The Gates of Byzantium

CHAPTER 19 BLAINE

They hadn’t been in a city as big as Beaumont since they had abandoned Dallas, so it felt a little odd to be driving up a highway that was suddenly stuffed with cars, giving him flashbacks of afternoon rush-hour traffic. Except there were no horns, no fumes, and none of the grinding sounds of machinery inching forward every few seconds.

There were vehicles in their path when they approached the outskirts of the city, but it only got worse as they continued on. Whenever the highway seemed to thin out and become passable, another huge block of cars appeared to prove him wrong.

After a while, Sandra began stopping more than she was moving. Finally, she simply stopped and parked next to an overturned Ford truck and a red Camaro buried in its exposed belly.

She sat back, then let out a frustrated sigh. “It’s not going to get any better, is it?”

“Doesn’t look like it,” Blaine said. “Want me to drive?”

“You can’t even walk.”

“I can walk fine.”

“Oh yeah? Get out and show me.”

“Not now, it’s too hot outside.”

“Right.” Then she smiled at him. “Besides, I like this. Driving you around. It’s liberating. I just wish the damn road would cooperate.”

Blaine wondered if Will and the others had encountered the same thing and how they got around it. You could go around the city, but that would add a lot of time to the schedule. Maybe even a day. No. Sticking to the highway, or near it, was the shortest route.

“What time is it?” Sandra asked.

He glanced down at his watch. “Three fourteen.”

They had made pretty good time since Lancing. The highways between towns and cities were always easy to travel, and it wasn’t until you hit the towns that things got complicated.

“Look,” Sandra said, pointing.

Blaine looked at where she was pointing, saw a Burger King to their right, in front of a big sprawling group of buildings. A mall, with a Sortys department store taking up most of the space on this side of the structure. The parking lot was almost entirely empty.

He searched out a sign and found one near the street that read: “Willowstone Mall.”

“Is this really the time to go shopping?” Blaine said.

She rolled her eyes. “No, not the mall. In front of it.”

She pointed again, and following her a second time, he saw a Cavender’s Boot City store near the feeder road. It was in front of the mall and squeezed between a Best Buy and a Petsmart. Cavender’s sold cowboy boots and hats and general Western wear. It wasn’t exactly the kind of place he visited regularly.

“I need new boots,” Sandra said. “This pair’s getting a little worn around the heels.”

He looked down at his own sneakers. They were dirty and worn around the edges. They were blue once, but were mostly white now, the colors faded from heavy use.

“Let’s go shopping,” he said.

They pulled into the Cavender’s and parked between a beat-up brown Toyota truck and a white Ford F-150. The storefront windows were intact, and there was enough sunlight that he could see racks of jeans, boots, hats, and belt buckles. There were a lot of belt buckles.

Yee haw.

The second he climbed out of the Silverado, Blaine flinched with pain. He stopped for a second and looked down, expecting to see blood on his shirt, and was relieved when he didn’t. Still, there was no mistaking where the pain was coming from. He felt like sitting down to catch his breath, but Sandra might be watching, so he forced himself forward, toward the front door of the Cavender’s instead.

“You think any of those jeans will fit me?” he asked.

He was at the doors, reaching for the handle, when he stopped. He saw Sandra’s reflection in the store’s glass door, and she wasn’t alone.

Sandra stood frozen next to the truck, with some kind of alien standing behind her. No, not an alien. It was a man wearing some type of black gas mask, with a large, elongated clear lens and two small breathing filters jutting out from the sides like shorn tusks. He was wearing some kind of gray hazmat suit. Not the big, bulky kind, but the thin, tactical types he had seen soldiers wearing on the news. The suit was light enough for the man to wear a gun belt with a holster. The Browning automatic that should have been in the holster was instead pressed up against Sandra’s temple.

