grip on the glass without realizing it. “What are you planning?”

“You shouldn’t have left the island, Will. That broadcast was a mistake. You should have stopped Lara from putting it out there.”

“You’re going to attack the island because of the broadcast?”

She shrugged and said nothing.

“It’s too late,” Will said. “Even if you burned the island down tomorrow, you won’t be able to put the genie back into the bottle.”

“Maybe I don’t care about putting the genie back into the bottle,” Kate said. “Maybe I’m just a spiteful bitch. Or maybe I’m just feeling a little jealous toward that little girl of yours.”

“Jealousy and vindictiveness are human traits, Kate.”

She laughed. It was almost lyrical. Almost…human. “Yes, they are, aren’t they? I guess I’m still more of the old Kate than we both thought.”

“What would Mabry say if he knew?”

“You’re assuming he doesn’t already know. Mabry knows everything, Will. Everything we know. It all comes from him, and it all goes to him. Haven’t you figured that out by now?”

She stood up from the stool.

“Kate…”

She didn’t seem to hear him and instead turned and walked away, the hem of her dress swishing around her legs. She wore high heels, the click-click of stiletto points like firecrackers in the emptiness of the city around them.

What happened to the locals? The soldiers? Where did everyone go?

It’s just a dream. It’s just her dream.

Or mine.

Or ours?

“Kate…”

He tried to get up in order to stop her, but he couldn’t move. Something was holding him down on the stool. An invisible force of some kind clinging to his arms and legs. He couldn’t even let go of the glass in his hand.

“Kate!”

She finally stopped at the door and looked back at him, and a ghost of a smile flashed across her ethereal face. “You shouldn’t have left the island, Will. It might not be there when you get back. If you make it back.”

She opened the door and stepped through. Daylight flooded inside and Will grimaced at the blinding brightness.

“Kate!” he shouted, but his words were lost in the wind, as if he had never said it in the first place. “Kate!”

“Don’t tell me, another trip to Deussen Park?” Danny said when Will opened his eyes from the dream.

“Shit,” Will said.

“The dream or our present predicament?”

“Both.”

“Then I’ll join your shit with my own shit. Talk about a double-shit burger.”

Three of the people they had met in the basement were asleep, dozing somewhere in the darkness. One of the faces visible in a small pool of LED light placed in the center of the room was the woman who had greeted them when they first entered, and who Will remembered from his dream (Nightmare?).

Her name was Rachel. The kid next to her with the M40A3 sniper rifle cradled against his shoulder like a comfortable blanket was Tommy. A third person, Milch, was somewhere to their right, still awake because Will could hear him moving against the hard concrete floor.

Rachel was clearly the leader of this group, and she stared across the room at him now, her AR-15 in her lap. Dirty black hair hung over her shoulders and she gave him the kind of look that was devoid of warmth. She wasn’t entirely unattractive. Late thirties, a face lined with hard living and surviving. Her people had taken his and Danny’s weapons and equipment when they surrendered less than — how long ago? A few hours.

At least they hadn’t taken his watch, and he looked down at the glow-in-the-dark minute hand, which ticked to five after midnight. He heard the ticking clear as day in the silence. The monsters had stopped banging on the door hours ago.

Dead, not stupid.

“Who’s Kate?” Rachel asked.

Did I say her name out loud?

“Someone I used to know,” Will said.

“Ex-girlfriend? Must not have left things in a very good place, the way you were moving around in your sleep, saying her name.”

“I shot her.”

She gave him a wry look, as if she was trying to decide whether to believe him or not. “Now that’s what I call a breakup.”

“The funny thing is? She didn’t die.”

“Just clipped her, huh?”

“No. I shot her in the chest.”

Rachel narrowed her eyes. “And she didn’t die?”

“Nope.”

“Whatever. Keep your little secret.”

Danny chuckled next to him. “She doesn’t believe you.”

“I guess not,” Will said.

Rachel looked annoyed. “You never told me what you two were doing in Dunbar.”

“We’re just passing through,” Will said.

“Bullshit. No one passes through Dunbar. It’s barely a blip on any map and we’re miles from the closest interstate. The only people who come to Dunbar are people who were coming to Dunbar.”

“That includes you?”

“I was born here. So were most of these guys. It’s our city. We’re not leaving.”

“Doesn’t sound like you have much of a choice anymore after last night.”

“Wrong.”

“Am I?”

“Tomorrow’s another day. We’ll start again.”

“With just the five of you?”

“There are more of us out there.”

“You hope.”

“I know.” She said the words with the right inflections, as if she actually believed it. “Harrison made sure we all knew where the safe houses were. There are other basements like this one around the city. We’re not the only ones left.”

Harrison was the man with the red hair, who Will had watched lead the locals to certain death last night. Probably dead now, like most of his people. There had been a lot of blood and bodies in the dream (memories?).

“You can always leave,” Will said.

“And go where?”

“Anywhere but here.”

She shook her head. “Dunbar’s our home. We’re not leaving tomorrow or the day after that.”

Will nodded. “You gotta do what you gotta do.”

Talk of home made him think of Lara, of the island.

What was that Kate had said?

“You shouldn’t have left the island, Will. That broadcast was a mistake. You should have stopped Lara from putting it out there.”

The island. He had to get back to the island…

“What now?” he asked Rachel. “What happens to us tomorrow?”

She shrugged. “The only reason you’re still alive is because you’re not wearing one of those uniforms. I’m willing to believe you’re just passing through, but I’m not taking any chances tonight.”

Will thought about the locals he’d been forced to kill when he fled Gaine’s Meat Market with Danny yesterday.

Right. Just passing through. Totally innocent bystanders here.

“I get where you’re coming from,” Will said. He looked to his left, where Tommy and the others had taken his and Danny’s weapons and packs. The radio was somewhere back there, too. “I need to ask a favor…”

Rachel snorted. “Oh, do you now?”

“I need the radio in our pack.”

“What for?”

“I need to transmit a message to a friend about something.”

Danny looked over, concern flashing across his face.

“It has nothing to do with you or this city,” Will said. “But my friend and I had a scheduled call that I missed last night. I just want to let them know we’re okay.”

Rachel shook her head. “You can do that tomorrow when you leave the city.”

“It’s vitally important they get this message. It’s a matter of life and death.”

“That’s your tough fucking luck, isn’t it?” she said, her eyes hard.

Will glanced over at Danny and could practically hear his thoughts: “The island? Something’s happening with the island?”

He looked back at Rachel and the sleeping Tommy next to her. There were three meters between him and Rachel. He didn’t know exactly where Milch was, just that he was (probably) still awake. That might be a problem. Tommy, on the other hand, would be easy to handle. He was obviously tired and struggling to keep his eyes open.

The real problem was Rachel…

Doable.

“Go ahead,” Rachel said, staring back at him. She placed her hand on the AR-15 for effect. “This rifle’s been converted to full-auto. All I need to do is pull the trigger once. You think you can make it across the room before that happens?”

Or not.

Will clenched his lips into a smile. “You’re right. It can wait till morning. Besides, my friend is probably asleep by now anyway.”

“Definitely asleep,” Danny said. “Probably snoring like a horse, too.”

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

“Bear?”

“Shut up,” Rachel said. “You’ll get your weapons and radio back tomorrow morning and get the hell out of my city. Do anything before then and I won’t hesitate to shoot you both.”

Will and Danny exchanged a look.

“Go ahead,” Rachel said, narrowing her eyes at the both of them. “Try me. I’m having one hell of a shitty day, so shooting the two of you might just turn it all around.”

“It can wait till morning,” Will said, gritting his teeth.

She’s coming, Lara.

Kate’s coming…

18 Lara

“You hear that?” Maddie said. “Listen carefully.”

Lara did listen carefully, but after about five seconds of silence, she shook her head. “I don’t hear anything.”

“I swear it was there. And this isn’t the first time, either. I’ve heard it before. Earlier this morning; and before that, yesterday.”

“It could just be the quiet,” Lara said. “It plays tricks with your mind. Besides, it’s been more than three months. Don’t you think they would have attacked by now if they wanted the island back?”

“I guess,” Maddie said. “I’d feel better if Will and Danny were around, though.”

You and me both, sister, she thought, but said, “What time is it?”

Maddie glanced at her watch. “Five fifteen. When is Will due to radio back in?”

“Before nightfall. We don’t have a set time, but he promised to check in with me twice a day, once in the morning and once in the afternoon or evening, depending on his situation.”

“You think they found Gaby yet?”

“I hope so.”

“I guess they’re good at that, huh? Tracking and stuff? They teach that at Ranger School, don’t they?”

“I’ll ask him when I talk to him again.”

Maddie went back to staring outside the east window at the long shoreline in the distance. The horizon was blanketed in a shade of orange and red, like a painting come to life. You wouldn’t know how dangerous it all was just to look at it.

Lara tried to remember the last time she had allowed herself to watch the night come with absolute serenity, but couldn’t. It had been a while.

Since Will left the island…

“What did it sound like?” Lara asked. “The noise you heard?”

“Like an outboard boat motor.”

“How many did you hear?”

“Just one, I think.”

“And you’re sure it was a motor?”

“I thought it was, but…” She shrugged. “I’m not so sure now. I didn’t see anything, so maybe you’re right; I might have just been imagining things. It can get pretty quiet when you’re all alone up here.”

“You should bring one of the kids to keep you company next time.”

“That’s a good idea, I’ll do that.”

“Until then, stay alert until Blaine relieves you.”

“Will do, doc.”

“You should probably stop calling me that.”

“Why?”

“Because we have a real doc on the island now. I don’t want her to get confused.”

“You’ll always be our doc, doc.”

Lara smiled. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

She left Maddie on the third floor of the Tower and headed down the spiral staircase. She had done a good job hiding her disappointment in front of Maddie, but now that she was alone with her thoughts, she gave in to the overwhelming anxiety. It was almost nightfall, and Will hadn’t radioed in yet. That wasn’t supposed to happen.

Twice a day, Will. That’s all I asked. So where’s my second radio call?

You better not be messing around out there.

She stepped outside the Tower and into a slight chill. It always got cool around the island near sunset, something that made her look forward to the coming months. November and December wouldn’t exactly be Christmas in Louisiana, but anything was better than the daytime heat of October.

Lara did the buttons on her long-sleeve shirt as she walked across the empty hotel grounds back to the hotel. She spotted figures racing down the front patio and up the pathway toward the beach. Bonnie’s girls, trying to get in a final hour along the white sands before dark.

Even with the safety of the island, they had a curfew — everyone needed to be at the hotel by six except for the guards. Benny would be on the boat shack right now. Even limping on one good leg, the young man had proven a worthwhile addition to the group. Not that she really needed him to do much. He and the others posted out there throughout the day were really just an early warning system in case of an attack.

Plan Z, right, Will? God, I hope we never have to use it.

She slipped into the hotel through a side door and walked up Hallway A, then the short distance to an office near the lobby. It was a big room, worthy of whoever was supposed to run the Kilbrew Hotel and Resorts. The plaque on the door was originally marked “Administrator,” but someone had put duct tape over it and written in large permanent marker, “Lara’s Lair.” She suspected Carly, but her best friend refused to own up to it.

Lara’s Lair had stainless steel filing cabinets, shelves, and comfortable chairs along one wall. Most of the offices in the hotel were empty, the island’s chosen administrators having never had the time to settle in before The Purge. Which made sense since the building itself was never completed. Far from it, with the entire second floor still missing and whole chunks of the first floor unfinished.

She slumped down on the large executive chair behind the equally large desk, which never failed to make her feel like a fraud. It might have had something to do with the vinyl upholstery or the way-too-elegant looking mahogany wood finish. The hand-applied brass nails certainly didn’t add to her comfort level. After settling in, she picked up the pen and wrote in the ledger, recording the day’s conversation with survivors through the radio.

Japan…upstate New York…Alaska…Beecher in Colorado…and now, just recently, a man claiming to lead a few hundred survivors in London.

All this time, we thought we were the only ones still out there running against the night. I wonder if they all thought the same thing?

There were so many people still left, all of them just waiting for someone to tell them what was happening. Her broadcast had been responsible for that, and they had used her as their in-between to communicate, exchanging ideas about weapons, defenses, and even survival techniques to live off the land.

She couldn’t help but feel pride swelling whenever she thought about it. She had done that. A third-year medical student. How the heck did she even get here?

Lara looked up at the sound of Carly’s voice. “You decent?”

“No, but that’s never stopped you before.”

Carly came inside and slumped down into a large loveseat, the furniture’s mahogany finish and oxblood vinyl swallowing up her bright red hair. She rubbed her stomach as she looked contently at Lara. “Heard from the boys yet?”

“Not yet.” Lara kept writing. “You look happy.”

“I had a good meal.”

“That’s it?”

“I’m a simple girl, Lara. A good meal, good company, my little sister laughing.” She beamed. “What more could a girl want?”

“I’m thinking about making a work rotation for the kids. I know they’ve been spending a lot of time on the beach and exploring the island, but sooner or later they’re going to get bored. This should keep them busy.”

Carly smiled at her.

“What?” Lara said.

“You’re good at this.”

“‘This’?”

“Running the island. You’re really good at it.”

“It’s only temporary. Once Will comes back—”

“He’ll insist you stay in this room, doing what you’re doing now.”

“You think so?”

“I know how your boyfriend operates. My guess is that’s why he brought Zoe — so she can take over the infirmary. He has big plans for you, kiddo.”

Lara laughed. “You really think Will thinks that far ahead?”

“It’s Will. ‘Hope for the best, prepare for the worst,’ remember?”

“Maybe.” She put down the pen and leaned back in the chair. “He sort of said the same thing when we talked earlier today.”

“See?”

“Don’t gloat just yet. Zoe can barely stand, much less run the infirmary.”

“For now. But she’ll get better. Then you’ll be stuck in here behind that big desk. Heck, we should get you a permanent plaque as befitting your new position.”

“Are you finally admitting you’re responsible for Lara’s Lair?”

Carly grinned. “I’m admitting nothing of the sort.”

“What time is it?” Maddie asked.

“Seven thirty,” Lara said.

“He should have called by now, right?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sure he’s fine. He’s got Danny with him. What could possibly go wrong?”

She gave Maddie a pursed smile. “I’m not worried. Why, do I look worried?”

“Just a little bit.” Then, as if it should explain everything, “Lara, it’s Will.”

She smiled again. This time it came out more convincing. Or at least, she hoped so. “I know.”

“If they didn’t call in today, I’m sure they had a good reason.”

“I’m sure you’re right.” God, I hope you’re right. “Did you eat yet?”

“Sarah’s saved me something in the kitchen. I’ll grab a bite when Blaine relieves me in a few.” Maddie turned back to the night sky outside the east window and peered out with the night-vision binoculars. “Sounds like they’re still going at it.”

“Sounds like it,” Lara said.

She glanced back at one of the radios on the table behind her. It was permanently tuned in to the FEMA frequency, and although the volume was lowered almost the entire way, she could still make out the endless chatter. Beecher had signed off a few hours ago and it was now mostly foreigners. The clamor of a dozen different languages, accents, and broken English was next to impossible to decipher.

“I can’t understand half of the things they’re saying,” Maddie said. “I can barely understand the guys from New York.”

Lara smiled, then glanced at her watch again: 7:34 p.m.

Two times a day, Will. That was all I asked. You can’t even do that for me. If I didn’t love you so much, I’d hate your guts right now.

She stared at the designated emergency radio on the other side of the table, willing it to come alive, for Will’s voice to blurt through the speakers.

Instead, she heard the loud roar of an outboard motor rising in the distance. No, not in the distance. Closer.

Lara ran to the south window and looked toward the beach.

“Is that one of ours?” Maddie said behind her.

“I don’t know.” Lara unclipped her radio and keyed it. “Who’s at the beach right now?”

“I am, Lara!” Benny said through the radio. He was on the verge of screaming, trying to be heard over the loud noise of the outboard motor in the background. “I was about to call in!”

She could see it — a small white light moving away from the pier. It was a spotlight on one of the boats. It was moving fast, so she guessed it was one of the bass fishing vessels.

“That’s one of ours, all right,” Maddie said. She was peering through the M4 with the ACOG mounted scope. “Blaine was using it earlier to recon the area for those sounds I thought I heard.”

“What’s going on down there, Benny?” Lara said into the radio. “Who’s on the boat?”

“It’s Roy and Gwen,” Benny said. “We saw something on the lake. A white boat. It looked adrift, so they’re going to intercept it.”

“Goddammit, who told them to do that?”

“I’m sorry, Lara. I tried to stop them. What should I do?”

“Stay right where you are.”

She took a breath and tempered down the anger and frustration. What the hell were those two thinking, running off like that?

She gathered herself, then keyed the radio again. “Roy, Gwen…come in. Roy, Gwen, answer me.”

She waited, but there was no response.

“They might not be able to hear over the motor,” Maddie said. “It can get pretty loud standing right next to it.”

“Yeah, probably.” Either that, or they were ignoring her. She wasn’t sure which answer was more aggravating. “I need you up here—”

“Got it,” Maddie said before she could finish. “Go.”

Lara nodded gratefully back at her. At least she could count on Maddie, Blaine, and the others. Carly, and even the kids. They had been together since Texas. Roy and Gwen and the others had shown up on the island recently and were still wildcards, trying to get used to how they did things over here. Or maybe it was her leadership. Maybe they didn’t fully respect her enough to do what she told them not to do…like running off on a boat to catch something floating in the lake like a bunch of amateurs.

Will would never have this issue.

She raced through the door in the floor and sprinted down the spiral staircase. She keyed her radio as she leaped onto the second floor below and found the second set of stairs. “Blaine, did you hear all of that?”

“I heard,” Blaine said through the radio. “What the hell are they thinking?”

“I don’t know. Grab your rifle and meet me at the beach.”

“On my way.”

“What about me?” Bonnie asked through the radio. “Carly’s out here with me.”

Like all the adults on the island, Bonnie had her own issued radio tuned into the same channel and it was powered on at all times, so whenever someone broadcasted, they all heard it. It was another one of Will’s protocols, and its singular purpose was to keep everyone in the loop. It was also why she was fuming that Roy and Gwen were ignoring her. If they could hear her radio call, that is.

Yeah, let’s go with that. The other answer is too aggravating.

“I need you guys on the patio,” Lara said. “Everyone else, stay put inside the hotel, and anyone who isn’t already in the hotel, get there now.”

“Got it,” Carly said through the radio.

“Carly…”

“Yeah.”

“I need a rifle.”

“Gotcha, boss.”

Lara burst out of the Tower and jogged across the grounds, making a beeline for the beach. Bonnie was already back outside the hotel’s front patio, cradling a Remington shotgun. The ex-model waved at her and Lara waved back.

Carly jogged down the patio steps as she reached them and handed Lara an M4 rifle. “Blaine’s waiting for you at the beach.”

“What were Roy and Gwen thinking?” Lara said to Bonnie.

Bonnie shook her head helplessly. “I don’t even know what they were doing down there at this time of the night. They know better than that. The curfew…”

“They’re, uh, involved,” Carly said. The other two women looked over at her. “What, you guys didn’t know? They’ve been sneaking into each other’s rooms for the last few days. I guess they were down there doing, you know.”

“Spare me the details,” Lara said, finding herself even more annoyed than before. “I need you guys here. There are other ways on the island besides the beach.” She met Carly’s eyes. “Remember?”

Carly nodded back. She remembered that night, too. “We got this. Go.”

Lara slung the carbine and jogged along the cobblestone pathway toward the beach. “Blaine,” she said into the radio.

“I’m on the beach with Benny,” Blaine answered.

“What do you see?”

“I think they stopped the other boat.”

Lara noticed how quiet it had gotten suddenly. They shut off the motor, she thought, and keyed the radio. “Roy, Gwen…can you hear me?”

“I can hear you,” Gwen said through the radio.

It took all of Lara’s self-control not to tear into the twenty-something right then and there. “Are you and Roy all right?”

“We’re fine,” Gwen said. “We have them, Lara.”

“The other boat?”

“Yes. There are two women onboard. They’re both unarmed.”

She was halfway to the beach, the wooded area that separated the hotel grounds from the water to both sides of her. Birds took flight as her footsteps warned them of incoming humans.

“Two women?” she said into the radio. “On a boat in the middle of a lake at night?” Alarm bells went off inside her head. “You and Roy need to be careful. It could be a trap.”

“What should we do with them?” Gwen asked.

Oh, so now you want orders? she wanted to ask, but instead said, “Bring them in.”

“Will do.”

The soothing breeze brushed up against her as soon as she reached the soft, mushy sands and heard the slowly lapping waves. It was always colder on this part of the island and was the main reason everyone loved to sneak in an hour or two near the evenings. There was no better place to forget about the state of the world than running barefoot across the white sands.

Which, she guessed, explained why Roy and Gwen were down here last night. She tried very hard not to picture them hiding in the woods somewhere doing…something.

She spotted Benny standing on top of the boat shack, peering through binoculars out at the water. It was impossible to see much of anything too far out beyond the lights along the piers — except for the bright spotlight of the boat that Roy and Gwen were on at the moment. Next to them, she guessed, was the other boat….with the two unarmed women.

Blaine was moving up one of the piers and Lara jogged past the shack, exchanging a quick nod with Benny. She headed up the middle pier, one of three that stuck out of the beach like the teeth of a fork. The wooden planks clapped loudly under her boots.

Blaine glanced back. “Doc.”

“You heard?”

“Two unarmed women in the middle of the lake, at night? Doesn’t make a damn bit of sense.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

The loud outboard motor had started up again and the bright light floating on the surface of the lake started moving, this time coming back toward them.

“How did they catch up to the other boat?” she asked.

“Benny said he heard a low whining sound, so they were probably using a trolling motor,” Blaine said. “It would explain how they managed to creep so close to the island without being seen. Well, until they were spotted, anyway.”

“How did that happen?”

“Benny saw it first with his binoculars. I guess they were drifting and got too close. He said Roy and Gwen were walking back to the hotel when he called them over. It didn’t occur to him those two idiots would jump into one of the boats and take off to intercept.”

Lara ground her teeth together. She had a lot of things to say, most of them vulgar. But this wasn’t the time. Not now. Roy and Gwen had come to the island at the same time as Bonnie and her sister Jo. They were in the same group, and it made perfect sense the two of them would be drawn to each other. It was almost inevitable, in a way.

It didn’t take long for the boats to reach them. The bass fishing boat was towing along a white vessel by a rope, and the two women they had caught were sitting on the floor at the front, while Gwen, all five-two of her, stood next to them (too close for Lara’s liking) with her Glock in her hand. Roy steered the boat over to the pier and cut off the engine.

