The Purge of Babylon: A Novel of Survival

CHAPTER 1 WILL

It was sweaty and stuffy, and death likely awaited them beyond the door at the end of the staircase, so of course Danny was making with the jokes.

“A couple is out celebrating their ten year anniversary. Things haven’t been going well, but the night starts off great, and the wife can’t believe how attentive her husband is. He orders the best wine and the most expensive food. She thinks, ‘I’ve never been happier!’ Then the husband hands her a note and says, ‘Sweetheart, I wrote you this letter because I couldn’t bring myself to say it.’ She takes the letter, but before she can read it, the husband starts gagging on some lamb. She throws the letter into her purse and yells, ‘Help! Help! My husband is choking!’ But help doesn’t come fast enough, and the husband keels over. At the funeral, the wife throws herself at the casket, screaming, ‘Why? Oh why? It was all going so well!’ Then suddenly she remembers! ‘Wait, my husband left me this letter and wanted me to read it!’ So she whips out the letter and begins to read. ‘Dearest wife,’ it says, ‘I don’t know how to tell you this, but I’m sleeping with your sister and I want a divorce.’”

“Old joke,” Will said. “You told that one already.”

“Bullshit. I came up with it this morning.”

“You’re repeating yourself and you don’t even know it. That’s a sign of dementia.”

“I got your dementia right here,” Danny said, grabbing his crotch.

Four heavily armed bodies up the line, Marker glanced back and scowled. “Shut the fuck up, I’m trying to hear what Command’s saying.”

An earbud wire dangled from Marker’s right ear, connected to a throat mic and a Motorola radio clipped to the front lapel of his urban assault vest. Everyone squeezed into the stairwell at that moment was wearing the same rig.

Will and Danny said simultaneously, “Sorry, sir.”

Danny’s sandy blond hair was matted to his forehead by sweat and dirt, blue eyes glinting with mischief when he shot Will a quick grin. To Will, looking at Danny was like looking into a funhouse mirror and seeing his exact opposite. The fact that they were friends was a mystery to most people, including Will himself.

Danny whispered, “Still better than the Stan, right? No sand in the crack.”

Will grinned back. Compared to trudging around in the scorching mountains of Afghanistan in Uncle Sam’s Army, working SWAT with the Harris County Sheriff’s Department was a cakewalk. It was a lot of downtime and training occasionally broken up by a nutcase locked in a house or a junkie with a knife stumbling around someone’s backyard in the middle of the night, usually buck naked. Most of their time was spent writing tickets or sitting in patrol cars underneath highways, watching increasingly strange porn on Danny’s iPad.

At the moment they were stacked eight men long inside the hot stairwell, and no one had moved more than a few inches at a time in the last ten minutes. Marker, all 250 pounds and fifty grizzled years of him — and every single year of it readily apparent on his grimacing face — was up front, sweating through his goggles.

Will glanced down at his watch, if only to break the monotony of staring up at Marker’s back: 5:04 p.m.

It was November — a hot November, even by Houston standards — but that didn’t matter inside a stairwell covered with the refuse of thousands of people that used to call this place home.

It smells like it, too.

Will could feel his goggles starting to fog up and had to swipe at the lenses with the sleeve of his shirt.

Marker finally looked back at Peeks, standing directly behind him, and nodded. “All right, just got word from Command. We have a green light.”

“Fucking finally,” Peeks grunted, and wiped at a thick sheet of sweat dripping down his goggles.

“Everyone, get into position,” Marker said.

Peeks slung his Remington 870 tactical shotgun over his back and unlatched the sledgehammer from his left shoulder. At thirty-five, Peeks was square shaped and solidly built, with a robust chest and legs that looked like tree trunks. He had six years on Will and Danny but was a foot shorter than both of them. Peeks looked like a Hobbit next to Marker’s six-three frame, though what Peeks lacked in height, he made up for in width.

Will watched Peeks grip the twenty-pound sledgehammer in his two hands as if it were a toy, and idly wondered if Peeks ever tried that trick at home when his kids didn’t behave. Peeks’s two favorite pastimes were working out and bitching about his kids. Sometimes he would get creative and bitch about his kids while working out. And when he was really inspired, Peeks would throw the old lady in there, too.

Will and Danny were in the middle, squeezed between Jenkins in front and Lambert behind them. They slipped the safeties off their M4A1 assault rifles, the barrels pointed low in the ready position. They exchanged a brief look and nod. Ten minutes inside a stuffy apartment stairwell was a breeze compared to some of their past call outs, which usually boiled down to ten hours of waiting followed by ten minutes of action — that is, if they were lucky.

Marker, up front, opened the staircase door and started out first. Peeks was right behind him with the sledgehammer, Ross and Jenkins following, with Will and Danny behind them. Lambert kept pace behind Danny, with Hollins bringing up the rear.

Standard stacking procedure. They had done it hundreds of times.

The Wilshire Apartments looked bigger on the outside, though the aesthetics were pretty much the same inside. It was twenty floors of 1950s brick-and-mortar low-income housing that should have been torn down decades ago, if anyone had cared enough to voice an opinion. The building had finally been condemned and abandoned in 2004, about thirty years too late if you asked Will.

They were on the twentieth floor now; the march up the stairwell had been a royal pain in the ass. There was an elevator, but the building didn’t have power, so that was moot. The fact that they were wearing thirty pounds of equipment, weapons, and extra ammo didn’t help, either. And this was their lighter setup. Unlike most of their other call outs, the plan was to hit the place and leave. Wham, bam, thank you, but I won’t have time to make sweet lovin’ to your daughter today, ma’am.

The twentieth floor hallway looked abandoned. The whole building gave off a graveyard vibe. But it was the smell that got his attention. It stung his nostrils and made his eyes water. This morning’s breakfast made a show of force and, looking back, Will saw Danny trying not to gag from the same stench.

Danny mouthed at him, “What the fuck is that smell?”

Will mouthed back, “Did you take a shower this morning?”

“Your mom didn’t seem to mind.”

“Fuck you.”

“That’s what she said.”

Will grinned and looked back up front.

Graffiti covered the walls and doors — what didn’t graffiti cover in this place? — and the floor was littered with garbage. All the doors showed signs of wear and tear and rotted wood damage. The wallpaper had ripped free years ago, and there were jagged, dangerous-looking cracks along the length of the ceiling above them.

Damn thing’s going to fall right on our heads.

You could always tell when someone was living in a place, and Will didn’t see any of those signs now. It took him a moment to realize that the refuse scattered around them wasn’t where the smell was coming from.

What the hell is that smell?

There was a lone window at the end of the hallway, but a dirty blanket, held in place by what looked like rusted nails, covered it up. Slivers of sunlight still managed to peek through, providing enough natural light for them to make out the hallway’s layout and avoid the more unsavory objects sticking out from the brown and stained carpeting, which itself looked miserably unhinged, as if someone had tried to rip it out but gave up halfway into the job.

Will remembered seeing covered windows all along the apartment building’s twenty floors as they rolled up on the Wilshire. Someone had gone to a lot of work to cover up a building that was supposed to have been empty since 2004.

Marker was setting the pace up front, his pump-action shotgun in front of him. They were approaching one of the very last apartments in the hallway, though one rotted door looked the same as the other. Intel had undesirables taking over the Wilshire, with the last apartment down the hall serving as a possible crack den. Where you found junkies, you found drug dealers. Junkies were customers, and customers paid. The problem with drug dealers was that they were territorial. Plus, they were usually armed. That was a bad combination.

They quickly stacked up next to Apartment 2025, the last one in the hallway. Marker let his shotgun hang in front of him from a sling and pulled out a flash bang canister from one of his pouches. He nodded to Peeks, who slipped out of line and faced the door. Peeks spent a second settling his stance, then changed up his grip on the sledgehammer. He took a deep breath, threw Marker a nod, then shattered the doorknob of Apartment 2025 with one arching, massive overhead swing. The door seemed to crush in on itself, a combination of force from Peeks and the door’s rotting wood finally, mercifully, giving way after all these years.

Peeks spun out of the way until his back was to the door. Marker tossed the flash bang into the apartment. They heard the loud, familiar pop!, saw a brief white flash flood out of the opened door, momentarily lighting up the semi-dark hallway.

Then Marker was inside, shouting, “Police! Get down!”

Ross and Jenkins disappeared through the door behind Marker. Peeks, the shotgun back in his hands and the sledgehammer back in its holster, was right behind them. Will and Danny started to follow Peeks inside when they heard a man scream.

Will entered with the M4A1 swinging up to chest level, his right eye scanning for targets behind the sight mounted on top of the rifle. The brief period it usually took him to get used to seeing the world behind the myopic clear lens — with a bright red dot in the center — flashed by in one-tenth of a heartbeat.

Will was almost a meter into the apartment, a half second through the doorway — scanning from left to right, controlling his breathing — when he heard the scream again. This time he had images to go with the sound.

Marker was down, and something crouched over him. No, not over him, on top of him. A man. Maybe. A woman, possibly. Naked. Sinewy muscle moved in the darkness, more silhouetted shadow than actual shapes and forms.

The room was dark. All the windows were covered like in the hallway, except there were no chances of sunlight in here.

The thing had its mouth clamped over Marker’s throat, and it was tearing at the soft and vulnerable flesh. Will saw, almost in slow motion, blood squirting out of Marker in arching spurts, bright red against the suffocating darkness of the room. He swore he could smell Marker’s blood as it splashed against the filthy carpet, the scent horrid and fascinating even against the powerful stench that permeated every single inch of the building.

The floor was thick with a liquid substance that stuck to Will’s boots when he moved, the plop-plop sound sending a disturbing image through his mind that forced him to waste another precious second to push aside.

Ross and Jenkins began firing on the thing clawing at Marker’s face. They had their M4 assault rifles on semi-automatic, and while Ross put a bullet in the figure’s forehead, Jenkins fired into its chest. It seemed taken aback by the gunfire, but it didn’t go down.

That’s impossible.

He had killed men before. He knew what was supposed to happen when you shot someone in the head. They went down. It didn’t matter how big or small, male or female. They all went down. It was instantaneous. What you don’t do is shake off a bullet to the head from a distance of two meters. You don’t stumble and growl back at the person who just shot you.

That doesn’t happen in real life.

Behind him, Danny whispered, breathless, “Fuck me.”

Will heard them before he actually saw them. Thin, hunched-over figures padding forward in the darkness on bare feet. Maybe they had always been there. He couldn’t be sure. Maybe they were coming out of the walls but, of course, that was impossible.

Wasn’t it?

They emerged out of the blackness around them. A wall of nude figures. Men and women. Maybe. They had no visible sex organs. He couldn’t tell their ages, because they didn’t seem to possess any of the things people use to tell each other apart, to stand out as unique individuals. They stood about the same height, dark and black pruned skin that was almost entirely hairless, yellow teeth stained black and brown, grotesque and jagged (Meth teeth), and their eyes…

The eyes gave them away. Even in the darkness, he could see they had dark, solid black eyes. Like tar, the thick, gooey, smelly substance that his father used to work with when he fixed roofs for people who could afford to hire out basic jobs they’d rather not do themselves.

These creatures had those — small oceans of black tar where eyes used to be.

They were so thin he could see bone protruding out of skin. No, not skin, really. Like cheap Halloween costumes draped over bony shoulders and meatless bones. Their faces were freakishly gaunt, and cheekbones stuck out like carved pumpkins. He instantly flashed on late-night commercials of Third World children suffering from malnutrition and obese men with white beards begging for monthly donations.

Then something fell on top of Ross and drove him to the floor. Another one. Naked, smaller than the rest, maybe a child. It was hard to tell. They all looked small and frail and dangerously on the verge of collapsing underneath their own sickness. But this one had enough strength to tear out Ross’s throat in front of Will.

“Back, back!” he screamed.

Jenkins turned and made a run for the door when another one — a girl maybe — darted out of a dark corner and leaped on his back. Jenkins stumbled to the floor and quickly tried to get back up. The girl climbed up Jenkins’s back as if he were some kind of mountain to be conquered and bit into his shoulder blade between the straps of his tactical vest.

Will saw blood spraying, and then Jenkins was screaming, too.

To Will’s right, Peeks let out a wild, incoherent scream and began firing with his shotgun. The noise of each blast in the closed confines of the apartment was earsplitting, even with the ballistic helmet partially pulled over Will’s ears.

He saw a bigger creature — the biggest so far, though it only went up to Peeks’s chest — stepping out of the shadow in front of Peeks. Peeks saw it, turned and fired, and half of the creature’s body, from waist to shoulder blade, disappeared in a shower of buckshot, and the creature was flung back by the force of the blast.

Then it slowly got back up, even with one side of its body completely gone.

That’s impossible.

Will squeezed the trigger once, twice as a figure made a run for him, coming out of the corner to his right. Will caught it full in the chest with both shots. It flopped to the floor, looking more surprised than hurt.

Then it was instantly back up on its feet.

That’s fucking impossible.

Will moved on instinct, flicking the M4A1’s fire selector to fully automatic and began firing into the room, the rifle’s thirty-round magazine emptying at a dizzying 700 rounds per minute.

Around him, everyone was firing now, and the staccato flash of gunfire lit up the room in spurts of half-second intervals, and each time he swore that creatures were coming out of the walls, the ceiling, and even the floor underneath his boots.

But that was impossible.

Wasn’t it?

CHAPTER 2 KATE

She heard sirens blaring along Interstate 45, the long stretch of highway that cut through the heart of Houston and was visible outside her tenth floor office windows. There was nothing major happening out there in the real world that she knew about. At least, there was nothing on TV or the Internet. Houston was not exactly Los Angeles; something as minor as a car chase with some idiot who refused to stop for a simple traffic ticket usually ended up on the news.

She glanced at the clock on her wall. 5:14 p.m.

Rush hour would be thinning out about now, and if she waited another thirty minutes, she would have clear sailing from the office to home. If there was lingering traffic — and there usually was — she could always take the tollway. Ironically, that would add an extra five minutes to her normal drive because the tollway was out of the way, but it was better than sitting in traffic. Houston was a notoriously car-heavy city, and not everyone had mastered the art of driving. She had seen tiny drops of rain turn a steadily moving highway into a parking lot.

Kate sat back down at her desk and stared at the stack of DVDs next to the equally large pile of folders. Audition tapes, commercials that needed approval, and the pleasures of paperwork. All of it would have driven her crazy if she hadn’t asked for it by opening her own business.

Be careful what you wish for, Kate.

She grabbed the brown bag that today’s lunch had come in and tossed it into the trash bin nearby. A nice arcing hook shot landed the crumpled bag on a stack of used newspapers and discarded folders. That struck her as odd. Usually the janitors were already up here by around five o’clock to start their rounds. The Amegy Bank building shut down completely by then, with most of the pedestrian foot traffic non-existent after three o’clock when the bank closed its lobby. The rest of the floors, like Kate’s, became a ghost town as soon as the clock hit five.

There were no signs of the janitors now, though. No Mel or Francis. Or was it Mac and Francis? Something with an “M.”

A flicker of failing sunlight outside the window caught her attention, and Kate wasted a pointless second or two staring out at the evening shade, towering over the heavy traffic on the 45. She would have been shocked by how fast it was darkening outside if she hadn’t spent most of her life here. Late November in Houston meant sunset before 5:30 p.m. and sunrise before 7:00 a.m. It was one of those times of the year where it got dark before you wanted it to and bright before you needed it to.

Kate shook off the randomness of the moment, got up, walked to the window, and closed the blinds. Out of sight, out of mind.

Pathetic. It’s Friday and you’re still at the office after five. This might actually be a new low.

She grabbed the first DVD case off the top of the pile. The plastic container felt cheap, and the DVD inside had the production name scribbled in permanent marker. She sighed.

Amateur hour.

She pushed the disk into her laptop, picked up her earbuds, slipped them on, and waited for the DVD to load. It took too long to load, which usually meant they formatted the disk wrong. That was annoying. How did they expect her to hire them when they couldn’t even send their audition tapes in the right format?

While she waited, Kate glanced up and out of her inner office window and saw Donald across the floor, packing paperwork into the faded hand-stitched leather satchel that he always carried. No one stayed longer than they had to on a Friday, and the fact that she and Donald were the only two people still on the floor felt oddly reassuring. Soon it would just be her (Pathetic, Kate, really pathetic), but for now…

He must have sensed her watching, because he looked up. Before she could turn away, he waved. Caught, Kate waved back as casually as she could.

Ugh. I’m back in high school all over again.

Donald was twenty-two, blond, and impossibly handsome. Just thinking about where he had been only a few months ago, lining up in the University of Houston’s Hofheinz Pavilion building to pick up his bachelor’s degree, made her feel ancient. It had never occurred to her that thirty-one was old until Donald smiled at her one day when they were alone in her office.

She looked away momentarily, feigned being busy by flicking her fingers over the laptop’s keys. By the time she glanced back out the window, Donald had stepped into the elevator and the doors were closing on his perfectly chiseled face.

The DVD finally started to play; loud, bombastic music blasting through her earbuds. That wasn’t a good sign, either.

Kate turned down the volume slightly, then with one eye on the laptop, picked up the first folder and opened it, scanning through the paperwork before signing her name at the bottom.

Don’t complain, you asked for this.

She sighed.

Two hours. She’d spend two hours on this and go home…

She ended up staying much longer and didn’t look up from the laptop, rubbing at her eyes, until it was almost eight.

By 8:17 p.m., she had ripped the earbuds free, signed the last forms on the pile, then gathered up her things and deposited the folders on her secretary’s desk outside. Kate soaked up the silence as she walked across to the elevator.

The ride down was uneventful. Kate passed the time going over ad jobs that had come into the office in the last week, slotting them in terms of importance, pay rate, and future investment. The Sears job automatically went to the front of the line. Department stores were hard to come by, and ones with almost 100 years in the bank even rarer. She would have to put Donald on that one. Evelyn generally did a decent job, but Kate didn’t need decent, she needed greatness. Donald could be great with the right tutelage. Hers.

Should have caught him before he left, Kate.

Kate pushed aside the lost moment as the elevator stopped, pinged, and the doors opened onto the third floor of the garage structure next to the Amegy building. She was immediately greeted by ugly gray concrete on every side, thick solid walls that isolated the structure from the rest of the Downtown noise.

Not that there were a lot of noises at the moment. Which was curious. Friday night in Downtown, Houston was usually a sea of activity, with the businesses shutting down and the clubs starting up.

But not tonight. Tonight, it was quiet.

Why is it so quiet outside?

More oddities in Kate’s life. Things that just didn’t add up.

Ugh.

She desperately longed for home. Order always came more easily to her while soaking in a hot tub filled with Deep Steep Honey bubbles. Maybe Rosemary Mint tonight…

The garage was relatively new, and smelled and looked the part. The only sound was the steady, rhythmic click-clack of her heels as she walked across the floor. Most of the parking spaces were empty, leaving a big gray field with only the occasional car to break the monotony. Kate found the emptiness suffocating and searched her purse for her key fob. The laptop bag was draped over her right shoulder from a strap, and Kate fancied that if she was ever attacked, she could swing the bag as a weapon. That was the idea, anyway.

Kate fumbled inside the purse, realized she was being absurd and slowed down, and finally found the fob buried underneath make-up and paperwork. She pressed it and listened to the familiar breep-breep! from across the garage. She couldn’t see the Mazda yet, but she knew exactly where it was.

She made a beeline for it and found herself thinking of Donald again. He would be home by now. Or at a club with a pretty girl. Younger girls than her.

She sighed. When did thirty-one become old?

Should have stopped him before he got into the elevator. “Hey, Donald, you wanna grab a drink?” Purely as friends, of course.

She smiled to herself, feeling silly.

“Kate,” a voice said behind her.

Kate jumped, but then she recognized the voice.

She turned around, excited, smiling.

He waited for me. Somehow, I knew he’d be waiting for me.

He staggered toward her, his face pale, mouth slightly open, as if he was about to say something but couldn’t remember what. The handsome young man she had recruited out of the University of Houston looked deathly ill and twenty years older, glaring wrinkles readily apparent underneath harsh and bright garage lights. And he was bleeding, blood spurting out between the fingers of his right hand pressed against his neck, leaving a jagged trail of blood in his wake.

Donald reached out toward her with his free hand, and in a garbled voice that sounded pained, croaked, “Kate, go back, go back…”

Kate dropped her purse and the laptop bag without thinking, and rushed forward and grabbed him just as he stumbled and fell. Kate grimaced as the concrete scraped her right knee, tearing skin and drawing a trickle of blood.

She struggled to hold on to Donald, his body pressed up against hers like a big lump of unyielding flesh. He was too heavy. He always looked so trim and thin: where was all the weight coming from? It was all Kate could do to push him into a sitting position against one of the garage’s support columns.

She sat back on the floor to gather her breath. “My God, Donald, what happened?”

Kate flinched at the sound of blood squirting through his fingers.

“Kate, be careful, don’t go outside,” he whispered. For a moment she thought he was going to start laughing. He grimaced and groaned instead. “Don’t go outside, Kate. It’s everywhere. They’re everywhere.”

She couldn’t process what he was saying. Her eyes, her focus, were on the blood squirting through his fingers.

He’s bleeding so much…

“Who did this to you, Donald?”

“Jack. Jack bit me.” His eyes sought hers and held on. “Don’t go outside, Kate. I came back to warn you. I came back to warn you…”

She shook her head. He wasn’t making any sense.

Warn her? About what? About going outside?

“I’m calling for an ambulance,” she said. “Sit still and try not to move, okay?”

“No, Kate, no, you can’t stay here. Jack’s coming. Jack bit me…”

Kate stood up and grabbed her purse from the floor. She took out her phone and dialed 9-1-1. “Why did Jack bite you?”

He shook his head. “You’re not listening to me, Kate. You have to run, hide. I came back to warn you. It’s…don’t go out there…they’re everywhere…”

“I don’t understand, Donald. What’s out there? What’s happening?”

“Can’t explain it.” He leaned back against the support column as two streams of blood squirted free between his fingers. “They’re everywhere…”

Where is all that blood coming from?

Kate heard the call connecting and turned back to it. She was surprised to hear a recorded message on the other end: “You have reached 9-1-1. We are currently experiencing a high volume of calls. If this is an emergency, please remain on the line.”

The message repeated itself, but Kate wasn’t listening anymore.

What the hell was happening out there?

Kate looked around her, at thick concrete walls separating her from the eerily quiet Downtown beyond.

Get away! something inside her screamed. Get away before it’s too late!

She fought against the urge and turned back to Donald. He seemed to have gotten paler since the last time she looked at him just seconds ago. “Donald, I’m getting a recorded message. The police aren’t answering.”

He made a noise that might have been a chuckle. “I know,” he whispered, exhaling deeply. “I tried to call. That’s why I came back to get you. Kate, you have to go back to the office. Lock yourself in and don’t come out for anything.”

“Donald, stop talking. You’re bleeding so much.”

My God, how deep is that wound?

“So much bad luck,” he groaned, breathless, and his eyes seemed to fade a bit. “So much bad luck in my life, but it was turning around when you hired me.” She thought he was going to lean back, to rest, but instead he lunged forward and grabbed her arm with his free left hand. “Get out of here, Kate.” His voice was low, guttural, and she had to strain to hear every little word. “He’s coming.”

“Who? Who is coming?”

“Jack. Jack’s coming. Go, Kate.” His voice grew stronger suddenly. “They’re everywhere, Kate. In the buildings. In the streets. Go back to your office and hide.”

Kate shook her head. This was wrong. None of this made any sense. Kate was always good at making sense of nonsense, but this… None of this was making any sense. There was no order here. It was chaos. Pure chaos.

This must be some kind of a joke. Donald is playing a joke on me. He has someone hiding in the garage recording all of this. We’ll probably end up on America’s Funniest Home Video. Or YouTube. Maybe we’ll go viral.

But she stared at him and knew it wasn’t a joke. This was Donald, looking impossibly older. Bleeding. Dying. In front of her.

He’s aged twenty years…

“Kate,” he said, barely getting her name out, “you have to go. He’s coming.”

He was talking about Jack. There was only one Jack that they both knew. The parking garage security guard. Jack was the easygoing father of two who gave her a friendly smile every morning, always quick with the small talk and a wave. And unlike the other guards that staffed the front gate when he was out, Jack never tried to look down her blouse when she drove through the gate. Not once. He was too much of a gentleman for that.

She liked Jack. The Jack she knew couldn’t have done this.

And what had Donald said? Jack bit him? That made even less sense.

“Stay still,” Kate said, “don’t try to talk, you’re really hurt. God, you’re bleeding so much.”

“He bit me. I can’t believe he bit me, Kate.”

“How bad is it? Can I see?”

As soon as the words left her mouth Kate wished them back. She didn’t want to see it. She was terrified to see it because he was bleeding so much, and she couldn’t even imagine what the wound must be like to cause that kind of bleeding.

Donald shook his head and opened his mouth to speak, but it was too much effort and he stopped himself, leaned farther back against the concrete structure behind him and seemed to drift off.

“Donald,” she said, kneeling in front of him. “Can you hear me? Donald, don’t go to sleep. You have to stay awake.”

He didn’t move at all, and he looked as if he was going to sleep. Or maybe he was already asleep. Kate felt panic rising from the pit of her gut. She tried listening to the phone again, but the same recorded message was repeating itself in the same feminine, robotic voice:

“… are currently experiencing a high volume of calls. If this is an emergency, please remain on the line. You have reached 9-1-1. We are currently experiencing a high volume of calls. If this is an emergency, please remain on the line…”

“Oh God,” Kate whispered softly.

What now? WHAT NOW?

There was a soft plopping sound, and every inch of her body flinched at the sight of the gaping wound in Donald’s neck. The hand he had been using to hold against the wound had fallen away, and blood was flowing freely down his shoulder. Down the front of his suit — his expensive suit, the one that she knew he’d bought with the advance she had given him — into his lap, and pooled on the floor underneath him.

The sight of the wound mesmerized her. It was red and black and ugly, and there were very noticeable indentations: teeth marks. Donald hadn’t just been bitten, she realized. Someone had actually bitten a whole chunk out of his neck.

Kate dropped the phone, heard the clatter of the screen breaking, and desperately grabbed for Donald’s neck, pushing both hands against the ghastly wound in an attempt to stem the flow of blood. Her fingers turned instantly red and became wet and slippery. Trying to keep one hand over the wound was impossible, but with two hands it was almost doable. Blood found ways through her fingers, and she grew queasy as it dribbled down her wrists and along her forearms.

My God, where is all the blood coming from?

She was pondering that deranged question when she heard the soft sound of bare feet against hard concrete behind her. The smell — like rotting vegetables — instantly hit her, choking her down to her core. She fought against the overwhelming instinct to grab at her nose and mouth in order to shut out the stench, because doing that would mean removing her hands from Donald’s neck.

How many pints are in the human body?

Kate turned her head slowly, careful to keep both hands on Donald’s neck. The blood had become slick and made her grip more tenuous, but she scrambled to hold on. She told herself not to turn around, but she couldn’t stop herself. There was something back there. She could smell and feel it.

Death.

It stood behind her in the form of Jack. The security guard. The one with the friendly smile every morning, who never tried to look down her blouse as she drove underneath his security booth. The same man who always shared pictures of his six-year-old daughter from some game she was playing or some play she was in.

Jack. Friendly Jack.

She recognized the guard uniform he was wearing. He looked different — rail thin. The man she had said “Hi” to this morning and exchanged small talk about the U.S. debt to China looked as if he had lost fifty pounds between then and now. His guard’s uniform hung absurdly on him, as if it was two sizes too big, the nametag drooping halfway down to his waist. And his eyes. They were black, deep and dark, like the bottom of a forbidden well. The thick patch of hair from this morning was gone, replaced by a few hundred strands that clung pointlessly to his pinkish scalp that was slowly turning mud black.

It was his mouth that grabbed Kate’s eyes. It was covered in thick blood that drooled down his chin and onto his sunken chest, and crooked and brown-stained teeth jutting off in different directions. He didn’t have those this morning, either.

Jack took a step forward, and Kate heard herself screaming as she scrambled up to her feet and staggered away. Donald — handsome, strapping Donald — slid off the support column and flopped like a great big bloody whale, the sound of his face hitting the floor making a sickening thwack that Kate didn’t think she would ever forget for the rest of her life. Blood poured out of Donald’s neck in thick rivulets.

Kate stared at the thick strands of blood, like fingers stretching across the concrete, hypnotized by the sight of so much dark red.

Jack, whose dark lifeless black eyes had zeroed in on her a few moments ago, now lost interest as he moved past her. She jumped away with a gasp, thinking he was coming after her, but he crouched next to Donald and began lapping the blood off the dirty floor.

Kate stared, sick down to the pits of her soul, and she thought she might vomit — throw up this afternoon’s sandwich and chips and Diet Coke. Somehow she held them back in her stomach. She didn’t know how, maybe it was the horror of the whole thing, maybe she was simply too stunned, too paralyzed by what she was seeing to even do something as simple as wretch.

Move! Move, you idiot, while he’s not paying attention to you. Move your stupid ass!

Kate turned and ran and almost tripped over her purse lying on the floor on its side. Before she knew what she was doing, she stumbled back for the purse (What are you doing, you idiot?) and reached for it on the floor, eyes focused on Jack the whole time.

He was crouched in the widening pool of Donald’s blood, his pale pink tongue — had it gotten longer, more reptilian? — slobbering up the redness flowing around him like a greedy child that couldn’t get enough. She was afraid he would notice her at any second, but he didn’t. She realized, with a mixture of relief and numbed horror, that he had simply lost complete interest in her, because there was just the blood now. Donald’s blood.

And so much of it… How can one man bleed so much?

Kate pried her eyes away from Jack’s ghoulish form, snatched up her purse, and turned and ran. Somewhere between Donald, Jack, and her car, her heels were no longer on her feet. They were in her hands, and she clutched them like weapons. She ran past a parked black Mercedes with shiny gleaming doors and windows, and Kate caught sight of her own reflection staring back at her for the briefest of seconds.

Her long dark mane, always immaculately positioned around her head to complement the shape of her face, looked wild and streamed behind her. Her mascara-smeared face contorted in anguish and fear, tears flowing down her cheeks in streams and destroying what was left of her make-up, though she didn’t remember actually crying. Her hands were covered in blood, as were the front of her blouse and parts of her skirt, and the image of Donald’s blood pouring out of his body kept flashing across her mind.

So much blood. Where did all the blood come from…?

CHAPTER 3 WILL

It took them four hours to fight their way back down to the tenth floor of the Wilshire Apartments, dragging a bloodied Peeks between them, and Danny was still making with the jokes.

“These two brothers are at home watching football one Sunday afternoon. As brothers are wont to do, they start arguing about whose wife is hotter. The first brother says, ‘Bullshit, you know my wife’s hotter. Admit it!’ But the second brother insists, ‘Are you kidding me? Have you seen my wife’s vagina? It’s gorgeous!’ The first brother considers that for a moment, then replies, ‘Hmm, on second thought, you’re right.’ They go back to watching football when an hour later, the second brother exclaims, ‘Hey, wait a minute, how do you know my wife’s vagina is prettier than yours?’”

“Fuck you,” Will said.

Danny laughed. “Come on, man, I got that one from Rob. You remember Rob? Big, fat guy from Pittsburgh?”

“One that got shot by a sniper while pissing at night in the yard? Hockey fan?”

“Yeah, him. I guess no one told him the Stan didn’t have hockey.”

“They have polo with goat heads.”

“Yeah, well, not the same thing, is it?”

“You two are fucked up,” Peeks said, looking up at them from the floor, where he was trying not to bleed to death.

“Everyone’s a critic,” Danny smirked.

Will glanced over at Peeks. The big man had seen better days; his right leg was busted, and he couldn’t use his left arm. He had told them around the fifteenth floor that he couldn’t feel anything past the elbow joint. That probably had a little something to do with the big gash along his forearm, where one of the ghouls had bit him.

It was impossible to tell what they used to be, so Will had started thinking of them simply as ghouls.

To keep him from bleeding to death, Will had cut off a piece of Peeks’s pant leg and wrapped it around the wound. Peeks’s left arm now hung from his shoulder like a piece of useless meat, and his right leg wasn’t any better. He could hobble, but not for more than a few minutes at a time. It made moving between floors a bitch. Of course they couldn’t leave him behind. Will had thought about it on the thirteenth floor, and he was sure Danny had too, but they had each come to the same conclusion: No one gets left behind. They couldn’t afford to, anyway.

Everyone else was dead.

After Marker, Jenkins, and Ross got dragged off kicking and screaming into the darkness, and while Will and Danny were busy pulling a bleeding Peeks out of Apartment 2025, Lambert and Hollins went into the apartment and never came back out.

And that’s when the ghouls started flooding out into the hallway. They came out in a tide, like an ocean of black death moving across the filthy carpeting.

Fast. Inhumanely fast.

The M4A1s had become useless at that point, even on full-auto, but habit kept Will and Danny from discarding them. Will wasn’t superstitious, but the rifle had served him well during his tours in Afghanistan, and only dead soldiers threw away good luck omens. Besides, Will reasoned that if push came to shove, the rifles made for effective blunting instruments. The telescopic stocks could absorb a lot of damage.

They were relying mostly on Peeks’s and Marker’s Remington shotguns now, and Peeks had the foresight — or dumb luck, depending on how you looked at it — to cram enough shells into his ammo pouches to take them all the way down to the tenth floor. The buckshot loads were a hell of a lot more effective than the 5.56mm bullets that the M4A1s fired, though they had the unfortunate side effect of creating the surreal sight of ghouls attacking with only half of their heads still intact, missing jaws, or gaping holes in chest cavities — the results of shotgun blasts at close range. Those nightmarish couldn’t-possibly-be-happening moments convinced Will he was dreaming it all.

Dream or not, Danny’s jokes were still terrible.

