The Fires of Atlantis

26 Keo

“That’s one nasty scar,” the woman, Bonnie, said.

“You should have seen the other guy,” Keo said.

“Worse than that?”

“He’s dead, and I’m not.”

“Hunh.”

“That’s what he said.”

The redhead (Auburn hair? Close enough) with the supermodel good looks was crouched on one knee at the bow of the eighteen-footer, as if she expected someone to start shooting at them from the shoreline at any moment. She had a Remington tactical shotgun slung over her shoulder and wore a gun belt with a sidearm, though the combination of the deadly items on someone that gorgeous struck him as somehow unnatural.

The boat they were traveling in was used primarily for bass fishing, with two seats in the middle, one behind the steering wheel, and two pedestal seats — one in the back next to the loud outboard motor and the other up front where Bonnie was crouched next to at the moment. It was also the same boat they had used to intercept Carrie and Lorelei last night. No wonder it hadn’t been much of a chase. The damn thing was fast.

The big guy, Blaine, was maneuvering them toward the shoreline. His target was a spot about half a kilometer up the road from a burnt out marina and what looked like the blackened foundations of a fire-gutted house.

“Coming up,” Blaine announced.

Keo freed his MP5SD and moved from his seat and toward the bow, then crouched next to Bonnie. He still had the M16 with the M203 grenade launcher. It was a heavier weapon — about nine pounds loaded — than the submachine gun and felt like a baseball bat thumping against his back.

Bonnie glanced nervously at him. “You’ve done this before, right?”

“What’s that?”

“This, what you’re about to do.”

He shrugged. “First time for everything.”

She gave him a horrified look. “Are you kidding me right now? Tell me you’re just kidding me.”

He looked back at Blaine instead. “Bring her in easy. Fifty meters.”

Blaine nodded, then pulled back on the throttle. The boat slowed noticeably before continuing forward on a glide. A tall ridge and muddy banks greeted them, but no signs of another living soul anywhere. There was a long field on the other side crowded with overgrown and sun-bleached grass. That would come in handy if there was a sniper out there waiting to pick him off. If he was lucky, Blaine’s bigger form would make a more tempting target and give him the early warning he needed to retreat.

I’d shoot him first, too.

It was hot and Keo was already sweating under his T-shirt. Both Bonnie and Blaine looked similarly drenched and uncomfortable under the unrelenting heat.

“Shore’s coming up,” Blaine announced.

Keo stood up and put his submachine gun away. He waited until the boat slipped onto the muddy bank before leaping out. He grabbed a line Bonnie tossed to him and tied it around a boulder nearby. After the islanders climbed out after him, he tightened the rope and made sure it wasn’t going anywhere. The last thing he wanted was to swim back to the island. Once was enough, and he was closer last night.

He glanced at his watch: 11:13 a.m. “There and back again by five should give us a ninety-minute cushion.”

“It’s your operation,” Blaine said.

“As long as we’re on the water by the time the sun goes down,” Bonnie said. She might have involuntarily shivered when she added, “I don’t like the idea of being caught out here at night.”

Keo took point. He climbed up the ridge and went into a crouch before scanning the area. Despite the oppressive weather and lack of shade, the grass had grown three feet high from the ridgeline all the way to the road on the other side. Route 27, according to a map Lara had shown him. Blaine and Bonnie climbed up behind him.

“I don’t see it,” Keo said. “You sure this is the right spot?”

Blaine nodded. “Should be.”

“‘Should be’?”

“It’s here,” Blaine said, with just a little more conviction that time. He stood up to survey the area before crouching back down. “I see it. It’s where it should be.”

“Take the lead, then.”

Blaine picked up a car battery he had brought with him, got up, and jogged through the grass. Keo followed, Bonnie right behind him with two red plastic cans of gas in each hand. She was surprisingly strong for such a skinny beanpole.

The big man was leading them toward an old tree about thirty meters from the flat highway. As they neared it, Keo began making out a large object. Square-shaped, covered in some kind of brown tarp and repurposed grass that blended it, if not perfectly, then just enough into the surrounding field to make it mostly invisible to passing eyeballs unless you knew what you were looking for and where.

They slowed down as they reached the vehicle sitting underneath the makeshift camouflage. Blaine grabbed one side of the tarp and pulled it, revealing a black Dodge Ram that looked to be in reasonably good condition.

Blaine tossed Keo a key. “Pop the hood.”

Keo got a whiff of stale air when he opened the door. Apparently they hadn’t needed to use the Ram in a while. He leaned in and pulled the lever. “How many of these things do you guys have stashed around the lake?”

“About a half dozen,” Blaine said. He stuffed the battery back into its slot and reconnected the wires. “Most of them still have some gas left in the tanks, but we bring enough extra just to be sure.”

Behind him, Bonnie had finished pouring the two cans of gasoline into the tank. She closed it back up now and tossed the empty cans into the back, then wiped her hands on her shirt and made a face at the smell.

When Lara had told him that Blaine knew where to get a vehicle and they would need a battery for it, Keo hadn’t been convinced. But the more he got to know these people, the more he realized he was dealing with seasoned survivors and not civilians fumbling their way through the end of the world.

Most of that, he thought, was the result of good leadership. Lara, and this Will guy whom Keo hadn’t met yet. He wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to, either. Keo had never gotten along especially well with Army guys. His father had been proof of that, and subsequent encounters with grunts during his career with the organization had never turned out especially well. As much as he didn’t have any use for career soldiers, Keo suspected they thought the same about him and his ilk.

Blaine slammed the hood down and walked back over. “How far up the road?”

Keo did the calculations in his head, replaying snapshots of the map and where he had encountered the weekend warriors. Or collaborators, as Lara called them. “Twenty kilometers north, but since we’re on the wrong side of the lake and we’ll need to loop around the south end, add in an extra ten. Thirty kilometers, give or take.”

“How much is that in miles?” Bonnie asked.

“Just a shade over eighteen,” Keo said.

“Eighteen miles,” Blaine nodded. “As long as we don’t get held up by anything, we shouldn’t have any problems making it back down here by five, and we’ll be on the island thirty minutes later.”

“Sounds like a plan. Let them know we’re off.”

Blaine unclipped his radio and keyed it. “Song Island. Can you read me. Over.”

“Loud and clear, Blaine,” a voice answered. It was one of the women, Maddie. Song Island, Keo discovered, had a lot of very capable women. Gillian and Jordan would definitely have fit in like gangbusters.

“We’re heading off now, Maddie,” Blaine said. “Wish us luck.”

“Good luck and see you when you get back,” Maddie said.

Keo climbed into the front passenger seat while Blaine slipped in behind the wheel. Bonnie settled into the back and leaned in between the two front seats. She gave Keo a long, curious look.

“What?” he said.

“Are you sure this is going to work?” she asked.

“No, but it’ll be fun to find out.”

Bonnie sat back with a heavy sigh. “Oh God, you’re going to get me killed, aren’t you?”

“That’s the spirit,” Keo said.

You really thought it was going to be that easy, huh? Think again, pal.

They were exactly where he last saw them yesterday, gathered around the red two-story house near the shoreline. Except this time there were more vehicles and more men guarding the roads and standing along the docks. He counted almost two dozen uniforms, likely more scattered elsewhere that he couldn’t see.

The radio clipped to his hip squawked, and Blaine’s voice came through at half volume because he had lowered the volume halfway. “How’s it look up close?”

He told Blaine about what he could see and what he couldn’t.

“Damn,” Blaine said.

“Yeah.”

“What’s the plan now?”

If I’m smart, I’ll go back and shoot you and the girl and take the truck and not look back until I’m halfway to Texas.

“Sit tight,” he said instead.

Blaine and Bonnie were waiting for him about three kilometers up Route 410. They had stopped even further back than that before pushing the vehicle with the gear on neutral for almost two extra kilometers so they wouldn’t give away their approach. Well, he and Blaine had pushed anyway, while Bonnie steered. Keo had hiked the rest of the way. It was a pain in the ass, but necessary since sound traveled these days, especially car engines. Even with all those precautions, he kept expecting gunfire coming his direction at any moment.

He was probably 200 meters from the red house, just further back than when he was last here with Carrie and Lorelei, and well hidden behind a brown building that was once a house before a fire gutted it years ago, leaving behind three walls and not much else. Keo was crouched along one of those still-standing sides, peering through his binoculars up the road at men transferring supplies from the house and parked trucks over to the docks. One of the men was looking through a box and pulled out night-vision goggles and tried it on.

Looks like they’re getting ready for a night assault.

The sentries at the two-story structure, including the one on the rooftop, looked alert. Two men paced the road almost exactly halfway between him and the shoreline. One of them was carrying an M249 Squad Automatic Weapon, an ammo belt wrapped around his shoulder and waist like he was a bandito out of a Western. That was the first time Keo had seen a machine gun in the last year, and he wondered where they found that little beauty.

“Are we still good?” Blaine said through the radio. “Keo?”

Keo didn’t answer right away. Then, “Nothing’s changed. Just more targets.”

“Maybe we should come up with another plan,” Bonnie said.

“I’m listening…”

“I didn’t say I had any ideas. I just think we should go back to the island and talk it over with Lara. Or wait for Will and Danny to come back tomorrow.”

“They’re going to attack tonight,” Keo said.

“How do you know that?” Blaine said.

“They brought night-vision goggles.”

“Oh, shit.”

“Yeah,” Keo said.

He put the MP5SD away and reached for the M16. Besides the extra two pounds, he also disliked the length of the rifle, but the M203 grenade launcher more than made up for that. Keo opened the ammo pouch along his right hip and took out a 40mm grenade round — the size of a deodorant dispenser, except cylindrical and with a bulbous head — and fed it into the tube under the barrel.

The M203 had an effective range of 400 meters, which was more than enough to take out the house and maybe a few of the trucks. They were still moving supplies back and forth, so if he could knock out the vehicles and what they were carrying, all the better. Maybe they had ammo in there, or if he was really lucky, things that went boom. Some secondary fireworks might even result in collateral damage.

The house, though, was the main objective. Besides being the biggest and easiest target, he counted at least a dozen soldiers inside (and the one on top of it). If he could take it out, that would probably cut the invasion force in half, or close enough. Hell, if he was really lucky, he’d take out their command and control, too. That would really cripple them. Even weekend warriors needed someone to give the orders.

It wasn’t a bad plan. Best of all, it was a safe plan, with minimal risk to his scalp. He felt even a little bit like a coward shooting from a distance hidden behind the gutted house, but what the hell, these soldiers were about to invade an island full of women and children. Keo had done a lot of bad things in his life, but he wasn’t going to sit by and let that happen.

I’m an asshole, but I’m not a fucking asshole.

The M16 came with a second sight for the grenade launcher toward the front of the barrel, and Keo flicked it into position now. He remained crouched but scooted a bit further out from behind the building, then moved left toward the road until he could see (and shoot) around the wall. He spent a few seconds adjusting for wind and elevation.

It was going to be a hell of a shot, but firing a grenade launcher wasn’t quite the same as shooting a rifle. It was mostly about angles and adjustments and letting the round do all the work. Unlike shooting a rifle from long-distance, an explosion was easier to “miss” with and still be effective. He was also comforted by the fact that he had extra ammo in his pouch if the first shot went astray.

See, adjust, and fire again. So simple even a baby could do it.

Of course, he would have loved to get closer. Maybe another fifty meters. Oh, who was he kidding. A nice, round hundred meters would have been ideal.

He aimed for the roof, hoping to land a round somewhere in that vicinity so the resulting impact would take out the second floor and collapse it down onto the first. If not, a second shot into one of the walls would just about do it. The one thing Keo knew for sure was that if one grenade didn’t accomplish its goal, two — or hell, three — usually got the job done. Usually—

Clink!

The sharp sound of metal grinding against metal made Keo stand up and spin around, his finger sliding away from the grenade launcher to the main trigger. He was prepared to fire, to spray and pray (Thank God he had kept the fire selector on three-round burst), but instead Keo lost a second processing what he was seeing.

It was a kid.

A goddamn kid.

He was sitting on a shiny new bicycle in the middle of the road, wearing one of those plastic shell helmets that was supposed to protect him from cracking his head if he fell. He had on wrist and knee pads and brand new Nike sneakers. The kid couldn’t have been older than ten, sporting a white T-shirt that was stained in equal measure with sweat and what looked like chocolate.

He stared at Keo, as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

Join the party, pal.

Then the brat reached down and unclipped a rectangle black object housed inside a holder along the bike’s down tube, where a water bottle was supposed to go. The kid pulled out a walkie talkie, and Keo remembered what Carrie had told him after the marina shootout back at Lake Dulcet. It was how the soldiers knew there was a boat at the marina in the first place.

“They’re spies. Lookouts. Their job is to go around the city looking for survivors. The guys in uniform come later. That’s how they found us. One of those stupid kids spotted us and the trucks swooped in.”

“No,” Keo said, taking his finger off the M16’s trigger, hoping that would have some kind of effect. “Don’t do that, kid. You don’t want to do that.”

The little bastard didn’t hear a word he said. Or if he did, it never registered, because he lifted the walkie talkie to his lips, pressed the transmit lever, and shouted into it, “There’s someone here! There’s someone down the road! And he’s got a machine gun!”

Aw, hell.

Keo turned back around and saw the two soldiers in the road looking in his direction. Because he was standing now, they saw him immediately and started pointing.

When Keo glanced back at the kid, the little tyke was bicycling away at full speed, the clink-clink-clink of his chains against heavy metal frame.

“Yeah, you better run, you little bastard!” Keo shouted after him, but he hadn’t gotten “bastard” completely out when gunfire split the air and bullets buzzed past his head.

He ducked instinctively and moved back behind the wall, which started coming apart piece by piece in front of his face. He slipped down to one knee and tried to wait out the pop-pop-pop of a carbine shooting, which meant the guy with the M249 hadn’t opened up yet. Of course, it was only a matter of time. Chances were the guy was waiting to get closer. Either that, or he wasn’t comfortable firing that heavy weapon standing up—

The wall behind him disintegrated before he could finish the thought, ripped apart by a barrage of brap-brap-brap gunfire that seemed to go on and on and on.

The M249 light machine gun had just joined the party.

“Keo!” Blaine shouted through the radio. “What’s going on? Keo!”

Keo could barely hear Blaine’s voice over the roar of the machine gun fire. He didn’t know how far the two soldiers were at the moment, but he guessed they would keep together, which meant slowly moving up the road toward him. At the moment, staying down and keeping his head from being detached from his shoulders by one of the SAW’s 5.56mm rounds seemed the more prudent move.

He swapped the M16 for the MP5SD then glanced to his left, wondering if there were more pieces of the house still standing back there when the machine gun suddenly stopped firing.

Keo sucked in a breath, thought, The hell with it, you only live once, and stood up behind what was left of the wall. There wasn’t much remaining, just about four feet of brick and mortar reaching up from the ground.

The two soldiers were still on the road. One of them was slightly crouched over and moving cautiously forward, but he was a good fifty meters away still. His partner was farther back and struggling to feed the ammo belt into the M249. That was the problem with belt-fed weapons. You never know when the next round was going to jam and ruin your day.

The one with the M4 saw Keo stand up and snapped off a shot. Too quick and the round missed by a wide margin, not even hitting what was left of the house wall. Of course, in the guy’s defense, there really wasn’t much left to hit.

As the man adjusted his aim, Keo returned fire. The man staggered down to one knee, so Keo guessed he had hit something. He kept pulling the trigger because fifty meters was a hell of a distance for the MP5SD, and Keo wasn’t taking any chances. He only stopped shooting when the soldier collapsed to the road on his stomach and didn’t move.

The one with the light machine gun saw his partner go down in front of him and tossed his jammed weapon and took off running back down the road. Keo was taking aim at his fleeing form when he saw something else — two of the trucks parked in front of the red house had fired their engines and were starting to move, their tires peeling and tossing dirt into the air around them.

“Keo!” Blaine was still shouting through the radio. “What’s going on? Are you alive?”

He didn’t waste time responding. Instead, he slung the MP5SD and brought out the M16 again, then calmly stepped out from behind what was left of the house wall and carefully took aim with the rifle.

One hundred meters for a grenade launcher designed to blow the crap out of something from four times that distance was almost child’s play. It was such an easy shot even a baby could have pulled it off. And he was definitely more skilled than a baby.

Nice, you almost believed it that time!

The trucks were burning rubber up the road, men in uniforms hanging on for dear life in the back, swarms of dust scattering in their wake. The soldier who had ditched the SAW had to dive out of the path of the oncoming vehicles when they were almost on top of him. He rolled comically sideways and landed somewhere in the ditch.

“Keo!” Blaine shouted through the radio. “Answer me, dammit!”

Blaine might have said something else, but his words were lost against the sound of the grenade launcher belching out a dull but incredibly satisfying ploompt!

The 40mm round landed near the closest truck as it was halfway to him. The driver, predictably, reacted badly to the sight of an explosion ripping a hole in the road directly in front of him and showering his windshield with chunks of asphalt. The man jerked on the wheel and the truck looked as if it had hit an invisible wall, turning sharply to the left and then rolling over onto its side before spinning forward once, twice, three times. It finally settled back down on its roof, sending showers of glass everywhere.

The second truck, seeing the first one spinning out of control in front of it — peppering the road with metal and plastic and aluminum, along with the two sad bastards who were in the back — came to a screeching stop, the smell of burning rubber filling the air.

Keo pulled back his right hand and found the main trigger on the M16 and fired, stitching the second vehicle’s front windshield with a series of three-round bursts. They were close enough now — less than fifty meters, he guessed — that it wasn’t too hard of a target. Of course, he was firing again and again just to be sure. God knew he had realized his shortcomings with long-range shooting recently.

Two men inside the front cab ducked as their windshield caved in on them. Men in the back dropped out of sight and one jumped down from the truck, lost his footing, and started crawling toward the back bumper for cover.

Keo backpedaled as he fired again and again, glimpsing more figures racing up the road behind the vehicles, weapons swinging wildly in front of them. There were simply too many of them. Way too many. So what else was new?

His eyes darted briefly to the two-story red house in the background. He thought about sending a 40mm grenade toward it, but that choice went out the window when he saw sunlight flashing off additional trucks blasting up the road.

Then he heard something — coming from behind him.

He glanced back, wondering how the hell they had outflanked him, and was shocked to see the Dodge Ram coming up on him fast. Blaine was behind the wheel, Bonnie in the front passenger’s seat holding onto the dashboard for dear life.

I guess they’re more useful than I thought.

Keo grinned at them — saw their terrified faces staring back — before he turned around and looked up the road. He grabbed a second 40mm grenade out of his pouch and reloaded the launcher. He did his best to ignore the sound of the Ram’s brakes squealing behind him as it came to a stop inches away. He was guessing it was inches away, because he actually felt the wind pushing against the back of his neck as Blaine nearly ran him over with the Dodge.

See, adjust, and fire again. So simple even a baby could do it.

The men from the house were about to reach the first two dead-in-the-road trucks while the driver and his passenger took the opportunity as Keo reloaded to scramble outside and run for cover behind the back bumper.

Wrong hiding spot, Keo thought, and fired and listened to the equally satisfying second ploompt! as the second round sailed.

This time the grenade hit its intended target, vanishing through the windshield of the second truck. The resulting explosion ripped across the vehicle and shredded the two men hiding behind it and tossed two more into the road, their clothes and hair and skin on fire. They might have been screaming, but it was hard to hear over the roar of flames and tires.

“Keo!” Bonnie, shouting behind him. “Come on!”

He tossed the M16 onto the ground and turned and nearly ran into the scorching hot hood of the truck. It was inches behind him. Jesus Christ. Blaine really did almost run him over seconds ago. He stared across the hood at Blaine, who stared back at him wide-eyed.

“Keo!” Bonnie shouted again.

Keo snapped out of it and ran around the Ram.

Bonnie saw him coming and threw the passenger side door open and he jumped inside, landing in her lap. She grabbed him with one hand, her other arm reaching across him and slamming the door shut, shouting, “Go, Blaine, go!”

Blaine didn’t need any encouragement. He shoved his foot down on the gas pedal and the Ram began reversing up the road, the big man’s hands gripping the steering wheel with such intensity Keo wondered what it would take to pry them loose if he needed to.

Bonnie struggled out from under him and scooted over to the middle of the front seats. “Jesus, we thought you were dead.”

He was about to answer when bullets punched through the front windshield and zipped past his head and tore into the truck upholstery around them.

“Christ!” Blaine shouted.

The big man spun the steering wheel even as rounds slammed into the vehicle’s side and front hood, the constant ring of ping! ping! ping! filling the air. Then a second later they were facing the right direction — back down the road — and the truck was picking up speed again with every breath Keo took.

Bonnie screamed when the back windshield exploded under a hail of bullets and they were showered with glass. She threw her hands over her head and kept it down, unwilling to come up even after the last piece of glass fell away.

“We’re good, we’re good,” Keo said, looking back up. Then to Blaine, “Nice driving.”

“Thanks,” Blaine said, though he hadn’t looked away from the road or even relinquished an ounce of pressure on the steering wheel.

Keo glanced out the blown back window. He didn’t see any pursuing vehicles, just the two wasted ones blocking the road. The first was still resting on its roof, while the second one was engulfed in flames. Two trucks were trying to get around them, but one had run into a ditch and men were trying to push it out to no avail. The fourth truck didn’t even make the attempt.

“Are they following us?” Bonnie asked.

“No,” Keo said. He glanced at his watch. “Get to the island by six, right?”

“Yeah,” Blaine said, almost breathless.

Keo reached into the back and pulled his pack over. He unzipped it and took out a bottle of water. It was freezing cold a few hours ago and was just cold enough now. Hell, that was more than he’d had in almost a year.

He sat back in his seat and took a sip, flicking broken glass off his clothes and picking them from his hair. He hoped he hadn’t been cut by flying shards. God knew he already looked like a mess with the scar and a broken nose that hadn’t entirely healed properly yet. The last thing he needed was a piece of glass sticking out of the other cheek.

After a while, he realized Bonnie was staring at him. “What?” he said.

“Did that go as you planned it?” She wasn’t being sarcastic, either; he could see it in her eyes. She was hoping he would say yes, because that would mean it was mission accomplished. Or close enough.

“The idea was to stall them until the Army Rangers get back and you can put up a proper defense for the island, right?”