Lara stared at Roy, who quickly looked away. She wasn’t sure if that was embarrassment or realization that he had done something she didn’t approve of. She ignored him (for now) and turned her attention to the two women while Gwen tossed a second line over to Blaine. The women were a brunette in her twenties and a blonde teenager peering back at her through long, stringy hair that seemed to shine under the pier lamps.

The older woman met Lara’s eyes. There wasn’t fear there, just a lot of reluctance. “We didn’t mean to start any trouble.”

“What are you doing here on a boat in the middle of the night?” Lara asked.

“Looking for a place to stay. We heard a message on the radio. It said to get to an island…”

Lara exchanged a glance with Blaine.

The radio broadcast. Her radio broadcast. A lot of things were happening because of what she had sent out into the world. A lot of it was good, but a part of her, deep down, wondered if the bad was around the corner…

“What’s your name?” she asked them.

“I’m Carrie and this is Lorelei,” the brunette said. “We were just looking for a safe place—”

The crack! of a gunshot exploded across the island from behind her.

She spun around and traced the shot back to Benny, standing on the roof of the boat shack. He was looking down his rifle at something further up the beach.

Benny fired again.

Lara looked where he was shooting and glimpsed a figure moving out of the water and darting up the white sands. It was a man, and he was moving fast. Sand erupted behind him as Benny fired a third time and missed badly.

“Blaine!” Lara shouted.

Blaine was already pointing his rifle at the two women in the boat. They stood frozen and terrified because both Roy and Gwen had also drawn their weapons.

“I got ’em, go,” the big man said.

Lara ran back up the pier, looking right, trying to track the figure’s progress as it slashed across the beach, making a straight line for the trees. He was moving too fast for her to see any details, except that he was running in wet clothes and was still somehow managing to outpace Benny’s shots. That was one hell of a feat. Could even Will move that fast?

She heard voices through the radio in her hand.

Bonnie, from the hotel patio: “I hear shooting. Guys?”

Maddie, in the Tower with the ACOG: “I can’t get a shot!”

Carly, also at the hotel: “What’s happening? Is everyone okay?”

Lara leaped off the pier and landed in the soft sand. She almost lost her balance, but managed to regain it quickly enough to run up the beach. She unslung her rifle as she ran and took aim—

— when the man disappeared into the woods.

Shit.

Lara lowered her rifle and pulled up. Her heart was pounding and the adrenaline was pouring through her.

You wanted to be a leader? Well, here’s your chance. Make it count.

She keyed her radio. “Someone’s in the woods. I repeat: we have an intruder in the woods. Consider him armed and dangerous. If you get a shot, take it.”

19 Will

Tommy woke up around one in the morning along with another man, Bratt, to take their turn on guard duty over Will and Danny in place of Rachel and Milch. Rachel had gotten up and disappeared into the shadows while Bratt replaced her in the light, sitting down next to Tommy.

It was dead silent outside the basement, and the only sound was the breathing of the people inside. Will watched Tommy continuing to struggle to keep his eyes open while Bratt looked as if he had gotten his full eight hours, even though Will knew for a fact he had only slept about four since they fled to the basement after the massacre.

And that was exactly what it had been. Rachel and the others didn’t want to admit it, but everyone they knew in the city was likely dead except them. Kate’s ghouls — especially the blue-eyed ones — had made sure of that. That was bad for Rachel, but it was also bad for him and Danny. They had come to Dunbar expecting to find Gaby. Unless she had made it out of the city before everything went to hell, chances were she was just as dead (or worse) as Rachel’s people.

What were the chances she had actually gone around the city? There was a small — very, very small — possibility of that. But unlikely. Dunbar was too big. It would have taken too long to go around. Easier to just go through it. Plus, Gaby would have wanted to look for supplies on the way to Song Island. She was traveling south — and there was only one thing down there.

Home.

The more he turned over all the possibilities in his head, the more Will reluctantly concluded that the chances of finding Gaby now had lessened dramatically. Hell, he wasn’t even sure he and Danny were going to survive tonight. Despite Rachel’s assurances about letting them go in the morning, Will wasn’t too confident there was going to be a morning.

Not with Kate’s ghouls out there. Her blue-eyed ghouls.

Four of them. Jesus. There were four of them out there right now. One was bad enough, but four that didn’t go down even after you shot them with silver bullets?

Then there was what Kate had said about the island, about Lara’s broadcast:

“Like a certain little island that should have stayed quiet. This is what happens when you stick your head out and get my attention, Will. I grab a hammer.”

He needed to get his hands on the radio. Even if Lara was asleep, someone would be monitoring the emergency frequency twenty-four hours a day in the island’s Tower. It was protocol. He should know; he was the one who put it together.

But to get to the radio, he needed to get through Tommy and Bratt. Maybe if he could talk to the kid, get him to understand. It was always easier to convince someone to do something when he didn’t look at you as an enemy.

Then there was Bratt. The man was cleaning a silver-chromed Smith & Wesson automatic with a small toothbrush. He was quiet and invisible for a big man—240 pounds easy — with a full graying beard and dark eyes. Bratt hadn’t said a word since he sat down.

Will only really needed to convince one of them, so it had to be Tommy. It was a no-brainer.

“Where did you get that?” Will asked the teenager.

Tommy was clutching the M40A3 sniper rifle, the same one he had been shooting during the gun battle yesterday afternoon. “It’s my dad’s. He taught me how to shoot with it.”

“It’s a hell of a rifle. Was he a Marine?”

“How’d you know?”

“I’ve only seen Marines using the M40 when I was in Afghanistan.”

“You were in Afghanistan?”

“Danny and me. You good with it?”

“Not bad. I’ve been shooting with it since I was eleven.”

“So, five years ago?”

Tommy grinned. “Eight going on nine, wise guy.”

Will smiled back at him, feeling like a pervert on a playground trying to lure a kid into his ice cream truck.

“I always thought I’d enlist when I was old enough,” Tommy was saying. “Never got the chance, with everything that happened. What branch were you in?”

“I was Army.”

“That’s unfortunate.”

Will chuckled. “Yeah, well, we all have our crosses to bear.”

Tommy glanced briefly at Danny, sleeping with his back against the wall next to Will. “Is he really asleep?”

Will looked over at Danny, then shrugged. “I think so.”

“He doesn’t look asleep.” Tommy narrowed his eyes. “He’s faking it, isn’t he?”

“He’s tired. We’ve been moving on water and beef jerky for the last couple of days, trying to get home.”

“I’m sorry,” Tommy said. “If it was up to me, I’d have let you guys go.”

There it is. There’s the opening.

“I need the radio, Tommy,” Will said. “I really need to give my friend a message. It’s a matter of life and death.”

Tommy didn’t answer right away. But he also didn’t say no right away, either.

“Tommy,” Will said, keeping his voice calm, conversational, “it’s just a radio. What’s it going to hurt?”

“I can’t,” Tommy said finally, shaking his head. “Rachel’s orders. I’m sorry.”

“She doesn’t have to know.”

“She’ll know.” The kid shrugged. “Anyways, it’s not going to work. Look around you. Concrete walls and floor. It’d be a miracle if you could get a signal out of this room.”

“I have to try. You have to let me try. A lot of lives are at stake.”

This time Tommy shook his head faster without even taking a moment to think about it. It was a bad sign.

“I can’t,” the teenager said. “I’m sorry. You’ll get it back tomorrow. It’s only, what, six hours away?”

Six hours too long…

This wasn’t going to work. So he tried another tact.

“You saw them?” Will asked.

“Saw what?”

“The blue-eyed ones.”

Tommy looked hesitant, uncertain, maybe replaying what he may or may not have seen in his head. Will knew for a fact Tommy was there at the parking lot along with Rachel. They had seen the four blue-eyed ghouls emerging out of the U-Haul trailer like demons from hell. You didn’t forget a sight like that. Will certainly wasn’t going to anytime soon.

“I don’t know what I saw,” Tommy said. “Everything happened so fast…”

“You saw them,” Will said. “I saw them, too. Blue eyes.”

The kid nodded reluctantly.

“How many of them were there?” Will asked.

“I saw four,” Tommy said. “They had blue eyes like you said, and they were fast. I mean, the others — the black-eyed ones — they’re fast, too, but these ones were… They were way faster.”

“Shock troops,” Bratt said suddenly, surprising both Will and Tommy. Bratt’s voice was deep and sounded as if he were swallowing gravel with every word.

Dammit. Not now. Can’t you see I’m working on the kid here?

“What?” Tommy said, looking over at Bratt sitting next to him.

“Shock troops,” Bratt repeated. He hadn’t stopped working on his gun and didn’t look up. If Will didn’t know any better, he would swear the man was talking to himself. “In wars, they’re the point of the spear, lightning-quick and mobile. They’re sent to break through the enemy lines to lead the way for the rest of the army. That’s what they were doing here last night. They were sent into Dunbar for us.”

“Us?” Tommy said. “What are you talking about, Bratt?”

“We’ve been causing trouble. It’s Harrison’s fault.” The click-click of meaty fingers slid gun parts into place. “Attacking their convoys around the area, killing their soldiers, all that stupid-ass stuff. I told Harrison he was asking for trouble, but he wouldn’t listen.” Bratt chuckled — or was that a cackle? “I guess it’s kind of an honor. I bet they don’t send those blue-eyed freaks out for just anyone, right?”

You’re not wrong, Will thought, remembering again what Kate had said:

“This is what happens when you stick your head out and get my attention, Will. I grab a hammer.”

“Shock troops,” Tommy said to Will. “Crazy, huh?”

Will almost laughed.

Crazy? If you’ve only seen the things I’ve laid eyes on in the last eleven months, you’ll realize this is the least crazy thing, kid.

He said instead, “Yeah.”

“I mean, what makes us so special?” Tommy shook his head. “Nothing. Nothing that I can think of.”

You’re not. You’re just an annoyance to her. That’s all we are to Kate, to Mabry. Cockroaches running around, dirtying up their new house. And cockroaches get stepped on if they stray into the light—

He felt it. It was a very soft vibration at first, and there was almost no sound.

Slowly, as he listened more carefully, it grew in volume…

Danny opened his eyes next to him. “You felt that?”

“Yeah,” Will said.

Tommy said across from them, “That wasn’t just me, right? You guys felt that, too?”

Will nodded and stood up, Danny and Tommy mirroring him.

Bratt followed suit, holstering his sidearm and unslinging his AR-15. “They’re coming,” he said matter-of-factly.

“I think you better wake the others up,” Will said to Tommy.

The teenager nodded and vanished into the darkness. Will heard urgent whispering, then Rachel’s groggy voice.

The sound had picked up noticeably and it was definitely coming from above them — the basement door. Will and Danny wandered over to the landing and looked up the flight of stairs. Even in the semidarkness, the steel door seemed to gleam at the other end.

“What are the chances they’ll give us back our weapons?” Will said.

“Maybe if you ask nice like,” Danny said.

“I did. Again and again.”

“Questionable noises weren’t coming from the other side of the door then.”

Will looked over as Rachel and Tommy emerged from the blackness. Milch and two others, Eaton and George, were moving slowly after them, rubbing the sleep out of their eyes.

“What the hell’s happening?” Rachel said.

“Listen,” Will said.

Rachel did. So did the others.

Slowly, their eyes wandered over to the top of the stairs. They could all hear it now. The slight vibrations, the dull thump-thump-thump of something tapping against the thick metal door from the other side.

“I thought they gave up?” Tommy said, whispering for some reason.

“They did,” Will said. “Now they’re back.”

“They’ve never done anything like this before,” Milch said. He unslung his M4 rifle and held it in front of him at the ready. “Right?” Milch added, looking over at the others. “They’ve never stopped and started over again, right?”

It’s the blue-eyed ghouls, Will wanted to tell them. The black-eyed ones behaved differently when they were around. They became more unpredictable, more creative.

And this time there are four of them out there.

A little overkill, don’t you think, Kate?

Will exchanged a brief knowing look with Danny before he sought out Rachel in the semidarkness. “If they get in…”

“They won’t,” she said.

He didn’t buy it for a second. “We need our weapons.”

“No.”

“I thought we already came to an understanding. We’re not a threat to one another.”

She didn’t answer right away, and Will saw conflict playing across her face.

“Rachel,” Will said, “we’re not your enemy. If they get through that door—”

“Give them back their stuff,” she said to Milch and Eaton before he could finish.

“Thank you,” Will said.

“You’re definitely going on my Christmas list now,” Danny added.

Rachel grunted before turning her full attention back to the door up the stairs. “Don’t make me regret this.”

Milch and Eaton vanished into the darkness before coming back with Will’s and Danny’s M4A1s and gun belts. Will took them eagerly, as did Danny. He felt instantly whole again with the extra weight of the pouches, spare magazines, and the cross-knife in its sheath around his left thigh.

“What about our packs?” Will said to Eaton. “The radio’s in one of them.”

Eaton glanced back into the shadows. “They’re back there somewhere.”

“We need them.”

“Not my problem,” Milch said before turning back to the door.

Will exchanged a look with Danny.

“The service in this place sucks,” Danny said. “I’m definitely complaining on the comment card.”

Will started to move toward the back of the basement when above them the noise had increased and the soft, barely audible thump-thump-thump became noticeably faster and seemed to be growing in volume. That stopped him in his tracks and he gripped the rifle, turning to face the door.

What the hell are they doing out there?

He knew for a fact the creatures weren’t banging on the metal slab without a reason. Not with the blue-eyed ones guiding them. So what was it, then? How did they plan to get inside?

“What about the side door?” Will asked.

“What about it?” Rachel said.

“There’s one, right? That’s how you got in here before us.”

“Yeah.”

“We might have to use it.”

“You don’t think there are more of them waiting out there?”

“Probably, but it’s a better option than facing what’s going to be coming through this door.”

“Assuming they get through.”

“Listen to them,” Will said. “They’re going to get through. They’re just getting warmed up.” He glanced at his watch: 2:16 a.m. “And they have hours on their side.”

“You’re a warm bowl of optimism, aren’t you, buddy?” Danny said.

“If we have to, we’ll use the side door,” Rachel said.

BOOM!

They all took an involuntarily step back from the stair landing. It wasn’t the same noise they had been hearing for the last few minutes. No. This was a single blow. Heavier, stronger, and more damaging. Will had become used to the rhythmic pattern of the ghouls slamming their useless flesh against a door, and this wasn’t it.

This was something else. Something more intense.

“Sounds metal,” Danny said.

“Yeah,” Will nodded.

“That all you got?”

“Yup.”

“You’re useless.”

“I try.”

“Shut up,” Rachel said, annoyed.

Danny mouthed at Will, “I blame this all on you.”

“We’re going to die tonight,” Will mouthed back.

“Captain fucking Optimism. I’m telling Lara.”

Will grinned.

“Tommy, go see if you can hear anything happening at the side door,” Rachel said.

Tommy rushed off into the darkness. The fact that people could disappear and reappear without warning was a bit disconcerting to Will, especially since he had zero visibility outside the small pool of light provided by the single LED lamp.

BOOM!

“Definitely metal,” Danny said.

“Let’s find out for sure,” Will said.

He jogged up the stairs, where he could still see the doorframe trembling in the aftermath of the last blow just seconds ago. Whatever they were using out there was definitely heavy and doing tremendous damage. He hadn’t been counting the seconds between the impacts, but it sounded like every ten seconds.

Which was just about—

BOOM!

Every inch of the door shook, and the brick wall surrounding it threatened to come unglued at any second. And there — a noticeable indentation had appeared at the side of the door, just over where the lever and locking mechanism were.

Footsteps behind him before Rachel’s and Danny’s breaths hit him in the back of the neck.

“Holy shit,” Danny said, staring at the indentation.

“What the hell is that?” Rachel asked, out of breath.

“They’re using some kind of battering ram,” Will said. “It’s the blue-eyed ghouls. They’re running the show out there.”

“Blue-eyed—” Rachel started to say.

BOOM!

All three of them took a step back as another indentation materialized in the door, very close to the first one. It sounded as if the creatures were literally driving whatever was on the other side into the door with great force, raining one concentrated, massive blow at a time every ten seconds.

“They’re going to cave the lock in,” Will said. “The door won’t hold for long after that.”

They hurried back down the stairs just as Tommy reappeared in the light.

“Nothing,” Tommy said. “I didn’t hear anything on the other side.”

“Are you sure?” Rachel asked.

“I’m telling you, there’s nothing out there—”

BOOM!

Will swore the entire basement vibrated for a good five seconds afterward that time.

“We gotta split,” Bratt said, his gravel voice cutting through the momentary silence. “The shock troops are coming. That’s them out there. We gotta go now.”

Will exchanged a quick look with Danny, who nodded back.

“Rachel,” Will said. “He’s right. We gotta go.”

“The side door?” she said, looking uncertainly at him.

“Yeah.”

“We’ll never survive out there.”

“We’ll have a better shot out there than down here when they start coming through that door.”

“Not much better…”

BOOM!

“Better than down here,” Will said, “trapped in this one big room with nowhere to go.”

“The door will hold,” she said, looking back up the stairs.

Will could tell he wasn’t going to get through. Maybe it was fear, or determination, or just simple human stubbornness (he knew a little bit about that last one), but he wasn’t going to budge her. She had decided, made her choice, and she was going to live (die) with it.

“It’ll hold,” she said again.

Another BOOM! blasted through the entire basement.

They spun around back to the stairs almost as one just as the metal door flew wide open and a burst of cold, rancid air flooded inside.

The first ghoul raced in, its bones clacking loudly.

Rachel, Eaton, and Milch opened fire and the creature’s forward momentum was stopped by a hail of bullets tearing into it, ripping away flesh and revealing bleach-white bones underneath. Then they lost sight of the ghoul because the black ocean pouring in through the open door swallowed the lone creature up and flooded down the stairs in a quivering obsidian tide.

“Go go go!” Will shouted.

Danny was already running, Tommy right behind him, when Will opened fire on the stairs.

Silver bullets punched through weak flesh and ricocheted off bones. Ghouls fell, flopping down the stairs, while others threw the dead ones over the banisters to make way for more to get down faster.

“Rachel!” Will shouted.

It didn’t do any good. He didn’t even think she heard him over the roar of blazing gunfire in the tight confines of the basement. Bullet casings sprayed around her and Bratt and Milch and Eaton, the clink-clink-clink of empty brass almost as loud as the unrelenting boom of assault rifles firing on full-auto.

Will turned and fled.

He darted into the darkness, guessing (praying) at the direction of the side door, using where he had last seen Tommy going and coming out of as a marker. Then he saw moonlight spilling through a rectangular hole in the wall and ran toward it.

Screams erupted behind him. Men’s voices, then a woman’s.

He kept going, because looking back would only slow him down. A second. Half a second. It didn’t matter. Slow was slow, and slow was death.

The floor under him trembled as the creatures landed everywhere. The slapping of flesh against concrete was loud because the gunfire had all but stopped. For a split-second there was no noise at all, until Rachel’s screams filled the room and bounced off the walls, then someone began firing with a semi-automatic handgun—

Will saw Danny in the doorway, holding the door open for him. There were no signs of Tommy. “Come on!” Danny shouted. “Can you run any slower, old man?”

Will put on a burst of speed and lunged through the opening and crashed into a brick wall chest-first on the other side. Behind him came the loud bang! of the door slamming shut and almost instantly the sound and fury of dozens of ghouls crashing into it from the other side.

Thoom thoom thoom!

Ennis’s basement side entrance was one floor below ground, with steps leading up into an alleyway beside the bar. Danny was already halfway up, shouting, “Can’t lock the door on this side! Run run run!”

Will pushed himself off the wall and followed as a gust of wind rushed against him about the same time the door banged open and the sound of hundreds (thousands?) of crashing bare feet flooded his senses.

Tommy was waiting for them in the alley above, absurdly still armed with his sniper rifle, and was pointing it at the mouth of the alley.

“Go go go!” Danny shouted.

Tommy turned and ran toward the back of the alley. Will wanted to shout at him, find out if he knew where he was going, but he didn’t get the chance. Creatures were coming up fast behind him, and he skidded and nearly fell against the dirty floor. He managed to catch himself at the last second, made a quick U-turn, and pursued Danny and Tommy into the darkened alley.

There were no lights, just the weak spill of moonlight from above. Thankfully that was enough to see with, and Will caught sight of Tommy’s lanky form moving with surprising speed. The kid was running so fast, so determined to get to the end, that Will wondered if he even still realized they were behind him.

Danny slowed down in front of him, then spun around like a ballerina doing a pirouette. Will kept going, the loud clattering of Danny’s rifle firing on full-auto behind him even louder in the narrow passageway.

Then he began to slow down, and as soon as Danny fired his last shot, Will stopped, spun, and lifted his rifle.

Danny darted past him a split-second later. “Changing!”

Will opened up on the horde. It was a wall of living darkness, liquid black eyes against the enveloping night. He fired into the center, then swung the rifle left to right, then right to left again. The magazine emptied at an impossible rate, the carbine getting lighter and lighter with every half-second—

“Go go go!” Danny shouted behind him.

Will turned and ran, Danny commencing firing as soon as he was past him.

Up ahead, Tommy was waving them over while holding open a steel door, moonlight glinting off its shiny surface. It was beaten and old, but it was intact, and that was all that mattered.

He ejected the magazine and let it drop to the floor and shoved in a new one while shouting, “Danny! You coming or what?”

Danny was already running back toward him, a big grin on his face. “Aw, I didn’t think you cared!”

“Don’t tell anyone!” Will shouted back, then pulled the trigger again.

Ghouls stumbled and fell, creating a dangerous pile that the others slipped and stumbled against as they tried to get over to get to him. Will was backing up as he fired, watching with morbid fascination as the black-eyed undead things toppled like dominos, bullets piercing non-existent muscle and dropping more of their kind behind them. They were so crammed into the tight confines of the alley and there were so many of them he was pretty sure he was killing a half dozen (more?) with every silver bullet.

He wished he could have said it did any good, but it didn’t. It didn’t make a damn bit of difference at all because for every single ghoul he killed, a dozen were already scrambling over its lifeless carcass and they were constantly moving forward at an obscene rate.

“Move your ass, Kemosabe!” Danny shouted behind him, his voice shockingly close.

Will hadn’t realized he was almost on top of Danny until he spun to his left and saw the open door in front of him. He threw himself inside while Danny unleashed another full magazine into the surging tide of writhing flesh, the harsh sound of bullets snapping and glancing off bones like some kind of strange melody that could only be orchestrated by a mad composer.

Will was turning around when Danny stepped through and Tommy, who had been waiting beside him this entire time, slammed the door shut with all his might. There was the loud (and very satisfying) clack-clack! of a large deadbolt sliding into place. Almost instantly, the door shook as the ghouls flung themselves into it from the other side—

Thoom thoom thoom!