Blaine spun, drawing his Glock. The sudden, quick movement made him grimace as pain shot through him like some pissed-off demon from Hell. He pushed away the pain and concentrated on taking aim at the man standing behind Sandra instead. He couldn’t see the face clearly through the gas mask, but he could see dark, small black eyes. The man was at least half a foot shorter than Sandra, and the sight of him holding her at gunpoint struck Blaine as absurd.

“Put the gun down or I put a bullet through her brain,” the man said. His voice sounded hollow behind the gas mask, but there was no mistaking the menace.

Blaine didn’t lower his gun. He wasn’t stupid enough to think doing so would magically free Sandra. And maybe Sandra knew it, too, because she looked right back at him. He saw fear in her eyes, but also grim determination. The guy had snuck up on Sandra before she had even had the chance to slam the truck’s driver-side door shut.

“That’s not going to happen,” Blaine said.

“You wanna get her killed? Is that it?” the man asked.

“It’s not going to happen,” Blaine said again.

“Tough guy, huh?”

“You expect me to believe you’ll let her go if I put this gun down?”

The guy might have grinned. It was hard to tell, because Blaine couldn’t see the man’s mouth. His eyes did seem to narrow, in the way eyes did when people were grinning.

“I guess you’re smarter than you look,” the guy said.

“No one’s ever accused me of that before.”

The guy chuckled. “Not like you have a choice, though.”

“I got a gun, I got a choice.”

“You think so?”

“You hurt her and I hurt you. Simple as that.”

“You’re right. It is as simple as that. The problem with that is, though?”

“What’s that?”

“I got friends and you don’t.”

This time Blaine heard them, except it didn’t matter, because he couldn’t take his gun away from the guy standing behind Sandra anyway. If he had, he knew the guy would end it right there and shoot him dead. Instead, Blaine let two more men come up on both sides of him, fighting every instinct to turn around to confront at least one of them.

He risked a quick glance left, then right — less than a second each time, but just long enough to see they were both wearing the same hazmat suits and holding M4 rifles pointing at him. They had come from around the corners of the Cavender’s, moving surprisingly cat-like for guys in chemical suits.

Had they been waiting there this whole time? Probably. Just like the guy behind Sandra had been waiting to sneak up on them. Hell, they probably saw the Silverado coming from a mile away. God knew they were the only car still running in the city for miles all around. He couldn’t imagine the noises they must have made moving along the highway.

“Here’s the plan,” the guy behind Sandra said. “I’m going to count to five. If you don’t drop your gun, they’re going to start shooting. Oh, and just in case you’re thinking of taking that shot anyway?”

The guy moved until he was completely hidden behind Sandra’s bigger frame. And because he was shorter than her, he didn’t have to bend at the knees. Blaine thought that was kind of absurd, too.

“Go ahead,” the guy said, like a ventriloquist speaking through Sandra. “Shoot back and you’ll hit her. I’m guessing you don’t want to do that. Not to this fine piece of ass, am I right?”

Blaine saw Sandra’s reaction, and this time it was all fear. The moment had passed, they both realized. They were royally fucked.

“One,” the guy said.

He didn’t get “two” out before Blaine lowered himself to the ground in a crouch, then laid the gun down carefully, feeling the barrels of the two M4 rifles tracking him every step of the way.

“All right,” Blaine said. “Let’s talk about this.”

“Good boy,” the guy said, coming back out from behind Sandra.

The man to Blaine’s right hurried forward and kicked Blaine’s gun away, while the one to his left grabbed him by the shirt collar and pulled him up, then threw him into the Cavender’s glass door. Blaine felt balls of flame raining down on him, but did his best to stamp out any sounds before they could leave his lips.

“Be careful!” Sandra shouted behind him. “He’s already hurt!”

The man who had thrown Blaine into the glass door looked back at Sandra. “Where?” he asked. Blaine heard a thick country accent.

“He was shot in the side,” Sandra said.

“Which side?”

“The right side.”

“Good to know,” the guy said, then he turned back around and punched Blaine in the right side, directly over the duct tape.

Blaine felt blinding pain and lost control of his feet and went down like a sack of meat and bones, quivering in a pile on the scorching hot concrete walkway.