“Yes…”

He looked at the truck’s side mirror, back at the flaming wreckage behind them. “Then maybe. I guess we’ll find out tonight one way or another…”

27 Will

Two down, two to go.

So where were the other two blue-eyed ghouls?

The question nagged at him from the time they climbed into the Bronco to when they were halfway up Route 13, with I-10 still hidden somewhere in the distance.

According to the map, thirty minutes would take them to the interstate, and from there another hour on the highway before hopping off for the small roads at the town of Salvani. Song Island lay further south. Another hour, give or take, thanks to the nonexistent traffic. If they could locate Gaby somewhere along the way, there was no reason why they couldn’t be home by nightfall. He was looking forward to that. More than anything, he wanted to see Lara again. Imagining her in his mind’s eye had become harder with each passing day.

And yet…

Two down, two to go.

Where did the other two go? Why weren’t they in Dunbar last night? The only explanation he could think of was that they had split up. Which had benefited Danny and him. He wasn’t sure he could have fended off four at once, even knowing a bullet to the head (Silver bullets? Or would any ol’ bullet do?) could finish them off, whereas they simply shrugged off everything else.

That was good and bad news. The good news was that you could kill them with a bullet to the head. The bad news was that you had to shoot them in the head and destroy the brain. The average human melon had a circumference of fifty-six centimeters (give or take), with the brain residing in the top portion. So take fifty percent away from the initial size, leaving the shooter with, at best, a target circumference of twenty-eight centimeters.

Not a difficult shot in and of itself, but when the target was moving — and there was no way in hell those blue-eyed bastards were going to stand still and let him zero in on them — it was another matter entirely. He had gotten lucky with the two from last night. The first one by way of the cross-knife when it was standing still, gloating over its victory, and he had caught the second one at almost point-blank range with the creature coming right at him. Even an amateur could have made that shot.

Shoot them in the head. Right. Easy peasy.

“At the risk of sounding like Carly,” Danny said, “what are you thinking?”

“Where did the other two blue-eyed ghouls go?”

“And you definitely saw four in that, uh, walkabout of yours.”

“Definitely. I mastered counting in elementary school.”

“I wouldn’t know. I was too busy making out with Suzy by the jungle gym.”

Danny had both hands on the steering wheel. His broken nose and bruised face looked even more noticeable against the burning sun and dry wind blowing through the open windows. Both of their clothes, weighed down by the gear they were carrying, were damp against their seats. Will would have preferred to drive with the air conditioner blasting, but knowing Gaby was out there somewhere made that impossible. They were also driving much slower than before — barely forty miles per hour now — just so they wouldn’t miss seeing or hearing anything that could point them to Gaby’s whereabouts. The idea of driving past her now, after all but giving her up for dead thirty minutes ago, was an unsettling thought.

“Given their whole hive mind thing,” Danny said, “it doesn’t make sense they didn’t launch a second attack after you took out the first two.”

“That’s what concerns me.”

“So maybe they weren’t in Dunbar. Maybe they were out here in Nowheresville doing…something else.”

“Or tracking someone else.”

“Gaby?”

“Best-case scenario.”

Danny chuckled. “Our best scenario is that two blue-eyed ghouls are hot on Gaby’s trail. Didn’t think I’d be saying that anytime soon.”

“Desperate times call for desperate best-case scenarios.”

“So we know she left L15 with two locals, then left Dunbar with three. Where do you think she picked up the third stray?”

“In Dunbar, maybe. Or—” Will stopped when he saw the smoke rising in the distance. “Slow down, Danny. Two o’clock.”

Danny eased the Bronco down to thirty-five, then twenty, miles per hour. They leaned forward at the sight of smoke hovering over the remains of a house. Recently, from the looks of it.

“Someone must have left the oven on,” Danny said.

“I see a road,” Will said, pointing.

Danny pulled the truck off the highway and onto a manmade dirt road, past an open gate, and drove them toward a farm. The remnants of the house were flanked by a red barn to one side and what looked like an unattached garage or possibly a supply shack on the other. There were a couple of vehicles parked in the wide, expansive yard.

Will picked up his M4A1 from the floor and scanned the property. Like most of the land they had passed since leaving Dunbar behind, the ground was flat and baked brown. There were no animals grazing, no signs of horses or cows, or whatever it was the owners had been raising before The Purge. Then again, he hadn’t seen a large land animal running free for almost a year now, so the complete lack of livestock didn’t add to the potential (if any) threat around the area.

The road was rough, but the Bronco’s tires traversed it without trouble. They reached a front yard covered in dead grass, and Danny parked behind a white pickup that was so old Will couldn’t place its make or model. A black minivan that looked out of place sat on the other side of the property. It had Mississippi license plates.

“Someone’s far from home,” Danny said. “Hell of a time to take a vacation.”

“It might be worse where they’re from.”

“I somehow doubt that, Kemosabe.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right.”

They climbed out of the Bronco, weapons at the ready, and spent another few minutes giving the property a cautious look-over. There was a slight breeze, but not enough to chase away the sweltering heat or keep the ruins of the house from smoldering in the aftermath of what looked like a ravaging fire. There were no bodies that he could see or signs of a battle.

So what started the fire?

“No Silverado,” Will said.

Darren, the twenty-something soldier who Gaby had shot in the ankle earlier in the day, told them Gaby had continued up Route 13 in his and his dead partner’s Chevy Silverado truck. They were hoping to run across it sooner or later.

“Fire must have been raging something purty when she came through here earlier,” Danny said. “You think she kept going?”

Will thought about it. “She’s a smart girl. And taking into account she’s dragging along three people…” He nodded certainly. “I don’t think she’d stop. We taught her better than that.”

“We would totally rock as parents. Separately, I mean. With, you know, girls. Not that there’s anything wrong with the other thing.”

“How about we make sure no one’s in the minivan first before we start making marital plans, Mrs. Doubtfire.”

“Certainly,” Danny said, mimicking a high-pitched female voice

They approached the van from separate angles. Will peered into the open front passenger window while Danny did the same on the driver’s side. A pink watermelon-flavored Little Tree Air Freshener, long past its smell-by date, hung from the rearview mirror. Will used that same mirror to look into the back of the van before opening the side hatch to make sure it was really empty.

Old soda cans and water bottles littered the floor. A pair of men’s shirts, shorts, and sandals. He picked up old footsteps in the ground from the side hatch outward, but they were barely noticeable.

“It’s been a while since they used the van,” Will said. “It would make sense if they came all the way from Mississippi. Maybe they exited the interstate to see what was out here, found the house, and decided it was as good a place as any to settle down.”

“Here?” Danny said. “There’s nothing here, buddy.”

“Maybe that’s the point. This far from civilization, if they hunkered down, they could go unnoticed for a while.”

Danny circled the van. “Dunbar’s nearby.”

“They might not know that.”

“So where are they now?”

Will looked back at what was left of the house. The charred frames that were still standing told him it used to be a two-story building. They moved toward it, trying to glimpse anything that might give an impression of who had been in there or what had caused the fire. The flames had mostly burned themselves out, leaving behind embers to give off more than enough heat to make getting too close uncomfortable. They stopped about ten meters away from what used to be a front wooden deck. There wasn’t much left except for the concrete steps that led up to the front door.

“Guess no one’s home,” Danny said.

“But something — or someone — had to have started the fire.”

“Spontaneous combustion?”

“That’s one theory.”

“What’s another one?”

“No idea.”

“Hunh. So what now?”

Will glanced back toward the road. “Come on, we’re burning daylight. Gaby was smart not to stop, and we should have done the same thing.”

“Too late for that.”

“Just don’t tell her when we finally catch up.”

“Mum’s the word.”

They started walking back to the Bronco when a flicker of movement—from the barn—caught the corner of Will’s eye and he stopped on a dime and spun. Danny did the same, and they stared across forty meters at the large twin doors that had swung open.

“I guess someone’s home after all,” Will said.

“Awesome,” Danny said. “Let’s go see if we can borrow some milk and sugar.”

They changed direction and moved toward the barn, approaching it from two different angles the way they had the minivan earlier. Will kept his eyes on the open alley doors in front and the closed loft door directly above those. If there was a sniper inside, he would use the higher perch to shoot from, but Will couldn’t make out any holes or makeshift gun ports.

The barn doors remained open, but no one had shown themselves yet.

They took the first twenty meters without fanfare, taking their time but moving steadily forward. Will scooted slightly right to eyeball the bottom of and along the slanted roof. Danny did the same on his side.

“Anything?” Will asked.

“Squadoosh,” Danny said. “Unless they have an invisible sniper. If they do, that would really suck.”

Finally, one of the barn doors opened even wider and a pair of tanned arms appeared in the sunlight. “Don’t shoot!” someone shouted. Young and male. “We’re not armed!”

“Step outside!” Will shouted back.

The owner of the outstretched hands stepped out of the barn. Tall, jeans and a white T-shirt stained with something red. Blood. The man squinted in the sunlight and his hair was a mess. Will couldn’t see a gun belt or a weapon, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t something behind his waist.

The man had moved a foot outside the building when Will said, “Stop.”

He did.

“Turn around,” Will said.

The guy gave him a confused look.

“Like Cinderella,” Danny said.

Another confused look.

“Just to make sure you’re not armed,” Will said.

He understood that and turned around a full 360 before facing Will again. He had wisely not lowered his arms the entire time.

“You said ‘we,’” Will said. “Who else is inside?”

“My girlfriend,” the man said.

“Her name wouldn’t happen to be Gaby, would it?” Danny asked.

The guy shook his head. “Um, no. It’s Annie.”

“Oh well, worth a shot,” Danny said.

Lance and Annie hadn’t arrived from Mississippi by themselves. There had been six of them four months ago. That number was trimmed to two after last night.

“They had blue eyes,” Lance said, trembling noticeably as he talked. “They played with them. I mean, they played with them. I’d never seen anything like it.”

“There were two,” Annie said.

Will and Danny exchanged a knowing look.

They stood around the Bronco with the weary couple. Both Lance and Annie still looked shell-shocked from last night’s harrowing encounter with the ghouls.

“What do you mean by ‘they played with them’?” Will asked.

“They let Toby out of the house,” Lance said. “Then they made him run into the fields. At first I thought the black-eyed ones would be all over him, but they weren’t. They just stood around and watched. Then the new ones — the ones with blue eyes — ran after him. Then…there was a lot of screaming. Toby. I would know his voice anywhere.”

“They gave him a head start?” Danny said.

“Yeah,” Lance said, as if he could barely believe his own story. “Those things… they didn’t act like the others. I think they were controlling them. I know that sounds crazy…right?”

“It’s not that crazy,” Danny said.

“You’ve seen them too, haven’t you?” Annie said, staring at them.

“Yeah,” Will nodded. “What happened to the rest of your people?”

“They killed them,” Lance said. “One after another. They started with Toby, then Danielle, then Sally…”

“…then Howard,” Annie finished.

“We hid in a room under the floorboards inside the main bedroom when they first attacked the house. I guess the homeowners were using it to store valuables. We saw bundles of money in there.”

“There was jewelry, too.”

“We stumbled across it by accident when we first moved in. We didn’t really have any uses for it until last night when they came. Usually they don’t bother with the house. We make sure the place is completely dark at night and we seal ourselves into the rooms. We had barricaded the windows and doors, too.”

“Every night?” Will said.

Lance nodded. “It’s a lot of work, but it’s worth it. Until last night.”

“What happened last night?”

“Usually the black-eyed ones might sniff around. Sometimes they’ll even bang on the doors or windows. But then they always leave when we don’t show ourselves. But last night, they didn’t stop. They just kept at it. I don’t know how, but they managed to break down one of the windows.”

It’s the blue-eyed ghouls. The others become unpredictable when they’re around…

“We barely got into the hidden room in time,” Annie said. “Then the screaming started…”

“They played games with them,” Lance said, and his eyes drifted over into the fields that surrounded the property. “It’s so quiet at night, you can hear a long way even through walls.”

Annie reached over and squeezed Lance’s hand.

“What about the house?” Will asked. “What happened to it?”

“We burned it down,” Lance said. “After last night, there wasn’t any point in staying. And they were in there…”

“They?”

“The creatures. They were hiding in the basement. When we came out of the secret room, we could hear them moving around under the house.”

“Lance thought we might be able to kill a few of them,” Annie said. She was staring back at the house now. The smoke had all but vanished, leaving behind just a twisted, blackened carcass. “I don’t know if it worked, or if the basement is still down there under all that. Should we…find out?”

Will exchanged another look with Danny.

“There could be a couple of Mister Blue Eyes down there,” Danny said. “Might be worth it to find out.”

“Through that?” Will said. “It’d take the whole day to sift through the wreckage. We don’t have that kind of time with Gaby still out there.”

“You mentioned her before,” Lance said. “Who’s Gaby?”

“A friend of ours. We’ve been looking for her since Dunbar.”

“We saw a lot of vehicles coming from Dunbar all morning.”

“Was one of them a Silverado truck?” Danny asked.

“I don’t know, I didn’t see one. Annie?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know what a Silverado looks like. And I only got glimpses of them from the barn.”

“But there was something else,” Lance said. “We heard shooting from farther up the road.”

“How long ago?” Danny asked.

“I don’t know, I think thirty or forty minutes?”

“The timing’s about right,” Will said. He looked back at Lance and Annie. “You guys can come—”

“Yes,” Annie said before Will could even finish.

Lance grinned sheepishly. “What she said.”

The Chevy Silverado was inside a ditch, resting on its back bumper with the front grill facing the cloudless sky. Harsh sun beat down on its chrome and hood, streams of sunlight piercing bullet holes that stitched the front windshield. There was a dead man outside the driver side door with two bullet holes in his chest. All the car windows were broken, with glass sprinkled liberally over the seats and spread out among the splashes of blood.

Will climbed up the ditch and back onto the highway, where the Bronco idled in the road. Lance and Annie were standing outside in the sun glancing around.

“Bad news?” Lance said, looking over.

“Not good news,” Will said.

He blinked up the road at Danny, walking back from a lone red pickup parked across one of the two-lane roads. He was dropping spent bullet casings from one hand.

“Anything?” Will called.

“There was a second car,” Danny shouted back. “Some kind of half-assed roadside ambush.”

“To stop the Silverado.”

“Looks like it. And these,” he said, flicking one of the bullet casings in Will’s direction.

Will crouched and picked up a 5.56x45mm brass casing. Assault rifles. Probably M4 or AR-15. God knew there were plenty of those just lying around these days.

God bless the Second Amendment.

“There’s a dead body up there,” Danny said. “Poor bastard decided to go up against the Silverado and — surprise — lost. Any signs of Gaby?”

“No, and that’s a good thing.”

“Pray tell.”

“No body means she’s still alive.”

Danny peered up the road. “They must have taken off in the third car. That thing’s leaking motor oil. I get the feeling they intended to dump it, grab the first vehicle that came across their little slapdash barricade, but—” he looked over at the undercarriage of the Silverado “—I’m thinking that didn’t quite work out as planned. That car can’t be moving very fast at all. If we haul ass…”

“So let’s get to hauling,” Will said.

Danny was able to track the motor oil stain on the highway from the Bronco’s driver seat. This way, they would know if the vehicle unexpectedly left the road. It hadn’t so far. Will just hoped they could catch up to it before it reached the interstate up ahead. It was going to be difficult, leaking motor oil or not, after that.

He hung out the window listening for sounds that didn’t belong and scanned the horizon just in case the trail they were following proved deceptive. Lance and Annie pitched in, the couple leaning out their windows while armed with Will’s and Danny’s binoculars.

They were ten minutes into the pursuit when Will said, “How’s it looking?”

“It’s looking,” Danny said. “Whatever they’re driving, it’s leaking good. No wonder they were so hot to switch vehicles. I’m guessing the red pickup must have been in worse condition or else they would have taken it instead.”

“We’re pushing up on time here, Danny. If we don’t find her and hit the interstate soon, we’re not reaching Song Island by tonight.”

“I know, I know.”

They drove on for another few minutes, the only sound coming from the wind rushing through the vehicle and the engine churning under them.

Behind them, Lance asked, “Anything?”

“Nothing,” Annie said. “Just a lot of empty land. God, there is so much emptiness out here. We were so lucky to find the house.”

“Yeah, lucky.”

“I mean before last night,” Annie said softly.

“I know what you meant, babe. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

Will imagined them smiling at each other back there, trying to comfort one another as best they could. The same way he would do with Lara…

“Aw, shit,” Danny said beside him.

Will looked out the windshield and saw it.

A lump in the road: a body.

Danny slowed down as Will picked up his M4A1 and looked into the back at Lance and Annie. “Stay inside.”

They nodded silently back.

Danny stopped the Bronco, and Will opened the car door and hopped out. He heard Danny’s door opening behind him, but he was already moving quickly toward the body, scanning the ditch to his right and the landmass beyond. He didn’t bother with his left side because he didn’t have to — Danny was covering it. Traces of leaked motor oil zig-zagged in front of him, already drying in the heat.

The body was thirty meters away and Will reached it first. He felt a tightness in his gut at the sight of blonde hair blowing against a slight wind. The lump lay on its stomach, arms awkwardly folded under it, as if the woman had attempted to stop her fall as she fell.

She was wearing shorts, a long-sleeve shirt, and sneakers. Blood gathered under her, glimmering against the harsh sun. He crouched next to the body and slowly, almost hesitantly, turned the woman over onto her back.

A girl. Young. Maybe seventeen.

But not Gaby.

“Is it her?” Danny said behind him.

“It’s not her,” Will said.

The girl’s face was partially covered in blood, and there were deep cuts along her cheeks and temple, likely from glass. From far away, she might have been mistaken for Gaby, but Will knew Gaby’s face well enough to see through the scars and blood.

“They dumped her,” Will said. “She was probably still alive at the time.”

“One of the girls with Gaby?”

“Maybe.”

Will thought about searching the girl for clues but quickly dismissed it. She looked at peace, and considering what she had gone through, she didn’t need him digging around her pockets.

“What’s the word?” Danny said.

“Let’s go.” He got up and they jogged back to the Bronco. Will could feel the urgency in every one of his bones. “She’s still fresh. Five minutes. Maybe less. We’re catching up to them.”

“Shitty car,” Danny said. “They’re probably moving slow, too. Good for us and good for Gaby. We get her and head home. No muss, no fuss.”

“Yeah,” Will said, glancing down at his watch.

12:40 p.m.

Too close. We’re cutting it too close…

28 Gaby

She was still dazed from the pain, trying desperately to make sense of what was happening to them, when Harrison stopped the car and threw Donna’s body outside. Then he climbed back in and drove off, leaving Claire’s sister to die in the middle of the highway. She was vaguely aware of Milly sniffling next to her, just barely able to stop herself from outright bawling, while Claire pressed the rag down against Gaby’s mouth, trying to stop the bleeding from her broken nose.

Gaby’s entire body was on fire, and the scorching sun that turned the backseat of the old Dodge Neon into an oven didn’t help. She couldn’t tell how Claire was handling the situation because she could barely make out the girl’s face through the haze that blanketed her vision. Claire wasn’t crying — she could tell that much because the girl was so close to her — but Milly was doing enough of that for both of them.

Harrison had taken their weapons and tossed them into the trunk before putting all three of them into the vehicle. The handcuffs dug into Gaby’s wrists, but she found herself grateful for them because the biting metal sensation took away some of the pain coursing endlessly through the rest of her body. Every inch of her face hurt, and her nose was clearly broken. If only her high school friends could see her now, they might not even recognize her.

She struggled to sit up and was only able to do so with Claire’s help. The thirteen-year-old took the blood-soaked rag away because she wasn’t bleeding anymore. She couldn’t tell if the sun was overly bright this afternoon or if something was wrong with her eyes. Maybe a loosened socket or two. She wouldn’t be surprised if she was bleeding internally, too. It felt like it.

“Donna…” she said.

Claire, sitting to Gaby’s left, shook her head silently. The girl looked resolute in her determination not to let any emotion show on her face, though when she glanced forward at Harrison, sitting directly in front of her, the hate shone through. Milly had turned herself into a ball to Gaby’s right, arms folded across bent legs and her head placed between her knees, like a tortoise hoping to escape from all this.

Harrison drove in silence. What was that he had said when he pulled her out of the Silverado?

“Everything was going fine until you showed up. Everything that’s happened, it’s all your fault.”

Screw you, Harrison.

There were a lot of things wrong with that statement, but she was sure Harrison wasn’t in the mood to debate them. Not that she was, either, as her eyes drifted from his face, reflected in the rearview mirror, to the Remington shotgun lying across the front passenger seat, the stock facing him. As luck would have it, she had sat up in the middle of the backseat and there was nothing at all between her and the weapon. All she had to do was lean forward and reach for it—

Harrison’s eyes shifted, picking her up in the rearview mirror. “You’re up.”

Sonofabitch.

“What happened to Donna?” she asked.

“The same thing that’ll happen to you and the kids if you make trouble.”

“Donna wasn’t making trouble.”

“She was going to die anyway.” He shrugged. “I saved us both the hassle. You should thank me.”

I’ll kill you instead.

Claire tensed up next to her. It never occurred to Gaby just how small Claire really was until now. The driver’s seat completely covered her up, which meant Harrison couldn’t see her.

As the fog began to clear from her head, Gaby’s mind went to work. She turned over everything that had happened, that was happening, and that would likely happen if they were still here, in this car with Harrison, when night fell.

Options. What were her options?

She couldn’t think of one at the moment. The shotgun was her best bet, but with Harrison already alerted to her conscious presence, her chances of reaching it before he struck was, at best, fifty-fifty. At worse, he was baiting her so he could hurt her some more. She wouldn’t put it past him to play games. He seemed sadistic enough to get his jollies out of something like that. And there were the handcuffs. Grabbing the shotgun and using it was going to be problematic with her limited mobility.

Her other option involved Claire. The girl was able and willing to act, but how? Maybe, if Claire could distract Harrison long enough for her to reach the shotgun…

“Where are we going?” she asked.

Harrison didn’t answer right away. Maybe he didn’t know. She guessed that Interstate 10 was somewhere in front of them, at the end of Route 13. At the moment, the road looked never ending, just another mile of flat highway and sunburned farmland to the sides. There were so few houses and nonexistent businesses that they might as well be traveling across another planet. Mars, maybe. Was Mars this hot?

“The kids said you were taking them to an island,” Harrison said. “The radio broadcast. You believe it. About the bloodsuckers not being able to cross bodies of water.”

“Yes,” she said.