— and Tommy stumbled back, disoriented by the brute force on display.

But the door held. It held.

“Where the hell are we?” Will said as he took in his surroundings.

He couldn’t see anything, but he could hear the sound of his and Danny’s instinctive reloading. Not that he needed light to change magazines. He mastered that little trick years ago and hadn’t looked back since.

Thoom thoom thoom!

Danny was standing next to him, the two of them in competition to see who was breathing harder and faster and more desperately. It was, he thought, a tie. The fact that they were standing in some kind of darkened hallway with no source of light whatsoever did nothing to make him feel any calmer. Danny apparently shared his apprehension.

Thoom thoom thoom!

Click! A beam of light speared a long hallway with white walls, carpeted flooring, and dust flitting wildly in front of them. “Someone’s been shirking their dusting,” Danny said behind the flashlight.

Will grabbed his own flashlight from one of his pouches and flicked it on. “Tommy, where the hell are we?”

Tommy stepped in front of them, still sucking in air. He looked back every time the creatures smashed into the door.

Thoom thoom thoom!

Will and Danny had forgotten about the sound. God help them, but they had become so used to it that it didn’t even faze them now.

Thoom thoom thoom!

“It’s a museum,” Tommy said.

“A museum?” Danny said. “In Dunbar? What’s the museum for? The crawdads of Louisiana?”

“History of the town. Dunbar is, uh, kind of proud of itself.”

“I’m proud of my boxers, too, but you don’t see me starting a museum for them.”

Thoom thoom thoom!

“Are we safe in here?” Will asked.

“I, uh, hope so,” Tommy said, looking back at the door again.

Then—silence.

The pounding had ceased without any warning.

All three of them looked back at the door, Will and Danny running their flashlights over it to make sure it was still closed. It was, and the deadbolt remained firmly in place. The frame looked slightly cracked by the vicious assault, but the door itself was still in one piece.

It was quiet around them. Not just inside, but outside as well. There were no screams, no gunshots, not even the soft but familiar tap-tap of bare feet. It was as if the ghouls had ceased all activity within the city limits.

“What the hell is this?” Danny whispered.

“Hell if I know,” Will whispered back.

It’s the blue-eyed ghouls.

Four of them.

Out there, somewhere.

They know we’re in here.

They have to know.

So what the hell are they up to now?

20 Keo

Damn, that plan went down the crapper fast.

The guy missed with his first two bullets, but all it took was one stray round to turn this into a very bad night. Fortunately for Keo, he had surfaced on the other side of the beach, with a good one hundred meters separating him and the man standing watch on the boat shack. He would have chastised the guy for being a lousy shot, except Keo didn’t think he could have done any better himself.

Looks like we both could use a little more time on the firing range, pal.

He pushed his way into the tree line and kept running. Bullets punched through branches behind and to the left of him as Mister Boat Shack continued to try to take him out. The guy had no chance out in the open when he could see Keo, and he had even less now.

Of course, all it took was one lucky shot…

This wasn’t how he had expected it to go down. Then again, he hadn’t anticipated finding an island lit up like a Christmas tree, with what looked like bright halogen lamps strategically placed from side to side and front to back, either. Towering solar collector trays ringed the place like a shiny necklace, which meant solar power. In a world without electricity, that alone made Song Island worth its weight in gold.

It also went a long way to confirm Allie’s story about a mysterious radio signal she had intercepted months ago that had lured seven of her people here. Those same survivors hadn’t kept in touch, which wasn’t supposed to happen. That was why Zachary and Shorty had come down here with him (well, mostly Zachary), to check up on their missing friends. It was that knowledge of those potentially missing (dead?) people that convinced Keo to take this particular approach.

Carrie hadn’t been enthusiastic about his idea when he told her. “You’re crazy,” she had said. “You’re going to get yourself killed. Why can’t we just go over there and tell them we’re looking for shelter and you’re looking for people who had come here before?”

His natural instinct was to respond with a cavalier, “Because this is the real world, not Fantasyland,” but instead he had said, “Can’t take the chance they turn out to be soldiers. This way, we’ll know who they are before they even see us.”

The three of them sat in the boat, adrift in the darkness with the island in the background. The string of lamps along the three piers looked like glowing fingers, and he could make out a silhouetted form moving on top of a shack on one side of the long stretch of beach. He couldn’t tell if the man (or woman) was armed from this distance, but that was probably a safe bet. The Song Island he was looking at now was worth killing for.

So where did that leave Allie’s people?

You owe me big for this, Zachary.

With the trolling motor turned off, the boat moved slightly back and forth on its own accord over the calm lake water. He was certain the guard would eventually spot the white paint on the boat, but so far, so good.

The lone guard didn’t concern him too much. It was the tall structure at the back of the island, with the floodlights over its windows. Some kind of lighthouse with an antenna sticking out of it. You could probably see the entire island from up there.

Now that’s one hell of an overwatch.

He expected to hear an argument between the girls, but there wasn’t one. In fact, neither woman said a word. He gave them their privacy anyway and didn’t hurry them along with a decision. It wasn’t as if he was going to run out of night anytime soon. Out here, far from land, he felt a certain freedom knowing the creatures couldn’t—wouldn’t—reach him. No wonder Allie and her people refused to budge from their little island—

“Okay,” Carrie said behind him. “We’ll wait here until you come back.”

He looked over. “Are you sure?”

“No, but we’ll do it anyway because we owe you.”

“You don’t owe me anything.” He looked at Lorelei. “You don’t.”

“Yes, we do,” Lorelei said, with what sounded like absolute certainty. “We’d be back at L11 right now if it wasn’t for you.”

“Besides,” Carrie said, “you’re just sneaking onto the island and finding out what you can and swimming back before daylight, right? If it’s not safe, we’ll go back to shore. If it is, we’ll show ourselves like we just arrived.”

“That’s the plan.”

Carrie nodded. He wasn’t sure if that was for his benefit, or hers and Lorelei’s. “Okay. We’ll wait out here in the dark for you. What could possibly go wrong?” She had said that last part while gritting her teeth.

Famous last words.

“Use the trolling motor if you have to,” Keo said. “It got us this close without being spotted, and it should be fine to turn on again if we need it.” He paused, then, “Remember, if things go bad — and if you hear shooting, that means things have gone bad — wait an hour, and if I’m not back by then, or you see boats leaving the island and coming your way, take off.”

“Take off,” Carrie repeated. “Right.”

They both looked scared. Lorelei had all but shrunk into the back of the boat, once again trying to hide behind her curtain of blonde hair.

“Just stick to the plan,” Keo said. “As long as you keep your distance, they shouldn’t spot the boat, and I’ll be back before sunrise. We’ll be fine. No muss, no fuss.”

He left his pack in the boat, strapping just the MP5SD tightly around his body before dropping off the side and into the water. It was cold at first, but his body adapted after a few minutes. He measured the distance to the beach. Not too far. Four hundred meters, give or take. He could do that in his sleep. Thank God for all those summers on Mission Beach back in San Diego.

Keo did calm breaststrokes for the first one hundred meters. He wasn’t in any hurry. The night wasn’t going anywhere, and he had plenty of time to search the island and do a little exploring. Push came to shove, there was a lot of water he could jump into from just about any part of the island and plenty of woods he could get lost in. He had a lot of experience outrunning pursuers in wooded areas these days.

At the 150 meter mark, he slipped under and didn’t come up for another fifty.

As soon as he poked his head back through the surface, he heard the roar of an outboard motor and saw the boat leaving one of the piers, bright spotlight flashing across the lake in the direction of—

Carrie and Lorelei.

On cue, he heard the boat they had commandeered this afternoon fire up its trolling motor behind him. The slow, gradual whine was almost instantly lost in the blare of the loud outboard motor pushing a bass fishing boat across the lake. Waves surged against him, jostling Keo around as the faster vessel shot across the water.

Dammit.

He treaded in place and looked after the boat as it streaked toward Carrie and Lorelei. Fast. Too fast. He couldn’t have stopped it even if he was close enough to use the submachine gun. Which he wasn’t. Instead, he helplessly watched it catch up to the white boat.

He waited to hear gunfire, hoping that he wouldn’t. Carrie still had her Glock, but if she was smart, she would get rid of it before the boat caught up to them. There was no way they were going to fight off a boat that was probably better armed, and he hoped she figured out that before it was too late.

Throw the gun away, Carrie. Throw the gun away…

Thirty seconds later, the boats were now drifting in the lake close to one another, and there still wasn’t any gunfire. That was a good sign. Carrie and Lorelei had surrendered and no one had shot anyone. They were still alive. Which meant he could still save them…later, on the island.

Keo turned and went back under the surface and continued toward the beach.

When he came back up again, he was just fifty meters from the impossibly white sands, and the craft with the loud motor was on its way back, towing Carrie and Lorelei’s boat behind it. He could just make out four figures in the first boat now. Two were seated and two were standing. He squinted, but he couldn’t tell if the two standing were wearing uniforms.

Maybe, maybe not…

He ducked back under and pushed on toward the island, fighting against the jostling waves from the boat’s wake a second time.

He was ten meters from the beach when his boots touched something mushy but just solid enough and he began walking up at an angle. He went into a crouch, half-submerged in the water. A quick check to the side found the island boat sidling up to one of the piers, where a man and a woman had appeared and were waiting for them.

Carrie and Lorelei were standing up on the boat now, so they were okay. At this point, both women alive was more than he could have hoped for, especially given the precarious nature of the night.

Of course, their capture changed everything. Without the boat waiting for him out there, he had no place to retreat to—

Crack! A bullet splashed into the lake behind him.

He bolted up from his kneeling position and took off up the beach. Not an easy feat. He was drenched from head to toe and he was carrying extra pounds thanks to the water absorbed by his clothes. Parts of Beaufont Lake were in the pockets of his cargo pants and T-shirt, and a whole lot of it was in his boots. He picked up speed (or thought he did, anyway) with every ounce of water that literally poured out of him. He would probably look like a bloated corpse on the beach if he were to die now.

Swim fast, leave a bloated corpse. Wasn’t that the old saying?

Close enough.

It was going to take a while before he dried up completely. Maybe half a day, since it was still night and he didn’t have the sun to make it go faster. He was shivering, because being out of the water and moving in wet clothes was a lot colder than when he was submerged in the lake.

The MP5SD in hand, Keo picked his way through the woods, skipping round underbrush and trees, making as little noise and leaving as few tracks as possible. The moon provided little light for him to navigate with, but he took comfort in the knowledge that if he couldn’t see where he was going, then likely his pursuers wouldn’t be able to, either.

Right. Keep telling yourself that, pal.

He was far enough from the lampposts to avoid their halos, and the only creatures that noticed his passing were birds in the trees and random land creatures that were annoyed by his presence, who scampered off. A few squirrels sat and watched him curiously. He grinned back at them. The furry little buggers had become his new lucky charms these days.

I should catch one of them, skin it, and hang its fur around my neck for good luck.

He could certainly use a little luck now. Hell, why settle for a little? He could use a lot more than that. It was going to be tricky if he had to fight an entire island full of soldiers, though he was starting to think that wasn’t the case. They just didn’t act like the men in uniform he had encountered the last two days. Something about them was…different. The vibe was all off.

Groovy, man. We living and dying by vibes now?

Keo took a moment to take inventory of his supplies. Besides the Ka-Bar, the submachine gun was it. Heckler & Koch made excellent weapons, and even wet, the MP5SD would still work like a charm. He fired off a couple of rounds just to be sure, putting two bullets into the ground, the suppressor keeping both shots at minimum decibels.

Satisfied he still had a working weapon, Keo moved on.

He was sure they would chase him into the woods or attempt to locate him from the surrounding fields (with the beach behind him) almost immediately. He was wrong. They were either taking their time, or they were too smart to follow him into the darkness. He would have preferred to keep doing this under the cover of night, but daylight had its advantages too, including drying him out, which would help with the shivering.

He thought he was prepared for what he would find as he reached the end of the woods, but the sight of the hotel startled Keo and left him breathless for a moment.

Daebak. I’ve died and gone to heaven.

The building was huge, with floodlights spaced out along the walls. And it wasn’t even finished yet. He knew that because there were scaffolding and construction equipment visible on the flat rooftop. The lights coming from the rooms, particularly the front patio and lobby, told him that the quiet hum he had been hearing since stepping foot on the island was the product of a power station probably somewhere on the other side of the island where the hotel guests wouldn’t notice. That was where all the solar collector trays were sending their juices.

A solar-powered island. God bless the peaceniks.

And there was the lighthouse, about half a football field from the back of the hotel, with a sprawling lawn between the two structures. Or it looked like a lighthouse. Three floors, with a cone-shaped top. Four windows each on the top two floors, light pouring out from the openings. A figure moved back and forth between the windows on the third floor with binoculars. Possibly a woman from the curves.

Keo would have liked to move around the island while sticking to the woods, but once he reached the eastern cliff, he was stuck. The woods only went so far, leaving him with open ground filled with two large empty swimming pools and bird-poop-covered fish ornaments between him and the hotel. From here, his only choice was to retreat back to the beach.

It wasn’t an optimal fighting position. Not by a long shot.

A voice, booming across the wide-open space in front of him, snapped his attention back to the hotel. “Keo!”

A woman. Probably the same one from the beach. The fact that she knew his name was expected. Carrie and Lorelei would have given up information on him by now. He hadn’t expected them to hold out under interrogation, much less torture, if indeed that was what had happened to them in the last two hours.

“Keo!” the woman shouted again. “We talked to Carrie and Lorelei!”

No kidding, lady.

“We’re not soldiers! Or collaborators!”

Keo tracked the voice to the patio, maybe 200 meters from his current position. He fished out his lightweight binoculars from one of his cargo pants pockets and looked through them.

A blonde. About five-five. A taller woman and the large man stood behind her. All three were clearly illuminated by the harsh glare of lights above them, which also allowed him to see their clothes — civilian pants and shirts, but no uniform. Of course, it could just be one big trap to lure him out. After what he had done to them, first at the marina and then later at the shoreline, he wouldn’t be surprised if one of the fake soldiers finally grew a brain.

“I know you can hear me, Keo!” the woman shouted.

She seemed to be looking in his direction, so he guessed she figured out that he didn’t have a whole lot of real estate to hide in after escaping the beach. It made sense. This was their island. They would know every inch of it by now. So why hadn’t they attacked him yet? Either they were risk-averse, or they didn’t want to make this encounter bloody. Of course, he could just be overthinking the whole thing, too.

“This is your chance to keep this from getting out of hand!” she shouted. “Step outside with your hands up!” She paused, probably for effect. “You make us chase you in there, and it’s not going to end well, and neither one of us wants that!”

Speak for yourself. I happen to have a lot of recent experience eluding people with assault rifles in the woods.

Keo turned and hurried back toward the beach. He skirted over familiar terrain that he had memorized before arriving at his destination.

He went into a crouch and listened for signs of armed men trying to outflank him.

Behind him, the woman was still shouting, her voice fading a bit with the distance. But the night was so silent he would have to be deaf not to hear her. “Look, we get it! You had no choice! You couldn’t be sure who we were! I understand that! I would have done the same thing in your shoes!”

Satisfied no one was moving in on him from the beach, Keo got up and jogged through the darkness and back to the other side of the woods. The woman and her companions hadn’t moved from the patio.

He looked to the lighthouse and saw two figures inside now, moving from window to window with binoculars. Searching for him, no doubt. He wondered if they had special binoculars. Night-vision, maybe. That made him take a couple of extra steps backward until he was behind a thick underbrush just in case.

“Keo!” the woman shouted. “Let’s talk this out!”

When he didn’t respond, the woman turned to the others and said something. When she was done, she went back into the hotel with the tall woman, and a few seconds later a second man came out and took up position outside the patio alongside the big guy.

Keo waited again for the attack he knew was coming.

And waited, and waited…but nothing happened.

He sat down on the ground in his still-wet clothes instead.

Who were these people? If they weren’t soldiers, then who were they? Maybe they were even Allie’s survivors. But that didn’t make sense, either. That lighthouse made a hell of a good broadcasting station, especially with the antenna at the top. Wouldn’t they have contacted Allie with it by now? Or broadcasted a “safe and sound” message? They had to know Zachary and the others were waiting to hear back from them. The only reason they hadn’t done that yet in the months since they arrived was because they were (dead) in trouble. So was that it—

“Keo!”

It was Carrie’s voice, coming from the hotel patio.

“Keo!” Carrie shouted again. “It’s okay! They haven’t hurt us, and they’re not going to hurt you!”

He moved back toward the tree line and looked out with the binoculars again. Carrie was on the patio with the boss lady and the two men. The sight of her, standing among the islanders, caught him by surprise. He certainly hadn’t expected this little development.

“Keo!” Carrie shouted. “They’re not going to hurt you! I’ve been talking to them! That’s all we’ve been doing. Just talking! They know what happened to those seven people you came here looking for! Keo, can you hear me?”

Carrie waited for him to answer, and when he didn’t, she turned back to the woman. They exchanged some brief words, the back and forth almost casual. Then the women went into the hotel, once again leaving the two men outside.

What the hell was that about?

Keo remained where he was, watching them and listening for sounds around him. Any noise at all other than the birds in the trees, the scurrying along branches from his furry buddies. Hints that the attack he knew was coming would finally arrive. They certainly knew where he was — or at least, the general vicinity — so what was keeping them?

He got up and moved back toward the eastern part of the woods. There, he leaned out between two trees and peered at the rocky formations below. There was nothing down there except large rocks. No handholds, either, so climbing without equipment was definitely out of the question.

There was only one path out of the woods that he could see. That was straight across the open grounds, past those two empty swimming pools, the unfinished gazebo, and hope and pray he didn’t get too close to one of the hundred or so lampposts that snaked around the place like someone’s gaudy idea of showing off to the neighbors during the holidays.

Hey. No one told you you had to come here. Remember?

Yeah, yeah…

There was a new figure on the boat shack; he could tell the difference by the height and the man’s outline. There was also someone new in the lighthouse — just one, this time, going from window to window and peering through binoculars and occasionally talking into a radio. The big man was alone at the hotel patio again.

Presenting one lone guard at each position was tempting. Was that the point? Were they trying to lure him out into the open? To make the first move? Was there really just one person at the beach? Or more inside the shack? Another one hiding in the lighthouse? Or waiting behind the front doors into the hotel lobby?

These people clearly weren’t stupid, so anything was possible.

Of course, it could just be his paranoia talking. Or maybe, just maybe, he was giving them too much credit again.

There wasn’t really much of a choice when he got right down to it. Run or fight. Or surrender. That last option wasn’t really an option. Keo had never been good at surrendering. It wasn’t in his DNA. At least he shared that much with his father. Of course, if he had been a better planner, a better tactician, he wouldn’t have found himself in these situations so often. Norris could have told him that. The old-timer was always criticizing his (lack of) ability to strategize.

Woulda, coulda, shoulda…

After watching the figure in the lighthouse and the one on the patio for an hour and getting their patterns, Keo waited for his opportunity. When he saw the woman in the lighthouse move away from the south window and the one on the patio turn his back briefly to check the other side of the island, Keo jogged out of the woods. He kept low, bent over at the waist, while still managing to sprint.

He made it to one of the swimming pools less than ten seconds later. He slid along the tall grass and fell off the smooth concrete edge and into the empty and slightly curved hole in the ground. It took him a moment to realize the thing was shaped into a pear and that he had landed somewhere in the shallow section. Which was lucky. If he had chosen the wrong spot, he would have had a pretty long plummet into the deep end.

He moved toward the other side of the pool and didn’t have to stand up to scan the lighthouse on one side and the patio on the other. It was two in the morning and he could tell both guards were tired. It was in their sluggish back and forth, the way they held their weapons.

Keo waited for the double turn again, and when it came, he climbed up and darted across the grounds, sticking to the patches of darkness and skirting around the haloed LED lampposts. The damn things were ridiculously bright up close and he had to blink away temporary blindness a couple of times. There were a couple of damaged lights here and there that allowed him to go in a straight line every now and then.

He finally slipped behind a large palm tree (Where the hell did they even get palm trees in Louisiana?) and glimpsed the lighthouse to his right, the patio to his left, and the side of the hotel — wicked bright floodlights and all — directly in front.

And there, one of the side doors stared invitingly back at him.

Keo waited again.

One minute. Two…then three…

The double turn.

He dashed through the lights and made the side door fourteen seconds later. He reached for the lever and cranked it and slipped inside, his MP5SD moving up into firing position—

Keo froze.

There was a police Remington pump-action shotgun pointed at his face from one meter away.

“You took your sweet time,” the redhead standing behind the shotgun said. “We thought you might have decided to swim back to the shore or something.”

Keo’s mind raced.

The redhead noticed and grinned. “Yeah, go for it. Three feet? I’m sure there’s a chance I could miss. Probably.”

“What happened to your face?” the pretty blonde asked.

“Birthmark,” Keo said. “It was a very painful birth.”

“I’m sorry for her.”

“So am I.”

“Is that why your mom named you Keo? As punishment?”

“She wanted to call me Harry, but it was already taken.”

“Really.”

“True story.”

“I’m sure it is.” She paused for a moment, watching him intently. “The plan didn’t quite work out, huh?”

He shrugged. “I’ve always been more of a doer than a planner.”

“It would appear so.”

The blonde was the clear leader. If he had any doubts before, he didn’t anymore. She looked convincing in cargo pants with a Glock in a hip holster. Late twenties (though it was hard to tell these days), watching him with crystal-blue eyes. The redhead, leaning against the wall behind her, looked even younger. She might have been twenty, maybe twenty-one.

They were both staring at him. Really, really staring at him.

After the incident at the side door, they had led him to a small room at the back of the building. Some kind of supply closet, with concrete walls and floor. He sat on an uncomfortable metal chair now, hands zip tied behind his back and ankles similarly restrained. The three of them were inside the room, but he could hear a fourth person — a man by the heavy back-and-forth footsteps — in the hallway.

How exactly had he ended up being held prisoner on an island run by two kids?

This is fucking embarrassing.

“We talked to Carrie,” the blonde was saying. “You’re looking for seven of your friends.”

Friends of friends, actually, he thought, but said instead, “What happened to them?”

“They were responding to a message on the radio?”

“Yes.”

“When was this?”

He recalled his conversation with Allie. “A while back.”

The blonde nodded. “They’re dead.”

“You know this for a fact?”

“Yes.”

“Did you kill them?”

“No.”

“Then who did?”

“The people who had this island before us.”

“And what happened to them?”

The blonde didn’t answer, and neither did the redhead. Their silence was all the answer he needed.