Once the shotgun shells ran out, it was a matter of finding apartments that could be defended with the M4A1s. The ghouls didn’t die if you shot them in the head, but it did seem to bother them. Like kicking sand in a cougar’s eyes, it really pissed him off and kept him from mauling you…for a while, anyway. If all else failed, they still had their Smith and Wesson combat knives.

He had managed to make contact with SWAT Command somewhere around the eighteenth floor. They had promised backup, but an hour later no one had shown up. His next five attempts to reach SWAT Command only got dead air.

Things went from bad to crap when they encountered ghouls coming from below them while they were in the stairwell between the thirteenth and twelfth floors. It seemed obvious now that the ghouls had been down there since Will and the others entered the building, waiting for the right moment to strike.

As he watched the creatures swarm up the stairs, Will had a hollow feeling in his gut. He knew why no SWAT backup had arrived — they had not gotten past the lobby. Or maybe the first floor. Or the second… How many of those things were down there waiting for them?

Twenty? Thirty? A hundred?

It looked like a forest of moving limbs and black eyes. Innumerable.

“Like an orgy no one bothered to invite me to,” Danny said between the twelfth and eleventh floor, looking down the stairwell at what was coming up at them.

“That happens a lot?” Will shouted back at him.

“Every now and then,” Danny said between shotgun blasts.

Each time one of Danny’s blasts hit a ghoul, it lost its footing and tumbled backward, smashing into the creatures behind it and carrying a tangle of limbs and pruned skin down with it. A second later they were back on their feet and clamoring up the stairs and over each other, gaping holes in sunken chests dripping thick, oozing black fluids that didn’t look like blood. But then what were they?

They eventually located an apartment on the tenth floor with a door that could be locked from the inside. They scrambled around in darkness as soon as they slammed the door shut. Every hallway they had encountered had been dark and dank, with blankets and paint and tape and God knows what else plastered over windows.

Forced darkness and the pervading stench of decay and lifelessness followed them all the way down from the debacle at Apartment 2025 like a rabid serpent.

We’re in a nest. Jesus Christ. We just stepped into a nest and didn’t even know it.

“Where the hell is SWAT?” Peeks shouted.

“SWAT’s gone,” Danny said matter-of-factly. “We’ll have better luck writing letters to Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny for help.”

Will could hear the ghouls coming down the hallway outside the apartment door, the sound of ruined, scarred bare feet crunching slowly against filthy carpeting. The realization struck him that they were moving cautiously.

“You know that, right?” Danny said from across the door, his blue eyes intense in the darkness, the ghost of a grin on his lips. “There’s no one out there. We’re on our own, Kemosabe.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

“I once dated this chick who insisted on doggy style every single time.”

“This is fucking nuts!” Peeks shouted from behind them.

“Nah,” Danny said, “I like doggy style.”

Apartment 1009 had three sets of locks, but only one was where it was supposed to be. The doorknob was gone, leaving behind a hole, and the door chain was missing. But, for whatever reason, the deadbolt was still intact.

Will turned it now and heard the solid click as the lock tumbled into place. Just to be sure, they pushed an old couch the color of vomit green against the door, then stacked a three-legged table on top for extra weight. It wasn’t much of a barricade, but they found through trial and error in the last four hours that it didn’t take a lot to defend a door against the ghouls.

Whatever had turned them into those things that roamed the hallways, it hadn’t granted them any more strength than what they already had to begin with. They seemed to rely almost purely on an unrelenting primal drive and sheer numbers. To get through the door, they would have to break it down first. That wasn’t going to be easy, even with the building’s rotted wood.

Will leaned against the wall and waited for an attack that never came. He listened, but couldn’t hear the footsteps from earlier. He glanced across at Danny, who caught his gaze and shook his head.

“Why’d they stop?” Danny whispered. “They had us on the run, right? That wasn’t just my imagination? So why’d they stop now?”

Will didn’t have any answers. The same thoughts were running through his head. “I gotta check on something,” he said instead.

He slung his M4A1 and dug a small LED flashlight from one of his pouches. He flicked it on and walked across the room to the window. It was draped with an ugly blanket, and over it were slabs of wood that covered the entire rectangular frame, giving it the look of a framed wooden box.

He grabbed one of the boards by the ends and tried to pry it free. It budged, but not by much.

“That’s God telling you it’s time to work out more, spud,” Danny said from across the room.

Had there been boards on the windows of the other apartments? He chastised himself for not paying more attention to his surroundings. Of course, being hunted by creatures that couldn’t possibly exist, that couldn’t be killed even when you shot them in the head, had not been covered during his months in Ranger school.

Now, without the sounds of gunfire and the chaos of combat to overwhelm his senses, he collected the evidence before him.

What did he know so far? Not much. But there were some things that couldn’t be denied.

Nests on the top floor and on the bottom floor. A kill zone. They created a goddamn kill zone and we walked right into it.

But it was the covered windows that nagged at him.

Why?

Why go to the trouble? The building was already condemned. The only reason they had been called in was because drug activity was suspected. So why go to the effort of covering up all the windows so thoroughly?

He could still feel it, gnawing at the back of his brain. The very distinct feeling that this wasn’t something random they had stumbled into. This was planned.

So what the hell was “this”?

Good question…

He glanced back at Danny. “Anything?”

Danny hadn’t moved from his spot, his right ear still pressed against the wall. “It’s deader than a bad stand-up comedy routine out there.”

“Thoughts and observations? Guesstimates?”

“Maybe they found something better to do with their time? Chasing after a bunch of guys with shotguns is not my idea of fun.” He shrugged. “Or maybe they just gave up.”

“Captain Optimism,” Will smiled back at him.

“You know me, glass half full kind of guy.”

“Come here and see if you can open this window.”

“What’re you, my dad? Do this, go there, come here.”

“Get your ass over here, Mister Glass Half Full Dumbass.”

“Definitely sounded like my dad right there,” Danny said as he walked grudgingly over.

Will swept the flashlight across the apartment, over dirty walls, stained carpeting, and cracked ceiling. Apartment 1009 was like all the other apartments they had passed on their way down from the twentieth floor, evidence of its former occupants scattered haphazardly about. Discarded personal items hung on walls, sat on dust-covered tables, or were forgotten inside loose drawers. Furniture that was either too big to move or too damaged to bother took up space in living rooms.

Will’s flashlight located Peeks on the floor. His back was against the far wall, and he looked even worse than he did a few minutes ago, if that was possible.

“Hang in there, Peeks,” Will said.

Peeks blinked under the harsh LED light and nodded back. Or tried to, anyway.

Behind him, Danny had pried one of the boards free with a loud grunt. He dropped it to the floor. “One down, a dozen nasty ass more to go.”

“Keep at it, buckaroo,” Will said.

“I’ll buckaroo your ass.”

Will grinned, then headed into the kitchen.

He searched the drawers and counters and found two bags of old Ramen noodles. Both had been feasted on by rats, their contents digested over the years then spat back out as droppings spaced generously along the counters and floor. He stepped around them and located a can of tuna without a label underneath the sink, but left it where he found it. He was always hungry after a firefight, but he wasn’t that hungry.

He opened the pantry closet and skimmed over empty grocery bags on the shelves. Dust erupted from one when he touched it, and he avoided the rest. The flashlight’s bright LED ran over the tip of a shoebox on the very top shelf. It was near the back as if someone had quickly tried to stash it but didn’t push it back far enough. Will reached for it, his curiosity further raised when he felt how heavy the box was. It was much heavier than a shoebox should be.

“Find some food?” Danny asked from the living room.

“You don’t want to eat what I found.”

“Any SPAM? I like SPAM. They say SPAM lasts for decades.” He grunted, pulled another board free, and dropped it to the floor. “Two down, and still dozens more to go.”

“Keep at it, buckaroo.”

“Shaddup.”

Will put the shoebox on the counter, crushing rat droppings underneath, and flipped open the lid. The flashlight revealed old and yellowed crumpled-up newspapers. He knew that wasn’t all there was. The box was too heavy. He picked up one of the two bundles and was rewarded with the weight of an object wrapped in the center.

He unwrapped the newspaper and stared down at a cross. It was big and gaudy, and about a foot long, which was exactly the same length as the combat knife strapped to his hip. But the cross was thicker and heavier, the weight distributed evenly from top to bottom. The sides of the cross reflected back a dull silver surface under the LED light. It was the only thing in the entire place not covered in dust or dirt or grime.

Sterling silver.

Will wondered if the person who had stashed it had simply forgotten about it. What was that saying? “Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans.”

The rest of the cross was bronze, and the combination of the two metals — the bronze inside, making up the bulk of the cross, and the silver at the edges — made for a unique look. Will changed his mind, and decided it was less gaudy and actually tasteful, maybe even a little bit elegant.

He ran his finger along the silver edge, reaching the bottom where the cross formed a half-star and ended in a sharp point. He jerked his hand back when the point broke through skin and a single drop of blood fell to the counter.

He sucked on the finger and took out the other newspaper bundle.

There was an identical cross inside.

A matching pair.

Will left the kitchen with the crosses in one hand. He shone the flashlight on Peeks’s face as he passed by. Peeks didn’t bother to blink against the brightness this time. He looked like a drowning man trying not to go to sleep.

“Stay with us, Peeks,” Will said.

Peeks gave him a quarter-nod, but didn’t open his eyes.

“Peeks doesn’t look so good,” Will said to Danny. He kept his voice low, though he probably didn’t have to. He wasn’t sure Peeks could even hear anymore.

Danny looked over at the still figure sitting on the floor in the darkness. “Week-old tuna doesn’t look so good. He’s past that point.”

Will nodded. He felt bad for the guy, because he’d always liked Peeks.

Danny saw the crosses. “Don’t tell me. You’ve found Jesus.”

“I found something.” Will handed Danny one of the crosses.

Danny stared at it. “I appreciate the matching set vibe, don’t get me wrong. It’s very bromance, which makes me a bit uncomfortable, but never mind that for the moment. What exactly am I supposed to do with this? Sing gospel tunes?”

“The bottom’s pretty sharp. I cut my finger on it.”

“You want me to blow on it for you?”

“Maybe later.” Will opened one of the empty ammo pouches on his belt and slipped the cross inside, pushed a bit until the sharp point stabbed through the leather at the bottom. “Last resort.”

“What exactly do you think the knife on my left hip is for, cooking?”

“These are heavier. You can use it to bash their heads in.”

“You’re nuts.”

“Really? We’ve been running from things that won’t die even when we shoot them in the head, and you think this is nuts?”

“Good point,” Danny said and pushed the cross into one of his own empty ammo pouches. “Looks expensive.”

“Two hundred, tops. They probably got a discount for the matching pair.”

“When did you become a jewelry expert?”

“That time when you were asleep and I snuck away to do some reading.”

“Ugh. Reading. No thanks.”

Danny had gotten three boards free from the window, but the others remained stubbornly in place. Will ran the flashlight over the nails of the remaining boards. They were surprisingly well-spaced.

Organized and disciplined. Keeping the windows covered was important to them.

But why?

He reached through the slit and pushed aside the blanket, doing his best to avoid the various dull-colored stains that pockmarked the fabric. Revealing dirty glass windowpanes — then beyond that, the city.

He was immediately struck by the quiet. The Wilshire Apartments was located in an unimportant, non-descript section of the city, but even so the emptiness of the world outside the window threw him for a loop. It was a heavy silence, the kind of calm filled with dread and promises of sudden violence. Like standing in the eye of a hurricane. It was uncomfortable and strangely, unnervingly soothing.

Will glanced down at his watch: 9:43 p.m.

He realized how isolated they had been, fighting for the last four hours from the twentieth floor down. What was happening in the city? Maybe that explained why SWAT Command wasn’t trying to send help.

He stood up on tiptoes and looked down toward the street. Police vehicles scattered along West Dallas Street, but there were no cops in sight. The SWAT van was still parked directly across the street. It looked unattended, which was never a good sign. A SWAT van had a lot of expensive and dangerous equipment inside. You didn’t leave something that valuable idling at a corner without supervision.

Will pressed the Push-To-Talk switch dangling from his radio. “SWAT Command, come in. SWAT Command, come in if you can hear me. Is anyone out there? If anyone can hear me, please respond.”

He waited for a response through the earbud in his right ear, but there was none. Just like the last five times he had tried to reach them.

Where is everyone?

Not just the cops. The civilians were gone, too. There had been a dozen lookyloos when they showed up this morning. That number usually ballooned by the time word got around that SWAT was in the neighborhood. He spotted the sawhorses from earlier, blocking both sides of the street. News vans were parked just up the curb, color logos visible underneath the halo of street lamps. Channel 2, Channel 11, and even Channel 26 had shown up, but there were no clues as to the whereabouts of their owners.

There were a couple of tenement buildings across the street, with lights on in a dozen or so apartments. He thought he caught a glimpse of something small and thin flashing by one of the windows, but when he looked again, it was gone. A pair of stores, including a Valero gas station, looked deserted, bright lights lit up along the pumping stations. Empty cars waiting in line for gas.

He glanced to his left and had to strain to make out the I-45 stretched in the far distance. Too far to really see anything except a long, black slab of raised concrete. Even so, he should still have been able to spot luminescent streams of white and red lights flashing along the north and southbound lanes. Instead, he saw unmoving white and red dots scattered all along the highway.

Will had the very odd impression of peering through a window and seeing the world at a very specific point in its existence, frozen forever in time.

The ghouls finally remembered they were still alive around ten. For a while, Will thought the creatures might have simply forgotten that they existed, but he quickly dashed that idea for another one: There had been something else occupying their time.

They’re organized and disciplined.

Will and Danny heard footsteps moving outside in the hallway. The creatures were quiet, but in the absence of any other noises inside the building, the ghouls might as well be wearing clogs. Will crept closer to the door, while Danny leaned back against the wall on the other side, his ear against the dirty wallpaper.

They had finally removed the boards from the window behind them, and moonlight streaked through the dirty glass windowpanes. It provided enough light for Will to see Danny and Peeks without the need of a flashlight. Peeks didn’t look any better in the moonlight, though. If anything, it gave him an odd, preternatural glow that made Will slightly uncomfortable.

He turned his attention back to the door and the footsteps on the other side.

Danny lifted three fingers in the semidarkness. Will nodded.

Three ghouls outside.

Will flexed his grip around the hilt of the combat knife in his right hand, warming to the familiar sensation of the plastic handle. With his ear against the wall, he listened to them moving outside.

The tap-tap of bare feet against soiled carpeted hallway floor.

Three.

Will glanced at Danny, adjusting his grip on his own knife. He looked anxious, which had to be a first.

Suddenly the ghouls outside the door began moving quickly, loudly…and away from Apartment 1009.

He looked at Danny for confirmation. Danny nodded back and pulled slightly away from the wall. Will allowed himself to relax, slowly releasing blood flow back to the fingers gripped around the handle of the knife.

Danny grinned at him. “So, this father took his son fishing one morning while the wife was busy shopping—”

A loud explosion, followed by shards of glass spraying inside the room like long, jagged bullets, cut Danny off in mid-sentence. They looked over in time to see a ghoul crashing through the window and smashing into the floor. The creature seemed to roll, like an out of control ball of flesh and bones, until it finally came to a stop and began unfurling itself, the grating noise of bones and joints snapping back into place. A thick shard of glass jutted out of the creature’s right cheek, though it didn’t seem to notice.

Danny was already rushing across the living room with great big strides. He barreled into the ghoul as it was straightening up and carried it across the room, ramming it into the wall next to the window. The ghoul might have caught its breath, though it was hard to tell. Did they even breathe?

Peeks, on the other side of the window, might have opened his eyes for a moment, before drifting back off again.

The ghoul glared back at Danny and let out a guttural shriek, a sound that came from the very pits of its stomach. It surprised Will. He hadn’t heard them make that kind of noise before.

Danny drove his knife through the ghoul’s forehead with an overhead swing, the force of the blow so vicious that all seven and a half inches of blade pierced flesh, then bone, and kept going until it embedded itself into the wall behind the creature’s skull with a solid thunk! The wall trembled slightly, and Danny staggered back as black clumps of liquid spurted out of the point of penetration in the creature’s forehead.

Will stared with disbelief as the creature tried to dislodge itself from the wall by jerking its body forward. But it was hanging five inches off the floor, and it had no leverage. It quickly gave up that approach and wrapped slender, bony fingers around the handle of the knife and tried to pull it out.

Behind Will, the door shook and trembled as creatures crashed into it. He took an involuntary step back and tightened his grip around the knife handle.

“What now?” Danny shouted.

“Shoot it!” Will shouted back.

Danny drew his Glock and shot the ghoul point-blank in the face three times. The first bullet shattered its right eye, the second destroyed the bridge of its nose, and the third obliterated a dozen teeth and slammed into the wall behind the back of its throat. The ghoul seemed to pause for a second, then it went back to trying to pull itself off the knife.

Danny glanced back at Will. “Any more bright ideas?”

Will put the knife away and reached for the cross. As he began pulling it out, he noticed the ghoul’s eyes darting away from Danny and over to him.

No, not to him. To the cross.

The ghoul became frenzied and thrashed its body against the wall, redoubling its efforts to free itself. Will pulled out the cross completely, and the creature let out a loud, almost involuntary shriek. When Will walked toward it, the ghoul’s agitated state seemed to double — then triple.

“What are you doing?” Danny asked.

“I don’t know,” Will said.

He was almost across the room when, with a last desperate lunge, the ghoul suddenly jerked itself free of the wall, Danny’s knife sticking out of its forehead, the handle like a plastic black horn. Will rushed forward and rammed the sharp end of the cross into the creature’s chest. The silver and bronze sank deep, the chest cavity giving way like papier-mâché, and the creature let out another wild shriek before collapsing to the floor.

Will reached for his knife, expecting the ghoul to get right back up.

But it didn’t. It stayed down. And it didn’t move.

He exchanged a look with Danny, saw his own flushed look of confusion, exhilaration, and apprehension reflected back in Danny’s face.

“What the hell did you do?” Danny asked.

“I stabbed it with the cross.”

“Why?”

“Shooting it didn’t work. Stabbing it didn’t work. I was going to bash its head in with the cross until it didn’t have a head anymore. I guess I decided to stab it instead at the last minute.”

“Oh,” Danny said.

“Yeah.”

“Assist us, O Lord our God…” a voice said from the darkness. They looked over and saw Peeks, suddenly wide-awake. His eyes were fixed on the dead ghoul in front of him, the cross lodged crookedly in its sunken chest. “… and defend us evermore by the might of the Holy Cross, in whose honor thou makest us to rejoice. Through Christ our Lord, Amen.”

Peeks made the sign of the cross with his right hand and almost as quickly, closed his eyes and seemed to drift off again.

“Makest?” Danny said.

“I haven’t been to a church since I was five,” Will said.

“Well shit, praise the Lord and pass the bullets.”

“You hear that?” Will asked.

“I don’t hear anything.”

“Yeah…”

He looked back at the door. The ghouls had stopped smashing into it. There was silence again, and the apartment, like the rest of the building, seemed to have settled down abruptly, the quick burst of violence and noise and chaos having dissipated into the ether. The only movement came from a soft gust of wind rushing through the broken window, fluttering the dirty curtains in its wake.

They know. Somehow, they know about one of their own dying…

CHAPTER 4 KATE

It was entirely possible she wasn’t afraid. Or maybe it was just adrenaline. There was a fine line between fear and courage and pure survival instinct, and at this very moment Kate wondered if she was more afraid of dying or of what would happen if she stopped moving for even a second.

After Jack and Donald, she had never made it out of the parking garage. When she finally reached the first floor, after what seemed like hours instead of the minute or so it had actually taken, there were already six cars haphazardly lined up at odd angles in front of the only exit gate that was still open after five o’clock. She imagined when the first car stopped, the other vehicles became stuck behind it, trapping everyone except the very last car from going forward or back.

There were no signs of the drivers, though the stench of blood filled her nostrils through the opened car window. She felt like gagging. Darkness had already fallen outside the garage, though Kate couldn’t see any cars along the usually busy Louisiana Street beyond.

So she sat in her car, the gear in park, behind the last car, a new-looking gray Mercedes with vanity plates (“S8UpFun”). Kate calmed herself, taking in slow, unhurried breaths, and tried to search for order out of the chaos.

There were two cars in front of the entrance side of the garage, and one of them — a slightly old red Chevy sedan — had crashed into the large metal slab that blocked access, the car’s front bumper crumpled up like paper. Smoke rose lazily from the badly damaged hood.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a shriveled, dark black head poking out of the open front driver’s side window of the Mercedes. She stopped breathing and sat perfectly still, watching as the creature turned its head slightly…toward her. Kate saw a face caked with blood, and dark black marbles where eyes should be zeroing in on her. Did its nostrils flare? Or maybe it was the garage lights playing tricks on her. She couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman — or whatever it used to be. It looked like an animal, small and primal, and the sight of it made Kate grip the steering wheel with vise-like desperation.

Then a woman’s head appeared in the same window, long blonde hair smeared with blood. She was young and attractive, a gorgeous oval-shaped, blood-red choker fastened around a long, elegant neck smeared with blood. The woman was trying to climb out through the window, trembling hands grasping for purchase along the door. She looked tired, as if she had been fighting for hours. The creature looked away from Kate, as if remembering there was someone else in the car with it. Kate watched in wordless horror as the thing put both hands over the woman’s head and pulled her back into the vehicle with barely any fight.

Kate willed herself to move, move, move. She numbly backed up the Mazda, spinning the wheel, and nearly ramming into one of the support columns behind her but managing to stop with barely an inch to spare. She headed back in the direction she had fled moments ago, hoping that the creature wouldn’t notice her, wouldn’t abandon the woman and come after her instead. She glanced in the rearview mirror, saw only a glimpse of the creature inside the Mercedes, its head bobbing up and down.

Kate turned left, onto the up ramp, and the Mercedes mercifully disappeared from her view.

I’m sorry, I’m sorry…

She passed the same half-dozen cars from ten minutes ago, the same patches of blood along windows and floors and splashed against open doors. The drivers were gone. Long gone. They were gone when she drove past the vehicles the first time, and they hadn’t come back since.

They were probably like Jack now…

Kate turned another corner and drove past the spot where she had last seen Jack and Donald. They were gone, and only a wide, bloody mess marked their passing. Then she was turning again, up to the last floor of the parking structure, with dark, cloudless skies opened above.

Kate slammed on the brakes and sat behind the steering wheel, feeling small and insignificant surrounded by empty concrete parking spaces.

Order out of chaos. Find the order out of the chaos…

She left the key in the ignition and climbed out of the Mazda and, out of breath for some reason, ran to the closest rooftop edge.

The clay-colored CenterPoint Energy Tower in front of her and the egg-shaped Trinh Real Estate building to her left. The Amegy Bank building, where she rented space for her ad agency, loomed nearby to her right. She saw flurries of movement through office windows of the buildings around her, but she was too far away to make out details.

She could see clearly now that the chaos wasn’t just inside the parking structure. It was spread out across the city. Everywhere. Nothing happened in Houston without touching Downtown, and nothing touched Downtown that didn’t eventually spread out to the rest of the city. She had learned that a long time ago.

Kate heard gunshots, screams, signs of life being chipped away, but they were sporadic and distant, little clusters of proof that she wasn’t alone. But the sound she expected to hear — desperately hoped to hear — was missing.

Where are the police sirens? Where are the cops?

Roaring engines filled the night before a Camaro blasted up Louisiana Street below her. She slipped her heels off her feet and hurried after it, racing along the edge, following the Camaro’s progress as it attempted to turn right at Bell Street. But it was going much too fast and sideswiped a Ford in the middle of the road. The Camaro somehow righted itself at the last moment and continued along Bell Street, heading toward Travis now. It was still traveling much too fast, and Kate eventually lost sight of it. Seconds later, there was a loud crashing noise, the unmistakable sound of metal grinding viciously against metal.

And then silence.

There were more cars along the streets below her, some parked defiantly in the middle, others along the curbs where vehicles usually littered Downtown like fleas during the day. She could see small two- and three-car pileups at nearby intersections, but there were no signs of their drivers, and she didn’t see bodies. The unnoticed streetlights blinked green, yellow, and red, then started over again.

Kate saw them — black figures darting in and out of the darkness, appearing for a split second underneath tall street lamps before disappearing again. She could make out more dark shapes running along the sidewalks, in the streets.

How many of them were there? Dozens? Hundreds?

“Kate.”

She spun around at the sound of his voice. She recognized it immediately. It was different than before — more hollow somehow — but she recognized it all the same.

Donald.

Or what used to be Donald. He looked old and wrinkled, his beautiful eyes now a lifeless black tint, as if there was something hidden behind them. Only she knew the truth. His tie hung indifferently around his neck, the broad chest gone, replaced by an empty pit that seemed to suck in his dress shirt. His slacks and socks looked ill-fitted — he had lost his shoes — and his hair had fallen away, leaving a pinkish bald spot that was being overwhelmed by dark black skin seemingly grafted over pale flesh.

“Kate,” the thing that used to be Donald said again.

They can talk, too.

She realized, with growing horror, that Donald was standing between her and the Mazda. He had moved so quietly that she hadn’t heard him at all until he had said her name. She didn’t have a weapon. Her purse was inside the Mazda, her keys in the ignition. All she had were her blouse, her skirt, and the expensive pair of Lanvin heels in her hands.

Donald walked toward her. He was impossibly quiet, bony fingers pulling at the tie around his neck as if he didn’t know what it was or why it was there. He pulled it free and let the satin fabric drop behind him. Then he started tearing at his shirt.

“Kate,” he said again.

She wondered if that was all he was capable of saying. Some primitive part of him that was still Donald, that still understood language, how to form words.

“Donald?” Maybe if she could get through to him…

“Kate,” he said again, and this time her name came out of his twisted, malformed mouth with obvious difficulty. “Kate…”

He pulled the shirt free, and the wind picked it up, carried it a few yards into the air before depositing it over the edge. His slacks hung from protruding hips and, as he moved closer still, Kate could see the jagged chunk in the side of his neck where Jack had bitten him. The wound had turned into a deep purple bruise, and thick, oozing black blood trickled out of it.

“Kate.” A croak, barely audible.

Behind her, Kate thought she heard gunshots and screaming. And somewhere farther away, what might have been an explosion, or possibly a car crash. Her mind was feverish, and getting more so as Donald got closer.

She willed herself to stand perfectly still. The instinct to run was strong, nagging at her, telling her to do it, run now before it’s too late. But she didn’t. She held her ground and watched, with growing horror, as the thing that used to be Donald moved silently, getting closer and closer with every second.

Donald seemed to be losing hair with every step. He was almost entirely bald, the pink skin all but turned black.

“Kate.” He reached out toward her with one bloody hand.

That’s when Kate struck.

She swung with her right hand and actually felt one of her stiletto heels go into Donald’s left temple. The blow staggered him, and Kate, holding onto her other heel, sprinted around him toward the Mazda.

The car looked so much farther away than she remembered. Had someone moved it?

Don’t look back, don’t look back, whatever you do!

But she did look back and saw Donald watching her, her heel sticking absurdly out of the side of his head like some bad attempt at comedy. Calmly, he reached up and took hold of the shoe and pulled it free.

Did he just smile at her? She couldn’t be sure because of the distance and the night sky and the fact that her mind was screaming at her. Run, stop looking back, just keep running!

Kate made it to the Mazda and threw herself inside. Slamming the door shut, locking it, jerking the gear into drive, and shoving her bare foot down on the gas pedal. For a second or two she fought for control of the car, the steering wheel fighting against her as if it had a mind of its own. She felt the car finally relenting and raced it back down the garage ramp, to the lower levels, to the wide-open space of the fifth floor, and saw the black skies disappearing behind her in the rearview mirror.

She watched, expecting Donald to appear, but he never did.

She drove, not knowing where she was going. The fourth floor passed by in a blur, and before she knew it she was back on the third.

She slowed down as she approached the same bloody puddle where Jack had feasted on Donald. She was driving much slower now, because she knew as soon as she made the turn she would be on the second floor, then it wouldn’t be long before she reached the first floor, and after that, the front gate…

Then she was back on the first floor, and once again faced with the exit. Except there were the exact same six cars parked between her and freedom. The same metal slab that would crumple her car like cheap eggrolls if she tried to ram it. For a brief moment, as she was coming down the ramp, Kate had convinced herself that the cars would be gone by the time she arrived, that someone or something would have removed them from her path as if by magic, or maybe divine intervention.

What was that saying soldiers have? “There are no atheists in foxholes.”

She felt like laughing, only it wouldn’t have really been laughter that came out of her mouth. It would have been a mixture of crying and laughing and self-pity, mixed in with a little (or maybe a lot) of utter depression, because the cars were still there, as she knew they would be.

Order out of chaos. Find the order out of chaos…

She didn’t see any of the creatures around, and it wasn’t difficult to spot them in the bright lights of the parking garage. The Mercedes with the vanity plates (“S8UpFun”) was where she had last seen it, at the end of the six-car line parked in front of the exit gate. The longer she sat in the Mazda, the harder it was to avoid the stench of blood and death, even with the windows up.

Kate put the Mazda in park and closed her eyes. She kept them closed for a while, then opened them back up again and went through her options.

Yes, she had options. Some were better than others, that’s all.

And some were unavoidable…

Kate took a breath, reached down between her seat and the door, found the trunk lever, and pulled it. She felt rather than heard the trunk pop over the idling engine. She groped along the door and found the lock switch and pressed it. She heard, like a bolt of lightning, the sound of the lock snapping free, much louder than she had anticipated.

This is crazy; you’re going to die out there. You know that, right?

Kate opened the door and stepped outside, moving almost on pure adrenaline and instinct now. She instantly felt the rush of cold night air against her skin and for a second, just a second, she considered going back inside the car.

But she pushed on instead.

She hurried toward the trunk, sticking very close to the side of the Mazda, counting the steps that she would need to retrace when she invariably fled back to the safety of the vehicle. Though that opportunity was slipping away with every step she took, taking her farther and farther away from the door, from safety…

Prying her eyes away from the dead corners, she turned to face the open trunk, scanning for the familiar pocket along the left side, grabbed it and pulled it open and saw the long, metallic, L-shaped tire iron where she knew it would be. Kate yanked it loose and turned around, scanning the garage, keeping her eyes on the dark corners around her, listening for a noise, but realizing she could hardly hear anything over the loud thrumming in her chest.

She hurried back down the length of the Mazda, her left hand gripping the cold, steel tire iron, the fingers of her right hand keeping contact with the heated exterior of the Mazda. She needed to know it was there, waiting for her if she needed it, right up to the very last second.

Then she was walking past the door and kept moving. And now she was walking faster, her bare feet scratching against the rough concrete that dug into her soles as if she was moving across broken glass.

She passed the Mazda and kept going.

The Mercedes with the vanity plate came next, and as she passed its opened driver’s side window, she couldn’t help herself and glanced in and saw a thick patch of blood drying on the driver’s seat. It was dark and glistened under the garage lights, and she knew that it was still very wet. There were no signs of the woman, though there were dozens of blonde hairs scattered along the seats and arm rest.

They lose their hair when they turn…

She reached the hood of a small Honda, the grill of the much bigger Mercedes buried in the Honda’s driver side door. Something shiny caught her eye. She turned and saw a small two-by-four inch color photo in a cheap frame dangling from the rearview mirror. A young boy and a woman smiled back at her. They looked happy, prompting Kate to wonder how they died, and if they were together when the end came.

The third car was a maroon Chevy, its front bumper pressed up against the much bigger back bumper of a Ford F-150 truck. The Ford looked undamaged, but the Chevy’s hood wasn’t so lucky — its grill had fallen free after the crash. Kate didn’t see blood inside the Chevy or the Ford. Had their owners managed to flee in time? How far could they have gotten on foot?

Next, she came upon the damaged front bumper of an aqua blue Prius, parked behind the last car in the jagged, undisciplined line — a big black Buick with its driver side window rolled down. There was blood on the front windshield of the Prius, in the center of a spider-webbed crack where the passenger would have been sitting about the same time the F-150 crashed into it from behind. The force of the impact would have been startling and deadly.

Kate was looking at the crack in the windshield when she felt the air around her bristle, and the hairs along the back of her neck stood up. She looked back and saw something land with a soft thap! against the hood of her Mazda.

It wasn’t Jack or Donald, or at least she didn’t think it was them. It was hard to tell now. She couldn’t even say if this one was a man or a woman, or maybe it was a child. It was small enough to be a child.

They lose their hair and they shrink…

But the longer she looked at the creature, perched on the hood of her Mazda, the more the picture filled in by itself. The dozen or so strands of blonde hair still clinging to the scalp, the circular, blood-red choker around its neck. Only the neck had shrunk so much that the choker now hung loosely by its strap, as if it was two sizes too big.

“S8UpFun.”

Kate turned and ran. She risked a glance over her shoulder and saw it coming. It moved with balletic grace, leaping from the hood of her Mazda and landing on the trunk of the Mercedes, scrambling up to the roof, before leaping again onto the Honda. It looked so small and weak, but it moved so fast and with such ease that Kate found herself entranced by the sight, taken with the fluidity of this creature that was chasing her, that wanted to rip out her throat and drink down every last drop of blood inside her body.

She ran faster.

The guard booth, with its big, open window, came up in a rush. She reached inside, screaming at herself to ignore the blood splashed over the swivel chair and the desk nearby (with the half-eaten sandwich and toppled can of Monster energy drink, thick green liquid spread out all over the table), and smashed her palm down on the green button.

The metal gate began to move up — so slow, so damn slow — but Kate was already circling around the hood of the Buick, back toward the driver’s side door.

Then she felt the air moving again and looked up and saw the creature was almost on top of her, torpedoing right at her. Kate didn’t have time to think, didn’t play the scenario over in her head, she just acted. She swung the tire iron in a wide arc, heard the whistling of steel slicing cold night air, then suddenly smashing into the creature’s neck. The blow dislodged it from the air and sent it crashing into the side of the guard booth.