Stall for time. That’s what Will would do. He would stall for time while he came up with other options. Because there are always options.

I just have to see it…

“It’s true,” Gaby continued. “Silver bullets. Bodies of water. They’re all true.”

“And ultraviolet?”

“I don’t know about that one.”

She couldn’t tell if he believed her. His face, in the rearview mirror, was placid. But then it always looked that way. Even back in the VFW basement when he admitted to beating Peter to within an inch of his life because he “had to be sure” Peter was telling the truth. There was a casualness about Harrison that bothered her. That, and a clear mean streak, a desire to inflict pain because he could. It was as simple as that. Some people, she had come to learn, were just born mean.

I’m going to kill you, Harrison. It’s just a matter of time.

She must have been staring at him without realizing it, because Harrison looked up at the rearview mirror and snickered at her reflection. “You want the shotgun? Go for it. It’s right there. All you have to do is grab it. What are you waiting for?”

She didn’t move. She didn’t reply and didn’t grab for the weapon.

What are my other options?

She was watching Harrison’s face when she picked up something in the distance. A slab of gray concrete rising out of the ground like some mirage. At first she wasn’t sure if it was her imagination, but the longer she stared, the more certain she was that it was the real thing.

Interstate 10! Finally!

Harrison saw it too, and he eased the Dodge down to a slower rate of speed. It wasn’t just the interstate in front of them that got his attention, but also the outlines of businesses on both sides of the road. Gas stations, maybe even strip malls. They were still too far away — a mile? two? — to really make out any details, but after so much nothingness, the sudden appearance (silhouettes?) of civilization was unmistakable.

Then Harrison stopped the car completely and leaned forward against the steering wheel, peering out the dirty windshield. It took her a few seconds to see what he was looking at: men on horseback, loitering on the road near the buildings, still so far away that they looked more like slivers of shadows than actual figures.

The posse. L15…

She knew immediately who they were and wondered if Harrison did, too. By the way he was staring — part confused, part intrigued — she wasn’t so sure.

“They’re soldiers,” she said.

He didn’t respond. Had he even heard her?

“They’ll kill you,” Gaby said, thinking, And us, too. Or worse, they’ll take us back to the towns. Back to Josh. Back to the blood farms. Back to breeding for future generations of ghouls to feed on.

Harrison leaned back against his seat, his eyes still focused on the figures dancing across the highway toward them now. She could practically see through the back of his head to his mind as the gears turned, as he tried to come up with a new plan of action. The only path for him at the moment was to go backward. He couldn’t go around the soldiers, even if he could survive the ditches and attempt to go around them by using the open land. The Silverado hadn’t managed that feat, and it was a hell of a lot more powerful and sturdier than the car they were riding in at the moment.

Gaby looked over at Claire, saw the girl staring back at her. Waiting (begging?) for her to do something.

Options. What are my options?

The idea of staying another day with Harrison was too much. What would he do to her? To the girls? She couldn’t even understand why he kept her alive. Did he plan on using her for other purposes? She shivered at the thought.

The hell with that.

Gaby caught Claire’s eyes again and nodded her head slightly forward.

Claire gave her a questioning look: “What?”

She rocked forward slightly—just enough—to let Claire know what she wanted her to do. The girl stared back for a moment, then a light went off behind her eyes. She nodded back and grinned.

That’s my girl.

Gaby steeled herself, turning forward again. Harrison was still concentrating out the windshield, both hands on the steering wheel, a foot no doubt poised over the gas pedal just in case. He hadn’t put the car in neutral, which was smart of him. But he hadn’t put it in reverse yet, either.

She took a big breath and snapped a quick glance at the shotgun resting on the front passenger seat. She looked just with her eyes while keeping her head facing forward.

How far? About four feet of space between her and the weapon.

Just four feet.

She could do it.

It was just four feet…

“Now!” Gaby shouted.

Claire rammed her entire body (all eighty or so pounds of it) into the front seat. She was so small and slight that she didn’t get nearly as much force into it as Gaby would have liked, but it was enough to rock Harrison forward, knocking him momentarily off-balance. He must have also stepped on the accelerator involuntarily, because the Neon lurched forward a good three feet before he was able to jam down on the brake again.

Gaby threw herself between the two front seats. She reached forward with both handcuffed hands, lunging for the shotgun. When Harrison stepped on the gas pedal, the weapon actually swiveled toward her, decreasing the distance between her and it. But as soon as her fingers brushed against the stock, Harrison stepped on the brake and the shotgun slid forward and off the seat and onto the floor!

With no choice and her body already stuck between the two front seats, Gaby changed course and swung left at Harrison. She balled her handcuffed hands into fists a split-second before she slammed them into the side of his face. She wasn’t sure if that little stunt hurt him or her more, because both her arms and entire body were vibrating from the impact.

Keep moving! Keep moving, or you’re going to die!

Gaby shoved the rest of her body through the front seats, and with her knees braced against the armrest — one knee actually dipped inside a cup holder — she rained blows down on Harrison, summoning as much force as she could muster with each strike. Her entire body screamed and her broken nose felt as if it would break free from the rest of her face at any second.

Harrison was caught off-guard and seemed to be struggling with keeping the car from going forward and warding off her attack at the same time. If her blows were having any impact, he didn’t show it, especially when he swung his right (sharp) elbow and caught her in the chest. Stabbing pain flooded her, as if she had been impaled by a sword.

Well, at least he didn’t go for my nose again, she thought even as she fought through the bursting sensations and continued hitting him with her balled fists over and over again. Except now Gaby had begun using the steel handcuffs, angling the metal just right, in order to cut into Harrison’s temple and face with every successful contact.

Blood sprayed the air between them.

She must have done a hell of a better job than she thought, because Harrison took his foot off the brake and somehow stepped on the gas and the Dodge started moving forward again. His face was bloody, his eyes lolling in their sockets, and his body went slack against the seat.

Gaby stopped hitting him long enough to lean over his body, grab the door lever, and jerk on it. The door swung open and she leaned back, put both feet against Harrison’s shoulder, and pushed with everything she had. He didn’t fight her — he didn’t look as if he were capable of fighting her. Thank God he wasn’t wearing his seat belt, because his body toppled toward the open door and disappeared into the air, landing with a solid thump! against the highway moments later.

“Gaby!” Claire shouted behind her.

Gaby looked back at the girl, saw her pointing, and turned toward the front windshield.

The horsemen were coming right at them at a fast gallop. There had to be at least a half dozen of them, and there was no confusing the camo uniform they were wearing.

Josh’s soldiers. I hate it when I’m right.

She climbed into the driver’s seat, jammed a foot down on the brake, and pulled the gear into reverse. She grabbed the steering wheel and switched her foot over to the gas pedal, pushing down as far as it would go until she felt it touch the floor.

“Hold on!” she shouted.

Here we go again, she thought as the Dodge began to reverse up the highway.

She struggled to keep it straight, using both the rearview and side mirrors, jerking the steering wheel left and right the entire time, trying to compensate for the drift. It was amazingly harder to drive backward than she had expected, but then, she knew that all too well. The last time she had tried this, she ended up in one of the ditches…

And the horsemen were coming. She had no idea horses could move that quickly.

She kept backing up, praying she was going straight enough. The last thing she needed was to go into the ditch again.

“Left, left!” Claire shouted behind her.

Gaby jerked the steering wheel left, knowing full well she was overcompensating but unable to relay that information to her hands.

“No, no, your right, your right!” Claire shouted.

Gaby righted the steering wheel and saw the ditch flashing by in her rearview mirror.

“Straight, straight!” Claire shouted.

Gaby grinned. Her own personal highway traffic controller. Now if only she could find Claire a pair of bright orange sticks—

Pek-pek-pek!

The front windshield cracked and Gaby heard a whistling sound as a bullet sliced past her right ear — an inch from taking it off completely? Two? — and tore off a piece of her seat’s upholstery. More rounds slammed into the hood, the ping-ping! of metallic ricochets echoing in the air.

“Get down, get down!” Gaby shouted.

She didn’t look back to make sure both Claire and Milly had obeyed orders because Gaby was too busy looking forward at the horsemen galloping up on them. Jesus, were horses supposed to be able to move that fast?

They were close enough now that she could make out six of them, like camo-wearing cowboys, a couple sporting baseball caps to keep out the sun. The country sky was thick with gunfire, bullets screaming around the car, digging chunks out of the road outside her window. The only reason she was still alive, she imagined, was because the soldiers were riding and shooting at the same time. It looked easier in the movies, but was apparently not so in real life.

But they weren’t completely terrible shots, either. Enough bullets were hitting the Dodge that smoke began venting out of the hood, and Gaby kept hearing glass breaking. The headlights, the windshield… Where else did the car have glass? And how long before every single one of them was shattered?

We’re going to die. We’re going to die on this miserable piece of sun-drenched highway. I’ll never get to drink ice cold water or sleep in my own bed again, or take a hot shower. I should have never gotten on that damn helicopter…

Then she heard an explosion and braced herself for the car to be engulfed in flames. But that didn’t happen. The hood was still in one piece and though smoke continued to rush out from underneath it, the sound hadn’t come from in front of her. It had come from under the car, which meant—

The Neon began fighting her and she knew one of the front tires had been punctured. Oh great. She had barely managed to get this far on four good tires, now she was swerving dangerously left, then right, then left again on just three.

What else can go wrong?

“Gaby!” Claire shouted.

“I know, I know!” Gaby shouted back.

She struggled with the steering wheel and searched out the shotgun and found it on the floor of the front passenger seat. There was no choice now. If she kept backing up, she would end up in the ditch again and that would be it. If the Silverado hadn’t been able to survive that kind of drop, there was no way the sedan, in its current sad state, would even come close.

“Stay down!” Gaby shouted just before she slammed down on the brake.

The car swerved, coming to a stop with the front bumper pointing at the left side shoulder and the front passenger side facing up the highway. Gaby put the car in park and lunged for the shotgun. In order to reach the weapon, she had to lay across both front seats, and when she scrambled up on her knees, the first thing she saw was one of the horsemen right outside the window.

Gaby pulled the trigger, prayed that Harrison had a shell already racked, and was rewarded with a loud blast that, in the closed confines of the car, was ear-splitting. The buckshot tore off pieces of the open window, but enough of them made it through and hit their intended target. Red splotches spread across the rider’s shirt as he fell out of the saddle.

The other soldiers, seeing one of their own go down, reined up twenty, maybe thirty yards away. Gaby threw herself back down to the seats as gunfire filled the air once again.

The ping-ping-ping! of bullets punching through the Dodge’s side, the warbling shrill of Milly screaming at the top of her lungs and her own labored breathing filling her ears all in one loud rush. Then there was another boom! as one more tire exploded and the car dipped slightly behind her.

Gaby gripped the shotgun and kept her head down. Glass pelted her from every direction, the noise of bullets whistling above her head like missiles. It was impossible to rack the shotgun and load a new shell while still handcuffed, so she had to grab the forend with both hands and pulled it back before returning her finger to the trigger.

She bided her time, keeping her eyes on the open front passenger door window above her, waiting for a head to appear on the other side like last time. But they had apparently learned their lesson and no one came close enough for her to shoot. They didn’t have to, either, because they could destroy the car from a distance just fine, which seemed to be what they were trying to do. The seats around her were perforated, the dashboard to her left literally coming apart by the second, and glass continued to rain down on her, cutting her arms. She might have been bleeding from her face (again), but she couldn’t be sure.

She didn’t know how long she lay there across the two front seats holding the shotgun, small and large shards of glass falling off her body with every slight movement she made or breath she took. It could have been a minute. Or a few seconds. Hell, it could have been an hour for all she knew.

We’re going to die. We’re all going to die.

There was a silver lining, though. If she died out here, she wouldn’t have to face Josh again. So there was that—

Silence.

She looked up, shocked by what she was hearing — or not hearing.

The shooting had stopped.

A trick? Were they moving toward her now? Maybe they wanted her alive after all. Or maybe they thought she was already dead. All she had to do was look around her at what was left of the Dodge’s interior and realize it was a miracle she wasn’t already bleeding to death from a dozen bullet holes—

Pop-pop-pop as a new round of gunfire erupted, but this time the walls of the car were unaffected. They were shooting over her.

What the hell?

She was still trying to figure out what was happening when another volley joined in, except these new ones were coming from behind her.

At first she thought some of the horsemen had somehow managed to outflank her. Those horses could probably maneuver over the deep ditches better than a car, but if that was the case, why didn’t they just run up and shoot her through the driver side window?

She was about to flip over onto her back and face her attacker when she felt a rush of wind and the door creaked open first. Gaby had no choice and scrambled up to her knees, turning the shotgun around.

A familiar voice said, “Whoa there, G.I. Jane.”

A hand grabbed her by the shirt collar and jerked her off the seats and through the open door like she weighed less than Milly. She was unceremoniously deposited onto the hot asphalt road, where she gasped for breath and looked up, then grinned at the figure crouched next to her, firing with an M4A1 rifle across the Neon’s hood.

“You’re a sight for sore eyes,” she said.

Danny didn’t take his eyes off his scope as he continued shooting, calmly pulling the trigger again and again. “We’ll talk about your terrible choice of fighting positions later, missy. Right now, grab the kids and head back to Big Willie.”

She looked over at Will, positioned behind the open door of a parked truck behind them, also firing calmly over her and at the horsemen farther up the highway.

Gaby scrambled up and opened the Dodge’s back door. Claire, her small body practically merged with the floor, looked up at her with wide eyes. “Come on,” Gaby said, and held out her hand. Claire took it and Gaby pulled her out. “Run to the truck!”

Claire glanced past her at Will.

“They’re my friends,” Gaby smiled.

Claire nodded and ran off, smartly keeping herself as low as possible.

Gaby looked back into the car and found Milly on the floor behind the front passenger seat. “Milly, come on.”

The girl hesitantly held out her hand and Gaby took it, pulling her toward the door. Milly leaped into her arms and Gaby, holding her tight, began backpedaling.

“Danny,” Gaby said.

“Right behind you,” Danny said. He fired two more shots before ejecting his magazine, making sure to catch it and put it away before slamming in a fresh one. “Go go go.”

Gaby turned around and ran, Milly clutching her so tightly she could barely breathe. She kept as low as possible while still running, which was amazingly hard with Milly’s weight pulling her down to the road.

Will said, “Hey, kid,” as she ran past him.

“Hey, Will,” Gaby said. “You look like shit.”

“Don’t tell Lara.”

“I won’t if you don’t tell her about my face.”

“Deal.” Will switched his rifle to full-auto, said, “Danny,” before firing off a single, continuous burst.

Danny ran toward them, using Will’s fire as cover. When Danny was back at the truck with her, Will switched back to semi-auto and continued firing off one round at a time again.

Gaby put Milly down behind the back bumper of the truck next to Claire. She took a moment to compose herself, her chest pounding so loudly she had difficulty hearing Milly’s sniffling. Gaby had to put one hand against the truck to steady herself before leaning back out to look up the highway.

There were four riderless horses out there now, two moving along the right side shoulder while the other two had escaped into the ditches and were grazing on sunburned grass. Their riders lay still on the road. The remaining two soldiers were fleeing up Route 13 at a fast gallop as Will fired casually after them, but by now they were already too far away to be picked off.

“What happened to your face?” Danny said to her.

“What happened to yours?” she said.

“Touché.”

Will fired a final shot, then walked back to them, reloading his rifle as he did so. “Anyone missing an arm or a leg or have holes where there shouldn’t be extra holes?”

Gaby shook her head and wiped at trickles of blood along her arms where falling glass had cut her. None of them were too deep, thankfully. “Just a couple of scratches. I’m good.”

“Yeah?” Will said, watching her carefully.

She gave him her best smile. “Good enough for now. Thanks for the rescue.”

“It’s a good thing we didn’t stop at that sushi place down the road,” Danny said. “You know how much I love roadside sushi.”

She looked at Will, then at Danny, this time more closely. They were still the same guys she knew, but in the week or so since she had last seen them, they looked beaten up, bruised, and battered. Danny, in particular, had a broken nose and cuts along his face, as far removed from the California blond surfer she was so used to. Will still looked like Will, which was to say, tired and weary, but somehow still moving around. But then, Will always did hide his wounds well.

“Man, you guys look like total crap,” she said.

“You should see the other guy,” Danny said.

“Bad?”

“Worse.”

“What could be worse than the sight of you two?”

“Dead.”

“Yeah, that’s definitely worse.”

Will had turned back up the highway. She walked over and stood next to him and looked over the roof of the Dodge. She hadn’t realized just what bad shape the vehicle was in until she got enough distance from it. All four tires were punctured and every window was broken. There had to be dozens of holes across the length of the car that she could see and probably more that she couldn’t on the other side.

My God. How did we survive that?

Will fished out a pair of binoculars from his pack and peered through them.

“The interstate,” Gaby said. “They’re guarding it, aren’t they?”

“Looks like it.”

“How many are up there?”

“A dozen,” Will said, lowering the binoculars. “Horses aren’t the only thing they’re riding around on. Looks like they have technicals, too.”

“Technicals?”

“Improvised fighting vehicles,” Danny said, walking over. “Basically, they put a machine gun on top of a truck.”

“Oh.”

“How many?” Danny asked.

“Two that I can see,” Will said.

She saw a vehicle — maybe a truck — moving up the road toward them. She could just barely register the silhouette of a man standing in the back. Then a second truck appeared and joined the first, the two of them riding side by side.

“Here they come,” Gaby said.

“Come on,” Will said. “We’re not going to survive a stand-up firefight against those.”

Danny circled the vehicle over to the driver side while Will slipped into the front passenger seat. Gaby opened the back door and was surprised to find two people already inside. A man and a woman, both in their twenties.

“Oh yeah,” Danny said. “It’s a little crowded back there. But that’s what laps are for, right?”

Gaby held open the door for Milly and Claire as they squeezed into the back. “Milly, sit on my lap.”

The girl nodded. She had stopped crying and her cheeks were covered in dried tears, but she looked ready to start all over again at a moment’s notice.

Gaby closed the door as Danny started up the truck and reversed. Then he somehow swung the vehicle around until he had it turned a full 180 degrees. He stepped on the gas and they were flying down the highway, away from Josh’s approaching soldiers.

It was a tight fit in the back. Even though the other two people were doing their best to make themselves small, they had to fight for space with weapons and boxes of supplies piled on the floor. Claire ended up sitting on one of the boxes while Gaby had to place her legs over another one, with the edge of crates poking into her ribcage.

Danny looked up at them in the rearview mirror. “Just think of it as a studio apartment and ignore the smell. Annie and Lance, that’s Gaby. I have no idea who those kids are, so don’t ask.”

“We’re sorry about your friend,” the woman, Annie, said.

“Friend”? Gaby thought, then, Oh, she’s talking about Donna.

“Thanks,” Gaby said, and wondered if Claire had deduced the same thing.

Gaby looked over her shoulder and out the back window.

Two trucks — the “technicals”—were coming up the road after them, but they weren’t going to catch Danny anytime soon. At least, she hoped not. After surviving Harrison and reuniting with Will and Danny, the idea of having all of that ripped away now was too difficult to stomach.

Will looked into the backseat and observed her for a moment.

“What?” she said.

“How’s the face?” he asked.

“It hurts. What do you think?”

He smiled, then took something out of one of his cargo pants pocket and tossed it to her. “Something for the pain.”

She caught the bottle. It didn’t have any labels, and there were only a few pills left when she opened it. She didn’t ask him what the pills were because she trusted Will. Gaby swallowed two of them.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“There has to be a back road, another way to the interstate and around what’s waiting up there.”

“And if there isn’t?”

“Then we’ll do what we always do,” Will said. “Hope for the best and prepare for the worst.”

29 Lara

“Everyone’s in one piece,” Bonnie said through the radio. “I don’t know how, to be honest with you. I think one of them had a machine gun. We could hear it shooting from miles away.”

A machine gun. Jesus.

“Where are you now?” Lara asked.

“Almost home. Thank God. I can see the sun starting to set, or maybe that’s just my imagination.”

“I’ll see you when you get back.”

“Okay. Over.”

Lara put down the radio. “They’re on their way back.”

Carly moved over to the north window and peered out with her binoculars. “I see them coming down the road now. Sarah will be relieved to have them back.”

“Blaine?”

“No, Lara, she’s been nervous about Bonnie. Of course Blaine.”

Lara smiled. “I wasn’t sure.”

“Everyone’s getting some nookie these days except us.”

“Danny will be back soon and you can make up for lost time.”

“Done, and done,” Carly said. “Has Will radioed in yet?”

“Not yet.”

She looked down at her watch: 5:29 p.m. It would be dark in less than an hour, and Will hadn’t called yet. If he was on his way, he would have told her so. But he hadn’t, which meant he was nowhere close to home and was busy doing something else (like surviving). For some reason, she wasn’t surprised by that. She just hoped he had spent all that time out there looking for Gaby.

No one gets left behind, Will. Find Gaby. Find her and come home to me.

“Looks like all that time you put into convincing Keo paid off,” Carly said. “How did you know he’d go for it? Or come through with flying colors?”

“I didn’t. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst, remember?’

“Well, you did good, kid.”

“Only if they don’t attack us tonight.”

“You think they might anyway? Even after what Keo did with that grenade launcher?”

Lara shook her head. “I don’t know. That’s the problem. I don’t know anything for sure.” She picked up the radio again. “Roy, come in.”

“What’s up?” Roy answered.

“Blaine and the others are headed back now. I need you to get one of the fast boats ready just in case they need a hand. Grab a battery out of the supply building and get Maddie to help you gas it up.”

“Will do.”

“I heard some Russians on the radio today,” Carly said behind her.

“Russians?” Lara said.

“Yeah. They were talking to some Italians.”

“What were they saying?”

“I have no idea. The Russians were talking in Russian to the Italians, who were talking Italian back at them. It was, uh, kind of confusing for everyone, not to mention super surreal.”

Lara smiled at the thought. She’d done that. Got people around the world communicating with one another. Even if they couldn’t understand a single word the other was saying, her broadcast had connected them by letting them know there were other survivors out there. That, she found, was what they needed to hear most — that they weren’t alone.

We started something. Now all we have to do is survive it.

Yeah, no pressure.

Blaine and the others didn’t shove off from shore on their way back to the island until five minutes after six. They were cutting it close, and Lara only allowed herself to breathe easier when they were halfway home and she could see their boat in the distance, with the sight of the sun dipping in the horizon behind them. She still didn’t feel comfortable sending people out there, and she didn’t think she ever would be.