“Ah,” Keo said. “This is one dangerous island.”

“It can be,” the blonde said.

“So what happens now?”

The blonde gave him a long look before glancing back at the redhead. “Do you see it?”

The redhead shook her head. “Nah.”

“You sure?”

“Looks okay to me.”

“Maybe I can help you ladies out if you’ll tell me what you’re looking for,” Keo said.

“We wanted to make sure you didn’t have squirrelly eyes,” the blonde said.

“I have no idea what that means,” Keo said, looking from the blonde to the redhead and back again.

“No, I don’t suppose you do.”

“He looks like one of those K-pop guys,” the redhead said. “Except for the scar. That’s butt ugly.”

“Now that’s just mean,” Keo said.

“K-what?” the blonde said.

“Those Korean boy bands I told you about.”

The blonde shook her head. “You do know that I only pay attention to you half the time, and almost never when it involves pop culture?”

The redhead smirked. “Now you tell me.” She looked over at him. “Your English is pretty good, K-pop.”

“I was born on an American base in San Diego,” Keo said.

“Well, that explains it.”

The blonde stood up and walked to the door. “Get some sleep and we’ll talk again tomorrow morning,” she said to him.

“Sleep?” Keo said. “It’s going to be hard getting any sleep like this.”

“He’s right,” the redhead said. “The poor guy.”

She walked over, stopped beside him, then lifted her foot and kicked the chair over. Keo landed on the hard concrete floor on his side with an oomph.

“There,” the redhead said. “That’s for making us stay up past midnight chasing after your dumb ass. Do you have any idea how much beauty sleep I need per day?”

“Not much, I’m sure,” Keo said.

“Flattery will get you pancakes in the morning.”

“You have pancakes?”

“Oh yeah, we have a lot of things. There’s a big ol’ freezer with all kinds of goodies. Be a good boy and don’t try anything funny, and we might share some of it with you tomorrow.”

“Deal.”

The blonde was waiting at the door. “Sit tight.”

“Some way to welcome a guest,” Keo said.

“You’re lucky we didn’t shoot you on sight after the month we’ve been having.”

The two women left, slamming the metal door shut after them. Keo heard a lock turning, then saw the big man from earlier look in at him through the security glass, before he, too, vanished. He didn’t go very far, though, because Keo could still see his shadow just under the door.

At least they hadn’t tied him to the chair, which Keo scooted away from now and laid on his side, his hands still bound behind him. He stared up at the ceiling, at the bright squiggly lightbulb above. It was impossibly bright, though the fact that he hadn’t been this close to an artificial light source in a while might have a little something to do with that.

“Hey!” Keo shouted. “Can you at least turn off the light so I can get some sleep?”

He waited for a response. The guy outside didn’t seem to have heard him. Or if he did, he didn’t care.

“Come on. Do a guy a solid, huh? Geneva Convention and all that? I know you can hear me. Come on, man. ”

The shadow didn’t move.

Keo sighed and closed his eyes.

At least he was still alive, so there was that.

One promise down, one to go…

21 Will

“Silver bullets?” Tommy said. “You mean they actually work?”

“You’ve heard about them?” Will asked.

“There was a radio broadcast some of the kids picked up a few days ago. Something about silver, ultraviolet lights, and islands.” The teenager shook his head. “Harrison dismissed it and we never really tried to put it to use. I mean, the idea of silver… That sounded crazy.”

“Because all of this is so clearly not crazy,” Danny said.

Tommy looked slightly embarrassed. “Harrison made the decision.”

“You guys do everything he says?”

“He’s the one who put this city together. He organized the resistance in the beginning. I don’t think we’d be here without him. For all his faults, he really did save us in the early days. After that, I guess it just became a habit to follow him.”

Even in the semidarkness of the Dunbar museum, Tommy looked young and innocent, and Will could easily picture the kid falling in line like the others, including Rachel. She had seemed strong-willed to him, even stubborn, but she too had hitched her wagon to Harrison.

It’s hard to say no to a savior.

“This radio broadcast,” Danny was saying. “Was it a woman?”

“Yeah,” Tommy said. “You heard it, too?”

“I might have caught a snippet or three.”

Tommy was talking about Lara’s broadcast. The same message that had incurred Kate’s wrath. Kate, who at this moment was plotting the island’s destruction as retaliation.

Goddamn you, Kate. You’re going to haunt me for the rest of my life, aren’t you?

They were crouched behind a half-circle entranceway that separated the lobby of the museum with the back of the building, where the administrative offices and back rooms were linked by a long, curving hallway on each side. The spacious front lobby made up nearly sixty percent of the place, with still-intact double glass doors looking out into the moonlit sidewalk beyond. There were half a dozen small windows, but they were too high up to make any difference. Why bother with those when there were the doors?

The museum was made up of old photos, commissioned paintings of the city’s founders, and different angles of Dunbar over the decades from cattle town to what it was now. Not much, if you were to ask Will, but then its residents probably saw it differently. There were old maps, clothing, and even six-shot revolvers in dust-covered glass cases. Evidence that mankind once built something here. How long would they last once Dunbar’s citizens were scattered into the wind after tonight?

“The towns, the pregnancies,” Kate had said. “They’re all just the beginning. In ten, twenty years, you won’t recognize any of this. In a couple of generations, man will have forgotten they were ever in control of the planet.”

A couple of generations, Kate? It’s hard to remember now, a year on…

He pushed those defeating thoughts of Kate away (nothing good ever came of thinking about Kate) and concentrated on the doors in front of him.

Those damn doors. Those were going to be a problem if the ghouls attacked. Will didn’t have any doubts that the creatures knew they were inside. Not after pursuing them through the alleyway.

Dead, not stupid.

So why hadn’t they attacked? The twin doors wouldn’t last under a prolonged assault. An hour, if he was being optimistic. Less, if he was being practical. Barricading them hadn’t been an option. The only furniture in the lobby were a few chairs, a water cooler, and some stanchions that had been knocked over months ago, along with the velvet ropes attached to them. Bringing the heavy oak desks and metal filing cabinets from the offices in the back was too much work. Besides, they had already come up with a plan of retreat for when the creatures finally gained entry into the museum. It wasn’t a matter of if, but when.

So where the hell are they?

He could easily make out the abandoned streets on the other side of the doors about twenty-five meters across the lobby. The entire city of Dunbar looked and felt as if it had become stuck in time, like a museum outside of a museum.

Tommy moved nervously next to him from time to time. Danny was on the other side of the half-circle, sitting Indian-style with his M4A1 in front of him as he ate a granola bar Tommy had produced from one of his pockets. The teenager had put away his M40A3 sniper rifle and was clutching a Glock from his hip holster. Will had given him one of his silver-loaded magazines, something they had precious little left of at the moment.

“How’re you for ammo?” he asked Danny.

“Three mags for the rifle, all five left for the nine mil,” Danny said while chewing and spitting out pieces of granola at the same time. “You?”

“Two for the M4, three for the sidearm.”

“I guess we should start conserving. Of course, we could always use Tommy here as a baseball bat. You take the right leg, and I’ll take the left.”

“Hey,” Tommy said.

Will grinned. “Deal.”

“Whatever,” Tommy said. “Anyway, where should I shoot them with this?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Danny said. “As long as you put silver into their bloodstream, that’s all she wrote.”

“Like some kind of chain reaction? Are they allergic to silver or something?”

“Ask him,” Danny said, nodding at Will. “He’s supposedly the mastermind. I just work here.”

Will shook his head. “We don’t know. Just that it works better than anything except the sun.”

“Hard to holster the sun,” Danny said. “I’ve tried. Burned a hole right through my boxers. Had to go commando for weeks until I could find another pair.”

Tommy stared at Danny uncertainly.

“He’s joking,” Will said.

“Oh,” Tommy said.

“Carly wasn’t amused, though,” Danny went on.

“Who’s Carly?” Tommy asked.

“The hottest redhead you’ll ever see, kid. I’ll introduce you to her when we get to Song Island.”

Tommy nodded anxiously.

They sat in silence and stared out the twin doors for the next few minutes, which became the next thirty minutes. Will glanced at his watch every now and then. Between the running and shooting and waiting, it was easy to lose track of time.

Three in the morning. Four hours, give or take, before sunup.

Doable.

Maybe…

“Where are they?” Tommy finally whispered. “They know we’re in here, so where the hell are they?”

“Why, you getting anxious?” Danny asked.

“I wish they’d just attack already, that’s all. Get it over with.” He passed the Glock to his left hand, then back to his right.

“Now you’re just trying to jinx us, kid—”

Danny hadn’t finished saying the word “kid” yet when the sound of exploding glass cut him off. Their eyes darted back across the lobby to the two front doors. Something had obliterated the long pane of glass that made up nearly eighty percent of the left door, leaving behind just the frame and a big gaping hole. Will traced the trail of destruction to the source — a long metal wrench lying on its side on the floor.

“Now you’ve done it, kid,” Danny said. “I blame this on you, I hope you know that.”

Tommy wanted to respond, but either couldn’t figure out how, or couldn’t make anything come out of his mouth when he opened it.

“You ready?” Will said.

“I was born ready,” Danny said.

“Then you changed your name to Danny?”

“What, I told you this story before?”

“Only a few thousand times.”

“Hunh,” Danny said.

Crash! The second glass door shattered into a thousand pieces, this time against the black metal of a tire iron that clattered to the floor. Glass sprinkled the lobby, chunks of it reaching halfway to the three of them crouched on the other side of the room. It was already cool in the building after nightfall, but now that the lobby was suddenly ventilated, the temperature dropped even further.

“Hey, kid,” Danny whispered.

“Yeah?” Tommy whispered back, his voice shivering slightly.

“What’s the difference between a wife and a hooker?”

Tommy stared at him for a moment. Finally, he said, “I don’t know. What?”

“The hooker’s cheaper to keep around.”

There was a brief pause as Tommy processed the joke.

“Don’t think about it too hard, kid; you’ll bust a blood vessel,” Danny said. He glanced over at Will. “I call dibs on the sniper rifle when he keels over.”

“Hey,” Tommy said.

Tommy might have continued his protest, except whatever sound was going to come out of his mouth turned into an involuntary gasp when they heard the tap-tap-tap of bare feet against concrete, and the streets outside the broken front doors blackened. It wasn’t because the moonlight had disappeared, though Will thought that might have been the preferable explanation. Instead, it was because a swarm of ghouls had come out of nowhere and converged on the sidewalk and began squeezing their way through the openings.

The sight of them slashing their skins against the glass shards hanging off the doorframes — thick clumps of black blood wetting the tiled floor — while desperately forcing their way in was hypnotic. There were so many of them it was hard for Will to know where one began and ended and the rest continued. It looked like one continuous squirming flesh, accompanied by the plop-plop-plop of blood on the floor and the patter of footsteps growing in intensity with every passing second as more arrived.

“It’s about damn time,” Danny said. He had dispensed with the whispering. “My legs were starting to cramp anyway.”

Will flicked his rifle to semi-auto, leaned out, and shot the first ghoul that was almost through in the chest. The bullet easily punched through the creature’s skin and muscle and hit another one — then another — behind it. As the undead thing fell lifelessly (again) forward, it was pulled unceremoniously back through the door and the next one flopped inside.

And just like that, the dam broke.

They moved with the same speed and agility, and with the absolute and complete lack of self-preservation that always managed to both fascinate and terrify Will. While he stared, Danny stood up and fired on full-auto, dropping a dozen ghouls on the first volley as they raced across the room. Silver bullets punched through soft, yielding flesh and slammed into bones and muscle.

“Go!” Will shouted back at Tommy.

The teenager gave him a horrified look before stumbling to his feet and running up the hallway to their right. He was moving so fast he was literally tripping over his own legs.

“Changing!” Danny shouted.

Will flicked the M4A1 to full-auto and pulled the trigger.

Ghouls fell, others slipped and slid, and multiple streams of arcing black liquid sprayed the lobby. Not that it did anything to slow them down. Not even close. The surging black wave of amassing flesh began to spread out, at once providing easy targets and too many to concentrate on.

“You coming or what!” Danny shouted behind him.

Will stopped firing and turned and ran.

He followed Danny up the hallway, reloading as he went, dropping the magazine and snapping in his next-to-last one. “Stick to the plan!”

“As long as it’s not Plan Z!”

“You love Plan Z!”

“You misheard! I said I love zucchini lasagna!”

They ran past offices and closets and didn’t bother to stop at any of them. They had checked earlier: the doors were cheap wood and wouldn’t last against a prolonged attack, even with a barricade using desks and filing cabinets. Maybe against just the black-eyed ghouls they might have stood a small chance, but that wasn’t all they were dealing with tonight. Not by a long shot.

They get creative when the blue-eyed ones are around.

The metal basement door under Ennis was proof of that.

But there was one, a bathroom at the end, that could work. Or, at least, it had the most potential to get them to sunrise. It had a stainless steel door with a large deadbolt on the other side and no windows. It was easily their best choice by a good margin, and the plan was always to retreat to it once the attack began.

Now all they had to do was get to it…

Then something happened. It was so unexpected that Will couldn’t have explained how he knew, except that he just sensed it.

He slid to a stop. “Danny.”

Danny stopped a few meters up the hallway and looked back, then opened his mouth to ask— Will held up his hand and Danny didn’t follow through with it.

Except for their labored breathing, they couldn’t hear anything.

The building, as it had been just a few minutes ago, was dead silent again.

“The fuck?” Danny mouthed at him.

“No clue,” Will mouthed back.

They both looked down the hallway — at the empty nothingness staring back. There was no wave of ghouls, no black eyes seeking them out, or moving death nipping at their heels like rabid dogs. Even the telltale patter of bare feet against tiled floor was gone, along with the all-too-familiar clacking of bones underneath sagging flesh.

There was just…silence.

Five seconds…

…then ten…

Until a scream pierced the hallway from behind them.

Tommy!

They looked back up the hallway and Danny started moving, and Will was right behind him when—

— he heard it, the noise he had been waiting for — anticipating with dread — coming from behind him: the tap-tap of bare feet coming, inhumanly fast.

He spun back around, lifting his rifle and expecting to see a flood of ghouls making their way up the narrow passageway.

But there was just one.

A tall, silhouetted figure with piercing, almost pulsating blue eyes. It wasn’t quite as thin as the ghouls he was used to seeing; it actually looked almost healthy, like the one that was standing outside of Ennis last night.

Ennis…last night…blue-eyed ghoul…

Silver…

It didn’t go down.

Will squeezed the trigger.

It was fast and somehow — and Will didn’t understand how — the creature was actually dodging his bullets! But as impossibly fleet of foot as it was (and God help him, it was fast), Will still managed to put two bullets into its chest.

But it didn’t go down.

Instead it kept coming, moving with a swiftness that defied logic (so what else is new?), disintegrating the distance between them even before Will felt the last silver round leave the carbine and smash into the curving wall, taking a big chunk of the creature’s shoulder with it.

Then it was there, in front of him, batting the rifle out of his hands.

Up close, Will saw black blood oozing out of the holes in its chest. He had put those there with two silver bullets.

Silver bullets!

Will opened his mouth to scream Danny’s name, but before he could get anything out, smooth black flesh wrapped around his throat and he was flailing from one side of the narrow hallway to the other. His breath exploded from his half-open mouth and his lungs burned in a sea of fire as it slammed him into the wall.

Where the hell’s Danny?

Will’s eyes darted left, up the hallway — and saw Danny firing at another blue-eyed ghoul running toward him from the other side. The damned thing was dodging Danny’s bullets, too. It also had something on its face that almost looked like a grin. But that was impossible. These things didn’t grin…right?

The creature grabbed Danny by the face and slammed his head into the wall, and a second later Danny’s body went slack and crumpled to the floor. The blue-eyed ghoul stood over Danny and there was fresh blood covering its mouth, the bright red liquid glistening in what little moonlight managed to penetrate this far into the hallway.

Tommy’s blood…

It looked up at him. No, not at him, but at the first creature, the one holding Will in place with a single hand, as if Will were fifty pounds of nothing. Its fingers dug into his throat, threatening to crush his windpipe with just a little bit of pressure.

And then the creatures did something Will had never seen them do before, that he didn’t think they could even still do.

They spoke.

“I told you it’d be easy,” the second one said. Its voice came out as a sharp hiss, almost like hot steam venting. It didn’t sound the least bit human. It was more than that. More than human. Beyond human.

“So you did,” the first one said. It manipulated Will’s eyes back to its face by turning his head, like a grown man would an infant that was completely and utterly at its mercy.

Forced to stare at it, Will couldn’t help but marvel at the smoothness of the creature’s skin and its domed, hairless head. Its face was encased in impossibly tight flesh, showing none of the pruned bumps that covered the black-eyed ones. The smooth contour of its skin from the neck up looked almost pristine, like something fresh and newly born. The holes in its chest, where he had shot it, had cauterized in the last few seconds, even if the monster probably didn’t consider them wounds in the first place. It sure as hell hadn’t acted like getting shot (with silver bullets!) had hurt at all.

The eyes were closer to a shade of sky blue, and the unnatural thing’s long and bony (and cold) fingers were wrapped so tightly around his throat that Will had trouble breathing. He guessed that was the point.

“Will,” it said, its voice coming out in the same unnatural hiss. “Kate says you’re a hard man to kill. But I told her you couldn’t be. After all, you’re only human.”

“Kate exaggerates,” the other ghoul said, and it made a noise Will didn’t understand at first, until he realized it was laughter. Soft laughter, as if it didn’t quite remember how to do it properly but thought that this was just close enough.

“Would you like to play a game, Will?” the one in front of him asked.

“Kate wants him,” the other creature said.

“We’ll tell her he resisted. Oops.” Lines where lips should be morphed into a smile. “What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her.”

“Mabry will know.”

“Mabry thinks she’s too obsessed with him. He’ll approve of this.”

“You’ve talked me into it.” And it, too, smiled. “Go on, then. Tell him the rules.”

“The rules are simple,” the first one said to Will. “We’ll have a blast—” It stopped talking and stiffened, and its fingers tightened further (Is that even possible?) around his throat as the creature hissed, “A knife? Really, Will?”

Cross-knife, Will thought.

He didn’t know when he had even reached for it, much less pulled it out of its sheath. But there it was, in his hand, gleaming in the moonlight as it moved in a wide arc from his thigh toward the ghoul’s head. He wasn’t sure if he was even aiming, but the knife seemed to know where it was going, as if it had a mind of its own.

The ghoul glared at him and there was a glint of something that could have been pity just a split-second before the knife punctured the side of its head. The blade kept going, penetrating the skull — it was surprisingly tough — and Will kept pushing with everything he had — which wasn’t much at the moment, but there was just enough — until the hilt of the weapon rammed up against slightly cold flesh and the knife couldn’t go any further.

He thought the creature would let out a scream, a cry of pain, maybe even panic, but it did none of those things. Instead, the sparkling blue in its eyes lost their luster and it collapsed in front of him. The fingers let go and Will could breathe again, and he slid down the wall, sucking in air, following the falling motion of the creature with his own. The clack-clack of bones as the ghoul hit the tiled floor first, then thump as Will landed on his ass.

There was a sharp hissing sound and Will looked up at the second ghoul. It stared at the creature lying motionless in front of him, the cross-knife still embedded in its skull. Then its eyes shifted over to Will and it moved—

The Glock, like the knife, had somehow magically appeared in Will’s hand without him ever knowing how it had gotten there. He stopped thinking about it, stopped trying to understand what was happening, and just pulled the trigger.

He fired once — twice—three times—hitting the creature in the chest with all three rounds.

It didn’t stop it. Of course it didn’t stop it. He knew it wouldn’t, but he was trained to hit center mass and that’s what he did.

The monster shook off the three silver bullets and kept coming.

Will tilted the gun up slightly and fired, creasing the ghoul’s right cheek. It flinched that time and actually paused for a second.

For a moment — just a brief, optimistic moment (Captain fucking Optimism, yeah right)—Will thought he had forced it to change its mind, that it would now turn and run away.

But of course it didn’t.

It lunged at him again, and Will fired instinctively and from point blank range, hitting it square in the center of the forehead. Something that might have been brains — or whatever still passed for brains inside them — exploded out the back of the ghoul’s head. The creature’s body — emaciated, yes, but somehow stronger and tougher and fuller looking than the black-eyed ones — twisted at the last moment and flopped to the floor, bones clacking and blood oozing out of what was left of its skull. The entire back part of its head was gone, leaving just the front.

Will gasped for breath, every successful attempt sending a jolt of pain through his body. He wondered if his old wounds had opened up. It would be ironic if he survived these blue-eyed bastards only to die from a gunshot wound inflicted by a human traitor.

Ironic, or was that tragic?

Who gives a shit.

But he wasn’t dead yet, and Will grabbed the cross-knife and jerked it out of the dead ghoul’s head. It came out easily, with no resistance whatsoever, just a soft slurp. He picked up his rifle and slung it, then crawled on his hands and knees over the two dead bony things to get to Danny.

He reached for the neck first and felt a strong pulse.

When he turned Danny over onto his back, he thought he might have felt a pulse that wasn’t there, because the face he was staring down at was covered in a thick layer of blood. Will felt his neck again just to be sure and got the same response. The bleeding must have looked way worse than the actual wound. He hoped, anyway.

He snatched up Danny’s carbine, then got a good grip on the back of his friend’s shirt collar and began dragging him up the hallway. He kept his eyes glued in front of him, at the half-circle arch into the lobby, and his ears open for any noises coming from behind him. He wasn’t entirely sure if he was seeing very much or hearing anything at all over the roaring pain in his chest and throat and ears.

Jesus, was there a part of him that wasn’t hurting at the moment?

Stupid question. Of course there wasn’t. He didn’t even know how he was still moving. It had to be adrenaline. It would hurt later, but for now, he could still make his legs move and keep his grip on Danny, and that was all that mattered.

He moved on automatic pilot, trying not to think about every aching bone and pulsating muscle in his body. It didn’t help that Danny was heavier than he remembered. Or maybe he was just getting weaker.

Will glanced back and saw the bathroom door coming up. It was open, unable to close because of the shadow-covered body lying half-in and half-out of it. Tommy. How the hell had the ghoul gotten behind them? They had searched the entire building and found no other way into the museum except through the front doors. The offices didn’t even have windows, for God’s sake. So how had the blue-eyed bastards sneaked inside?

When he finally reached the bathroom, his suspicions were confirmed. It was Tommy. Or most of him, anyway. It was actually just everything from the neck down, because his head was missing. Teeth marks covered the stump where the head had been attached.

He pulled Tommy’s lanky frame out into the hallway to clear the door, then dragged Danny inside. He closed the heavy stainless steel door, then turned the lock and heard the satisfying click-clank of the metal bolt sliding into place.