Kate staggered toward the Buick’s driver side, praying and hoping for the key to be there, be in the ignition, maybe on the driver’s seat, somewhere close by, so long as she didn’t have to waste precious seconds looking for it. Because she could already hear the creature getting up on the other side of the car—

Her heart leaped at the sight of the keys lying in a pool of red on the driver’s seat, each key sticky with someone’s blood. Old-fashioned keys, not a key fob. She grabbed them as she lunged inside the vehicle, the sickening, squishy sound of her skirt becoming slick with the congealed blood barely registering. She grabbed the door and pulled at it with all her might. The Buick was a big car with big doors, and pulling at the door was like closing the twin gates of some castle under siege.

It closed with a loud bang!, so loud that it made her jump.

Kate stabbed the key into the ignition, and the Buick’s engine fired up on the first try as the creature raised itself up from the ground and stood next to the passenger’s side window, looking in through the closed glass at her. There was a noticeable indentation along its neck where the tire iron had struck, and the creature’s head was tilted to one side in a comically grotesque image. The red choker had cracked, and pieces had fallen loose.

The creature scrambled onto the hood of the Buick as Kate grabbed the gear shift, pulled it into drive, and slammed her foot down on the gas pedal. The creature lurched as the car shot forward. It lost its balance, smashing its face into the windshield before Kate jammed her other foot down on the brake. The Buick screamed as it slid to a sudden stop and the creature was flung backward, landed in a ball of bones and flailing flesh on the street.

Then it slowly got back up.

Kate gunned the gas again and the big American car launched clumsily forward and the creature let out a loud shriek as it disappeared underneath the hood. Kate heard the thump-thwump! as the right front tire ran the creature over, and less than a second later, another thump-thwump! as the rear right tire ran it over as well.

Then Kate was out of the garage and on the street, and she turned right along Louisiana Street and kept going. She glanced up at the rearview mirror and saw the creature stumbling back up to its feet, looking after her, its head still impossibly angled to one side.

They won’t die. They just won’t die.

Kate was rolling up the window when she saw Bell Street coming up. She turned right, running a stop sign, wondering if there were any cops left out there to write her a ticket. She had never wanted a police ticket more in her life.

There were cars on the street, silent and still and driverless. She swerved around them, going much too fast, heard the tires squealing and the Buick’s grill delivering glancing blows off one of the vehicles, then another. She had to use both hands because turning the Buick was a monumental task. She didn’t know how anyone could drive such a monstrous car all day long. Her hands were already aching.

She saw the same cars and intersection pileups that she had seen from the fifth floor of the garage, but up close they looked more vicious. And the blood. There was blood everywhere underneath the bright street lamps.

The red Camaro flashed across her mind, and she pulled her foot off the gas with some effort, watching the speedometer drop from fifty to forty and then finally to thirty. She came to a red light, where a pileup had rendered the entire intersection impassable. Kate came to a near stop, but then panic overtook her and she made a hard U-turn, a difficult feat given the Buick’s size. She managed to scrape the sides of two more cars before she could finally turn all the way around.

She went back up Bell Street, in the direction she had come, never once allowing the Buick to stop completely.

She took her foot off the gas some more and brought the speed all the way down to twenty. Then did it again until she was going as slow as ten miles per hour. She kept her right foot firmly poised over the gas pedal, ready to crunch down any second if needed. She prayed that she wouldn’t need to, because Kate wasn’t entirely sure the Buick could accelerate on a whim.

But there was no need to push the Buick. Although she could see them in the shadows, along the rooftops, and between the alleyways and sometimes inside the parked vehicles, they didn’t attack. They watched her instead, following her with black, unblinking eyes, waiting for an opportunity. Just waiting…

They were everywhere.

They were simply…everywhere.

She drove in silence, scanning the roads and sidewalks and buildings around her for signs of survivors. There had to be others. She had survived, and there was nothing special about her. She had no training, no weapons — unless you counted the tire iron or her high heels — and she had managed to live through the night. For now, anyway.

Look for order out of chaos. Look for order out of chaos…

She leaned forward in the big seat as she neared Smith Street, which ended Bell and forced her into a decision — left or right. I-45 was to her left, and turning right would only take her farther into the Downtown district.

Order out of chaos…

She listened to the soothing click-clack of the lights as they changed from yellow to red then to green and back to yellow again.

Lights. So many lights. That was all she heard. All she could hear.

The buildings were quiet, the streets lifeless around her.

She didn’t know how long she sat there, but at some point, and she didn’t know when exactly, she turned right and kept driving…

CHAPTER 5 LARA

She was dreaming, though she wasn’t entirely sure about what, when the pop-pop-pop sounds of gunshots intruded and she woke up with a head full of rocks.

Lara opened lazy eyes to the pitch-black darkness of her room and lifted her head from a heavily dog-eared copy of Pocket Medicine.

I need to get a Kindle version…

Blonde strands of hair fell across her face, and she blew at them, then sat very still and listened, wondering if she had actually imagined the sound of gunshots. Her mind wasn’t nearly creative enough to spend precious brain cells conjuring up non-existent sounds of violence. God knows she saw enough of it in real life; she didn’t need to go dreaming about it, too.

Her laptop was open in front of her, a dimmed screen saver featuring the cast of ER floating in the background, until she accidentally tapped the casing and Windows desktop flickered back on, the first source of light in the entire room for…

How long had she been asleep?

She glanced down at the clock on the laptop: 10:11 p.m.

Ten hours…

She had a throbbing headache, and her joints felt restless and tired at the same time.

How many melatonin pills had she taken? She only remembered one. Maybe two. It was hard to think at the moment.

Never again…

Lara forced herself to stand up, get the blood flowing again. She moved across the room to the window, taking her time with the short distance. She stepped over a backpack, its contents spilled out all over the place. She made a mental note to get rid of the two-day-old sandwich in the corner, which explained the smell.

She swiped at the curtains, wondering if Tracy had left any cans of Red Bull in the fridge. Red Bull was usually good to wash away melatonin-induced drowsiness. What were the chances of that, though? Miniscule. Tracy drank Red Bull like water.

Lara stared listlessly out the second floor window at the apartment complex across the street. She saw lights on behind a couple of windows, but most of them were dark. Which was unusual. The Eastside University Village Community had its own ebb and flow, distinct from the city around it, and you could find lights on at all hours of the night, seven days a week, but especially on the weekends. After-hours clubs were plentiful and popular around here.

She glanced down at the sidewalks, expecting to see the usual groups of college students coming and going, chatting aimlessly or buried in their smartphones. College students with social lives were the bane of her existence, a reminder that she should be out there, not in here with her face buried in her books. Tracy would be the first person to tell her that. Where was Tracy, anyway?

But there was no one down there at the moment. There were cars parked along the curbs as usual, but the streets were silent and empty. After ten on a Friday night. The very idea was absurd.

Where was everyone?

She let the curtains fall and crossed back to her desk. The walk seemed to take days, another side effect of her ten-hour ‘nap’.

Never again…

Riiiiiight.

She was halfway to her desk when she heard loud pounding from the living room. Like hammers raining long, rusted nails into her skull. She winced at the very idea and stood still, hoping the noise might go away if she ignored it.

It didn’t.

Lara hurried outside her bedroom, crossing the small living room space to the front door as the pounding got louder and faster.

Wait.

She began to slow down as her brain finally caught up with her legs.

It wasn’t Tracy. It couldn’t be. Her roommate had a key. And even if she had somehow lost it — not a stretch, as Tracy was already on her third copy — she wouldn’t be pounding on the door like that. Tracy was five-two and 100 pounds soaking wet. She couldn’t have generated that kind of force even if she threw her entire body into the door, which she wouldn’t do, even when drunk. Tracy buzzed when she drank, she didn’t bang.

And whoever was out there now was banging.

Lara slipped behind the window next to the door, pulled back the curtains, and peeked out to the right.

A man stood outside, knocking furiously on the door. Even from a side profile, with most of his body and face hidden from the lights that dotted the second floor walkway, she didn’t recognize him. He was tall, with wild, spiked hair, and he wore baggy cargo pants with a white T-shirt.

He suddenly looked over in her direction, and Lara quickly let the curtain drop from her fingers and stepped back.

Had he seen her? Probably not. She was safe.

The knocking at the door stopped abruptly and she breathed a sigh of relief. It didn’t last very long.

The knocking resumed — this time at the window.

Slick, Lara. Real slick.

She heard his voice, and it was impossible not to notice the desperation in it: “Open the door! Come on, I saw you. Open the fucking door!” As if he realized that approach wasn’t going to work, he suddenly shifted gears, and his voice got lower, softer, and less deranged: “Please, open the door. There are things out here, I need to get inside. You don’t understand, there are things out here!”

Lara didn’t answer. Maybe if she stayed perfectly quiet…

“I know you’re in there!” He was shouting again, the desperation back in his voice. “I saw you at the window! Please, open the door. I won’t hurt you, I promise. I just need to get inside. There are things out here, dangerous things. You have to let me in!”

He began pounding on the windowpane again, and Lara wondered how long before he actually punched his way through. She could tell he was big from the quick glimpse she had gotten — at least six feet tall — and it wouldn’t take much for him to break his way in. She had seen the aftermath of home invasions, and the idea of becoming another victim made her almost angry.

“I’m calling the police!” she shouted, trying to put as much courage into her voice as she could. She didn’t think it sounded all that convincing, but maybe it was enough.

“No, please, just open the door!” he shouted back. “You have to let me in! Please!”

Like hell I do.

She hurried across the living room to the cordless phone, picked it up, and dialed 9-1-1, keeping one eye on the window the whole time. She could see the man’s tall, silhouetted figure through the curtains.

“I’m calling the police now!”

He stopped pounding with her finger poised to push the final 1. For some reason, she didn’t go through with it. Maybe it was his voice — it sounded weaker than before, almost as if he had surrendered.

“Please, please, don’t call them. You don’t understand. I’ve been knocking on every door on this floor, and you’re the first one to even look out the window. I think everyone’s dead. Something’s happening. It’s all over the city. Please, I need to get out of the night. Please, can you hear me in there? You don’t understand, it’s bad out here, it’s bad…”

It’s a trick. Don’t be an idiot.

“I’m sorry,” she said, so softly that she wasn’t sure he had even heard, and pressed the final 1.

“No, no, please…”

The phone rang on the other end of the line, and as soon as she heard the call connecting, Lara said into the phone, “Hello, I’m at home—”

But she stopped when she realized the voice on the other end was a recorded message and it was talking over her:

“You have reached 9-1-1. We are currently experiencing a high volume of calls. If this is an emergency, please remain on the line.”

Sudden panic and indecision filled her. What now? She waited absently for something, some kind of direction from the computerized voice, maybe a beep to leave a message.

Something.

Instead, the recorded voice simply repeated itself: “You have reached 9-1-1. We are currently experiencing a high volume of calls. If this is an emergency, please remain on the line.”

Behind her, the man was still talking, his voice even lower now, more desperate if that was possible: “Please, please, you don’t understand, it’s happening everywhere, there are things out here… Please, for God’s sake, open the door. I’m begging you. God, I think I can hear them coming… Please. Please…”

He stopped talking, and there was only silence.

His silhouette had also disappeared.

Where did he go?

Lara took one step toward the door. “Hello? Are you still out there? You should know I already called the police. They’re coming any minute now.” She stopped and listened. “You better go before it’s too late!”

She waited for a response. Or at least sounds of fleeing footsteps.

There was silence.

The phone in her hand was still repeating the same computerized message.

Lara walked to the window. She took a second to make sure the door locks were still in place and the chain was still in its slot. Then she leaned toward the window, took hold of the curtain with two pinched fingers, and pulled it to the left, enough to look out without making it too obvious. She expected the man to suddenly lunge against the glass, the way masked killers did in horror movies.

It didn’t happen, and for a moment she felt almost disappointed.

She could only see the second floor walkway, with its metal guardrail seven feet away and a quiet Holman Street beyond that.

It’s so quiet. Where is everyone?

Then she heard it. It was a soft noise, but against the eerily quiet night, it stood out — an anomaly that demanded her attention. It sounded like slurping, like someone drinking.

She had to stand on tiptoes and look down before she saw it.

The man with the spiked hair hadn’t gone anywhere. He lay crumpled on the walkway below the windowsill, and someone was crouched next to him. Lara saw scraggly whiffs of blond hair clinging to a balding head, the pale flesh underneath wrinkled and pulled painfully tight. She was reminded of the cancer patients she visited every month at the hospital, how their hair would fall off after chemotherapy, how painfully pale and heartbreakingly sad they always looked.

The figure lifted its head, and Lara might have stopped breathing entirely. It looked at her with dark black eyes, cheeks so hollow she could see the sharp, smooth contour of its skull underneath. There was blood plastered over the lower half of its face, around its mouth. The mouth itself was grotesque, a crumbling cavern of black and yellow and crooked teeth.

She couldn’t tell if it was male or female, or maybe a combination — or neither — even though it wasn’t wearing clothes. There were no sex organs that she could see. No penis or breasts.

It didn’t look human.

Lara was used to seeing dead bodies, and this thing in front of her, perched over the man with spiked hair, looked like a corpse. But this “corpse” wasn’t dead. It was licking its lips at the sight of her. No, not at her, it was trying to get at the blood around the corners of its mouth, like a kid who had to have every last drop, taste every last sensation.

Just as quickly as it had seen her, it lost interest and went back to feeding on the man with spiked hair. The stranger who had been going up and down the second floor walkway knocking on apartment doors, hoping someone would help him get out of the night. He lay very still underneath her window, and Lara couldn’t tell if he was still alive.

“Please,” he had said, “for God’s sake, open the door. I’m begging you. God, I think I can hear them coming… Please. Please…”

Lara took a quick step back and ran to her bedroom.

She might have been screaming the entire time, but she couldn’t be certain. After all, how could you scream if you weren’t even breathing?

She paced in her bedroom in the dark for the next hour, caught between fear and anxiety and a desperate need to do something.

Anything.

She had tried calling 9-1-1 five more times since slamming her bedroom door shut, locking it, and shoving a chair underneath the doorknob — she had seen people do that in the movies. Each time she got the same damn recorded message telling her to stay on the line if she had an emergency. How many people were getting the same message tonight, and were they as terrified as she was at the thought that no help was coming?

Yes, I have an emergency. A stranger with spiked hair is being eaten outside my door at this very moment.

It was absurd. Just thinking about it made her want to laugh, but when she opened her mouth to, a wheezing sound came out instead.

At least the phones were still working. Her cellphone had no reception, which had never happened before. The Internet was also down, so she couldn’t get any news about what was going on outside her apartment. When was the last time the Internet was down? She couldn’t even remember.

And what had the man with spiked hair said? “I think everyone’s dead. Something’s happening. It’s all over the city.”

If that was citywide, that meant the police weren’t coming. They would have more to deal with than a medical student locked in her bedroom in the dark.

The silence was broken by screams from outside her window. She hurried across the room and peered out through the corner of the curtains, too scared to throw them open and look out.

Be smart. You have to be smart.

The first thing she noticed was the apartment complex next door — it was pitch-black. The same windows she had seen lights on earlier were now bathed in darkness, and Lara swore she could see silhouetted figures moving behind some of them. It occurred to her that they too might be hiding, peering out of their windows, too afraid to make themselves known. Maybe strangers with weird hair had been banging on their doors, shouting ludicrous stories, too.

She couldn’t locate where the screams had come from, though she was certain she had heard it. Hadn’t she?

Maybe…

Sudden movement from below drew her eyes. A dark figure darted along the sidewalk below her. It was a woman, her hair flowing wildly behind her, eyes darting left and right, holding something small and shiny in her right hand. A knife? She ran across the sidewalk, moving fast, showing off an athlete’s gait.

Where are you going? Why are you in the streets? Don’t you know what’s out there…in the dark?

The woman vanished down the street.

Run. Run as fast as you can…

Lara remained at the window looking out, careful not to be seen, scanning the streets and windows for signs of others hiding. She wasn’t sure how long she stood there, unmoving. Maybe only a few minutes. Maybe half an hour. She couldn’t be sure, because she was transfixed.

By the city. By the stillness of it.

Houston was a city of at least two million people, and she had never seen it like this in her life.

There was nothing out there. There was just the silence.

Lara thought of her parents, in their home back in the Woodlands. They would be asleep by now. Did they know what was happening? Were they thinking about her, too? She remembered how they had argued about her going to medical school.

So long ago now. So pointless…

A song by R.E.M. popped into her head. She couldn’t remember the lyrics. Something about the end of the world.

She smiled despite herself. A line from an old song from decades ago. Her friends would make fun of her if they knew she listened to alternative music from the ’90s. It was all pop and Rihanna and rappers with grills for teeth.

Were other people out there having the same pointless, inane thoughts at this very moment? Were they trying desperately to talk themselves into something resembling calmness?

Somewhere in the dark distance, she heard what sounded like gunshots.

She listened, trying to recapture the sound, but it was gone.

There was just the silence again.

How did that R.E.M. song go again…?

CHAPTER 6 WILL

Peeks died sometime around eleven. Maybe. Will had lost track of time around the third wave of ghouls. They kept coming, and there seemed to be more urgency to their attacks in the aftermath of Will’s killing of the ghoul with the cross.

After turning the events over in his head, Will decided it wasn’t the cross that was doing all the damage, it was the silver along the edges. Where bullets only annoyed them and knives pissed them off, stabbing them with the point of the cross sent them into a frenzy. As long as the silver spilled blood, they died almost instantly. It was the kind of wild, from-the-ethers logic — if you could even call it that — he would have scoffed at a day ago.

Danny wanted to test the theory out. So he fashioned a cross out of their knives and used it to stab at the ghouls. The creatures shook off his blows, even when the knife skewered an eye and went out the back of one ghoul’s skull. It kept coming. When Danny finally stabbed it in the forehead with the cross, it shrieked and fell and died.

“Okay, it’s probably the silver,” Danny said, and kicked the jerry-rigged knife until it skidded across the apartment and vanished into darkness.

“Told you,” Will said.

“Don’t rub it in.”

“Just saying.”

“What are you, twelve?”

They didn’t spend any more time on it beyond that. Will was not religious — and neither was Danny, for that matter — nor given to pontificating about things he couldn’t explain with a sentence or two. He was soldier, a grunt when you got right down to it. In the absence of someone smarter, someone with insight, the ghouls being fatally susceptible to silver was as good an explanation as any.

They were knee-deep in dead ghouls, with about two dozen of the things spread across the hallway and living room.

And yet, they kept coming.

And Will and Danny kept killing them.

The ghouls attacked in waves, one after another, coming through the windows and the door at almost the same time. A coordinated attack, he was sure of it.

Organized and disciplined, was the thought that kept running through his head all night. The ghouls gave off the impression of being rabid and wild, when the truth was very different. They were aimed, he concluded, unleashed at very specific targets. That bulls eye being him and Danny at the moment.

Then, without warning, they stopped.

Will was at the door, while Danny kept watch on the window on the other side of the room. The door was gone, obliterated, the doorframe covered in blood and thick patches of dark liquid that Will wasn’t quite sure was blood. It certainly didn’t look like any blood he had ever seen, and he had seen more than his share. Not that he could really tell for sure in the semidarkness, with only the moonlight from the window to break the monotony of shadows.

When they were sure the ghouls had finally retreated, they slid down to the floor and allowed themselves a moment to rest. Will loosened his grip on the flesh- and blood-encrusted cross. He could barely see the silver or bronze anymore. He wiped the clumps off by scraping it against the hard carpet. What would their owners think if they knew what he and Danny were doing with their religious symbols? He imagined screaming, shouts of blasphemy being possibilities.

“What are they doing?” Danny asked from across the room.

“I think they’re retreating.”

“Fucking A.”

They were both covered in blood and what smelled like pus. Maybe it was something else the ghouls bled in lieu of blood. It wasn’t like he had time to sit down and examine it with a microscope. Survival had taken precedence over inventory, and eventually the smell had mostly faded and become inconsequential.

Mostly…

Will found the couch, not far from the door. He picked up one side and Danny hurried to help, stepping over dead bodies. Sounds of brittle bones cracking like kindling underneath boots echoed inside the room.

“Aw, man,” Danny said, “this isn’t right. Sorry, guys. My bad.”

“I don’t think they’ll mind.”

“It’s not about them, it’s about me. I can practically smell the nightmares after tonight, and they smell like rotting pus.”

“That’s cute. You think we’re going to live through tonight. Captain fucking Optimism.”

Danny grunted in reply.

They put the couch back in front of the hole where the door used to be, then stacked a dresser from the bedroom on top of it. That covered half of the door but left a gaping hole at the very top. That was fine. Climbing ghouls were easier to deal with than ones that walked unencumbered through the door.

He searched the room until he located Peeks’s body. The big man stood out from the smaller, twisted dead things scattered around him. Peeks, even dead, looked like a God among the emaciated forms.

Will and Danny crouched in front of Peeks and watched him in silence. The former SWAT man was propped up against the wall, his hands entwined in front of him as if he had died in the middle of prayer. He looked peaceful, and in some ways, Will felt relieved for him. Peeks had been in tremendous pain throughout the night.

“Maybe he’s just fucking around,” Danny said.

“I doubt that.”

“He wasn’t bad, for a fat fuck with tree trunks for legs.”

Will smiled. He knew Danny actually liked Peeks. They all did. Peeks was always good with his share of the breakfast in the mornings and the lunches in the afternoons. Will had met Peeks’s wife, Sharon, and their kids, Lisbeth and Marcus, a couple of times at birthday parties for the kids of guys on the team. He recalled Sharon. She was such a little thing, such a counterpoint to her husband. The kids, though, were wildcats. You could tell they were going to grow up to be miniature versions of their father.

“His wife—” Will started, but he didn’t finish because at that very second Peeks opened his eyes and lunged at him.

Will fell backward, the cross falling from his hand and the back of his head smashing down on the femur of a dead ghoul lying on the floor. Peeks’s huge size collapsed on top of him like some boulder come alive. It was all Will could do in the split second he had to get his hands underneath the dead man (?) to keep from being crushed by his huge weight.

He saw dark black pits where Peeks’s eyes used to be, and the suffocating aroma of rotting cabbage stung Will’s nostrils. He realized, with sudden clarity, that the putrid smell spewing out of every pore of Peeks’s body at the moment was the same prevalent stench that filled every inch of the Wilshire Apartments.

Peeks was grinning down at him. Will saw grotesque and damaged teeth. (Meth teeth.) It wasn’t Peeks. Not really. The man Will knew was dead. This thing on top of him, reaching for his throat with its malformed hands, was something else.

Something dead.

“Any time, man!” Will screamed.

Danny appeared behind Peeks and rammed the sharp end of his blood-encrusted cross into the back of Peeks’s head. The life — as damaged and perverted as it had become — in Peeks’s black eyes went out like extinguished candles, and the big body slumped over him, suddenly soft and pliant.

Will pushed what used to be Peeks off with some effort. Peeks collapsed on the floor and lay still. Danny leaned over the dead man (again?) and pulled his cross free with a dull sloshing sound that reminded Will of spilling beer.

“Fuck me,” Danny said.

Will pushed himself back up to his feet, light-headed and wobbly. The effort he had expended to keep Peeks from crushing him had sapped most of his strength. He hadn’t realized just how big Peeks really was until seconds ago.

“You good?” Danny asked.

“Not really, no.” He gathered his breath. “You took your sweet time.”

“I wanted to make sure Peeks was really dead.”

“He didn’t look dead to you?”

“You can’t be too sure,” Danny said. “Shoving a silver cross through the back of a man’s skull is serious business. And you’re welcome.”

Will smirked, and Danny grinned back.

He looked around and found his cross, picked it back up. “From now on, everyone gets a silver cross to the head, just to be safe.”

Danny crouched over Peeks’s still form. “What happened to him?”

“One of those things bit him on the fifteenth floor. Maybe that’s how you turn. They break skin, you die, and you become one of them.”

“You just making all that up?”

“Probably, yeah.”

“Good enough.” He wiped Peeks’s blood and sticky clumps of brain matter off the cross using Peeks’s remaining pant leg. “So what’s the lesson here? Don’t let them bite you? Or don’t let them bite you and don’t die?”

“Sounds about right.”

“Which part?”

“Both?”

“Good to know, good to know…”

Around midnight, they heard movement throughout the building and thought the ghouls might launch another attack, but it didn’t happen. Will and Danny crouched in the darkness, crosses in their fists, ears pressed against the walls and floors listening for noise. Any noise. Though the ghouls were quiet, they still made some noise, and against the stillness of the city outside, it was enough to travel through the floorboards.

But no further attack came.

Not at midnight. Or one in the morning.

Two in the morning came, and there was still no attack.

Instead, the lights outside died.

“Oh, great,” Danny said. He was guarding the window while Will kept watch over what was left of the door. “I think we just lost the lights.”

“You think?”

“I’m pretty sure we just lost the lights.”

“Your power of observation is stunning, Danny.”

“I know, but don’t tell anyone. I like playing the thickheaded Neanderthal.”

“Your secret’s safe with me.”

Will moved across the living room to the window as quietly as he could, stepping over bodies as he went. He did his best to move around them, but even using the flashlight and moonlight as guides, he still managed to step on a head, heard the crunching noise as the skull feebly caved in underneath the sole of his boot.

Are skulls supposed to be that weak?

He flattened his back against the wall across the window from Danny. He looked out, slightly stale night air rushing against his face. He thought he was prepared for what he would see, but he was wrong.

He stared into blackness.

Will had to strain to see by moonlight. The street lights had shut down, and every window he could see for miles had gone dark. The Downtown skyscrapers in the distance, once visible beyond the 45 like towering Christmas trees, had been reduced to shadowy giants hovering over smaller buildings of concrete, glass, and steel.

And he felt it in the air, along the streets, and even inside the room with Danny. It was unmistakable. A sensation he often had when they were stuck in combat back in Afghanistan and he knew, without the shadow of a doubt, that not everyone was going to make it out alive.

The very air around them vibrated dread. It coursed through every fiber of his being.

“What happened?” he asked.

“You tell me. One second there are lights, the next — poof. No lights.”

“Power grids must have gone down.”

“That supposed to happen?”

“If power grids could run themselves, there wouldn’t be jobs for Joe Electricity Employee. You know how many people the city employs just to keep the water and power going day-to-day?”

“I take it the answer is a lot.”

“A lot, yeah.”

“Awesome. What do I win, Charlie?”

“Peeks might have some power bars squirreled away in his pockets. Why don’t you check?”

“Bleh. I’ll pass.”

Will looked around, taking in as much as possible. There was enough moonlight to see parts of the streets below them, but just about everything else was a solid black canvas. The police lights that were spinning earlier in the night had stopped, and he couldn’t quite make out the vehicles parked along the streets anymore. Even the SWAT van had been swallowed up by the overwhelming nothingness.

“So,” Danny said. “The crosses.”

“What about the crosses?”

“We going with coincidence, then?”

“What else could it be?”

“I dunno…” Danny shrugged. “Something else?”

“Like what?”

“I dunno.”

“You know how I feel about…that.”

“Yeah, me too, but man, those things being there when we needed something that would kill these things.” He shook his head. “Makes you think.”

“Does it hurt?”

Danny grunted. “Bite me.”

Will grinned.

“You see it?” Danny asked.

“We back on the crosses again?”

“No. There.” Danny pointed across the street.

Will looked where he was pointing. Two of the creatures, crouched low to the ground, were watching them from an alleyway entrance between two apartment buildings. Even under the blanket of darkness, he could make out the unnerving obsidian eyes. They stared intensely back at them, unmoved by having been seen.

“They’ve been going up and down the street,” Danny said. “In the apartments, too. Coming and going like busy bees. They were out there even before the lights went out.”

Will nodded. It made sense. They had been fighting for countless hours inside the Wilshire Apartments. Except for when they had looked out the window, they had been occupied with trying to stay alive.

“How many did you count?” Will asked.

“Hundreds. I stopped counting after a while.”

“That’s not good.”

“Nope. I don’t think they’re the same ones that are in here with us, though. I think there’re a lot of them out there. And hey, I could be wrong—’cause it’s been known to happen — but I’m pretty sure there’s more and more of them every hour.”

“Like Peeks. They’re turning people.”

“That would certainly explain the increased numbers in such a short time.”

“Hunh.”

Danny gave him an annoyed look. “Really? I tell you there are armies of those things crawling around outside the building, waiting for us — assuming we do manage to get out of here in one piece — and all you have to say is ‘Hunh’?”

“I guess we’re screwed,” Will said.

“I would certainly not disagree with that particular assessment, no sirree. I do believe we are truly and royally screwed. So what’s the plan?”

“Plans A and B went up in ashes around midnight.”

“So where are we now?”

“Plan Z or thereabouts.”

“Well, that blows. Your Plan Zs are always shit.”

“That’s a matter of opinion.”

“That’s true,” Danny said, “but in the overwhelming opinion of those who have been surveyed, they say your Plan Zs are always shit.”

CHAPTER 7 LARA

Despite her best efforts, Lara fell asleep around midnight and woke up later when a loud bang from somewhere along Holman Street reverberated all the way up to her apartment. To her disappointment, she opened her eyes to the same dark room she had gone to sleep in.

It’s still night…

She scrambled up from the floor where she had been lying crumpled up in a tight ball. She was too frightened to use the bed, too afraid of being seen from the window, even though she had closed the curtains tight and hadn’t turned any lights on. She had even closed her laptop, afraid the flickering screen might give her away.

She looked across the room to the digital alarm clock on the nightstand, but it was turned off. She stared at it for a moment, confused. She crawled toward her work desk and, still staying low to the floor, blindly groped the tabletop for her iPhone. She grasped the cold, small rectangle lump and then crawled back to her position between the bed and window.

Lara looked down at the iPhone and thumbed the “slide to unlock” animation, bringing up the password prompt. She entered the four numbers, but did it so quickly that she put in wrong numbers. Calming herself, she tried again and the iPhone opened up. She still had no bars, and the iPhone’s battery was at twenty-five percent. She had forgotten to charge it last night.

She tried calling 9-1-1 again, but the phone call never connected. She tried turning on the Safari browser, but it returned a “No Connection” message. She turned on Messaging, typed a quick sentence to Tracy, and tried sending it, but it refused to connect.

As she pondered her next move, the phone alerted her that she was down to twenty-four percent battery life.

Lara crawled back to the table, found the charger, and plugged it into the end of the iPhone. She waited to hear the quirky breep! sound as the phone began to charge, but there wasn’t one. She pulled the charger free and plugged it back in, but there was still no expected breep! sound.

Frustrated, she crawled over to the window and, making sure she was behind the wall, stood up and peered through an inch-long slit where the curtain opened slightly at the side. For a moment she thought it was just her vantage point, because the world looked nebulous through her miniscule one-inch view. But that wasn’t it.

The street lights had gone out, and every window she could see was pitch-black. She was momentarily baffled, then stunned when she couldn’t find a single working light anywhere in the neighborhood, no matter how far she looked.

This is impossible…

Desperate, she looked to the distance, toward Downtown, expecting to see lights along the skyscrapers. She could barely make out the dark outlines of what were supposed to be towering buildings. The only lights she could detect were the inert red and white lights along the highways, cars frozen in place. The city slumbered underneath some amorphous cloud, as if someone had thrown a blanket over it.

For a moment she childishly resolved not to go to sleep again, because it seemed that every time she closed her eyes, something bad happened outside.

Who needs sleep, anyway?

The quiet pulled at her and refused to let go. Where had everyone gone? There had to be others out there, maybe hiding in their apartments like her, waiting for daylight, for the police to show up, for anyone to show up. The military. The government. Unless it was happening in other cities, too. Around the whole country, maybe.

It had to be some kind of a terrorist attack. It was the only thing that made sense. Some religious fanatic with a grudge must have destroyed the power grid. Or some homegrown terrorist with an irrational fear of the current administration. There was an explanation here, somewhere. Cities didn’t just go dark. There were people to take care of these things — city employees dedicated to keeping the lights on. There were infrastructures in place to make sure something like this didn’t happen, and the only way it could was if someone attacked it.

Of course it had to be terrorism.

It doesn’t explain the man with the spiked hair…

Or the creature perched over him…

Movement flickered suddenly in the corner of her eye. Lara pressed herself against the wall and stopped breathing completely, her eyes glued to the small one-inch view that was her only safe connection to the outside world.

She glimpsed a white shirt and black slacks in the moonlight as the figure — a man, not one of those things—darted between cars parked on the curb across the street from her apartment. He hid behind the bumper of a truck and looked around, scanning the streets for something.

Idiot, get out of the streets. Don’t you have any idea what’s out there?

She watched him jog off the street and toward one of the apartments to his right. He tried the door, found it locked, then moved on to the next apartment and repeated the process.

At least he was smart enough not to knock or make too much noise. If only the man with spiked hair had been that smart…

The man was on his third apartment door, and finding it locked, he quickly darted back into the street to hide, this time behind a blue Ford. He crouched against the bumper, and Lara saw him gathering his breath, looking around, growing desperate.

You should be scared…

He was almost directly in front of her now, and she could see him more clearly in the moonlight. He looked young, maybe early twenties, about her age. A plain black tie hung loosely from his neck. He looked left, then right, then left again.

He doesn’t know where to go. He’s stuck…

She thought about the man with the spiked hair, and before she realized it, she had knocked on her glass window — just one quick rasp with her knuckles, loud enough that she hoped he could hear.

But he didn’t seem to, because he didn’t move.

She knocked again, and this time louder. He turned, looking around him. Wondering, probably, what he had heard.

She knocked a third time, even louder still.

That did it. The man glanced up in her direction. Afraid he couldn’t see her, Lara brushed the curtain aside just enough to reveal herself.

He looked straight at her.

Lara wasn’t sure what to do next. She looked down at him and met his eyes. He smiled and spread his hands, palms up, as if to say, “Now what?”

Good question.