It was beginning to darken, and still no word from Will. That meant there was no chance he was coming back today. A part of her always knew they’d have to survive another day without him. Maybe that was why she took such a big gamble with Keo.

“How many?” she asked Keo later while he was eating in the dining room.

Keo tore apart a white bass and gobbled up the meat. “Over twenty, easy. They were definitely preparing for an assault.”

“One hundred percent sure?”

He nodded. “They were loading supplies onto boats when I showed up. And they had night-vision gear.”

“Even after you killed some of them, they were still coming…”

“Like I said: they really have a bug up their ass for you people.”

Will was right. Kate’s coming, and nothing’s going to stop her.

Keo grabbed a glass of water and gulped it down and didn’t stop until he had drained the entire thing. Even Blaine and Bonnie, eating across the table from him, looked impressed. Lara exchanged a brief grin with them.

“Ice cold water,” Keo said, putting the glass down. “Worth its weight in gold these days, especially in the summer.”

Lara had already eaten with the others two hours ago, so she was the only one at the table not pulling apart fish at the moment. Blaine and Bonnie still looked a bit shell-shocked by their experience, and to hear them tell it, they hadn’t really done much except dropped Keo off, then picked him back up when the shooting started. Keo, who had been in the middle of the firefight, didn’t look the least bit fazed. At first she thought it was an act, a tough guy façade. She only had to watch him eating for a few minutes to realize that wasn’t the case.

“What happened exactly?” Lara asked Keo. “It sounded like you had to improvise.”

“There was a kid,” Keo said. “He ruined the plan.”

“We didn’t see him,” Bonnie said. “But then we had to stop the truck pretty far away so they couldn’t hear us coming.”

“Carrie told me about them,” Keo said. “The soldiers are using them as lookouts. They send the brats across the cities to look for survivors, then radio in if they find any.” Keo wiped fish oil from his lips. “I should have shot the little bastard.”

Lara and Bonnie stared at him.

“I said should have,” Keo said. “I didn’t, for the record.”

“So, in your expert opinion,” Lara said, “do you think you stopped them?”

“Stopped them? Not even close.” He shook an ice cube out of his glass and popped it into his mouth, crunching it loudly. “Delayed them, maybe.”

“Maybe?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know these ghouls as well as you do, so I can’t predict what they’re going to do next. I would have liked to take out more. That house, for instance. But situations being what they were…”

“The kid,” Lara said.

“Yeah. The kid.”

“They’re using children,” Bonnie said, shaking her head. “It’s hard to believe they’ll stoop that low.”

“It’s actually pretty smart,” Lara said. “Kids are impressionable. Adaptable, too.” She thought about Elise and Vera and how the two young girls had carried on despite everything they had been through. “You give them a job and they’ll glom to it. Especially if you make them think it’s the most important thing in the world. And by extension, they’re important for doing it.”

“Yeah, well,” Keo said, “I still think I should have at least stolen the little tyke’s bicycle. That was a pretty sweet-looking ride.”

“There are plenty of rooms left to choose from if you don’t like the one I picked out for you,” Lara said when she was walking with Keo up Hallway A after dinner. “This is assuming you’re at least staying the night.”

“It’s a little too dark out there to be sailing, don’t you think?” Keo said.

“I didn’t want to presume. You’ve already done more than enough to earn everything I promised you. We’re grateful. I’m grateful.”

“Are you propositioning me?”

“What?”

He laughed. “I’m just messing with you, Lara.”

“Oh.” Then, because she thought she had been blushing just a bit, “You’re anxious to get going.”

“I made a promise, and I’m way overdue.”

“She doesn’t know you’re trying to make your way over?”

“No. We didn’t exactly plan to separate. It just came up at the last minute, so we didn’t put any kind of communications system into place, the way you have with your boyfriend. You guys are a lot smarter than us.”

“We have our moments.”

“But it’s not going to last, you know.”

“What do you mean?”

“Regardless of how many times you push them back, delay them, or repel a full-on frontal assault. You can’t do it forever. Sooner or later, if they want this island bad enough, they’ll get it. And when that happens, a lot of people will die.”

She didn’t answer him because she knew he was right. She had spent countless days and hours thinking about it, trying to find a way out, a way that would keep them all alive. And each time she failed to see the answer. Always.

They walked in silence for a moment, the only sounds coming from their footsteps against the hallway and the slight hum of the lightbulbs.

“What would you do if you were in my position?” she finally asked.

“The odds are against you,” he said with that matter-of-fact tone that annoyed her, but at the same time she found herself grateful for because it was the truth—or at least, as he saw it. “Even with the Army Rangers, you won’t be able to keep the island indefinitely. I understand why you don’t want to leave. The hotel, the power supply, the beach… Hell, I’d risk it just to have ice water every day, but that’s me. I’ve survived past my sell-by date even before the world went kaput. Bottom line? There’s no reason why you and the others can’t start again someplace else.”

“Where would we go?”

“I can’t tell you that.” He paused, then added, almost reluctantly, “This island is a paradise, Lara, but it’s not worth dying for. What’s that old saying? ‘Home is where the heart is’? These days, it might be enough just to have a home that isn’t constantly under attack.”

It was almost dark outside when she stepped out onto the hotel patio with Keo’s words echoing inside her head.

“The odds are against you… This island is a paradise, Lara, but it’s not worth dying for.”

Wasn’t it, though? If Song Island wasn’t worth spilling blood for (and God knew, they already had, too much), then what was these days?

She just wished Will were here with her. Right now, she would be satisfied with just hearing his voice.

She looked toward the Tower, where Carly was still posted with Jo, Bonnie’s little sister. The two of them were moving from window to window with night-vision binoculars. Lara had doubled up on the watch to improve their chances of catching an attack if Kate decided to send her collaborators anyway. It was dead quiet out there, so if they were coming by boat (which they would be — was there any other way?), even using those trolling motors, they would give away their approach.

“This island is a paradise, Lara, but it’s not worth dying for.”

Maybe. Maybe not.

Lara unclipped her radio and said into it, “Everyone in position?”

“Lake looks quiet from up here,” Carly said. “Jo and I are good to go.”

“Keo’s coming up to relieve you later tonight, Carly.”

“He’s staying?” she asked, sounding surprised.

“For tonight.” Then, “Roy?”

“Beach is clear,” Roy said.

“Piers, too,” Blaine said.

Blaine and Roy had the beach tonight, with Bonnie scheduled to relieve Roy in an hour, and Gwen for Blaine an hour after that. Not that she expected two people on the beach to repel a full-scale attack. But if they could see an assault coming, it would give them time to set up the real defense at the hotel and, if necessary, start putting Will’s Plan Z into motion.

God, that’s such an awful name for a plan that’s supposed to save our lives, Will. We need to come up with a better, more optimistic-sounding one.

“Benny?” Lara said.

“Looks good from up here,” Benny said.

Lara glanced up at the roof of the hotel behind her but couldn’t see Benny up there. He wasn’t alone; Stan the electrician and Kendra’s son Dwayne were also up there somewhere. Lara had been hesitant to make use of twelve-year-old Dwayne until she saw him shoot with his bolt-action rifle. Even Benny and Blaine were impressed. The kid was, easily, the best shot on the island. She hadn’t asked the boy if he had ever shot anyone before, because she didn’t really want to know.

She listened to the others calling out through the radio. Gwen and the fourteen-year-old Derek were with Sarah, along with Carrie and Lorelei, in the hotel lobby. They had looked nervous when she walked through the room a few minutes ago. She didn’t blame them and she wondered if they were thinking the same thing:

“We’re prepared…but are we really?”

She didn’t know the answer to that, and she wouldn’t know until the real thing. Lara prayed none of them had to find out tonight.

One more day. Until Will and Danny come back.

And then what? We do it all over again, because Kate isn’t going to stop. She’s going to keep coming, and coming, because what’s one or a dozen more human sellouts to her?

“This island is a paradise, Lara, but it’s not worth dying for,” Keo had said.

Maybe he was right. Maybe…

Her radio squawked and Carly’s excited voice came through. “Lara. It’s your boyfriend on the radio. Should I tell him you’re busy?”

Lara smiled and ran down the patio, then across the grounds toward the Tower. She felt ten years old again and didn’t care.

If she was going to die tonight, at least she’d get to hear Will’s voice first…

30 Will

Once they realized they weren’t going to catch up to the Bronco, the technicals slowed down, then stopped completely. An hour after that, they resumed traveling cautiously up Route 13, showing surprising patience. Then again, he guessed they could afford to take it slow and easy — the night was their ally.

Will checked his watch for the third time in the last hour: 3:16 p.m.

Three and a half hours before nightfall, give or take.

Josh’s soldiers were a kilometer out before he could actually see their vehicles as more than just flickering mirages under the sun. One was a bright cherry red mid-size Toyota Tacoma. The other was a gray full-size Nissan Titan. Both trucks moved on large tires and each had a soldier in the back positioned over an M240 machine gun (Where the hell did they find those, and where can I get one, too?) mounted on the roof by bipods. There was a driver and a passenger in each vehicle, making the total number six, unless there was additional personnel in the truck beds that he couldn’t see from his position. That was unlikely. It was way too hot to be lying down back there.

Not that he could see everything from the side of the ditch where he had been positioned for the last hour, bathing in his own sweat. Wearing the assault vest didn’t help, but Will was used to discomfort, especially with the smell of upcoming combat lingering over the horizon.

He lowered the binoculars and keyed his radio. “They’re on approach. One klick.”

Danny’s voice came through Will’s right ear. “Two little piggies went to market, while the other little piggies stayed home. Two little piggies in trucks, with more little piggies in the back with machine guns. Two little piggies are about to get shot, and they’ll be crying wee wee wee all the way home.”

Will opened one of his pouches, pulled out a granola bar, and took a bite.

“What are the chances we’re making it to the island today?” Gaby asked through his earbud.

“Not while they’re out here,” Will said.

The problem was the flat terrain around them. It didn’t matter where they drove, on or off the highway, because the soldiers would be able to spot them from a safe distance. That would lead to a car chase and a running gunfight. The Bronco was a decent vehicle, but it wasn’t going to stand up against two trucks with mounted machine guns. And those were just the bad guys they could see. There were probably (likely) more waiting closer to the interstate. A radio call later and they could easily run into an ambush without realizing it.

No, they weren’t going to avoid this. That much was clear now. The soldiers knew exactly where the Bronco had turned off the road, and it was there they were moving toward at the moment. Hopefully, they hadn’t also seen him and Danny making their way back up Route 13 on foot using the ditches as cover.

Hopefully.

“Better to shoot our way through, anyway,” Danny was saying. “Funner.”

“‘Funner’ isn’t a word,” Gaby said.

“You’re wrong and I’m righter,” Danny said.

Will imagined Gaby rolling her eyes back at their temporary base, where she was staying at the moment with the girls and Lance and Annie. The farmhouse was the best they could do in a pinch, since retreating all the way back to Dunbar was a non-starter. Gaby had mentioned a cemetery, but that was too far back, though he was impressed when she told him she had stayed in a crypt the previous night.

The enemy trucks were close enough now that Will could hear the sounds of their engines, even at their current slow, almost painfully deliberate pace. He swallowed the last piece of nearly stale granola down.

He didn’t have to use the binoculars to see them this time, with the Tacoma in one lane and the Titan in the other. The men in the back were swiveling the mounted LMGs around, looking for targets. They were scanning the ditches, fully expecting some kind of an ambush. The bipods holding up the weapons looked firmly attached to the roof.

He slipped the binoculars into his pack and scooted backward until the curved angle of the ditch allowed him to slide all the way down to the floor. He unslung the M4A1 and leaned back against the cool earth wall and waited.

“They’ll be on top of you in five,” Danny said in his right ear. “Try not to screw this up like you always do.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“That reminds me of a joke…”

“Of course it does.”

“Two high school best friends are sick and tired of being virgins, so one day they cook up a scheme to both get laid at the same time. One of the boys comes up with the perfect girl to seduce. So they go on the Internet and watch hundreds of videos about what girls like. When they’re finally ready, they plot their move. One day, as their target is walking home from school, our virgins jump out of a bush and both shout at the same time, ‘Hey, you wanna have hot sex? We guarantee we’ll please you!’ The girl squeals, ‘Ew, gross!’ Then she points at virgin number one and says, ‘I’m going to tell mom, Rob!’ And runs off. Virgin number two is understandably confused. He turns to his buddy and says, ‘Dude, we are so screwed! Why didn’t you tell me she was your sister?’ To which virgin number one replies, ‘Well, her room’s right next to mine and she’s always screwing guys every night, so I figured she’d be pretty easy!’”

“Gross, Danny,” Gaby said.

“You gotta be there, I guess.” Then, “Speaking of which, one minute until they’re on top of you, Kemosabe.”

“Roger that,” Will said.

Not that he needed Danny to tell him. He could hear the tires crunching against the hard asphalt. He guessed they were moving ten, maybe fifteen, miles an hour. From this distance, the drivers could see the bright red barn and the two-story house where Gaby was currently watching from, along with the Bronco parked in the front yard.

“I counted six,” Will whispered into his throat mic.

“Sounds about right,” Danny said. “Four inside, two in the rear. Speaking of rears—”

“Be careful, guys,” Gaby said, cutting him off. “I don’t like the look of those machine guns.”

“Neither do I,” Danny said. “950 rounds per minute is not my idea of a fun prom date.”

“What’s the range on that thing?”

“Don’t worry; they’re not going to be shooting at the house until they’re way closer.”

“That doesn’t make me feel better, Danny.” She sighed, then, “Where did they get something like that, anyway?”

“Probably the same place they got the rifles and ammo, and army boots, and MREs…”

Will glanced up just as the first truck — the Tacoma — was directly on the road in front of him. There was a slight squeak as the gunner swiveled the machine gun around on its bipod. The M240 was a heavy weapon at just under twenty-eight pounds, which was why it was more effective when mounted instead of being carried by a single soldier. It utilized an ammo belt, which was the source of the clink-clink noise he was hearing now as the dangling bullets tapped against the metal of the car.

“You good?” Danny said in his right ear.

“Go for it,” Will whispered back.

“I call shotgun,” Danny said just before a loud crack! rang out.

Will was moving even before the shot had finished its echo. He stretched up to his full five-eleven height and his vision filled with the cab of the Tacoma that had stopped directly in front of him.

Danny fired again, then again, and again. Calmly, putting every bullet where he intended them.

The driver was fumbling with the gear, trying to reverse, when Will shot him in the left temple, shattering the closed window in the process. The man slumped forward, his head slamming into the horn and causing it to fill up the countryside with a headache-inducing blare.

Then the brap-brap-brap-brap of one of the M240s firing, overpowering even the loud car horn. Bullets weren’t hitting the ditch around him, so Will assumed the man was trying to hit something else (Danny) down the road and still didn’t know he existed.

Will couldn’t see the Titan from his position, with the Tacoma in the way. He had to climb out of the ditch before he could see the rest of the road.

The Tacoma wasn’t going anywhere. He had shot the driver and Danny had taken out the front passenger and the one manning the machine gun in the back. But while the Tacoma was down, the Titan was still alive and kicking, its machine gun firing at Danny’s position, the clink-clink-clink of bullet casings pelting the bed of the truck like falling rain. A second soldier was adding his own fire, standing behind the open driver side door. Will couldn’t tell if the passenger was still alive on the other side of the truck. Not that he wasted too much time thinking about it.

He shot the machine gunner in the back, then put a second bullet into the man’s collarbone as he was falling down. The sudden silence of the M240 must have surprised the driver, because he stopped shooting up the highway and looked back, saw Will, and swiveled his rifle around just before a bullet chopped through the door’s open window behind him. The soldier stumbled forward, looked surprised, then collapsed to the ground in a heap.

Will maneuvered around the Tacoma, sweeping it for signs of movement, before moving on to the Titan. There was no body outside the front passenger side door, and when Will got closer, he saw the third man slumped over the dashboard with a neat bullet hole drilled through the windshield in front of him.

“We good?” Danny said in his right ear, his voice barely audible over the blaring horn.

Will didn’t answer until he had completed a full circle around the two vehicles. He reached into the driver side window of the Tacoma and pulled the dead man off the horn. Blessed silence.

“Right as rain,” he said into his mic.

“Anyone hurt?” Gaby asked.

“My butt’s a little sore from sitting down for the last hour and change,” Danny said.

“So what? You want me to massage it for you or something?”

“Would you, please?” Danny said.

They dumped the bodies on the highway and drove the trucks back to the farm where the others were holed up. They had been careful not to damage the vehicles during the firefight (bullet holes in windshields and broken car windows didn’t count) and as Will expected, there were more 7.62x51mm ammo for the M240s and supplies in the backseats. The machine guns would come in handy, and Will had no intention of giving them up now. He was already thinking about ways to set them up along the island’s perimeters in preparation for one of Kate’s assaults…

Gaby and the others came out of the house while they were driving up the dirt road. The farm was surrounded by fields of dry grass, which made it like every other homestead they had passed since starting up Route 13 out of Dunbar. At one point he imagined that horses, cows, and other livestock grazed the vast acres and kept the family fed. They might have even raised enough to sell at the market.

The two-story house wasn’t anything special, but it looked sturdy, with a front porch and peeling paint, along with evidence of rotting foundations if you looked closely enough. For their purposes, it would work just fine.

The thirteen-year-old girls, Claire and Milly, stayed close to Gaby the entire time. Milly looked just as shell-shocked now as when Will first saw her, but Claire seemed to be amazingly composed for someone who had just lost a loved one. According to Gaby, the girl he and Danny had found on the road earlier was Claire’s sister, Donna. In so many ways, Claire looked like a younger version of Gaby — strong, determined, and way tougher than most people probably had given her credit for in her pre-Purge life.

“Nice rides,” Gaby said.

“The machine guns will come in handy on the island,” Will said.

“Pump out some silver rounds for those belts and we got ourselves a bona fide ass kicker or two,” Danny said.

“We can’t use our silver bullets for them now?” Gaby asked.

“Wrong caliber,” Will said. “We’ll fix that when we get back to the island—”

He was cut off by the distant sound of car engines.

“Or not,” Danny said.

Will took out his binoculars and turned back to the highway. Men on horseback, maybe a half dozen, were galloping alongside a light green truck heading in their direction.

“How many?” Gaby asked behind him.

“At least six on horseback and a technical,” Will said.

The caravan stopped about half a kilometer away, and men climbed out of the back of the trucks and began taking up positions, the vehicle moving to straddle the two lanes. The riders climbed off their horses and began spreading out, some sliding down the ditches along the shoulders. They were already passing around bottles of water.

“Are those little rascals doing what I think they’re doing?” Danny said.

“Yeah,” Will said. “Looks like they’ve come prepared to stay a while.”

“Does that mean they’re not attacking?” Lance asked. He sounded almost hopeful.

“Maybe their friends have the answer,” Danny said.

He was looking down the other side of the highway as another technical appeared and parked across the lanes, while more men in uniforms climbed out of the back. There were no horsemen on this side, but Will counted seven men in all, including one perched behind another machine gun mounted on the roof of the vehicle.

“What are they doing?” Annie asked, sounding already panicked.

“They’re boxing us in,” Will said.

“Why?” Lance asked.

Will glanced at his watch. 3:59 p.m.

“Does this mean we’re not going to the island?” Milly asked, her voice on the verge of cracking.

“I don’t know,” Gaby said. She walked up beside Will and exchanged a look with him. “What now?”

He glanced back at the house, the barn next to it, and a smaller building they had checked earlier that contained farming equipment. Then he looked at both sides of the highway one more time to make sure the soldiers still weren’t moving. They weren’t. His first instincts were correct: they were settling in.

Night is their ally. But it’s not ours.

“Will?” Gaby said. “What now?”

“We get ready for nightfall,” Will said.

“How are you for silver bullets?” he asked Gaby as he handed her a box of ammo from one of the two technicals.

“I’m out,” Gaby said. “I used everything up in Lafayette when me and Nate got caught in the pawnshop.”

“I’m sorry about that.”

Gaby nodded. “He was a nice guy.”

“Yeah. He was a good soldier, too. We could have really used him at the island.”

“I don’t even know what happened to him, Will. Not really, anyway.”

Gaby was looking at Claire, standing across the yard from them, watching the road. Will had given her the FNH shotgun and it hung across her back, its thirty-nine inches just a foot shorter than her entire frame. A large pouch bulged against her hip, stuffed with extra shotgun shells. She had learned surprisingly fast when he showed her how to load and fire the weapon less than thirty minutes ago. The girl was a natural, which again reminded him of Gaby.

“Are you sure about that?” Gaby asked.

“Not really,” Will said. “Fact is, if we need her to start shooting, we’re already in trouble.”

“Just don’t give Milly one of those, okay?”

“I don’t think you have to worry about that.”

Gaby followed Will back to the house. He glanced up at Danny, watching the roads from one of the open second-floor windows. He had chosen a spot that gave him a clear view of both sides of Route 13. Lance stood next to him with binoculars, peering left, then right, then back again every few seconds.

“We should have brought Tommy’s rifle,” Danny said down at them.

“Shoulda woulda coulda,” Will said.

Danny made a gun with his fingers and said, “Pew, pew,” up at the road.

“Who’s Tommy?” Gaby asked.

“A kid we met in Dunbar,” Will said. “He had a sniper rifle. He was pretty good with it, too.”

“What happened to him?”

Will shook his head, recalling Tommy’s decapitated body in the hallway outside the bathroom in the Dunbar Museum. The next morning, it was gone.

They take the dead. Why the hell do they take the dead?

They walked up the rickety steps to the front porch and stood underneath the awning. It was old and cracked and there were holes up and down its length, but it still provided a welcome respite from the heat. They stood in the shade and looked back out at the yard, Claire’s tiny figure standing sentry, the sun-drenched road beyond.

“Everyone’s dying around us, Will,” Gaby said quietly.

“Not us.”

“What makes us so special?”

She peered out at him through the broken nose and bruises around her face. Even with all of that — and all the cuts and scratches from the helicopter crash, if he looked closely enough — Gaby was still just the eighteen-year-old girl he and Danny had molded and trained to be a killer on the island. He guessed she would never outgrow that image in his head.

“We’re not,” Will said. “We’re just well-prepared. And we have something to live for. Don’t underestimate the importance of that.”