With Danny inside, Will unslung his rifle and scanned the bathroom just to be sure. There were no windows in here, so the other blue-eyed creature had to have gotten in from somewhere else. Maybe another window they had missed. It was dark and they were moving by flashlight, so just about anything was possible.

He fished out the flashlight and clicked it on. He slung the rifle and drew the Glock, then went through the three stalls inside the bathroom again, just to be sure. He found nothing, which made him relax a little bit, though not by much since even just breathing hurt.

He walked back over to Danny and sat down next to him.

Even under the mask of blood, Danny had something on his face that looked suspiciously like a smile. Maybe he was dreaming he was back on the island with Carly. Danny had the right idea. What Will wouldn’t give to be back on Song Island right now, walking on the beach with Lara…

He thought about last night’s dream. Of Kate again. He hadn’t been able to stop thinking about it. The way she had proudly admitted to orchestrating everything that had happened in Dunbar yesterday. The trap with the U-Haul, with the blue-eyed ghouls inside. Four of them.

Four of them…

He glanced at the door. There were two out there. He couldn’t tell if they were the same ones from the dream, the same group that had ambushed Harrison’s people. But they had blue eyes, and there had been four of them when Kate showed him the…what the hell was it? A memory? A dream? More like a nightmare…

So where were the other two now? Did they always work in fours? Or did the other two leave after they had decimated Harrison’s people? No, that didn’t make any damn sense at all.

Because, obviously, all of this makes perfect sense.

Yeah, that’s the ticket.

He stuck his hand into his cargo pants pocket and pulled out the small bottle. Thank God Rachel hadn’t taken it from him last night along with his pack and weapons. He couldn’t read the label in the dark, not that it mattered. He twisted off the cap and shook out a couple of pills and swallowed them, then realized that wasn’t going to work and tossed down two more.

He put the bottle away and pulled his shirt up to make sure his wounds hadn’t reopened during the fight. No wetness along his waist, which was good. That was the one stitching he was worried most about opening up again. But Zoe had done a hell of a job, and the stitches were still in place. He’d have to thank her again when he got back to the island.

Now who’s being Captain Optimism?

He tucked his shirt into his pants, then picked up the M4A1 and made sure it was still in one piece. He laid it across his lap and leaned back against the wall, trying to see if he could hear them through the door. It was so dead silent he could hear just about everything, including the thrumming in his chest, the creak of his bones, and the throbbing from all the bruises up and down his body.

He wasn’t too worried about the black-eyed ghouls, though. They were weak and they didn’t have the creativity to break down a metal door. But the others, the blue-eyed ones, were dangerous. Ennis’s metal basement door hadn’t stood a chance, so if those other two bastards were out there somewhere…

He drew the Glock and laid it on the floor next to him.

Blue eyes or not, faster and stronger or not, they still went down if you got them in the right spot: the head. Or was it the brain?

Either/or.

Just to be sure, he’d just shoot them in the head until there wasn’t a head anymore.

Yeah, that’s the ticket.

22 Gaby

The cemetery didn’t look any less inhospitable in the daylight, but that could just have been the plentiful weeds and scattered debris that had overtaken the place since it had last seen a caretaker. Nothing ever looked the same these days; the cities were always too hollow and unwelcoming, the houses too dark and depressing, and the streets too wide and empty. There was no reason a place where the dead resided would be any different.

Gaby kept to the winding path, staying out of the grass with the girls following closely behind. Donna kept pace behind her, followed by Milly, and Claire brought up the rear with her Winchester clutched tightly in her small hands. Though Donna was older and taller, Gaby had no doubt that when things went sideways — and they usually did, these days — she wanted Claire to be the one standing beside her, shooting.

She didn’t remember the front gate of the cemetery being as far as it was or the place being so big. She couldn’t see Route 13 from here, but the sunlight danced off a pair of large buildings to her right. Not far, maybe half a mile.

“What’s over there?” she asked, pointing.

“Dunbar Airport,” Donna said.

“Big airport?”

“Not really. Just a couple of hangars and a waiting room in one of the buildings. Not much to look at, and most of the planes that land there are those small ones. Why?”

“It’s always a good idea to reload on supplies whenever you can.”

“I remember a couple of vending machines. Drinks and stuff.”

Gaby shook her head. “Not worth walking all that way for just drinks and stuff. We’ll make do with the supplies we took from the VFW hall.”

“You think that’ll be enough?”

If it’s not, that means we didn’t make it to Song Island, Gaby thought, but she decided the girls didn’t need to hear that. She said instead, “It should be.”

She looked back at Milly. The girl had been quiet since they woke up in the crypt this morning. Not the best morning she’d faced before or since the end of the world, and it had to be worse for Milly, who had just lost Peter. The two of them weren’t related, but they shared a stronger connection, one created from survival. She knew what that was like. Her link with Will, Danny, and Lara — those were the kind of bonds she could never have created with her friends or even family before The Purge. It was the kind cemented in fire and combat.

“Hey, are you hungry?” she asked Milly.

The girl looked up, big eyes peering through long, dirty hair. She shook her head silently.

“If you are, tell me, and we can stop and eat again,” Gaby said.

Milly nodded. She looked as if she were moving in a stupor, not connected to the world the way Gaby and the sisters were. Gaby would have to keep an eye on her. She owed Peter that at least.

“Claire said you guys had been wanting to leave Dunbar even before I arrived,” she said to Donna. “Why?”

“It’s Claire’s idea,” Donna said. “Ever since she heard that radio broadcast, she’s been obsessed with it. She plays the tape recorder once every hour, and to anyone who’ll listen. It’s kind of annoying.”

“That’s the only reason?”

Donna shrugged. “Harrison… I never liked him. My dad used to teach us about what kind of man to stay away from. You know, when we got older. Harrison fit his description perfectly.”

“So why did you stay with them for so long?”

“Dunbar’s the only place we know. And besides, the others were pretty cool. Rachel, for one.”

“Was she back at the VFW hall?”

“No. She was outside with Harrison. She’s like his second-in-command.”

“She’s really your friend?” Claire asked from behind them. “The woman on the radio?”

“She is,” Gaby said.

“She sounds cool.”

“She is pretty cool.”

“And the island is safe?” Donna said doubtfully. “The creatures — these ghoul things — can’t get to it?”

“I was there for three months and they never crossed the water,” Gaby said.

“What about the hotel? Tell me about the hotel. You said it had power, which means hot showers, right?”

Gaby nodded. “All the hot showers you want.”

“Oh my God,” Donna smiled widely. “It’s been so long since I’ve had an honest to goodness real shower.”

“You smell it, too,” Claire said.

Donna rolled her eyes. “It’s not like you smell any better.”

“Better than you.”

“Oh, shut up.”

Claire snorted, but didn’t have any comeback for that one. The thirteen-year-old continued to keep watch behind them, eyes roaming the cemetery for potential threats or surprises.

“Can she really use that rifle?” Gaby asked Donna.

“She was good with it before all of this,” Donna said. “Now, she goes to sleep with that thing in her arms. It’s creepy.”

“I heard that,” Claire said.

“You were supposed to.”

“Whatever.”

Gaby smiled. It had been a while since she heard sisterly bickering. In some strange way, she liked it. It reminded her that, whatever happened, sisters would still be sisters even at the end of the world.

“Come on,” Gaby said, glancing up at the sun. “The faster we get up Route 13, the faster we’ll hit Interstate 10.”

“And Song Island after that,” Donna said.

“And Song Island after that. Meanwhile, keep an eye out for any vehicles. It’d be nice not to have to walk the entire way there.”

“Can you drive?”

“A little.”

“Good, because I never got my driver’s license.”

“I doubt anyone’s going to ticket you, Donna.”

“No, but she might drive into a ditch and kill us all,” Claire said.

Donna groaned. “God, you’re stupid, Claire.”

“Whatever.”

They finally reached the front gates of the cemetery and stepped through it. They turned left, heading back toward the highway in the distance.

They hadn’t gone very far toward the highway when Gaby saw sunlight glinting off the metal dome of a vehicle parked at the intersection between Route 13 and the country road that had led them to the cemetery. The car hadn’t been there last night.

She grabbed Donna’s arm and pulled her left, toward the ditch and off the road, snapping, “Car.”

Behind them, Milly and Claire smartly followed without a word. Gaby slipped to one knee and unslung the M4, flicking off the safety.

Donna was on both knees in the grass, peering forward. “Is that a truck?”

Gaby nodded. It was a big silver truck, about 200 yards further up the road and parked along the shoulder. She couldn’t tell what kind of vehicle from this distance, not that she had ever been particularly good at distinguishing one car from another. The end of the world hadn’t done a whole lot to fill in that particular knowledge gap.

A man was climbing out of the front passenger seat of the truck now and did something she couldn’t quite make out from this distance. Too bad she hadn’t grabbed a pair of binoculars. She remembered seeing a few of them on the shelf in the basement under the VFW hall. Will and Danny would have picked one up just in case.

“Hope for the best, prepare for the worst,” they would say.

“What should we do?” Donna whispered. She didn’t really have to, given how far they were from the highway. Then again, sound did travel these days, so maybe the girl was wiser than Gaby gave her credit for.

She glanced back at Claire and Milly. They were crouched behind them, Claire with her rifle in front of her, looking ready for action. Milly was a quivering mess, and Gaby expected her to jump up and run off at any second.

She looked back at the truck just in time to catch a second figure approaching from the other side of the road. Both men. She could tell by the way they moved. After a while, she began to make out the multiple colors of their camo uniforms.

Josh’s soldiers.

Were they looking for her? Had Josh sent them? He would have been informed by now of her escape. There was one thing about Josh — the old and the new — that she knew with absolute certainty: he didn’t give up when he set his mind on achieving a goal. Unfortunately, that was her at the moment.

Whatever he had become, whatever he had deluded himself into believing, he was still, at heart, the kid who fell in love with her the day she moved in across the street from him. She knew that because he had told her.

Kid? Did I just call him a kid?

He’s not a kid anymore. He’s nineteen. Old enough to know better. Old enough to stop lying to himself.

“Gaby?” Donna whispered. “What should we do?”

They were watching her curiously. Donna next to her and the two girls behind them.

Good question.

Options. What were her available options?

She could look at this as a stroke of bad luck, but that was probably not what Will or Danny would have done. No, they would see the soldiers and the truck (but especially the truck) as an opportunity.

Besides, she didn’t feel like walking the rest of the way to Beaufont Lake, anyway.

“Stay here,” Gaby said, looking first at Donna, then at the thirteen-year-olds. “Don’t move from this position, and stay as low as you can until I give you the word.”

“I can help,” Claire said eagerly.

“Yes, you can — by keeping everyone here safe with that rifle.”

She fixed the girl with a hard look and Claire, understanding — which didn’t mean she liked it one bit by the way she gritted her teeth — nodded reluctantly.

“Remember, keep low,” Gaby said. “Don’t make a sound. If anything happens and I don’t come back, wait until they leave, then keep going south until you reach Beaufont Lake. Understand?”

Donna nodded without any enthusiasm. Like her sister, she apparently didn’t see any point in arguing. Milly just looked mortified by the whole thing.

“Okay,” Gaby said. “I’ll be back.”

She gave them her best smile, then shrugged off her pack and handed it to Milly since Donna was already carrying the supply bag. She got up and began jogging up the country road, back toward the highway. With just the rifle, her holstered sidearm, and spare magazines around her waist, she felt lighter on her feet, though of course that could just be the adrenaline trying to convince her she could, possibly, survive this.

Captain Optimism, right, Danny?

They needed the truck. It was going to make returning to Beaufont Lake easier, faster, and safer. There was no way around it. That truck had a working battery and likely a full tank of gas to be out here by itself. She needed that damn truck in the worst way.

Gaby was fortunate the country road had ditches on both sides, each about four feet deep. That allowed her to slide all the way down to the bottom of one of them and, hunched slightly over, move up the road without being seen.

Or, at least, she hoped she couldn’t be seen.

The morning heat had picked up noticeably and Gaby was already sweating after twenty yards of bent-over running. She kept the M4 in front of her the entire time, ready to use at a moment’s notice. Her legs carried her forward on automatic pilot, and she kept her eyes focused straight-ahead at all times. She prayed something didn’t pop up in front of her — like a tree root — and trip her up. It wouldn’t have taken much, given how little attention she was paying to what was on the ground at the moment.

Thirty yards…

…forty…

She watched the soldiers the entire time. There were definitely just the two of them, which was the good news.

The bad news was, there were still two of them, and just one of her.

She gripped the carbine tighter, wishing she had her own weapon. The rifle she had now had proven decent back at the VFW hall, but she understood why Will and Danny were so adamant about holding onto their M4A1s all the way from Afghanistan. Soldiers weren’t supposed to bring weapons back home with them, but the two had managed it anyway. “We knew someone who knew someone,” was all Will would say when she asked how he had managed that.

She missed her old M4. The feel of this one wasn’t quite right, though she imagined it was all in her mind. Probably.

Sixty yards…

She concentrated on the two soldiers to take her mind off the things she didn’t have but wished that she did. She still couldn’t make out a whole lot of details, but they were definitely both men. Gaby had only killed men so far, but she didn’t think she would have trouble pulling the trigger on a woman. A collaborator was a collaborator. And uniform or not, these were still members of the human race that had sold out their kind. She couldn’t summon any sympathy for them even if she tried.

Eighty…

They hadn’t spotted her yet and seemed to be too busy talking to really pay any attention to their surroundings.

After moving steadily up the ditch for a while, she stopped and went into a crouch. She took the opportunity to glance back at the girls. They were lying on their stomachs and watching her back. Or she assumed they were looking in her direction. She could only really see three lumps in the grass, and that was only because she knew where to look.

She faced forward again and caught her breath: one of the soldiers was turning in her direction when he stopped and seemed to stare right at her from across the distance.

She gripped the M4 tighter and mentally prepped herself to launch into battle—

False alarm.

The man hadn’t seen her. He was looking down while trying to open some kind of bag. Then he was turning away, stuffing something into his mouth as he did so.

She forced her fingers to loosen around the rifle.

Jumpy. She was way too jumpy.

When the man had turned his back to her again, she got up and continued along the ditch at a half-trot while slightly bent over at the waist to lower her profile.

Ninety yards…

She was at one hundred when she stopped a second time to get her bearings. The man on her side of the silver vehicle was leaning against the front grill and staring off down the road at nothing in particular. Their lack of attention to the land around them was incredible.

You need better “soldiers,” Josh.

She got up again and kept going.

110 yards…

The second one was walking back around the truck and handed the first one a bottle of water. They drank while looking down the highway, back toward Dunbar. They were clearly waiting for someone and weren’t going anywhere soon.

130 yards…

She took a second to make sure the fire selector on the M4 was set to semi-auto.

150 yards…

She was close enough now that she could hear them talking. They sounded young, and she could make out blond hair on one soldier, while the other one had a long black ponytail.

160 yards…

She wasn’t sure what happened. Maybe she wasn’t being nearly as quiet as she thought she was. Or maybe one of them, by some fluke, saw something that alerted him to her presence, the way she had seen the reflection of their truck under the sun earlier.

Either way, one of them saw her, said something, and both men began unslinging their rifles.

Gaby immediately stopped, took aim through the red dot scope, and fired — and missed.

Her bullet pinged! harmlessly off the hood of the truck. It was a bad shot, but it still made one of them dart for cover, so at least it had some impact. The one that didn’t move opened fire on her, the pop-pop-pop of his three-round burst filling the air even before her own shot’s echo had faded.

Gaby forced herself to stand perfectly still and reacquire her target even as the ground to her right, at shoulder level, exploded and she was showered with loosened dirt and grass. The man was firing too fast, too wildly, probably trying to fight against the same adrenaline that was pumping through every inch of her at the moment.

Whoever these men were, they didn’t have the advantage of being trained by a pair of Army Rangers. Will and Danny hadn’t held back — not once in the three months they broke her down and built her back up on the island.

She summoned that experience now and forced one of her senses to ignore the sound of bullets buzzing past her head.

She corrected her aim, swiveling slightly to the right, and fired again.

This time she hit the man in the waist, and he dropped his rifle and grabbed at the spot where he had been shot. When the man tried to run around the truck for cover, Gaby calmly took aim again and shot him in the back.

The man stumbled and slammed into the hood of the truck and slid down the smooth surface, but by then Gaby was already rushing up the ditch again. This time she dispensed with the slow jog and was in a full sprint mode, peering through her weapon’s sight the entire time and searching for another target.

Where’s the other one? Where’s the other one?

Running forward was the only path open to her. She couldn’t retreat, not with one of the (fake) soldiers still alive. He had the truck and she needed it. She knew exactly where the resolve came from: the very real desire to get back home to Song Island at all costs.

That’s my truck, asshole!

The second man was moving along the length of the truck, smartly keeping behind cover. Unfortunately for him, thanks to her lowered vantage point inside the ditch, she easily spotted his boots moving underneath the vehicle. The man was clearly trying to reach the back of the truck (a Chevy, as it turned out), probably in hopes of catching her by surprise. Either he didn’t know she could see his feet or he was counting on her not picking it up.

When he poked his head out the back, she snapped off a shot. Her bullet shattered one of the taillights and the man jerked his head back instinctively.

Gaby picked up the pace. She was twenty yards away now and she could still see the man’s boots, this time holding their position at the middle of the truck. Gaby laid the M4 on top of the ditch, took careful aim, and shot the man in the right ankle. There was a loud scream and the figure crumpled to the ground on the other side of the Chevy.

Gotcha.

She climbed up the ditch and scrambled up the road. The first man she had shot was dead, lying facedown on the hot asphalt in a pool of his own blood. Gaby scanned all the sides of the highway, looking for any potential threats. She hadn’t seen any before, but that didn’t mean someone hadn’t heard the shots and was responding. It was a big road and seemed to go on endlessly in both directions. She hadn’t properly realized what a huge task it would have been to travel it on foot until now.

I definitely need that truck.

She skirted around the hood of the Chevy, the rifle ready to shoot the second man on sight. He must have had plenty of time to prepare for her by now. It had taken her how long to climb up the ditch and then jog over? Twenty seconds? Maybe thirty?

More than enough time. Maybe he was going to make a final bloody stand, hoping to take her with him. She wasn’t going to give him that chance if she could help it. She was tired of giving people the benefit of the doubt. They always ended up disappointing her, like Josh…

But the man wasn’t a threat. Not anymore.

He sat on the highway, back against the driver side door, trying desperately to tie a handkerchief around his bleeding ankle. His face was locked in a tight grimace, sweat pouring down his temple and chin, and he didn’t seemed to notice her at all. He was young, too. He couldn’t have been more than twenty, and “Darren” was stenciled over his nametag.

Gaby tightened her finger on the M4’s trigger.

Darren finally realized she was there and looked up. He didn’t make a move for his weapons and only clenched his teeth in pain. “Please, please don’t shoot.”

Gaby stared at him. He had soft blue eyes and a burgeoning stubble. He didn’t look dangerous, but then, none of them did. It wasn’t what they did that made them her enemy; it was what they were committed to.

“Please,” Darren said again. “God, please, don’t kill me.”

She wanted to shoot him. It was the smart thing to do. He was the enemy and she was, without a doubt, stuck behind enemy lines. If she let him go, he would alert the others to her presence. If Josh had sent him, he would go back and tell him where she was. Josh would immediately know where she was heading, and what roads she would take.

Letting this man (boy) go would be the dumbest thing she could do at this very moment. Will would shoot him. He wouldn’t even hesitate.

So why was she?

Gaby breathed for the first time in what seemed like hours and took her finger off the trigger. Darren, seeing her response, sighed with great relief.

“Don’t move,” Gaby said.

He nodded.

She scooted over and picked up his assault rifle. She pulled his sidearm out of its holster and shoved it into her waistband, then took a step back. “I need your magazines.”

Darren began removing them from his pouches and placing them on the road without hesitation. Gaby stepped back a little bit more and gave Darren a quick look, then glanced down the road and waved with both hands at the girls. She hoped they would understand and was grateful to see all three rising and running up the road as fast as they could. From this distance, they looked like stick figures twinkling against the sun.

She looked back at Darren as he took out the last magazine. “Is there gas in the truck?”

He nodded. “We filled it up this morning.”

“From where?”

“In town.”

“Dunbar?”

“Yes.”

“You were there last night?”

“No, I arrived this morning.”

“What are you doing out here? Are you looking for someone?”

He looked reluctant to answer.

“Are you really going to make me ask twice?” she said, trying to inject as much menace as she could into her voice. Will wouldn’t have had a problem with it, but then, she wasn’t an ex-Army Ranger.

“There were people still left in the city,” Darren said. “We were supposed to make sure no one tried to leave.”

“Did Josh send you?”

“Who?”

She stared at his face. Was he lying to her? The way he had answered the question — quickly, without even taking a second to think about it — made him either the world’s best liar or he was telling the truth. Josh hadn’t sent him. He didn’t even seem to know who Josh was.

If Josh didn’t send you, then who did?

“Never mind,” she said.

Gaby glanced over again. She could make out Claire in the lead, with Milly behind her, and Donna lagging in the back because of the heavy supply bag she was carrying.

“Where’s the key?” she asked Darren.

“Inside,” he said. Then, blinking in the sun at her, “Are you going to kill me?”

“I haven’t decided yet.”

His face turned ghostly white. “Please…”

“Stop begging,” she said, fighting the growing irritation.

“Be a man,” she wanted to say. “Accept the consequences of your decisions and your actions. You and Josh and the rest of them.”

Instead, she motioned for him to get away from the truck. He struggled to his feet, then dragged one leg behind him as he hobbled away, leaving a bloody trail in his wake. His eyes shifted down the road for a brief moment.

“Expecting reinforcements?” she asked.

He shook his head quickly. “No, I was just…” He didn’t finish and instead looked down at nothing.

She slung her rifle and drew the Glock, then opened the driver side door. The key was in the ignition. She pulled it out and pocketed it, then opened the back door and looked in. There were two cases of refilled water bottles in the back, unopened bags of MREs, and spare magazines thrown haphazardly across the seats.

“How many others are out here?” she asked.

He seemed to think about it. “This far out? Just us.”

She fixed him with a hard look.

He swallowed. “I swear.”

She didn’t know whether to believe him or not. She had never been particularly good at reading faces anyway, but Darren looked too scared to lie.

“I’m going to take your truck,” she said.

“Take it,” he said quickly.

The girls had reached them by now, Claire clutching her rifle at the sight of Darren. Donna was out of breath and leaned against the hood for support. Milly looked winded but was too busy being queasy at the sight of the dead soldier.