Lara traced the number 214 in the air with her fingers a few times. He watched her carefully, then mouthed the words, “214” back at her. She nodded quickly.

He was suddenly on his feet and racing across the street, toward her apartment. She watched him for as long as she could until he disappeared underneath her window.

Stupid, Lara. This is so stupid.

She hurried to her bedroom door and wrestled free the chair underneath the doorknob. Adrenaline coursed through her, though she wasn’t sure if it was from anticipation or fear — probably both. She opened the door as quietly as possible, then peered out, one hand on the doorknob ready to slam it shut again if there was something—anything—out there.

There was only darkness.

She moved as quietly through the living room as she dared, reminding herself what she had heard below her only hours ago. She used what little moonlight there was from the window as a guide. It was barely enough.

She was halfway across the room when she heard the doorknob twisting, and for a split second she turned to run back to the bedroom.

Stop! her mind screamed. It’s him!

Her heart was still racing uncontrollably in her chest when she crossed to the window and quickly pulled aside the curtain to glance toward the door.

The young man in the white shirt and black slacks was waiting anxiously outside her door, glancing around him. Without the walkway lights, he looked foreboding and dangerous, and a part of her screamed that this was unwise, that opening the door was stupid, and what the hell was she thinking?

She fought through her fears and unlocked the door to let him in. As he moved past her, she could almost hear his heart racing in his chest.

At least it’s not just me.

She closed the door as softly as she could and locked it. First the doorknob, then the deadbolt above it. She stepped back and looked at him.

He was older than she had initially thought, though not by much. Dark brown eyes looked back at her while he crouched over at the waist, catching his breath. “Thanks. I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t let me in.”

“Sure,” she said, and an image of the man with spiked hair flashed across her mind again. He was forever ingrained in her memory, a guilt she wasn’t going to be able to purge for a long time, if ever.

The man pushed himself from the wall, walked over to the couch, and sat down heavily. He leaned forward and ran his fingers through brown curly hair.

She walked over and sat in an armchair across from him. “What’s happening out there? The lights don’t work. When did they go out?”

“You don’t know?” He was talking in a low voice.

She shook her head. “I fell asleep around midnight. The lights were still on then.”

“They went out around two o’clock.” He looked down at his wristwatch. “I don’t know what happened. One at a time, the lights started going out. Couldn’t have taken more than a few minutes. City just went dark.”

“Is it terrorists?”

“Hell no,” he said with absolute certainty. “It’s not terrorists. Nothing like that. I’ve seen things…” He shook his head and looked at her, as if trying to decide if he should tell her. “I don’t even know how to describe it. People die…then they come back, except they’re not the same. Sometimes they don’t even die. They get bitten and…just like that,” he snapped his fingers, “they’re one of those things.”

“What are they? Those ‘things’?”

He shook his head, trying to find the right words. “My roommate was attacked by this… I don’t know…it had black, wrinkled skin…”

“I’ve seen it…”

He nodded. “It’s not natural, right?”

“I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Yeah, me neither.”

“What happened to your roommate?” she asked.

“He turned into one of those things. After he was bitten. I mean, I hit this thing with a pipe and it just…sort of shrugged it off. But I managed to get it out of the apartment. But Ed… Ed was gone. I don’t know when. I was sitting there with him trying to figure it out when he suddenly tried to bite me. I could tell it wasn’t him anymore, you know? I could just tell. It wasn’t Ed. Not anymore.”

He shivered in the dark.

“I barely got away,” he continued. “I’ve been running since. It started long before that. We got texts telling us shit was happening all over the city. It was all over the news, the Internet — everywhere. It started about five-thirty, I think. All I know is that as soon as it got dark—boom! Like a bomb went off. They were everywhere. Everywhere.” He stopped and leaned toward her. “You didn’t see it?”

“I was asleep,” she said, almost embarrassed. “I’ve been having problems sleeping, so I took some pills. I might have taken more than one.”

“You’re lucky. You don’t want to see what I’ve seen.” He looked toward the window. “It got really quiet real quick after that first initial burst of attacks. I think people realized what was happening and started hiding. It got so quiet. I was hiding, too, until a few hours ago when I heard a couple of them moving around me. I took off and ended up here.”

“I don’t see anything out there…”

“They’re out there, just not in the same numbers. In the last place I was hiding, I saw a whole army of them moving along the highway, heading out of the city.”

“Out of the city?”

“Yeah. It’s like they took the city, now they’re fanning out. I dunno.”

“Into the countryside?”

“Yeah,” he said, his voice drifting off slightly.

“Does your phone work?” she asked, remembering her battery-drained iPhone.

He fished a cellphone out of his pocket. It was an Android with a Houston Cougars cover on the back. He powered it up from sleep mode and shook his head. “No signal. Bars went dead around seven. Internet went down about the same time.”

Lara looked toward the window. “My roommate’s out there somewhere. I don’t even know if she’s still alive.”

“You don’t want to be caught out there. Most of them are gone, but there are still a lot of them in the dark.”

“Where’s your building?”

“Holman and Adair. You know it?”

She nodded. There were three student housing buildings a couple of streets down from hers. The entire street was filled with students, thanks to its proximity to the University of Houston campus.

“By the way,” he said, “I’m Tony.”

“Lara.”

“Nice to meet you, Lara.”

“Yeah, you too.”

“Thanks for saving my life.”

“You’re welcome.”

At least I managed to save someone tonight.

Tony’s head snapped back to the window and he said in a quick, low voice, “Get down!”

He leaped off the couch and pressed down on the floor. Lara, on instinct, did the same thing next to the coffee table as the dark silhouette moved across the curtain.

The figure stopped at the window and turned its head, trying to look in. It was small and hunched over. A thin frame, almost skeletal, pressed against the window. The outline of a sharp head and pointy chin looked exaggerated in silhouette form.

She glanced at Tony. He put a finger to his lips, his other hand pressed down on the carpet as if getting ready to jump back up. She nodded and didn’t move, but almost let out an involuntary gasp when a second shadow appeared at the window.

She was struck by how unnaturally they moved. The way they turned their heads and arched them forward and up, then forward and down, reminding her of Velociraptor dinosaurs. Though they moved on two legs, there was nothing human about them. At least, not anymore. She couldn’t hear voices; they seemed to be communicating without sounds.

Then they were gone, moving past the window in the same way they had first appeared — without making any noise.

Tony didn’t move right away and, as a result, Lara didn’t either. He still looked coiled, ready to spring.

He finally pushed himself from the floor and sat against the couch. He said in a low voice, “You okay?”

She nodded and, following his example, sat on the floor with her back against the chair. “What should we do?”

“I don’t know. Keep trying to survive, I guess.” He glanced at his watch again. “It’ll be daylight in three hours.”

“You think it’ll be better when the sun comes up?”

“I don’t know. I’m hoping it will.”

“What do you base that on?”

“They didn’t come out until it got dark. Maybe that’s part of it. I don’t know. I’m just spitballing.”

She nodded. “It’s more than I have.”

He was staring at her with an almost curious look.

“What?” she said, a bit annoyed.

“You really slept through most of this?”

“Yes.”

“Damn,” he said, smiling, “it must have been a hell of a nap.”

Tony went to the Bauer College of Business at UH and was nine credits short of graduating. He had started school late, having gone to work right after high school and not even bothering to take his entrance exams until he was twenty. He was twenty-four now — just one year younger than Lara, which surprised her because he looked older — and he wasn’t even sure if a bachelor’s degree was going to be all that useful.

“My dad runs an auto body shop along the 610 and 290,” he said, referring to two of Houston’s busier freeways. “I’m supposed to take over one of these days.”

“You don’t sound as if you’re looking forward to it,” she said.

They were inside the kitchen, sitting on the cold floor tiles, eating melted ice cream and fruit and washing them down with bottled water. They were still talking in low voices, going quiet every time they thought they heard movement from the walkway outside. It was almost 3:00 a.m., three more hours until sunup. Lara hoped he was right, that daylight would bring salvation. It was almost too much to hope for, but what else did she have?

“Not really,” Tony said, “but it’s my dad, so it’s not like I have a choice.”

“Have you told him?”

“Tell my dad I don’t want the family business?” Tony grinned at her in the dark. “You don’t know my dad.”

He drifted off. Was he thinking about family and friends like she was? Where was Tracy now? Somewhere still out there, maybe hiding in someone’s apartment the way Tony was hiding in hers. Maybe dead in an alleyway. She thought about her parents, her childhood friends, all the people she knew. All the people she once knew…

“Did you call your parents?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Never got the chance.”

“Maybe he’s fine. Your father.”

He nodded. “He’s pretty tough. If anyone can make it through this, I’d put money on him. You know that he taught himself how to fix cars? He couldn’t even speak English when he started working at a neighbor’s garage.”

“He sounds like an amazing man.”

“When the power comes back, I’ll call him and we’ll arrange a meet.”

“You have that kind of pull?” she asked with a smile.

“Absolutely,” he said, smiling back.

He went quiet, his expression frozen, and she instantly knew why. She looked over at the window and saw another one of the creatures trying to peer into the apartment.

Go away. There’s nothing to see here.

They didn’t move for a long time, not until the creature finally turned its head and crept off.

“How many does that make now?” she asked, her voice barely audible.

“Seven,” Tony whispered back.

“How many did you see out there?”

“A lot.”

They sat quietly again.

“How many Twitter followers do you have?” Tony asked.

“Twitter?” She didn’t know how quite to respond. “I deleted my account two years ago. Why?”

“I have 229,” he said. “I’m just wondering how many of them are still alive…”

CHAPTER 8 WILL

They started dozing off and had to take turns waking each other up, so at least one of them could stay awake at all times. The ghouls hadn’t attacked again, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t change their minds. They had done it before.

Around four in the morning, Will opened his eyes to Danny’s voice coming from the other side of the world. “You got any ideas?”

“What?” He struggled to sit up, chasing away the incessant drowsiness. “What did you say?”

“About these things. You got a theory or something?”

“Not really, no.”

“Oh come on. I know you have a theory. You always have theories. That’s why you’re you and I’m me. I provide the jokes and good looks, and you bring the theories. It’s what you do.”

“It’s what I do?” Will grinned back at him.

“Yeah, exactly. So what’s your theory? What the fuck are these things? Where did they come from? And more importantly, how am I going to survive this fucking night? All those fine ladies at the bars aren’t going to pick up themselves, you know.”

It was a good question. Will had been thinking about it for the last few hours, and the same question kept coming up.

Why board the windows? Every window? What was the point?

Why?

It all came back to that: Why?

“I’ll tell you when the sun comes up,” Will said.

“Fuck you, we’ll probably die before then.”

“They haven’t attacked in over four hours. Why would they start now?”

Danny thought about it. “Good point. Maybe we’ll survive this, after all.”

“That’s it. Keep thinking good thoughts.”

“Hey, you know me — Captain Optimism.”

The sun reappeared at exactly 6:50 a.m., its presence announced by a bright ocean of orange and white smearing across the Houston skyline like the hands of God. Will didn’t think he had ever seen anything so beautiful in his life when the sunlight reached through the open window and spidered across the filthy carpeting, even filthier now that he could actually see all the dirt and refuse of humanity that clung to it.

He thought the night had prepared him for everything, but he was wrong.

When the sunlight touched one of the dead ghouls on the floor, the black skin, which was shriveled like tanned leather, turned instantly white. Then it seemed to come unglued at a molecular level and evaporated, leaving behind just bones in a swirl of cigarette ash-like white substance on the floor. A gust of wind brushed the window, snatched up the ashes, and scattered them into nothingness.

“Are you seeing this?” Will asked.

“Yeah,” Danny said, sitting with his mouth open across the room. “But I don’t believe it.”

“Even after last night?”

“Yeah, well…” He stopped talking. Danny at a loss for words was something to behold.

By the time the sun had completely engulfed the room, the ghouls that lay between Will and Danny had been reduced to nothing but clouds of white powder and piles of bones. Peeks was also gone, leaving behind his uniform, boots, ammo pouches, and wisps of his hair in the breeze. There was a stinging, acrid smell in the air that hadn’t been there before.

Will stood up and rushed across to the window. The police vehicles were still there. Under the luster of sunlight, thick patches of dry blood dotted the streets and sidewalks and were smeared across windows inside apartment buildings across the street. To his left, in the distance, the skyscrapers over Downtown that used to look elephantine in the daylight now looked worn down by time and brittle.

But it wasn’t what Will saw that made his mind spin, grabbing for answers that weren’t there. It was what he couldn’t see.

Where are the ghouls?

He couldn’t find a single one of them anywhere on the street or in the buildings around him. Instead, he saw something else that hadn’t been there last night — blankets, sheets, and objects covering the windows of the apartment buildings and storefronts wherever he looked.

Like the Wilshire Apartments when we arrived. They’ve spread out. They’ve taken over other buildings. Covering up the windows because…of the sun.

Will looked back at the ashes that still swirled around in the room.

Because the sun is not their friend.

“So now we know why they covered up all the windows,” Danny said. “The sun.”

“Yeah. The sun.” He remembered something else. “Can you get reception?”

Danny took out his phone and held it outside the window. The phone didn’t show any bars, and Internet service was down. “Jack shit, and Jack doesn’t even have the courtesy to answer the phone.”

“Power’s down, cellphone towers are down, but the satellites are probably still working.” Will looked up at the sky as if he could see them orbiting up there. “Of course, if the towers don’t have power, satellites are useless.”

“How do you know all this stuff?”

“I read.”

“Forget I asked.” He leaned out the window and looked down at the streets, then at the buildings across from them. “You see it?”

“Yeah, the sheets.”

“Maybe they all migrated, and they’re not waiting for us to walk outside this door. Possible?”

“Captain Optimism,” Will smirked.

“Yeah,” Danny said with a frown. “Probably not.” He looked back outside. “I’m going to have nightmares about this. For days. Maybe weeks. Months, even. I might even need therapy. You think the department will pay for my therapy sessions?”

“I don’t see why not.”

“It’ll be cool. I can talk about how my parents screwed me over and finally figure out why Betty Johnson didn’t say yes when I asked her to the Junior Prom. That still haunts me, you know.”

“Betty Johnson, who you said blew up into a 200-pound housewife and that thank God you didn’t get with her?”

“Yeah, but she was really slim and hot back in the day.”

“Keep dreaming.”

“I…” Danny stopped and glanced back across the room, at what was left of the door.

Sunlight poured into the hallway beyond, but there were still dark patches everywhere. Will wondered if it took direct sunlight to kill the ghouls, to turn their skin into white ash.

So many questions…

Then he heard the sounds. He couldn’t see them, but he could hear them moving around beyond the door. They were in the hallway, staying beyond the fatal reach of sunlight. There had to be a dozen of them out there, maybe more.

They sounded agitated, even angry. He expected them to start charging into the room at any moment, but they didn’t. They were content to wait, bide their time. And why not? Sooner or later, it would be dark again.

Sooner or later, the sun always sets.

“I don’t suppose they’ll let us just walk down to the lobby and out the door,” Danny said. “Call this whole thing a big misunderstanding?”

“I dunno. Go ask them.”

“Pass.”

“Chicken shit.”

“Guilty. So how are we going to do this? We can’t stay here forever.”

Will turned back to the window, stuck his head outside, and looked down at the sidewalk below. He measured the distance in his head.

Danny shook his head. “Goddammit. You know I hate heights.”

“You’ll be fine.”

Danny sighed, unconvinced.

They ripped the curtains off the window in the living room, then acquired more in the kitchen and the bedroom next door. They also found a queen-size bed and old, soiled sheets that held together when Will tried to tear them with his bare hands. There were no bath towels in the bathrooms, and what cleaning rags they found were too small. So they tied together what they had, cutting strips to stretch out the length.

It looked decent by the time they were done, but Will guessed they would still have to jump the last few meters to the ground.

Doable.

Probably…

“Shit,” Danny said, looking at the makeshift rope in Will’s hands. “That’s never going to hold.”

“It’ll hold.”

“That thing’s going to tear, and I’m going to fall and break my neck, and that’s all she wrote.”

“We’ll see.”

“You’re trying to kill me, aren’t you?”

“Possibly.”

“Is this about that thing with Gina?”

“I liked Gina.”

“It’s not my fault she liked me more.”

They grabbed the three-legged table from the floor where it had been tossed the night before and used it as a makeshift grappling hook, positioning two of the legs against the wall under the window and tying the rope to the third leg. With the table held firmly — or firm-ish at least — in place against the wall, the two lower legs even digging into the weak Sheetrock and braced against the rotten wood underneath, they tossed the rope down from the window and measured the jump.

“How far?” Danny asked. He didn’t want to look.

“About three meters,” Will said. It was more like fifteen, but he could see the terrified look on Danny’s face and decided he wouldn’t know the difference once he was on the rope. Probably. “Give or take. You can do it.”

“Yeah, sure. You gonna carry me to the hospital after I break both my legs?”

“No promises.”

“This is definitely about Gina. I knew you haven’t forgiven me.”

Will grinned back.

They took off their web belts and, along with their equipment and holstered handguns, tossed them down first to reduce the load on the rope. With his M4A1 slung over his shoulder, Will climbed out onto the windowsill, where he took a moment to balance himself. The wind seemed to have picked up a bit, and he was struck by how the silence of the city was more disturbing outside than inside. Who knew a few inches either way could change perceptions so much?

He took a breath, then grabbed the rope, tested it for strength and, closing his eyes, swung down before he had a chance to change his mind. Danny was right. The rope was going to give, and he was going to plummet to his death. The irony of surviving last night only to die in the safety of the morning made him want to let out a few choice guffaws.

He opened his eyes and found himself dangling from the rope, which miraculously hadn’t snapped into two pieces yet.

Yet.

He grinned up at Danny, watching him with a look of pure, unadulterated terror from the window above.

“You’re going to die, you know,” Danny said with a frown.

“Gee, thanks.”

“Just saying.”

Will started down, lowering himself hand over hand, feeling every inch of the Frankenstein rope against his palm. By the time he had nearly reached the end, with the street almost directly below him, he felt the rope starting to tear.

Shit.

He said a quick prayer and let go, jumping down in a straight drop and somehow managing to land in a low crouch without, miraculously, breaking his neck.

He straightened up instantly and unslung the M4A1. He scanned the streets and buildings around him, but there was nothing to shoot. He spun quickly and saw that someone — some things—had covered the inside of the Wilshire Apartments’ lobby windows with thick, dirty blankets. Those hadn’t been there yesterday when he had arrived with SWAT. Eight of them had gone inside the building, and only two were now coming out. Will couldn’t help but feel more than a little sadness at that realization.

He pushed the thought aside and glanced up at Danny. The tenth floor looked a hell of a lot higher from the ground. “Nothing to it!”

Danny didn’t look convinced. “You sure?”

“Come on, you pussy! You want me to go up there and hold your hand?”

“Would you?”

“Not today, sweetheart. I got things to do.”

Danny smirked, then climbed up onto the windowsill. He balanced himself against the wind, then reached out and took a tentative grip on the rope.

“You sure this thing’s going to hold?” he called down.

“Pretty sure,” Will said.

“Pretty sure? Are you fucking kidding me?”

“Mostly sure,” Will said, grinning up at him.

CHAPTER 9 KATE

Kate woke up to streams of bright sunlight piercing through holes in the steel garage door in front of her. In the three seconds it took her to realize she had fallen asleep inside the Buick, fear filled her at a dizzying speed, and she sat up so fast she hit her knees against the steering wheel. Pain shot through her legs.

She rubbed her knees as the smell of motor oil drifted into her nostrils. The garage was part of the auto body shop she had taken refuge in last night. It had seemed like a good idea at the time. At least she was no longer roaming the streets alone in a large, loud Buick.

The clock on the dashboard read 11:45 a.m.

She had slept almost the entire morning.

She turned the key to power the radio, then scrolled through the dial, hoping to find a station that was broadcasting. She expected to hear the Emergency Alert System, the long beeping sound followed by a recorded male voice assuring her that everything was fine, that help was coming, and all she had to do was hang on.

But there was nothing, only static.

That’s impossible.

Someone had to be broadcasting. If not the radio stations, then the city, or the government. Whatever happened, the United States government would still be functioning. Or at the very least broadcasting the Emergency Alert System. That was the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s job, right? Wasn’t this the sum of their entire existence?

She was angry, and it came boiling up in a stream of emotion. Angry at getting nothing on the radio. Angry at Donald, at Jack, at the woman in the Mercedes. Most of all, she was angry with herself, because the fear from last night still lingered and wouldn’t go away. She hated the feeling of being out of control, being at the mercy of someone else.

Some thing else.

She switched the radio to AM and turned the dial again, hoping to find something, anything. Where was all the chatter? There was always chatter on the AM dial. Right-wingers, left-wingers, and all the nuts in between. But even they were gone.

Where the hell is everyone?

She gave up and leaned back in the seat. She felt restless and frantic. She needed to move.

Kate opened the big car door, the loud squeal magnified in the closed confines of the garage.

She walked to the steel door, old and new motor oil on the floor clinging to her bare feet. Her skirt had an inch-long tear along one side, and she was missing some buttons along the hem of her blouse, now untucked. It struck her how nonchalantly she noticed these things when just a day ago she would have been horrified. Appearances were everything in her profession.

Used to be…

She pressed her ear against the steel door. Hearing nothing that could be mistaken for humanity or activity of any kind, she frowned in the semidarkness.

She crouched, gripped the metal handle, and jerked the door upwards. It slid up along the two railings at its sides, and she grunted as she pushed the steel sheet farther up, and up some more. It was much harder to open than close, or maybe it was because her arms felt like jelly after last night. She noticed, for the first time, bruises along her elbows and forearms. When had she gotten those? Her scraped right knee had scabbed over and begun to itch.

She wondered how she looked but was too afraid to check in the mirror. Torn clothes, scars along her body, and her hair probably a mess, too. Her make-up was gone, washed away by tears. She didn’t even remember crying.

Sunlight flashed across the opened garage door and bathed her in its heat. She sighed, stumbled out of the garage, and closed her eyes for a moment, allowing herself to believe that everything was all right. The caress of the warm sun was rapturous, and she dreaded the moment when she finally had to open her eyes again.

The barren streets greeted her first. Then the still, silent traffic lights.

The city looked like some felled capacious beast, now content to dwell in a long, deep slumber. She had expected the sight of the familiar skyscrapers and expanded sea of gray, lesser buildings to fill her with hope, but there was none. Instead, she felt an overwhelming emptiness and sadness…

But mostly sadness.

There was no help coming. There were no helicopters in the sky. No Army trucks in the streets. No police cars blocking traffic or National Guardsmen directing people to safety.

A piece of newspaper, covered in dried blood, blew past her, and she stared after it in silence, wondering where it was going, and if there would be any salvation once it got there.

The Buick’s gas gauge was still hovering over the big red ‘E’ when she checked for the third time in the last ten minutes.

She flipped the visor down to shield her eyes from the sun and drove the Buick out of the garage, going slowly at first, searching the street in front of her. She exited the driveway and eased back onto Milam Street before heading left.

She glimpsed the I-45 in the distance, its long stretch of concrete visible between the tall buildings that sprouted out of Downtown like trees. The I-45 became her beacon. Where there was a highway, there were cars. And where there were cars, there were people. She couldn’t possibly be the only person still in the city. The numbers didn’t add up. It was illogical — vain, even — to think she might be the only person who had survived the night.

The odds are in my favor. They have to be.

She drove slowly, easing around cars parked in the streets, surprised by how many more cars there were in the daylight. Or maybe they had always been there. It was a disturbing thought. How had she avoided an accident when she hadn’t even seen the cars? Was it the lack of seeing, or the not noticing that made her slightly sick?

There were cars on the curbs and sidewalks as well. Not accidents, just haphazardly parked. She maneuvered around familiar pileups at intersections. She saw blood along the sidewalks, on the streets, splashed against car doors, windshields, and car hoods. She felt suddenly very safe inside the big, expansive Buick.

So much blood, but no bodies. She wasn’t surprised, because she knew why.

They’ve been turned. Like Donald, Jack, and “S8UpFun.”

The blinking dashboard fuel light pulled Kate out of her thoughts.

She stared at the small black dial, willing it to move, dammit, move.

But it didn’t.

She leaned back and sighed, and closed her eyes for a brief second when there was a loud thump!

She snapped upright in her seat and saw a man standing next to the Buick holding a baseball bat. He stepped quickly aside as Kate drove ahead a few yards before stepping on the brake.

He was young, just a teenager, really. She guessed he couldn’t be more than sixteen, maybe seventeen, though he was tall. He was African-American, wearing a bloodied white T-shirt and baggy cargo jeans. Kate saw weary eyes looking back at her in the car’s side mirror.

After some hesitation, the teenager walked toward her car door, the baseball bat — caked in dried blood and recently chipped — hung loosely, threateningly at his side. She watched him through the mirror, both hands on the steering wheel.

He was much younger up close. Maybe fifteen…

When he was close enough, he stopped and stared through the closed window. “You going to open the door, or what?”

She didn’t respond. She stared back at him through the window, aware of her foot on the gas pedal. She was buoyed by the fact that the Buick was still in drive, though her other foot was on the brake. Still, all she had to do was release one foot and press down on the other—

“Look, there’s nobody here,” he said. He looked up the empty street for effect. “You’re the first person I’ve found since last night. You can come out.” He paused for a moment. “It’s the sunlight…they don’t like it. I think they’re hiding…or sleeping… I don’t know, but I haven’t seen a single one of them since last night.”

The killings didn’t start until nightfall…

He waited for her to answer, to lower the window or come out — to acknowledge him. She didn’t. Instead, she remained mute behind the safety of the glass, though the rational part of her wasn’t sure if there was much safety there at all. The bat could probably smash right through the window…

“You gonna open the door or what?” he asked again.

She didn’t respond.

“Come on, lady, there’s no one else out here. You’re the first person I’ve seen all morning. Have you seen anyone?”

She managed to shake her head.

“Yeah, me, neither. You got a name, at least?”

She didn’t answer.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said, sounding exasperated now. Then he threw his hands up. “Okay, whatever. You don’t want to come out. Good luck out there.”

He began walking away.

She watched him in the side mirror. Her right foot was still poised over the gas pedal, and she thought she was going to step on it and leave, but was shocked to find herself putting the Buick in park, opening the door, and stepping out into the street instead.

He stopped and looked back.

“Kate,” she said. “My name’s Kate.”

He stared back at her for a moment, and she realized he was pouting.

He’s just a kid.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know what to do. After last night…”

“Yeah,” he said.

She could see it in his eyes, in the blood on his clothes, the sticky flesh that caked his baseball bat. He knew all about last night.

His eyes shifted over to her car and he pointed with the baseball bat. “Your grill’s all messed up.”

“What?”

“Your grill.”

She walked to the front of the car and saw that the Buick’s grill was miraculously hanging on by a couple of hooks. How had it stayed on all night? How had she missed it this morning? She shook her head and managed a small smile. “It’s not mine.”

“You stole it or something?” He looked amused.

“No, I…” She smiled again. “I guess I did.”

“I grabbed this, too.” He held up the baseball bat. “Took what I could when it all happened.” His face darkened. “You saw it, right? You saw them?”

Kate looked back at him and nodded. “Yes.”

His face flushed with relief. “Where you headed?” he asked.

“I need gas.”

“I passed a gas station a block from here. I can show you if you want.”

“Okay.”

“What happened to your shoes?”

“What?”

“You’re not wearing shoes,” he said, pointing with the bat again.

“Oh. I guess I lost them.”

His name was Luke, and he was right. The creatures weren’t outside in the sunlight. They had gone into hiding.

The attacks didn’t happen until nightfall…

Kate drove the Buick, Luke sitting in the passenger’s seat with the window rolled down, his bat on the floor within each reach. She saw the newly covered windows around them. She hadn’t noticed them earlier, but now that Luke pointed them out, they became obvious. Every window of the bigger buildings they passed — stores, offices, and strip malls — was covered over with blankets, fabric, newspapers, or, in some cases, big, blocky furniture.

They didn’t leave, they went inside.

Smaller buildings, like the auto body shop she had stayed in last night, seemed to be free of coverings…

“One of them tried to get me around sunup,” Luke said. “I could tell it was psyching itself up, ready to just go for it, when the sun came out and it took off. I never saw anything move so fast.”

“Where were you?”

“I was in this small shop, looking for supplies. When sunlight started coming in through the windows, it took off for the back room and never came out. Like it was scared or something. I don’t know why. I guess they don’t like sunlight.”

“The attacks…they didn’t start until nightfall, I think.”

“I noticed that, too. I guess it makes sense.”

Sense? Nothing about this makes sense. There’s no order here, just chaos.

She drove on in silence.

The gas station he mentioned hadn’t been of any use to them. There were sheets thrown over the windows, keeping out the sun. To use the gas pumps, they needed to go inside to turn them on first, and neither of them were too excited about that idea.

“You work in an office or something?” he asked after a while.

“Why do you ask that?”

“Your clothes.”

She was suddenly very aware of her appearance: the tear along the skirt, the missing buttons at the bottom of the blouse draping off her waist. At least it wasn’t the buttons near the top which would have left her bra visible. Still, she felt half-naked sitting next to him.

“I do,” she said. “Work in an office. I was leaving work when it happened. What about you?”

“I was eating pizza with some guys about three blocks from here.”

He stared out the window, and Kate noticed that his hand had wandered back over to the taped handle of the bat.

“What happened?” she asked.

“These things just started appearing everywhere and attacking everyone.” He shook his head. “It was crazy, like something out of a movie.” He shifted in his seat. “One second I was talking to Mark and Steve, and the next they’re down on the floor bleeding all over the place. It was unreal. The guy behind the counter had this bat — for security, I guess. He was trying to hit one of them with it, but he kept missing. They got him, and he dropped the bat, so I picked it up. I guess I was better with it than he was.”

“How did you survive after that?”

“I don’t know. I just took off. I don’t think they were chasing me. They don’t do that. When they get someone down, they just…you know, you’ve seen it.”

“Yes,” Kate said, remembering Jack and Donald again.

“Did you lose someone?”

“Some friends…”

“What’s happening, do you know?”

He sounded so young. Like the kid that he was, trying to understand the bigger world, turning to the first adult he saw for answers. In this case, her. She felt embarrassingly ill-equipped.

“I mean, where are the cops?” he asked. “Shouldn’t there be cops all over the place? Or soldiers? Do you know what happened?”

“I don’t know,” Kate said. “Nothing makes sense.”

“Where’s the government?” he asked, as if she should know.

I don’t know.

“Where’s the military?” he went on. “When I woke up and didn’t see anyone on the streets — no tanks or helicopters or anything — I think that’s what really freaked me out. I always thought, you know, the government would send in troops if something like this ever happened. But they haven’t, have they?”

“No.”

“Did you hear anything on the news? It would have been on the news, wouldn’t it? How does something like this go unreported?”

“I didn’t hear anything.”

He looked thoughtful. “A lot of kids didn’t show up for school yesterday. That was pretty crazy. They even let us go home early because of it.”

“How many?”

“What?”

“How many kids didn’t show up for school?”

“I don’t know. A lot. I think like sixty or seventy, I wasn’t really paying attention when they announced it. It was enough for them to send us home early, anyway. That’s never happened before.”

“There was nothing on the news about that.”

“No?”

“No,” she said.

There was nothing on the news. Nothing that warned of this, anyway. There had been something about a police action in some building near Downtown, but that was it. News about that many kids across the city not showing up for school would have been a big deal.

“Maybe it’s happening all around the country,” Luke said thoughtfully. “That would explain why the government isn’t doing anything, right?”

She nodded. Like most citizens, she was conditioned to accept the government responding in cases of emergency.

So where were they? Where the hell were they when they needed them the most?

She drove in silence, feeling the anger boiling inside her.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“I’m fine.”

“You don’t look okay.”

“I’m fine,” she snapped. Then, in a softer, apologetic tone, “Look for another gas station. This car can’t keep running on ‘E’ forever.”

“It just occurred to me that finding a gas station is probably not going to help.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s no power.”

“What?”

“There’s no power to pump the gas,” he said. “The lights. They died after midnight. You don’t know?”

“I…”

It dawned on her that she had been driving in a daze all morning, oblivious to the fact that the street lights weren’t working.

She stopped the Buick and put the gear in park. She felt tired, helpless, and a part of her wanted to just sit back and wait for darkness and get it over with.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, looking worriedly over at her. “Are we out of gas?”

“Not yet. But I don’t think we’re going to find a gas station without those things inside. How many have we already passed so far?”

“We can always just get another car.”

She looked over at him. “Another car?”

“All those cars out there,” he said, nodding outside the window. “I don’t think their owners are going to care if we take them.”

She smiled. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

“You would have, sooner or later,” he smiled back.

“Maybe.”

“I should probably tell you that I don’t know how to drive.”

“You don’t?” she said, genuinely surprised.

“I’m fourteen,” he said defensively.

Even younger than I thought…

“Then we better find a car that I’ll like driving,” she said. “Something smaller this time.”

They climbed out of the Buick. Luke had his bat gripped tightly in his right hand, and he swung it around, even as his eyes suspiciously razed the street and buildings around them. The whip-whip noise of the bat making circles in the air was the only sound for blocks.

Kate looked over the hood at him. “I guess we should find a car with keys in it.”

“Unless you can hotwire a car?” he grinned.

“I can’t. Can—”

“No,” he said before she could finish. “My parents were teachers, and I grew up in the suburbs. So no, I don’t know how to hotwire a car. Just in case you were wondering.”

“Like I said, we better find a car with the keys still inside, then.”

They started up the street, but didn’t get more than a few feet before Luke froze and looked over at her, eyes wide with excitement. “Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“Listen.”

“I am.”

“No, listen.”

Kate stopped moving and listened. Really listened.

She heard the silence. The sounds of tossed-aside newspapers moving along the streets around them. A flock of birds in the sky.

Then, from nowhere, a new sound. A familiar sound.

Police sirens!