“The island,” Gaby said.

“No, not the island. The people on it…”

“You radioed Song Island yet?” Danny asked.

“Not yet,” Will said.

“What’s keeping you?”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“Good news and bad news. Good news, we found Gaby. Bad news, reunion time won’t start until tomorrow. Don’t tell her we’ll probably die tonight, though.”

“Good advice, Danny.”

“That’s what I’m here for.” Then, “Sunset at 6:30, give or take.”

“Yup.”

“They got us by the balls.”

“Does it hurt?”

“Kinda, yeah. And itchy, too. Is it supposed to itch?”

“When was the last time you bathed?”

“You’re asking me?” Danny sniffed him. “You smell like week-old cabbage. No, I take that back. That’s giving week-old cabbage a bad name.”

Will smiled. Pouring bottles of water over himself took away some of the stink, but it wasn’t nearly enough. “I’ll shower when I’m dead.”

“So soon, then?”

Will smirked. “Captain fucking Optimism.”

Danny chuckled. He was leaning on one side of the open window across from Will. The main bedroom on the second floor gave them a perfect view of Route 13 and the soldiers at both sides of the road. With only one vehicle parked across the lanes, it was less a barricade and more of an invitation. Will knew a fake opening when he saw one, and he was looking at two right now. Danny had come to the same conclusion.

“Maybe we should give it a shot anyway,” Danny said, alternating between looking out the window and finishing a can of SPAM with a steel spork. “Give them what they want. You know me; I’m a people person.”

“We’d never make it. Even with the M240s on each truck. A machine gunner out there is a sitting duck. We proved that.”

“Maybe we can move it inside the cab.”

“How?”

“I dunno. I’m just throwing out ideas. That’s me. The idea man.”

“We’d never make it,” Will said again. “Not with the girls and the kids.”

“When did you get to be such a Debbie Downer all of a sudden?”

“I’m just being practical. The ones along the ditches are the problem. They’ll pick us off because we’ll be sitting ducks in the middle of the road. Before we know it, the ones on the other side will flank us, cut off our retreat.” He shook his head. “No, there’s no way around that. And they know it.”

“I hate sitting and waiting. Did I tell you that? They used to call me Action Danny back in college.”

“So I hear.” He glanced down at his watch again. 5:31 p.m. “It’ll be dark soon, and they’re still out there.”

“‘They’?” Danny said.

“Yeah. They.”

“Oh. They.”

The other two blue-eyed ghouls. They’re out there somewhere. Waiting for nightfall.

Always waiting…

“Maybe we got lucky and they’re not around here anymore,” Danny said. “Maybe they went home. They have homes, don’t they? Maybe when you put down the other two, they got scared and ran off.”

Will didn’t say anything.

“Of course not,” Danny said. “When has anything ever been easy with you around?”

“You blaming all of this on me?”

“I thought that was pretty obvious.” He shoved another chunk of SPAM into his mouth. “We need a new plan.”

“We already have a plan. Sit and wait and see what they do, and react accordingly.”

“That’s a sucky plan. Come up with a better one.”

“You know what they say about plans.”

“That yours suck?”

“No plan survives contact with the enemy.”

As soon as he said the words, he thought about Kate. She had said the same thing back in Dunbar. In the dream. The nightmare. One of those.

He looked out the window and scanned the flat empty landscape around them.

Are you out there, Kate? Are you pulling the strings right now?

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Danny said.

“What’s that?”

“Contact with the enemy. The real enemy. The last time that happened—” he touched his broken nose “—I got just a little bit uglier. I mean, sure, I’m still male model material compared to you, but a guy can only take so much abuse before he starts losing gigs, ya know?”

Gaby, Lance, and Annie were downstairs hammering the closet doors they had pulled off the rooms on the first and second floor over the windows as well as the front and back doors. They had found everything they needed from the shack on the property, including buckets of rusted nails. Lance, who didn’t look as if he had ever picked up a tool in his life before The Purge, handled a hammer surprisingly well, while the girls, Milly and Claire, pitched in as best they could.

Will had no illusions that the barricades were going to hold, but putting them up gave everyone something to do and took their minds off what was about to happen in less than an hour. It was either this or watch them staring off into empty space, waiting for the inevitable darkness to fall.

Gaby glanced over when he came down the stairs. “We’re almost done. What about the upstairs windows?”

“Three windows — main bedroom and two additional rooms in the back,” Will said. “We’ll save the rest of the doors for them.”

“What if we run out?”

“We’ll pull the floorboards. There’s just dirt under them anyway.”

The house was old and the stairs groaned. The wallpaper was peeling, and the floorboards were real wood that could be easily ripped free with the proper tools, like a hammer or a prying bar. Everything moved and creaked as they walked around.

Lance sat down on a couch and drank deeply from a warm bottle of water. His clothes were soaked, his face was flustered, and his tired, hollowed eyes sought out Will. “They’re not going to hold. You know that, right? I told you we had them up at the other house, too. They broke in after a couple of hours.”

Gaby and Annie didn’t say anything. Even the two girls seemed to greet the matter-of-fact comment with subdued acceptance and were paying more attention to the heat. The temperature had been tolerable earlier, but now with the windows covered, it had become insufferable.

“We don’t need them to hold,” Will said. “They just need to keep them out for a while.”

“And then what?” Lance said.

“Then we make our stand on the second floor.”

“What about the basement?” Gaby asked. “Those have always worked for us in the past.”

“Against the black-eyed ghouls, it’s a no-brainer. But not with the blue-eyed ones around.” Images of Dunbar and the basement under Ennis’s flashed across his mind. “They’re too smart. Even if they couldn’t get through — and that’s a big if—there are the soldiers to worry about. If we seal ourselves down there, we’re trapped with only one way out.”

“Like what we did to the other house,” Annie said softly.

“What did you do?” Gaby asked.

“We burned it down because we thought there might be creatures — the things you call ghouls — in the basement.”

“Did that kill them?”

“I don’t know. We never checked.”

“We’ll make our stand on the second floor,” Will repeated. He glanced at his watch again. “We need to finish up soon, so let’s get it done.”

Lance got up and held out his hand, and Annie took it and the two of them exchanged a private smile. Will thought they looked almost resigned to their fates as they walked past him and up the stairs. Claire and Milly followed, leaving him on the first floor with Gaby.

The nineteen-year-old stood next to him and looked after the others. “It’s going to be close,” she said, keeping her voice low enough that the others couldn’t hear.

He nodded. “So what else is new?”

“These blue-eyed ghouls… They can be killed?”

“Yeah, but you have to shoot them in the head.”

“Regular bullets or silver?”

“I don’t know. We’ll default to silver just in case. I stabbed one of them in the head with my knife and that seemed to work, too.”

She glanced down at the cross-knife at his hip. “I really gotta get me one of those.”

“I’ll make you a copy when we get back to the island. Deal?”

“Deal.”

They walked up the stairs together. Slowly, as if they had all the time in the world.

“So it’s the brain,” Gaby said. “Which would explain why you say they’re smarter than the others. They actually still have brains.”

“As good an explanation as any.”

Gaby smiled at him through her scars, bruises, and broken nose. “I thought you were dead after we split up in Harvest.”

He smiled back. “Someone once told me I’m too stubborn to die.”

“They’re probably right.” Then, she surprised him by hugging him in the middle of the stairs. “I knew you’d find me. I always knew you would.”

Will hugged her back and felt her body trembling in his arms. He decided she didn’t need to know that he was prepared to leave her behind, thinking she was dead, until he found out differently just a few hours ago.

Instead, he said, “There’s someone else who’ll be glad to know you’re still alive…”

“Gaby,” Lara said through the radio. She sounded breathless and happy. “It’s good to hear your voice again.”

“That’s funny, because I’ve been hearing your voice a lot these days,” Gaby said, smiling across the window at Will.

They were back in the main bedroom on the second floor of the house, with the portable ham radio sitting on the windowsill between them, its antenna sticking outside the open window.

“The broadcast,” Lara said.

“How did you know?”

Lara told them about other survivors who had reached out to her through the radio because of the message she had sent out into the world. People from Russia, the United Kingdom, and even some kid living on an island in Japan.

“Wow,” Gaby said. “That’s amazing. I didn’t know there were so many people still out there.”

“Neither did they,” Lara said. “I guess this is why Kate’s so pissed off. We unwittingly brought everyone together. At least, over the airwaves. People are starting to coordinate as a result. Guys in New York are talking to guys in San Francisco. Will, there are two groups in East Texas that we didn’t even know about until now.”

Gaby passed the microphone to Will. “All of that’s great, but I’m more worried about the island right now,” Will said. He sneaked a look outside at the darkening skies. “Are there any signs of an attack yet?”

Lara didn’t respond right away.

Will and Gaby exchanged a worried look.

“Lara,” he said into the mic.

“Do you trust me, Will?” Lara said finally.

“You know I do. Implicitly.”

She told him about some guy named Keo and the two women he had been traveling with. What they had seen back on shore, including more men in uniforms roaming Louisiana, and a staging area higher up Beaufont Lake. He listened and didn’t interrupt, absorbing everything she said, especially what she had attempted — and succeeded — with this Keo guy.

“I think it might have worked,” she said. “I guess we’ll know for sure tonight.”

“And everything’s ready just in case it didn’t?” Will asked.

“Plan Z…”

“Yes.”

“Everyone knows their roles,” Lara said. “I just hope we don’t have to use it.” She paused for a moment, then, “I knew you weren’t going to make it back today, Will. That’s why I made the choices I did.”

“You did the right thing, Lara.”

“Did I? Maybe I just made things worse.”

“Things can’t get any worse, babe. Besides, the island’s still there, isn’t it? You’re still safe. And the others, too.”

“Yes…”

“So you made the right choices.”

“I wasn’t sure…”

“Don’t doubt yourself. You’re smarter than me. Always have been.”

“You’re the one who kept us alive all these months.”

“Not by myself.”

“You and Danny…”

“Danny’s just a dumbass with a gun.”

“Hey,” Danny said. He was sitting on the big mattress behind them, cleaning his rifle. “Leave me out of this.”

Will ignored him and said into the mic, “We’ll be back tomorrow. Gaby, Danny, and me. And some other people, too.”

“You keep picking up strays,” she said. “Looks like we have that in common.”

He smiled. “I guess we just can’t help ourselves.”

He looked outside at the falling night again, at the soldiers milling about on both sides of the highway. The trucks had turned on their headlights. Waiting, just waiting, because they had all the time in the world.

They do, but we don’t.

And it seems to get shorter every day…

Will turned back to the radio. “It’s getting dark, and we both have a long night ahead of us.”

“Be careful,” Lara said. “You too, Gaby. I don’t want to lose you guys again.”

“What am I, chopped liver?” Danny said behind them.

Will held the mic toward Gaby, who said into it, “Get a glass of cold water ready for me, Lara. I also wouldn’t mind if someone went into my room and made the bed. I might have left it a little messy.”

Lara laughed. “Your highness’s wishes are my command.”

Gaby nodded at Will, then stood up and walked over to where Danny was, her way of giving Will some privacy with the radio.

“We’ll be home tomorrow,” he said into the mic. “Wait for me, okay?”

“Someone recently told me that home isn’t where I’m staying, but where the person I love is,” Lara said. “Come back to me, Will.”

“Tomorrow…”

“Tomorrow,” she repeated.

31 Keo

“You think it worked?” Blaine asked. “Earlier today?”

“I don’t know,” Keo said. “Maybe.”

“We should have blown up that house. Or taken out one of those docks and the boats. Maybe if we’d stayed longer instead of running so quickly…”

“Then all three of us would be dead right now.” Keo shrugged. “We did what we could. If they’re smart, they’ll accept today’s losses and regroup.”

“And if they’re not that smart?”

“Look around you, Blaine. These people took over the planet. I’m not talking about the human puppets. I’m talking about the ones pulling the strings. The creatures that Lara called ghouls. They’re not stupid.”

Blaine nodded. “You’re right. Anyway, if they want this island, they’re going to have to take it over our dead bodies.”

That’s what I’m afraid of, Keo thought, but said instead, “That seems to be the consensus with everyone here.”

“Lara’s a smart woman. She’ll get us through this.”

Keo didn’t doubt that the blonde was smart, but sometimes it took more than smarts to survive an unwinnable situation. Sometimes you just have to accept that you can’t win and move on. Or run. He had done plenty of both in his life.

And that’s what I should have done earlier today, too. Run the hell away from here and these people as fast as I could.

So why the hell am I playing guard duty?

Isn’t it obvious? Because you’re the dumbest man alive.

Keo sighed to himself.

From up here, he had a view of every inch of the island with the exception of the forested western half. He could see why Lara had someone up here twenty-four seven. It was a hell of an overwatch. Armed with the ACOG-mounted M4, a good shooter could pick off targets on the beach or boaters coming from the shorelines almost at will. Not him, of course. His skills were more close and personal-based.

“I was here when the island came under attack the first time,” Blaine was saying. “It was a hell of a night. Bullets everywhere. People dying.”

“They attacked the place before?”

“Over three months ago. Will and Danny were here that time.”

“You guys made it through okay, apparently.”

“Barely.” He lowered the binoculars and glanced up at the skylight above them. “They almost took down the Tower with one of those grenade launchers you used back at the staging area.”

Keo peered up at the full moon. It was a cloudless night, which was good for them because it extended their coverage of the surrounding lake.

He looked down at his watch: 8:16 p.m.

“Are you staying?” Blaine asked after a while.

“No,” Keo said. “I’ll help out as much as I can until I leave tomorrow.”

“Thanks for that.”

Keo chuckled. “Don’t get the wrong idea, Blaine. I’m stuck here for now, so if they attack, my ass is on the line, too.”

“Hunh. Good point.”

They didn’t say much after that, and Keo was glad Blaine wasn’t the type who felt the need to fill every second with noise. Shorty had been one of those.

The silence was finally broken by their radios squawking, and they heard Lara’s voice. “Keo, Blaine.”

Blaine answered his radio first. “What’s up?”

“Anything?” Lara asked.

“Nothing yet.” He glanced over at Keo for confirmation. Keo shook his head. “All quiet up here.”

“If you see anything, I want to hear about it. Anything at all.”

“Roger that.”

Keo moved to the south window and looked off at the stretch of white sands along the beach. There was a figure standing guard on top of the boat shack. Either Bonnie or Roy, though Keo hadn’t completely memorized their guard shift yet. A second figure walked in and out of the dozen or so halos along one of the piers. Tall and slender, so that was probably Bonnie. He turned a bit to the right and looked over the roof of the hotel and spotted two more figures, one crouching, the other standing. There were supposed to be three people up there tonight.

“Doesn’t she ever sleep?” Keo asked. “Lara.”

“A few hours here and there since Will left the island,” Blaine said. “I don’t know how she does it. She must drink two or three cups of coffee every morning.”

“Where do you guys get coffee anyway?”

“We got stacks of the stuff in freeze dried form. Sarah says those things last anywhere from two to twenty years in the pantry, and indefinitely in the freezer. You don’t know how much you miss coffee until you’ve smelled it in the morning.”

A flicker of movement against the moonlight caught his attention just before their radios squawked again. This time it was an excited female voice. Not Bonnie, but one of the other women. Maybe the short one?

“I see something on the water! I think it’s coming toward us!”

Keo adjusted his binoculars and picked up multiple white lights skirting across the lake at a snail’s pace, moving gradually in their direction. The object was too far away and too hidden by darkness to make out any details, but Keo had seen enough of them to know what the lights belonged to.

“I see it,” Keo said into his radio. “It’s a boat.”

“What kind of boat?” Lara said through the radio. Her voice was shaky and she was breathing hard.

Keo turned the binoculars downward and saw a figure racing toward the beach. Damn. How’d she gotten out of the hotel so fast? The woman really didn’t sleep.

“It’s still too far away to tell,” Keo said. “But it’s moving slow, which means it’s big.”

“Or it could be trying to sneak up on us,” Carly said through the radio.

“No. It’s got its lights on.”

“Keo,” Lara said, “I need you on the beach with me. Maddie, head to the Tower and take his place.”

“I’m on my way,” Maddie said.

Keo nodded at Blaine, then slipped through the door in the floor.

He saw Maddie racing in and out of the lampposts that dotted the hotel grounds as he exited the lighthouse/radio tower. They exchanged a brief nod and he jogged off as she darted into the building behind him, slamming the door after her.

Keo glimpsed dark figures moving around on the hotel rooftop as he ran past. Three up there at the moment, including the twelve-year-old, what’s-his-name. Civilians were usually queasy about kids and guns, but Lara had put the tall kid up there anyway.

She’s ballsy, all right. Gotta give her that.

He made the beach a few minutes later. The short woman with the impressive rack, Gwen, was on top of the supply building to his right, while Bonnie, the tall ex-model, was at the other end of the beach to his left. He wondered if their placements were on purpose, because that was how he had sneaked onto the beach last night. The result of Lara adapting?

He found her at the end of the middle pier, standing underneath one of the bright LED lampposts that lined the walkway.

“What’s out there, guys?” Carly asked through the radio. She sounded anxious.

“It’s definitely a boat,” Lara said. “And it’s headed toward us.”

“Hard to miss the island. We are lit up like a Christmas tree, remember?”

“It’s a yacht,” Keo said. He had been thinking about it during the walk over. “It’s the right size. Two, probably three decks from the position of the lights.”

Lara glanced back at him. “You’ve seen yachts at night before?”

“I’ve boarded one or two in my time.”

“At night?” she said doubtfully.

“Hard to board a boat in the day when they can you see you coming.”

He stopped beside her and peered through his own binoculars. The boat was really moving slowly, as if it was in trouble. Was it leaking? Damaged? Still, he could just make out a bit more detail now. From the front, it was difficult to tell how many decks the vessel had, but its sleek white paint job was clear enough against the blackness.

“How many people does something like that hold?” Lara asked.

“I’m guessing anywhere from five to ten cabins. So two, maybe three per would be comfortable. But you could squeeze in more if you had to. You’d need at least five crewmen to keep something like that running, with eight to ten being preferable.”

“It looks pretty big.”

“The beam can be anywhere from five to ten meters.”

“What’s a beam?”

“The width of the boat.”

“Oh.”

“Something that wide is probably thirty to fifty meters long.”

“Is that big?”

“For a yacht? That’s luxury yacht territory. It’s a moving bed-and-breakfast, basically. Can you hear its engines?”

“Barely,” she said, straining to hear.

“That means it’s got a really quiet engine. Whisper quiet, they call it.”

“You know your yachts.”

“Like I said, I’ve had to board one once or twice in my old job. Of course, that just means I know my own limitations. You need to take something like that, I’m your man. You need someone to keep it afloat? That’s not me.”

Lara hadn’t said anything in a while, so he glanced over. He could see her mind working, processing the information.

“Oh, shit,” he said.

“What?” she said. “I didn’t say anything.”

“I know that look.”

“You don’t even know me.”

“I don’t need to know you to know that look.”

She smiled almost sheepishly. “I was just thinking…”

“Of course you were…”

“…that it might be nice to have a moving bed-and-breakfast on hand.”

Keo had to laugh. “You’re seriously thinking about it, aren’t you?”

“It wouldn’t hurt to have something like that around just in case. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst, as Will would say. Besides, wouldn’t you like to ride something like that to the Texas coast?”

“I’ll make do with a sailboat.”

“Think about it,” she said. Then, into her radio, “Tower, I need you to keep an eye on the rest of the lake in case this is some kind of distraction. I don’t want someone sneaking up on us again.”

“Roger that,” Blaine said through the radio. “What about the boat?”

“Let’s wait and see what they want. They’re not trying to hide their approach, so that’s a positive sign.” She said to Keo, “Can they turn off those lights manually?”

He nodded. “They’re letting us see them on purpose.” Then, “We should probably step back.”

“Why?”

“In case they have snipers onboard.”

“You think…?”

“Can’t be too sure, right? You saw the boat and you’re already making plans to acquire it. And they’ve seen what you have on this island. Even from a distance—”

“The power,” Lara said. “They know we have power.”

“And lots of it,” he nodded.

She turned and headed back down the pier, lifting the radio to her lips again. “Gwen, make yourself as small as possible back there. Bonnie, head back toward the tree lines for now.”

At the end of the pier, Gwen went into a crouch on top of the boat shack and Bonnie retreated up the beach toward the woods.

“Are we expecting trouble?” Roy asked through the radio.

“No,” Lara said. “Just in case.”

Just in case, Keo thought. Apparently that was the island’s motto.

“What now?” he asked her.

“I don’t know.” He thought he might have heard the first sign of a strain in her voice. “I wish Will was here. He’d know what to do.”

“You’re doing pretty well on your own.”

“For now,” she said. They stopped at the end of the pier and looked back at the approaching lights. “You said a boat that size had to have a big crew.”

“At minimum, five people just to keep it running.”

“They can’t be Kate’s soldiers. It’s too obvious.”

“Who’s Kate?”

“This bitch we used to know,” Lara said, but she didn’t elaborate. Instead, she narrowed her eyes and said, “If they’re hostile, it might be too late to do anything about it once they’re closer.” She paused for a moment, and he could almost see that mind of hers spinning again. “Can you sink something like that? I mean, by shooting it?”

“You can sink anything if you shoot it enough,” Keo said.

She continued staring at the approaching lights, her lips twisting, face contorting with indecision. He felt almost sorry for her. It wasn’t just her life at stake here. It was the others, too. Blaine, Maddie, the girl with the big rack behind them.

And the kids. He didn’t even know their names. One of them was Ellie or something. Janet? Wang?

You don’t even know their names. So what’s the point?

Because they’re kids.

Goddamn it, because they’re kids…

“There’s a way to find out if they’re friendlies,” Keo said.

“How?” Lara said, looking at him.

“It’s your island, and it’s your people. If you tell me to go ahead with this, you could be putting them all in unnecessary danger. Or you might be saving their lives. But ultimately, you’re going to have to decide, because once I start, I can’t stop. And whatever happens because of it will be on you. You understand?”

She stared at him, clearly confused. But that confusion quickly gave way to understanding, and she nodded. “Thank you, Keo.”

He sighed. “Don’t thank me yet. This is either going to work out and everyone will live happily ever after, or it’s going to blow up in both of our faces and everyone’s going to end up dead.”

Two nights on this island, and I’m soaked from head to toe…again.