They were in the Sortys department store employee lounge, sitting on a plastic couch. Mason, the guy who had threatened to shoot Sandra in the head, straddled a chair in front of them, his chin resting on the backrest.

Mason tore at a big stick of jalapeno-flavored beef jerky and devoured it in a few bites. He looked even shorter outside of the hazmat suit, with uncombed black hair just this side of greasy. He wore cargo pants, Army boots, a white T-shirt, and the same gun belt he had worn over the hazmat suit. When he grinned, Blaine saw a big gap where he was missing a front tooth. The guy was five-four, tops.

The room they were in was bright, with an open window near the ceiling. Dust and paper were scattered along the floor, and an overflowing wastebasket sat in one corner.

There was another guy in the small room with them. It was the same cowboy who had given Blaine a nice “hello” to the side with his fist. Blaine was still smarting from that, and he gave the cowboy a once-over with cold, hard eyes. The man was dressed almost identical to Mason, but instead of a white T-shirt, he had on a black one. Other than that, he looked like a taller, skinnier version of Mason, and Blaine thought he could probably break the guy over his knees.

“Keep dreaming,” the cowboy said, smirking back at him.

Mason snapped his fingers, directing Blaine’s eyes away from the cowboy and back over to him. “So, one more time. You don’t know the guys that came through earlier today?”

“No,” Sandra said, her voice calm.

That’s my girl.

Mason looked over at Blaine. “And I don’t suppose you know them, either?”

“No idea,” Blaine lied.

“They were packing some pretty impressive firepower,” Mason said. “We thought about doing to them what we did to you, but there was something about those two guys, the way they held their weapons…” Mason shrugged and bit off another big piece of beef jerky. “Not worth the hassle. We’re just caretakers here, after all.”

“Here” was the Willowstone Mall, the big, sprawling complex behind the Cavender’s Boot store. Mason and the cowboy had brought them over with the third man, whose name Blaine didn’t catch, and who had disappeared as soon as they were inside the dark, dank confines of the mall. They had walked through the Sortys department store, passing racks of unused clothes. At least they’ll never run out of things to wear, he remembered thinking.

He had noticed right away there were no barricades against the windows or doors, and there were shadows everywhere — at least a good half of the store was untouched by sunlight. Mason and the others didn’t look disturbed by this shortcoming, though. At first Blaine thought it might have been the hazmat suits, giving them some kind of false confidence, but he quickly realized it was more than that. It wasn’t that Mason and the others thought they were safe in here. Blaine somehow felt that these men knew they were safe. How, he couldn’t fathom.

“So,” Mason said, eyeballing Blaine again. “What are we going to do with the two of you? That’s the question.”

“Why aren’t you scared?” Blaine asked.

“Of what?”

“Them.”

Mason smiled. “We don’t have to be. We’re…partners.”

“Partners?” Sandra said. “With them?”

“They’re not as mindless as you think.”

Blaine remembered what Will had told him about the ghouls: “Dead, not stupid.”

His mind raced back to that night at the house, looking down from the pink bedroom window and seeing the blue-eyed ghoul below. A lone figure staring back up at him, eyes brimming with intelligence.

“In fact, they’re pretty fucking smart,” Mason said. “How did you think they managed to pull this off? One night, that’s all it took.” He snapped his fingers. “That takes planning. Intelligence. Discipline. They have it in spades.”

“I don’t understand,” Sandra said. “You’re ‘partners’ with them? How?”

“Survivors might be a better word. We do something for them, and they let us live. It’s not a bad trade-off if you really think about it. What’s better — running around like you two, always trying to beat the night, or being able to live your life without worrying all the time that it’s about to get dark? I’ll take that trade-off any day.”

“It’s not like you can kill the fuckers,” the cowboy said.

They don’t know about silver.

“Well, you can kill them with sunlight,” Mason said. “But that’s only half the day, and it’s not like you can holster or fire the sun whenever you want. Have you ever tried shooting these things?”