They were very faint, but she would recognize that very distinct wail anywhere.

It was coming from their left, from the other side of the I-45…

CHAPTER 10 WILL

They spent a few hours collecting as much ammunition and weapons as they could find, digging among the squad cars parked outside the Wilshire Apartments and spread along West Dallas Street. Civilization seemed to have vanished, leaving behind dried bloodstains and discarded, bloody clothes on the sidewalks and streets to mark their passing.

The SWAT van yielded new batteries for the Motorola radios, extra comms systems, and more ammunition and weapons than they could carry. They tossed everything into one of the few squad cars that wasn’t covered in blood. All the battery chargers were electric, which made them useless if the power stayed down.

If the city looked and felt deserted from a window, it was like stepping into another universe once they were outside. The hush around them was disturbing, and Will was reminded of it every time the soles of his boots squeaked, he dropped something, or closed a car door. After a while, he found himself moving as quietly as possible.

He tried the police radio in the car, but couldn’t raise anyone. Static became his new enemy, at once irritating and omnipresent. By the time Danny returned from his foraging, Will had given up on the radio.

Danny put a couple of Remington 870 tactical shotguns into the trunk, then slid into the front passenger’s seat. He tossed a plastic grocery bag that crunched as it hit the floor. “Anything?”

“Static. Lots of static. Cell towers are probably down, but I should have still been able to reach someone with a radio.”

“Sheriff’s Department?”

“Nope.”

“Government?”

“Nothing on the emergency frequencies.”

“That’s disturbing.”

“Uh huh.”

“Statewide, and probably nationwide, is that what you’re telling me?”

“That seems to be what I’m telling you.”

“Hunh,” Danny said. “That’s not good.”

“Nope.”

“All of that in one night?”

“It looks like it.”

“Damn. That’s kind of impressive. I mean, it sucks, but you gotta admit, that’s really impressive.”

Will nodded. It was impressive.

His mind kept going back to last night, mulling over the way the creatures fought. He recognized the intelligence, the organization, the discipline. And most of all, the planning.

“Well, at least the vending machines still work,” Danny said. He upended the contents of a Funyuns bag into his mouth. “What now?” he asked with a mouth full of crumpled yellow bits.

“I’m open to suggestions.”

“Go back to the House, see if anyone made it through the night?”

“Captain Optimism,” Will smirked.

“Worth a shot. Even if no one else made it, there are those C4 in the armory we can liberate. You can’t have a Plan Z without C4.”

“When did you suddenly buy into Plan Z?”

“Who says I’m buying? I’m just saying, we can’t have one without the C4.”

“So, the House, then?”

“Unless you got some other place to be.”

“Not at the moment, no.”

Will put the car in gear and started down West Dallas Street, back toward the I-45. He could see the Downtown skyscrapers beyond that, colossal sentries over a city stuck in repose.

He drove slowly. There were too many cars and debris in the streets.

“You drive like an old woman,” Danny said.

“You wanna drive?”

“Pass.”

“Then sit back and shut up.”

Will’s mind was already elsewhere. He had noticed them as soon as they began moving up the street. There were a few of them at first, but the numbers increased until he couldn’t look out the car windows and not see them.

“You see it?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Danny said.

The windows. Blinds and shades were squeezed shut, curtains pulled in tight. And where there were no blinds or curtains to close, blankets and furniture had been piled over the windows from inside the buildings. Store fronts, offices, and homes.

Everywhere…

“One night,” Will said. “All of this in one night.” He shook his head. Saying it out loud didn’t make it any easier to swallow. “They must have planned this out for God knows how long.”

“You scared yet?”

“Just about.”

“Don’t tell anyone, but I’m already shitting my pants.”

“Thanks for sharing,” Will said.

“We need some music.” Danny leaned forward and flipped a switch. Loud, blaring sirens filled the street. “Just in case,” he shouted.

“In case of what?” Will shouted back.

“In case there are very attractive young women out there, waiting for us to come rescue them. Can you imagine how thankful they’ll be when they hear this and come running out to be saved? ‘Oh, Danny, oh Danny!’”

It took them longer to get back to the SWAT house than they expected. The culprit, like so many things in Houston even before last night, was traffic. The feeder roads around the highways were parking lots, awash with cars of every shape and size. Will was forced to use the small roads, and even so he kept running up against pileups and congestion, often forcing him to back up and find a new route.

They hadn’t found any survivors on the way, which surprised Will. Downtown was always thickly packed, even during the weekends. There were always people around. But the streets were empty, and all he could see were covered windows. Even the blaring sirens didn’t help, and he was sure they could be heard across the city given how absolutely soundless the world was at the moment.

The SWAT house was located away from the main hub of Sheriff’s Department buildings in the middle of the Downtown area, sitting on a small road a couple of blocks from Highway 59, which looped around Downtown.

Or at least, the SWAT house used to be there.

A fire had gutted the building, much of it probably fueled by the inordinate amount of weapons and ammunition stored inside. There wasn’t much left of the two-story structure but huge, charcoaled beams, leftover debris from the roof, and a fridge that Will remembered was inside the lunch room, near the back. The fridge, which had been painted over at least three times, the third and final time in throw-up yellow, was at least fifty meters from where it should have been.

They stood looking at the remains of the House, as stunned by the sight of the carnage as they had been by anything in the last two days. Danny had miraculously not yet run out of Funyuns despite the long drive, and he opened another bag now. With the sirens turned off, there was only the crunch-crunch of the onion chips.

“How many of those did you find?” Will asked.

“About a dozen.”

“Tell me that’s the last one.”

“Six left.”

“Jesus.”

“Want one?”

“No.”

Silence again.

Then Danny said, “C4 is probably still there.”

“In that?”

“If the C4 had gone up with the fire, there wouldn’t even be rubble. There would just be a big crater where the House used to be.”

“How much C4 was in there, anyway?”

“Enough to take out most of the neighborhood. Give or take. We just stocked up last month. Chief got it special ordered from Uncle Sam at a discount, and I was supposed to start training Ross and Jenkins on them next week.”

Will looked at the remains again. Could anything have possibly survived that? But Danny was the expert here, so he would know. “Can you find it?”

“I don’t see why not.”

Danny poured the last few rings from the bag into his mouth, then crumpled and tossed it away. The wind snatched the bag out of the air and took it down the empty street.

“We kept the C4 in a safe,” Danny said. “It’s solid steel, fireproof. You’d need an explosion to open it, and this looks like a fire. A raging, destroy-pretty-much-everything fire, sure, but just a fire.”

“I didn’t know there was such a thing as ‘just a fire’.”

“There’s a lot you don’t know, Kemosabe. Like women. Kids. And how to avoid women with kids.”

Danny walked into what was left of the SWAT house, Will following behind. Burned wood and singed fabric crunched underneath their boots. They were halfway through the rubble when they came across a hand sticking out of the blackness, as if reaching for salvation and finding nothing to hold onto. The flesh had been burned clean off the bones.

They found other bodies in the pile, five in all. Nothing left but bone, and it was impossible to tell who they used to be.

Danvers has to be one of them.

Danvers had gotten left behind with a stomach flu when they rolled out yesterday. He wouldn’t have gone home, but would have stayed behind in the House in case they needed backup. Will wondered if Danvers had in fact gotten that backup call and rushed over to the Wilshire Apartments to help out.

They saw more charred remains scattered about the black and smoke. It was impossible to tell if they were wearing uniforms or civilian clothes. Or if they were wearing clothes at all. Will felt the same sense of loss, the overwhelming sadness in the pit of his stomach that he felt when Marker and the others died in the Wilshire Apartments.

He was sure one of the bodies was Caroline, the civilian secretary. She was always good at manning the phones when the team was out on calls. With the team out and Danvers sick, she would have stayed beyond her normal hours to keep him company. That was Caroline. Sweet, always dependable Caroline.

But who were the others? Maybe civilians that ran to the House for help. It would be the most logical place for people to go in times of emergency, and last night would have been a really big emergency. A SWAT house was like a police station, only with heavier weaponry. That would account for the extra bodies in the rubble.

It turned out Danny was right. They found the armory near the back of the destruction, where it was supposed to be. Although the room had been gutted, most of the weapons melted and the ammo expended in the fire, they found a big, ash-covered lump among the debris, a charred beam lying across it.

Danny pushed the beam aside with his boot and kicked the big lump. It didn’t budge an inch, but the kick knocked loose the ash that covered it. Evidence of a smooth, metallic surface shook free underneath. The safe. It lay at an angle, one very sharp metallic end pointing up.

“Can you open it?” Will asked.

Danny nodded. “The combination’s fire-resistant. So yeah, as long as I remember the combination.”

“Do you?”

“Probably. Give me a sec.”

It took them a while to clear away the burned chunks of the House that had fallen around the safe in order to access the combination lock and the latch underneath it. The safe was much too heavy to lift out of the ruins, and rolling it over was also impossible. Eventually, they found the ash-covered combination and latch. Danny crouched next to it and spun the lock right, then left, then right again, and finally left one more time. He grabbed the latch and twisted it, and the safe opened a crack, though it took both of them to pry it open enough for Danny to reach in for its contents.

The C4 looked like stacks of packaged modeling clay, each about the length of a shoebox, one inch in height and two inches wide. They were malleable plastic explosives, so users could twist and prod them into whatever shape was needed to do the job. The only way to set off a C4 explosive was to detonate a smaller charge. Danny knew all about that. He had served a stint with the Army’s EOD, the Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit, back in Afghanistan.

They stuffed the C4 into three heavy satchels that they carried back to the squad car and were back on the road again in minutes.

“Where to now?” Danny asked.

“Silver,” Will said.

“I don’t mean to pick on your fashion sense, but do you really think now is the time to start accessorizing?”

“I’m thinking more along the lines of silver bullets. Like the Lone Ranger. If the silver on those crosses can kill those things, what kind of effect do you think silver bullets will have?”

“Then let me be the first to say, hi-ho fucking Silver!”

They found a jewelry store not far from the SWAT house, in a strip mall along Highway 59.

It wasn’t hard to spot the big tan and brown building with the large Johan logo on top. Johan’s Galleria Of Jewelry was one of the bigger and more expensive jewelry chains in the city. Will was optimistic they would find everything they needed inside — if not under the displays, then in the back, where the inventory was kept.

As soon as he parked in front of Johan’s, he noticed the covered windows. The rest of the buildings in the wealthy area were also covered, reminding him that they were in enemy territory.

Just like Afghanistan all over again.

But this time they had an advantage — sunlight.

Or at least, that was their advantage out here. Sunlight had a way of disappearing when windows were closed and doors got shut, or hallways twisted and turned, which they invariably did the farther into a building you ventured.

He glanced at his watch as he climbed out of the squad car: 11:13 a.m. They had saved a lot of time by finding a Johan’s this close to the SWAT house.

“Johan’s sure has let itself go,” Danny said. “Look at those window displays. Talk about uncouth. Bleh.”

Will slipped the cross out of his pouch and looked down at it for a moment. He had cleaned the flesh and blood off it with water and rags, and the silver glinted like new under the sunlight. He couldn’t help but chuckle softly.

“What’s so funny?” Danny asked.

“How much do you think Uncle Sam spends to turn out one fully functional Army Ranger per year?”

“Do I look like someone who knows something completely random and pointless like that?”

“Guess.”

“I dunno. Five grand?”

“Conservative estimates have it between $250,000 and $500,000 per person. Obviously I’m in the latter camp.”

“Oh, obviously,” Danny said, rolling his eyes.

“Point is, all that money to train me, and this…” Will held up the cross “…is what it takes to keep me alive. God bless the United States Army.”

Danny held up his cross. “Mine’s bigger.”

“They’re the exact same size.”

“Keep telling yourself that.”

The ghoul looked confused, almost afraid, as Will rushed it head-on instead of retreating. He slammed the sharp end of the cross up into the bottom of its chin and drove the makeshift weapon straight up into its brain. His momentum sent the long length of the cross up too high, and even as life slipped from the ghoul’s black eyes in a rush of confusion, fear, and resignation, Will knew he was in trouble.

They were inside Johan’s, jammed in a hallway that led to the back of the store. The ghouls were waiting in the darkness, unwilling — and too smart — to come into the front of the store, where Will and Danny had stripped away the window coverings to allow sunlight to pour inside. Though not far enough, as it turned out.

They had already cleared out all the silver they could find under the glass displays. It had taken them about thirty minutes, and thankfully Johan’s kept boxes underneath the counters that they used to carry the jewelry outside to the squad car.

They knew the ghouls were inside the darkened hallway that led to the back room where the inventory was kept. A part of Will didn’t want to risk it, but the practical part knew it would be worth the effort. They might not find another place like this again, and time was not on their side.

So they went into the hallway where the ghouls waited and, as soon as Will stepped into the darkness, one hand on his tactical flashlight, the other holding the cross in front of him, the creatures swarmed.

The first ghoul he killed didn’t make a sound; it slid to the floor and lay still. As he stepped over it, stabbing a second one in the chest, a third leaped over the others, but he had expected it and took a step back. The creature landed in front of him and he ran toward it, his momentum sending the cross all the way up the ghoul’s chin and into its brain.

As he scrambled to pull the cross out of the impaled head — the ghoul’s body was slack, sliding to the floor, and pulling the cross and Will with it — two ghouls emerged out of the darkness, surging forward.

Danny stepped in front of Will and stabbed one of the creatures through the chest, then swiped at the second one, sending it hopping backward, just out of reach.

Will grabbed the dead thing by the head and finally pried the cross free using his boot as leverage. He took another step back, hands and much of his shirt covered in black blood. Danny stepped back with him, their flashlights illuminating pale, shriveled faces, dark black eyes, and crooked, chipped teeth moving in the shadows.

Danny was out of breath. “You take me to the best places, Kemosabe.”

“I aim to please.”

“How many you think are in here?”

“You still wanna find out?”

“You?”

“It’ll probably be worth it.”

“Probably, huh? Not exactly a world of confidence there, chief.”

“We can always go back.”

“We could,” Danny said, “but where’s the fun in that?”

Danny took a step forward and Will followed, the two of them moving side by side. The silver crosses flashed, blood splattered, and haggard breaths labored within the tight confines of the hallway.

It took them another twenty minutes of slowly, methodically moving up the hallway, taking the enemy territory inch by inch, killing as they went. They reached the end, walking over and around dead ghouls in their path, and stepped into the store’s tightly packed back room.

There were five more waiting inside, but they were staying well within the shadows and away from pools of sunlight that blistered the room from small, high windows. Will felt almost sorry for them.

They dispatched the remaining creatures quickly, and with most of their clothes now soaked in thick, pungent black blood and what looked like severed, wrinkled skin and layers of gooey muscle, Will and Danny sat down on a crate to catch their breath.

Will looked down at the cross in his hand. He couldn’t see the silver anymore, and wondered if he had been wrong, that maybe it was the cross and not the silver. Was that possible?

“What?” Danny said, looking over at him.

“Hmm?”

“You got that look.”

“What look?”

“The ‘I’m thinking of something super deep right about now’ look.”

“I was just thinking…”

“What?”

Will shook his head. “Nothing. Forget it.”

He stood up on tired legs and scanned the inventory with his flashlight. They were surrounded by crates, stacked high along the walls, and shelves filled with bagged jewelry in a row along the back. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of items. Some were silver.

“Jackpot,” Will said. “You wanna grab something pretty for yourself, too?”

“Don’t mind if I do,” Danny said.

CHAPTER 11 KATE

“Listen!” Luke said.

He sat on the hood of the Jeep, the baseball bat tapping anxiously at his legs, when he froze and looked off in the direction of the I-45.

Kate sat in the driver’s seat behind him, trying to get as comfortable as she could behind the steering wheel. It was the first vehicle they had found with a full tank of gas with the keys on the driver’s side floor. The Jeep felt too rough, even uncivilized, to her, but it had gotten them almost to the I-45 before they lost the police siren. It was there one moment, then gone the next.

That was two hours ago.

Now they could hear it again, but this time coming from their left. For a while, it sounded as if the siren was circling around them. Now it was back — except on their other side.

“Do you hear it?” Luke asked. He glanced excitedly back at her. “There it is again. It has to be the same one.”

“It’s moved,” she said. “Why did they turn it off a couple of hours ago?”

“I don’t know, but it’s back. We should get going.”

He climbed off the hood and into the front passenger’s side. He moved like a bundle of energy, the way kids get when they have their sights set on something that can’t, and won’t, wait.

Kate started the Jeep, stepped on the gas, but wasn’t prepared when it shot forward like a rocket, surprising both her and Luke, who had to grab the dashboard to keep from banging his head into it.

She quickly stepped on the brake and slowed down, giving Luke an embarrassed look. “Gas pedal’s a lot more sensitive than the Buick.”

She eased them up Fanning Street, slowly at first, then picking up speed. She had to maneuver around a couple of trucks that had rammed into each other, leaving their front fenders twisted and tangled up. They looked like bulls with locked horns.

She could see the I-45 up ahead and the multitude of vehicles on top and below it along the feeder roads. Abandoned cars stretched in all directions, every single one rooted in place since last night. She didn’t have to get near the congestion to know they were never getting through it. Instead, she turned left onto St. Joseph Parkway, and drove parallel to the raised 45 structure to her right. She glimpsed the roofs of cars pressed up against the concrete dividers.

How many people? Thousands? Tens of thousands?

She had almost joined them last night, but had turned right instead of left. That simple, seemingly arbitrary decision had saved her life.

“Why are there so many cars here?” Luke asked, looking over at the highway.

“Everyone was trying to get out. It’s human instinct. Fight or flee. Most people flee when creatures start trying to eat them. The first place people go when they’re trying to get out of a city is the highway.”

“Was that where you were headed, too? Last night?”

“It was, at first.” She shook her head. “I changed my mind.”

“Lucky, then.”

“Yeah…”

Up ahead, she saw the big intersection where Highway 59 met the 45, joining the parallel highways for the first, and only, time. From there, they would take the 59 until it became the Southwest Freeway. She was almost certain that was where the police siren was coming from. It sounded so close now, that at any moment she expected to see the squad car parked in front of her, red and blue lights flashing.

As they got closer to where the two highways converged, the roads grew congested again. She was forced to lower the speedometer to thirty-five, then thirty, and finally twenty in order to avoid all the obstacles suddenly in her path. Eventually she came to a complete stop. Putting the Jeep in park, she stood up in the driver’s seat and looked forward at the thick sea of cars clogging up the lanes in front of her. There was no getting around them.

“We’re going to have to go around,” she said. “The long way.”

“I can still hear the siren,” Luke said.

For now, she probably wanted to reply, but didn’t. The worry in his voice was obvious. He was afraid they might lose the siren again. She was, too, she realized.

“Let’s hurry,” she said.

She did a full U-turn and headed back toward Crawford Street, where she turned left. She was rewarded with noticeably less vehicles along the feeder lanes, though she still had to drive slowly, zigzagging her way through the bottleneck, and at one point had to drive up the sidewalk before she could find a path underneath the I-45 and finally onto the other side of the highway.

“Kate,” Luke said suddenly, breathless beside her.

“I know, I know,” she said.

She could hear it, too: the siren was fading again…

They drove up Crawford Street for a while, hoping to catch another whiff of the police siren, but it was gone.

Either it had gone too far ahead of them — which meant it must have really been speeding dangerously given the conditions on the streets — or it had been turned off. Maybe the people in the police car got tired of hearing the siren. Or maybe they had crashed.

There were a lot of possibilities, but there was one certainty: the siren was gone.

They were driving aimlessly now. Kate eased her foot off the gas pedal and brought the speedometer back down to twenty-five miles per hour just to be safe. The number of abandoned vehicles on the road had become unpredictable. One long stretch could be almost empty, then without warning become too dangerous to drive more than ten miles per hour on. She had thought that the farther she left Downtown behind, the more the traffic would thin out. It did…until it didn’t.

She glanced up at the sky and began counting down the hours before it would get dark.

They own the night.

Goddamn short, late November days…

Luke had all but given up. All his energy expended in the chase, and now that they had lost the siren again, he stared listlessly at the buildings around them. As with the Downtown districts, the buildings, stores, and houses out here were almost completely covered up, signs that the creatures slept — or bided their time — inside. Kate found that depressing.

“Can you hear them?” she asked Luke, though she already knew the answer.

“No. Not for a while now. I think they’re gone. Do you think they turned it off?”

“Maybe it means they found where they were going and decided to turn off the siren. It’s loud. It can be pretty annoying.”

He nodded, but she could tell he didn’t buy it. She didn’t blame him. She didn’t buy it, either. She had to remind herself that Luke was just a kid. He had survived the night, and he certainly knew how to swing that bat, but in the end, he was still just a fourteen-year-old kid.

She kept driving, because there was nothing else left to do. Eventually, she turned left onto Richmond Avenue. Richmond was one of the busier roads in the city. If there were any survivors left out there at all…

She drove in silence, Luke sitting quietly next to her, his head turned away. The wind rushing against her felt good, and she wondered why she had never gone for a Jeep before. It had stopped feeling uncivilized tens of miles ago, and the freedom, the sensation of being out in the open while driving was contagious.

Luke suddenly jolted up in his seat.

Kate, startled, jerked at the steering wheel and almost swerved into an overturned car before somehow managing to regain control. “What, what?” she shouted.

“We have to stop!”

She braked hard and brought the Jeep to a complete stop in the middle of the street. “What?” she repeated.

“Look.”

He pointed at a pawnshop in a strip mall to their right. The big parking lot contained a Wallbys Pharmacy and an old Blockbuster up front, along with a dozen other smaller businesses in the back, including a Dairy Queen. The pawnshop sat in the very center.

“The pawnshop?” Kate asked.

“Yeah. See it? Bars on the windows.”

She could barely make them out from a distance. “What about them?”

“Burglar bars, Kate, and there’s nothing covering the windows on the inside. You know what that means, right?”

She nodded. “They’re not inside.”

“Yeah. And the bars on the windows.” She didn’t know where he was going with it, and he saw it on her face. “Bars, Kate. They couldn’t get through the bars. We might not find whoever is running around with that police siren, but that place… We could be safe there. We wouldn’t have to fight them off. The bars would do it for us.”

“If they couldn’t get in, how are we going to? Those bars are on the windows for a reason, Luke.”

“I can get us in.”

“How?”

“Kate, I got guns.”

“You’re going to shoot the windows out? What about the bars? I don’t think you can shoot the bars out, Luke.”

“Not those kinds of guns.” He lifted both arms and flexed for her. “These guns.”

She had to suppress a giggle.

Despite his ‘guns’, it still took Luke forty minutes of heavy exertion and a lot of grunting. Using a tire iron they found underneath the back seat of the Jeep, he was able to force one of the burglar bars all the way to one side, until it touched the next bar.

The whole time, Kate stood behind him with his baseball bat, one eye on the streets and the other on the covered windows of the Wallbys and Blockbuster stores in front of them. They had plenty of sunlight and, though she knew it wasn’t the case, the hours felt as if they were draining away at a rapid and unnatural pace.

“How are those guns holding up?” she asked.

“They’re holding, they’re holding,” he grunted back.

He kept at the bars, sweating profusely. Once he’d finally pried the first bar to one side, he went to work on the second, bending it to the other side until he had a big enough hole to fit his thin and lanky frame through. They were lucky the bars only ran up and down the window and not across, too. The idea was to not damage them in the process, so they could be bent back in place later on.

He finally stood back and gave the hole he had created a once-over. It looked too small, even for him.

“Are you sure you can get through that?” she asked. “Maybe if we cover you in butter first…”

He gave her a smirk, then began loosening up. “I’ve crawled through smaller spaces than this.”

“Why?”

“What?”

“Why did you have to crawl through smaller spaces than this?”

“You know, stuff,” he said, as if she should understand.

He’s fourteen. Of course he’s crawled through places smaller than this.

Luke smashed the window behind the bars with the tire iron and knocked the glass shards away from the frame. He used his hands to pick out small pieces that couldn’t be dislodged and flicked them away.

“You sure it’s safe?” she asked.

“Mostly. I’ll be careful.”

“You’ve done this before, right? Crawled through a window?”

“Nope.”

Crouching down in front of the window, he inserted himself through the bent bars and slithered like a snake through the hole, going in headfirst. She was afraid he might cut himself on some leftover piece of glass and dreaded the sound of him screaming.

Any second now, any second now…

Amazingly, he was halfway through in no time, his head pushing the curtain aside, and grabbing at something inside the pawnshop. With a grunt, he pulled himself all the way in and fell down on the pawnshop floor with a loud thump.

I guess he really has done this before.

“Bat,” he called.

She quickly slipped the bat through the burglar bars. He stood up on the other side and grabbed at the bat.

“I’ll be back in a few,” he said and disappeared from the window.

She picked up the tire iron and went back to watching the parking lot. She heard him rummaging inside the pawnshop behind her, and it took him ten minutes to find what he needed to find. She called his name every minute to make sure he was still alive. She thought he might get annoyed eventually, but he didn’t…or at least, he didn’t tell her to stop. He needed the reassurances that she was still out there, apparently.

Finally, he found a key in one of the drawers behind the counter. He quickly opened the front door and used the key to open the security gate over the door. He stepped aside and Kate hurried in, anxious to finally be indoors and hidden from prying eyes.

The store smelled of old things, but she quickly got used to it while going through the shelves. She busied herself while Luke went outside and bent the bars back into their old shape. Or as close to it as he could get them. He did a mostly good job, and she hoped the creatures weren’t too keen on details. Their lives would depend on it.

He hurried back inside and locked the security gate. Then he snapped all three locks on the door into place one after another. He walked over to the window and stared at the broken glass.

“How does it look?” she asked.

“I guess if we keep the curtain closed somehow…”

“Nail it to the wall?”

“That could work. Or tape it. You find something we can use for that?”

“I saw some duct tape. And these.”

She walked over with a machete and a curved sword, both items with price tags still dangling from their scabbards. They were the most lethal-looking bladed weapons she could find, and just holding them made her weary. The only blades she had ever wielded in her life were kitchen knives. And these looked dangerous, which was exactly what they needed.

Luke looked at the sword and grinned from ear to ear. “I call the Samurai sword.”

“I never would have guessed.”

He took the sword and slid it out of its scabbard. It made a sharp noise and Kate swore it might have hissed as the steel came in contact with air. He took a few steps and made practice slashes with the bladed weapon. She winced, reminding herself that he was just a boy, playing with sharp objects. She chastised herself for not leaving it on the shelf in the first place.

“Be careful,” she said.

“Yes, Mom,” he said between slashes against the air.

She rolled her eyes, but smiled anyway.

CHAPTER 12 CARLY

Carly heard the police siren long before she actually saw the car driving up Richmond Avenue. She watched it slow down in order to weave past a small pileup on the street below her. She glimpsed two people in the front — they had the bulk and shoulders of men — and there were big bundles in the back seats. She tried to zoom in with the binoculars, but by the time she got the damn thing working right, the car was already gone.

They drove past the ESL Language Center building that she was lying on top of and kept going. She briefly considered standing up and trying to flag the car down, but she was still thinking about it when the car vanished into the distance, and she eventually lost sight of its red taillights.

She shoved the binoculars into the backpack and left the rooftop, where she had been perched for the last few hours eating a sandwich and drinking a can of Diet Coke while scanning the horizon for survivors. Back inside, she made sure to lock the rooftop door behind her. The door was made of steel, so it closed with a solid and comforting wham! She turned the tumbler, then tested the door. She had to be sure. It wasn’t just her life at stake, and she had learned last night that they couldn’t break down doors if you locked them. Well, they could if they kept at it long enough — she had seen that, too — but they weren’t going to get through a steel door.

Hopefully.

The ESL Language Center building had four floors, and she jogged down to the fourth, where Vera and Ted were holed up. The three of them had been here since last night, when everything went to hell as Carly and Vera came out of the store with a bag full of coloring books. It was Ted who saved them, pulling them out of the streets when he didn’t have to, with chaos and people dying all around them. Carly had never believed in the whole Good Samaritan thing, but Ted had changed her mind that night.

Vera was where Carly had left her, sitting near one of the windows drawing in her coloring book. At seven, the girl reminded Carly of their mother, including her blonde hair and blue eyes, while Carly got stuck with their father’s ginger traits and brown eyes. They were both thin girls, but that wasn’t really a choice. Mom’s disability social security checks paid for the rent and kept the lights on, but not much else. Carly had to supply the rest.

Don’t need the lights on now, Mom.

Ted couldn’t be more different from them. He was twenty-five, with short brown hair that complemented his eyes. He was also big. She remembered thinking, He’s a giant, when he grabbed her arm and dragged her into the building. There was real terror when she saw him looming over her for the first time, but then she saw his eyes and she knew he wasn’t going to hurt them. She hadn’t known how she knew, she just did.

“I saw a police car,” Ted said as she came out of the stairwell. He was excited and managed to spill some of his Mountain Dew when he looked up. “I couldn’t tell if they were cops from the window. Did you see them?”

“I couldn’t tell if they were wearing uniforms,” she said.

“Did they see you?”

“No.”

She saw the disappointment on his face. Ted was easy to read, mostly because he didn’t try to hide his emotions. Or didn’t know how to.

“I thought about trying to wave them down,” she added, “but we don’t know who they are, and I don’t want to risk it in case they weren’t, you know, like you.”

Ted flushed a bit. “That’s probably smart. At least now we know there are other people out there. I was starting to think it’s just us.”

Carly nodded. There was something reassuring about knowing that others had survived last night, too. When she woke up this morning and saw nothing, just an empty street and an equally empty city around her, she felt a kind of depression she didn’t think was possible.

Ted was already playing with his portable radio again. “Anything?” she asked.

“Not yet.”

“You think you’ll eventually get something?”

“Probably not.”

“But that’s not going to stop you from trying, huh?”

“I’m stubborn that way, I guess.”

“Or maybe you’re just optimistic,” she smiled.

“What’s that?”

“Optimistic?”

“Uh huh.”

“It means you think positively. You know, if there’s a glass of water that’s only half full, you think, ‘Hey, it’s half full!’ While others would think, ‘Damn, it’s half empty.’ They call that being optimistic.”

“Oh. I guess I am, then.”

“Keep trying.”

He nodded, but she could tell he was already thinking about something else. He tended to drift off like that.

She walked over and sat down next to Vera. She was coloring in a picture of Dora the Explorer, the character on her favorite TV show. Carly wasn’t sure what she would tell Vera when she eventually started asking questions about last night. Vera had seen it begin — the killings, the screaming, the debilitating fear as they fled down the street — but Carly hid everything from her after Ted rescued them. Or hid as much as she could, anyway. She couldn’t shut out the screaming no matter how hard she tried.

To her surprise, Vera hadn’t asked about it when they woke up this morning. Maybe she just knew, or maybe she didn’t know how to ask. Vera could be enigmatic like that sometimes.

“How’s it hanging?” Carly asked, ruffling the girl’s hair.

The girl didn’t look up from her coloring book. “It’s hanging.”

“We’ll get you some more coloring books later. Maybe tomorrow Ted and I will try to find some in the CVS store across the street.”

“Cool,” the girl said.

“You eaten yet?”

Vera picked up a small bag of peanuts that Ted had procured from one of the vending machines in the lobby. There were also soda cans and bottled water nearby. If nothing else, they had plenty of food and drinks. Eventually she would have to find something less sugary for Vera. And toothbrushes. She hadn’t brushed her teeth since yesterday morning, and Carly could feel it along every inch of her mouth.

She leaned against the window and took some of Vera’s peanuts. They crunched loudly in her mouth. Her thoughts drifted back to her mother, who was probably dead or turned into one of those things, hiding in some building with covered windows like the ones around them. Mom did the best she could. All three of them did. A part of Carly felt guilty that she wasn’t more affected by the idea of her mother no longer being with them.

Some daughter you turned out to be…

She looked back at Vera and found it easy to forget about her guilt. Vera had always been her responsibility, even before last night. It was just more obvious now.

“Your hair’s growing long,” Carly said. “We should cut it.”

“No,” Vera said, her nose firmly planted in her coloring books.

“A little.”

“No.”

“A smidgeon?”

“Maybe.”

Carly smiled. She added scissors to her list.

Until then, she looked around their sanctuary. The fourth floor was one big classroom, with old chair/desk combos that looked like they had been raided from one of those old-timey schools from the ’50s or ’60s. There was a chalkboard on the far wall and bulletin boards covered with citizenship information and brochures about further English studying and offers of private tutoring in English, Vietnamese, Spanish, and a dozen other languages.

Ted walked nosily over and sat down across from her and Vera. His face was slightly contorted.

“What’s up?” she asked, though she already knew.

“Should we follow them?” he said hesitantly. “The cop car, I mean? I know you said we can’t be sure if we can trust them, but we’re going to have to trust someone sooner or later, don’t we? It can’t just be the three of us, can it?”

“Why not? It’s worked out so far.”

“So far, yeah.” He struggled for the right words. “But for how long, though?”

“Even if we did go looking for them, we wouldn’t know where to look. I can’t hear the siren anymore. Can you?”

“No. But where were they headed the last time you saw them?”

“Down Richmond.”

“Did you see them turn?”

“They kept going down Richmond until I couldn’t see their lights anymore.”

“So maybe they stopped somewhere up the road.” He paused, thought about it further, then shrugged. “Maybe we’ll get lucky, I don’t know. I think we’re due some luck, don’t you?”

“We got our luck,” she said. “We found you.”

He flushed again. She smiled. He was cute when he did that.

Gentle giant.

“Do you really want to find them?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I’m fine with just the three of us, but what’s that saying? About numbers?”

“Strength in numbers.”

“Yeah. If they are cops, then they might have guns. Guys who know how to use guns would be a really big help in this situation, don’t you think?”

“You have a gun and you know how to use it.”

“Yeah, but there’s just me, and I only have six bullets in this one gun. And come on, it’s not like I’m really trained to shoot. They had me do a one-day course before I got this job. I think I shot for, like, thirty minutes before they handed me some papers. I’m not a pro or anything.”