Claire returned Gaby’s pack, but her eyes were fixed on Darren. “What are we going to do with him?”

“I don’t know yet,” Gaby said. “What do you think?”

The girl was eyeballing Darren like a predator. Although he was five-ten and probably had one hundred pounds on the thirteen-year-old, Darren still shrunk back from her intense stare. He glanced from Claire to Gaby, then back again.

Gaby couldn’t tell if he was more afraid of her or the kid.

Definitely the kid, she thought with a smile.

23 Will

“Am I dead?”

“Almost,” Will said.

“Thank God,” Danny groaned. “Because if I’m dead and your ugly mug’s the first thing I see, it’s a pretty good bet I didn’t go, you know, up there.” He hiked a thumb upward, then looked down at his shirt, which was covered in a thick film of dry blood from last night. “All this red stuff mine?”

“Yup. There’s more on your face.”

“Shit.”

“Yup.”

“So that explains the sore joints, aching bones, and this wicked pounding inside my skull.”

Danny winced as he sat up, pushing back against the wall for support. In the glow of morning that filled up the bathroom, his face was covered in dried blood, and to look at him, it was unfathomable that he was still alive. His nose was crooked and broken at the bridge. Will had stuffed two wads of year-old toilet paper into each nostril.

“Morning?” Danny said.

“Morning.”

“We made it.”

“Yeah.”

“Let’s not do last night again.”

“Deal.”

Danny pulled the tissue paper out and flicked them away. “I hate nosebleeds.”

“I wouldn’t call what you had last night nosebleeds. More like a blood-gushing torrent.”

“That bad, huh?”

“I was pretty sure you were dead. I had a speech prepared for Carly and everything.”

“I kinda wish I was.” He glanced over at Will, sitting to his right. “You look like how I feel.”

“That bad?”

“Worse.”

Will didn’t feel like moving from where he had been sitting for the last few hours. In-between chewing on a pair of granola bars from one of his pockets, he had downed two more painkillers. His side throbbed and his neck hurt, but he was alive, even if every inch of him claimed otherwise.

“Water?” Danny said.

“Back in Ennis’s basement.”

He looked over at one of the stalls. “I can’t believe I’m asking this, but…toilet water?”

“Went dry a long time ago.”

“So what’s the good news?”

“We’re still alive.”

“That’ll work. So, you got anymore of the good stuff?”

Will pulled out the light bottle of painkillers and tossed it over. “Finish it off.”

“This everything?”

“More in the packs…”

“…back at Ennis’s,” Danny finished. He shook out two, then decided four was the better number and popped them into his mouth and chewed on them as if they were rock candy. He tossed the empty bottle away and watched it skid across the room. “It wasn’t my imagination, right? There was one of those blue-eyed buggers in the hallway.”

“Yup.”

“I shot it.”

“You did.”

“With silver bullets.”

“Uh huh.”

“I mean, I shot the crap out of it. A dozen rounds. At least six.”

“Give or take.”

“So how the mother truckin’ hell did it keep coming?”

“I was going to tell you,” Will said. “I saw one of them outside the bar last night. I shot it with a silver bullet and it didn’t go down.”

Danny smirked. “And you were saving this for…when?”

Will shrugged. “Eventually. We were sort of preoccupied with other things last night. Like trying to keep Rachel from killing us. Then I fell asleep. And you know what happened after that.”

“Excuses, excuses.” Danny paused, then, “So why are we still alive?”

“Shooting them doesn’t work, not even with silver bullets. But taking out the brain seems to work just fine.”

“You still need silver for that, or will any ol’ bullet do?”

“I have no idea. Let’s just use silver to be sure.”

“Sounds good to me. That’s what they used to call me back in college, you know. Sure Thing Danny.” He paused again to catch his breath. “Damn, I could use some water.”

“Yup.”

They sat in silence for a moment, staring at nothing in particular. Talking was easier than moving, but it seemed to have tired Danny out almost as much as it had Will.

Danny touched the gash along his left temple, fingers sticky from the ointment and disinfectant Will had used to cover it up when there was enough light to work with. He had wiped as much blood off Danny’s face as he could, but even so, Danny looked like the result of a plastic surgery gone awry.

Danny flinched. “Goddamn, that hurts.”

“So don’t touch it.”

“Yeah, good idea. You’re full of good ideas this morning.” Danny nodded at the long trail of dried blood that led to the door. “Is that mine or Tommy’s?”

“Both.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t know. I think one of them found another way in. Waited for Tommy, then…you know.” He added, almost as if in afterthought, “It took his head.”

“It took his head?”

“Yeah. It took his head.”

“The fuck?”

“What I said.”

“Did you…find it?”

“No. I don’t want to, either.”

The bathroom smelled of something rotten, and it wasn’t just from their sweat and blood. Will had been breathing mostly through his mouth ever since he struggled to drag Danny inside about four hours ago. Even though there were no windows, visibility had greatly improved and he could feel the warmth of the sun against his skin and face coming into the room from…somewhere.

“So,” Danny said after a while.

“So…”

“Blue-eyes.”

“Yeah.”

“Two?”

“Four.”

“Four?”

He told Danny about his dream, the one Kate had shown him. About how they had ambushed Harrison’s people.

“Smart buggers,” Danny said.

“Bratt had it right.”

“What’s that?”

“He called them shock troops. The tip of the spear, sent behind enemy lines to break the resistance. That’s what they did. Harrison and his people have been causing problems for the ghouls, attacking their convoys, that sort of thing. So Kate sent the four blue-eyed ones to take Dunbar.”

“And it was all your ghoulfriend’s idea?”

Will sighed. He hated that word. “She claims it was. She was a former ad executive, you know. It’s what she used to do for a living. Getting people to do what she wants.”

“That how she got you into bed?”

“All she had to do was take her clothes off to accomplish that.”

Danny snorted. “Tits and ass is all it takes with you, huh?”

“Pretty much.”

“You’re such a dude, dude.”

“Dude, right?”

Danny chuckled for a moment, then smacked his dry, cracked lips together. “So, four?”

“I saw four.”

“In the dream.”

“Uh huh.”

“And we’re sure the dream was real?”

“It didn’t feel so much like a dream as they were…memories.”

“Whose?”

“She said one of the ghouls’.”

“She can do that now?”

“I guess so.”

“Man.”

“Yeah,” Will said.

A few more seconds of silence passed between them before Danny said, “But there were only two last night.”

“Two minus four is indeed two.”

“So Mrs. Miller was right. Math really does come in handy in real life. So where are the other two?”

“I have no idea.”

“Does that worry you?”

“Every second of last night.”

Danny’s stomach growled. “Excuse me.”

“Hungry?” Will smiled.

“Just a tad.”

“Well, we know where our packs are…”

“Ennis’s.”

“Yup.”

Danny sighed and reached over and picked up his rifle. “What are we just sitting around here twiddling our thumbs for, then? Let’s get this show on the road.”

Tommy’s headless body wasn’t in the hallway when Will and Danny emerged from the bathroom, weapons at the ready. There wasn’t a whole lot of light back here, and patches of shadows jumped out at them from both sides of the passageway.

They swung left, then right, then stood with their backs together, rifles pointing into the darkness on both sides of them, waiting for something to happen. There should have been an attack from a nest of waiting ghouls, only there wasn’t.

“Shoot for the head?” Danny asked.

“Shoot for the head,” Will nodded.

“Should have told me that last night.”

“I didn’t know last night.”

“Yeah, well, this broken face is still your fault.”

“Relax. You still look pretty.”

“That goes without saying…”

Even among the shadows, multiple streaks of blood ran up and down the hallway, including a long jagged trail from when Will dragged Danny to the bathroom. And another big swath of blood, where Tommy’s body used to be.

“They take the bodies, right?” Danny said.

“As far as I know.”

“Why?”

“I have no idea.”

“We should really sit down one of these days and talk about everything we know about them. I’ll dictate and you type.”

“What makes you think I can type?”

“I dunno, but you look like the typing kind.”

“What kind is that?”

“You know, with dainty fingers and such.”

They moved toward the lobby, passing the spot where he had last seen the blue-eyed ghouls. He wasn’t surprised to find them gone, leaving behind only smeared, clumpy black blood in their wake, too far from the sunlight to have evaporated. There was still a wet quality about the liquid, which shouldn’t have been possible given how many hours since they had bled out.

“That them?” Danny asked.

“Yup.”

“Blood’s still wet.”

“Yup.”

“How’s that possible?”

“Hell if I know.”

“Do you know anything?”

Will pointed at the patch of dried red blood on the wall. “I know that’s you.”

“Damn. Are you sure I’m still alive? Maybe this is just one big freaky Jacob’s Ladder type of scenario?”

“Are you saying you’re Tim Robbins?”

“Hell no. I’m much handsomer.”

“Keep telling yourself that, buddy.”

“I do every day. Someone’s gotta.”

They stepped over the blood — a difficult feat, since there was so much spread around the narrow passageway — and continued down toward the lobby, drawn forward by the warmth of the morning heat. There was just enough sunlight as they neared the half-circle arched entrance that they began to relax.

“Right in the head?” Danny said.

“How many times are you going to ask me?”

“So it’s the brain.”

“I think so, yeah.”

“Why do you think that is?”

“I’ll let you know when I figure it out.”

“When will that be, you think?”

“Five years, two months, one week, and three days from now.”

“I’m gonna hold you to that. Anything else you wanna share, now that we’re both in a sharing mood?”

“I think Kate’s going to attack the island.”

Danny sighed. “How many times have I told you? Stop dating the psycho bitches. But do you ever listen to me? Noooooo.”

“In my defense, we barely dated.”

“You know what I always say about those one-night stands, man. They’re killer.”

The lobby looked like a war zone, with shards of glass covering most of the tiled floor, scattered among dozens of bleached-white bones. The acrid smell of evaporated flesh and tainted blood hung in the air.

Will started breathing through his mouth again. It seemed like he was doing a lot of that lately.

They maneuvered around the chaos and death and stepped outside onto the sidewalk and into the hot sun. The street looked even more empty this morning, and the city of Dunbar was eerily quiet, with hardly any wind at all. Debris and spent shell casings littered the streets.

Except for the two of them, there were no sounds or signs of any other survivors.

Danny looked over at Ennis’s next door. “You think any of them made it?”

“Doubt it.”

“Maybe Rachel got out.”

“You think?”

Danny thought about it, then shook his head. “Nah, I can’t even muster up enough optimism for that one.”

“Some Captain Optimism.”

“I know, I’m really not living up to the title these days. You wanna give it a try for a while?”

“No thanks.”

Danny glanced around him for a moment, then said, “So, what else did your ghoulfriend say about attacking the island?”

Ennis’s basement was covered in swaths of dried red blood. Or, at least, the part of it that they could see using the light pouring in from the side door. There were still large sections of the room covered in darkness, and Will and Danny scanned the place with their flashlights first and were surprised to find it empty.

They headed straight into the back, where Rachel’s people had taken their packs last night. They found what they needed in a corner, some of the contents spilled around the area. Everything was still there, including the radio.

They hurried out and climbed back up to the alley next door, then stepped through another graveyard of bones, this one thicker and deeper and longer than the one in the Dunbar museum. It was impossible to take a step without crunching a femur or snapping a finger or pulverizing ribcages. The lingering acrid smell of dead ghouls was overwhelming, and they had to put handkerchiefs over their mouths and nose to get through the alley on their way in and out.

Will took a moment to gather himself back out on the sidewalk, pulling out a warm bottle of water from one of the packs and quenching his thirst. He spent the rest of it washing as much of the blood and grime off his face and hands as possible. Danny had already wasted two bottles cleaning the dry blood off his face, grimacing and hissing each time he touched his broken nose.

The city hadn’t gotten any livelier since they stepped outside the museum thirty minutes ago, though it seemed to have gotten hotter, the streets on both sides of him flickering like mirages.

He found a beat-up red truck on the curb and sat the portable ham radio down on the hood and powered it on. He pressed the pre-set button to bring up the island’s designated emergency frequency and adjusted the attached antenna as high as it would go.

“How’s this going to work?” Danny asked, drinking the rest of his second bottle. Mostly free of his bloody mask, he actually looked even more bruised and battered in the sunlight, if that was possible.

“What do you mean?”

“So, you’re just going to tell Lara that your psycho ex is going to launch an attack on the island, and that she told you herself in a dream?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“And this doesn’t strike you as the least bit odd?”

He thought about it. Then, “Lara and I have talked about it before.”

“And she believes you?”

“Of course she does.”

“Why?”

“Because—” Will stopped.

It was a good question. But whenever he thought about it, he always came back to the same answer: because Lara had seen Kate that night in Harold Campbell’s facility back in Starch, Texas. Once you’ve seen the blue-eyed creatures and had their existence confirmed with your own eyes, it was easier to accept that they were capable of things that weren’t always entirely explainable. Danny, for all his involvement in their survival, had never actually seen Kate. Last night was, in fact, the first time he even saw one of the blue-eyed ones.

“Because she’s seen them,” Will said finally. “Just like you did last night. Did you really believe me before then?”

“Of course,” Danny said without hesitation.

“Really?”

“Well…” Danny grinned. “Okay, I had my doubts.”

“And after last night?”

Danny sighed and nodded at the radio. “Call the island. Then we have to get the hell back there as soon as we can.”

“Are you sure?” Lara asked.

“Yes,” Will said.

“Will, are you sure?”

“Lara, she’s coming. I don’t know how, or when, but she made it pretty clear that she’s been ignoring the island all this time because we haven’t been worth her attention.”

“And now, because of the broadcast, she’s paying attention again. So all of this is my fault.”

According to Kate, yes, he thought, but said, “Don’t blame yourself. It was bound to happen sooner or later. We couldn’t hope to stay under the radar forever. We’re a loose end. She said as much.”

“Kate…”

“Yes.”

“Goddammit, Will.” He could hear the exasperation in her voice. And maybe a little bit of anger. Or a lot of anger. It was sometimes hard to get all the nuances of someone’s tone over the radio.

“Look, anything she says can’t be taken at face value,” Will said. “Maybe she’ll attack, and maybe she won’t. Maybe it’s because of the radio broadcast, or maybe she’s just using it as an excuse. I don’t know. But we shouldn’t take any chances.”

Lara didn’t say anything for a while.

“Lara…”

“I’m still here,” she said. “What about Gaby?”

Now it was his turn to take a long pause.

“Will, what about Gaby?”

“The island is vital, Lara.”

“It’s just an island.”

“But you’re on it. And Carly. And the kids…”

“You have to find Gaby. We don’t leave our own behind, remember?”

He wanted to find Gaby, but he couldn’t deny what had happened last night. Kate had all but ended Dunbar and its occupants. It had been so easy, too. That was the most disturbing part. Everyone who was here before last night was dead (or worse), and that included Gaby. Will was still certain she had come into the city. What were the chances she had made it out after last night?

“We’ll keep looking for her on our way back,” he said finally.

He must not have been convincing enough, because she said, “Will, you can’t leave her out there alone. Not again. You can’t give up now.”

“The island is important, Lara. We can’t lose it.” He added, “Gaby would understand.”

There was another long silence, this time from both of them.

“Do you know where she is now?” Lara finally asked.

“That’s the problem. Danny and I tracked her to Dunbar yesterday. If she was still here after nightfall… I don’t know. I just don’t know. I’ll keep looking. But the island, Lara, the island…”

“I know,” she said softly, her voice barely audible over the connection. “I know.”

He didn’t know what else to say and was grateful for the sound of a car engine coming from up the street. He glanced back as Danny turned the corner in a white Ford Bronco.

“Danny found a vehicle,” Will said into the mic. “I have to go.”

“Find her, Will. Do everything you can to find her.”

“Lara…”

“Promise me.”

“The island…”

“Don’t worry about the island. I’ll take care of us here. You just take care of yourself and Danny, and find Gaby. Find her, Will.”

If she’s even still alive, he thought, but said, “We’ll keep looking for her on our way back. But we can’t stay out here forever. Not with the island in danger.”

“There’s something…” she started to say.

“What is it?”

She didn’t answer right away.

“What is it, Lara?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing that I can’t handle. Just find her and come home. In the meantime, I’ll look after things here. You trust me, don’t you?”

“You know I do.”

“Good. I love you, Will.”

He smiled. “I’ll see you soon.”

He put the microphone down and turned off the radio as Danny parked the Bronco in the middle of the street behind him, then hopped down from the raised driver side door.

“How’d it go?” Danny asked.

“It went.”

“You told her about Gaby?”

“Uh huh.”

“And she was fine with us coming back without the kid?”

“What do you think?”

“Well, I hope you don’t mind, but I’m going to tell Carly it was all your idea.”

Will grunted. “Sounds fair to me.” He nodded at the truck. “Where’d you find that beast?”

“Auto body garage next to a VFW hall on the other side of town. Harrison might have been an idiot, but he wasn’t a total idiot. There were a half dozen working vehicles inside, including a fuel truck. Working batteries, too. From the looks of it, they kept all the cars running just in case.”

“Any survivors?”

“There was a hell of a lot of blood in the VFW. They had the windows and doors barricaded, but apparently it didn’t work. There was a basement in the back, but I heard scurrying from down there and decided I’d rather not investigate further.”

“Smart.”

“It’s been known to happen.” Danny watched Will pack up the radio. “Song Island or bust?”

“No choice,” Will said. The words came out like gravel. “Can’t take the chance that Kate will attack without us there.”

Danny nodded. Will knew he didn’t like the idea of giving up their search for Gaby any better than he did. But like him, Danny had come to the same conclusion.

The island. They had to protect the island. It wasn’t just the beach and the hotel and the solar power, though those were important, too. It was the people on the island.

Lara, Carly, Vera, and Elise….

We can’t lose the island. Not now. Not after we’ve fought so hard to keep it.

“Well, let’s get truckin’, then,” Danny said. “I’m driving.”

“You’re a terrible driver.”

“I’m a great driver. Better than great. I’m a spectacular driver. Back in college, they used to call me Danny the Driver. True story.”

The back of the Bronco was piled high with supplies Danny had raided from the VFW hall, though to hear him tell it, there were probably more goodies in the basement. He had stockpiled a generous amount of MREs, granola bars, and unopened cases of bottled water. He had also picked up weapons and ammo, along with a Mossberg pump-action and a FNH self-loading tactical shotgun.

Will grabbed the FNH from the back and turned it over. Eighteen inches, black matte finishing, and it didn’t look as if it had ever been used. It had a metal shell carrier along the left side with six shells already preloaded. The shotgun was semi-automatic, which meant you didn’t need to pump it after each shot. Harris County SWAT had been thinking about switching from the Remingtons to the FNHs but had never gotten around to it.

“Nice, right?” Danny said. “For the lazy shotgunner.”

“I can dig it,” Will said.

“There’s a box of ammo in the back if you can find it.”

Will had to rummage around the water and lumps of shiny MRE bags before he found the box of shells on the floor. He tossed it into his pack. “This was all in the VFW hall?”

“Most of it.”

“Last stand?”

“Looked like it. A hell of a mess. I think they had kids in there, too.”

“How could you tell?”

“I just could,” Danny said, but didn’t elaborate.

“So there were definitely more goodies in the basement,” Will said. “An armory, maybe, where they kept more of these.”

“Probably.”

“It might have been worth it to go down there.”

“Not in this lifetime.”

“When did you get so queasy around these things?”

“Since shooting them only got me these little keepsakes,” Danny said, touching his broken nose, then rubbing — and grimacing — the red gash along his temple. “Now I know how you feel walking around with that face all day.”

“Keep your eyes on the road, pretty boy.”

“What the hell for? There’s nothing out here. Even less than nothing. If there was a name for this place, they’d call it Nothingland. Nothingapolis. Loadacrapola.”

He wasn’t wrong. Route 13 out of Dunbar was uneventful. Will was ready for an ambush or at least some kind of activity on their way out, but there was none. The streets remained deserted, and the main highway connecting Dunbar to Interstate 10 was a flat two-lane road with empty scenery on both sides of them. He expected to start seeing farmland and houses soon, but apparently they hadn’t ventured far out enough.

‘Loadacrapola’ is right.

Then Danny said, “Whoa,” and slowly stepped on the brake.

Will looked out the front windshield and immediately saw a body lying across the highway where Route 13 intersected with a country road on its right side.

“Body?” Will said.

“Body,” Danny nodded.

“Stay sharp.”

“I’m so sharp I give myself pinpricks.”

Will put down the FNH and unslung the M4A1. The window was already rolled down, so all he had to do was focus in order to listen in on his surroundings. Not that he could hear very much over the churning of the Ford’s engines. He did glimpse something to his right in the distance, along the country road. It looked like a cemetery.

Now that’s not an ominous sign at all.

Danny stopped in front of the body. It was wearing a camo uniform and lying on its stomach. “Ambush?”

“Doubt it.”

“You go out and make sure while I wait in here.”

“Don’t leave without me.”

“Whatever you say, boss.”

Will opened the passenger side door and hopped down. He scanned the area — the land to his right, then up and down the highway. He stepped on bullet casings as he moved toward the body.

The figure was definitely dead, fresh blood pooling underneath him. The man’s hip holster was empty and there was no sign of a weapon nearby. Will turned the man over onto his back with the toe of his boot. Male, twenties, with a ponytail. “Lumis” was written over his right breast pocket. He hadn’t been dead for very long. There were no vultures or crows circling above, so the smell hadn’t reached the carrions yet. He had been shot once in the hip, then again in the back.

His right ear clicked, and Danny’s voice came through the earbud in his ear, part of the comm system they had recovered from Ennis’s basement earlier. “Dead?”

“Looks dead to me.”

“Give it mouth to mouth just in case.”

“I think I’ll skip that part.”

“Why, cause he’s a guy? You’re such a homophobe.”

Will straightened up and looked around at the flat country landscape again. There was nothing out here, which made stumbling across a body odd. Someone had to have killed this man. Maybe someone had actually survived Dunbar last night. Maybe that person might have even been Gaby…

Captain Optimism.

“I’m heading back,” he said into his throat mic.

He was halfway to the Bronco when he heard rustling and spun back around toward the ditch that ran alongside the country road. He didn’t hesitate and ran toward the source of the sound with his rifle at the ready.

“Don’t shoot!” a voice shouted as he neared.

Another man in his early twenties, also wearing camo, was crouched in the ditch with his hands raised high. The man was unarmed, sporting an empty hip holster and a makeshift tourniquet around his right ankle. His face was pale and he was covered in sweat, and the name “Darren” was stenciled across his nametag.

“Don’t shoot!” Darren shouted again.

“Get up here,” Will said.