He slipped into the water from the eastern half of the island and swam in the darkness laterally — not toward the approaching yacht, but where he expected it to be at a certain point. His biggest advantage was that he could see the boat just fine to his left along with the island to his right.

Keo swam at a leisurely pace, slowing down and treading water only when he could feel the waves pressing against him more urgently than before. The vessel, bright white against the black canvas, glided in front of him, its half-dozen floodlights on full blast. They definitely weren’t trying to hide themselves. Either they actually did come in peace, or they really, really wanted the island to think that.

From his angle, he was able to count all three decks on the boat, with the highest one also the smallest. He eyeballed the length of the craft at just over forty meters, so he wasn’t too far off when he had guessed from the pier. Keo let it glide smoothly across the water in front of him and read the name written along the side: Trident.

He reached the boat’s stern just as it was passing him by and grabbed at one of the two ladders half-submerged at the back. He thought he had missed it for a moment but felt smooth metal at the last second and tightened his grip, then let himself be dragged through the water. He reached out with his other hand, got a good grip on the wet ladder, and slowly began climbing. The only sound other than the engine was the tricolor Mexican flag flapping from a long metal staff above him.

Keo crawled onto the lower deck, dripping pools of Lake Beaufont everywhere. A large floodlight created a giant halo with him in the center. This part of the boat was designed for lounging and easy access to the water. Fortunately, there was no one around at the moment to see him. He didn’t worry about being overheard, either. The churning engine, “whisper quiet” or not, still overwhelmed most noises around him, especially at night.

He swung the MP5SD forward and flicked off the safety, then darted out of the pool of light.

Keo could feel the vibrations of the boat’s engine room under his bare feet, humming as it pushed the Trident at a ridiculously slow pace toward the island. The boat was definitely moving at speeds well below its capability. So what was the point of that?

Even from his limited angle in the back of the luxury yacht, he could see the well-lit beach of Song Island spread out like a huge welcome mat. The piers in front, the long stretch of white sands, and the ring of solar-powered collector plates looked like glittering jewelry.

Windows and glass doors in front of him provided a nice view of a dimly lit dining room. No movement, so he ignored it and moved to the side toward one of the ladders leading up to the main deck. Keo climbed as quickly as he could, very aware that he was still dripping water with every rung he took.

He was almost at the top when he heard voices. He flattened his body against the ladder as two men walked past above him. Male voices talking in English, with heavy footsteps. He couldn’t quite make out what they were saying, though they sounded excited.

Keo waited until the voices faded before continuing up.

He swung over the rail and landed in a crouch in the back of the main deck, the MP5SD swinging in front of him at the ready. Keo scanned the boat, wondering what he looked like at the moment if someone spotted him. A tall barefoot guy in wet black clothes with a silenced submachine gun. He wouldn’t blame them if the first person who spotted him started shooting. He would, in their shoes.

Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all. He was operating under the assumption that the people on the boat had ulterior motives. Lara thought the same, which was why she had agreed to let him take this approach.

“Don’t shoot unless you have to,” she had said.

“Trust me,” he had replied, “if you hear shooting on the boat, there’s a very damn good reason for it.”

She had nodded solemnly back at him.

Tough girl, he remembered thinking. Tough call. Ballsy call.

He was impressed with her. Keo wasn’t a leader; he didn’t give orders, but he appreciated people who could. Lara was one. He wondered if she had known she possessed that kind of fortitude before the world crapped out on them. Not everyone knew their full potential until they were faced with a cliff and had to take the leap. Lara had, in his eyes, passed with flying colors.

He was squatting in another lounging area, one that was open to the moonless sky, with a darkened room in front of him. Sofas, chairs, and a bar. Entertainment center. The bridge was above him on the upper deck, and he moved toward another rung of ladders and climbed again. He wasn’t dripping quite as much water this time and didn’t encounter voices above him, either.

He went into a crouch next to the ladders and took a moment to orient himself with the boat’s layout. Then, after about ten seconds, he found an unlocked door and slipped inside.

Another entertainment room, with a big-screen TV on a wall with a wide array of media players and electronics facing comfortable sofas. There was plenty of evidence that the place had been lived in, but the details were hidden in semidarkness. He slipped through the spacious room, reaching a spiral staircase to his right that led back down to the main deck. The bridge was in front of him and around a slight turn in the narrow passageway.

He tiptoed down the hallway, then peered around the corner and into the bridge through an open door. There were two men inside, one standing at the helm, the other one next to him looking through binoculars at the island. They wore gun belts with sidearms in hip holsters, and an AK-47 lay across an empty chair, another one leaning against the console. Their backs were to him, so he couldn’t see their faces and only caught glimpses of their reflections in the wide windshield up front. The one with his hands on the steering wheel was wearing a white captain’s hat that didn’t look like it quite fit him.

They were in the middle of a conversation, so Keo leaned back and listened.

“How many do you see?” the “captain” asked.

“Just three,” the other one said.

“What does Rod say?”

The man with the binoculars grabbed a radio off the console and said into it, “Give me a count, Rod.”

“I see two,” a third muffled voice said through the radio. “But I saw four about thirty minutes ago when we were on approach. One’s gone and one’s just disappeared. I think one of them went into the woods.”

“Where’d the fourth one go?”

He’s behind you, Keo thought.

“I have no idea,” the man named Rod said.

“Do you have a shot?” the captain asked.

Rod didn’t answer right away.

“Rod,” the captain pressed, “do you have a shot?”

“One’s moving around too much,” Rod said. “But the other one’s pretty still. He’s crouched on top of a building. Looks like a storage shack. Short fucker, too.”

“Can you take him?” the second man asked.

“Probably,” Rod said.

“‘Probably’ isn’t good enough.”

“Yeah, well, that’s all you’re gonna get,” Rod said. “Take it or leave it.”

The captain grunted. “We should have put Hank up there instead. He always follows orders.”

“Rod’s okay,” the second man said. “You think they got diesel in that place?”

“Fat chance of that. But you see those things around the island? Those are solar panels. That means they have a constant reliable power source. When was the last time we had that?”

“So we’re definitely doing this, then.”

“Hell yeah,” the captain said. “Tell the boys to stay hidden, but get ready. We’ll see what kind of firepower they have first.”

“I still think we should have taken the lifeboats inland instead of just showing up with lights flashing.”

“It’s called a Trojan Horse. And it’s worked before. If it ain’t broke…”

“…don’t fix it,” the other man finished.

There was a slight tremor in their voices. It wasn’t fear. Keo recognized it from all those times he was deployed into a new arena.

It was excitement.

Clang-clang from behind him, coming from the spiral staircase that connected the main and upper decks.

Keo hurried back down the hallway and slipped behind the staircase just as a bearded man wearing a sweat-drenched T-shirt climbed up the steps. The man had a shotgun slung over his back and a gun belt was riding low around his waist. He was turning, the staircase moving him from left to right as he climbed higher and higher.

Keo slung the MP5SD and slowly, silently, slid the Ka-Bar out of its sheath.

He took a breath, and just as the man put his foot onto the wooden floor of the upper deck, Keo lunged forward and slapped one hand over the man’s mouth and stabbed him once, twice, three times in the side before the man could get out his first startled gasp. Keo kept his grip over the man’s mouth as he lowered the still-twitching body to the floor. Blood poured out of the gaping wounds and over Keo’s fingers, but he ignored the warm sensation.

His eyes remained fixed down the hallway, toward the bridge hidden around the bend. He could still hear them talking.

“You think they have women on the island?” one of them was asking. It sounded like the one with the binoculars.

“What are the chances they don’t?” the captain said.

“It’ll be nice to get some new ones onboard.”

The other man chuckled. “Just keep it in your pants until we have the whole place locked down.”

“Remember, we get first dibs.”

The bearded man had gone completely still in Keo’s arms. He lowered the body all the way to the floor and wiped blood off his hand against the man’s dry pants.

“Rod sound a little rebellious to you a while ago?” the “first mate” was asking.

“A little,” the captain said. “Probably cabin fever. We’ve been at sea for way too long.”

“Must be.”

Keo tugged the shotgun from the lifeless body and stood up. He would have used the MP5SD, but the suppressor wasn’t going to make a lot of noise. And right now, he needed to make noise. Enough that Lara could hear all the way from the island.

“Don’t shoot unless you have to,” she had said.

“Trust me, if you hear shooting on the boat, there’s a very damn good reason for it,” he had answered.

He headed back down the hallway and turned the corner, and as soon as he stepped inside the bridge, the captain saw his reflection in the glass.

The man looked over his shoulder. “Who the fuck are you?”

“You the captain?” Keo asked.

The “first mate” turned around and went for his sidearm. Keo fired and the man’s head disintegrated in a hail of buckshot that continued and spiderwebbed the windshield behind him, splattering chunks of brain and skull against the console.

Keo racked the shotgun and swung it back over to the captain. “I asked you a question.”

“I–I guess,” the man said.

Keo stepped forward and pulled the man’s sidearm out of its holster. It was a fancy silver chrome six-shot revolver. “Nice gun.”

“Thanks,” the captain said.

Keo shot the man in the right kneecap with his own gun. The captain howled in pain and fell to the floor. Keo grabbed him by the back of his shirt collar and dragged him across the room, then deposited him into a corner.

“Stay,” Keo said.

Even through the captain’s high-pitched cries, Keo heard footsteps pounding across the boat, originating from outside the bridge. They weren’t being the least bit subtle about it. Then again, they probably didn’t know what the hell was happening.

He slid the revolver into his waistband and leaned out the door just as a bald man poked his head up the spiral staircase. Keo lowered the shotgun’s iron sight over the melon-size target.

Nice and juicy, just the way he liked them.

32 Gaby

She shouldn’t be this afraid. If her chances were decent when she was lugging around three girls, then having Will and Danny beside her was a hell of an improvement. But of course all those times didn’t involve a small army of Josh’s soldiers pinning her inside a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere and the knowledge that the coming night was going to bring out something worse.

Will said there had been four of them in Dunbar. He had killed two. Four minus two got you two.

Four!

She wasn’t sure she wanted to see them. Just hearing stories about the creatures — from Will, from Lara, from Blaine and Maddie — was creepy enough. She had never actually felt the need to ever come face-to-face with the abominations.

Gaby shivered slightly and was glad no one was around to see it.

She was on the second floor, crouched at the head of the stairs, looking down at total darkness. Ten feet. That was all that separated her from the first floor, where the ghouls would come in first. Unless, of course, they decided to try climbing the two-story house. That was possible, too.

“They can be creative when the blue-eyed ones are around,” Will had said.

Gaby shifted her bent legs to keep them from falling asleep. Lance was sitting against the wall next to her, an AR-15 loaded with silver ammo in his lap. His eyes were focused on the peeling wallpaper in front of him, just barely visible in the streams of moonlight filtering through the main bedroom further down the hallway to their left. The door was open and Danny’s silhouetted form stood still, peering out the slots they had left in the window after covering it up with slabs of countertop from the second-floor bathroom.

There wasn’t enough light to see much of anything, though her eyes had adjusted to the darkness and her mind filled in the missing pieces. She couldn’t see Will on the first floor, but she could hear him moving from one barricaded window to another every few minutes. Nightfall had come an hour ago, and they were still waiting for signs of an attack.

Because it was coming. She knew that for a fact. There was no way they were getting through tonight untouched.

Gaby was in the center of the second floor, with two bedrooms to her right and a bathroom at the very end. All three doors had been removed to cover the first-floor windows and reinforce the main bedroom. Closet doors, along with whatever else they could take down, had also been used to block the other windows along the floor. It wasn’t impossible to get through the barriers, but it would take a lot of force and there wasn’t a lot of leverage to be had while clinging to the outside. Just the same, they had sealed up the other bedroom windows with dresser, beds, and furniture.

Better safe than sorry. Always better safe than sorry.

She felt reasonably safe up here. It was the first floor that they had to worry about. The fortification would hold for a while, but not forever. Sooner or later, the ghouls would batter their way through. And if they couldn’t, then their human allies could open the door, literally, for the creatures. Then there would just be the stairs to block their path.

A click in her right ear, and Danny’s voice. “Anyone huffing and puffing down there yet?”

She heard him loud and clear through the earbud, connected to a Motorola radio clipped to her hip. Danny and Will only had two of their assault vests, but Danny had brought along an additional comm rig when he came looking for them days ago and found Will outside of Lafayette. She reached up and pulled at the plastic band wrapped around her throat. Gaby didn’t think she would ever get used to the constricting feel of it against her skin.

“Nothing in the front yards,” Will said. “You?”

“I got zilch and nada,” Danny said.

“What about the soldiers?”

“Still hanging around. Buggers aren’t leaving anytime soon. All dressed up and nowhere to go.”

“Ghouls?”

“I see them.”

“How many?”

“How do you say ‘a shit lot’ in Spanish?”

“What are they doing? How are they reacting to the soldiers?”

“They’re leaving them alone.”

Gaby keyed her radio. “How do they know to leave the soldiers alone? Is it the uniforms?”

“Maybe,” Will said.

“Like with the hazmat suits.”

“Likely.”

“Aw, shit,” Danny said.

“What is it?” Will said.

“Buckle up your seat belt, kids, here comes trouble. And the bitch brought friends.”

Will didn’t respond. Gaby waited impatiently, wanting to ask what they were seeing, but somehow managed to bite her tongue. She felt a pair of eyes on her and glanced over at Lance. He was watching her and had been for a while. Questions flooded his eyes, but like her, he was exercising amazing restraint. Lance was in his late twenties but looked older.

“I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head at him.

He nodded, grateful for at least that much.

Then Will’s voice, finally, in her right ear. “Gaby.”

“Yeah,” she said.

“Remember: shoot them in the head.”

“In the head,” she repeated. Then, “How many of them are out there?”

“Four.”

“Four?” Gaby said, almost shouting the word out.

“You think it’s a new group, or did they get reinforcements?” Danny asked.

“I have no idea,” Will said. “I can’t tell them apart. One blue-eyed fuck looks like the other to me.”

“You’re such a racist.”

“Four?” Gaby said again.

“It’s probably because of what Willie boy did back in Dunbar,” Danny said.

“Or protocol,” Will said. “They operate as squads of four. They lose two, they replace two. Or maybe it’s an entirely different group. That doesn’t seem likely, though.”

“Maybe one of them’s your ghoulfriend.”

“Ex-ghoulfriend.”

“What are they doing, Will?” Gaby asked.

“The black-eyed ones are staying back along with the soldiers. It’s just the shock troops.”

“Shock troops?”

“That’s what this guy back in Dunbar called them. It’s not a bad theory.”

“What was that guy’s name, Brick?” Danny said.

“Bratt,” Will said.

“Ah, that’s right.”

“What happened to him?” Gaby asked.

“He didn’t make it,” Will said.

Of course not. What a stupid question.

Gaby heard a soft tapping noise and looked over at Lance. His fingers were moving nervously against the side of the AR-15 while his eyes had returned to the same patch of dirty wallpaper in front of him.

“Lance,” she whispered.

He glanced over. “Hmm?”

“You okay?”

He nodded and tried to smile. “Yeah. You?”

“We’ll be fine. Will and Danny are really good at this. Just do what we talked about, okay? Exactly what we talked about, and you’ll get through this fine.”

“Okay,” he said, and made another futile attempt at a smile.

She turned back to the stairs and peered down at the pool of darkness below, wondering just where her ability to suddenly bullshit with such conviction came from. She had never been a particularly good liar, but these days, lying came easier. She wanted to think it was because Lance needed the assurance, but maybe it was for her own benefit, too.

A click in her right ear, followed by Danny’s voice. “Gaby.”

“Yeah?” she said.

“You’ve never seen one of them before, right?”

“No…”

“Come take a look.”

Gaby stood up and said “Stay here” to Lance then jogged up the hallway toward the bedroom.

Danny peeked over his shoulder as she approached. “It’s time you find out what all the crazy kids are talking about. It’s a real gas, man.”

Gaby moved across the large bedroom, looking briefly over at Claire, Milly, and Annie huddled on the floor next to the king-size bed. Claire had the FNH gripped tightly in her hands, while Milly was lying across Annie’s lap, her eyes closed. Annie stroked the girl’s hair, the two of them finding comfort in each other. Claire, though, was all business. She caught Gaby’s eyes and nodded. Gaby smiled back at her.

She’s going to make a great soldier one of these days.

Gaby reached the window and slid against the wall across from Danny. They had left plenty of slots to see out through, with the biggest being a few inches wide. He pointed at the front yard, lit up by the moonlight. It was amazingly bright out there and she could make out a lone figure standing next to one of the trucks with the mounted machine guns.

The first thing she noticed was the way it stood — tall, like a human male. It also looked noticeably healthier than the other ghouls she was used to seeing, which usually made her think of loose flesh draped over skeletal remains. And its eyes. If she couldn’t quite make out the details of its body, she had no trouble seeing its eyes.

Blue eyes. Blue fucking eyes.

She always believed Will and the others when they told her about the existence of the blue-eyed ghouls, but maybe there was a part of her (a very, very small part) that was doubtful. But here, now, staring down the window at one of them — and being watched back by it — she felt a hollowness in the pit of her stomach.

They’re real. Jesus, they’re real.

In some ways, she thought she knew the world. Even after The Purge when she was confronted with an all-new set of realities, she had become accustomed to it and understood its rules: Stay out of the dark. Silver kills. Bodies of water. Now there was something new, and suddenly everything was upside down again. It was almost enough to make her want to scream and pull out her hair.

“There and there,” Danny said.

She followed where he was pointing and saw a second one standing next to the supply shack on the left side of the yard. And there, a third, perched on top of the same building. Three pairs of blue eyes glowed in the darkness.

Radiant blue, like diamonds…

“Three,” she said, her voice coming out strangely calm (Why am I so calm?). “You said there were four.”

He pointed again. “And heeeeeere’s Johnny.”

The fourth blue-eyed ghoul emerged out of the sea of black, moving with impossibly fluid steps for something that shouldn’t even exist. It was pulling a man behind it by a strap it held almost nonchalantly in its right hand. The other end of the line was wrapped around the man’s neck, like some kind of dog leash. The man didn’t struggle against his restraints or seemed capable of resistance. All the fight had clearly been beaten out of him.

The ghoul and its “pet” stopped about ten feet from the front door of the farmhouse. It tugged at the leash and the man staggered forward until he was standing beside his “master” before falling (gratefully, tiredly) to his knees. The man had distinctive red hair, the color providing an absurd contrast next to the black-skinned creature with the smooth black skull.

The man lifted his head and looked in her direction. Blood coated his face from forehead to chin, and he peered across the short distance through badly bruised eyes.

Harrison.

She always wondered what had happened to him after she pushed him out of the car. Now she knew.

Gaby keyed her radio. “That’s Harrison.”

“Yeah,” Will said in her ear.

“You’ve met him before?”

“No.”

“How did you know who he was?”

“It’s a long story.”

“The guy from Dunbar?” Danny asked.

“Uh huh,” Will said.

“What’s it doing with him?” Gaby said.

She had no love for Harrison. She hated the man’s guts. He had killed Peter, all because he “had to make sure.” That phrase haunted Gaby. They were such simple words, but there was nothing simple about the result.

“They like to play,” Will said through her earbud. “They played with Lance and Annie’s friends last night. And they were toying with us back in Dunbar, too. They called off the dogs when they had us trapped just so they could have more fun. It’s all a game to them. A sick, bloody game.”

“I’ve been telling Willie boy,” Danny said, “that if they like games so much, we should introduce them to Parcheesi or Monopoly. All the fun and none of the fatality. Win-win.”

The other blue-eyed monstrosities in the yard hadn’t moved. The one on the roof of the shack continued to stare in her direction while the other two remained perfectly still, as if waiting for the show to begin. There was an effortlessness about the way they just stood that unnerved her, as if they could stay in that pose all night and never have to move for even a second. It was so…unnatural.

“Here we go,” Danny said softly.

The ghoul tugged on the leash, and Harrison stood up obediently. Gaby braced herself for what she thought she knew was coming when the creature beckoned its captive toward it. Long, delicate fingers reached toward Harrison’s throat, and when they pulled away seconds later, the leash was no longer attached. It had freed him.

Why?

When Harrison realized this, he groped at his neck to make sure. He stared at the creature, then around the front yard, before finally up at the second floor. She wondered if he could see her and Danny peeking back at him through the slits. Maybe just her eyes. Was that enough? Did he know she was up here? For some reason, she hoped he didn’t. The prospect of her name being shouted out loud in front of those things made her shiver.

The blue-eyed ghoul opened its mouth and said something to Harrison. Its voice was too low for her to hear from up here.

Its voice.

It’s talking!

“Oh yeah, apparently they can talk, too,” Danny, seeing her reaction, said from across the window.

Harrison was backpedaling in the yard now. First slowly, then quicker, while glancing wildly around him. Then he did what she knew he would do — what she feared he would: He ran toward the farmhouse and straight to the front door. He disappeared under the window and a second later she heard loud banging from below.

Then Harrison’s voice, pained and panicked. “Open the door! Please, open the door! Let me in! You have to let me in!”

The ghoul tossed away the rope and watched Harrison. There was a look on its face, something she had never seen before on the creatures. It looked amused. She turned slightly and saw the same look on the faces of the other three.

They’re enjoying every second of it.

The loud banging continued for a while along with Harrison’s voice. “Please! For God’s sake, open the door! You have to let me in!”

Like hell, Gaby thought, when the banging suddenly stopped.

Harrison reappeared outside her window for a moment before whirling around, expecting an attack at any second. So did she. They were both surprised that none came. Harrison turned and fled up the yard. Then he stopped, seemed to be trying to get his bearings, before taking off again, this time running alongside the house and disappearing.

The creatures hadn’t moved. They simply watched him go. Waiting.

For what?

“There he goes,” Danny said.

“Are they just going to let him go?” Gaby asked.

He shook his head, and in a voice that was odd for Danny, he said solemnly, “No.”

The first ghoul to move was the one perched on the shack. It leaped off the building and darted off in the same direction that Harrison had gone. Then a second one took off, followed quickly by a third, until all four had vanished from the yard.

There was just silence again.

“What are they going to do to him?” she whispered.

Danny shook his head and didn’t answer.

A minute passed, and she was only aware of her shallow breathing.

Five minutes…

She looked across at Danny again, hoping to find some answers from his expression. There weren’t any. He was waiting and listening like her. Maybe he knew something more, but he didn’t say it. She was going to click her PTT and ask Will when a scream pierced the night air.