“Yeah,” Blaine nodded.

“I’ve shotgunned one in the face and the fucker just kept coming.”

“I put a machete through the forehead of one and it didn’t even feel it,” the cowboy said. “You can’t fight that.”

“That’s how they beat us, you know,” Mason said. “They’re unkillable. Well, maybe if you used a nuke, but who the hell knows even then?”

It occurred to Blaine that Mason didn’t have to do this, sit here talking to them, trying to justify what he was doing. But he was.

Why?

“So what now?” Blaine asked.

“Now, you decide what you want to do with the rest of your life,” Mason said.

“Meaning?”

“You have a choice. You can keep doing what you’ve been doing. Running from city to city, hiding in basements, praying they don’t find you tonight, or the night after that, or the week after that. Or you could do the smart thing and join the club. I got plenty of hazmat suits for two more.”

“That simple, huh?”

“It’s that simple.”

“Bullshit,” Sandra said.

Blaine could tell Mason was surprised to hear that coming from her. Maybe they had expected him to say it, to be the dissenting voice, and not Sandra. He detected a slight tweak along the corner of Mason’s eyebrow that might have been amusement.

“There’s more to it than you just ‘partnering’ with them,” Sandra continued. “What is it that you’re really doing for them?”

Mason grinned. “Well, that’s a little hard to explain.”

He didn’t explain it. Instead, he showed them.

Mason led them out of the Sortys employee lounge. The cowboy walked behind them with the M4. Blaine noticed the guy kept at least ten yards between them. Not that Blaine had any ideas about wrestling that rifle away. Even if he wasn’t hurt, even if each step didn’t make him wince just a little bit more, he couldn’t risk a fight now, with Sandra so close and Mason right in front of them.

No, this wasn’t the time. Not yet. He had to wait for the right moment, the right circumstances. It would come. It always came, sooner or later.

As they passed the jewelry section of Sortys, Blaine noticed some of the glass counters had been smashed. Jewelry was scattered everywhere, some on the floor, crunching under his shoes. He imagined someone excitedly bashing the cases open, grabbing the expensive merchandise, and then having second thoughts. What the hell were you going to do with jewelry now?

But then he saw it — silver. The pieces were under one of the still-intact glass displays. A fancy pen, a folded label under it boasting that it was 100 % silver. A whole set of silverware — forks, spoons, and butter knives. Things no one looked at twice, but invaluable in the new world. Blaine made mental notes.

They continued through the shoe area before exiting the opened gates where the department store connected to the rest of the mall. Their shoes squeaked against the dirty ceramic tile floor, the only noise in the entire place. The stores were open around them, basking in sunlight pouring down from the skylights.

“There isn’t a single creature inside the mall during the day,” Mason said, up-front. “That’s the compromise. This place is all ours. It’s not a bad way to live, if you think about it. The mall has everything we need to survive. Food, shelter, entertainment.”

“Entertainment?” Blaine said.

“There are two gyms in the place. Basketball court, track, everything to keep busy. Plenty of non-perishable food to last years. Bottled water, soft drinks. Endless boxes of the stuff from around the world, just lying around. You can die an old man eating this stuff.” He chuckled. “I’m not saying you’d be a very healthy old man, but hey, you’d get to be old.”

Mason led them up an escalator frozen in place.

As he took the first step, Blaine thought, Steps. Awesome.

He did his best to hide his discomfort as he took the steps one at a time, but he thought the cowboy might have picked up on it. When Mason and Sandra started to outpace him, Blaine forced himself to move faster.

Two figures looked down at them from the second-floor railing. They were both wearing hazmat suits and carrying M4 rifles, and he could tell by their shapes that one of them was a woman. The hips were a dead giveaway. Their weapons looked new. In comparison, he remembered the scratches and dents on Will’s and Danny’s rifles.

By the time they reached the second floor, Blaine was winded but fought through it and kept moving anyway. Sandra had stopped and was waiting for him, and she reached out a hand and he took it. She squeezed and smiled at him. “Our secret,” that smile said.