Darren hesitated, then stood up and climbed out of the ditch with some difficulty. The handkerchief he had tied around his ankle was covered in blood and he winced each time he put pressure on the leg.

Danny had come out of the Bronco and was standing behind Will now, scanning their surroundings for possible signs of a threat. “Looks like we missed the party.”

“Looks like,” Will said. Then to Darren, “What happened here?”

“We were parked on the road when someone attacked us,” Darren said.

“You were in a car?”

“Yes.”

“Where is it?”

“They took it.”

“Who is ‘they’?”

“I don’t know,” Darren said. He wiped at the beads of sweat dripping down his face. “There were four of them.”

“What did they look like?”

“They were girls.”

“Girls?”

“Yeah.”

“You mean kids?”

Darren seemed to think about the question before answering. “Teenagers, I guess.”

Will exchanged a quick look with Danny, who grinned back at him. “Ya think?”

Maybe…

“Was one of those teenagers blonde, tall, about five-seven?” Will asked Darren. “Pretty, despite the bruises on her face?”

“You know, the kind you’d give that right leg to take to the prom?” Danny added.

Darren grimaced at him for a few seconds. Will wasn’t sure if it was because of the sun, the pain, the memory of what had happened to him, or maybe all three.

The kid finally nodded. “You guys know her or something?”

Will smiled. “Yeah, we’ve met. Where’d she go, and how long ago?”

24 Lara

Carrie and Lorelei had good things to say about Keo, but more important was what they told her about the “soldiers” and Keo’s reaction to them. He wasn’t their friend. Far from it.

The enemy of my enemy is friend. Isn’t that the old saying, Will?

Then Will called on the radio and told her about Kate. A part of her was still annoyed his ex-girlfriend was visiting him in his dreams. In his dreams. But that was the kid in her talking. The pre-med student who had survived The Purge on pure luck. The new her, the one who had been running Song Island for the last few weeks, was concerned about other things.

Like survival. Hers. And Carly’s. Elise’s and Vera’s, too. The new people who had joined them, hoping for a fresh start. Or, at least, a less terrifying existence. All these people who had come here and now depended on her, and she didn’t know when it would all fall apart.

That was what concerned her the most. The not knowing. Today, tonight, or tomorrow. Or the week after. She knew one thing: they were sitting ducks. The enemy knew where they were at all times. The island that was such a godsend also made them an easy target. There was nowhere to run or hide, just fight.

Just fight…

Those thoughts swirled around her head as she walked to the back of the hotel.

Survival. Their chances would increase when Will and Danny returned. But that wasn’t for a while. A day at least. Maybe two. Gaby was still out there, too. The thought of losing her because Will had to rush back home tormented Lara.

Roy was sitting on a chair outside the makeshift jail cell, an old inventory room with a steel door, when she turned the corner. He glanced up when he heard her footsteps.

“Did you eat yet?” she asked.

“Not yet. Blaine’s supposed to show up in thirty minutes.” He looked nervous this morning, and she guessed he had been waiting for this — the two of them talking — since last night. “Lara, about what happened …”

“We’re not talking about that right now, Roy.”

“I just wanted to say I’m sorry. Going out there was stupid—”

“Later,” she said, cutting him off. “For now, go get something to eat.”

He looked confused. “Are you sure?”

“Yes.” She peered through the security glass.

“Lara, about last night, with Gwen…”

She gave him a reassuring smile. “Roy, we’re all adults here, aren’t we?”

“Yes.”

“It’s fine. You found someone. I’m happy for you. For Gwen, too. And about what you did… Well, it worked out for the best. I’m not saying it was the right thing to do — and yes, I’m still pissed off you did it — but no one died. That’s all that matters for now.”

He nodded, looking not pleased exactly, but relieved. “Just be careful with him. I’ve seen guys like this before.”

“What kind of guys is that?”

“The dangerous kind,” Roy said.

She nodded. He was talking about West and Brody, two men Roy had traveled with since The Purge. He was right. Those two were dangerous men. Every now and then, she wondered whatever became of West…

“Go grab some breakfast, Roy.”

“Just be careful with him,” Roy said again before heading down the hallway.

“Roy,” she said after him. When he stopped and looked back, “Don’t ever do that again without asking for my permission first. Do you understand?”

He nodded and pursed his lips. “I understand.”

“Go eat some breakfast.”

She waited until he turned the corner before reaching for the key that hung from a hook. She unlocked the makeshift cell door and pulled it open.

Keo looked up from the floor where he was sitting with his back against the far wall. A white plastic plate with thick dripping syrup rested between his bent legs while he shoved the last piece of fluffy pancakes into his mouth using a flimsy plastic spork. Crumbs from biscuits were sprinkled liberally on his clothes and around him.

“Frozen pancakes,” he said.

“Frozen pancakes,” she nodded.

“Tastes just like the real thing.”

“They are the real thing. Just thawed out. How’d you like the biscuits?”

“What’s not to like? The only thing missing are eggs and sausages.”

“We were thinking about bringing a hog or two onto the island and letting them run wild in the woods.”

“I always wanted to try my hand at being a pig farmer.”

She picked up Roy’s chair and set it down in front of the open door, then sat down on it. She leaned forward and smiled at him. “You don’t strike me as the farming type, Keo.”

“What do I strike you as?”

“Dangerous. That’s what everyone says.”

He shrugged. “I’ve been called worse.”

He hadn’t moved from the floor and his eyes watched her curiously, first dropping to the Glock in her hip holster, then to the open door behind her. Ten feet of space separated them. It wasn’t very much and she wished it were more.

He was tall for an Asian-American. Six-one, easily, and was obviously in good shape. Muscled; more toned than huge like Blaine. Fast, too, she thought, remembering last night. If she had any doubt that he was, as Roy said, dangerous, one look at that long scar along one side of his face took it away. This was a man used to violence, even before the world came to an unceremonious end.

So what were the chances she wasn’t about to make the biggest mistake of her life right now?

You wanted to be the leader, so lead. This is what it means to lead.

The hard choices. The tough calls. This is it.

So lead.

She replayed everything Carrie had told her about this man in her head for the fifth time in as many minutes. The soldiers at the marina in Dulcet Lake. The ones on the shoreline of Beaufont the next day. The man was dangerous. A professional, she had thought when she heard about what he had done. She had come so close to telling Will about him during their radio call this morning.

So why hadn’t she?

Because Keo is dangerous. Too dangerous.

And after West and Brody, Will would never agree to let me do this. And maybe he’s right, and I’m dead wrong, because that’s exactly what I’ll be if I misjudge this man.

But she had other information Will didn’t. She had seen Keo up close and in person. She knew what he had done, why he was even on the island. The fact that he had saved Carrie and Lorelei and never asked for anything in return and in fact had shouldered the responsibility of bringing them down here with him…

“I’m Lara, by the way,” she said. “We didn’t get a chance at introductions last night.”

He stuck a finger into the leftover syrup and licked it clean. “You know what I miss most about the end of the world, Lara?”

“What’s that?”

“IHOP. Best damned pancakes in the history of the world. Their French toasts with fruit topping and sweet cream? To die for.”

“I don’t think we have any of that in our kitchen.”

“Heaven without the fluffy clouds?” he smiled.

She smiled back. “Carrie told me you were headed somewhere else, that you only came here to find out whatever became of your friends.”

“I’m keeping a dead man’s promise. It was the only reason he came down here with me in the first place. I figured, what the hell. It’s already on my way.”

“The seven people.”

“Yeah.”

“So you don’t know if they actually made it to the island.”

“Nope.”

“But I didn’t lie to you last night. If they did make it here, then they’re probably dead. My group only survived because we got lucky. Does that answer your question?”

“Yes, if you’re telling the truth.”

“What reason would I have to lie? Look at where you are now.”

He chuckled. “Point taken.”

This time, it was her turn to watch him closely. She thought he looked almost relieved by what she had told him. Then again, she didn’t know this man at all, and she could be misreading him completely.

God, please don’t let me get everyone here killed.

“So what’s next for you?” she asked.

“I move on.”

“Santa Marie Island.”

“That was the original plan.”

“Who is she?”

“What makes you think there’s a ‘she’?”

“There’s always a she, Keo.”

He grinned. “I met her when all of this first happened. We got close, and like a fool, I told her I’d meet up with her later. It’s been four — five? — months since, and I’m still trying to make good on it. Hell, I don’t even know if she’s still alive.”

“So all of this could be for nothing?”

“A big fat nothing, yup.”

“Must be true love.”

“Sure, that’s one way to look at it.” He nodded at the Glock at her hip. “Can you use that thing?”

“Yes,” she said without hesitation.

“I believe you.” He picked up the spork and sucked at the syrup clinging to it. “So what happens now? You going to lock me in here for the rest of my life? Even after how Carrie and Lorelei told you what a swell guy I am?”

She leaned back in the chair. “I have a proposition for you, Keo.”

“I thought you already have a boyfriend.”

“You wanna hear it or not?”

He gave her a noncommittal shrug. “Not like I have a choice.”

“I’m expecting an impending attack. It might be today, or tonight, or tomorrow. But it’s coming.”

He gave her a knowing look. “The soldiers I ran into yesterday.”

She nodded. “You told Carrie you thought it was a staging area. She also told me about the boat that was going up and down the lake. It was watching us.”

He nodded. “They were reconning you.”

“Here’s my offer, Keo. Lend us a hand, and I’ll give you everything you need to reach Santa Marie Island. It beats swimming over there.”

“I don’t know, I can swim pretty far, as you saw last night.”

She continued as if he hadn’t said anything. “I’ll give you a sailboat with an outboard motor and plenty of fuel and supplies to last for weeks out in the Gulf of Mexico. The way I hear it, boats are in pretty short supply these days.”

“I’m sure there’s one lying around somewhere…”

“Not according to what Carrie told me.”

“Carrie talks too much.”

“She wants to stay here. Lorelei, too.”

“Are they?”

“You mean, am I going to let them?”

“Yes.”

“I am,” she nodded. “There’s no reason not to.”

“That’s big of you.”

“It’s common decency.”

“I’ve heard of that. Never had much use for it.”

She smiled at him. “That’s not what the girls told me.”

“Like I said, they talk too much.” He sucked on the spork again. “I could always just walk to Texas.”

“Yes, you could. It’s a long way, but hey, maybe one day you’ll actually make it. Hide in basements at night, walk in the day. Of course, you might run into those soldier buddies of yours again, or some nutcase with a sniper rifle who decides he wants your stuff.” She shrugged. “Who knows, you might even find a working vehicle.”

“You’ve thought this through.”

“I’ve been out there, Keo.”

“All right. I’ll play along. What exactly do I have to do to win this great prize of yours, Barbie Barker?”

“I don’t need you to fight our battles for us. I just need you to help me delay the attack.”

“Delay it?”

“Yes.”

He seemed to think about it, then gave her that noncommittal shrug again. “For how long?”

“A day. Two. Whatever you can give me. I’m going to get reinforcements from two Army Rangers either later today or the day after. But I’m not waiting around to find out when the attack is coming.”

“You want to attack them first.”

“Yes.”

“Ballsy.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “Just desperate.”

He actually looked impressed. For a moment, anyway. Then he was back to pretending he didn’t give a damn about her or the others on the island. “Sounds like you have it all figured out, Lara.”

Except for the part where I mess up and trust the wrong man and get everyone killed as a result.

“The question is,” Keo said, “are you really willing to put your life, and the lives of everyone on this island, into the hands of a stranger with a gun? Because that’s what you’re about to do. Are you certain you’re not going to regret that decision?”

“Is this smart?” Carly asked.

“I don’t know,” Lara said.

“Can we trust him?”

“I don’t think we have a choice.”

“What did Will say?”

“I didn’t tell him about Keo or last night.”

“Oh.”

“Should I have?”

“I don’t know,” Carly said. “I guess that’s why you get paid the big bucks. To make decisions like this.”

“Yeah,” Lara said. “The big bucks.”

If I’m wrong, we’re all dead.

Then again, if I don’t do this, we’re probably all dead, anyway.

“If all else fails, there’s always Plan Z,” Carly said.

“God, that’s such a stupid name.”

Carly chuckled. “Isn’t it, though?”

They both smiled. Mostly because they didn’t know what else to do. Carly, more than anyone, knew what was at stake here. Not just her own life, but her sister Vera’s, too. The fact that she was making a decision that could take away both lives hung over Lara like the Sword of Damocles.

“We’re probably all going to die,” Lara said.

Carly laughed. “Yeah. Probably.” Then, after she had settled down, “I have to tell you, the image of Kate out there pulling the strings makes for a pretty icky visual.” She shivered a bit. “I liked her, you know. We were friends.”

“I know.”

“But I don’t think we were ever as close as you and me right now. The age difference and everything. She was always kind of…”

“What?”

“I don’t know. I guess out of my league.”

“I didn’t know the two of you dated.”

Carly snorted. “She wishes.”

They leaned against the railing on the hotel’s front patio and watched Keo and Roy across the open grounds in silence for a moment.

The two men were observing Kendra and some of the kids as they worked on a patch of land that Kendra told them had the best soil for growing vegetables. They had found everything they needed to loosen the earth from the supply shacks in the back, including rakes, shovels, and more variety of hoes than Lara knew existed. Kendra had been disappointed they didn’t have a tiller machine, which would have made everything easier. In one of Will and Danny’s forays on land for supplies, they had picked up a crate full of seeds from one of the home improvement warehouses. It wouldn’t be long now before they could begin planting along the rows being carved out.

If they were still alive in a week from now, anyway. A lot of things could happen in a few days. All she had to do was look at the last couple of weeks for evidence of that.

“I know what you’re doing,” Carly said.

“What’s that?”

“Giving him a tour of the hotel, then showing him everyone eating breakfast together in the dining room. And now showing him the garden, with Kendra and the kids. Danny told me about this. The Army calls it psy ops. Psychological warfare. Hearts and minds, right? You’re trying to convince him without actually saying a word that the island is worth saving by showing him the people on it. I mean, the kids, Lara. Who could resist Elise and Vera covered in dirt? You’d need a heart of stone, and I don’t think Keo has one. At least, not the Keo that Carrie and Lorelei told us about.”

“You give me way too much credit, Carly,” Lara said before she smiled to herself, hoping that Carly hadn’t caught it.

“Slick,” Carly said, grinning at her. “Real slick, boss. I always knew you had it in you.”

She stood with Keo on the beach. He had taken off his boots and was enjoying the sensation of bare feet soaked in the cool and clear Beaufont Lake water. Elise, Vera, and Jenny, fresh from helping Kendra with loosening dirt for the garden, were fighting against the waves in front of them, cleaning off the dirt and grime of their hard work. The girls hadn’t bothered to change into bathing suits given how everything on them was dirty. She guessed this way they were hoping to kill two birds with one stone — clean up themselves, and their clothes, too.

Blaine’s silhouetted form on top of the boat shack watched them carefully; he was there just in case Keo decided he wanted the boat and supplies minus the whole risking his life part. That was why she only wore her Glock in a hip holster. Worst-case scenario, Keo would be armed with a handgun while Blaine had the M4. Maddie was also watching them from the Tower with the ACOG-equipped rifle while Roy and Carly were on alert back at the hotel.

She hadn’t counted on the girls showing up suddenly on the beach, though. If things did go bad and he grabbed one of them…

Please, God, don’t let me be wrong about Keo.

“If you were me, how would you do it?” she asked. “Delay the attack.”

“You seemed to be awfully sure there’s going to be an attack.”

“You saw it yourself. The staging area with the soldiers.”

“But that’s not all. You have inside information.”

That’s one way to put it, she thought, and said, “I know it’s coming, yes.”

“Okay.” He seemed to think about her question for a moment. Then, “It’s been a whole day, so by now they would have gotten reinforcements. Men to replace the ones I took out yesterday. You’re looking at a dozen assaulters at least. Two, maybe three dozen, if you’re really SOL.”

“What else?”

“The fact that they’re willing to commit to assaulting the island at all, given how isolated you people are, tells me you’ve pissed either them or their ghoul masters off. I’m guessing that radio broadcast of yours had a little something to do with it.”

She smiled. After Carrie and Lorelei mentioned he knew of her broadcast, she had been waiting for him to put two and two together. “Finally figured it out, huh?”

He chuckled. “I know I look it, but I’m not that dense. But yeah, it took a while.”

“What finally gave me away?”

“Your voice sounds more echoey on the radio.”

“I recorded it in the Tower. It’s an enclosed space.”

“How’d you find out about the silver?”

“Trial and error.”

She sneaked a look at him. He was watching the girls frolicking against the waves. She couldn’t quite read his reaction. Maybe he was marveling at the sight…or was it complete indifference?

I can’t read this man. I’m about to put the lives of everyone on this island into the hands of a stranger whose face I can’t read with any certainty.

“Will you help us, Keo?”

He looked over at the boats docked along the pier. One of them was a sailboat — small enough to be handled by one person, with a powerful outboard motor that would have had no problems taking him south and to the coast of Texas. The boat Carrie and Lorelei had come in sat among them, looking almost quaint next to the more travel-ready vessels.

This is it. This is where he proves me right or wrong.

She didn’t realize it, but her hand had moved closer toward her sidearm. She shifted her eyes slightly to the right and saw Blaine watching them closely, his rifle gripped in front of him at the ready.

“And you’ll give me one of those boats, plus fuel and supplies?” he asked. “Everything I need to make it to the Texas coast?”

“Yes,” she said, and hoped her voice wasn’t nearly as anxious as it had sounded to her own ears.

She waited for his answer, but he surprised her by chuckling softly to himself.

“What’s so funny?” she asked.

“A year ago, you wouldn’t have liked me.” He was watching Elise and Vera building castles in the sand while Jenny, Sarah’s daughter, did backstrokes nearby. “In fact, you would have hated me, and justifiably so. I’ve done things you couldn’t imagine.”

“I’m sure you had good reasons.”

“No,” he said, and laughed, though it was devoid of humor. “Not really.”

“You’ve changed. We all have. Adapt or perish.”

“I’ve gone soft is really what’s happened.” He sighed. “The organization would have put me out of my misery months ago.”

“‘Organization’?”

“The people I used to work for.”

“They don’t sound like very nice people.”

“Nope. They were most definitely not.” He looked over at her. “I’m not promising anything, you understand? I’ll do what I can, but it might still not be enough. But maybe it’ll buy your boyfriend time to get back here and put up a proper defense.”

“I’m willing to take that chance.”

“First things first,” he said. “I’ll need guns, ammo, explosives, and at least one person to lend a hand. So, I asked you the question before, and I’ll ask it again: Are you really willing to put your life, and the lives of everyone on this island, into the hands of a stranger with a gun?”

Over the months, Danny had organized the subterranean space under the Tower into a makeshift armory. Lara had been surprised when she first saw it, but Danny had single-handedly done a magnificent job. He had halved the basement, with emergency supplies like rations, crates of MREs, cases of small bottled water and five-gallon coolers — half of them unopened, the other half refilled with tap water — and equipment up front. The back contained the weapons, ammo, and silver that hadn’t been melted down yet. There were green ammo cans filled with silver rounds stacked high in one corner and even more housed in regular moving boxes. The rest of the non-essentials, like clothes and personal items, had been transferred over to the hotel and put in a “lost and found room” in the back where anyone could take what they needed.

As a result, the basement looked bigger than when she was last down here two months ago. The room was longer than it was wide, extending away from the northeast cliff. Lara had never measured the space, but she guessed it was ten yards at its widest and at least twenty at its longest. LED lights, powered by the solar cells around the island, lined the ceiling, with battery backups hanging from wall hooks.

“When do you expect your boyfriend back?” Keo asked. He was standing in front of the racks of rifles. She couldn’t tell if he was impressed or indifferent by the selection Will and Danny had collected over the months.

“Best-case scenario is later tonight,” Lara said. “Worst-case scenario is…God knows.”

“So I’m a stopgap, is that it?”

“You said it, not me.”

His laugh echoed slightly in the contained room. “At least you’re honest about it.” He pulled an M16 from the rack. “You got rounds for the M203?”

The M203 was the grenade launcher attached under the barrel of the rifle. It was the same type of weapon that had almost ended her life when Kate’s people last assaulted the island.

She gestured at the crates around them. “Be my guest.”

“I’ll also need my guns back.”

“They’re in the hotel.”

He nodded. “So. Where are my volunteers?”

Blaine and Bonnie had joined her and Keo on the third floor of the Tower. She expected to see Blaine there. He had volunteered almost as soon as she brought it up earlier, but Bonnie’s presence was a surprise.

“How’s this going to work?” Blaine asked.

Keo leaned against one of the windows, looking over his submachine gun. He looked overly well-armed with the addition of the M16. “I just need you to do the driving.”

“What about me?” Bonnie asked.

He shrugged. “I guess you’ll be there in case he gets shot.”

Bonnie and Blaine exchanged a worried look.

“Just you against that army out there?” Blaine said.

“Don’t be so dramatic,” Keo said. “Even with reinforcements, it’s still a makeshift group of assholes in homemade uniforms. And besides, numbers isn’t going to play a part in this.”

That didn’t seem to really reassure either Blaine or Bonnie, and Keo didn’t look like he cared too much about their reactions.

“You guys don’t have to go,” Lara said. “I can ask for other volunteers.”

“I’m good,” Blaine said without hesitation.

“Me too,” Bonnie said, though not nearly as quickly. She scrutinized Keo across the room. “Tell me one thing: You’re not going there just to get yourself killed, right? You want to come back here?”

“That’s a dumb question,” Keo said, looking almost offended by the mere suggestion. “I don’t have a death wish. I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t think I could walk away from it. I just wanted to make sure you know what you’re getting into, that’s all. People are going to die. Maybe the two of you will be among them. You need to understand the risks. But trust me when I tell you, I’m not going there to get killed. I got places to go and people to see.”

That seemed to reassure them somewhat.

“Last chance,” Lara said. “Speak up now—”

“I’m good,” Blaine said again.

“Yeah, me too,” Bonnie nodded, and this time she said it quicker and with more conviction.

Lara wanted to tell them something reassuring, make a speech that would ease their minds. She tried to come up with words that Will would say to rally the troops as they prepared to go into battle.

Instead, the only thing she could think of to do was glance down at her watch. “Let’s get something to eat before you guys go.”

“Maddie’s relieving me in a few hours,” Blaine said.

“Okay, I’ll send her over earlier.”

If having someone in the Tower twenty-four hours a day was important before, it was imperative now. So she, Keo, and Bonnie walked down using the spiraling cast-iron staircase while Blaine stayed behind.

Keo wandered ahead, and Lara used the moment to walk beside Bonnie.

“I’m volunteering because I want to, Lara,” Bonnie said before Lara could ask the question that had been on her mind since she saw Bonnie waiting for them on the third floor.