Harrison.

It was shrill and loud and seemed to go on and on and on.

She had never heard that kind of scream in her life. It wasn’t just that he was in pain. There was mortal terror in every second of it.

And my God, did it seem to keep going, and going…

She had difficulty reconciling that voice with the hardened man who had beaten Peter half to death (or if he hadn’t done it himself, had ordered it), then later tossed Donna out of the car to die on the highway. She wanted not to feel sorry for him, but she did anyway.

Gaby didn’t know how to interpret her feelings. Was it weakness? He was her enemy. She shouldn’t care what was happening to him. Or was it strength? Was courage being able to feel empathy even for your enemy? She didn’t know. She only knew that no one, not even Harrison, deserved what was happening out there at this moment.

No one…

She looked back at the girls huddled in the corner. Annie had placed her hands over Milly’s ears and the girl looked half-asleep in her lap. But it was Claire’s eyes that Gaby saw. The thirteen-year-old’s face was placid, unmoved by Harrison’s cries.

Click. “Gaby,” Will said in her ear. “I need you back at the stairs.”

“On my way,” she said, and walked quickly across the room.

She was glad to leave the window, because the further she moved away from it, the harder it was to hear Harrison’s continued screams. Until finally she was back in the hallway, and she couldn’t hear the dying man anymore.

Lance looked over at her. “They’re doing it again, aren’t they? Like last time. Back at our house. They’re doing it again…”

She didn’t reply. Instead, Gaby sat numbly back down at the head of the stairs, then flicked the fire selector on her M4 from semi-automatic to burst fire. She longed for her own weapon, or at least something with full-auto capability. At least she had silver bullets in her rifle again, so there was that.

“Remember: shoot them in the head,” Will had said.

Right. Shoot them in the head.

Easy enough…

The next two hours ticked by in silence, inside and outside the farmhouse. The lack of noise — or any sounds at all — was nerve-wracking.

Blue-eyed ghouls.

She could have lived the rest of her life without seeing them in person.

Not just one, but four.

Four!

She shivered again in the semidarkness and looked quickly to see if Lance had noticed. She shouldn’t have bothered. Lance had dozed off, the AR-15 positioned awkwardly across his lap. She thought about taking the rifle away from him. The last thing she wanted was for him to wake up suddenly and start shooting. And the barrel was pointed right at her, too…

The neon hand of her watch ticked to 10:16 p.m.

Not even close to sunrise. When did the sun come out last time? Around seven?

All we have to do is survive nine more hours.

Oh, that’s it?

The clicking noise in her right ear made her jump slightly. “What’s the word, daddy bird?” Danny said through the comm.

“Jack shit,” Will said.

“How long does it take to eat Harrison? The guy was kind of thick around the ankles. An hour? Two?”

“Oh, nice.”

“What? Too soon?”

“Way too soon.”

“Oh, come on. It wasn’t like we really knew the guy. You know what they say about gingers.”

Tap.

Gaby’s eyes darted up to the ceiling.

Tap tap.

She reached down and squeezed the Push-to-Talk switch connected to her radio. “I hear something.”

“Sorry, kid, I tried to hold it in,” Danny said.

“No, above us.”

“What was it?” Will asked.

“Footsteps. I think.”

She looked across the hallway and saw Danny, still stationed at the window, craning his head upward toward the ceiling.

Tap tap.

“I hear it,” Danny said.

“Ignore it,” Will said. “They’re just probing the roof, looking for a weak spot.”

“What if they find it?” she asked.

“Then we’re shit out of luck with a fist full of ham sandwiches,” Danny said.

Gaby listened intently to the noise above her when it suddenly stopped.

She breathed a little easier.

They’re probing. That’s all. They’re just probing for weaknesses.

“Gaby,” Will said in her ear.

“Yes…”

“Stay where you are. You’re in the perfect spot right now. And wake Lance up.”

She smiled. “How’d you know?”

“He’s not one of us.”

Gaby felt a flush of pride. “One of us.” Her, Danny, and Will. The three of them. In this post-Purge world, it meant the world for him to include her.

She turned to Lance and put her hand on his shoulder, giving it a slight nudge.

He opened his eyes and snapped awake, looking around before locating her through his groggy haze. “What’s happening?”

“You were asleep.”

“Oh.” He rubbed his eyes, then wrapped his hands back around his rifle as if it were his lifeline. The barrel was still pointed at her…

Gaby turned back to the stairs. Or the pitch blackness at the other end. She could really see only the first half dozen or so steps, with the rest hidden in the shadows.

“Heads up,” Danny said in her ear.

“I see it,” Will said.

Gaby glanced to her left, past Lance and into the open bedroom door at Danny. He had taken a step away from the window and had lifted his M4A1 slightly.

“Danny,” Gaby said out loud. “What’s happening?”

“They’re back,” he said through her earbud.

“The blue-eyed ones?”

“Ol’ blue eyes. Maybe they want to serenade us. Sing us to death.” Then he added, his voice rising noticeably, “Shit.”

“What is it?” Will said through the comm.

“I only see two of them.”

“Find the other two—”

Something that sounded like an explosion rang out, drowning out Will’s voice. Gaby moved on instinct, diving further up the hallway, away from the stairs, just as the first pieces of rubble came tumbling down from above her.

The roof. It was caving in on them.

“Lance!” she shouted.

He was struggling to his feet, legs wobbly from sitting too long, and hadn’t straightened all the way up before the roof crashed down on top of him. He let out something that sounded like a scream (A squeal?) before he was pummeled by falling slate tiles. One of them broke over Lance’s head and he stumbled, somehow managing to brace himself against the wall, as more roofing material flooded down on top of him one by one by one.

Then it came down.

It.

One of the creatures. It fell down from the sky like some archangel, minus the wings and halo and good intentions, landing in a crouch next to Lance. It straightened up, its body impossibly long, spindly arms and legs extending in what little light was available in the second-floor hallway.

Glowing blue eyes searched her out, and finding her, zeroed in.

It was gripping something long and shiny in one of its hands. Moonlight glinted off the smooth surface of a sledgehammer.

“Gaby!” Will shouted in her ear.

She was too busy scrambling back up to her feet to respond. She didn’t think and didn’t waste a second. She simply reacted, lifting the M4 and pulling the trigger. The carbine bucked in her hands and the sound of the three-round burst in the close confines of the hallway was like three powerful thunder strikes, one after another.

Her aim was true, and she hit it with all three rounds in the chest.

But it didn’t go down.

It didn’t go down.

Instead, it looked back at her and grinned before tossing the sledgehammer away. Then it took a step forward. Pow! A bullet hit the creature from behind. That same bullet punched through flesh and zipped past her head before disappearing into the wall behind her. Slurping noises as thick, coagulated black blood burst out of the fresh hole in the thing’s neck and splashed with a sickening plop against the floor.

“Gaby, get down!” Danny shouted from the other side of the hallway.

Her mind was reeling, the sight of the creature still standing after she had put three silver bullets into its chest making it hard for her to think straight.

“Remember: shoot them in the head,” Will had said.

Shoot them in the head!

The creature wasn’t looking at her anymore. It was already turning and bounding up the hallway toward Danny, who was firing, having switched to full-auto. Bullets pierced the creature’s body and embedded into walls as Danny tried to track its constantly moving and shifting form. It was dodging his gunfire. How was that even possible? Were they really that fast?

Stupid question, because she could see it with her own eyes.

Danny’s silver rounds that did land were penetrating the creature’s body and continued on, zip-zipping up the narrow space like flies buzzing, slamming into the wall around her. She had to duck to keep from being hit by a stray bullet, and suddenly the prospect of dying by friendly fire was very real.

In a crouch, Gaby lifted her rifle and tried to get a bead on the creature as it fled away from her (“Shoot them in the head!”). Before she could fire, she lost track of it as it disappeared into the room. It was suddenly on the floor and Danny was under it, fighting for his life, and she couldn’t make out where the creature ended and Danny began.

Instead, she reached down and pressed the PTT, and shouted, “They’re inside! Will, they’re inside the house!”

Where the hell was Will? Couldn’t he hear what was happening up here? What was he doing down there? What—

There was a massive BOOM! and the entire house shook from its foundations all the way up to its ceiling, as if a bomb had gone off on the floor under her.

The first floor. Will.

What the hell was happening down there?

She started forward toward the stairs—

— when a second creature fell through the same hole the first one had made with the sledgehammer and landed in an elegant crouch in front of her. It made so little noise, and there was so little effort in its movements, that for a moment the sight of it straightening up, stretching its body like some twisted, deformed ballerina, startled Gaby to the core.

It had its back to her as it rose to its full height — it was at least a foot taller than her, maybe more — and turned around. Gaby became instantly mesmerized by its ethereal blue eyes. Like two impossibly bright orbs washing over the darkened hallway, reaching into her very soul.

It opened its mouth, revealing twisted and cracked brown and yellow teeth stained with oozing black liquid that looked, for some reason, as if they, too, were alive and wiggling.

“Wanna play?” it hissed, eyes glinting with mischief in the moonlight.

33 Will

The darkness did things to you these days. It lulled you into a strange state of numbness with its overwhelming silence, the unnatural sense of calm that seemed to pervade everything, while at the same time it made you dread all the things out there that you couldn’t see.

Inevitable. Night after night.

Are we just living on borrowed time? Is that all it is?

Tonight. Tomorrow night. The week after. The next month?

How long can we keep the island? How long can we keep fighting them before it becomes too much? Before the costs are too great?

How long…

He had to shake himself to rid his mind of those depressing thoughts. Being downstairs by himself didn’t help. The most he could do to keep busy was move from window to window, checking every corner of the front yard. He couldn’t really see the soldiers on the road from here, but he knew they were still out there, somewhere.

When they finally came, he was able to concentrate on the matter at hand. His senses were never more razor sharp as they were during the preamble to combat. He felt it now, the hyper awareness of his surroundings. Every sound, every flickering image, and every glowing blue eye.

As he watched them toying with Harrison, he realized just how different these creatures were. They were the same, but not — an entirely new breed of what he was familiar with. Radically different. More dangerous. This was why they had kept the other ghouls back in Dunbar. Because this was their show. Their sport. Harrison was a warm-up and now they were coming for the main event. He and the others inside the house.

So where were they now? What was taking them so long?

Will glanced back at the staircase behind him. It was too dark to make out much of anything on the first floor even with the slivers of moonlight filtering in through the barricades over the windows, one next to him and the other one on the other side of the door. He could just make out the stair landing—

There was a loud crash from above him, and the entire house shuddered.

He reached for his radio. “Gaby!”

He waited for a response, but there wasn’t any. Instead, he heard the pop-pop-pop of an M4 exploding from the second floor. Three-shot burst. Gaby’s rifle, because Danny still had his M4A1 and he would have either used single shots or gone full-auto.

Will abandoned the window as more gunfire erupted from the top of the stairs. In the packed confines of the house, the sounds were thunderous, but they couldn’t quite drown out the voice. Danny’s, shouting between gunshots. He wasn’t using the radio, either. That was a bad sign.

The first floor. Stay on the first floor! Don’t abandon—

Then Gaby’s voice, blasting through his earbud. “They’re inside! Will, they’re inside the house!”

He was at the stairs, grabbing for the wooden globe on top of the newel, when shadowed movements flickered across the wall in front of him. Figures, moving outside one of the windows, their shapes casting across the room by moonlight.

He spun back around and saw the indistinguishable shapes moving on the other side of the window he had abandoned just seconds ago. As soon as he saw them, the silhouetted forms raced away again.

What—?

The explosion (or was that explosions?) shredded the window, the barrier over it, and a large section of the house around them. Will dived to the floor as chunks of the wall and even the porch buzzed over and around his head, sharp pieces embedding into the floor inches from him. Debris rained down across the room and his ears were buzzing. He was sure he had gone temporarily deaf (Please let it be temporary), though that couldn’t possibly be the case because he could still hear continuous gunfire from above him.

Grenades? Did they just use grenades on the wall?

Jesus Christ.

He looked up from the floor, expecting the entire house to come tumbling down on top of him at any second. But it didn’t. Somehow, by some miracle, the second floor remained where it was — above him — despite the jagged, gaping hole across the room looking out into the moonlit yard. Absurdly, the door next to it had remained intact, as had the repurposed lumber they nailed over it. Smoke from the explosion poured out of the house, and he became aware of the chilly night air for the first time in the last few hours.

He managed to scramble to his knees, glad he hadn’t lost the M4A1 during his swan dive. Pieces of wood and glass fell off his shoulders and back and head, and there may or may not have been a trickle (or two or a dozen) of blood flowing down his face. His ears were still ringing, which made the sight of two figures, both in camo uniforms and gas masks, stepping through the hole in the wall and moving against the lingering smoke look like monsters in a bad dream.

He couldn’t hear his carbine firing, but he could feel it bucking against his hands.

The first man slumped forward while the second one tried desperately to track him in the smoke. His vision was likely blocked by the limited view of the gas mask.

Sucks to be you.

Will put a bullet into the second man’s right eye. He stumbled awkwardly before collapsing into a pile.

Will struggled to his feet. His equilibrium was off and he swayed left, then right, then left again. The coughing fits didn’t help him adjust any quicker as he reached out with his free left hand, got a grip on something solid, and finally managed to steady himself.

Or as steady as he could get, anyway. The room had begun to spin and he considered falling back to the floor, where it would be so much easier to regain his senses. The world had looked pretty stable from down there, and he didn’t remember coughing nearly as much, either. Up here, though, the smoke was everywhere, and it was hard to just breathe.

The wall he was touching shook, but he had a hard time tracing where the vibrations were coming from. Behind him? Above? Maybe from outside the house. It could have been more steady gunfire from the second floor. Gaby and Danny were still up there. So were Lance and Annie and the two girls.

What’s happening up there?

He made to turn back toward the stairs to go find out when he saw the shadows shifting once again out of the corner of his eye. He spun back around just in time to see a pair of blue slits glowing in the swirling smoke.

They were coming—launching—at him.

Will reflexively struck out with the rifle, because lifting it and firing would have taken more time — a second, maybe two, that he didn’t have. The M4A1 vibrated on contact, both his arms shaking long after he had swung from right to left, his body turning with his momentum.

It didn’t fall very far and it was back up on its feet even before Will could right himself. It attacked again, springing like an animal on all fours, barreling into his chest and knocking him back. He groped for the wall but couldn’t find it and briefly had a feeling of being weightless as he was thrust through empty air before crashing back down to earth.

He was in the back hallway, past the stairs leading up to the second floor. The door was farther behind him, invisible in the darkness. For a moment, he waited for another blue-eyed ghoul to break its way through that side of the house—

Concentrate! Focus!

The creature climbed up the length of his body and he felt (impossibly) cold dead fingers wrapping around his throat, over the plastic band of the mic. A pair of glorious gems in the blackness bore down at him even as thin, pencil-like lips curled into a smile. It leaned down until its face — the deformed shape of the skull obvious behind smooth black flesh — was inches from his own.

Will stared up at it, fumbling with his fingers for the cross-knife in its sheath along his left hip, cursing himself for losing the rifle. He hadn’t even remembered when he had lost it. Hopefully it was still somewhere nearby.

The rifle.

Lara called it superstition, but he called it habit.

She’s probably right. I am superstitious about the damn thing. I should tell her that when I get back to the island.

I love you, Lara, please forgive me for dying.

He couldn’t breathe. How long had it been since he took his last (smoke-filled) breath? A second ago? Two seconds? Ten? An hour?

The creature’s fingers were tightening with every erratic heartbeat he managed, and he momentarily rejoiced at the touch of the cross-knife’s smooth handle.

The brain.

Go for the brain.

Will pulled the knife out and swung it upward in a wide arc—

— but the sharp point never reached its destination. The creature’s other hand had intercepted his swing well short of its intended target.

Oh, shit.

“We know,” it hissed at him. “Didn’t Kate tell you?” It was holding his hand up in the air with hardly any effort. “We know what happened with the others. How it happened. You didn’t think we’d let you get away with it twice, did you?”

He could hear its voice, which meant he hadn’t gone deaf after all. Thank God.

“Don’t worry,” the creature hissed. “It’s not going to end that easily for you, Will. Kate made us promise her this time. I think she has big plans for you. Of course, she didn’t say anything about punishing you for what happened at Dunbar first.”

Its lips curled into a devilish grin.

He somehow found the strength to look away from its face to his own hand, suspended in the air, the cross-knife (Go for the brain!) frozen in place. It didn’t even look like the ghoul was exerting any effort at all. It was so strong. So fast and so strong. What chance did he have against an army of these things? What chance did Lara and the island have?

Lara. At least I got to talk to her one last time.

Please forgive me for dying.

His vision was faltering and the creature’s fingers were still tightening, and Will swore he could feel cold bones cutting into the skin around his throat. Was that even possible? Who the hell knew? He didn’t. Right now, all he could do was lie on the floor and wait to die, wait to be taken, wait to be given to Kate…

BOOM!

The hallway trembled, as if it had been hit by an earthquake.

The walls, the ceiling, and even the floor underneath him quaked in the aftermath of the shotgun blast at such close proximity.

Will’s eyes snapped open because he could breathe again.

Air!

The creature was still perched on top of him, but it had turned its head and was glaring at something behind it. Chunks of its shoulder and neck were gone, and blood arced out of the ruptured flesh and splattered the wall next to it in a grisly shower of thick, clumpy black blood.

Will looked past the ghoul and saw a small figure standing at the mouth of the hallway, holding a shotgun.

Claire. It was Claire. The little girl with the FNH semi-automatic shotgun.

How’d she get down here?

Claire fired again — the massive BOOM! lighting up the hallway a second time.

The blue-eyed ghoul’s head jerked backward as buckshot tore into its face, shards of shiny white skull shattering and imploding in the air. Meaty globs of foul-smelling flesh hit Will in the face before he could turn his head in time.

Then his left hand was free and Will wrestled it loose from the ghoul’s grip, even as the lifeless (again) body on top of him flopped sideways to the floor. The creature’s form was so much lighter now that Will found it difficult to understand how this almost feathery thing landing next to him was the same creature that had, just moments ago, smashed into him like a five-ton elephant.

He sucked in air like a drowning man, scrambling up from the floor, trying desperately to command his legs to work properly. Maybe it was the lack of oxygen, or the throbbing pain. Despite what the creature had said about promising Kate (What the hell did that even mean?), it sure didn’t seem to care that it was about to crush every bone in his throat.

Claire was standing in front of him, staring at the dead (headless) body resting in a thick pool of its own blood. She didn’t seemed to notice him as he finally got back on his feet and grabbed the wall to steady himself, the creature’s flesh and blood caking his face and clothes like a second layer of rotting skin.

Goddamn, it smells.

The continued loud clatter of gunfire from the second floor told him everything he needed to know — it wasn’t over. Far from it.

The gunfire snapped Claire out of it, and the girl rushed over and grabbed his waist with one hand — the other still clutching the shotgun — to keep him upright because, even though he didn’t realize it, he needed her help. She was a small, frail thing, but she gave herself up as a crutch so he could stand on wobbly feet.

“My rifle,” Will said, his voice coming out as a croak. “My rifle,” he said again, louder and clearer this time.

“I don’t know,” Claire said. Her own voice was strained but somehow still impossibly calm.

She’s going to make a great soldier…if we survive this.

“What are you doing down here?” he asked.

“They told me to run,” Claire said.

Gaby and Danny…

He clutched the knife in his left hand, thanking God he had held onto it all this time, and searched the darkness for his rifle, doing his best to squint through all the pockets of shadows. There were no traces of the carbine anywhere. Of course, there was so little light that it could have been right next to him, and if he didn’t step on it, he might never find—

Claire gasped.

Will looked up at a new pair of blue eyes piercing the darkened living room from the jagged hole in the wall. Its tall, elongated frame looked theatrical against the light of the moon splashing in behind it. Will couldn’t figure out if it really was that tall or if the angular shape of its body added to the preternatural deceit.

He reached down and pulled Claire’s arm away from him, pushing her back into the hallway. She went willingly.

The creature’s eyes shifted from Will to the dead carcass of the other ghoul lying on the floor behind him and Claire. What was it the creature was seeing? Was it the twisted body of its friend? Comrade? Maybe even a lover? Did they even love anymore?

“Kate made us promise her this time. I think she has big plans for you.”

What the hell does that mean?

Will reached for the holstered Glock at the same time the creature moved, but he only groped empty air. The Glock was gone. He hadn’t realized it until now, but he should have sooner. The gun belt felt lighter, but in all the moments of trying to survive, trying to just learn to breathe again, he had missed it.

He switched the knife to his right hand and prepared himself for the inevitable when Claire fired next to him. She was standing so close that he swore this time he really did go deaf from the noise of the shotgun blast. She didn’t stop with one shot, either.

The girl fired again and again, the self-loading gun allowing her to shoot without having to manually rack the weapon each time. She was so small she would never have managed it anyway, though Will was awestruck that she somehow held onto the shotgun after every shot. What was she, eighty pounds soaking wet?

The blue-eyed ghoul didn’t come straight at them. Oh no, it wasn’t going to make it that easy. Instead, it was running sideways — left, then right, then back again — like some kind of goddamn leaping animal. Buckshot from Claire’s blasts caught it in the sides, the thighs, and even took a big piece off its temple. The creature was almost on top of them when another blast hit it full in the chest, making a hole so absurdly wide that Will could actually see through it.

And yet it kept coming.

Will waited for Claire to fire again, but she didn’t. Or she couldn’t. The FNH had seven shots. Had she fired all seven?

Fuck it.

He launched himself forward at the oncoming creature. He saw its radiant blue eyes widen, registering shock a split-second before he hit it straight in the chest with his entire body, catching it while it was still in the air. He thought he might have heard a grunt from the undead thing, or maybe that was just air wheezing out of the gaping hole in its chest.

Something wet and thick slathered across Will’s face, joining the remains of the first dead ghoul, as he tackled the creature. They both fell to the floor in a heap, but Will had the momentum and he was up first. He shoved his left arm against its neck to pin it to the wooden floorboards, putting every ounce of strength he had into it. Even so, it was already getting back up, its strength unimaginable for something so sickly looking.

It was hissing at him. He couldn’t be sure if they were words or just guttural sounds. He didn’t give a damn. Its eyes bored into him. It didn’t quite look so amused or smug anymore, and for a second — just a split-second — Will allowed himself a momentary surge of triumph.