“Beaumont’s a big city,” Mason was saying, his voice echoing off the second-floor storefront windows and the big glass skylight above them.

A thick pool of sunlight poured down on top of them like an ocean, illuminating almost all of the second floor.

Including the bodies.

Dozens. Hundreds.

Thousands.

At first Blaine thought he was staring at a cemetery covered in dead bodies, but then he realized they were still alive when he saw their chests moving slightly underneath their clothes. They looked like coma patients, stuck somewhere between sleep and death, with grotesquely thin frames, gaunt faces, and cheeks hollowed from malnutrition. Some looked frailer than others, and some were no more than just skin and bones, reminding him, in so many ways, of ghouls.

A woman lay less than six feet from the tips of his dirty sneakers. He couldn’t tell her age; all he could see was a skull underneath loose flesh that fell over her face like a flimsy, thin piece of see-through film. They all looked like that, and it was impossible for him to tell adults from children, old men from boys. Their hair looked like dried-up leaves exposed to the sun too long, and he was reminded again of freshly buried corpses.

The sight of them — and the sheer number of them — took his breath away. They were spread out across the entire second-floor structure, and he could spend all day counting without ever getting to the end.

He looked behind them, and there were more spread out on that side of the floor.

There were so many there was absolutely no space to walk once they stepped off the escalator. Even the two people in hazmat suits watching them couldn’t move very far without stepping on an arm or a leg.

“Beaumont has over 100,000 people squeezed into an eighty-five square mile radius,” Mason said. “They turned most of the population, but not all of them. The rest are here.”

“What…is this?” Sandra asked, her voice almost a whisper.

“It’s a farm,” Mason said. “A blood farm. Don’t ask me how they do it, but they put these people in some kind of coma. They don’t wake up. Ever. Then they…well, you know what they do.”

“They feed on them?”

“Ding ding, give the lady a cookie.”

It wasn’t until Sandra said the word “feed” that Blaine noticed the teeth marks along the arms of the woman in front of him. Not just her arms, but along the sides of her neck as well. He imagined there must have been more, but her clothes covered up the rest. He turned slightly to look at an old man wearing shorts next to the woman and saw similar markings along his arms and legs.

We’re their food. This is what happens to food. You store it, then you feed on it when you’re hungry.

I think I’m going to throw up.

Next to him, Blaine could almost feel Sandra’s entire body trembling slightly.

“They’re alive?” Blaine asked.

“They’re breathing, yeah,” Mason said. “As to whether they’re really still alive?” Mason shrugged. “Hell if I know.”

“No one’s ever woken up,” the cowboy said behind them.

“So they just feed on these people…over and over?” Sandra asked. “And you let them?”

“Let them?” Mason almost laughed. “I guess you could put it that way. We just do the grunt work. Keep the place secured during the day while they sleep. At night, well, we try to stay out of their way.”

“And what happens then?” Blaine asked.

“What happens to what?”

“To the rest of you when night falls?”

“Nothing. They leave us alone. That’s the deal.”

Sandra looked over at Mason, then back at the cowboy, then over at the other two in the hazmat suits. “And you’re fine with this? All of you? Leaving these people to be…victimized over and over every night?”

They stared back at her with blank faces, though Blaine detected a slight movement in the woman’s face behind the gas mask just before she looked away.

Sandra focused her stare on Mason. “How could you do this? To your own kind?”

If she had expected Mason to retreat, Sandra would have been disappointed.

Instead, Mason glared back at her. “It’s a new world, honey. We’re doing what we have to in order to stay alive.” Mason drew his Browning automatic and held it at his side, then looked at Sandra before shifting his dark black eyes over at Blaine. “The question is: what are the two of you willing to do in order to survive?”

“He’s desperate for us to join him,” Blaine said, later, when they were back in the Sortys employee lounge.

Sandra nodded. She sat on the sofa, rubbing her hands together as if she were cold. “Why, do you think?”