“Can I ask why?”

“You don’t know?”

“Should I?”

“Because someone had to, or else you would have volunteered. And we couldn’t allow that.”

“‘We’?”

“Carly, me, Benny, Roy… Everyone.”

The ‘we’ strikes again.

This wasn’t the first time the island had made a decision for her because they believed it was for her own good. It was ironic because she was supposedly running the place in Will’s absence. And yet, whenever they felt like it, the others always got together and discussed what was best for her. She should have been angry about it, even pissed off, but she couldn’t, really, because they were almost always right.

“One of us had to go with Blaine and Keo,” Bonnie continued. “Carly wanted to. So did Maddie. And Benny and Roy, and even Jo and Gwen. But in the end, we decided I was the best choice.”

“Why you?”

Bonnie laughed. “You sound so surprised.”

“I…” Lara began, but didn’t finish because everything she would have said would have come out as an insult to Bonnie.

“I know,” Bonnie said with a grin. “The ex-model? I don’t blame you. All I can say is, you have to trust me, because compared to the rest, I’m the best choice. I was always athletic as a kid. I played basketball when I was in high school and I’ve stayed pretty active over the years. It was either stay skinny by sweating your ass off or throw up everything you ate, and I was never good at chucking food.”

Lara smiled.

“So yeah, between everyone, I’m the obvious choice,” Bonnie said.

“All of this, so I wouldn’t volunteer myself?”

“Yes.” Bonnie gave her an earnest look. “You’re important to the island, Lara. More than the rest of us.”

“I don’t know what to say, Bonnie.”

And she didn’t. She had no idea whatsoever. Because Bonnie was right. She would have gone with Keo and Blaine if no one else had stepped forward. Keo had made it clear — he could have done with one, but he preferred two. Three people gave them the best chance at success, and right now, they needed success in the worse way until Will and Danny could come home.

“Thank you,” Lara said. It was the only thing she could think of to say, and it felt too simple and unworthy of Bonnie’s sacrifice.

She wondered if Bonnie had even heard her, though, because the other woman looked preoccupied with Keo, who was walking ahead of them. “You really think he’s as good as he thinks he is?” she asked.

“From what Carrie and Lorelei told me, he’s pretty damn good,” Lara said.

“And you think this could work?”

“I hope this works.”

“What happens after that? I know you just want to delay them for a few days until Will and Danny can get here. But what happens after that?”

“I don’t know,” Lara said quietly. “I’m just trying to get us to tomorrow first…”

25 Gaby

She should have killed the kid. Darren. Well, he wasn’t really a kid. He was older than her by a few years, but to Gaby, anyone with a rifle who couldn’t put up a fight was a kid. Of course, killing Darren went out the window as soon as he started crying. Even Claire had looked almost sickened by the sight of that.

So they had left the collaborator on the side of the road and taken his truck. It was a Chevy Silverado, though one truck was the same as another to Gaby. It had a high perch, which allowed her to see a lot of the road up ahead, something that she liked. It was also powerful, and she finally understood why boys loved their trucks so much. It was hard not to feel as if you could run over just about anything behind the wheel of one of these monsters because, in all likelihood, you probably could. All she needed from it at the moment was to get her to Song Island.

Donna and Milly were stuffing themselves with food and refilled bottles of water in the back. Claire, who sat shotgun in the front passenger seat, leaned over every now and then to grab some for herself. Each time she did, Gaby resisted the instinct to tell her to put on her seat belt. She had to keep reminding herself that she wasn’t the girl’s mom, though she felt a strange connection to her, even more so than to Milly, whom she had known longer.

It was still morning, and the sun baked the empty vastness to both sides of them. The hot asphalt road shimmered and looked like water in front of her, and the nothingness made her feel like she was daydreaming. It should have made her comfortable and lulled her into something resembling serenity, but instead it only made her more alert and sit up straighter in the leather seat.

It was Josh. She couldn’t stop thinking about him. About what he had become, what he was doing. She kept looking at her side mirror, expecting to see him coming up behind her at any moment, declaring his love for her, that he was doing all of this for her, while bringing along a small army of lackeys.

Keep lying to yourself, Josh. Maybe one day you’ll actually believe it.

“Is it far from here?” Claire asked after a while. She talked through a mouthful of bread and pieces of sausage.

“Where’d you get that?” Gaby asked.

“Back here,” Donna said, holding up a blue plastic Tupperware with more sausages inside. “It’s pork.”

“How’s the bread?”

“It’s about a day old. Still pretty good, though.”

Donna pulled off a chunk and leaned forward. Gaby gobbled it up and chewed for a moment, keeping one hand on the steering wheel and her eyes outside the windshield the entire time. The last thing she needed was to run them into a ditch while trying to eat. All those “Don’t Text and Drive” commercials flashed through her mind all of a sudden. That and those “Click it or Ticket” billboards.

The good old days…

Donna was right. The bread was still pretty good. Then again, it had been a while since she had last eaten some. They had frozen dough on the island, but these actually tasted fresh. Or, at least, one-day fresh. Donna handed her one of the pork sausages and Gaby devoured that, too. It was even better when she stuffed the remaining parts into the bread and ate it like a hot dog.

“They must have a pig farm or something,” Donna said. “And fresh flour.”

Gaby nodded. She wondered how much Donna knew about what was happening out there, with the collaborators and the towns, while she was stuck in Dunbar all this time with her sister under Harrison’s protection. But she decided not to ask. The sisters knew enough to be scared of the soldiers and what was out there at night, and those were the only two things she needed them to know at the moment.

“You know how to cook?” she asked Donna.

Donna shrugged. “A little.”

“She thinks she’s good, but she’s terrible at it,” Claire said.

“At least I can cook,” Donna said.

“Barely.”

“Ugh, you’re never eating anything I cook again.”

“Promise?”

“You say that now—”

“Look!” Milly shouted, leaning between the front seats and pointing not up the road, but to the right of the highway.

Gaby took her foot off the gas slightly and the Chevy slowed down, going from forty to thirty, then twenty, as she saw what Milly was pointing at: a white two-story house being ravaged by a raging fire. The building was part of a farm, flanked by a red barn and some kind of storage shack. After leaving the cemetery behind, farmland and the houses of the people that tilled them had begun popping up.

“Whoa,” Claire said, leaning against her door. She had rolled down the window and the girl stuck her head out a bit. “It’s really burning that sucker up.”

They were almost past the house, and Gaby swore she could feel the flames all the way over here, adding to the already terrible morning heat. Donna and Milly moved toward the back right window to get a better look at the flames.

“Should we stop?” Donna asked.

“No,” Gaby said without hesitation.

“What if someone needs help?” Milly said.

“It’s too dangerous. After what happened with the soldiers, I don’t want to take any chances.”

Gaby gave the house one last look, scanning the grounds around it. She couldn’t detect any signs of movements or vehicles in motion in the front yard or along the manmade dirt road that connected it to the highway.

She added pressure to the accelerator and the Chevy began to pick up speed again.

Donna and Milly continued gazing out at the burning house, eventually moving from the side window to the rear windshield as they passed it by. Gaby looked briefly over at Claire, and the girl, bread stuffed into her mouth, gave her an approving nod.

Gaby smiled back.

“How much further to Beaufont Lake?” Donna asked.

“I’m not sure,” Gaby said. “After we reach I-10, it’s about half a day, I think. The good news is that the road out here is pretty empty, so we should make good time. But depending on how long it takes us to reach Salvani, we might have to find a place to spend the night.”

“I was hoping we’d get there today.”

“Me too,” Milly said.

“But you know where to go?” Claire asked. “Even without a map?”

Gaby nodded. “Once we hit I-10, we turn right, then left on Salvani. After that, it’s a straight drive down south.”

She glanced at Claire, then at Donna and Milly in the backseat, and hoped she had been convincing enough. They looked satisfied, so she probably had been.

The truth was, without a map, she was just guessing. She had traveled from Texas to Louisiana with Will and Lara, but she had never taken the wheel during any part of the drive. She even spent most of that trip asleep in the backseat (with Josh). Even during the helicopter ride with Jen, she was just a passenger, and she slept through most of that, too.

But it seemed like a pretty straightforward trip. Hopefully.

“I can’t wait for a hot shower,” Donna said wistfully. She took a sip from a bottle of water and made a face. “And cold water. With ice. That would probably be the best thing ever.”

“It’s not bad,” Gaby said. “The soft bed and your own room is a close number three and four.”

“I’ve never stayed in a hotel before,” Claire said. “Is it a nice hotel?”

“The parts that are finished are.”

“How unfinished is it?” Donna asked.

“You’ll hardly notice.”

“She’ll notice,” Claire said. “She complains about everything.”

“I only complain about you,” Donna said.

Claire smirked. “See?”

They went back and forth for a few more minutes, but by then Gaby had automatically tuned them out. She found it easy to do after the tenth time they started in on each other. Not that she ever thought about telling them to stop. She just assumed this was their way of coping, the same reason Danny joked his way through a firefight. It was their natural response, their sanctuary.

She couldn’t help but share Donna’s enthusiasm. How long had it been since she tasted cold water? Or stood under a hot shower? Had it really been weeks since she laid down on her own soft bed? God, she missed that the most.

Thinking about all the comforts waiting for her back on the island only made her long to see signs of the I-10 highway in the distance. Any sign at all. It would be hard to miss: a tall concrete structure rising up from the flat landscape she had been traveling for the last — how long had it been?

Gaby glanced at her watch. 9:15 a.m.

Had they only been on the road for less than forty minutes? Of course, she had only been driving at forty miles per hour. The slow speed was a combination of not being entirely confident in her driving skills and a wariness of what lay ahead. She had very little experience driving, but even more so when it came to these big trucks—

Sunlight reflected off something metallic in the road, and her left leg went down on the brake before she realized what it was: a barricade, consisting of two vehicles parked across the lanes and spilling onto the shoulders on both sides. It wasn’t an accident; she could tell that much even from a distance. The cars had been parked on purpose to block the road.

Claire saw it, too, and immediately stopped her back and forth with Donna.

“What?” Donna said. Then she, too, saw it. “Oh no, that can’t be good.”

Gaby slowly eased her foot off the gas pedal until the truck was moving at a snail’s pace. Claire had already picked up her rifle and put it in her lap.

“Power up your window,” Gaby said. Claire did, and Gaby did hers at the same time. “Girls,” Gaby said, looking up at the rearview mirror, “move behind the seats. Milly, get on the floor. Stay hidden.”

Donna moved behind Gaby while Milly did as she was told. She was small enough that she was able to sink all the way down to the floor on her bent knees until she was hidden completely behind Claire.

Gaby checked to make sure her rifle was still leaning against her seat, the stock resting on Claire’s side so it wouldn’t accidentally fall and become tangled with her feet while she was busy with the gas and brake.

Outside, the vehicles took the shape of a white four-door sedan and a beat-up red truck. Both cars looked like they had seen plenty of use; the sedan’s paint was peeling and its windows were rolled down. The truck’s windows were down too, and both looked empty.

Looked empty, anyway.

Gaby knew better. Cars didn’t stop in the middle of nowhere and park themselves nose to bumper. Certainly not out here, with only the spread-out land and farmhouses (including one that was burning somewhere behind them) resembling civilization. She guessed they were either halfway to the I-10 by now, or pretty close.

God, she hoped they were almost there.

The Chevy was thirty yards from the obstruction when Gaby came to a complete stop. She kept both hands on the steering wheel because if she had to jam down on the gas pedal, the truck was going to shoot forward like a rocket. When that happened, it was going to fight her with everything it had, which was a hell of a lot.

She did what Will taught her and turned the options in front of her over in her head.

There were a few that she could think of right away. The sedan and truck were no match for the larger Chevy, and she could probably power her way right through them without suffering too much damage. But there would be some damage, and she wasn’t sure if she wanted to risk that. At least, not yet. Not as long as she had other options.

Which were…?

The ditches, she knew from earlier, were too deep to drive across. That seemed to be the entire point of positioning the two cars across the road in the first place. Even if they couldn’t completely overlap the shoulders, enough of them did that it left little space for her to maneuver the wide truck around without ramming the bumper on one car or the front hood on the other. So she would have to go down the ditch and come up on the other side if she wanted to avoid impacting the vehicles entirely. Was the Silverado powerful enough to pull that off? She had no idea.

She could retreat. That was the third option. She didn’t particularly like it, but it was there. Going backward meant heading in the wrong direction, though. Home was up ahead, not behind her. So that was out of the question.

“Gaby?” Donna said. She was pressed so tightly against the seat that Gaby heard her even though she was whispering. “What are we going to do?”

“We can ram them,” Claire said.

“Ram them?” Donna said. “You’re crazy.”

“Why not? I bet we could.”

It had been less than thirty seconds since she had stepped on the brake. In that time, the highway remained empty except for their vehicle and the two in front of them. She expected a head, followed by a weapon, to appear behind one of the cars at any second, signaling that this was an ambush as she (knew) feared. The Silverado’s raised seat gave her a good view of her surroundings, but at the moment she couldn’t see anything to indicate this wasn’t just some freak accident.

Yeah, right. And I’m on a Sunday drive in the park with some kids.

She waited, but nothing happened.

There were no heads, no weapons, and no signs that someone was hiding behind the vehicles. Or around them. There were just two dead cars that shouldn’t be there but were and an empty field to the right and left of her.

Up ahead was I-10…

Maybe she was overthinking this. Or maybe someone had set up an ambush here a while ago but gave up when they didn’t find any takers. That was possible, too. You could only wait so long until you got tired and moved on. Maybe those vehicles were actually dead.

Maybe. So many maybes.

It was starting to get hot inside the truck with the windows rolled up, and Gaby glanced down at the AC controller when she caught a flicker of movement in the rearview mirror.

A man, cradling a rifle, was sneaking up on them from behind—

“Get down!” Gaby shouted, at the same time shoving the gear into reverse and slamming her foot down on the gas pedal. The truck lurched backward with such awkward force that Gaby was thrown forward into the steering wheel and had to hold on with everything she had.

The Silverado’s tires screamed as it reversed. Or was that more of a shrill? She swore she could also smell rubber burning, but that could have just been something her frenzied mind was making up on the spot.

She felt rather than heard the THUMP! as the truck rammed into the figure behind them and she glimpsed something flying through the air, flashing across her side mirror. It was big and dark and seemed to be failing wildly, and it was there one split-second and gone the next.

Keep going! Don’t stop! Don’t stop!

She didn’t stop and she kept going, pushing back against the seat while gripping the steering wheel with all her might. A dark black lump flashed by to her left, lying on the road (I guess he landed), just as a flurry of movement tore her eyes away to a second man emerging out of the ditch to her left. She didn’t get a good look at his face — the truck was moving too fast — but he was definitely wearing slacks and a T-shirt, so he wasn’t one of Josh’s people. Not that it mattered at the moment. The shotgun clutched in his hands was what was important.

Then Claire screamed her name.

Gaby snapped a look in the girl’s direction and saw a third figure climbing — lumbering, really, because the man was huge and moved with great difficulty — out of the ditch to their right. The AR-15 looked like a toy in his hands. The man stopped and took aim and opened fire.

“Stay down!” Gaby screamed.

She kept her hands tight around the steering wheel even as the truck continued to reverse, the sound of peeling tires now lost in the string of shotgun blasts pounding the air, joining the AR-15 as it pelted the truck. She hoped and prayed she was going in a straight line back down Route 13 even as the front windshield shattered and glass shards zip-zip-zipped around her head. In another second, the entire windshield seemed to disintegrate until there was nothing left.

“Gaby!” Claire shouted. “Watch out—”

Before the girl could finish, the ground gave out under them and they were going down. Then her view out of the rectangular hole that used to be the windshield changed positions and she found herself staring up at the cloudless sky, bright sun hitting her full in the face. Without the glass to protect her, the full force of the heat was overwhelming and she had to blink even as the sound of the truck’s rear tires spinning fruitlessly against the ground forced its way into her senses. She still had her foot pressed down on the gas pedal, though she wasn’t sure why because they didn’t seem to be moving at all.

They were upended, with the truck’s bumper resting on the bottom of the ditch and the tires fighting for purchase against the dirt wall. She looked to her right and saw Claire clinging to her seat, hands over her head, dazed and confused.

Gaby pulled her foot off the gas pedal and reached for the M4 lying across her and Claire’s seats just as the driver side door was yanked open with a loud squeal of metal grinding against metal. The man had to be immensely strong because opening a door upward took a hell of a lot of strength, and yet he had done it almost effortlessly.

She gave up on the rifle and went for her Glock instead.

The large man with the AR-15 was trying to pull her out with one hand even while he kept the door pried open with one bulging shoulder. Trying? No. He was succeeding. Meaty fingers dug into her flesh, and she couldn’t have fought him even if she wanted to. He was so much stronger that she didn’t think he was even exerting any force whatsoever as he yanked her toward the open door.

She twisted in her seat and saw his eyes go wide at the sight of the gun in her right fist. He opened his mouth to say something — maybe to ask her not to shoot — but before he could get a word out she shot him in the chest, the discharge deafening in the tight confines of the vehicle.

Behind her, either Donna or Milly began screaming. By the shrill noise, she guessed it was probably Milly. Gaby had been wondering when the girl would finally let it all out. She guessed this was as good a time as any.

The big man — who was probably shorter than her, though he made up for it with width and at least one hundred pounds — let go of her arm before stumbling back, looking more stunned than hurt. The door slammed back down, but Gaby could still see him through the cracked driver side window. The man’s rifle was slung over his shoulder and he was clawing for it. He looked confused, as if he couldn’t quite figure out where the rifle was, or remember how to breathe.

She shot him a second time in the chest, shattering the driver side window in the process.

“Aim for center mass,” Will always said. “The biggest part of the body is your best target. Only delusional idiots aim for the head in a gunfight.”

The man crumpled to the bottom of the ditch on his stomach.

She was about to leap out of her seat (Get out of the car! It’s a death trap! Get out of it now!), when she heard glass shattering behind her, from across the front seat, and Claire screaming. Gaby twisted back in that direction. She hadn’t gotten completely around when she saw a familiar face, the same shade of red hair, leaning in Claire’s suddenly open passenger side window with a shotgun in his hands.

But she was still halfway around when the man ruthlessly shoved the barrel of his weapon against Claire’s cheek, then glared at her from behind the girl’s head. “Go ahead, see if I don’t blow this little girl’s head open like a melon before you get that gun all the way around.”

Gaby froze.

Harrison.

She stared at him, then at Claire, fastened to her seat as if she was glued to it, too afraid to even move. There was a big bump in the girl’s forehead where she had slammed into the dashboard because she wasn’t wearing her seatbelt. For the first time since she had met her, Gaby saw very real fear in the thirteen-year-old’s eyes.

“It’s okay, Claire,” Gaby said. “Everything will be okay.”

“Don’t lie to the girl,” Harrison said. “It’s unbecoming.”

Gaby gripped the Glock. It was still pointed in the wrong direction — at her steering wheel — but it wouldn’t have taken much to swing it sixty more degrees, lift it slightly, and shoot Harrison on the other side of Claire. Of course, that would require better aim than she had proven herself capable of with a handgun. And he was standing right behind Claire, using her small head as a shield.

The crying continued in the backseat. Gaby couldn’t be sure if it was still just Milly or if Donna had joined in.

Options. What were her options?

Will said there were always options. She just had to see them.

So what were her options now?

She couldn’t see them. God help her, she couldn’t see any of them.

“Don’t make me say it again,” Harrison said. “Put down the gun or I’m going to splash this little girl’s brains all over you. You know I’ll do it.”

“Yeah,” Gaby said. “I know you’ll do it.”

“So what are you waiting for?”

She threw the Glock out her window. “Don’t hurt her.”

Harrison kept the shotgun pressed into Claire’s cheek with one hand and reached down with the other. He brought the hand back up and tossed something to her.

Gaby looked down at a pair of steel handcuffs in her lap.

“Put one around your right wrist and the other around the steering wheel,” Harrison said.

“Why?”

“Because I said so.”

Options? What are my options?

None. I don’t see any.

God help me, I don’t see any…

She picked up the handcuffs and did as he instructed. The metal bit into her wrist and she instantly regretted it. “Now what?”

“You’re going to sit tight,” Harrison said.

He snatched up Claire’s rifle and tossed it into the ditch. Then he grabbed her M4, which had slid into Claire’s side of the truck, and stepped backward before disappearing completely from her field of vision. She heard him moving around the ditch, climbing up and then scrambling over to the other side, though she couldn’t see him because the truck was pointing up at the sky at the moment.

She looked into the backseat, at the weapons that Darren and his friend had brought with them. There, an AR-15, lying between Donna and Milly— “Donna, the rifle, hurry.”

Donna stared back at her as if she couldn’t understand what she was saying.

“The rifle!” Gaby said, just loud enough to get through to her.

She could hear Harrison moving around the truck, reaching the other side…

“Give me the rifle!” Gaby said again, louder this time.

Donna finally understood and reached for the rifle. She picked it up by the barrel and was holding it out to Gaby when the back passenger window exploded and showered the teenager and Milly with glass shards. Both girls screamed and the rifle fell. The girls threw their arms over their heads while Milly sank even lower into the floor behind Claire’s seat. Gaby couldn’t tell if they were hurt or just terrified, but she saw fresh blood on the upholstery in the backseat.

The loud, unmistakable sound of a shotgun being racked filled the air, then Harrison was standing next to her on the other side of her shattered window. “Nice try,” he said, then hit her in the face with the stock of his weapon.

Gaby actually heard her nose breaking, then tasted blood in her mouth as her head laid back against the comfortable headrest. She tried to shut off her senses. She wanted to go to sleep, but the sun was still beating down on her and she was able to open her eyes just in time to see Harrison pulling open the door with some effort.

He reached in and unlocked the handcuff around the steering wheel. He grabbed her by the arm and pulled her out of the truck roughly, throwing her down into the ditch. She landed on top of the short but large man she had shot earlier and scrambled to get away.

She was straightening up when Harrison hit her in the gut with a balled fist. She doubled over from the pain before falling back down to her knees in the grass. Thick blood dripped down around her in clumpy streams.

Are those mine? Yes. I think so.

Harrison towered over her, his bigger frame blotting out the sun. “You should have stayed out of my city. Everything was going fine until you showed up. Everything that’s happened, it’s all your fault.”

She looked up at him and shook her head. “No,” she said, but before she could continue defending herself, he punched her in the face — right in her broken nose. All the pain in the world seemed to come down on her at that very moment.

Someone screamed, then someone else joined in.

She heard her name just before the loud roar of another shotgun blast silenced it.