But it wouldn’t stop moving against him. Of course not; what was he thinking?

It had managed to pull its head up from the floor and its hands were reaching for his throat when Will slammed the cross-knife into its temple. He didn’t stop pushing down down down until the guard smacked into the bone and the end of the knife pierced the floorboard on the other side of the thing’s head.

The creature went slack almost instantly under him.

“Will!” Claire shouted.

He looked back at Claire, shoving shells from the pouch into her shotgun, her hands fumbling with the ammo because her eyes were elsewhere. He followed her gaze to the hole in the wall, knowing full well what he was going to find out there.

He wasn’t disappointed.

There were hundreds of them crowding around the ragged opening, and those were just the ones he could see. But there was something wrong with the way they moved. Or didn’t move. They weren’t pouring inside the house even though there was nothing to hold them back. Instead, they were peering tentatively at him.

No, he was wrong; they weren’t looking at him.

They were looking at the creature under him. The dead blue-eyed thing he was crouched over was the center of their universe. It, and only it, as if he didn’t exist at all. They weren’t running, or charging, and there was none of the rabid intensity he was so used to.

“Will, what should we do?” Claire shouted behind him.

“Don’t move,” he said.

“But—”

“Don’t move.”

Will looked down at the creature lying still, dead (again), on the floor. Blue eyes, not quite as bright as before, stared accusingly back up at him. He pulled out the knife, then grabbed as firm a grip as he could on the smooth, oozing black skull and lifted it up.

The mass of quivering figures outside the house seemed to go absolutely still as one. He saw something in them, in their responses, that he hadn’t seen in a while. Since that night back in Harold Campbell’s facility. And he could smell it, too. It wasn’t the two dead creatures’ flesh and muscle and blood that drenched him from head to toe.

No, this was coming from the hundreds (thousands?) of undead things that gathered outside the house.

Fear.

They were afraid.

Will looked down at the blue-eyed ghoul, then, getting a better grip on the smooth head, began sawing the neck with the cross-knife.

“Oh God,” Claire said behind him just before he heard retching, followed by the smell of vomit.

He kept sawing…

34 Gaby

Someone was screaming inside the bedroom, but it was impossible to tell if it was Danny, Milly, Claire, or Annie. She guessed it had to be either Milly or Annie, though it was a stretch that Milly could produce that kind of ear-splitting sound. It couldn’t be Claire, who was as strong as a rock. And she knew for a fact that it couldn’t possibly be Danny, because she had never heard Danny scream in his life. At least, not in fear like this.

Not that she could have done anything to help them anyway, because the blue-eyed ghoul was right in front of her, grinning like a madman. There was something amazingly human about its expression — a twisted, nightmarish version of what a man would look like if he simply gave in to all his base animal urges.

She pulled the trigger on the M4 again and got off another three-round burst. Just a lone silver bullet found its target this time, snapping a piece of flesh off the creature’s shoulder blade as its body slid to the right to dodge the other two rounds. Then, without missing a beat, it was moving forward with that same unnatural fluidity that shouldn’t be possible.

Impossible. All of this is impossible.

It grabbed the rifle by the barrel and yanked it out of her hands. The move was so effortless that for a moment it took her breath away. She staggered back, unsure if she even had control of her legs anymore. She reached down to her hip for her sidearm and drew the Glock as the creature watched her, head cocked to one side, eyes glowing magnificently in the semidarkness of the narrow hallway.

She aimed for the head—

“Remember: shoot them in the head,” Will had said.

— and fired.

It flicked its head to one side, and the bullet sailed harmlessly past it and hit the master bedroom doorframe at the other end of the second floor.

“Remember…”

She fired again.

It moved its head left, and again the bullet disappeared up the hallway, but this time it vanished into the darkened bedroom. She prayed she didn’t accidentally hit Danny or one of the girls.

“…shoot them in the head.”

She squeezed the trigger again and again and again—

The creature continued coming toward her, its head snapping left, then right, as if it were sashaying, a dancer with absolute control over every inch of its body, every slight twitch. Its head bobbed and weaved like a boxer.

And it kept coming…

It was three feet away when she fired her final shot and watched the bullet graze its cheek, taking away flesh and cutting into bone underneath. There was a thin trickle of black blood before the wound seemed to seal itself up.

It stood so close to her now that she could feel its breath — acidic and strangely warm — against her face. It watched her struggling to reload the Glock, her fingers trembling from the adrenaline and terror and the sight of this undead thing standing so close to her that it could reach out at any moment and lick her face.

She managed to put the magazine in and worked the slide, and as she lifted the weapon there was a blur of black skin and the gun flew from her hand. Her arm stung from the blow and she backpedaled again in shock.

It followed and grabbed her by the shoulders, smashing her into the wall. The entire house shook. Or maybe that was just her imagination. The world that existed from her toes to her head definitely trembled because she couldn’t focus on any one thing anymore as pain exploded through every fiber of her being.

She slid to the floor, thankful that the wall was there to prevent her from collapsing like the sad sack of useless meat she felt like at the moment. Her ears might have been bleeding, and she couldn’t feel the shape of the earbud in her ear anymore. When had she lost that? And where was the radio? It was gone, too. When had that happened? Maybe it was for the best, since she couldn’t hear much of anything anyway, even the gunfire from below her.

Will.

And Danny from the main bedroom. Was he shooting? Was that the pop-pop-pop of automatic gunfire? Or something else? Maybe all the noises were being conjured up by her mind, which at the moment might have been on fire.

Was that possible? Could her mind actually be burning?

And pain. There was so much pain…

She couldn’t feel her left arm, which had jammed into the wall first. Was it broken? She couldn’t move it no matter how hard she tried. So maybe.

And what the hell was that ringing in her ears?

It was crouching in front of her, long bony legs bending at awkward angles. Its smooth skin, pulled taut over a sharp skeletal frame, reminding her of all those anorexic supermodels in lingerie catalogs. Eat something, she wanted to say to it, then maybe laugh in its face. Of course, when she opened her mouth to do just that, only a slight gasp came out.

Had she even opened her mouth? Could her mouth even move?

It touched her cheek with one long, slender finger. There was no fingernail, only a fleshy nub. The contact was surprisingly gentle, almost like a lover’s caress. She didn’t feel very loved, though, but trying to pull away was not working. She only managed to turn her head slightly, but even that took a lot of effort, and the creature simply grabbed her chin with its other hand and forced her to stare back at it again.

“I knew someone,” it said, hissing out the words.

Unfathomably bright eyes pierced through her as if they could touch her soul, but she didn’t see what she expected to see. There was no glaring evil on the other side, just something that, once upon a time, was human, but wasn’t anymore.

“She looked like you,” it said.

It turned her head carefully left, then right again, as if to get a good look at every inch of her face, to memorize every line, every bruise and healing scar. The broken nose from this morning and the cuts from the helicopter crash that still hadn’t fully healed yet, and might never.

“Not as pretty, but close,” it said.

The crashing of gunshots. Danny and Will. Fighting for their lives against how many more of these monsters inside the house? Three? One was definitely inside the room with Danny, so were the other two downstairs with Will? How was Will going to fight off two when she and Danny could barely survive one each?

We’re dead. We’re all dead.

If we’re lucky…

The creature turned its head, looking back toward the bedroom, just as a small figure emerged out of the blackness.

Claire.

The thirteen-year-old was holding the shotgun Will had given her. It still looked ridiculously massive against her slight frame. Claire was running toward them when she slid to a stop in front of the pile of debris — and Lance, still buried under them — as the ghoul feasted its eyes on her.

“Shoot it!” Gaby shouted. “Shoot it in the head!”

The creature was standing up when Claire fired, the shotgun blast so loud in the narrow passageway that Gaby physically flinched at the explosion. The ghoul turned its body slightly right as most of the buckshot glanced off its shoulder, the rounds punching through soft flesh and embedding into the wall.

Then it moved toward the girl.

No, not Claire! Stay away from her!

Gaby’s eyes darted down to the floor.

The Glock. Where the hell was the Glock?

There!

Less than three feet away. She lunged for it, throwing her entire body forward with everything she had, unsure if it would even work until her chest slammed into the floor. That was a stupid move. More blinding flashes of pain, but she gritted her teeth through them and she reached for the 9mm handgun, wrapped her numbed fingers around it—

She struggled to sit back up.

The creature was almost on top of Claire, who had backed up and fired again. A large chunk of the ghoul’s thigh disintegrated, but the creature kept advancing, undeterred. It could have reached Claire faster, she realized. She had seen it move with blinding speed when it wanted to. But it wasn’t at the moment. Why not?

Because this is a game. It’s playing with her.

It’s all just a game to them…

“Hey!” Gaby shouted.

It turned and looked back at her, and its mouth curved into a grin.

“Run!” Gaby shouted, not at the creature, but at Claire. “Go to Will! Go now!”

Claire climbed over the debris and Lance and darted down the stairs.

The ghoul didn’t seem interested in pursuing Claire anymore. It only had eyes for her again. “Still want to play?” it hissed.

“No,” she said, and shot it in the right kneecap.

The gun was steady in her hand. She didn’t know how that was possible, but it barely moved as she fired.

The creature’s leg buckled, and as it went down, she shot it again, this time in the left kneecap, forcing it to involuntarily kneel in front of her.

Then she saw it in its eyes.

Understanding.

It knew what she was doing, and it wasn’t smiling anymore.

It started to get up when she shot it again, but this time her hand moved slightly for whatever reason, and she hit it in the cheek. The impact snapped its head upward like a spring. Before it could fully recover, she shot it in the center of the face. Its nose — or what was left of it — exploded into tiny chunks, and something punched its way out of the back of its skull, sticky wet goop splattering across the walls.

The creature flopped sideways and lay still.

It wasn’t as dramatic as she thought it would be. One second it was on its knees, as if in worship, and the next it was lying in a pool of its own oozing black blood, blue eyes still incandescent in the semidarkness. It might have even been looking back at her. Or maybe through her. What mattered was that it didn’t move again.

She struggled up to her feet. It was difficult. Her left arm wouldn’t respond no matter how hard she tried. She stumbled over the twisted carcass — it looked more emaciated in death for some reason, and less powerful — and up the hallway.

She stopped for a moment at the sight of Lance, buried in debris, bright red blood pooling under him with the halo of moonlight falling through the opening in the roof. Gaby looked toward the stairs. She couldn’t hear anything from down there. Not a single sound. And she couldn’t see anything, either. The other end of the staircase was completely swallowed in darkness.

Crying, coming from the master bedroom. Annie. Or was it Milly?

She climbed over the debris and Lance — she felt like throwing up while doing it — and fumbled her way to the open bedroom door. She lifted the Glock as she neared it. There was just enough moonlight shining through the still-barricaded window that she could make out a figure on the floor, near the center of the room.

Danny. God, don’t let it be Danny.

As she stepped closer, the shape on the floor became clearer.

Don’t let it be Danny…

It wasn’t Danny. It was one of the ghouls, lying on its back. Where she expected to see blue eyes, there were instead two black holes. Except they were much bigger than eye holes were supposed to be. The head lay in a thick puddle of congealed blood, blackened against the moonlight. Danny’s cross-knife was buried in the creature’s forehead up to the guard.

“Danny!” Gaby called out.

“Over here,” a voice said.

There was a click! and Danny’s face was lit up by a flashlight beam. He grinned back at her through a layer of blood. A mixture of black and red, like some kind of Kabuki mask. It was impossible to tell where he was bleeding, or where he wasn’t.

“Can you move?” she asked.

“My right leg’s broken,” he said. “Too bad, cause that’s my dancing leg.”

“Annie?”

Danny moved the light away from him and across the room at Annie. She was still huddled in the corner with Milly, the two of them having folded up into a ball, arms encircling each other in mutual defense. Both were crying softly, unwilling to look up even when Danny’s flashlight illuminated them.

“The other girl…” Danny said.

Gaby looked back toward the stairs.

“Go,” Danny said.

“What about you?”

“I got this situation well in hand. The busted leg’s just to make it fairer.”

She managed a slight smile at him before stumbling her way back down the hallway toward the stairs, fighting the urge to throw up again as she stepped over Lance and the debris a second time. The fact that Lance’s face, turned to the side, was clearly visible in the pouring moonlight made her gag slightly.

She finally reached the stairs and hurried down.

“Will!” she called out. “Claire!”

Her voice echoed, but there was no reply. The only sound was the loud echo of her footsteps. She was halfway down when a silhouetted figure moved in the darkness below her. She stopped and lifted the Glock.

“Don’t shoot!” a small voice shouted.

Claire.

Gaby sighed and ran down the rest of the way as Claire stepped back. The thirteen-year-old was still clutching the FNH in both hands, and she didn’t look hurt or bleeding. Then again, it was so dark on the first floor that Gaby could barely see where she was stepping. She could tell where Claire was looking, though, and she turned in that direction.

Will.

He stood with his back to her, standing near a large hole in the wall of the house. The loud boom that she had heard earlier, she guessed. Some kind of explosion. Will was holding his M4A1 at his side, not in any threatening manner, and was looking out at the front yard.

“Will,” she said, a lot quieter than she had meant to.

Will glanced over his shoulder. “You okay?”

“Alive.”

“Danny?”

“Alive, too.”

He nodded and looked forward again.

Gaby turned to Claire. “You okay?”

Claire nodded. “Annie and Milly…?”

“They’re fine.”

“I saw Lance…”

“Yeah.” She looked back at Will, but said to the girl, “Stay here.”

She walked to Will and almost stepped on a body lying on the floor, hidden in the shadows. She looked down at a twisted black and pruned carcass. Or what was left of it. The head was missing. The monster wasn’t the only evidence of a fight down here. There were also two men in uniforms lying unmoving on the floor, both wearing gas masks. She didn’t have to ask Will what had happened to them.

“Will,” Gaby said. “What happened to the others? The black-eyed ones?”

“They’re still out there,” Will said. “There’s a lot of them.”

“How many?”

“I don’t know. Maybe thousands.”

“Why haven’t they…?”

She didn’t finish her question, because by then she was standing beside Will and looking out the hole in the wall. There was something else there in the middle of the jagged opening. It was a decapitated head impaled on a long, thin piece of broken wood. The head was hairless and the smooth skin gleamed in the moonlight. When she looked back at the dead creature behind her, she was able to put two and two together.

“Where…?” she whispered.

“Outside,” Will said. He wasn’t whispering, she realized.

She looked out the house and into the yard again. Will was right. The ghouls hadn’t gone anywhere. They were still outside.

All of them.

She could only see the first few hundred through the opening. The rest were hidden in the darkness beyond the power of even the moon to reveal. Not just in the yard, but around the house. The sides, the back, and well into the fields, too.

Her heart pounded at the sight of the creatures amassed outside. Their eyes, always creepy even when there was just one of them, were unfathomably terrifying with so many gathered at one spot. They looked like uncertain children, tentative and afraid. At first she thought they were looking at Will, but she was mistaken. They were staring at the head he had placed in the middle of the hole in the wall, which looked like the crooked mouth of a cave opening.

There was, she knew with great certainty, absolutely nothing to stop the thousands of undead things out there from coming into the house at any moment. Even silver bullets would only kill so many before the rest overwhelmed them in an unstoppable tidal wave of black death. And then what? They could head up the stairs, but against that many, they would never survive the night. She didn’t have to look down at her watch to know that they had hours—hours—to go before sunrise.

But the creatures weren’t attacking. They stayed where they were, swaying slightly against each other, a mass of squirming black flesh, almost indistinguishable against the night. There was something odd about the way they looked at the head, with a mixture of fear and awe and something she hadn’t really seen from them before.

It was indecision. They didn’t know what to do.

“Will,” Gaby whispered. “How did you know it would work?”

“I didn’t,” Will said. “But the blue-eyed ones control them. I just didn’t know to what extent.” He paused, then, “There were two more…”

“They’re upstairs. Dead.”

“Good.” Will pulled out his cross-knife and handed it to her, the silver gleaming brilliantly against a stray stream of moonlight. “Bring them down here. Just the heads.”

It was stickier than she had expected, and the smell made her want to retch every few seconds. She was no stranger to blood these days, but this wasn’t really blood. At least, not anymore. It was like washing her hands in tar, and she wondered if she would ever be able to clean them off — really, really clean them off — after tonight.

Cutting the heads hadn’t been easy with one hand. Her left was still effectively useless (though she didn’t tell Will that), but she found that pressing down on the creatures’ chests with one knee and slicing with her right hand was good enough. It took a lot of work, but thank God it hadn’t been as difficult to saw through bone as she had anticipated.

The black blood dripped from her fingers as she stood next to Claire and watched Will prop up the two heads on two separate objects sticking up from the floor. With the first makeshift spike, Will had broken a hole in the floorboards with the heel of his boot, then rammed the piece of wood into the dirt ground and set the head on top. He did a similar thing now with the two new heads she had brought down, using a lamp for one, shoving the exposed neck into the spot where the lightbulb was supposed to go, then setting it down on the ground. He used a rifle he had picked up from the floor for the other one.

If she thought the sight of the three decapitated heads side by side was disturbing, she felt better at how uncomfortable, how frightened the black-eyed ghouls looked outside where they continued to amass in the hundreds and thousands.

Claire stood next to her, both of them keeping a safe distance behind Will. He hadn’t moved, so they hadn’t, either. She wasn’t sure how long they stood on the first floor, in the darkness, waiting for something to happen.

But the ghouls never came in. They remained outside for the rest of the night and through the early morning hours. As far as she could tell, they barely moved at all and continued to huddle against one another, shoulder to shoulder, chest to back, peering in at the three severed heads, as if transfixed.

Around midnight, Will ordered her and Claire upstairs.

Annie was asleep in the corner, on the floor, with Milly snoring in her lap. Danny had (somehow) stood up and was peering out the window through the slots. He was using his rifle as a crutch and had wrapped pieces of lumber around his broken right leg with duct tape. He drank water and kept in constant contact with Will downstairs through their radios. Like Will and her, he had lost his earbuds during the chaos, but both of them had managed to keep their radios in one piece.

Gaby wanted to pick up Milly and put her on the bed, but she didn’t have nearly enough feeling in her left arm to lift her own hand, much less carry the girl. So she sat on the bed with Claire instead and listened to the thirteen-year-old gradually fall asleep, until eventually she was snoring in tune with Milly and Annie. Claire was still clutching the shotgun against her chest as if it were a childhood teddy bear.

She stayed awake throughout the night and morning, watching Danny as he stood, unmoving, by the window. Every now and then, he asked her to take out some food from his pack and they ate. It didn’t occur to her until much later that he could hardly move.

“You okay?” she asked as he chewed on some stale jerky.

“Sure,” he said, giving her a smile.

Danny had rinsed blood off his face with water, leaving behind a gash along his cheek and another one across his temple that he had treated. Those new wounds, along with his broken nose, ruined the California surfer good looks. But scars, she knew, would heal. It was the ones you couldn’t see that lingered.

“You did good, kid,” Danny said after a while.

“Thanks.”

“Not just tonight. The last few weeks, too, to hear Willie boy tell it.”

“I did okay.”

“Don’t be so modest. We did so good with you, I told the guy downstairs we should open a school. Willie and Danny’s School of Asskicking. What do you think? If you refer a friend, you get a free ammo can filled with silver bullets as bounty.”

She smiled. “Sign me up.”

“I’ll do that. Now, go to sleep,” Danny said. “I’ll wake you in an hour for your turn at the window.”

She didn’t argue. She simply didn’t have the strength.

Gaby lay down on the bed next to Claire’s snoring form. She didn’t think it would happen, but as soon as she closed her eyes (Just for a little bit), she was asleep.

Danny was still standing by the window when she opened her eyes and struggled up on the bed.

“Danny,” she said. “You were supposed to wake me.”

“You feel that?” he asked.

She did. The warmth inside the room. The brightness of the walls. The bloody stains on the floorboards looking more ghastly somehow in the morning light. And the small remnants of blood that Danny had failed to clean off his face during the night.

Morning!

“We made it,” she said softly, afraid that if she said it too loud it might jinx it.

Danny nodded. “Told you.”

She looked down at Claire, who had crawled over to sleep in her lap sometime during the night. Annie and Milly were both snoring on the floor in the corner, Milly curled up in a fetal position. The girl looked cold despite the sun that highlighted her dirty round face.

“So what now?” she asked.

“We go home,” Danny said.

“Can we?”

“I don’t see why not.”

She carefully untangled herself from Claire, then climbed off the bed and walked across the room to the window. She looked out at the empty front yard. The grass was trampled and there were signs everywhere that hundreds (thousands) of ghouls had been down there last night. The trucks, she saw with some relief, were still where she had last seen them, and they looked to be in the same condition.

“Will?” she asked.

“Still giving head downstairs.”

She smiled, then peered out across the farm at the highway in the near distance. She expected to see trucks — or technicals, as Will and Danny called them — staring back at her, waiting to finish the job, but they were gone, too.

“The soldiers?” she said.

“They made like bananas and split sometime around sunrise,” Danny said. “My guess is, they realized we had a secret weapon—” he glanced at Claire’s snoring form on the bed “—and decided not to risk it. What is she, twenty?”

“Thirteen.”

“The hell you say.”

“Uh huh.”

“Damn. That girl saved my life last night.”

“How did she manage that?”

“When Frankly Dead Sinatra came through the door, she was the one who distracted it long enough so it didn’t rip my heart out when it had the chance. Hit it with that shotgun of hers, like she was swinging a mallet at a county fair. I guess she didn’t want to risk shooting it for fear of hitting me. Thank God. Have you ever been shotgunned?”

“No.”

“Take my word for it, kid; you’re gonna want to avoid it if you can.”

“I saw her outside in the hallway. She saved my life, too.”

“Technically, you owe me since I’m the one who told her to run.” He looked over at Annie and Milly. “I told them, too, but they weren’t quite as good at following orders. Anyway, when ol’ Blue Eyes was distracted, I managed to judo it and got on top and did my thing with the knife.” He mimed it for her. “I feel sorry for it, actually. It never stood a chance.”

“I didn’t know you knew judo,” she said.

“I didn’t tell you? Judo and me go way back. She still calls me every time she’s in town. She loves to wrestle, oh boy, does she ever.”

Gaby couldn’t help but laugh. Even her left arm didn’t seem to be hurting quite as much as when she had first opened her eyes a few minutes ago. Well, that wasn’t quite true, but she figured as long as she told herself that, the pain was manageable.

Mostly, anyway.