“Maybe you’re right,” she said. “Maybe we should go look for them.”

“Couldn’t hurt to try. If we don’t find them…” He glanced at his watch. “We have plenty of time to make it back here before nightfall.”

She looked over at Vera. “Hey, what about you? You get a vote, too.”

Vera shrugged, then went back to coloring in Dora’s eyes with a brown crayon.

Ted said, “I don’t know what that means.”

“That means she’s game if we are.”

“Oh. You got all that from a shrug?”

“Didn’t you?”

Ted had a car in the parking lot behind the ESL building. It was an old, beat-up Camry sedan with torn seats, and you had to pull on the front passenger door to get it to open because, he told her, of an accident a few years ago. After Carly failed to open it the first couple of tries, Ted opened it for her with barely any effort. Vera, already in the back seat of the Camry, giggled.

“Be quiet, you,” Carly snapped playfully at her. “Put on your seatbelt.”

“No one can get it open,” Ted said, smiling at her.

The Camry made a strange clinking noise as Ted drove, but Carly held off asking about it. Besides, the car seemed to be moving just fine.

They followed the police car’s trail, which wasn’t hard since it had gone straight up Richmond Avenue, one of the longer and more commercialized streets in Houston.

She glanced at her watch. 2:10 p.m.

It was late November, so it tended to get dark faster now than any other month of the year. Did the creatures know that? Maybe. She had seen the way they moved, attacked, and dragged people off the streets. They didn’t killed everyone right away — they took people, kicking and screaming and fighting. She didn’t want to think where, or why. It was terrible enough just to see it all play out in front of her, as she sat in the darkness of the ESL building, unable to look away and too afraid to move or speak or even breathe at times.

“If we don’t find them by three-thirty, we need to start heading back,” she said.

Ted nodded. “Okay.”

He drove with two hands on the steering wheel, with a look of total concentration that reminded her of student drivers. They were barely doing thirty-five, not because Ted was afraid of hitting cars in the streets. It was how Ted normally drove — slow and steady. She found it oddly endearing.

Richmond Avenue seemed to go on forever, crossing paths with the city’s major roads and highways. Commercial buildings passed by in an endless stream of banners and signs and parking lots. Apartments, townhomes, and office buildings.

By the time they passed Hazard Street, they were already thirty minutes into the drive, and she started counting down the time in her head before they had to turn back.

Ted, who had been quiet for most of the drive, finally said, “Look at the windows.”

“I see them,” she said.

She had seen the creatures covering up the windows across the street from the ESL building last night. It was the sunlight. They scurried off the streets when morning came, like cockroaches looking for cover. She knew then they could be safe in the daylight, because those things feared it. A covered window was a sign there were creatures inside.

“They’re everywhere,” Ted said. “How is that possible?”

“The people they attacked,” she said. “They infect them somehow. The victims don’t die, Ted, they turn.”

“Yeah, but there are so many now…”

“How many people are in Houston?”

“Two million, one hundred thousand, and forty-five hundred at last count,” Ted said without hesitation. “But that was back in 2011. There might have been more since.”

She gave him an amused look.

“I read a lot,” he smiled embarrassingly. “That’s what you do when you don’t have a lot of friends.”

“You don’t have any friends?”

“I have some friends, just not a lot of friends.”

“Well, you have two more now.”

They exchanged a brief, awkward smile, when Vera’s voice suddenly cut through the air like a knife.

“Carly, look!”

Vera was pointing back at a strip mall parking lot they had just driven past. Carly saw it: a police car was parked in front of an Archers Sports and Outdoor warehouse store. The police lights were flashing, but the siren had been turned off.

“What?” Ted said, looking back at Vera, then at Carly. He still had two hands firmly on the steering wheel. “What happened?”

“Stop the car,” Carly said. “I think we found them.”

“Found who?”

“Them.”

Ted stepped hard on the brake, and Carly had to grab at the dashboard to keep from hitting it with her face. She felt a slight thud against her seat and looked back to see Vera rubbing at her forehead.

“Ow!” Vera said.

“Didn’t I tell you to put on your seatbelt?”

Vera made a face.

“Now you know. Carly’s always right.”

“Sorry, kid,” Ted said, his face red.

They sat parked in the street and looked back at the squad car and its flashing lights. They were too far away to see anyone moving inside the Archers, and there were no windows along the front wall to indicate the presence of creatures inside.

“What should we do?” Ted asked. “It’s almost time to go back…”

“Let’s take our chances,” Carly said.

Vera sat up in the back seat and hiked a thumbs-up in approval.

CHAPTER 13 KATE

Like most pawnshops in Houston, this one had a gun rack of rifles and shotguns on the wall, the handguns laid out underneath the glass counter. They spent the next hour taking weapons out of the case and trying to figure out how to load them without accidentally shooting themselves. It was a nerve-wracking experience, and Kate constantly waited to hear the loud boom of an accidental discharge.

The bullets came in boxes, but finding the right ones for the right guns took trial and error, and even when the bullets did fit, they didn’t feel comfortable enough to risk firing off rounds in the store. Eventually, they were able to load a couple of six-shot revolvers and a shotgun. She had to pull back the lever underneath the barrel — or pump it, she guessed was the right word — to load the shell.

Staring at the guns spread out on the counter, she didn’t know whether to feel safe or endangered. Maybe a little of both, and it occurred to her yet again just how ill-equipped she was to survive in a world that didn’t value her creativity or move to the whims of her personal ambitions. She was out of her element here.

Luke, with the sword slung over his back, stared down at the guns and looked as lost and apprehensive as she was. After a while, he said, “Maybe as a last resort?”

She nodded. “Definitely.”

“My mom wouldn’t let my dad keep one in the house. I don’t even know if we loaded them right. What if they, you know, explode on us?”

“Can they do that?”

“I don’t know. They can, can’t they? I’ve seen movies where that’s happened.”

“You’re right, last resort. We’ll use them only if we have to. And even then we should be careful.”

“We already have this.” He drew his sword and walked back to the window. “If they get in, it’ll be through here. I can’t shoot a gun, but I’m pretty sure I can hack off a head or two with this.” He slashed at the air for effect. “How tough do you think their necks are? They looked pretty weak, and when I was hitting them with the bat, they went down pretty easy. They didn’t stay down, but they went down easy.”

Kate thought about Donald. Striking him with the stiletto and how the sharp point slipped into the side of his head, as if the skull wasn’t even there.

“Unless you cut off your own leg first,” she said.

“No way.” He slid the sword back into its scabbard. “I’m getting used to it.”

He pushed the curtains aside and looked out into the strip mall parking lot. She walked over and stood next to him.

They stared at the Wallbys and the Blockbuster store. With the windows covered, they looked foreboding, unwelcoming, even ugly. The Blockbuster in particular looked old and decrepit, like some ancient thing from the past that didn’t belong in today’s world.

“When was the last time you rented movies at a Blockbuster’s?” Luke asked.

She had to think about it. “It’s been a while…”

“Funny, I didn’t even know they still had Blockbusters around. Who rents movies anymore? I stream them over the net.”

“Yeah, me, too.”

“You torrent?”

“What’s that?”

“It’s this illegal downloading thing. You can get free movies or TV shows and stuff like that.”

“Oh,” she said. “Good to know. Maybe when the power comes back on, you can show me how.”

He laughed. “You really think the power’s going to come back on?”

She shook her head. “No.”

“I don’t think it’s ever coming back on,” he said. “When I was in middle school, we took a field trip to a power plant. There were all these buttons and switches and hundreds of people had to keep the place working around the clock. One person doesn’t show up, someone’s got to replace him. You can’t run a power plant with just a few people.” He shook his head. “I don’t think the lights are ever coming back on, Kate.”

“You’re probably right.” She glanced at her watch. They may have lost all power in the city, but as long as there were batteries, her watch would still work. Behind her, she could hear the ticking of a wall clock. “Two hours until it gets dark. We should keep looking for more supplies.”

Luke looked up toward the sky. “Did it always get dark so soon?”

“It’s always like this in late November.”

“Funny, I never noticed until now…”

In the back rooms, Luke found a couple of big safes but no combinations. Undeterred, he retrieved a sledgehammer from one of the shelves.

“That’s not going to work,” Kate said.

“You don’t think so?”

“Not in a million years.”

He started wailing away at one of the safes. She stood back and watched him, hands over her ears to keep out the loud, clanging noise. She shook her head.

He gave up after a half-dozen tries that left one of the safes dented, but no closer to opening. Sweating and gasping for breath, he crouched, using the sledgehammer as a resting post.

“Told you,” she said.

He made a face and tossed the sledgehammer down. He found a crate in a corner, sat down, and closed his eyes. “I’m going to rest for a while.”

“Take your time.”

She went back to the front of the pawnshop and worked her way through a rack of second-hand women’s clothes. Most of them were dusty, cheap, and hopelessly out of style. She searched for a shirt and pants that would fit, locating a white shirt and black slacks among the camouflage hunting gear and oversized tees.

She changed in the pawnshop while Luke got going again in the back. She could hear him tossing boxes around and cursing.

She was glad to be out of the torn blouse and skirt. She didn’t realize how much they smelled until she had stripped them off into a pile next to her then threw them into a nearby trashcan. She looked for sneakers and socks and found them in another aisle, along with something to tie up her hair.

She grabbed some clothes in Luke’s size and tossed them at him when he came out of the back room.

“What’s wrong with my clothes?” he asked.

“They’re covered in blood.”

“Oh.” He looked down at himself. “I didn’t even notice.” He took the clothes into the back room to change.

There was a fridge in what she guessed was an employee lounge. Inside were bottles of water and an old Red Delicious apple that had turned a pale shade of brown. The fridge smelled of rotten air when she pulled open the door, so she grabbed the bottles and slammed it shut again. She found unopened strips of Jack Link’s beef jerky inside a drawer underneath the cash register. The find made her giddy.

“Gatorade would have been better,” Luke said.

“Evian would have been better,” she said. “Or Perrier. Or red wine. I could go for some red wine about now.”

“I’ve never tasted wine.”

“You’re too young; that’s how it should be.”

“I hear in France kids drink wine when they’re ten, sometimes even younger than that.”

“Did you know the French invented French fries?” she asked.

“Really?”

“No. I’m just messing with you.”

“Oh, ha ha,” he said.

She laughed.

“So who invented French fries?” he asked.

“We did. They say Thomas Jefferson was the first one to ever eat them ‘served the French way.’”

“Hunh. You learn something new every day.”

They were sitting on sleeping bags that Kate found on a back shelf. They were careful to set up in the middle of the pawnshop, hidden from the front windows in case the creatures looked in, but close enough to rush forward and defend if necessary. The prospect of actually doing that filled her with dread.

The beef jerky went down with some difficulty, but Kate hadn’t eaten a thing since lunch yesterday afternoon, and her stomach growled loudly, eager for each new strip of beef. She had almost convinced herself not to eat it when she saw how much sodium was in each piece. But once she started eating, she couldn’t stop. Her stomach wouldn’t let her.

“I guess you don’t eat this stuff on a daily basis, huh?” Luke said.

She made a face, and forced another strip down with a gulp of warm water.

Sundown came at 5:30 p.m., and it was pitch dark outside before they realized it had happened. For a moment Kate forgot to breathe. It had gotten so dark so fast that it took her breath away, and all she could think was, My God, when did that happen?

Then she heard the sound of the city waking up.

Then she heard them.

There were a lot of them, moving in different directions. She could tell that much from the scampering nature of their movements. She imagined this must be what it sounded like if you paid attention to cockroaches moving in the dark. When they leaned out from behind the shelves and looked toward the window, they saw dark figures moving across the window, a constant stream of odd shapes and sizes.

“How many do you think are out there?” Luke whispered.

His voice sounded even younger than his fourteen years. She could feel his fear, radiating from every inch of his body. She understood exactly how he felt and had to put both hands in her lap to keep them from shaking.

“A lot,” she whispered back.

How many? Hundreds. Thousands. Tens of thousands…

She felt something strange — plastic and metallic — and looked down in surprise to see she had picked up the machete without realizing it. Her fingers were a pale white as she gripped the handle. She willed herself to release some of the pressure and uncurled her fingers slowly.

One of the creatures had stopped in front of the window. Its skeletal, silhouetted figure looked like a puppet moving behind the curtains of a puppet show, lit up by a flashlight. In this case, the flashlight was the moon. There were two windows at the front of the shop, on either side of the door, and the creature had stopped in front of the window Luke had broken to get inside. It was standing there much longer than it should, as if it was looking at something, seeing something amiss.

Luke tensed up next to her. Both of them had stopped breathing.

The creature continued to look at the window. Maybe it had noticed the bent burglar bars. Maybe it saw or heard or smelled them.

Could they do that? Could they smell them?

Luke gripped his sword, the sharp blade pointing at the ceiling. He had taken it out of the scabbard. When had he done that?

He nodded at her, as if to say, “I’m ready if you are,” and again she was taken aback by just how young he was.

She looked back toward the window.

The creature turned its head quickly, as if its attention was snapped elsewhere. It disappeared from the window, even as new creatures rushed by, silhouettes appearing one second and gone the next in an endless blur.

Luke let out a loud breath. She did the same, feeling a little light-headed for a moment. How long had she held her breath? It had seemed to take forever for the creature to finally move on.

“That was a close one,” he whispered.

“Yeah…”

He slouched, the sword still clutched tightly in his hands.

She didn’t have to say anything, and he didn’t have to tell her, but she knew neither of them were going to get any sleep tonight.

Then they heard it, in the distance. There was no mistaking the noise. It was loud, like thunderclaps.

Gunshots.

As soon as she said it, four more shots rang out, one after another.

They exchanged a look, scrambled to their feet, and hurried to the window to the right of the door, keeping low in case one of the creatures stopped to look in again. More gunshots broke the night air, and the intensity of movements outside seemed to become frenzied in response.

Luke used the point of his sword to brush aside a piece of curtain, enough to give them a glimpse of the parking lot. It was teeming with them as they moved toward the streets all at once. They looked like a horde of stampeding cattle, moving swiftly with an unnatural but graceful gait that struck her as odd and impossible.

There’s so many of them…

The creatures moved with purpose. Not running toward the street, but surging toward the sound of gunshots. Soon it was hard to tell where one creature ended and another began — there was a mass of blackness moving like an ocean wave underneath the moonlight.

She thought about the machete in her hand and the sword in Luke’s, and realized with sudden terror just how ridiculous they had been to think they could ever defend the pawnshop if the creatures discovered them. How long would they have lasted? A minute? Two?

They sat still in the dark underneath the window for the longest time, not saying a word, listening to the dwindling footsteps.

The gunshots continued for a while, then began to fade.

Then there was just the eerie, suffocating silence again, the noise of a city waking when it should be sleeping.

“You think they got them?” Luke whispered.

“I don’t know.”

“I hope it wasn’t those guys in the police car…”

They moved quietly back to their bedrolls. Luke lay down and closed his eyes, the sword on the floor next to him, his right hand gripping the handle in a tight clutch. An absurd, almost comical image of him waking up from a nightmare and accidentally stabbing himself flashed across her mind.

It wasn’t until ten o’clock that she felt the first hint of drowsiness nagging at her. She closed her eyes and tried to sleep, but nothing happened. She opened them and stared at the ceiling instead, listening to the darkness.

The wind lightly tapped against the wall, and she listened for the distinctive crack of gunshots. She longed to hear it. It was proof someone else was out there besides her and a fourteen-year-old kid.

Midnight came and went.

She couldn’t keep her eyes closed, or stop herself from hearing every single noise outside, no matter how trivial. Her hands, palms flat against the cold tiles beneath her, felt every little insignificant vibration.

And there were no gunshots…

“Luke,” she whispered.

“Yeah,” he whispered back.

“Are you asleep?”

“I can’t sleep.”

“Me neither. Tell me about your family.”

“Are you going to tell me about yours?”

“If you want.”

“I do,” he said.

“Okay.”

She heard him take a deep breath. “My mother’s name is Patricia, my father’s is Thomas. I’m an only child…”

CHAPTER 14 WILL

Will heard gunshots, somewhere down Richmond. On a normal night, with traffic and the sounds of a city shifting from day to night, he wouldn’t have heard them at all, but this wasn’t a normal night. Without the distraction of daily life, the faint pop-pop-pop echoes might as well be thunder.

He and Danny were on the roof of the Archers Sports and Outdoors store, lying prone near the edge. They watched a small group of ghouls emerge from the 24-hour Walmart Superstore to their left. The group soon ballooned, and Will stopped counting after 300. They darted into the darkness, toward the sound of gunfire.

“That’s the last time I go shopping at Walmart,” Danny said in a low voice.

“When was the last time you went shopping at Walmart?”

“I’m just saying. I’m not going there now.”

“You heard that, right?”

“Gunshots? Yeah. How many rounds did you count?”

“Fifteen. Maybe sixteen. More than one?”

“I’m guessing two. Maybe three?”

“Either or,” Will said.

“So there’s someone else out there,” Danny said. “Bad decision makers, obviously. Probably dead now. I wonder if they know about the silver?”

“How did we find out?”

“Dumb accident?”

“There you go.”

“Or it could have been the work of God. What’s that they say? God works in mysterious ways? Maybe this is one of those mysterious ways.”

“When did you suddenly believe in God?”

“I’m not saying I do,” Danny said. “I’m just saying me not believing in God doesn’t preclude it from being God’s work.”

“How could it be God’s work if you don’t believe in God?”

“God is God. He doesn’t need me to believe in him for him to do what he does. If that were the case, he wouldn’t be God.”

“That makes no sense.”

Danny shrugged. “Makes perfect sense to me.”

“Of course it does,” Will said.

They lay still and watched more ghouls emerge from the Walmart. There had to be 500 now, maybe a thousand since the last time he had looked. Even through the night-vision binoculars, the creatures had become indistinguishable, like pebbles on a black beach covered in tar.

“They look excited,” Danny said, peering through his own night-vision binoculars. “The gunshots have them all afluttered.”

“Afluttered?”

“Yeah, I’m sticking with that. Afluttered.”

“I guess they do look afluttered,” Will said.

“How do they communicate, you think?”

“I don’t know. Some kind of hive mind, maybe.”

“Come again?”

“It’s just a thought. Remember at the Wilshire? The way they attacked and retreated. It’s like they were communicating without saying a word. They knew when to time their attacks and when to retreat when it wasn’t working. Like a hive mind.”

“So you’re saying they’re like psychic undead creatures now?” Danny chuckled to himself.

“Something like that,” Will said. “You asked.”

“That’s almost crazy enough to be true.” Danny paused, then added, “Or you’re just crazy.”

“That’s entirely possible, too.”

They heard movement behind them, but neither one looked back. Will would have liked her to be quieter, but she was just a kid and didn’t know any better, even though she seemed more mature than girls her age. She was nineteen, but anyone with a “1” in front of their age was a kid to him.

Carly crawled over on her belly until she was lying next to them. She had followed their lead and dressed in black clothes taken from the plentiful racks in the Archers. Her eyes went wide at the sight of the ghouls flooding out of the Walmart next to them, and she inhaled a sharp gasp of air.

“Oh my God, how many of them are there?”

“That’s about the last of them,” Danny said. “They’ve been coming out of there for the last ten minutes.”

“I think I’m going to pee my pants.”

“They can smell pee.”

“Really?”

“Probably not.”

“Oh, nice,” she said.

Carly, her sister Vera, and the big guy, Ted, had showed up earlier in the day, when he and Danny were still clearing out the two dozen or so ghouls asleep in the back of the Archers store. It was slow going because the creatures were spread out, but as soon as Will staked the first one, the rest came out of the shadows. They were lucky, because unlike the Walmart next door, the Archers had been relatively sparse of undead inhabitants.

Will liked having the newcomers with them. He and Danny had been moving on pure adrenaline for the past two days, fighting to survive in the Wilshire Apartments, then moving from spot to spot afterwards. They had developed an idea of what to do, but hadn’t considered what to do after. The presence of civilians put things in perspective. He was already beginning to formulate a survival plan, one that went back to the first few weeks after he left the Army.

Harold Campbell.

I knew that name would come back sooner or later.

He had chosen the Archers for a reason. They found everything they needed among the hunting gear and DIY equipment. With Ted’s help, they transported all the weapons and ammo from the squad car into the store, adding them to the existing stock supply of rifles, shotguns, and handguns that Archers carried. They already had more bullets than they needed, but they weren’t the right kind of bullets. It took half an hour, but they located all the supplies they needed to make the right kind.

He was surprised how easily the newcomers accepted his and Danny’s story about the silver. Then again, he supposed once you’ve seen creatures that can’t possibly exist not only exist, but kill and turn others into more of them, the as-yet unidentified power of silver wasn’t all that far-fetched.

Melting down the silver came first, and it required setting up a workbench in a back room with a window. Ted’s size came in handy, and soon he and Danny were adding the jewelry from Johan’s into the heated pot, watching it melt into liquid form. They didn’t need pure silver bullets — that would be a waste. If the crosses had taught them anything, enough silver did the job. So they added lead from the bullets they were replacing into the pot, creating a bigger pot from the combined materials.

Will found everything he needed from the shelves to make their own bullet molds. They kept it simple, banging out just three types of molds—9mm for the Glocks, 5.56 x 45mm for the M4A1s, and buckshot for the shotgun shells. By the time he finished, Danny had brought over the first pot, and Will knocked out the first dozen bullets with a plastic mallet within the hour. Resizing, priming, then recasting the bullets came later, using more equipment already assembled from the shelves. Will set up a mini assembly line and was cranking out silver bullets by nightfall, with Danny eventually joining on the other set to push the production.

By the time darkness crept up on them outside the store, they had enough bullets to load a half-dozen magazines, four clips for the M4A1s, and fifty shotgun shells. Ted swapped his.38 for one of the Glocks in the store, while Will and Danny loaded their M4A1s and four pump-action shotguns. They kept the silver crosses as insurance.

Half of the parking lot was gray by the time they pushed heavy shelves and exercise equipment in front of the store’s front entrance. Like most Archers stores, this one had two sets of doors. The first consisted of an outer section with three doors — two along the sides and one larger one in the middle. They opened up into a waiting area, with benches and chairs along the walls. This interior section was about seven meters wide and slightly longer than three meters. At the other end of the waiting area were the inner doors. Both sets were made of glass and reinforced with a shatterproof film.

Will was certain the ghouls would use the front doors, but just to be safe, they also reinforced the two back and side entrances with enough heavy objects that it would have been easier to break down the walls rather than go through the doors. Or at least, that was the idea.

The exercise equipment — benches, weights, and bars — piled high up front was heavy, and it was going to be a bitch to move the next morning. But that was for next morning. Surviving the night was the priority.

Lying on the rooftop now, he watched the ghouls moving impossibly quietly across the parking lot, vanishing one by one into the streets. The creatures had ignored the Archers completely, and Will started to doubt his own theory that the ghouls had a hive-like mind. If that was the case, wouldn’t they know what had happened to the other ghouls in the Archers earlier in the day? Or maybe things got lost in translation in the daytime, when they were asleep? If it was the latter, then they were lucky. If not…

He turned to Danny and Carly. “Time to go, kids. Pack up your toys.”

They crawled backward almost two meters, then got up and ran, hunched over, through the rooftop door. Inside, he and Danny made sure the steel door was locked, then followed Carly down to the store below. There was only one entrance onto the rooftop, making defending it easier if the ghouls decided to climb the walls and give the Archers more than a cursory look. They hadn’t done that so far, but better safe than sorry.

They had made base near the back of the store, using battery-operated lamps and sleeping in camping gear. The lamps were the only sources of light in the entire store, far enough from the front windows to be undetectable. Will found Ted listening for noise from a portable radio he had brought with him, while Vera had her face buried in one of her coloring books, using light from one of the lamps to work. The girl had a bag full of coloring books and crayons.

“Anything?” he asked Ted.

Ted shook his head. “Not yet.”

“There’s never anything,” Carly said with a smile.

“Gotta try, keep optimistic, right?” Ted said, smiling back at her. Will figured it was an inside joke between the two of them.

He nodded at Ted. “Get some sleep. Danny and I will keep watch.”

“If you wake me, I can relieve you.”

“We’ll see.”

Carly sat down on her sleeping bag next to Vera’s. “So what’s the plan? Keep low and quiet, and hope they don’t notice us?”

“That’s basically it.”

“Kind of a lame plan.”

“Yeah, well, it’s a plan.”

“Wake me up at midnight,” Danny said and slipped into his sleeping bed and closed his eyes.

“Everyone get some sleep,” Will said. “God knows we all need some after last night.”

Vera looked up and gave him a thumbs up. The girl didn’t talk much.

He headed toward the front of the store, unslinging the M4A1 as he went. The rifle was now equipped with silver bullets and a night-vision sight he liberated from one of the shelves. It was a ridiculously expensive piece of equipment he would have loved to have in Afghanistan, but Uncle Sam would never have shelled out that kind of money.

Shadows moved across the front glass doors as he arrived. Too many. Way too many. They could fire every single bullet and they wouldn’t make a dent in the enemy’s numbers.

Stay quiet. Survive. Come up with a plan tomorrow.

Yeah, that’s the ticket.

He took out some granola bars and bit into one. It wasn’t bad, but he doubted the health claims on the packet. Two or three were enough to fill him up, and there was plenty of water in refrigerators around the store. Warm, yeah, but water was water. He took a sip of some generic energy drink. Like drinking warm piss.

He glanced at his watch, the digits glowing in the darkness. 7:15 p.m.

He was thinking about Harold Campbell again when he heard movement behind him. He didn’t have to turn his head to know who it was. Women smelled differently than men — better, even when they hadn’t taken a shower in a few days.

Carly sat down next to him and took out a bag of Doritos. He flinched. The sounds of her crunching in the pitch darkness were like gunshots. “Want one?”

He held up the remaining half of his nutrition bar.

“How’s the taste?” she asked.

“Like week-old grass.”

“Yum.” She emptied the Doritos bag, crumpled it up, then tossed it into a nearby trashcan. She brought out a box of Pringles from somewhere and offered it to him. “Don’t be shy.”

“How’s the taste?”

“Definitely not like week-old grass.”

“I’ll pass for now.”

“Your loss.” She popped them into her mouth. More gunshots in the darkness. “By the way, thanks for not shooting us.”

He smiled. “You’re welcome.”

“We weren’t sure. Ted and me. We took a really big risk looking for you guys. I heard you driving past our building earlier in the day.” She explained to him why she hadn’t tried to flag him down.

“We wouldn’t have heard you anyway,” Will said. “The siren was too loud.”

“I figured.” She shook out another handful of Pringles. “I’ve been meaning to ask…”

“The silver?”

“Yeah. How did you and Danny know about it?”

He told her about their last stand in the Wilshire Apartments, and the discovery of the silver, left behind by the former tenants of Apartment 1009.

“A cross, huh?” she said. “I guess it’s true what they say. God works in mysterious ways. You think he has something to do with it?”

“He?”

She pointed up at the ceiling. “You know, he.”

“I was raised agnostic, so I guess sure, it’s possible.”

“But you don’t believe it.”

“I’ve seen too much.”

“Danny said you guys were in Afghanistan together.”

“Yeah.”

“Can I see it?”

He took out the cross from the sheath he once used for his combat knife. It didn’t really look like a cross anymore. He had sanded down the two long sides to make them resemble the guard on a knife and honed the sides into a double-edge blade. Plastic wrapped around everything past the guard to make the handle easier to grip.

She took it with reverence and gripped the handle as if she were holding a small sword. “I don’t know how you didn’t instantaneously convert after discovering something like this. I’d have been on my knees.”

He smiled at the imagery. “How long have you been taking care of your little sister?”

“Oh my God, I don’t remember. It’s been a while. Our mom…she tries, you know, but it’s hard for her. She’s on social security disability. Not that you could tell there’s anything wrong with her. I think she got some scumbag lawyer to do some papers for her, and now she’s living off the government. Yes, you’re looking at someone who has been sucking on the government teat most of her life.”

He chuckled. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. You’re just a kid.”

“I’m nineteen.”

“Like I said…”

She rolled her eyes. “I’ve been taking care of Vera since she could walk. You wouldn’t know it to look at her, but she’s very smart. Way smarter than me at her age, anyway.”

“She likes her coloring books.”

“That’s like saying air is good for you. She goes through them like her life is at stake, but only when she knows I have the money to buy her new ones. She can sense if I’m running low, then she makes them last.”

“Smart girl.”

“Yup.” She paused for a moment. “Hey.”

“Hmm?”

“You think we would date if we weren’t surrounded by blood-sucking creatures from the deepest bowels of hell?”

Will grinned. Another great use of imagery. “Sure, why not.”

“Gee, try to put a little enthusiasm into it, jerk.” She took another chip from the can. She didn’t say anything for a while, and he listened to her chewing in the darkness.

Still too loud…

“You married?” she asked.

“No.”

“Ever been married?”

“Nope.”

“You like girls, right?”

“Sure.”

“Weird that you’ve never been married. What are you, thirty?”

“Twenty-nine.”

“No girl ever snatched you up?”

“Not yet.”

“Let me guess. You’re a player.”

Another fine image. It was also the first time someone had ever called him that. “No. I’ve just never met the right woman.”

“Gonna be difficult now.”

He couldn’t help but chuckle. “Yeah.”

“Hey,” she said.

“What?”

“What are the chances we’re going to live through the week?”

“They’re not great.”

“Couldn’t you at least sugarcoat it a bit?”

“Sorry. I meant to say, they’re pretty good.”

“Yeah?”

“Not really.”

“God, you suck.” She held out the Pringles can again. “Chips?”

“Sure.”

He took one. Sour cream exploded against his taste buds. Not half bad, as it turned out.

“What’s that French word about seizing the day?” she asked.

“Carpe diem. And it’s actually Latin.”

“I knew it had to be one of the two. So what I’m saying is, you think Danny’s into me?”

He smiled again. Somehow he knew that question was coming. “Are you interested?”

“He’s cute.”

“Is that a yes?”

“That’s a yes.”

“I’m pretty sure he’s into you.”

“Yeah?”

“You want me to pass him a note? I’ll pretend I need to talk to him after class, get him alone in the hallway, then slip it to him. Just like that. No one will notice.”

“You’re such an asshole,” she said and punched him in the shoulder.

She sat with him for another hour, asking him questions about Danny. By eight-thirty he was alone in the darkness again, finishing off her box of Pringles. Sour cream. Who would have thunk it.

Around midnight, Danny tapped him on the shoulder. “How’s it going?”

“It’s going.”

Danny laid his M4A1 on the cold tiled floor and adjusted his night-vision goggles. He scanned the front windows and parking lot beyond. “We good?”

“Peachy.” Will got up to leave. “By the way…”

“What?”

“The girl. Carly. She’s into you.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Must be the new deodorant,” Danny said.

“You wearing new deodorant?”

“Yeah. It’s called sweat and hard work. You want me to bottle it so you can enjoy the benefits, too?”

“I’ll pass.”

“Your loss.”

Will jogged back to the sleeping bags, expecting to hear gunfire by the time he reached the makeshift camp. He didn’t.

The others were asleep, Ted snoring loudly in his bedroll. Vera had abandoned hers and was sleeping with Carly, whose hands were wrapped protectively around her little sister.

Will lay down and waited to hear those gunshots he had been expecting from the front of the store. He drifted off to sleep around one in the morning, and woke to sunlight in his eyes and the sound of Danny and Carly flirting nearby.

He rolled over and went back to sleep for another hour.

CHAPTER 15 KATE

Kate and Luke emerged from the pawnshop in the morning. Luke stretched and yawned next to her, making noises she hadn’t heard before. She had finally given in to sleep at around three in the morning, though Luke had drifted off an hour before that.

She emptied a bottle of water over her head and drank the remainder in the sunlight. She was amazed by the little things she had begun to miss — like cold water straight from the fridge, showers, clothing that didn’t smell…

Some were more important than others.

“You think we should keep going, try to find that police car?” Luke asked.

“You don’t think we should?”

“We have this place now. What if we don’t find them?”

“We could always come back here.”

He wasn’t convinced, and she didn’t blame him. The pawnshop had been their salvation last night, and he was reluctant to give it up so easily. It was safe.

“We just have to time it right,” she added. “Make sure we don’t stray too far, so we can come back in time.”

He nodded reluctantly. “Yeah, that doesn’t sound too bad.”

She looked northward, where the gunshots had come from last night. Luke did the same thing.

“What do you think happened to them?” he asked.

“I don’t know, but I’d like to find out.”

“Yeah, me too.”

They spent the next few hours looking for things they could use back in the pawn shop. Kate sifted through rings in an unlocked security box hidden underneath the counter. Cheap, nothing worth more than $100 in even the best economy. The expensive stuff would be in those two massive safes in the back, the ones that had almost given Luke a rotator cuff tear when he tried to break into them with a sledgehammer yesterday.

Luke found more potential weapons — a high-tech hunting bow and arrows, some spring-loaded knives, and what looked like a battle-axe from some bygone medieval century.

“Check it out,” he said, holding up the bow. He tried to notch an arrow, but it dropped to the floor. He tried again, and this time managed to hold on, although the shot hit the ceiling instead of the wall.

“Probably not,” Kate said.

“Yeah, probably not.” He picked up a pair of knives and handed one to her. “For emergencies.”

She took it warily. It wasn’t big, about five inches long, with a button on the side that when pressed, released a sharp, double-edged blade. She felt somewhat badass pocketing it.

Luke picked up the battle-axe and made practice swings. They were wild and uneven, and after a while he gave up.

“I’ll stick with the sword,” he said.

“Another good choice,” she smiled.

They loaded the Jeep with bottled water and beef jerky, the only food they could find in the entire place. There was a big two-by-two box of the stuff in the back room, underneath some old armor. It all came in just one flavor — jalapeno. She had never been a fan of jalapeno, and now she knew why.