“Maybe he’s running out of people. There’s only five of them. Mason, the cowboy, the third guy, and the two on the second floor. It explains why they didn’t risk attacking Will and the others. Not enough people to start a fight they don’t know they can win.”

There was a window above them, too small to escape through. Not that Blaine thought they could have gotten far anyway, without weapons or a car. There was a reason Mason had put them back in here. They weren’t going anywhere except through the door, and there was a guard outside named Lenny. He was the third man from Cavender’s.

They had two options that Blaine could see: join up or be killed. Mason had shown surprisingly little interest in harming Sandra, which both comforted and disturbed him. Sandra was not the kind of woman you ignored. At least, not after the first few minutes of being in the same room with her. But Mason revealed zero inclinations toward her, and neither had the cowboy, though Blaine had noticed Lenny stealing a glance at her when he had taken up position outside the door earlier.

Blaine’s mind returned, as it had every other second of the last thirty minutes, to the people on the second floor.

Thousands. There has to be thousands up there…

“We can’t, Blaine,” Sandra said after a while. “I won’t do it.”

“We don’t have any choice.”

“There’s always a choice.”

“They’re probably not going to kill us, Sandra. They’re going to give us to the ghouls. They’re going to add us to those people up there. I don’t want to see that happen to you.”

She looked down at her hands. “I can’t, Blaine. I’d rather die than be a part of this. I don’t ever want to become like Mason, taking the easy road out. But I also don’t want to become like those people on the second floor. Do you understand?”

He nodded. “I understand.”

Blaine took the bottle of Tramadol from his pocket and shook out two, gulping them down without bothering to swallow. Mason had given him back his pills, though Blaine didn’t for a second believe the man was being altruistic. Mason wanted to turn them to his side, and letting him die didn’t figure into those plans.

“How long does it usually take for those things to work?” Sandra asked.

“A few minutes.”

“How many do you have left?”

He looked into the bottle at the dozen or so pills. “Not many…”

“There should be some over-the-counter painkillers around the mall. They won’t be the same, but …”

“Yeah,” he said, saving her the trouble of lying to him.

They looked over at the door as the doorknob turned. The door opened and a woman entered. They both instantly went quiet, and the woman stopped for a moment, like she had just barged into a room with two conspirators. Which wasn’t far from the truth.

She had short brown hair and brown eyes, and she looked much smaller without the hazmat suit. She wore cargo pants and a T-shirt like the others and had a gun belt around her waist, though it looked too big for her frame. She closed the door behind her, then pulled out bags of Doritos from a brown plastic bag and tossed them over.

“They’re a bit stale, but they’re edible,” the woman said. “It’s as good as you’re going to get around here, despite whatever Mason told you.”

Blaine remembered how the woman had looked away from Sandra’s accusing stare back on the second floor. She was the only one.

“Thanks,” he said. “Do you have a name?”

“Maddie.”

“I’m Blaine, this is Sandra.”

Maddie nodded and turned to go.

“Is it worth it, Maddie?” Sandra asked.

The question stopped Maddie, and she turned to look back at Sandra. Blaine realized she was much younger than he had thought. Late twenties, though she wasn’t wearing any makeup and that made her look slightly older. She was pretty, but in the same room with Sandra, you could get away with calling her homely.

“Is what worth it?” Maddie asked.

“Selling out the human race,” Sandra said. “Is it worth it?”

“It’s either this or become one of the people on the second floor. Or one of them. Honestly, I don’t know which is worse, and I hope to never find out.”

“Can we trust him?” Blaine asked. “Mason. Can we trust what he says?”

“Mason’s an asshole,” Maddie said. “But yeah, you can trust him on this. We lost a couple of guys a few months ago, so we’re short-handed. More and more people with guns are rolling through this place every week. Most of them are smart enough not to risk searching a mall, but you get the occasional idiots, and we have to deal with that.”