Luke slid into the passenger’s seat with his sword, which had replaced his baseball bat. Kate leaned the machete, still in its scabbard, between the two front seats. The thought of brandishing it was frightening.

She drove through the parking lot, enjoying the sun and wind against her skin. The gas gauge was already halfway down, and the reality that they would soon have to swap it for another vehicle disappointed her. Unless, of course, she could find a way to siphon gas out of another car’s tank. They would need the proper equipment, and some guts wouldn’t hurt. Sucking gasoline through a hose was potentially hazardous work, and not something she was looking forward to.

She turned up Richmond Avenue. It was the best route in absence of an actual plan. Maybe they would stumble onto more survivors. Maybe even find the police car they had been chasing yesterday, like Ahab and his whale. Or maybe nothing at all.

“We’ll probably never find them,” she said.

“You’re probably right. Chances are pretty low.”

“Pretty low, yeah.”

“Then again, it’s not like we have anything to lose.”

“Not a whole lot, no.”

“So…”

“Yeah.”

She kept driving.

Kate was thinking about hope and despair and what they would do if they didn’t find the police car, when Luke bolted upright in his seat. They had been driving for a while, and she was starting to count down the minutes until she had to make a U-turn and head back to the pawnshop.

“What?” she said.

“Can you hear it?” He looked over, eyes wide with excitement. “Kate, can you hear it?” he asked again.

She shook her head. “Hear what?”

“The siren! You don’t hear it?”

She didn’t, and wondered if he wanted so badly to hear the police siren that he had imagined it out of thin air. Because as hard as she tried, she couldn’t hear anything but the stillness around her and the turning of the Jeep’s engine.

She stopped the Jeep and got out and listened. Luke did the same on the other side. They were parked in the middle of the street, surrounded by abandoned cars and stores with covered windows. An overturned van rested nearby, and what was left of a taco truck.

Then she heard it. It was barely audible.

It came from in front of them, farther up Richmond Avenue.

“I hear it,” she said.

“You hear it?” Luke asked, just to be sure.

“I can hear it!”

She hurried back into the Jeep, Luke scrambling to keep up. She aimed the Jeep forward, suddenly doing forty miles per hour, swerving dangerously around immobile cars.

“I told you we’d find them again!” Luke shouted over the roar of the wind and engine. “Never had a doubt in my mind!”

“Never a doubt?” she smiled back at him.

“Never a doubt!” he insisted.

The siren grew louder. She had no idea if it was the same one from yesterday or another one entirely — one police siren was indistinguishable from another.

But it had to be. What were the chances there were two police cars driving around town blaring their sirens?

They approached a strip mall that looked like every other strip mall they had passed for the last two days, only this one was bigger, with a massive parking lot housing a Home Depot. Next to it was a 24-hour Walmart Superstore.

“I think this is it,” Luke said.

She came to a stop at one of the entrances. There was an Archers Sports and Outdoor store on the other side of the Walmart. It had been hidden from the street by a Wendy’s and smaller outlet stores closer to the street.

“There!” he shouted, pointing in the direction of the Archers.

She saw it — a police car, its lights spinning and siren shrieking, parked in front of the warehouse store.

“I see it.”

She nosed the Jeep into the strip mall, sticking to the looping driveway to avoid the cars parked in front of the Walmart. As she neared the Archers, the traffic lessened and she was able to leave the driveway and cut across the parking lot. She came to a stop by the police car parked across the No Parking lanes in front of the store.

Kate put the Jeep in park but didn’t get out or turn off the engine. She looked over at Luke, who had reached for the lever on his door. “Wait.”

He froze. “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know. But just wait a moment.”

He took his hand off the lever and sat back in his seat. He stared forward with Kate. At the police car, and the Archers behind it. They could see through the glass windows and doors and into the store beyond. Clothing racks and gym equipment. In the sunlight, it looked inviting and open and homely.

And empty.

She couldn’t see signs of people inside, and that worried her. With the siren on and the lights spinning, there should be people here. Other survivors lured over, the way she and Luke had been. She remembered the gunshots from last night. Were they from the same people?

“Are we going to just sit here all day?” Luke asked.

“Where is everyone? Where are the guys who turned on the siren? They should be here.”

“Maybe they’re inside.”

He was probably right. The noise of the siren would have prevented anyone inside from hearing their approach. No one was coming out to greet them, because no one knew they were there.

It all made sense, but it also did nothing to comfort her.

“Okay,” she said finally. “Let’s stay as close to the Jeep as possible, just in case.”

“Just in case,” Luke repeated.

She left the Jeep running (just in case), opened her door, and stepped outside. Luke followed suit, but she detected a little hesitancy in the way he opened the door. She glanced back at the machete lying between their seats where she had left it, but thought better of it. One person with a sword was enough. Two might give the wrong impression.

“We’re being watched,” Luke said.

He pointed up at the roof, where a man stood at the edge with a rifle. It looked like a military rifle, the kind Kate had seen soldiers carry in news reports on Afghanistan. The man wore cargo pants, T-shirt, and some kind of assault vest. Stray blond hair stuck out from underneath a wool cap. She was relieved he wasn’t pointing the rifle at them, but kept it aimed at the sky in a non-threatening manner.

Luke’s sword against a rifle. I wonder who’d win?

The man waved down to them. She looked across at Luke, who looked as relieved as she was. She shrugged, and they both waved back.

It was all so absurd. The two of them standing by the Jeep, Luke with his sword, waving back at a stranger with a rifle standing on the roof of a store.

She looked back down at the store’s front doors as another man in similar dress stepped outside. He had a shotgun at his side and wore a gun belt around his waist, a holstered gun on his right hip and a knife, which actually looked more like a cross, in a sheath on his left leg. Short brown hair blew in the breeze.

He walked over to the squad car, leaned inside, and turned off the siren. Blessed silence.

The man walked around the hood of the police car toward them. He had an easy smile. Closer, he was handsome. Tall, like the one on the roof, with a confident gait that was dangerously close to swagger. He had soft brown eyes and some kind of black plastic band wrapped around his throat. A wire ran up to his right ear, where an earbud dangled, and another wire connected to a radio clipped to the front of the assault vest.

“Nice katana,” the man said to Luke.

Luke glanced down at the sword, gripped tightly in his hands. “Thanks. Nice shotgun.”

“It has its moments.” The man looked over at Kate. “My name’s Will. The guy on the roof is Danny.”

She gazed up at Danny, already looking through binoculars at the street beyond.

She turned back to Will. “I’m Kate. This is Luke.”

“We’ve been chasing your siren since yesterday,” Luke said.

“Danny’s idea,” Will said. “You guys hungry?”

“Depends,” she said. “Is it jalapeno flavored?”

He gave her a quizzical look. “No.”

“Thank God,” she said.

The black band around his neck was a throat mic, the wire connected to a receiver in his ear, and a Velcro strap held the radio in. The gear ran on batteries, which allowed them to communicate even with the rest of the city blacked out.

Luke said, “You got anymore of those?”

“Couple,” Will said. “I’ll grab you one.”

“Thanks. You guys cops or something?”

“We were SWAT before all of this.”

“Cool.”

“Are you two the only ones left of the police?” she asked.

“Pretty much,” Will said. “We barely got out alive ourselves.”

He led them through the aisles, passing racks of clothing, hats, and sports gear. She resisted the temptation to run off and look for clothes to replace the second-hand shirt and pants from the pawnshop.

“Do you know what happened?” she asked. “Why this is happening?”

“We know as much as you do,” Will said. “We rolled out to this building the morning it went down. After that, it was run and fight and try to stay alive. Sorry. I know that’s not what you were hoping to hear.”

“Is this it? Everyone who survived?”

“Everyone we’ve managed to find so far.”

“What about Uncle Sam?” Luke asked.

Will shook his head. “We haven’t been able to reach anyone in the state government, much less the federal government.”

“So it’s not just here, it’s everywhere,” she said.

“Seems that way,” Will nodded.

Will led them to the back, where clothing racks had been pushed aside to make room for a small circle of camping gear and tents. A little girl looked up from the floor where she was lying on her stomach, coloring in a book. She had large blue eyes and blonde hair and reminded Kate of a cartoon come to life.

“How’s it hanging, Vera?” Will asked the girl.

“It’s hanging,” the girl said, returning her attention to her coloring book.

“That’s Vera,” he said to Luke and Kate.

A young woman came out of a tent next to Vera. Despite the baggy hunting clothes, she was pretty, with a shock of red hair and brown eyes. She walked over with her hand outstretched. “Let me guess — the police siren? Us, too. I’m Carly.”

Kate shook her hand. “Kate. This is Luke.”

“Hey, Luke.”

“Hey,” he said. Kate thought he might have stuttered a bit (?).

“You guys hungry?” Carly asked.

“Famished,” Kate said.

“Come on, we liberated some tacos from the Taco Bell across the street earlier. Might as well eat as many as we can before everything goes bad.” She glanced down at Vera. “You wanna come?”

Vera shook her head.

“I’ll bring you a couple, okay?”

Vera nodded, but was already back at work coloring in Dora’s rain boots.

“Come on,” Carly said to them.

“You guys go ahead,” Will said, “I’ll be on the rooftop with Danny.”

Carly nodded and led Kate and Luke down the aisle. Kate looked back at Will as he headed off in the opposite direction.

Carly said, “There’s a staircase that leads up to a second floor catwalk. It’s actually pretty scary, really high up, with just this metal walkway keeping you from going splat against the floor below. From there, you can climb up to the roof.”

“How many of you guys are here?” Kate asked.

“Me, Vera, Danny, and Will. Oh, and Ted. So, five. Well, seven now. You guys meet any other survivors out there?”

“You’re our first. But we did hear gunshots last night.”

“Will and Danny heard them, too. They think the guys who were shooting are dead.”

“Why?” Luke asked.

“Because they were shooting,” Carly said, as if that explained everything. When they didn’t respond, she added, “You make that much noise, you’re just drawing them to you. And with so many of them out there…”

Kate nodded. Like moths to a flame.

“You know that Walmart next door?” Carly asked.

“We passed it on the way here,” Kate said.

“There must be thousands of them in there. I mean thousands.” Carly shivered. “I get the creeps every time I think about how many of them are right next door to us. That’s why once Will and Danny finish making their bullets, we’re going to leave.”

“There’re not enough bullets here already? I thought that’s all they sold here. Bullets and guns.”

“Kate doesn’t exactly shop at Archers a lot,” Luke smiled.

She smiled, too, feeling a little embarrassed. Her life had changed so much in just a few short days, it sometimes took her a while to realize that the life she knew was gone, replaced by something foreign and dangerous.

“They’re making silver bullets,” Carly said.

“Why?” Kate asked.

“The creatures are allergic to silver or something. Will and Danny say you can empty a whole clip into the buggers and they’ll just keep coming. But you shoot them with one silver bullet and down they go. So they’re making as many silver bullets as they can.”

Kate remembered Donald, smiling at her after she had driven the three inches of heel into the side of his head…

“Luke and I were staying at a pawnshop before we came here,” she said. “There was plenty of silver back there. There were also a couple of safes in the back that probably contain a lot of valuables, maybe even more silver.”

“I’ll let them know,” Carly said.

“So they’re going to finish making the bullets soon?”

“Danny says they should have most of the silver melted down and recast into bullets by tonight. Once they’re done, we’re outta here,” Carly added, sounding relieved.

“Where are you going?”

“Into the countryside. Will says there’s a place near Lake Livingston that’s like some kind of underground bunker, built by this guy named Harold Campbell. Have you ever heard of him?”

“No,” Kate said.

“Doesn’t ring a bell,” Luke added.

“Supposed to be this crazy millionaire,” Carly said. “Anyway, after Will left the Army, he went to work for this Campbell guy building his bunker for a while. It’s supposed to be impregnable.”

“Sounds almost too good to be true,” Luke said.

He looked over at her, as if to ask, Are we going, too? She didn’t know how to answer, so she kept her face as neutral as possible. An impregnable underground facility somewhere in the countryside? It really did sound too good to be true.

Carly led them into a hallway at the very back of the Archers, then into an employee lounge. Inside, a big man in cargo pants and a sweater was eating tacos.

Carly said, “That’s Ted. As you can see, he likes him some tacos.”

Ted grinned and came over and shook their hands.

“Ted, this is Luke and Kate,” Carly said. “Ted here was the first guy we met that night. He saved my sister and me all by himself.”

Ted’s cheeks flushed red with embarrassment. “It was nothing,” he said.

“Don’t believe him,” Carly said. “It was something, all right.”

“You guys hungry?” Ted asked, clearly trying to take the attention away from himself.

He had made two tacos and put them inside Taco Bell wrappers. The finished product didn’t look anything like the commercials she remembered, but the smell of cooked ground beef and fresh cheese made her mouth water just the same.

“It’s not much,” Carly said, “but we’re trying to eat as much as we can before it all goes to waste.”

“We’ve been eating nothing but jalapeno-flavored beef jerky for the last two days,” Kate said. “Trust me, this is a vast improvement.”

“Then dig in, before Ted eats it all.”

Kate and Luke exchanged a look, then happily dove in.

CHAPTER 16 WILL

“You remember that whole Mayan 2012 thing?” Danny asked.

“End of the world?” Will said.

“Yeah.”

“What about it?”

Danny chuckled. “I got Stacy Patterson to sleep with me because of that. Best sex of my life.”

“She hated your guts.”

“Not that night. She believed in the whole Mayan thing.”

“So you tricked her.”

“Shut your mouth. I was just agreeing with her.”

Will laughed. Stacy Patterson was a part-time dispatcher at their SWAT house, an attractive twenty-five-year-old with a strict policy of not dating cops, especially the SWAT guys she worked with. Danny had been after her ever since they arrived, his constant failures to get even a date a running joke among the guys. The fact that Stacy developed a new, even stricter policy of not speaking to Danny after December 22, 2012, the day after the Mayan calendar predicted the world would end, now made perfect sense.

“What brought that up?” Will asked.

“I dunno. I was just thinking about her all of a sudden. She had a really nice rack.”

“Great rack.”

“Tremendous.”

They were back on the Archers roof, scanning the city with binoculars. Below them, the police siren wailed away in the hope of attracting more survivors. It had already worked twice…

Danny said, “So, Harold Campbell?”

“You got a better idea?”

“Can’t say that I do.”

“We can’t stay in the city. The numbers don’t work out.”

“Math was never my strong suit.”

“We’ve been lucky so far,” Will said, “but that’s not going to last. Tonight. Tomorrow. The day after. This city belongs to them now, and whatever unlucky bastards are still hiding out there, they’re going to wish they weren’t very soon. We need someplace more defensible.”

“Howard Campbell,” Danny said.

“Howard Campbell, yeah.”

“Good plan, but it still leaves a big city to make it through in one piece.”

“Cars are out of the question. Not with the cluttered highways. We could take the small roads, but that’d take forever. We could always island-hop. Travel by day, shelter up at night. We’d eventually make it out of the city.”

“Eventually sounds like a long time.”

“Safety first. The longer we stay here, the higher the risks. You saw them last night. It’s more than just a hive mind, Danny. They’re being led. You don’t take down the country in one night without a chain of command.”

“You thought this out.”

“Except the part where we don’t all die.”

“Yeah, that’d be nice, too.” Danny took out some of the jerky that Kate and Luke brought with them and took a bite. Jalapeno-flavored beef lingered in the air. “So how do we bypass the highways?”

“Maybe with bikes.”

“Ride piggyback, two to a bike?”

“Something like that.”

“Gonna have to teach the big guy and one of the girls to ride if the two new ones decide to come along.”

“True.”

“What about the guns?”

“That’s a problem.”

“Lots of problems if you ask me.”

“Yup.”

“Maybe find another way.”

“I’m open to suggestions.”

“Fly out?”

“We’d need to find a helicopter. You said you knew how to fly one, right?”

“I said I’ve flown in a helicopter. So did you. In Stan. I had sex in the cockpit of one once. Does that count?”

“Not really, no.”

“There goes that option.”

“Yup. Got another one of those?”

Danny fished out another stick of beef jerky. Will took a bite in silence.

“You come up with another idea yet?” Danny said after a few minutes.

“Nope.”

“Some brains of the operation you turned out to be.”

“Who’s the brains of the operation?” a voice said behind them.

Will glanced back at Kate as she walked across the roof toward them. He stared just a bit longer than he should have. He couldn’t help himself — she was a looker, even in the plain pants and T-shirt that was at least a size too big. She had no make-up on, not that it seemed to matter.

“This guy,” Danny said, hiking a thumb in Will’s direction. “Supposedly, anyway.”

“Did you and Luke eat?” Will asked her.

“We definitely filled up on our share of tacos,” she said. “What’s for tomorrow, Subway sandwiches? I saw one on the way here. It looked small. Probably not many of those creatures inside. They like the bigger buildings, don’t they?”

“Have no fear, we have God on our side,” Danny said, tapping the silver cross-knife strapped against his left leg. “And silver bullets. Those are good, too.”

“We were talking about leaving,” Will said. “You’re welcome to come with us. You and Luke both.”

“Thanks,” she said. “I appreciate that. We both do.” Kate walked to the edge of the roof and looked down at the quiet parking lot spread out in front of them. “Carly told me about this Harold Campbell. You know for a fact that his facility’s there?”

“Yes.”

“And we can get there?”

“That part’s going to require a bit of faith.”

“Just faith, huh? Short supply of that these days…”

“Faith is bullets,” Danny said. “A few thousand rounds, to be exact. We’ll make more as we go, collecting silver along the way. Kinda like the great train robbery, minus the whole people giving a shit part.”

“Don’t you guys already have a few thousand rounds stashed down there?” she asked. “Carly says you’ve been making bullets since you got here.”

“We should definitely get there by tonight,” Will said.

“And that’s going to be enough?” she asked doubtfully.

“Not nearly. But it’s a start.”

Soon they were back at work making more bullets, with Danny and Ted melting and pouring silver and mixing them with lead in one room, while Will knocked out rounds for the Glocks in the setup area.

Kate showed up as he banged a plastic hammer on the molds to free the freshly cast bullets, plopping them into a bucket of water, the hot lead and silver weights hissing and sizzling in the bucket.

“Isn’t there an easier way to make bullets?” she asked.

“About a million different ways. Unfortunately all of them involve machines that we don’t have. And electricity.”

“How did people make bullets before electricity?”

“You’re looking at it.”

He took the molds back to the workbench. The pot of lead and silver liquid was almost empty, though he could probably bang out a dozen or more before waiting for a new batch. Danny and Ted worked nearby, the acidic evidence of melting lead and silver thick in the air around them.

Kate looked nervous, shuffling her sneakers once or twice. She had the look of a woman who wanted to ask something but didn’t quite know how to broach the subject.

“What’s on your mind, Kate?”

She pursed her lips. “Can anyone learn to shoot?”

“If you want to learn, I can teach you.”

“I should learn, right?”

“It’s up to you.”

“I should learn,” she said, obviously trying to convince herself.

She looked down at the bucket, at the 200 or 300 rounds resting at the bottom. Once the bucket was half full, he would prime and recast them into new bullets. They wouldn’t be nearly as perfect as the ones out of a factory, but those didn’t have silver in them. In this new war, these were the new perfection.

“What’s up first?” she asked. “Learning to shoot, I mean.”

“Have you ever owned a gun before?”

“No.”

“Hold one?”

“Not really, no.”

“Does that mean you’ve touched one?”

“At the pawnshop before we came here. But Luke and I were too scared to actually use them.” She gave him an embarrassed smile. “I’m a lost cause, aren’t I?”

“Everyone has to start somewhere.”

“Are you just trying to make me feel better, Will?”

“Yes,” he smiled back.

“This is a Glock,” Will said. “It’s an excellent gun for a beginner because of the simplicity. Pros swear by them because it’s one of the most reliable brands out there.”

She held the Glock 19 with both hands. She looked exactly how he had expected her to look — uncomfortable. He showed her the proper way to hold it, then had her repeatedly holster and draw the weapon over and over.

“You’re holding a Glock 19,” he continued. “It’s what you’d call a starter Glock. It’s twenty-one ounces unloaded, thirty-one with a full magazine. Go ahead and load it, but don’t chamber a round.”

She picked up the magazine from the counter and loaded the weapon without chambering a round. She had done it five times already, and each time she got better at it. He was impressed, but not terribly surprised. He had met women like Kate before — career-minded, driven, and ambitious. When they put their minds to something, nothing was impossible. Guns were, after all, just tools. Anyone could learn how to use a tool. Eventually.

“The Glock 19 magazine holds fifteen rounds. Can you feel the difference between a loaded Glock and an unloaded one?”

“Yes,” she nodded. “It’s a lot heavier with the magazine in. I didn’t really expect it to be that heavy.”

“Good. So next time when you’re watching a movie and they pull that bullshit ‘I gave the bad guy an unloaded gun, and he tried to shoot me with it, thus proving his bad guy-ness,’ you’ll now be the only one in the theater laughing your ass off.”

“Are we talking from personal experience?”

“Not at all… Okay, maybe once or twice.”

“I notice there’s no hammer,” she said.

“There isn’t one. There’s also no safety switch. But if you’re worried about accidental discharges, don’t. I can count on one hand the number of times a Glock has misfired on me.”

“That’s a lot.”

“I said one hand, not all five fingers, Kate.”

“Oh.”

“Okay, let’s go ahead and chamber a round…”

He got her shooting at paper targets plastered to the wall until it was nearly dark. Luke and Carly had come over to watch. Will noticed Luke looking on anxiously, wanting to get in on the action.

Boys and guns.

With darkness coming, he cut Kate’s lesson short so they could prepare the Archers for the night. He and Danny slipped their SWAT gear back on, then he went outside to turn off the siren. He spent a minute scanning the parking lot, still startled at how quiet the city could be without people.

Back in the store, Ted and Danny were lifting the heavier exercise equipment into position over the inner doors. Carly, Luke, and Kate helped with the smaller items. They had all the doors secured in less than forty minutes, which was better than yesterday’s hour and change. The front outer doors, like last night, had only been locked and not reinforced. The interior doors were the important ones anyway. If the creatures breached those, it would make a hell of a racket and give them time to prepare for an assault. That was the idea, anyway.

Will looked over the makeshift barricade before turning to Danny. “Could be our last night here.”

“Yup,” Danny said.

“C4 in place?”

“Plan Z in full effect.”

“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”

“Right,” Danny said, “and Santa’s not screwing around behind Mrs. Claus’s back with Doris the sexy elf.”

“Where do you get this shit?”

“It’s called comedic genius, pal.”

“Keep telling yourself that.” He looked over at the others. “I’ll take first guard and wake Danny up at midnight. Everyone get some sleep. Even if we get through this night unscathed, it’ll be our last night here. We’re going to be doing a lot of traveling soon, and sleep might come in unpredictable spurts. All right? Good. Let’s get to it.”

Everyone drifted back to the camping area except for Kate. She was staring at the doors in silence.

“They’ll hold,” he said.

“Are you sure?” She looked at him, and he could tell she was trying to gauge his reaction, to see if he was lying.

He did his best to hide it.

“I’m sure. If all else fails, there’s Plan Z.”

“That’s such an awful name, Will. Couldn’t you have come up with something better? Something more, I don’t know, less last-resort-ish?”

He grinned. “Don’t diss Plan Z. It’s been working for Danny and me since Afghanistan.”

She didn’t look convinced. Kate struck him as an incredibly serious woman. He wondered what she was like before all of this changed everything.

“Carly said there were thousands of those things in the Walmart next door,” she said. “And there are more of them out there in the rest of the city. I’ve seen them converging like ants when they pick up a scent, Will. What if they all attack at the same time? Do you really think these doors will hold them back?”

Again, he did his best to hide his doubts. “Let’s hope we don’t have to find out.”

“What are the chances of that?”

“Pretty good.”

“Really?”

“Hope springs eternal…”

The ghouls showed up at the outer doors at 8:05 p.m.

At first Will was convinced they would ignore the Archers for a second straight night, and with each wave of ghouls that passed the front doors in the moonlight, he became more hopeful. But then one stopped and faced the outer windows.

Then one became two, and two became five…then ten.

Then suddenly there were hundreds in the parking lot, so many that they blocked out the police car outside and there was just blackness.

So much for hope springing eternally.

He sat in the darkness, far from the pool of moonlight that splashed through the two sets of front doors. He didn’t think they could possibly see him. He was well-hidden, and they hadn’t proven they had anything resembling heightened vision.

He unslung the Remington 870 shotgun and laid it on the floor in front of him. He was wearing a web belt with a variety of pouches, most of them holding extra shells for the shotguns and magazines for the rifle. He unslung the M4A1 and switched on the mounted laser pointer. The naked eye couldn’t spot it, but when he slipped on the night-vision goggles he could see the laser pointer clear as day.

He found the Motorola radio’s push-to-talk switch in the darkness and clicked it once. He heard Danny’s voice, wide alert through his earbud: “Talk to me.”

“They’re at the outer doors.”

“I guess they know we’re here.”

“Either that, or they think there’s a sale on Texans jerseys.”

“Hey, jokes are my area, dickhead.”

Will grinned. “You should get up to the catwalks.”

“Roof?”

“Chances are…”

“On my way.”

He imagined Danny already moving toward the second floor catwalk to cover the rooftop door. They would be up there, too, seeing if they could gain entrance from that direction. They would also try the back doors and side doors just to be sure.

Dead, not stupid.

Everything he had learned about the ghouls told him they were anything but stupid. That made them dangerous. Very, very dangerous.

He was also convinced there was a command structure in place. Field commanders calling the shots, relaying orders. Otherwise the ghouls outside would already be throwing themselves at the glass doors, mindlessly trying to batter them down.

But they weren’t. Someone—something—was telling them not to. Yet.

The earbud in his right ear clicked: “I can hear them moving outside on the rooftop,” Danny said. “I think we’re good to go up here, though. Door’s sturdy — they’re not getting through here in a million years. How’s it going down there?”

“They’re waiting for something.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe their leader? Commanding officer? You said it yourself, they behave like infantry soldiers. They might be waiting for orders.”

“Maybe…”

“Stay frosty.”

“Will do.”

He heard shuffling behind him, then Kate and Carly emerged out of the darkness. Kate had the Glock 19 in a hip holster. It looked odd on her. Civilians and guns. It was a combination that always made him nervous.

The women sat down in the darkness next to him, then looked into the moonlight at the sea of ghouls beyond the front glass doors. Carly gasped audibly.

“How many are out there?” Kate whispered.

“I have no idea,” he said honestly. “Could be thousands.”

Carly’s voice shook a bit when she asked, “Will the doors hold, Will?”

“They’ll hold,” he lied.

“Where’s Danny?”

He pointed up into the air.

“I’ll go see if he needs help,” she said and hurried off, seemingly anxious to be away. He didn’t blame her.

Kate, though, remained crouched next to him in the darkness. “It’s not going to hold,” she said softly.

He thought about lying. But he said instead, “No.”

“What happens then?”

“We do what we practiced this afternoon.”

“That’ll work?” She added quickly, “Feel free to lie.”

“Yes,” he said.

“Are you lying?”

“No.”

“I can’t tell if you’re lying or not.”

“It’ll work.”

“How can you be so calm?”

“Am I?”

“It’s annoying.”

“Sorry,” he smiled.

She became quiet, staring at the amassing creatures. Was there more of them since the last time he looked? How was that even possible?

“What is it?” he asked.

“I was just thinking about a friend of mine. I wonder if he’s out there right now, among those…things.”

“It’s a big city, Kate.”

“That’s what I keep telling myself.” She went quiet again. After a moment, she said, “Can you tell them apart?”

“No. I think that’s the point.”

“What do you mean?”

“They’re homogenizing the population. Turning everyone into them. Ghouls.”

“I never thought about it that way, but you’re right.” Then, “Ghouls? You call them ghouls?”

“What do you call them?”

“I guess I just thought of them as creatures. Why ghouls?”

“When I first saw them that was the first word that popped into my head. Ghouls.”

“So ghouls look like that?”

“In the movies that I’ve seen, yeah.”

“I don’t watch a lot of horror movies.”

“I always figured you for a Friday the 13^th kind of gal, Kate.”

She made a face. “Was that a joke?”

“Yes.”

“Hunh,” she said.

They watched the ghouls in the darkness. The creatures seemed to have stopped moving entirely, so both Will and Kate remained still, too.

“You should head back, Kate,” he said after a while.

“And leave you here by yourself?”

“I’ll be fine.”

“I’ll stay.”

“Kate…”

“I’ll stay,” she said firmly.

He sighed. “All right. Go back and pick up one of the night-vision goggles and come back if you really want to.”

She nodded, got up, and hurried off.

He sat back and enjoyed the brief solitude, but she returned much quicker than he had expected. He wasn’t sure if he heard or smelled her first. She certainly smelled nice.

She sat back down, holding the night-vision goggles. “How do you put this thing on?”

He slipped the strap around her head and adjusted the protruding lens in front of her eyes. “Can you see my rifle’s laser pointer?”

“Yes.”

“Take out your Glock.”

He took it from her, then opened another one of his pouches and took out a smaller version of the laser pointer mounted on the rifle and snapped it underneath her Glock. He switched it on and pointed it at the door.

“See it?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Good.” He handed her back the weapon. “Point and shoot. The bullet will go wherever the laser is.”

“Always?”

“One hundred percent.”

“Did you guys have this in Afghanistan?”

“Most of the time. It was almost like cheating when we got into a firefight at night. Not that we minded, of course.”

“Whatever works, right?”

He nodded. “Whatever works.”

His earbud clicked, then Danny’s voice: “Sounds like they’ve stopped probing the rooftop door. How goes below?”

“Quiet,” he said.

“Maybe they gave up,” Danny said.

“Don’t fret. They’ll start getting serious soon enough. Stay alert.”

“I’m on my third can of Red Bull in the last five minutes. Forget staying alert, I’m not sleeping for a week.”

“Where did you get Red Bull?”

“Carly brought them over.”

Kate interrupted. “What’s he saying? Are they coming through the roof?”

Will shook his head. “They were just probing up there, too.”

“Maybe they’ve given up.”

“Just wait for it.”

“For what?”

“They’re gathering, Kate. That’s a prelude to invasion. They’re coming. They’re just waiting for orders.”

“Orders?”

There was a thunderous boom, then loud crashing sounds as one of the outer glass doors gave way and glass shattered into thousands of pieces onto the floor of the waiting area.

Will didn’t need the night-vision goggles to know what had happened. The ghouls had just taken down one of the glass doors, shatterproof filming and all, and they were coming in.

“It’s starting,” he said.

CHAPTER 17 KATE

Kate felt fear, but that wasn’t anything new. She had been in a state of constant fear for the last few days. But for some reason, this time it was more pronounced, more paralyzing. It was the claustrophobic nature of the store. They were coming, and she was trapped inside waiting for them, with no other place to go.

No, not trapped. That wasn’t entirely true. There was a plan that Will and Danny had laid out for them earlier.

Will’s Plan Z.

It was such a bad name for a plan that was supposed to save them when the worst happened, and the creatures—ghouls as Will called them — attacked. There was a plan, but it didn’t prevent the shaking. The fear gripped her, tightening around her chest and throat, and she had to remind herself to breathe.

In and out, in and out…

Will was on one knee next to her, calmly laying the shotgun in front of him. The ghouls were coming. There was no stopping them now. They had shattered the outer glass doors and pretty soon they would be in the waiting area. Then crashing against the inner doors. Then they would be inside the store.

Inside the store!

“It’ll be okay,” he said. His voice seemed to come from the other side of the planet. “Just follow the plan. You’re going to live through this, Kate. I promise.”

She tried to smile back, but it came out all wrong. He was already checking his rifle again, for what must have been the tenth time in the last five minutes.

Time and space seemed to have contracted, making it hard to tell how long they had been sitting there in the darkness listening to the ghouls breaking down the outer doors, the shatterproof glass falling in chunks to the floor. So loud in the eerie silence of the night.

The massive black tide moved and squirmed against the doors, anxious to pour inside.

She was shaking. Her hands were trembling, and her feet tapped involuntarily against the floor. She tried to stop them, but they refused to listen.

Will’s hand folded over her wrist and she stopped trembling. “You’ll do fine, Kate.” His voice came through much clearer now. “You’ve come this far, you’re not going to give up now. Just do what we talked about, and everything will go according to plan.”

“Plan Z, right?” she said, trying to smile again, but her lips were quivering too badly, and she bailed on the attempt halfway through.

“You have to trust me, okay?”

She nodded. Or thought she did. Her chest felt tight, and she had to again remind herself to breathe.

“Okay,” she heard herself say. (Or had she?)

“You have to go now. No arguing this time. Go. Just like we talked about earlier. Kate, are you listening?”

She managed to nod.

“Go, Kate. Now.”

She stood up on trembling legs and took a few hesitant steps backward before stopping.

He had already returned to checking his rifle when he must have sensed her hesitation, because he looked over. He looked so young and boyish in the darkness. He and Danny. So seasoned for their age. She couldn’t imagine what they had already seen and done in their lives to make the end of the world just another battlefield for them.

“Kate, now,” he said gently. “Go.”

“You’ll come too, right?”

“I’ll be right behind you.”

She couldn’t tell if he was lying.

Kate turned to go, willing her legs to move one step at a time, expecting that at any moment the doors would give and they would be inside and Will would be shooting.

But there was no crashing sound and he didn’t shoot, and she managed to keep moving until she was running through the darkness. There was enough light to navigate around the clothing racks and shelves, though she mostly kept to the pre-planned path, turning left, then right, then straight. The night-vision goggles bounced against her chest, hanging from a strap around her neck, but it never occurred to her to slip them back on.

Danny was already on the first floor when she reached their camping spot. He was rushing Carly and Vera as the two girls struggled to get their supplies together. All three wore glow sticks around their necks, dangling from strings, which gave their faces and the immediate space around them a green neon glow. They looked like aliens moving in the darkness.

“Kate.” Danny handed her a glow stick with an attached string.