“What happened to those guys that came into town before us?” Blaine asked, hoping to sound just uninterested enough to not make her suspicious.

Maddie shrugged. “They’re up the road somewhere. Mason sent someone to keep an eye on them until they leave.”

“So he’s not going to attack?”

“With what? These yahoos?”

Blaine smiled. He decided he liked her.

“If you’re smart,” Maddie continued, “you’ll sign up. It’s either that or keep running and constantly looking over your shoulder. I know what that’s like. It gets old pretty fast.”

“So you’re saying it’s worth it,” Sandra said.

There was an overtly accusing tone to Sandra’s voice that made Blaine flinch, and he saw it affect Maddie the same way. Sandra wasn’t trying to make friends, and he wondered what she hoped to gain here. Didn’t she know they were at the mercy of these people, that antagonizing them wasn’t going to help the two of them one bit?

“It depends on what you want out of this life,” Maddie said matter-of-factly. “You’ll have to decide for yourself.”

Maddie opened the door and left. Blaine caught a glimpse of the tall, broad-shouldered Lenny outside, turning as the door opened, but before he could look in, Maddie closed the door in his face.

Sandra looked quickly over at Blaine and said in a low voice, “Gaby and Josh and the others. They’re still in the city.”

“Sounds that way.”

“Maybe we can get them to help us.”

“I don’t see how.”

“Gunshots, maybe. Draw their attention. The way you drew my attention back at Grime. The way we tried to call them in Lancing. Sound travels these days.”

“We’d need guns…”

“We can get guns,” she said, looking at the door.

“Too risky. Let’s wait.”

“For what?” she asked, looking unhappy.

“Maddie.”

“What about her?”

“I think she’s the key,” he said, though he didn’t quite know how yet.

Before night fell, Maddie returned with another plastic bag containing more food and warm bottles of Gatorade that she handed to Sandra. She was already wearing her hazmat suit but had her gas mask clipped to her hip. Lenny wasn’t at the door anymore, but they still kept it locked from the other side.

Blaine was standing under the window, watching the sun descend outside, and with it, the very familiar sense of dread. Mason wasn’t entirely wrong. Constantly having to outrun the darkness was a pain in the ass. The knowledge that each night you survived only meant another day where you had to do it all over again was tiring, and sometimes he just wanted to stop.

“What now?” Sandra asked Maddie.

“You’ll need to stay in here during the night,” Maddie said. “They usually leave this part of the mall alone. Mostly it’s straight up to the second floor to do what they have to do.”

“Why the suit?” Blaine asked. It had been on his mind all day.

“It’s how they tell us apart from, well, you,” Maddie said. “One of them told Mason to wear it, so we wear it. I don’t know where they got the suits, to be honest with you. After a while, you become used to it. It’s actually pretty comfortable, even out in the sun, which is a nice bonus, I guess.”

“You said ‘one of them’ told Mason to wear the suits? You mean one of the creatures?”

“Yeah. There’s one of them that talks to him from time to time.” She watched them closely, as if trying to gauge if they believed her. “It has blue eyes,” she said after a while.

Blue-eyed ghoul!

“Blue eyes?” Sandra said. He could hear the disbelief in her voice.

“Yeah,” Maddie nodded. “Damnedest thing I ever saw. Blue eyes, and it stood tall. You know, like a human. Well, I guess it used to be human, but it still carried itself like one.”

“What does it say to Mason?” Sandra asked.

“It tells him what they need us to do, that sort of stuff.”

“Was it a woman?” Blaine asked.

“What?” Maddie said, her eyes darting to him.

“The blue-eyed ghoul,” he said. “Was it a woman?”

“I don’t know,” Maddie said, and seemed to think about it for a moment. “It’s hard to tell with them. Why?”

“I was just curious.”

She stared at him, disbelieving his answer.

“After tonight, then what?” Sandra asked.

Maddie looked back to her. “Mason will want an answer by morning.”

“And if we say no?”

“Then he’ll probably shoot you. Or hand you over to the creatures. I don’t know. I do know that it’s in your best interest to say yes.”

“We’re thinking about it,” Blaine said.

He said it quickly, before Sandra could answer. He needed Maddie on their side, and the more she considered them potential allies, the better. Blaine didn’t think he had a chance in hell of convincing Mason, the cowboy, or Lenny.

Maddie is the key…

“Think fast,” Maddie said. “Mason will kill you. I hope that isn’t something you’re doubting. He will, and he won’t lose sleep over it for a single night.”

“He had a gun to my temple,” Sandra said. “I don’t doubt that at all.”

Maddie nodded and opened her mouth as if to say something else, but stopped. She turned and left instead. Blaine heard a key turning in the lock, then footsteps fading down the hallway.

Sandra looked over at him. “It would be nice, wouldn’t it?”

“What’s that?”

“To not have to keep looking over our shoulders. Not have to keep trying to outrun the day.”

He nodded. “It would be nice, yeah. But it hasn’t come to that yet. Give me until tomorrow.”

“Then what?”

“I don’t know yet.”

He could see how tired she looked, how beaten down and exhausted by the last few days. She opened the bag and pulled out a box of animal crackers and two Gatorade bottles, one lemon-lime and the other Hawaiian punch.

She tossed him the crackers. “Your favorite.”

Blaine caught them and sat down next to her. He opened the box and fished out an elephant and took a bite. It wasn’t bad. Sandra opened one of the Gatorade bottles and drank from it. For a moment, they sat quietly and drank warm artificial drinks and snacked on slightly stale animal-shaped cookies. From time to time they glanced up at the fading light coming from the other side of the window.

“Gatorade,” Sandra said. “I used to hate this stuff. Hated it even more when it was warm like this. Now? It’s not so bad.”

Blaine felt bloated after a half-dozen crackers and handed her the box. He didn’t have to look up at the window or glance at his watch to know that night was closer. The room had started to get dark around them, inch by inch, until he couldn’t see half of the employee lounge anymore.

“That thing about the blue-eyed ghoul,” Sandra said. “Do you believe her?”

“Yes. Because I saw one, that night at the house.”

She looked at him, shocked. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I thought we were going to die. And when we didn’t… I guess I just forgot.”

“Did it…say anything to you?”

He shook his head. “I saw it from the second-floor window. It was in front of the house while the rest of them were attacking. Like it was coordinating the attack, I guess.”

“You think it was a woman? You asked Maddie if it was a woman.”

“It could have been. It looked like a woman. But like Maddie said, it’s hard to tell with them.”

Sandra looked back toward the door. “Blue-eyed ghoul or not, I don’t want to think about what’s going to be happening outside that door tonight.”

“Then don’t.”

“How can I not?”

She leaned her head against his shoulder, like she was finally lying down for the first time after centuries of being awake. Blaine wrapped his arm around her body and pulled her tight.

“We have to get out of here,” she whispered softly. “We can’t be a part of this.”

“I have a plan. But we’ll need Maddie’s help.”

“You think she’ll help?”

“God, I hope so, otherwise there’s no plan.”

“Are you going to tell me?”

“Not yet.”

“Why not?”

“Because I haven’t been able to convince myself it has a chance in hell of actually working yet.”

“Oh. That good, huh?” she said, smiling a bit.

“Yeah.”

Soon, they were swallowed up by darkness along with the rest of the employee lounge.

“Blaine?” she whispered in the darkness.

“Hmm?”

“When I went back to find your body and you weren’t there?”

“Yeah?”

“I wasn’t going to leave Grime.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, that was it. I was going to find a place and lie down, and that would have been it.”

“Oh.” He didn’t know how to respond. After a while, he said, “I’m glad you didn’t.”

“Me, too,” she whispered.

Blaine tightened his arm around her and heard her sigh in the darkness.

Outside the mall, beyond the window, he thought he heard what sounded like rats scurrying. But of course he knew it wasn’t rats.

It was a much more dangerous infestation…