She bent it the way he had shown her this afternoon until she heard the sharp crack! and the stick began to glow an intense neon green. She looped the string around her neck and rushed to help Vera pack her clothes. The girl smiled at her, showing absolutely no fear, and went about collecting her coloring books and crayons while Kate scooped up their backpacks. They were light, housing only changes of clothing.

Luke appeared out of the darkness with Ted, both already breathing hard. Their faces were also lit up by glow sticks hanging from their necks.

“Is it time?” Luke asked, his eyes darting from Kate to Danny and back again.

“As good a time as any,” Danny said. He pressed the PTT switch dangling from his radio and said, “You still alive?” He listened for a moment, then replied, “Try not to die until I get over there.” He listened to Will’s reply, then grinned at the rest of them. “Always gotta have the last word, that guy.”

“Now?” Ted asked.

“Now,” Danny nodded. “Okay, everyone, just like we rehearsed this afternoon. Vamos!”

He led them through the store, holding a glow stick. Despite wearing his tactical gear and carrying the rifle and shotgun, he still somehow moved faster than them all, and had to slow down for them to keep up.

Kate looked at Vera, walking beside her. “It’ll be okay.”

Vera smiled back. “I know.”

The girl’s steadfast courage was contagious. Kate didn’t have children — had never even considered having them — but looking down at Vera now, she couldn’t help but wonder what she had missed out on.

Carly was shouting at Danny, “Where’s Will?”

“Don’t worry about him, he’ll be fine.”

“But is he coming?”

“Eventually.”

“Should we go back to help him?” Luke said.

“No,” Danny said, in a voice that told them the decision was already made. “Keep going.”

Kate heard gunshots like thunderclaps echoing through the store, through the racks of clothes and aisles of shoes and sports supplies and hunting gear. It didn’t sound like a Glock, which she had become accustomed to after the hour or so of shooting instructions from Will.

It sounded like a rifle.

Will.

Carly stopped and looked back, but Kate quickly grabbed her wrist and urged her forward. “Come on, Carly.”

Up ahead, Danny snapped at them, “Let’s go! Now!”

Kate tugged on Carly’s wrist and got her moving again. Vera, Ted, and Luke had already disappeared into the employee lounge. She led Carly through the door, trying her best to ignore the loud booming sound of gunfire behind her.

The lounge was lit up with Rayovac LED lanterns in the four corners of the room. Each lantern had 4-watt LEDs that were brighter than anything Kate had seen, despite the fact that they were barely bigger than two soda cans put together. According to Will, the lanterns ran on three solar rechargeable D batteries, which made them invaluable with the power grid down. They had gathered up every lantern from the shelves, about twenty in all, along with every rechargeable and non-rechargeable battery they could find.

Danny stepped inside and turned to Ted. “Remember what we talked about.”

Ted nodded back. He looked afraid, but was trying his best not to show it. He flinched each time gunshots rang out from the front of the store. They all did, except Danny.

“Close the door,” Danny said, “and don’t open until I give you the go-ahead.”

He tapped his earbud. Ted, who was wearing the same communications gear that Danny and Will wore, nodded back.

Danny jogged off, the neon green glow around him fading into the darkness of the store. Ted was already closing the door, sliding two newly attached deadbolts into place. The loud gunfire, which seconds ago had sounded so close and immediate, now receded into the background, reaching them as thudding echoes instead of pounding hammers.

Kate walked to the back wall and sat down on one of the sofas next to Vera and Carly. Vera had opened one of her coloring books and was already penciling in color to Dora’s camping clothes, blue where it should have been khaki brown. Carly sat quietly next to her sister, sweaty palms rested on trembling knees.

Kate reached across to Carly, took the other woman’s wet hand, and squeezed. Carly looked over and smiled, but neither said a word.

They both jerked a little at a new round of gunfire from the other side of the door. There seemed to be more urgency, the gunshots coming faster and faster. The ghouls must be coming in now, swarming the front doors, or Will wouldn’t be shooting so much, so fast. He wouldn’t waste bullets like that, would he?

Was this what being in a warzone was like? Was this what Will and Danny lived with every day when they were in Afghanistan? Was this what it sounded and felt like to live in a country turned into a battlefield? Loud, crashing violence and paralyzing terror?

The gunshots seemed to double in quantity and volume, and she knew Danny had made it to the front of the store and was shooting, too. Will had help now, and that made her feel better. But they were still out there, on the other side of the door, while she was safe in here. What if they didn’t make it back? There was no guarantee Will’s plan would work, but what if they never even got around to trying it?

She knew it was all in her head. The doubt, the fear, the what-ifs and indecision. Out there, Will and Danny didn’t have the same luxury. Their weapons fired non-stop now. Over and over again. How many bullets had they fired in the few minutes since their retreat into the employee lounge?

A few hundred? Maybe a thousand? How many bullets did they have left?

“There must be thousands of them in there. I mean thousands,” Carly had said to her about the Walmart next door.

Thousands…

Ted and Luke were at the door, Luke tapping his Nike sneakers nervously against the floor. Ted looked calmer, crouched in front of the door and staring at it intently, as if he could see right through to was happening on the other side.

“That’s Danny, right?” Luke said when they heard the new round of gunfire.

“Yeah,” Ted said. “They’re both up front now. They’re using the rifles. Soon they’ll switch to the shot—”

The unmistakable sound of shotgun blasts interrupted him. The rifles had sounded like thunderclaps, but the shotguns were like explosions going off next door.

“—guns,” Ted finished.

“What does that mean?” Luke asked.

“It means they’re about to head back. Get ready with the locks.”

Luke nodded and put his hands on the deadbolts, while Ted gripped the doorknob and waited, and Kate wondered how hard their chests were heaving at that moment. Especially Luke’s. She could see how focused he was on the locks, oblivious to beads of sweat dripping down his temples.

She counted down the number of shots from the other side. She learned this afternoon that each shotgun held seven shots, something she would never have known in her previous life. Seven shots didn’t sound like a lot to her.

Ted cupped his earpiece and turned to them. “They’re taking turns reloading and shooting, but they’re about to run out of ammo. Get ready,” he said, the last one directed at Luke, who nodded back and licked his lips. Sweat dripped down his cheeks.

Kate turned to Carly. The younger woman looked back anxiously. “It’ll be all right. It’ll work.” Kate smiled, surprised how easily the lie left her lips.

The shotgun blasts continued unabated, seemingly louder if that was possible. Then she realized they weren’t just getting louder — they were getting closer.

Ted shouted, “Now!”

Luke slid both deadbolts back and jumped out of the way as Ted turned the doorknob and threw the door open. Suddenly Danny was there, appearing out of the darkness like a ghost. He slid inside, out of breath, the shotgun in his hands, the rifle bouncing against his back. He was covered in blood and skin, and for a second Kate thought he was wounded until she realized it wasn’t his blood.

Luke said, “Where’s Will?”

“On his way,” Danny said between gasps.

They heard a shotgun blast, then Will was there, visible in the doorframe as he turned and fired his final shot. Kate heard an inhuman shriek and then there was nothing but the sound of rushing feet.

Will rushed through the door, screaming, “Close it! Close it!”

Ted slammed it shut and Luke rammed both deadbolts into place just as something crashed into the door from the other side. It was such a hard impact that the door shook for a second. Ted and Luke took a couple of quick steps backward as more bodies collided, one after another.

Boom! Boom! Boom! Over and over again.

The frame and wall around the door shuddered with each impact.

Will looked over at Danny and nodded. “Do it.”

“You sure this isn’t going to kill us all?” Danny asked.

“Probably not.”

Danny smirked at him. “That’s it? That’s your big pep talk?”

Will grinned back at him. “You wanna live forever?”

“Kinda, yeah.”

“So do it.”

Danny slung his shotgun and pulled a mustard-covered square object from one of his pouches. It was the size of a cigarette box, with a fat black antenna at the top and a lever on one side.

Plan Z.

“Fire in the hole,” Danny said calmly before closing his palm around the device.

Kate heard a click, then her world threatened to come apart at the seams. For a brief, terrifying second, she was sure the ceiling would collapse and kill them all.

But it didn’t.

The initial explosion was tremendous and tossed an unprepared Luke to the floor, while Ted had to grab at the nearest wall to stay upright.

The sofa underneath her shook, and Carly grabbed Vera, pulling the little girl into her chest in a protective bubble. Vera put her hands over her ears and squeezed her eyes shut but didn’t scream or cry.

Brave girl. What a brave girl…

Will and Danny had been prepared for the explosion and held onto the walls as the building around them moved and trembled and did its best to cave in on itself.

It was just the beginning.

A moment later, a series of smaller explosions ripped through the building, and Kate remembered watching Danny and Will setting up the C4 explosives — small strips of plastic that looked like molding clay, with small black charges attached to them — and propane tanks around the store, strapping them to the huge struts that held up the ceiling.

Will had explained that the explosions were set up in a pattern that would keep the resulting damage from reaching the employee lounge, but would do maximum damage to the rest of the store. If all went well, the C4 would detonate the propane tank, and the two combined explosions would cave in most of the Archers, creating a thick, impregnable semicircle of brick and mortar and concrete around the employee lounge.

That was the idea, anyway.

She didn’t know if that was what was happening outside, but as the last explosion shook the lounge like the hand of God and aftershocks followed, she marveled that they were still alive and the room was still standing, even though cracks had appeared along the walls and pieces of the ceiling had peeled off and fallen down around them.

But it held!

She didn’t know when she had started clutching onto the cheap plastic upholstery of the couch. She listened to the loud groaning as the building fell around them before it slowly began to settle.

Will and Danny slumped down on the floor in front of her, both exhausted, and grabbed bottled water out of a box beside them. They splashed their faces and gulped down the rest. They had prepared for this with boxes containing supplies scattered about the room and inside the powerless fridge near the back.

Will looked over at Danny and began laughing. Danny joined in. They looked like frat boys having fun at a sleepover, wet faces and mischievous eyes clear as day against the LED lanterns.

They’re insane. Both of them. They’re insane.

But they did it… We’re alive!

“What’s the grade?” Will asked after they had stopped laughing.

“We’re still standing,” Danny said. “B-plus.”

“Good enough.”

The building creaked in the aftermath, and rubble continued to fall outside the employee lounge. She wondered how much of the store was left. There would be unforeseen damage, things that even Will’s Plan Z hadn’t accounted for.

She felt exhilaration that they were still alive, and horror that they had actually blown up a building to save themselves.

As the building continued to settle, they heard noises from the other side of the door. Shuffling movements. Will and Danny didn’t seem disturbed by it, but she and Luke looked up. It sounded too close.

“What is that?” Luke asked. “Can you guys hear that?”

“Ghouls,” Will said. “Some would have made it through before Danny boy hit the switch.”

“Can’t be too many,” Danny said. “Probably a hundred or so.”

“Around there,” Will nodded.

“Can they get through?” Luke asked, concerned.

“I doubt it,” Danny said.

There were three quick thuds against the door, then silence.

Then another series of pounding.

She knew Danny was right. The creatures would never break down the door. They were fast and they relied on numbers, but they didn’t have the strength. As proof, the pounding grew weaker and weaker by the minute.

She looked back at Will and Danny. They were opening more bottles of water and gulping them down and washing more blood and skin off their faces. Their boots were caked in thick black mud that they had tracked all the way through the store and into the lounge.

No, not mud.

Blood…

“Get some sleep,” Will said. “We have a long day tomorrow.”

She fought against sleep, beating it handily for the first few hours, drinking water and eating chips and more beef jerky than was probably healthy. She hated the taste, but the jalapeno kept her alert.

By ten o’clock she started to feel drowsy, and in a perverse way the constant drumming against the door started to lull her to sleep. A part of her was afraid of what would happen and what she would find when she woke. If she woke at all.

Will and Danny were convinced the door would hold. They were probably right. It had held without so much as a crack for the last three hours.

Luke and Ted sat on the other couch, trying hard to stay awake, but Ted eventually gave in around eleven. Luke lasted until midnight, but was dozing a few minutes later. Carly and Vera, curled up on the couch next to Kate, had fallen asleep long ago, with Vera wrapped tightly against Carly’s chest.

She stood up to get another bottle of water. There were five left. She drank it while Will and Danny sat on the floor, backs against the wall with the door between them. They had drank a half dozen cans of Red Bull and didn’t seemed any closer to sleep.

Danny was telling jokes again.

“Two secretaries are in the employee lounge, bitching about their respective bosses, when one of them says, ‘You won’t believe it, but he tried to grab my ass again.’ The other secretary sighs and says, ‘Oh, why don’t you just give in, it’ll make life so much easier. Trust me.’ The first secretary guffaws and says, ‘I can’t! People are still laughing at his last secretary behind her back.’ To which the second secretary says, ‘Wait, I was his last secretary.’”

“You already told that one,” Will said. “And it wasn’t funny the first time.”

“Bullshit. When?”

“Stan. When that sniper had us bogged down outside Kabul for seven hours.”

“Oh yeah. I forgot about that. He got Daniels in the ass that time, right?”

“That was outside of Bagram. And it was another sniper.”

“Really? I could have sworn it was the Kabul thing…”

They continued all night. Sometimes the jokes were funny, and she smiled with them. Other times they were horrendous, and she groaned along with Will. They didn’t seem to notice her, and kept going back and forth, arguing about something from Afghanistan, then reminiscing about one of the guys on their SWAT team.

Listening to them jawing back and forth had a strangely calming effect on her. If they weren’t scared, if they could carry on like this for hours and hours, then things might not be that bad. They wouldn’t be joking if it really was dangerous, would they? She hadn’t known them long enough to know for sure, but listening to them chatter on about nothing made her feel better anyway.

By two in the morning she was drifting in and out of sleep, each time opening her eyes to the sound of Danny telling another filthy joke, and Will either laughing or critiquing. The ghouls had stopped banging on the door hours ago, perhaps realizing it was fruitless, or they were just tired. Did they get tired? She didn’t care either way.

Just die already…

Sometime around three in the morning, she opened her eyes to Danny, sounding very far away, telling another joke.

“These two high school sweethearts have been dating for two years, but they’ve never had sex. The guy keeps waiting for the right time to make his move, but it never seems to happen. One day, he decides enough is enough, and sneaks into his girlfriend’s bedroom window ready to take her cherry. Instead, he finds her already in bed with some guy. He’s shocked, but not as shock as the sight of his girlfriend riding the guy like a cowboy, whoopin’ and hollerin’. He lunges into the room and yells, ‘Baby, baby, what are you doing? Please tell me, what are you doing?’ The girlfriend stops riding the guy, rolls her eyes and says, ‘See? I told you he was stupid.’”

“I don’t get it,” Will said.

“Because she’s been telling this guy how stupid her boyfriend is, and he goes, ‘Please tell me, what are you doing’ when he sees them doing the horizontal mambo. Get it?”

“Not really.”

“You get it.”

“So he’s not really stupid, is that it?”

“Fuck off.”

“Hey, I’m just trying to understand. It’s not my fault your jokes suck so much you have to explain them.”

“I got yer explanation right here,” Danny said.

Kate smiled, just before sleep completely overcame her and she closed her eyes and drifted off.

She woke up to the cold, cheap fabric of the couch underneath her and pieces of the ceiling in her hair and clinging to her clothes.

Will, Danny, and Ted were talking briskly in front of her, with Will banging his fist against a wall. There was a buzzing in her head that prevented her from understanding what they were saying.

She glanced at her watch. 7:12 a.m.

Morning. They had made it through the night.

We’re alive!

She pushed herself up from the couch and yawned.

Will glanced over. “Look who’s up.”

“Did you guys sleep at all?” she asked.

“A couple of hours, on and off.”

She heard snoring and looked at Luke, asleep on the other couch, the handle of his sword sticking out from behind him. Next to her, Carly and Vera were also still asleep, entangled in each other’s arms. The two of them combined didn’t make as much noise as Luke.

She looked back at Will. “So how are we getting out of here? Through the door?”

“There are ghouls on the other side of that door.”

“They’re still alive?”

“Definitely,” Ted said. “You can still hear them moving around.”

“We’re not going through the door,” Will said. “That’s why explosions master here is going to blow a hole in this wall.”

“Making doors where none previously existed is a hobby of mine,” Danny grinned.

“Will that work?” she asked doubtfully.

Danny shrugged. “It’s entirely possible I might blow us all up in the process. Or cave in the already fragile roof above our heads. Or collapse whatever’s left of the Archers down on top of us. Basically, kill us all while we wait to suck in the sweet taste of fresh morning air behind this wall.”

“You’re joking, right?” Ted asked with concern.

“Maybe.”

“He’s joking,” Will said.

She couldn’t tell if he was or not. It was hard to tell with Danny and Will.

“I guess we don’t have any choice,” she said.

“Oh, there are lots of choices,” Danny said, “but none of them are nearly as fun as this one.”

They woke up the girls and Luke, then moved to the back of the room. They stacked the couches on top of one another, then took the door off the refrigerator and put Carly and Vera behind it, while Kate, Luke, and Ted squeezed in behind the main bulk of the fridge.

Danny was taping strips of C4 against the far wall, but he was using smaller pieces than when he had rigged up the store. After a while she realized he was making a jagged door-shaped sketch with the explosives. He had a backpack full of the stuff, and the pieces he was using to blow the wall barely made a dent in the backpack’s bulge. When he was done, he got behind the couch with Will. They had angled the furniture so it would cover their heads from any blow back.

“Everyone keep their heads down,” Danny said. “I’m not responsible for shrapnel through eyeballs, decapitations, or other assorted bodily injuries. We clear? I don’t wanna hear from anyone’s lawyers after this!”

No one answered, probably because no one could really hear him through the earplugs Will distributed to everyone earlier. She had wondered what the earplugs were for when they were packing the boxes.

Squeezed in behind the fridge, Luke was on her right and Ted on her left.

Luke was grinning at her. “I told you we should have stayed at the pawnshop. Last time I checked, there wasn’t a crazy dude with explosives trying to blow us all to hell.”

She grinned back.

Danny screamed, “Fire in the hole!”

Even with the earplugs, the massive blast left Kate’s ears ringing. The ground under her feet seem to come unglued, and she held on to the fridge as Luke and Ted pressed in even tighter around her.

After a while, the world settled again.

The blast had done its job — destroying the far wall completely and caving in half the ceiling. Sheetrock and jagged, hard pieces of brick showered down on the floor around them. She felt the ground tremble with every large chunk of brick that peppered the asphalt parking lot outside, because Danny had directed the blast to blow out, not in.

A white coating instantly covered the room and got into their hair and eyes and clothes. She heard a distant noise. It was someone coughing, but with her ears still ringing she couldn’t be sure if it was her or one of the others, or if she was mistaking the ringing for coughing. It was hard to tell, but it cleared up a bit when she shook off the thick white layer of dust and stood up.

Luke and Ted, similarly covered in a blanket of white powder, looked as if their ears were also ringing.

Ted shouted, “What?” at her, but she shook her head. She hadn’t said anything. Had she? He looked just as confused.

She helped Carly and Vera up from the floor. They were both fine, but like the others, covered in white and looked lost. Carly’s bright red hair had turned a strange shade of pink. Kate had to suppress a slight giggle.

She felt a tap on her shoulder. Will stood next to her. He pointed at the bright parking lot beyond the rubble, then nudged her in that direction. She stumbled over piles of brick, wooden beams, and what was left of the ceiling and wall.

She could smell sunlight, and it kept her going until she finally staggered out into the parking lot and the bright, warm sun. Away from the Archers, away from the swirling white and red mist.

When she turned back and saw what remained of the store, it took her breath away.

More than half of the building had collapsed in on itself, leaving a huge pile of rubble in its wake. It reminded her of those old film reels of cities devastated by carpet bombing during World War II. In a sense, she guessed bombs had hit the Archers store, except these had been controlled explosions masterminded by Danny. The cave-in had created a jagged wall around the back section, where the employee lounge was located.

Will appeared behind her. “Danny can be a real painter when he puts his mind to something!” he shouted.

“Too bad he doesn’t put in as much work on his jokes!” she shouted back.

He grinned.

“What now?” she shouted.

He glanced at his watch, then shouted back, “We have ten hours of sunlight left! Let’s make the most of it!”

Danny and the others fumbled their way out of what was left of the employee lounge behind them.

“Everybody good?” Will shouted at them.

Danny gave him a blank look. “What?”

“Everybody good?” Will shouted again, louder this time — if that was possible.

Danny shook his head and shouted back, “I can’t hear a thing you’re saying! But if you’re asking if I’m good, then fuck, yeah!”

Vera stuck out her thumb and smiled, apparently agreeing with Danny.

It made Kate laugh. It felt strange, but at the same time, so deliriously fantastic.

CHAPTER 18 LARA

Lara sat up and looked toward the covered window across the room. It was dark inside the travel agency, but what she couldn’t see wasn’t as important as what she had felt or heard.

“Did you hear that?” she whispered.

Tony was sitting half-asleep on an armchair across from her, but she knew he had been dozing on and off despite his best efforts to stay awake. It was hard not to with the stillness of the city around them at night.

“What?” he said, trying to sit up straight.

She stood up and tiptoed quietly to the window, careful to keep her voice down. “I heard something. It sounded like an explosion.”

“I didn’t hear anything.”

“I felt the ground move, too.”

“I must have dozed off…”

She peered out the window, careful not to move the curtains. She couldn’t see very much in the darkness, but there seemed to be a slight brightening in the distance. It quickly faded as she tried to adjust her eyes to make out more detail.

“What is it?” Tony asked behind her.

“I’m not sure.” She tried to pick up the light again. “It’s gone now. It was there, just for a brief moment…”

From the corner of her eye, she saw movement and quickly stepped away from the curtains. Shadows flitted past the window, moving too fast to see their silhouetted outlines properly. But she knew what they were.

One, then two, then a dozen. They seemed to be moving in the same direction.

Toward the explosion…

Tony was watching her from across the room, the golf club resting across his lap. Her roommate Tracy played on the University of Houston’s golf team, and they found her golf bag inside her closet. When they had decided to leave the city, they had armed themselves with Tracy’s golf clubs. Neither one of them knew anything about guns, and the steel clubs seemed both dangerous and innocuous enough.

They had been traveling most of the day on a dirt bike Tony had found near her apartment, stopping only to get fuel and to hunt for supplies. There was something about riding on a bike that was tiring, but with the highways so congested, it was the only way to travel through the city. They had been on it for four hours before calling it a day.

The travel agency they were hiding in now was the perfect spot to spend the night — small and hardly noticeable between two bigger buildings. There was a door and a window at the front, so they had pushed a desk against the door and covered the window.

She padded back to her bedroll on the floor. It was pitch-black inside, with just a little moonlight filtering through the curtains. They had solar-powered flashlights in their packs, along with food and bottles of water. Supplies weren’t hard to come by. There was plenty of food left behind, most of it still good, though she doubted that was going to be the case a month from now. Gasoline proved more difficult to find. Without power to pump the tanks the gas stations were useless, so Tony had siphoned gas from cars along the way using a plastic tube.

She sat back down on her sleeping bag.

“Could have been thunder,” he said.

She shook her head. “It was an explosion.”

“Okay, it was an explosion.” He sounded tired. “Get some sleep. Let’s try to start on the road earlier tomorrow. Maybe we can get out of the city by afternoon.”

She nodded and lay down.

It had been slow going at first, with the dirt bike constantly running out of gas, and roads brimming with vehicles left behind by people fleeing the city. The rest of Houston beyond the Downtown area had been exactly as she and Tony expected. Depressingly deserted in the day and terrifyingly silent at night.

Around midnight, she drifted off to sleep, waking the next morning to sunlight on her face and Tony snoring lightly in the chair next to her. She sat up and watched him for a moment, the golf club clutched tightly in his hands. They had run across plenty of other weapons along the way, but for some reason he insisted on keeping the golf club.

“It feels right,” he had told her.

“It’s a golf club,” she reminded him.

“Yeah, but it’s a nine iron.”

“You don’t know what that means.”

“I know it’s better than an eight iron. It’s got an extra iron. That’s pretty good.”

They had a good laugh over that.

She glanced at her watch and then back at Tony. She thought about waking him, but he looked so peaceful, and he hadn’t really gotten a lot of sleep the last few days.

Instead, she sat back against the wall and watched him sleep for a while. For the first time in a long time, she allowed herself to enjoy the loneliness.

“Let me teach you how to ride,” Tony said.

“I don’t know if that’s such a good idea.”

She put on her sunglasses and gingerly climbed up on the bike behind him, the heavy backpack strapped to her back like a boulder threatening to topple her at any moment. She wrapped her arms around his waist.

He looked back over his shoulder. “Come on, it’ll be fun.”

“I don’t see how it would be all that fun.”

“You’ll love it.”

“I truly doubt that.”

“Okay, can I be honest? I just wanted to be the one with my arms around your waist, at least once.”

She laughed over the dirt bike’s engine. “I knew there was an ulterior motive.”

“Think about it?”

“No.”

“You’re no fun.”

He turned back and gunned the throttle.

He aimed the bike out of the parking lot and back onto the feeder road. He turned onto the on-ramp, back up to Highway 59, sticking to the shoulder to skirt around a parked semi-truck that had clogged up the entire single lane. There was a light breeze, but the loud cough and sputter of the bike’s engine was the only unnatural sound for miles.

They progressed slowly up the highway, the glut of cars forcing them to travel anywhere from twenty to twenty-five miles per hour. Even on the dirt bike, which had maneuverability on its side, they had to travel slowly. It wasn’t just the cars, it was all the debris of humanity — clothing, boxes, electronics — that people had tried to take with them when they fled. It had never occurred to her just how much went into keeping the city clean until those services vanished overnight.

After about an hour of travel, Tony lifted his hand in the air, indicating that he needed to stop. He turned onto an off-ramp and pulled into a gas station.

The store had covered windows, so they didn’t bother to scout it out.

He parked the bike between a beat-up red pick-up truck and a black SUV that looked more expensive than all three years of her medical school tuition combined. The vehicle had chrome wheels and golden trims along the sides and front. She peered into the semi-tinted windows at the small LCD TVs dangling from the ceiling and state-of-the-art Blu-ray players embedded in the back of the front seats.

“We should take this SUV,” she said to Tony, who was already crouched next to the truck with his siphoning setup. It was really just a green garden hose that he had sliced down to five feet. It was crude, but effective.

“Too much bling. I don’t want to get carjacked,” he said.

She chuckled. “You think the Blu-ray players run on batteries?”

“They’re probably hooked up to the SUV’s battery.”

“Maybe we can use it as a battering ram. You know, just push cars out of the way.”

“Is this a joke? Is this you being funny?”

“I am funny.”

“Not really, no.”

She made a face, and he grinned back.

He stuck his end of the hose into the dirt bike’s gas tank and stood back, spitting out the taste of gasoline. “You know, there’s an easier way to do this.”

“How?”

“My dad used to have a cheap hand pump — probably about ten bucks. It had a plastic pump that you attached two hoses to and all you had to do was pump it to get the gas flowing from tank to tank. Hardware stores sell them.”

“Maybe we should try to find one.”

He seemed to think about it, then shook his head. “Nah. The disgusting taste of gasoline aside, it’s not worth the effort. And those stores are huge. Who knows how many of them are inside.”

She nodded. The idea of going into a big, sprawling warehouse store left her feeling queasy.

The gas pumped slowly between the two vehicles, and the slurp-slurp of the gas sloshing through the hose reminding her of something else.

She pushed the thought away. “I guess I should learn how to drive it. The dirt bike, I mean.”

“Ride it,” he said.

“What?”

“You don’t drive a dirt bike, you ride one.”

“Whatever.” She rolled her eyes. “You know what I mean.”

“Once we get to the countryside, I can teach you.”

“I assumed you wanted to teach me before that. You know, so you can put your hands around my waist and all.”

“That’s true, but I don’t feel like swallowing more gasoline until I absolutely have to.”

“Your loss.”

She picked up the backpack and slipped it on. She felt him looking at her, and she glanced over her shoulder and caught his eyes.

He smiled, and she smiled back.

It took them a couple more days, but they finally made it out into the countryside by the end of the second day. Once they cleared Humble, a small city just outside Houston, it was smooth sailing the rest of the way, with the highway opening up and a startling drop in the number of cars. Tony was able to crank the throttle up to thirty and, at some spots, forty miles per hour.

They finally stopped in the city of Cleveland, which had no resemblance whatsoever to the Ohio city. This one was smaller by a few million residents. They took shelter along the highway in a small mom-and-pop diner called Teddy’s, parking the dirt bike outside, squeezed between two trucks.

There was no couch, so they slept on the hard floor, but they were used to that.

When she woke in the morning, he was already outside in the parking lot siphoning gas from one of the trucks. She spent some time looking over Teddy’s, hoping to find food that hadn’t gone bad.

She stocked up on chips from the racks, warm bottled water, a couple of Gatorade bottles, and some soft drinks from the warm freezers in the back. On her way out, she grabbed some Cheetos and Baked Lays chips.

Outside, Tony was watching the gas squirting from the truck into the dirt bike’s tank. He looked up as she came out of the store. She tossed him one of the Cheetos and a Gatorade.

He attacked them with a big satisfied grin on his face. “My favorite,” he beamed, showing stained orange teeth.

“I can see that.”

She walked to the edge of the parking lot and glanced briefly at the highway to her left, then looked northward toward their destination. Unlike in Houston, Highway 59 eventually leveled out until it was almost flat with the ground.

“What’s out there?” she asked.

“Hunting, fishing, farming.”

“You know how to do any of those things?”

“Fishing. And maybe a little hunting.” He slid the golf club out of a sheath he had made and attached to the side of the dirt bike, then took some swings. “You haven’t seen real hunting until you’ve seen it with golf clubs.”

“Nine iron, right?”

“Yup.”

“Your expansive golf knowledge continues to impress me.”

“I know, right?” He grinned. “Anyone can hunt with rifles. With golf clubs? Now that takes some serious skills.”

“I could probably do some farming,” she mused.

“Yeah?”

“Probably.” She shrugged. “It can’t be harder than medicine, right?”

He chuckled. “We’ll see.”

“You don’t believe me?”

“I believe that you believe you can do it.”

“Smart ass,” she smirked.

They continued up Highway 59, her arms around his waist, face turned into the wind. Far from the city, she felt free, as if they were getting a second chance out here in the wide-open spaces. There were walls of trees on both sides of the road, and she wondered what lay beyond.

Farms? Houses? Sanctuary? The possibilities were endless.

She enjoyed these moments, riding on the road with Tony, just the two of them in a world that didn’t seem alive anymore. She tightened her arms around his waist and pressed her cheek against his back. He turned his head slightly, probably curious by the extra show of physical contact.

They rode in silence for a long while, the only sound coming from the steady grunt of the engine underneath them and the wind in her ears, like soothing music. It was a comfortable feeling, something she hadn’t allowed herself to indulge in for days. A part of her had thought they wouldn’t make it out of the city, that as soon as they chose the wrong place to hide for the night, the creatures would discover them and it would be over.

Out here in the countryside, things seemed possible again. She didn’t delude herself, though. It wouldn’t be easy, but she did accept that it would be possible. That was new and exciting and exhilarating.

After a while, she sensed the bike starting to slow and looked up. Tony hadn’t lifted his hand, so they weren’t running low on gas. And besides, they had just filled up at Teddy’s parking lot, so gas wasn’t the issue.

She leaned to one side, far enough to see around him.

And saw what he was seeing: cars, including a big 18-wheel truck, strewn about the road ahead of them. The obstacle came out of nowhere and caught her off guard, like a wall sprouting from the ground.

Tony came to a complete stop on the road. He flipped the kickstand and climbed off, Lara doing the same. She still had the backpack on, so she had to move slowly, wary of quick or sudden movements that would topple her like a top.

He glanced back at her worried eyes. “Stay here for a moment.”

“What are you thinking?” she asked.

He hesitated. “I don’t know. Just stay here for a moment.”

“Be careful.”

He nodded and flashed that boyish smile she had become increasingly fond on in recent days.

He slid the golf club from the dirt bike and took a few tentative steps up the road. She wondered how useful the golf club really was, and how absurd it was that he still clung to it like a favorite toy.

There were more than a dozen vehicles altogether, with the big 18-wheeler—‘Kroger’ was written on its side — taking up most of the space, the head of its tractor unit spilling onto the grass divider between the north and southbound lanes. The trailer part of the massive vehicle alone took up the entire northbound lane. Smaller cars and trucks were scattered about, taking up the rest of the space.

This isn’t right. A pileup doesn’t look like this.

The only way past the pileup was to go around, which meant driving off the main road and onto the grass. But there was a problem there, too. The flat highway was flanked by five-foot ditches on both sides. Even on a dirt bike, it would be rough going.

Tony was walking back toward her now. “I guess we’ll have to go around it.”

“You can’t see a way through?”

He shook his head. “Too many cars. I don’t know what the hell happened, but they somehow managed to block both lanes.”

She thought about what he had just said and tried to wrap her mind around the pileup and why there were suddenly cars all over the road when previously there’d only been the occasional vehicle ever since they’d left Humble behind. She was just thinking how it didn’t make sense when she heard a loud crack! shatter the morning air.

She glanced to her right, where she thought the sound had come from.

The woods. It had come from the woods.

“Tony, what was that?”

He didn’t answer her.

She looked back at him, but he wasn’t there. At first she thought he had run off and left her behind, scared away by the noise, but then realized how silly that was. Not Tony. He wouldn’t leave her. Not after all they had been through.

Something flickered in the sun, drawing her eyes. Tony’s golf club was lying on the road, the sunlight glinting off the long, steel length. He had wrapped black duct tape around the handle to get a better grip, and a piece of the tape looked as if it had come loose.

She saw bright red liquid flowing toward the golf club. Horrified, she traced it to its source…

…and found Tony on the road.

He was lying on his side, a pool of blood growing, widening underneath his head. He stared back up at her with hollow, lifeless eyes.